Chiang was born in a Catholic family in
Haining,
Zhejiang, China, towards the end of the
Qing dynasty. He was a maternal cousin of the
wuxia novelist
Louis Cha. He graduated from
Peking University in 1923 with a degree in philosophy, and obtained a government scholarship to study
library science at
Berlin University and graduated in 1930. In 1933, Chiang started the National Central Library in
Nanjing and oversaw its move to
Chongqing during the
Second Sino-Japanese War. On 1 August 1940, he was appointed as its first director. Between 1940 and 1941, he organised funding for the purchase of
rare manuscripts and books collection preservation from collectors in
Shanghai to protect them from
looting by the Japanese during the war. The library was moved back to Nanjing between 1945 and 1946 after the end of the war. In 1948, the
Nationalist government moved the library, along with its core collection of about 130,000 volumes of rare manuscript books, to
Taiwan following its defeat by the
Communists in the
Chinese Civil War. On 23 April 1949, when Communist forces occupied Nanjing towards the end of the Chinese Civil War, Chiang left mainland China and went to
Hong Kong before eventually settling down in
Taipei, Taiwan. In 1951, Chiang became a professor in the
National Taiwan University. About three years later, he was appointed as the director of the National Central Library again after the library was rebuilt in Taipei. In September 1965, he became
Director of National Palace Museum in Taipei. A year later, he was reassigned to be the director of the National Central Library. In 1974, he was elected to
Academia Sinica, the
national academy of Taiwan. In 1983, he resigned from the National Palace Museum and was appointed national policy adviser to
President Chiang Ching-kuo. Chiang died on 21 September 1990 in Taipei. ==References==