Man-houng Lin

Lin Man-houng is a Taiwanese historian and the first female president of Academia Historica. She is also one of few female historians to boldly argue in public about Taiwan's sovereignty and international status.

Biography

Lin was born in Changhua, Taiwan, in 1951, and was raised in Wufeng, Taichung. After graduating from Taichung Girls' Senior High School, she earned her B.A. and M.A. from National Taiwan University and earned her Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages from Harvard University in 1989.

Lin’s research primarily focuses on treaty ports and modern China, opium in late Qing China, currency crisis in early nineteenth-century China, and various empires and the role of Taiwanese merchants in East Asian overseas economic networks.

She has published five books and some 70 papers in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean. Her book China Upside Down links China’s topsy-turvy change from the center of the East Asian order to its modern tragedy with the Latin American Independence Movement.