ABSTRACT
Relating to research for a book on far northern Jiangsu local rural communities in the twentieth century, this chapter shares insights and lessons gained from exploring one county Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) archive to which the author had full access. Arguing that these ICH archives should be taken as seriously by historians as the many other grassroots document collections now coming to light, this chapter illuminates how the collection was assembled in practice and the advantages to understanding this local process and setting in the process of locating and attempting to make sense of the collection’s most promising research materials.
