The Art Museum, Digital Services team of the University Library, and experts from Shanghai spent four years to digitize and transcript the Sheng Xuanhuai Archive, which comprises almost 4 million characters in over 13,000 correspondences. The archive is key to understand that period of seismic changes and will revolutionise the studies of late Qing and early Republican China. It also brings us to an important milestone in the skills and techniques of archival digitization.