Archives in Ming and Qing Dynasties are divided into cabinet files, Ministry of War files, internal affairs files, Zongren files, National History Museum files, files in various places in the Qing Palace, and files in government offices of various ministries and institutes in Qing Dynasty. Among them, most of them are in Chinese, and there are old Manchu archives and diplomatic archives in Britain, France and Germany.

During the Republic of China, these archives with great historical value experienced various hardships. On the eve of liberation, the Kuomintang government transported about 400,000 Ming and Qing archives to Taiwan Province Province. There, the archives are well protected, and there are special people to sort out and study them. After liberation, the new China government changed the document library of the Palace Museum into an archive, which was directly under the management of the Archives Bureau. In the 1950s, the archives took back all the Ming and Qing archives left in different places in Beijing.

There are about100000 files in Ming and Qing dynasties in China.