Man-houng Lin is a highly-regarded economic historian, becoming the first woman president of the Academia Historica, and one of the few female historians to boldly argue in public about Taiwan's sovereignty and international status.

Born in Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

 in 1951, she graduated from National Taiwan University

National Taiwan University

National Taiwan University is a national co-educational university located in Taipei, Republic of China . In Taiwan, it is colloquially known as "Táidà" . Its main campus is set upon 1,086,167 square meters in Taipei's Da'an District. In addition, the university has 6 other campuses in Taiwan,...

 and later received her Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1989. Lin has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica

Academia Sinica

The Academia Sinica , headquartered in the Nangang District of Taipei, is the national academy of Taiwan. It supports research activities in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from mathematical and physical sciences, to life sciences, and to humanities and social sciences.Academia Sinica has...

 since 1990 and Professor at the Department of History, National Taiwan Normal University

National Taiwan Normal University

National Taiwan Normal University is an institution of higher learning operating on three campuses in Taipei, Taiwan . NTNU is widely recognized as one of Taiwan's elite institutions of higher education. The university enrolls approximately 11,000 students each year. The ratio of undergraduate to...

 since 1991. From May 20, 2008 to December 15, 2010, she served as the president of the Academia Historica, the central academy of history of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Her appointment marked the first time a woman had headed the institute since its founding in 1947.

She resigned because of the institute's hosting of a controversial online poll, which listed Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

 and Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese politician, statesman, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng was a reformer who led China towards a market economy...

 among the candidates for the Top 100 most influential figures in the Republic of China's hundred-year history.

Lin’s research primarily focuses on treaty ports

Treaty ports

The treaty ports was the name given to the port cities in China, Japan, and Korea that were opened to foreign trade by the Unequal Treaties.-Chinese treaty ports:...

 and modern China, opium

Opium

Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy . Opium contains up to 12% morphine, an alkaloid, which is frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade. The latex also includes codeine and non-narcotic alkaloids such as papaverine, thebaine and noscapine...

 in late Qing China, currency crisis

Currency crisis

A currency crisis, which is also called a balance-of-payments crisis, is a sudden devaluation of a currency caused by chronic balance-of-payments deficits which usually ends in a speculative attack in the foreign exchange market. It occurs when the value of a currency changes quickly, undermining...

 in early nineteenth-century China, and various empires and the role of Taiwanese merchants in East Asian overseas economic networks.

Lin comes from the same native place of Lin Xiantang 林獻堂.

She has published five books and some 70 papers in Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean, which are listed at http://www.drnh.gov.tw/www/page/english/a01.htm. Her book, China Upside Down: Currency, Society and Ideologies, 1808-1856 (Harvard East Asian Series, 2006) links China’s topsy-turvy change from the center of the East Asia

East Asia

East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...

n order to its modern tragedy with the Latin American Independence Movement.