A rare photo shows chairman Mao Zedong attending a tea party celebrating VDay in Chongqing on Sept 4, 1945.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Rare images from Taiwan of contributions made by common Chinese in the resistance against the Japanese invasion are part of book out in March, Yang Yang reports.

The historian Li Hua discovered a treasure trove of images about the mainland on his visits to Taiwan since 2010.

The materials form the basis of Memories of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, a book to be launched in March.

It was a year earlier that he decided to travel to Taiwan after his colleagues attended a cross-Straits book fair in Xiamen, an eastern city on the mainland.

The fair's hosts, Xiamen International Book Co, enabled Li's visits to several museums in Taiwan. His main purpose was to enrich the Democratic Parties History Museum of China in Chongqing.

At Academia Historica and Taiwan Film Institute, he was amazed to find tens of thousands of rare photos of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45) and historical events such as negotiations between the Communist Party of China and the Kuomintang in Southwest China's Chongqing city in 1945.

"They were generous to let us see the original photos instead of copies. We were so excited that we read the catalogs for three consecutive days, trying to pick photos to buy," Li, 63, who is curator of Chongqing's Red Cliff Revolutionary History Museum, says of his Taiwan trips with colleagues.