The digital edition of the international business correspondence of the company L. Kniffler & Co. from 1859 to 1876 can be considered a lighthouse project for future digital preservation and use of historical sources. The edition project of the Ruhr University Bochum was accompanied organizationally and scientifically by the Society for Corporate History. The edited sources date from the early phase of the L. Kniffler & Co. company, which was founded in Nagasaki in 1859 by the Prussian merchant Louis Kniffler and taken over in 1880 by his partner Carl Illies and renamed C. Illies & Co. From Kniffler's time from 1859-1876 a total of 156 business letters have survived, which have now been published as the first business correspondence of a German company from the time of the Japanese treaty ports. The edition in itself, and equally its digital edition, therefore make a significant contribution to the study of German-Japanese economic history and the history of German trade with Asia.

In the course of editing, the letters have been digitized, transcribed and annotated. The sources, which are searchable by keyword, can be viewed freely at any time at:

https://kniffler.ub.rub.de/exist/apps/Kniffler/index.html