Apple Daily Archive: The Race to Save Hong Kong’s Most Important Newspaper From Erasure
When the Hong Kong authorities froze the assets of Apple Daily in June 2021 and forced the paper to shut down, they did more than silence a newsroom. They attempted to erase a record. Twenty-six years of journalism — investigations, editorials, photographs, video reports, front pages, commentary — was at risk of vanishing from the internet the moment the paper’s servers went dark. What happened next was one of the most remarkable acts of collective digital preservation in the history of journalism: hundreds of technologists, activists, and ordinary citizens raced against the clock to archive everything they could before it was gone forever.
This is the story of the Apple Daily archive — why it matters, what was saved, how it was saved, and where you can still access it today.
Why the Apple Daily Archive Matters: Journalism as Historical Record
Apple Daily was not merely a newspaper. It was, for twenty-six years, the most comprehensive independent chronicle of Hong Kong’s political, social, and cultural life. Founded in 1995 by Jimmy Lai and published by Next Digital, the paper covered Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997, the SARS epidemic of 2003, the Article 23 protests, the Umbrella Movement of 2014, and the historic pro-democracy demonstrations of 2019. It documented the erosion of “one country, two systems” in real time, with a clarity and fearlessness that no other Hong Kong outlet matched.
By 2020, Apple Daily was the fourth most-used offline news source and the second most-used online news source in Hong Kong, according to a Reuters Institute poll. Its digital archive represented not just the paper’s institutional memory but a crucial public record of events that the Chinese government has strong incentives to distort or suppress. When authorities moved to shut it down, preserving that record became an act of historical resistance.
The stakes were clear from the moment the raids began. Under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, authorities gained the power to request the removal or blocking of content deemed subversive or secessionist. The company that approves internet domains in Hong Kong announced it would reject any sites that could incite “illegal acts.” Internet service providers had already begun blocking access to pro-democracy websites. It was not paranoia to fear that Apple Daily‘s digital archive — containing thousands of articles critical of the Chinese Communist Party — would be targeted next.
The Emergency Archiving Operation: Hong Kong’s IT Community Mobilizes
The archiving effort began almost immediately after the June 17, 2021 raid on Apple Daily‘s headquarters, when over 500 national security officers arrested five executives and froze the paper’s assets. Within hours, calls to preserve the newspaper’s digital content began circulating on online forums. The South China Morning Post reported that at least 1,300 IT professionals mobilized, organizing themselves to systematically back up millions of web pages and videos before the servers went dark.
“We spent a lot of time discussing the most efficient ways to archive millions of web pages and videos of Apple Daily before it shut down,” one participant told the Post. The challenge was immense: the paper’s digital presence spanned 26 years, included video content, interactive graphics, and a vast archive of articles in Traditional Chinese — content that required specialized technical knowledge to properly capture and store.
The effort was coordinated across multiple platforms and used multiple archiving methodologies simultaneously. Different teams tackled different content types: article pages, video streams, image galleries, and the paper’s social media presence. The urgency was real — Apple Daily‘s website was replaced by a shutdown message at 23:59 HKT on June 23, 2021, just days after the arrests.
Archive Team and the Wayback Machine: Systematic Web Preservation
One of the most systematic preservation efforts came from Archive Team, a volunteer collective dedicated to preserving at-risk websites. Their wiki documents an extraordinarily detailed operation: article pages listed in the paper’s sitemaps were saved on June 21; video streams in M3U8 format were archived across eight separate batch operations between June 22 and June 25; MP4 video files were extracted from both article pages and the paper’s daily archive digests.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine also captured significant portions of Apple Daily‘s web presence. The Internet Archive maintains one of the world’s largest collections of web snapshots, and its captures of Apple Daily pages provide timestamped records of specific articles as they appeared during the paper’s operation — important not just for historical research but for verifying the exact content of articles that authorities later cited as evidence of “sedition” in criminal proceedings against the paper’s staff.
These mainstream archiving efforts were crucial for accessibility. The Wayback Machine, in particular, remains one of the most widely used tools for accessing archived web content and requires no technical expertise beyond a web browser.
Blockchain Preservation: Making the Archive Censorship-Proof
Beyond conventional web archiving, a parallel effort emerged to preserve Apple Daily‘s content on decentralized, censorship-resistant platforms — specifically the Arweave blockchain, a decentralized file storage network designed to make stored data permanent and tamper-proof.
The Block reported that an anonymous individual or group began uploading archived Apple Daily articles to Arweave shortly after the raids. A tracking page called “Decentralize Apple Daily” monitored the uploads, with approximately 5,000 pieces of content encoded to the network, each assigned a unique cryptographic hash allowing verification of authenticity. One of the earliest blockchain transactions — dated June 18, the day after the arrests — preserved an article headlined “National security police arrested five Apple Daily staffers; took away 44 hard drives with news material.”
The use of blockchain technology for this purpose was philosophically significant. Arweave’s architecture means that once content is stored, it cannot be deleted or altered by any government, corporation, or individual. It is, in the most literal sense, beyond Beijing’s reach. The Standard reported that a 21-year-old tech worker named Ho — who withheld his first name for safety reasons — was among those uploading articles to Arweave, explaining the motivation simply: the National Security Law’s power to request content removal meant that even overseas servers were potentially vulnerable to pressure. Blockchain was the only truly censorship-proof solution.
Kevin Abosch’s PERSISTENCE: Art as Archive
Perhaps the most unusual preservation effort came from Irish conceptual artist Kevin Abosch, whose artwork PERSISTENCE transformed the Apple Daily archive into a piece of political art. As CoinTelegraph reported, the artwork takes the form of a USB drive containing over 11,000 Apple Daily news articles, along with an executable file that can be used to boot a Koii node — a decentralized computing node — secured by the Arweave blockchain. The drive also includes an encrypted key suggesting ownership of a non-fungible token and, in a provocative touch, a set of hacker tools that Abosch described as potentially useful “under certain circumstances.”
Abosch framed the work explicitly as political: “The battle to preserve freedom of the press will be fought with technological weaponry.” The artwork was presented at London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in July 2021, bringing the question of archival preservation into the art world and raising the profile of the broader campaign to protect Apple Daily‘s legacy.
Koii founder Al Morris articulated the underlying principle that motivated multiple preservation efforts: “Whether conflicts are armed or cultural, the history books are usually written by the prevailing force. Decentralized technology makes it possible for all participants in the human struggle to preserve their voices forever.”
The First Amendment Museum Archive: English-Language Access
For English-speaking audiences, one of the most accessible entry points into the Apple Daily archive is the First Amendment Museum’s virtual exhibition, which presents translated English versions of articles from the paper’s final issue. The museum’s exhibition contextualizes the paper’s significance within the broader framework of press freedom, making the archive accessible to readers who cannot read Traditional Chinese.
The final issue itself — published June 24, 2021 — is an extraordinary document. Its 32 pages included a 12-page retrospective of the paper’s history, farewell messages from readers and journalists, pages of significant historical front pages, coverage of ongoing National Security Law cases, and reporting on press freedom conditions in other countries. It was, deliberately, a comprehensive statement about what the paper had been and what its closure meant. The First Amendment Museum’s translation ensures that statement remains accessible internationally.
What Was Lost: The Limits of Archival Preservation
Despite the heroic efforts of archivists, technologists, and activists, not everything was saved. The emergency nature of the archiving operation meant that coverage was uneven. Some content — particularly older articles, video content, and interactive features — was incompletely captured. The paper’s YouTube channels, which contained years of video journalism, were shut down at midnight on June 24, and while Archive Team made extensive efforts to capture video content, completeness cannot be guaranteed.
More fundamentally, an archive is not a living newspaper. The Apple Daily archive preserves what was published; it cannot replace what would have been published had the paper continued. The investigations that were never completed, the sources who went unprotected, the stories that were never told because the reporters were arrested or fled into exile — these losses cannot be archived. They are simply gone.
This is why the international journalism community has been emphatic: preserving the archive is important, but it is not a substitute for the conditions that made Apple Daily possible. Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Human Rights Watch continue to advocate not just for the memory of Apple Daily but for the restoration of the conditions — press freedom, the rule of law, genuine autonomy — that allowed it to exist.
The Archive as Legal Evidence: A Double-Edged Record
One of the most disturbing dimensions of the Apple Daily archive is the use that Hong Kong authorities have made of it in criminal proceedings. Prosecutors in the trial of Jimmy Lai and six former executives cited more than 160 Apple Daily articles as examples of “seditious publications.” The archived record of the paper’s journalism — preserved by activists to protect press freedom — was used by the state to justify imprisoning the journalists who produced it.
This dark irony underscores the complexity of archival work in authoritarian contexts. The same permanence that makes decentralized archives valuable as historical records also means that content cannot be selectively removed if it is later used against its creators. This has important implications for how future archiving efforts in similar situations should be structured and who controls access to archived material.
On February 9, 2026, Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with six former Apple Daily executives receiving sentences of six to ten years. The articles they wrote — now preserved in multiple digital archives around the world — were treated as crimes. The archive endures. The journalists who created it are in prison.
How to Access the Apple Daily Archive Today
For researchers, journalists, and members of the public seeking to access Apple Daily‘s archived content, several pathways exist. The Wayback Machine at archive.org provides the most user-friendly access to captured web pages. The First Amendment Museum offers English translations of the final issue. The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation maintains ongoing coverage of Apple Daily-related news and advocacy.
For those comfortable with blockchain technology, Arweave’s network provides access to the thousands of articles uploaded during the emergency preservation effort. Archive Team’s documentation provides technical details for those seeking to understand the scope and methodology of the archiving operation.
Perhaps most importantly, the special revival edition published by Reporters Without Borders and former Apple Daily journalists in June 2025 — on the fourth anniversary of the paper’s forced closure — demonstrated that the archive is not merely a historical artifact. It is a living tribute, a continuing declaration that the journalism Apple Daily practiced has not been extinguished, only temporarily driven underground.
The Meaning of Preservation: Why Archives Are Acts of Resistance
The effort to archive Apple Daily was, at its core, an argument about who gets to control the historical record. Authoritarian governments understand that controlling information about the past is as important as controlling information in the present. The Chinese Communist Party’s approach to history — the erasure of Tiananmen Square from public memory being the most famous example — reflects a sophisticated understanding of how controlling the archive shapes political reality.
The people who raced to save Apple Daily‘s digital archive understood this too. The 1,300 IT professionals who mobilized, the anonymous Arweave uploaders, the Archive Team volunteers, the First Amendment Museum curators — they were all engaged in the same fundamental act: insisting that what happened would be remembered, regardless of what the powerful wanted forgotten.
The archive of Apple Daily is proof that a newspaper was published, that journalism was practiced, that truth was told, and that a city fought for its freedom. No court order, no asset freeze, no national security law can change what is encoded in a blockchain or stored in the Wayback Machine. That is why preservation matters. That is why the archive of Apple Daily is an act of defiance as much as it is an act of scholarship.