In the past few years there has been a fruitful exchange of expertise on the subject of partial differential equations (PDEs) between mathematicians from the People's Republic of China and the rest of the world. The goal of this collection of papers is to summarize and introduce the historical progress of the development of PDEs in China from the 1950s to the 1980s. The results presented here were mainly published before the 1980s, but, having been printed in the Chinese language, have not reached the wider audience they deserve. Topics covered include, among others, nonlinear hyperbolic equations, nonlinear elliptic equations, nonlinear parabolic equations, mixed equations, free boundary problems, minimal surfaces in Riemannian manifolds, microlocal analysis and solitons. For mathematicians and physicists interested in the historical development of PDEs in the People's Republic of China.