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Officials at one of China’s premier universities sought the aid of late American financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in building a branch campus in the Boston area, emails released Friday show.

The correspondence spans more than a dozen emails, part of a tranche of 3 million documents made public by the Department of Justice more than a month after the deadline set by Congress in legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump.

The correspondence involved Epstein, Harvard mathematics professor Martin Nowak and Shing-Tung Yau, a Harvard mathematics professor of more than three decades who acted as an intermediary with senior officials at Tsinghua University, the Beijing-based institution often compared to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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“How is Jeff doing? Is he still interesting in the big projects he has been talking? Please tell him that Tsinghua university is talking seriously to run a branch here,” Yau wrote in an April 19, 2016, email to Epstein’s assistant, Lesley Groff.

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In October 2016, Yau introduced Epstein to Harvard alumnus and real estate mogul Gerald Chan as a potential source of financing, suggesting Chan could “advise you about the building we talked about.” Chan and Epstein arranged to meet for dinner at the now-closed Parsnip Restaurant in Harvard Square on December

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As Hardvard’s The Crimson reports, Epstein and Chan arranged a lunch meeting in December 2016 at the now-shuttered Parsnip restaurant in Harvard Square to discuss the proposal.

Two years earlier, Chan — a venture capitalist — had donated $350 million to the Harvard School of Public Health, the second-largest gift in University history. The school was subsequently renamed in honor of his late father.

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