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The Flowering of British Sinology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 May 2022
Abstract
This account of Sinology in the United Kingdom, in part incorporating personal reminiscence, starts with an analysis of the growth of the British library resources necessary to the practice of Sinology, followed by a sketch of the marginality in Britain in the early twentieth century of this type of scholarship. The changes brought about by the military requirements of World War II are seen as foreshadowing an era during which large-scale funding in Asian and other studies briefly allowed Sinology to flourish, after which a failure to understand the benefits of training in a non-spoken language reduced the opportunities for British students to the point where British Sinology is virtually extinct, and the willingness of scholars from elsewhere in Europe to engage with British university life is being sorely tried. The contributions of British Sinology, supported by Chinese and other incomers during its efflorescence, are briefly surveyed.
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References
1 To be clear, unattributed material from the mid-twentieth century onward may be taken to derive either from oral tradition or from the author's own personal reminiscences, which in both cases should be dated to after 1967.
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58 John Haffenden, William Empson, Volume II: Against the Christians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 192, 197, 390, 396.
59 David Hawkes, Classical, Modern and Humane: Essays in Chinese Literature, edited by John Minford and Siu-kit Wong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1989), 23.
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63 Denis Twitchett, “Land Tenure and the Social Order in T'ang and Sung China: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on 28 November 1961.” London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1962.
64 University Grants Committee: Report of the Sub-Committee on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1961), 78.
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75 Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, Japanese Degree Courses 2001–2002: A Directory of Japanese Degree Courses in Universities and Other Tertiary Education Institutions in the United Kingdom (London: The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, 2002), 10.
76 Jin, Interculturality in Learning Mandarin Chinese in British Universities, 42. The writings of Glen Dudbridge and David Pollard demonstrate eloquently that “fragments of a long-distant past” is a completely inappropriate description of the realms of Sinological knowledge that they explored. True, the work of Paul Thompson, mentioned below, does concern the reconstruction of ancient fragments, but his rationale for undertaking this work explicitly contrasts the paucity of work on ancient Chinese texts with the abundant concern in Europe with the heritage of Greece and Rome, and indeed later times; for what possible reason is China to be assigned an inferior status in this regard?
77 See p. 25 of the insightful preface by Vladimir Braginsky, editor of Classical Civilisations of South East Asia: An Anthology of Articles Published in the Bulletin of SOAS (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002). Braginsky is a particularly well-informed but originally Russian-educated observer of British academic life in his field.
78 Bawden, “Walter Simon,” 475.
79 Glen Dudbridge, Lost Books of Medieval China (London: The British Library, 1999).
80 P.M. Thompson, The Shen Tzu Fragments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
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84 Kornicki, Eavesdropping on the Emperor, 313–15.
85 E.D. Edwards, Bamboo, Lotus and Palm: An Anthology of the Far East, South-East Asia and the Pacific (London: William Hodge), ix, 360–61.