Essays on Tang and pre-Tang China.

• Author: Kroll, Paul W.
• Position: Book review

Essays on Tang and pre-Tang China. By EDWIN G. PULLEYBLANK. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Burlington, Vt.: ASHGATE PUBLISHING, 2001. Pp. xi + 286. $124.95.

The Ashgate Variorum Series provides a distinct service by reprinting between hard covers selected groups of papers written by scholars of renown. Articles that might otherwise be difficult of access--increasingly so with the passage of years--are thus brought together conveniently, and a portion of an individual scholar's works (excluding full-length books) are preserved so as to encourage renewed attention. The present volume includes ten of Edwin G. Pulleyblank's studies on Chinese history and historiography published from 1950 to 1976, most of them centered on the Tang period.

Although Pulleyblank's work since the 1960s has focused most closely on historical linguistics, especially the reconstruction of Middle Chinese which he has taken to a new level of exactness, in the first stage of his career he published a series of studies that established him as one of the leading historians of medieval China. His book, The Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan (Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), which was a revision of his 1951 doctoral thesis at the University of London, remains after half a century the one indispensable work in English on the reign of Xuanzong (712-56) and the lead-up to the debacle that brought down this greatest of Tang emperors. The first fruit of this research was the article, "The Tzyiyh Tongjiann Kaoyih and the Sources for the History of the Period 730-763," published in 1950 in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Reprinted here, this article, packed with valuable and detailed observations, is still the starting-point for anyone wishing to work on the "High Tang" period.

Pulleyblank's inaugural lecture ("Chinese History and World History") as Professor of Chinese at Cambridge in 1953 challenged the common disregard of China evinced at that time by most professional historians in the West. The breadth of reference and wide scope of concern expressed in this communication has been fundamental...