Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology.

• Author: Pulleyblank, Edwin G.
• Position: Book Review

Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology. By DAVID B. HONEY. American Oriental Series, no. 86. New Haven: AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY, 2001. Pp. xxxv + 359. $35.

The reverential title of this account of the work of Western scholars working in the field of Chinese studies up to the middle of the twentieth century, with some survivals into the early decades of its second half invites us not merely to acknowledge and respect the work of our predecessors but also, in chosen cases, to worship them. We are asked to go back to them for a comprehensive, "philological" method that has been too much pushed aside and forgotten in the compartmentalization of scholarship along the lines of disciplines such as history, linguistics, comparative literature, etc. Ancestor worship is an important aspect of traditional Chinese culture, but is it really something we should import into modern scholarship? I think not. As I have recently had occasion to point out in connection with the development of Chinese historical phonology in the twentieth century, uncritical acceptance of the errors of some of the major players, Bernhard Karlgren, Chao Yuen Ren and Li Fang-kuei, continues to bedevil the field. (1) Appreciation for the contribution of our predecessors should be this side idolatry. We must build on the achievements of our predecessors but not uncritically.

Raising the issue of philology (and sinology as a branch of philology) versus disciplinary studies also seems to me to be a rather perverse attempt to reawaken controversies that were fought out during the period of rapid expansion of Chinese studies that took place after the end of the Second World War. The war against Japan and the Communist Revolution in China had revealed how ill-equipped Western countries were to understand East Asia. In the rapid expansion of East Asian studies that took place in the immediate post-war decades it is not surprising that there were conflicts between established scholars whose interests had been mostly focused on the classical, formative period of Chinese civilization and those who thought that attention should be transferred to more recent times and what they felt were more immediately relevant problems.

If we look at the present state of Chinese studies in North America and Western Europe, with flourishing departments in most major universities and China specialists in departments of history, economics, sociology, comparative literature, linguistics, etc., and compare it to the situation before the Second World War, there is really no comparison. There has always been good scholarship and bad scholarship and it is important to recognize and learn from the good scholarship of the past but, in my view, there is much greater danger in too much reverence for what has been laid down by our teachers than in striking out in new directions in response to ideas that come from outside a narrowly defined discipline. Whether one chooses to call oneself a sinologist or a student of Chinese history, or language, or literature, or art, or whatever, is less important than bringing the appropriate tools to bear in trying to solve the problems one sets oneself. This seems to me to he more or less what Denis Twitchett was sayi ng in "A Lone Cheer for Sinology," (2) which Honey cites selectively on p. 157 in support of his identification of sinology with traditional Western philology.

Of course, at that time, which I lived through, there were serious practical issues involved. When I arrived in Cambridge in 1953 as Professor of Chinese in succession to Gustav Haloun, I found that I had inherited from him a proposal, which I was glad to support, to introduce the teaching of Modern Chinese into the curriculum and to appoint a Lecturer in that subject. There was opposition in the Oriental Faculty from the Regius Professor of Hebrew, who was afraid that it would be the thin edge of a wedge that could lead to the introduction of Modern Hebrew. It was explained to me by my Colleagues that we must insist that what we meant by Modern Chinese was not a language that anyone actually spoke but the written medium of early vernacular literature going back to the thirteenth century. We succeeded and Michael Halliday, who had begun learning Chinese during the war and as a graduate student in the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London had later spent time in China, was appointe d to the post. He taught spoken as well as literary Modern Chinese at Cambridge and later went on to a distinguished career as a general linguist. Other modernizing efforts I found myself engaged in at Cambridge were less successful. We taught Chinese history as well as language in the Oriental Faculty, but in the highly specialized Cambridge system of undergraduate education this meant that our only students in that subject were Honors students in Oriental Studies specializing in Chinese. History as such was the business of the History Faculty which in those days was entirely focused on English, and to a lesser extent Western European, history. The history of Greece and Rome, taught in the Faculty of Classics was, of course, also given recognition but the rest of the world was ahistorical as far as Cambridge was concerned. This was very different from what I had been used to at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where there was a separate History Department whose seminars, which I attended while I wrote my doctoral dissertation in the Far East Department, provided me with an education in historical method. At Cambridge, however, attempts to get the History Faculty to recognize China, ancient or modern, as worthy of notice had little effect.

There, as elsewhere, competition for financial resources were as much a part of the story as conservative resistance to innovation. Honey refers to a falling out at Harvard between Francis Cleaves, a quintessential philologist,3 and John Fairbank over funding for a proposed bilingual translation series of classical Chinese texts along the lines of the Loeb Library or a series of historical monographs. Honey, who accuses Fairbank, quite unjustly, of a "cavalier attitude towards the Chinese...