In memoriam: Derk Bodde (1909-2003); President of the Society, 1968-69.

• Author: Rickett, W. Allyn
• Position: Obituary

Derk Bodde, Emeritus Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and president of the American Oriental Society in 1968-69, passed away on 3 November 2003 in Philadelphia. As perhaps the last of the great Sinologists, Bodde's passing brings to an end a tradition of scholarship going back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century. These men and women shared a fascination with traditional Chinese culture, and many of them spent long years living in China. Many of them were also pure amateurs with no formal connection with academia. Lacking our present-day research tools, library resources, modern dictionaries, indices, and bibliographies, not to mention the Internet, they were still able to produce an amazing amount of solid work that has provided the basis for our present endeavors in the China field with its increasing emphasis on professionalism and disciplinary specialization. Coming at the end of this tradition, Bodde was able to capture the best of both worlds. He had the breadth and devotion of the traditional Sinologist as well as the expertise of the modern professional scholar. He was a prolific writer who constantly broke new ground in the field of Chinese studies. From 1933 to the end of the century he produced fourteen books, over a hundred articles, and ninety-plus reviews, covering such diverse disciplines as philosophical and religious thought, folklore and festivals, history and social institutions, literature, law, in addition to such unusual subjects as "Henry A. Wallace and the Ever-normal Granary" and Tolstoy and China. Nor were Bodde's interests limited to traditional China. His Peking Diary: A Year of Revolution remains one of the best eyewitness accounts of the fall of the Kuomintang and the establishment of the new Communist government in Beijing in 1948-49. For a bibliography of his works, current through 1985 (a comprehensive bibliography remains to be compiled), see Chinese Ideas about Nature and Society: Studies in Honour of Derk Bodde, edited by Charles Le Blanc and Susan Blader (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 1987), 21-34.

Bodde's interest in China began early. When Bodde was ten years old, his father received an appointment to teach physics at what is now the Communications University in Shanghai. Though the young boy learned little in the way of Chinese language during the three years he resided in Shanghai, the experience made a strong impression on him and, after returning to...