China-Literatur in der Universitatsbibliothek Leipzig, 1500-1939: Eine systematische Bibliographie.

• Author: Kern, Martin
• Position: Book review

China-Literatur in der Universitatsbibliothek Leipzig, 1500-1939: Eine systematische Bibliographie. Two volumes. By THOMAS JANSEN, with the assistance of Gabriele Schlesinger, Richard Teschke, and Katharina Zinn. Leipzig: LEIPZIGER UNIVERSITATSVERLAG, 2003. Pp. 523, 409. [euro] 98.

On June 1, 1878, Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz (1840-1893) was appointed Supernumerary Professor of East Asian Languages at the University of Leipzig, marking the beginning of professional Sinology in the German-speaking realm. Von der Gabelentz, justly famous for his magnificent Chinesische Grammatik mit Ausschluss des niederen Stiles und der heutigen Umgangssprache (1881), was followed in 1897 by August Conrady (1864-1925) who in 1922 was named to the newly established Sinological chair, at the time only the third such chair in Germany (after Hamburg in 1909 and Berlin in 1912). His successor from 1925 to 1931 was Erich Haenisch (1880-1966); in addition, Eduard Erkes (1891-1958) served as supernumerary professor from 1928 to 1933--that is, until the Nazi regime dismissed him from the university. Following World War II, Erkes returned to Leipzig to serve as chair until his death in 1958. He was, however, not replaced. While the study of China continued in some less distinguished form for another decade at Leipzig, the German Democratic Republic had decided to concentrate its resources in East Asian studies at Berlin. It was not before 1984, with the appointment of Ralf Moritz, that Leipzig was again granted a Sinological chair; and it took until 1993, four years after the German unification, that East Asian studies--now including Chinese, Indonesian, and Japanese studies--was reestablished as a department.

Such is, in a nutshell, the chequered history of Chinese studies at Leipzig, the second-oldest German university, which will celebrate its six-hundredth anniversary in 2009. And yet there is, as so often, another history at Leipzig, in this case the history of its library collection of Sinica in both East Asian and European languages. This collection includes treasures such as the gazetteer Hangzhou fuzhi [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1579), Gonzales de Mendoza's Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres de gran reyno de la China of 1595, the collection of Tang poetry Tang shi huapu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1620/21), Martino Martini's Novus atlas Sinensis of ca. 1655, and a copy of the first European translation of the...