Chinese Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang: Saddened by the death of Professor Shi Jingqian, I pay high tribute to him

Qin Gang, China's ambassador to the United States, tweeted on December 28 that he was saddened to learn of the death of Professor Jonathan Spence. He said: Shi Jingqian is an outstanding scholar of Chinese history and a great Chinese storyteller. "I would like to pay him a high tribute and express my deepest condolences to his family."

Shi Jingqian, a famous historian and professor emeritus at Yale University, passed away on December 25, 2021 local time, at the age of 85.

According to CCTV News, Shi Jingqian is one of the most high-profile American sinologists of our time, known as the most "storytelling" sinologist, born in The United Kingdom in 1936, received a doctorate from Yale University in 1965, and is also a professor at Yale University, the director of the History Department and the Center for East Asian Studies, and the president of the American Historical Society. Shi Jingqian, along with Philip Alden Kuhn and Frederic Evans Wakeman, is known as the "Three Masters" of American Sinology after John King Fairbank.

Since 1974, he has completed 14 historical works on China, including In Search of Modern China, Tiananmen: Intellectuals and the Chinese Revolution, The Death of Wang: The Fate of the Little People Behind the Great History, Kangxi and Cao Yin, Matteo Ricci's Palace of Memory, and Former Dynasty Dreams: Zhang Dai's Glitz and Desolation.