On December 26, 2021 local time, Jonathan D. Spence, a famous sinologist and honorary professor at Yale University, died in the United States at the age of 85.
Shi Jingqian, who looks like 007 actor Sean Connery, graduated from Yale University and was a professor at Yale University from 1966 to 2008, during which time he served as the director of the Yale University History Department and the Center for East Asian Studies, and has enjoyed a reputation in Western Chinese historiography for decades. He was elected president of the American Historical Society, one of only three chinese historians (the other two being Fairbank and Wei Feide) to receive the honor in the organization's 140 years of existence, and the first professor at Yale University to hold the position in more than three decades.
In August 2017, Shi Jingqian won the 11th China Book Special Contribution Award. On September 7, 2018, he won the 4th World Contribution Award for Chinese Studies. His works have a large number of readers, translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean and many other translations, some commentators believe that Shi Jingqian is "the most proficient sinologist who can tell Chinese stories", and is also "a Chinese historian with the broadest readership in our time" in the West, and his large number of books and articles "enhance the Western understanding of Chinese history and culture".
That year, I came to Shanghai to make an appointment
Privately, Shi Jingqian was a humble gentleman.
Yong He, a famous photographer and chairman of the Shanghai Photographers Association, had many contacts with Shi Jingqian, and in his impression, Shi Jingqian was very polite, had a very humble attitude, spoke very quietly, and had the style of a gentleman.
Almost 30 years ago, Shi Jingqian wanted to publish a photographic album with Chinese themes at Harper Collins Publishing House in the United States to ask Yonghe for a manuscript. Yonghe had previous experience dealing with some unreliable foreigners, rhetorically taking away the photos, and then there was no news, this time, for this foreigner he did not understand, his heart was somewhat drumming.
He gave him a few pictures, didn't give too many, and thought to himself, it doesn't matter if the album comes out anyway.
In 1996, the album was published, using 6 of his photographs, and Shi Jingqian called Yonghe and said that he had brought them to him when he came to Shanghai. After that, Shi Jingqian came to Shanghai many times to meet yonghe, and the atmosphere was very relaxed. Yonghe remembered that he liked to drink a little whiskey.
Around 2006, Shi Jingqian brought a few Americans and Canadians to dinner with Yonghe at the Ruijin Hotel, and they looked through Yonghe's photographs and praised them. Eight of their four couples strongly recommended him to go to the United States for a photography exhibition. Yonghe was too busy at work at that time, although he agreed, he was delayed because of many things. As everyone knows, several Americans and Canadians present at that time were financial patrons of top art institutions in the United States, and many well-known artists in the United States were popular in their exhibitions. Thinking about it now, Yonghe felt that he might have lost a great opportunity to become famous in the United States.
In 2014, Shi Jingqian embarked on a month-long trip to China, from Beijing to Chengdu, Xi'an, and then to Shanghai, the final destination of the trip, spanning most of China. However, in Shanghai, he only stayed for one day. Yonghe picked up the wind for him at the Peace Hotel, which was the only time Yonghe invited the couple to dinner, and it was the best riverside private room. But Shi Jingqian seemed to be a little afraid of heights, and did not dare to go near the window.
"Seriously, I've always wanted Shi Jingqian to write me a text." Yonghe said. But this wish has been unable to be fulfilled, and today when he heard the bad news, Yonghe remembered the past and felt very sad.
In 1936, Shi Jingqian was born in Surrey, England, to an intellectual family, formerly known as Jonathan Spencer. So, he was British and never became an American, although he had been teaching at Yale University in the United States. In his words: "Why should I betray Shakespeare? ”
His parents loved art and history, and his father, Demot Spencer, taught at Oxford University and heidelberg University. Shi Jingqian later said that the reason why he was related to China may be because when he was born, his mother was reading a book about China.
In 1959, Shi Jingqian, who studied at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, won the Myron Scholarship and was given the opportunity to exchange studies at Yale University. Therefore, after graduating from Cambridge University, he entered Yale University in the United States for further study. During this period, he developed a keen interest in Chinese history and studied modern and contemporary Chinese history under Professor Mary Rui.
Mary Clalaugh Wright is a student of the famous sinologist Fairbank, an authoritative expert in the study of modern Chinese history and Chinese literature, and her husband is also an expert in the study of Chinese culture, the two have visited China and were once imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp in Shandong, where they have a deep understanding of Chinese religion, politics and history.
Rui Marie introduced Shi Jingqian's reading of Qu Tongzu's works on local government in China, He Bingdi on social class mobility, Zhang Zhongli on the Chinese gentry, and Xiao Gongquan on the Chinese countryside, which had a great influence on him.
At that time, Mary Rui asked him to bubble in the library first, and then determine the direction of research. After spending a month in the library, he read the works of Mr. Fang Zhaoyao, a qing historian, from the pile of books, so he wrote to Australia to visit the master (one said to be recommended by Mary Rui).
Fang Zhaoyao is an internationally renowned expert in Chinese history, focusing on the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties and modern Chinese history. He graduated from the Department of Mathematics of Yenching University in his early years and married Ms. Du Lianzhe of the History Department of the university.
In the early 1930s, Mr. and Mrs. Fang Zhaoyao were invited to the United States to participate in the Qing dynasty biography writing program. From 1943 to 1944, the two-volume "Biography of Celebrities in the Qing Dynasty" edited by Heng Muyi and co-compiled by Fang and Du was published in Washington. This work was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation of the United States, and is an important collective result of the American sinology community on the study of Qing history, and has a great influence on the international sinology community.
Good at telling Chinese stories
During his studies in Australia, Fang Zhaoyao gave him a Chinese name, Shi Jingqian, which means: studying history and admiring Sima Qian.
Later, at Mr. Fang Zhaoyao's funeral, he met Jin Anping, who later became his wife. Born in Taiwan in 1950, she moved to the United States with her family at the age of 12 and studied under Fang Zhaoyao when she was a doctoral student at Columbia University's Institute of East Asian Studies. He is now a senior lecturer in the History Department at Yale University, researching the pre-Qin Zhuzi, and has published a biography of The Four Hefei Sisters, including Zhang Chonghe and Zhang Yunhe.
In Australia, Fang Zhaoyao instructed him to read the history of the Qing Dynasty, and Fang Zhaoyao, who was familiar with the person in charge of the Qing history archives at the National Palace Museum in Taipei at that time, introduced Shi Jingqian to check the archives, which were collected in Taichung. So, in 1963, Shi Jingqian went to a lush mountain forest in Beigou, Wufeng Township, Taichung City, Taiwan for the first time. The administrator gave him a bunch of Kangxi-era notes, where he stayed for 10 days or two weeks, and he was the first Western sinologist to come into contact with this precious first-hand account.
Opening these secret folds, he seemed to have entered the real world where the Kangxi Emperor was located, and he seemed to really see how the Kangxi Emperor handled political affairs and was thinking about something. And in this batch of folds, he noticed a name: Cao Yin.
He had read "Dream of the Red Chamber" before, and knew that the author's grandfather was named Cao Yin, and his attention naturally came to him.
In 1965, his doctoral dissertation, Cao Yin and Kangxi: Masters and Slaves, was published and won the Porter Prize, which allowed him to stay on to teach at Yale University. The famous sinologist Levinson read the book and exclaimed: "This man is writing like an angel. ”
In the 1970s, Shi Jingqian read in the Yale Library the "Compendium of Criminal Cases" of the Qing Dynasty, which recorded a murder case of the Wang clan of Tancheng in Shandong Province after eloping with someone, and the body was found in the snow, plus the relevant records in the "Chronicle of Tancheng County" and Huang Liuhong's "Fuhui Quanshu" of Tancheng Zhixian County, the original material is only a dozen pages.
Such a murder during the Qing Dynasty in China aroused great interest in the British, and he thought that he might be able to recreate the murder in a montage.
Starting from these more than a dozen pages of original materials, Shi Jingqian searched for a large number of relevant historical materials, reproducing the poor life of the rural people in Tancheng and Zichuan, Shandong in the early Qing Dynasty. One of the protagonists, Wang Shi, was overwhelmed by the weight of life, eloped with people, and finally died tragically at the hands of her husband. From this case, he sought to explore the laws of the Qing Dynasty, local taxes, various social systems, and the tragic fate of women at that time.
The most wonderful thing, unlike ordinary historians, is that in this work, he uses literary sources: Pu Songling's novel "Liaozhai Zhiyi", a fictional novel that ordinary historians do not use. The author makes extensive use of text descriptions to construct the mental images of the local people in Shandong in the early Qing Dynasty, and from the perspective of today's cultural history research, this method of combining historical documents and literary works shows the author's creativity and foresight. Through vivid images and concrete descriptions, we truly enter the rural world that we once wandered around by abstract concepts, and truly entered the lives of these people and their sufferings and dreams.
This makes the book as fascinating as a novel, with the poet Kitajima arguing, "It is more appropriate to say that he is a writer than a historian." His "The Death of Wang" and "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" read like a detective novel and a historical tragedy, respectively. Therefore, it is appropriate to say that he is "the most American sinologist who can tell Chinese stories", and China has always had a tradition of "literature and history without separation of families", and such works are more acceptable to Chinese readers.
Of course, his introduction of fiction into serious history has also caused some criticism in the academic circles, and some people think that academic research is not a novel, and you are "too much".
As for why it is necessary to quote "Liaozhai Zhiyi", Shi Jingqian said: Because we know that they are novels. But at the same time, we know that Pu Songling lived in the era covered by this book. Despite being a novel, it represents an insight. We see Pu Songling himself in "Chatting with Zai Zhiyi". Pu Songling also wrote a lot of palm notes and the like. Although these are not exact social histories, we can say that these writings represent the ideological concepts of the time and can be used. Pu Songling wrote about his hometown and nearby areas, and he wrote about homeless people, peddlers, street tricks, and people who had no status in society and could be collectively called homeless people. We also learn from his writings that he was in Tancheng (where the book "The Death of the Wang Clan" takes place). One of his stories takes place exactly south of Tancheng, in a small town located on the side of the road from Tancheng to Peidi in Jiangbei. So I think Pu Songling was a Chinese voice of his time, and "The Death of Wang" was to express the voice of the Chinese at that time. Moreover, Pu Songling is also interested in how Chinese treat and use violence. So it's not, "I suppose this happened," but rather, "We know there's a murder here, and we know that Pu Songling is very concerned about this kind of violence, so maybe we can use the real records in the Fuhui Quanshu with Pu Songling's novels." This approach has received a lot of criticism.
Shi Jingqian's style of historical research, known for his narrative and writing, has also become his label, and his writing style has made his academic works on history less boring and obscure, almost all of which are best-selling, so they have a large number of readers.
This brings to mind another historian with somewhat similar styles: Huang Renyu. Shi Jingqian liked Huang Renyu very much and felt that they were like-minded, he said: "I appreciate Professor Huang Renyu's works, we have discussed the issue of historical writing together, and found that we are like-minded. I think his way of writing is one of the more frank of many ways of writing history. In "Fifteen Years of Wanli", he adopts a multi-narrative, multi-point perspective approach, combining the stories of multiple characters, providing a broader perspective for historical writing from the perspective of the country. I'm very interested in that. And I usually start with a specific person or a certain type of person to build a precise clue, so as to dig deeper into the true connotation of historical events. ”
Personal history and the history of the home country reflect each other, in this way, the history of the scene from a small point of entry into history, unfolding a picture of history. From this starting point, he also wrote "Former Dynasty Dreams: Zhang Dai's Glitz and Desolation", "John Hu's Confused Journey: The 18th Century Chinese Catholics' French Disaster", "Matteo Ricci's Palace of Memory" and other works, with a little bit of psychedelic and Proust meaning.
He is one of many "foreigners" who study China, sinologists. He once wrote a book, The Great Khanate: China in the Eyes of the West, to look at how Westerners imagined China's historical course. From the Lubbock monks and Marco Polo in the Mongolian Yuan period to the contemporary Nixon and Kissinger, they not only wrote about the Chinese experiences recorded by Westerners in China, but also wrote about how literati writers who had never come to China imagined China, which affected the impression of China on the general public. And he himself, how could he not be one of the many Westerners who are watching China?
This "viewing" is of course misread, but it at least offers a different perspective. Shi Jingqian's works are equal, his research on China extends from the late Ming Dynasty to the contemporary era, the study of Qing history is the starting point and focus of his research, and among many public readers, he is one of the most well-known Chinese masters. It is a pity that he has taken his Chinese stories to heaven today, but I believe that his works will always accompany his readers, so that they lead them into the fascinating places of history. (Written by Hexi)