Kang Dan (Zhang Jing-e)
On April 16, 2021, Khitan language expert Daniel Kane passed away in Melbourne, Australia.
Born on 25 January 1948, Mr. Kang Dan grew up in a poor family and lived with a single mother. After majoring in Chinese and Russian at the University of Melbourne and obtaining a first class honours degree in 1971, Mr Kang pursued a PhD at the Australian National University and completed his doctoral thesis on Jurchen in 1975. Since 1981, Mr Kang has been a lecturer at the University of Melbourne Chinese. In 1997, he was hired as a professor of sinology at Macquarie University until his official retirement in 2012. At Macquarie, he continued to study the Jurchen script, as well as the Khitan language, which has not yet been fully deciphered, and became one of the world's few experts in Khitan language. His lecture on Khitan at Yale University in 2016 remains a benchmark in Western academia.
Mr. Kang has been sent to Beijing twice to work at the Australian Embassy in Beijing. In 1976, when he first went to Beijing, in addition to getting up early every day to read Chinese newspaper and make full preparations before the ambassador's morning newspaper, he often went out to read large character newspapers and chat with students. At that time, everyone heard that there was an Australian who could translate the big character newspaper on the spot. From 1995 to 1997, he served as Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy. In the 1980s, Mr. Kang met Ms. Yip Siu Ching, who was studying in Macao, and the two sides admired each other and became the love of each other's lives. Ms. Ye Xiaoqing is a talented woman in Shanghai, a talented woman, and the two are very right. Unfortunately, Ms. Xiaoqing unfortunately fell ill in the 1990s, and she fought with the disease for more than 20 years and died in 2010. A scholar of modern Chinese history, Ms. Ye Xiaoqing wrote books on the Qing court and drama for more than a decade before her death, and she continued to work until the last few months of her life.
Mr. Li's former friend Ren Luman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University's China Global Research Centre, interviewed him in 2019, and Dr Zhang Xiaoxuan, PhD of the Department of Translation at RMIT University, translated the interview. The immortals had already passed through the Penglai Pavilion, and I wondered if Mr. Kang Dan, who was now reunited with Madam Xiaoqing, had deciphered the Khitan script in heaven?
Growing up in Melbourne, how did you become interested in Asian languages?
Kang Dan: I have developed a strong interest in language since I was a child. When I was in elementary school, I used to ask the children around me (most of them were the children of European immigrants after World War II, some from Poland and some from Hungary): "How did you go from one to ten?" "There are a lot of children from Italian immigrant families in elementary school, and I learned a lot of Italian from them. At that time, I often went to church to learn some Latin, and after high school, I learned Latin more systematically and took French. At that time, Melbourne was very culturally diverse, and most people did not speak English.
Later, for various personal reasons, at the age of sixteen I left school and got a job in a bank. I work on Lygon Street, also known as Little Italy, next to the University of Melbourne. I'm quite happy with the job. I spoke Italian every day and occasionally some French. Before that, I had also learned a lot of Spanish. At that time, most of my people were immigrants. I wasn't so ambitious that I didn't even know what it was. Then one day, while I was working, I came across a client from college and we started communicating in Italian. He asked me, "Why do you work in a bank?" I said, "Make a living." Then he said, "Why don't you go to college?" "My perception at the time was that people who would have to be doctors and lawyers would go to college. The man said, "Come to my office when you have time, let's talk." Later I learned that he was the dean of the School of Arts at the University of Melbourne.
To make a long story short, I took the university entrance exam with the dean's encouragement and was successfully admitted to the University of Melbourne. But I didn't have a clear academic plan at the time, and what I could be sure of was that I wanted to study languages, the more exotic, the more unusual, the harder, the better. So I decided to study Chinese and Russian because neither language is simple. I studied the language for four years and took other courses, which increased my knowledge a lot. At that time, people read a lot, learned Russian, and we had to read all of Chekhov's novels, and we had to read a lot of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The same is true Chinese, the first year we learn some basic Chinese, and by the second year it is difficult to read. But I really loved these words that seemed strange at the time, and even a little hungry.
What was it like to study Chinese in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s? Were there scholars you particularly admired or people who encouraged you to move forward in the process of learning?
Kang Dan: At the University of Melbourne, our curriculum is very focused on literary education, and we have studied the best Chinese literature in more than two thousand years. In the second year of the course, we had to read Hu Shi's articles, one of which was called "The Meaning of New Thought.". We also read Ba Jin's "Moonlit Nights" and Lu Xun's works, such as "Hometown". In addition, I also read classic works such as "Water Margin" and "Dream of the Red Chamber". In the third year, we continued to read "Dream of the Red Chamber" and Tang poems. In the fourth year, we began to read song ci. My classmates love to read this kind of literature. They didn't learn how to say Chinese, because at that time, no one could go to China, so there was no practical use in learning Chinese. When you go to a university open house, usually, Japanese students will tell you that they want to do business or find a job in Japan in the future, but if you ask students who study Chinese, their ideas are particularly unrealistic. Someone may be a Buddhist, someone may be interested in Kung Fu. I remember a retired lady whose ambition was to read Dream of the Red Chamber, and she didn't even want to learn Chinese.
At the University of Mexico, we spend a lot of time in a place called the "library" in the college, which actually has no books, it is just a room, and everyone goes there when they have time. It's a very equal place, because the lecturer or professor will occasionally come over and sit with everyone and talk. Classmates also help each other, for example, if you are a first-grade student and do not understand the text you are reading, you can ask a third-grade student who has finished that text. So people were very close to each other at that time, and I had some of my best friends who I met at that time. It's a place to forget your troubles. Later, the Australian National University I studied was somewhat similar to this, except that the Australian National University only recruited graduate and doctoral students at that time, not undergraduates. The students there are very interesting people, and the things they study are also strange. Every morning and afternoon, we have a coffee break, and everyone goes to the pantry and sits down to talk for five to ten minutes.
When you were a PhD student in the Australian State, you had close academic exchanges with the famous Mongolian and meta historian Professor Igor de Rachewiltz. Can you tell us about your teacher-student relationship?
Kang Dan: Professor Roygo is a gentle and elegant person, and you can always hear a lot of interesting stories from academia from him. When I graduated from the University of Melbourne, I received a first class honours degree. The Australian national government gave me the opportunity to study for a PhD, as well as a full scholarship. So I went, but at that point I had no idea what I wanted to do, only that I wanted to study Chinese historical aspect. I became interested in the history of Chinese in the Yuan Dynasty, because at that time people had already put a lot of effort into the Tang Dynasty and pre-Tang Dynasty Chinese, and of course, the earlier Old Chinese. My supervisor at that time was Professor Liu Cunren, but he couldn't figure out me and didn't know how to treat me well.
Professor Luo Yiguo did not know where he heard that I was studying "Zhongyuan Phonology", so he took the initiative to contact me and said that he was willing to help. At that time, European linguists had just made progress in deciphering Etruscan, an ancient European language that had died out. Professor Roigo knew this very well, and I was interested in it, and it was probably then that he told me that if I was interested in deciphering such a dead language, I should study the Khitan language. He also recommended to me the Social History of Liao Dynasty China co-written by Wei Tefu and Feng Jiasheng. The book was thick and recorded everything known about the Khitans, such as Khitan customs and culture, but there was no mention of the Khitan language because it was little known at the time.
My linguistic background played a role at this time, as I could read scholarly works on ancient China written in Russian or French. Some European scholars at that time, such as Professor Roygo, considered Khitan to be a mongolian language. But I don't think so. Probably I was the only person in the world who thought that way at the time, because I was an empiricist and I hadn't seen the evidence to support their ideas. I had a theory at that time, I think khitan language is related to Jurchen language, Jurchen language is the language of the Jin Dynasty after the Liao Dynasty. Therefore, I think that if we can understand the relationship between khitan and Jurchen, we can find out the truth. But as a result, I couldn't do it at that time, and I learned after a long time that I was actually right. In the end, my phD thesis turned to the Jurchen language, because first of all it was related to the Khitan and secondly I could not write in my dissertation what I had not yet been able to prove.
After graduating with your Ph.D., you entered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and were sent to Beijing in 1976. What was China like after the Cultural Revolution?
Condé: When I finished my PhD, the Gough Whitlam government in Australia had established diplomatic relations with China, and they needed to find young Australians who could say Chinese and send them to a new embassy in China. Because Canberra is small and everyone knows each other, a friend of mine in Melbourne recommended me to them. The first six months of my arrival in China were very interesting, and although I would Chinese, my Chinese was far from that of The Chinese political officials. I can't understand what the people on the street are saying, because they speak in tongues. The embassy gave me six months to specialize in learning the official dialects and dialects, such as the Smashing gang of four. I took a course on Chinese literature at Peking University, all about class struggle and peasant literature. At that time, "opening doors to run schools" was popular, and I also went to work in a factory.
Chinese students have the habit of taking lunch breaks, but foreigners do not, so when there are not many people during the lunch break, I go to read the big character posters posted on the wall. By reading the big character newspaper, I learned to read cursive and also learned dialects. Then I went to work at the embassy. My job title is "Third Secretary", which is said to be behind the ambassador's driver. But that's a good thing for me, because I don't have a lot of responsibility and have a lot of free time to play around In Beijing. I got to know Beijing very well. I also act as an interpreter for the Ambassador, so I have taken on important events, such as speeches at the Great Hall of the People or during the Prime Minister's visits. At that time, I Chinese and speak Italian every day, just like when I was ten years old. I was very enthusiastic about Chinese at that time, spent a long time studying, and spent a total of four years in China.
You are an authoritative expert on the Khitan language, can you tell us about this language? How did you decipher it?
Kangdan: The Khitan founded the Liao Dynasty (907-1125) in northern China, which existed for more than two centuries, and the Khitan language is the language of the Khitan people. The Khitan language is divided into two scripts: "big characters" and "small characters". As I mentioned earlier, I learned a long time later that the Khitan characters were indeed related to the Jurchen script. At present, people still do not know the origin of khitan small characters.
When I was working at the embassy in the 1970s, I saw an advertisement in the Beijing Daily one day saying that the National Culture Center wanted to hold an exhibition of ancient characters. At that time, there was a Khitan writing expert named Liu Fengyi, and I had read his articles, but I never had the opportunity to meet him. I went to this exhibition, where I met a girl who was studying for a master's degree, and I asked her if she could understand the text on display, and she said she couldn't understand it, but her teacher could understand it. So I asked her, "Who is your teacher?" She said, "Liu Fengyi." I said, "Ah, I'd love to meet him, where can I find him?" She said: "He may have gone home, wait a minute." When she had finished she turned and disappeared, and five minutes later she returned with an old gentleman. I asked, "Are you Mr. Liu Fengyi?" He said in astonishment, "Oh my God, how could you possibly know?" "Imagine that in those days, a foreigner suddenly walked in and said you were so-and-so, which must have been a terrible thing. In short, I became very good friends with Professor Liu Fengyi, who gave me a lot of things that people outside of China couldn't get.
There is a Chinese proverb that Sai Weng lost his horse and knew that it was not a blessing. During the Cultural Revolution, scholars like Liu Fengyi were sent to the "May Seventh Cadre School." While there, because there was nothing else to do, they copied down the contents of the rubbings with Khitan and Chinese characters printed on them, and drew a table to compare the Chinese characters with the Khitan characters.
The rubbing they copied became the "Rosetta Tablet" of the Khitan script (bilingual tablets written in Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian, including ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and secular scripts, which were the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian). It comes from the wordless stele in front of the tomb of Empress Wu Zetian, in fact, there are words on the wordless stele, but they are on the top of the stone tablet, which is difficult to see. Unless you climb the ladder to see, you can't see it.
Qianling wordless monument
Bilingual rubbings on the wordless stele: Emperor Dajin's brothers are all through the Records of Lang Junxing
The rubbing is bilingual, with Chinese characters on the left and Khitan on the right. Usually, if you can read Chinese characters, the interpretation should be a piece of cake, but in fact this is not the case, because the first two words on the rubbing are written as "Dajin". When people first found this rubbing, they thought it was written in Jurchen text. It was not until the 1920s, when tomb robbers discovered the tombs of Liao emperors in chifeng city in inner Mongolia, that people realized that the text on the rubbings was in Khitan script. Even so, researchers have not made much progress for a long time. The dates and numbers above are understandable, and it is a beginning, but you don't know the pronunciation, only that a certain character represents a certain meaning. At the end of the rubbing, there are two official titles and names, and it was later learned that the names in khitan were upside down, which caused confusion for many years.
By 1987, Chinese scholars had deduced the pronunciation of many words based on the names of officials. Probably 70 percent of their speculations are correct. But in the middle of the rubbing, there are about three-quarters of the text, and no one knows what was written, and it still is today. So you just asked me how I deciphered the Khitan language, and I didn't actually decipher it. What I can do is to write what Chinese scholars write in a language that European scholars can understand, or I can write what foreigners write in Chinese so that Chinese scholars can understand it. The problem with European scholars is that they didn't know much about Chinese historical linguistics in the past, and now they're starting to catch up in this regard, and Chinese scholars who study Khitan are historians who know very little about languages. So, they had to wait for someone like me. One colleague summed it up well, saying, "KangDan's book is the end of an era of Khitan studies, and the beginning of a new era." ”
This question may sound ignorant, but what is the difference between Jurchen and Manchu, which was later used in the Qing Dynasty?
Kang Dan: At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Guanwai people who invaded the Central Plains from the north did not call themselves Manchus, they were Jurchens. But the problem was that by then, the word Ju en/Jurchen already had the meaning of "slave", so the second emperor, Emperor Taiji (1592-1643), after establishing the Qing Dynasty, changed the name of the clan to Manchuria, and he did not explain much. There are some different theories about this, but simply put, no one really knows why. The official language of the Qing Dynasty is very close to the Jianzhou Jurchen dialect spoken by the AixinJueluo clan, which founded the Qing Dynasty.
Manchu has long been endangered, but is now slowly recovering in academia and popular culture, thanks to some popular Chinese tv dramas set in the Qing Dynasty. What are your thoughts on this latest development?
Condé: I once wrote an article about this. The revival of the Manchu language began shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Although many people are learning Manchu now, they may stop after the first ten or twenty words. I've met people in China who speak real Manchu, and there are some young people in China who are reviving Manchu, and they can probably write in Manchu, but always write the same thing over and over again.
You are an expert on more than one language that has perished or become endangered, and what is the importance of studying them today?
Condé: That's an interesting question. There is a view, probably the view of most people, that each language has its own unique way of seeing the world. There are some cultures that have different perceptions of time, and some that have different understandings of color. These are all interesting because we are used to taking our culture for granted. My own view is that studying these languages is an interesting thing in itself, a love of antiquities. When I was younger, I was already interested in the language of extinction. I never really asked myself why I was interested in these things, presumably by nature. Once, when I was at Peking University, I met an American female professor of geology, about fifty years old. I asked her how many female classmates there were in her class when she was a student, because female geologists were rare at that time. Not a single one, she said. So I asked, "Why are you interested in geology?" She replied, "I don't know." When I was a kid, other kids would pick up a rock and throw it away, and I would pick up a rock and say, 'Oh my God, this rock is so interesting.'" ”
Another point of concern is that when a language dies or is about to die, it goes through a process of simplification. This can be seen in languages such as Manchu. For example, in the early Qing Dynasty, the Manchu word "cup" alone may have more than a dozen expressions, such as cup, cup and the like. However, by the end of the Qing Dynasty, people only remembered the expression of "cup", and the rest forgot all. I can see this phenomenon in today's society, at least in my children. They only say "cup," and no one really says "chalice" or "goblet." Kids today might say, "You don't understand the way we talk. But ten years from now, the words in our heads will no longer exist.
In the decades since you worked on Asia and China in Australia, has anything changed in academia?
Kang Dan: For me, there is no academia at all, it doesn't exist anymore. Of course, there are still a few very good scholars, but very few, and the rest of them do not know anything at all. There are many pairs of eyes in the world now staring at China, but almost no one in these so-called "China experts" will say Chinese, let alone have any knowledge of today's China. In academia, you should be with like-minded people, thinking about problems with people who are interested in culture, philosophy, history, and art, and coming up with answers together, whether they are undergraduates, graduate students, or professors. In the past, the academic community seemed to live in an ideal village, which was particularly wonderful. But then it fell apart.
In today's academic environment, or, as you say, non-existent academic environment, do you think young scholars can still study extinct or endangered languages as much as you did then?
Kang Dan: The short answer is no, for two reasons. First, when I retired in 2012, political correctness had taken over the heights of the university. If I had stayed in Macquarie or anywhere else, I would have been attacked by these people. I left at the right time, because before I could retire, the president of the university where I worked, Macquarie, left and was replaced by an American. The new chancellor pays special attention to things like university rankings and publication output. Since then, as a member of academia, your value depends on the number of articles you publish, with a minimum requirement of four per year. Articles are not written on the basis of writing, let alone writing books or translating them.
"Dream of the Red Chamber" is a good example. I don't know exactly how long it took Hawkes and Minford to translate it into English, but it certainly took a lot of effort and time. I had read translations by Dai Naidi and Yang Xianyi before, but when I read the first chapter of Hawkes's translation of The Book of Stones, I was amazed at every sentence. It is truly the ultimate realm, behind every word and every sentence is endless thinking and dedication. The same is true of Needham's History of Science and Technology in China, an achievement that is unattainable in today's environment.
Do you have any advice for today's young scholars?
Condé: As they say, you have to "cultivate your own garden" (from Voltaire's The Honest Man, which means to create your own spiritual home). You'll meet this type of person in the most unexpected places. Sometimes I meet young scholars who impress me, even though in an educational and academic environment like this, they can still be so outstanding and so knowledgeable. When I went to Rome a few years ago, I went to Keats's Tomb and met some American students. There was an American girl who cried loudly at Keats's grave, unabashedly expressing her emotions. I think it's remarkable that a girl in her early twenties has such a deep appreciation and understanding of Keats.
Mr. Dan Kang and Ms. Ye Xiaoqing
Bibliography of Professor Dan Kang's Writings (compiled by former friends and students)
1971: ‘Lo Chang-pei.’ Unpublished honours thesis, Department of Oriental Studies, University of Melbourne.
1975: ‘The Sino–Jurchen Vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters.’ PhD thesis, The Australian National University, Canberra (later revised and published under the same title, see item below).
1983: Translation of Sha Yexin, ‘The Impostor (If I Were Real).’ Renditions 19–20: 333–69.
1989: The Sino–Jurchen Vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters. Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol. 153. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies.
1993: ‘Irrational Belief among the Chinese Elite.’ In Modernization of the Chinese Past, edited by Mabel Lee and A. D. Syrokomla-Stefanowska. Sydney: Wild Peony Press.
1997: ‘Language Death and Language Revivalism: The Case of Manchu.’ Central Asiatic Journal 41(2): 231–49.
2000: Translation of Kang Youwei, ‘Selections from Notes on Travels around Europe.’ Renditions 53–54: 189–98.
2000: ‘The Qieyun as a Historical Document: The Spirit of the Metropolis.’ Papers from the 13th European Association of Chinese Studies Conference.
2004: ‘A Note on *Cisdeben (Khitan).’ Central Asiatic Journal 48(2): 223–25.
2006: ‘Khitan and Jurchen.’ In Tumen jafun jechen aku: Manchu Studies in Honour of Giovanni Stary, Tungusco Sibirica 20, edited by Alessandra Pozzi, Juha Antero Janhunen, and Michael Weiers, 121–32. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
2006: The Chinese Language: Its History and Current Usage. Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing.
2008: Introduction to and updated translation of Wu Cheng’en, retold by Timothy Richard, Journey to the West: The Monkey King’s Amazing Adventures. Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing.
2009: The Khitan Language and Script. Handbook of Uralic Studies, Vol. 19. Leiden: Brill.
2009: With Louis Kervyn, ‘Joseph Mullie and the Beginnings of Khitan Studies.’ In The Early Mongols: Language, Culture and History, edited by Volker Rybatzki, Alessandra Pozzi, Peter W. Geier, and John R. Krueger, 79–90. Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol. 173. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.
2013: ‘Introduction, Part 2: An Update on Deciphering the Khitan Language and Scripts.’ Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 43: 11–25.
2013: ‘The Great Central Liao Khitan State.’ Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 43: 27–50.
2016: ‘Ten Lectures on the Khitan Language and Khitan Studies.’ Unpublished lectures presented at the Council on East Asian Studies, Yale University, 11 to 19 May 2016.