Historiographical writing and reading should have more world vision丨 2021 Beijing News Humanistic Reading Thought Map

Questions to keep thinking about

Yang Bin, Ph.D., Northeastern University, Professor of History, University of Macau, Member of Xiling Printing Society, Visiting Scholar of Harvard Yenching Society, author of "Sea Coins and Coin Shells".

Yang Bin: In recent years, I have mainly focused on my own research, exploring the interaction between China and the Indian Ocean world during the Song and Yuan Dynasties and the consequent generation, transmission and forgetting of China's knowledge about the Indian Ocean. As we all know, during the Reign of Yongle Xuande, Zheng He went to the West seven times, and although some key issues (such as the size of the treasure ship) have not been resolved due to historical reasons, his deeds have been studied by Chinese and foreign scholars for more than a hundred years. I am concerned with the pre-Zheng he era and the post-Zheng He era. The former is the precursor, foundation and platform for Zheng He to go to the West; the latter is the transformation after going to the West. After Zheng He until the formation of the modern navy, Chinese ships never entered the Indian Ocean again, and Chinese rarely traveled the Indian Ocean world. The Knowledge of the Indian Ocean that was produced, accumulated, and transmitted in the Tang, Song, and Yuan Dynasties, as well as in the early Ming Dynasty, began to be misunderstood, disappeared, and even forgotten after the middle of the Ming Dynasty. This is a key theme in my new book manuscript.

Huaiyu Chen is a co-associate professor at arizona State University's School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and the School of International Languages and Cultures, and was selected as a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Clare College, Cambridge University, and the Berlin Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Max Planck Institute. His research interests include the history of Chinese religion and thought, the cultural history of the Silk Road, and modern thought and scholarship. He is the author of "Animals and the Political and Religious Order of the Middle Ages".

Chen Huaiyu: In the first half of 2021, the main focus was on teaching, but since the summer vacation in May, I have continued to think about the manuscript I am currently writing. On the one hand, I am constantly reading new materials, including primary and secondary literature; on the other hand, I also communicate with academic peers in the form of conferences and lectures to make my ideas more mature.

Although I also thought about some other issues this year, what has always been on my mind is to explore the interrelationship of Buddhist architecture, literature, and rituals in the Middle Ages through the study of stone lamps. Stone lanterns are now widely spread in Korea and Japan, not only international tourists to Japan will notice the stone lanterns that can be seen everywhere, even the Japanese gardens in Europe and the United States are decorated with stone lanterns as the main element of Japanese cultural symbols, but in history, stone lamps are actually the invention of Chinese Buddhism, which can be described as the flowers of peach and plum blooming in the courtyard adjacent to the partition wall. At present, it is generally believed that stone lamps appeared in the Northern Qi period. However, the real prosperity was until the Tang Dynasty, and most of the current discoveries came from the reign of Emperor Xuanzong, but after the Tang Dynasty, they gradually disappeared into obscurity. Its rise should be examined in a broad context, that is, the rise of the material phenomenon of the Medieval Buddhist community was influenced by a variety of factors, not only from the long-standing lamp-burning offering culture rooted in early Buddhism, but also from the stimulation and challenges of specific religious ritual traditions such as Zoroastrian fire altars and Taoist lamp altars after Buddhism entered China, and even the Buddhist apocalyptic ideas that became popular in the central plains in the late Northern Dynasty were also a factor.

In addition, the rise of stone lanterns was also influenced by the changes in the natural environment and the change of dynasties by Buddhists, who sought to build permanent buildings that preserved their own cultural and ritual traditions, essentially Buddhist monuments. The merits on these stone lamps have also been preserved in new textual forms into Buddhist culture, and although the original manuscripts no longer exist, they are preserved as inscriptions and lists of devotees, along with the stone lamps. The stone lantern came from the grassroots movement of Buddhism, which was not valued and supported by the imperial court, and although it also embodied the Buddhist cosmology and world view, it had a strong locality. So my main concern is the monumentality, textuality, materiality, and locality of the stone lamp.

Books to watch

Yang Bin: Because I focus on my own research, I rarely track the latest published works, which is a shame. I might mention the research of the Japanese scholar Kentaro Yamada that I myself saw while studying ambergris. He began studying ambergris around the 1930s and published it, but it was discontinued due to war, and by 1955-1956, he had published a long article on ambergris based on Chinese and Western historical sources. In my opinion, this is the most outstanding article on ambergris in China and abroad, but unfortunately it has been hardly known for decades.

Recent studies by domestic scholars on the map of the South China Sea have also lifted my spirits. Using the stacking method, the scholar and collaborator overturned the historical materials of the Vietnamese claim for sovereignty over the Paracel Islands and the historical materials of the Philippines on the claim to Huangyan Island, and selected and analyzed Chinese documents to further calculate the 21.3 kilometers of a more in ming and qing Chinese navigation, and the relevant research has been published or is about to be published. These are extremely far-reaching breakthroughs in the study of China's maritime history.

Chen Huaiyu: One of the most impressive books in 2021 is the new book "Dunhuang Writing Culture: The End of the First Millennium" by Imre Galambos, a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Cambridge. It is also his third book in a decade to be published in the German publishing house De Guitte's "Cultural Studies in Writing", which, like the previous two, once again emphasizes the multilingual and multicultural characteristics of the manuscript unearthed in northwest China. Based on the experience of reading Dunhuang manuscripts in the past fifteen years, Gao Yirui's new book explores how the manuscripts were produced, used and reused in the historical and social context of the dunhuang rebel rule from the perspective of material culture and through some details that ordinary people did not pay much attention to in the past.

Dunhuang Manuscript Culture: End of the First Millennium (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020) book cover.

The book provides Dunhuang Studies with a new perspective on the practice of copying, arguing that after the withdrawal of the Tubo regime from Dunhuang in the ninth century AD, the Rebel society did not return to the state before the Tubo occupation, but developed a unique multilingual, multicultural writing culture, mainly because of the changes in the local population composition, and the copying cultures of the Han, Tibetan, Sogdian, Khotanese and Uighurs influenced each other. For example, the first chapter points out that after the Tubo people left, their Bayeux script form was inherited by some Chinese scripts from the Rebel period. The third chapter discusses the order in which some Chinese inscriptions and painting inscriptions are written from left to right, which is also influenced by the writing habits of the "Hu language" in Central Asia, for example, the top-down writing of Chinese inscriptions from left to right may be from the Sogdian and Uighur writing habits. The second chapter mainly analyzes the age, identity, and status of the apprentices, trying to reveal the historical and social significance of the later. The fourth chapter mainly analyzes the demographic composition reflected in the names of the people reposted by the Social Division, who believes that the Sogdians were an important group in local economic and social activities during the period of the Rebel Army. However, he did not say why the Uighurs were not common enough in these names, and whether it was because the economic and social interaction between the Uighurs and the Han chinese was not as close as that of the Sogdians. In conclusion, there are still some issues to be discussed.

Looking forward to the original work

Yang Bin: I can only talk about the writing and publication of historical works according to my own feelings. I hope that domestic historical works can have a little more world awareness and world vision, and Chinese readers can also have a little more world awareness and world vision; after all, China is in the world, not outside the world. For the Chinese people, the Shang Zhou Han and Tang Dynasties certainly have a sense of cultural kinship and are naturally attractive. However, China is of course an inseparable part of the community of human destiny, so both the author and the reader need to have the consciousness of a world citizen and be able to understand the world with considerable sympathy and even empathy.

Second, I look forward to more interdisciplinary historiography. The development of human society is complex and does not advance according to the rules and regulations of political history, economic history, cultural history, etc., which inevitably requires us to explore any historical problem according to the problem itself and the material itself (including the wordless). Therefore, I hope that young students who love history can expand their interests and learn mathematics, study physics, study biology, study medicine, and so on. In this way, we can expand the entry point of historical research and undertake the all-encompassing and endless learning of history.