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In 1991, Mr. Dai Yi, then president of the Chinese Historical Society and the Institute of Qing History of Chinese Minmin University, spoke about the achievements of Chinese history in the 40 years after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and greatly affirmed the research on the "Boxer Rebellion" of Shandong University.
Mr. Dai Yi said that together with Peking University's "History of the Wei-Jin, Northern and Southern Dynasties" and "History of the Song Dynasty," Nanjing University's "Yuan History," "History of the Taiping Rebellion," and Central China Normal University's "History of the Xinhai Revolution," it can be called an important representative of the historiography of New China, and its influence is very widespread.
It can be said that the Boxer Rebellion has become a bridge between Shandong University and the national historical circles and even the world academic circles.
Why can the Boxer Rebellion studies of Shandong University receive such praise in society? Who made such a result, and how did he do it? This has to start with the book "Lu Yao and His Historiography: Lu Yao's Oral History".
Lu Yao, formerly known as Wu Songling, is a famous historian, tenured professor, chair professor and doctoral supervisor of Shandong University, and is recognized as a famous scholar of Boxer Rebellion history and folk religious history at home and abroad.
Professor of Shandong University Lu Yao
Since the 60s, he has led his team to engage in fieldwork in the field of Boxer Rebellion and folk religion research.
Lu Yao was still doing fieldwork between the ages of 60 and 70, and he was already retired, but Lu Yao, who had achieved such impressive results in historical research, did not study history at first.
The road from college
After the liberation of Qingdao in 1949, Shandong University set up a history major, and Lu Yao was already a sophomore Chinese student at that time, about switching from Chinese to the history industry, Lu Yao recalled this:
After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Shandong University added a history department, and I switched to history. Why did interest shift? Because there were many progressive student clubs in the school at that time, when I entered in 1947, Chiang Kai-shek's reactionary rule was at the end of its period, and a Chinese student one level higher than me founded the Historical Research Society. I saw their posters alluding to the history of the Kuomintang secret service rule at that time, and I thought history was very useful.
Our teachers at that time were all famous professors, there was a historical perspective in literature, and there were philosophical theories in literature, so after studying for a year, my horizons broadened, and it turned out that there was still so much learning.
Only from the heart of interest and love can people do a good job in research, and studying history is not only the need of the times, but also a meaningful thing that Lu Yao thinks.
By chance, he embarked on the road of historical research, so how did he embark on the road of research on the Boxer Rebellion, and this research will become the most important achievement of his academic life? Lu Yao later recalled:
For me personally, I began to want to do a little research on the Boxer Rebellion, in addition to the guidance of the teacher, personal interests, organizational arrangements, and another factor was the influence of Mr. Dai Yi of Chinese University and Lu Jingqi, a young teacher who had just come to work in our department.
Before graduating from the graduate class of Renmin University in 1955, Lu Jingqi visited his teacher, Mr. Dai Yi. Mr. Dai Yi told him: "After you go to Shandong, don't do anything else, but specifically do the Boxers, because now the academic circles can't even understand the basic facts of the Boxers." ”
After Lu Jingqi came to teach in the department, he revealed Mr. Dai Yi's expectations many times in his conversations with me, which left a deep impression on me.
Touched by filling the void in his heart, Lu Yao anchored the Boxer Rebellion as his goal and dedicated his life to it.
However, at the beginning of the Boxer Rebellion, it was very difficult, no one had ever done systematic combing, and there was a lack of information and the nature was unknown. At the same time, there are still many expectations in this matter, and the pressure on Lu Yao's body can be imagined.
In order to open his own research road and find a solid basis, Lu Yao led the team to find a way to break the situation, and at this time, a method that had not been valued once came into their eyes.
A key factor is that the Boxer Rebellion took place in 1900, only a year after the survey was carried out in 1960, so many of the elderly who participated in the movement were still alive, so there were interviewees for fieldwork.
Leaving the desk and desk, going to the countryside to find witnesses, looking for the source of the information, this is a lot of challenges for college students who have been buried in the desk, especially when there was no decent means of transportation, sometimes the fellow villagers did not trust them very much in these investigators, and the whole work was very hard. According to Lu Yao's recollection:
In a chance interview, an old man said that Pan Laoji, the rich man of Ganji, was from Liangzhuang.
But all over the visit to the elderly over 70 years old, they did not talk about Pan's affairs. This is because the surname Pan is the big surname of Liang Zhuang, and the Pan Laoji family is a generation of large landowners, and the ordinary villagers have been affected by the previous political movement in the early stage, and they are worried and dare not talk more. We talked to many elderly people surnamed Pan, but they still refused to tell the truth.
Finally, we found a young accountant Pan, who looked through the family tree and told us about the situation, and based on fieldwork and documentary records, it seemed that we could conclude that "a fist is a fist, and a regiment is a regiment."
This kind of process of eating a closed door in the search and repeatedly confirming a small detail can be said to be the norm in fieldwork. But as the saying goes, all success is made by smart people with clumsy efforts.
In 1960, the results of this investigation were remarkable, 14 investigation teams collected more than 750,000 words of oral information, and completed nearly 300,000 words of 16 topics in the "Shandong Boxer Rebellion Investigation Report", which became the most basic information for all studies of the Boxer Rebellion, and also made some information that was about to disappear reappear in the world.
It should be said that fieldwork not only salvaged historical materials, but also allowed Lu Yao to realize a historical research method suitable for himself, that is, combining history with sociology and anthropology, and gradually forming his own academic style. Lu Yao described his academic experience and said:
I have always insisted on combining fieldwork and literature in my research, and later I gradually realized that this is a research method that combines history with sociology and anthropology, which is called "historical anthropology" in the West, and I think that calling it "historical sociology" is more in line with the research transformation of historians. We can absorb the theories imported from the West, but we cannot be led by their noses, but we must put forward our own independent thinking and innovation according to local realities.
In this way, starting in 1960, Lu Yao and his colleagues conducted six fieldwork surveys, and then combined with the literature and archives, they discovered the origin of the Boxer Rebellion in one fell swoop, which not only solved the long-standing and unresolved problems for decades, but also formed a unique research path and identity mark, which attracted the attention of the international academic community and achieved "Lu Yao and His Historiography".
Pioneering and watchful in the field of unpopular academic research, interest-oriented, doing one line of love, willing to study, not afraid of hardship, and always holding the initial belief of "filling the gap" has always persisted, which is the key element for Lu Yao to make significant contributions to the field of new Chinese historical research. And his academic methods and life experience can also be inspired and referenced.