This "Daming Chongzhen Nine-Year School" is very...
Alibaba, which Ma Yun founded, has a culture that employees should give themselves a "flower name" after joining the company, such as Ma Yun himself is called "Feng Qingyang", in order to play a role in diluting the level and eliminating the sense of distance.
In fact, many companies, more or less consciously or unconsciously, will be like this, "It's going to be the New Year... In the office building, Linda, Mary, Jerry, and Sam will squeeze into the train, return to their hometown, and change back to Guifang, Cuihua, Bolt Pillar, Dog Leftover..."
Although it is only a joke, it shows from one side that it is still very common to be willing to give yourself a "foreign name" contemporary number.
▲ List of names of sinologists, a bit of a trance...
However, the following names, you taste a pin - Lie Kanru, Xie Shuli, Gao Yan, Shi Jingqian, Kong Feili, Fei Zhengqing, Vogel Yi, Yuwen Soan, Murong Jie... Is it quite elegant, is it the boss of Guifang and the dog leftovers in the office building?
In fact, they are all out-and-out foreigners, but they are a group of foreigners who may be more Chinese than many Chinese, and they have a common identity - "sinologists". This is a group of high-quality foreigners who can be called overseas "fine", which is in stark contrast to some domestic "fine X".
▲ His name is Shi Hanwei, a German, author of "A Brief History of China"
Sinologists, that is, non-Chinese experts who study content related to Chinese culture ("Sinology" or "Sinology"), outside of China, have different specific research fields, some study Chinese literature, some study Chinese music, but most of them still study Chinese history and current situation.
At first glance, this group seems to be very far away from us, and many people do not know, but in fact we can still contact their ideas and works, but many times we do not realize it.
"Yuanfang, what do you think?" This sentence is familiar to everyone, right? The buzzword comes from the often-replayed TV series "Detective Di Renjie".
"Di Renjie" is a famous minister of the Tang Dynasty, a real person in history, the reason why it has become a big IP in the film and television industry after a thousand years, it has been repeatedly made into movies and TV series, and it also enjoys the reputation of a Chinese detective in the world (although the real Di Renjie is not known for judging cases), and thanks to a foreigner from the Netherlands - Gao Luopei.
▲ Little Gaulope when he was on the island of Java
Gaurope, whose real name was Robert Hans van Gulik, was born on August 9, 1910 in Zatfin, the Netherlands, the son of a medic in the Dutch colonial army in Indonesia, so he spent his childhood on the island of Java.
After the family moved back to the Netherlands, he was attracted by the Chinese on the vase at home, and saw the Chinese incense burners and calligraphy and paintings brought back from the East by his neighbors, and became strongly interested in China, and invited a Chinese student to teach Chinese "one-on-one". When he entered leiden University in 1930, he did not hesitate to choose sinology as his major, and became a diplomat after receiving his doctorate.
▲ Gao Luopei is a combination of East and West
After the outbreak of the Pacific War, he came to Chongqing, served as the first secretary of the Embassy of the Dutch Government-in-Exile in China, came into contact with many outstanding Chinese talents who had withdrawn to the rear area due to the war, gathered in Chongqing, eagerly studied Chinese culture, and married Shui Shifang, the granddaughter of Zhang Zhidong, a famous minister at the end of the Qing Dynasty, as his wife, and became a Chinese son-in-law.
▲ The top is Gao Luopei's, the bottom is mine, the gap is a bit big...
Gao Luopei called himself "Zhitai", the study was called "Jiyi Zhai" and "Yin Yue An", the piano and chess calligraphy and painting were all familiar, the level was quite high, and he wrote well in calligraphy, especially preferring cursive writing, from the age of 20 until his death, insisting on 37 years. And wherever diplomats go, they have to set up a Chinese-style study.
▲Gao Luopei and his wife costume photos
Gao Luopei is best known for his contribution to the Di Gong Case series of novels— while in Chongqing, he read a novel written in the early Qing Dynasty, The Four Strange Cases of Wu Zetian. It is said that even if foreigners understand Chinese, it will certainly be very difficult to read, but it is not a problem for Gao Luopei at all.
▲ Hand-drawn ancient city floor plan of Gao Luopei's creative process
He compared Chinese public case novels with Western detective novels, and found that the level of "detectives" in ancient China was not worse than That of Holmes, but they were unknown in the world, and even degraded, for which he was deeply unfair.
Therefore, Gao Luopei first translated the novel into English, and then felt that he was not addicted, and simply did it himself, creating "The Case of the Copper Bell" in English, which was very popular as soon as it was published.
▲Various "Di Gong Case"
In the past 22 years, Gao Luopei has successively written more than a dozen novels with Di Renjie as the protagonist, such as "Labyrinth Case", "Lake Case", "Iron Nail Case", collectively known as "Di Gongjue Case Grand View", the English name is "Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee", Judge Dee is Di Renjie (Judge Di ... ）。
This ancient Chinese "detective novel" was translated into 29 languages, published in 38 countries, and sold more than 20 million copies, and Di Renjie, a famous Tang Dynasty courtier, could not have imagined that he would almost become the image spokesperson of China after a thousand years. The U.S. Foreign Office has even issued a regulation that all U.S. personnel serving in China must read "Judge Dee" to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese and Chinese culture!
Gao Luopei died in 1967, and his whole life was full of affection and even belonging to China, and His wife Shui Shifang summed up her husband like this: "He is not a foreigner! From the time we realized that he was dying, he did not break the word practice for a day, he loved to eat Yuan Cup sausage, liked Sichuan cuisine, he was really a Chinese. ”
Gao Luopei was an "amateur sinologist" because being a diplomat was his "official job." In addition to him, there is a British sinologist who has deeply considered Chinese history and culture, and he is also an old friend of Chinese min and a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Joseph Needham, who is also very outstanding.
Joseph Needham, whose real name was Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, was born on 9 December 1900 to a family of British Christian intellectuals. He did not care about China, but was fluent in German and French, and once dreamed of becoming a doctor.
Needham was admitted to Cambridge University at the age of 18 to study biochemistry, received his doctorate at the age of 24, published his book "Chemical Embryology" at the age of 31, and became a leader in the discipline at a young age. Not surprisingly, he will become a scientist who studies biology or chemistry full-time and has nothing to do with China, and perhaps we will only see him on the list of Nobel laureates.
▲ Lu Guizhen
In 1937, the arrival of a Chinese female student, Lu Guizhen, changed the trajectory of his life. Born in 1904 in Puchun, Hubei Province, Lu Guizhen studied physiology at Jinling Women's University. Her fiancé died in the anti-Japanese battlefield, and Lu Guizhen, who was already in her 30s, was deeply saddened and became a "celibacy".
By this time Needham was married to dorothy Mary Moyle, a fellow biologist, who was Lu Guizhen's mentor. Unexpectedly, Needham was fascinated by Lu Guizhen's oriental charm and quickly developed into a lover relationship.
It is said that this is a "derailment" on the board, but the generous Dorothy does not care. The name "Needham" was also given by Lu Guizhen, and later even Dorothy had a Chinese name - Li Dafei, the three of them actually "coexisted peacefully", and often went on outings, dinners, and discussions together... Really harmonious.
But this is not the most important, what is important is that Needham has since turned his research direction to China, worked hard to learn Chinese and Chinese culture, especially interested in Taoism, and gave himself the word "Dan Yao" and "Ten Taoists".
In 1941, Needham, who was already proficient in Chinese, was appointed by the British government as the curator of the Sino-British Science Cooperation Pavilion and held the title of "Science Counsellor". Needham came to China as a diplomat in 1943 and did not leave until 1946, after the victory of the War of Resistance.
In the past three years, he traveled 11 times, from the China-Myanmar border to Fujian and Dunhuang, almost all the places that could be reached, traveled 50,000 kilometers, conducted an in-depth investigation of Chinese history and culture, was shocked by ancient Chinese projects (such as Dujiangyan), and produced a "Needham's Question" or "Needham Problem" that is still being discussed to this day - why was modern science and technology and industrial civilization not born in China, where the world's science and technology and economy were more developed and prosperous?
In 1964, Needham visited China again
Needham was not the first to raise this question, but it was the most weighty to raise this question in terms of his identity, status, influence, and understanding of China on the ground, and it also made the question more widely known. As for the answer, of course, there is no unified version of the benevolent and the wise.
Needham's work didn't stop there, and in 1948 he submitted to Cambridge University Press a plan for the publication of science and civilization in China. He believes that China's contribution to world civilization far exceeds that of all other countries, but the recognition it has received is far from enough.
The University of Cambridge approved of the plan and even dispensed with all teaching tasks, allowing him to concentrate on writing books. In August 1954, the first volume was published and was widely acclaimed, and the first 5,000 thousand copies were snatched up and had to be reprinted several times.
According to the plan, the entire book will have 7 volumes and more than 30 volumes, covering a wide range of contents, from mechanical engineering and military technology to small inventions such as umbrellas, porcelain, kites, and toilet paper, involving ancient Chinese philosophy, history, mathematics, physics and chemistry, agriculture, biology, medicine and many other fields.
In Needham's view, China has more than four major inventions, simply four hundred inventions, even four thousand inventions - the drum car (recorder car), gyroscope, rocket, water conservancy machinery, deep well drilling... Because there was so much content, it was a super project, and it was not completed until 1995, when Needham died. As of 2014, a total of 14 Chinese translations have been published, and the title of the book is "History of Science and Technology in China".
Nature once commented, "In the 20th century, no scholar rewrote the stereotypes in people's minds like Needham, and he described and sorted out the history of China over the past 1500 years with picturesque clarity." The famous British historian Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975): "The practical impact of Dr. Joseph Needham's work, as great as its scholarly value, is an act of 'recognition' of Westerners at a higher level than diplomatic recognition." ”
In general, although Needham's personal virtue is lacking (how to say that he is "derailed"), he is still an outstanding scientist and sinologist with high prestige, full of good feelings for China, and a justified name for China's image.
After talking about two "amateur" sinologists, let's talk about "professional sinologists".
Harvard University is no stranger to everyone, and among the first-class universities in the United States and even in the world, there is a "Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies" - Fairbank, a professional sinologist and the first director of this research center.
Born on May 24, 1907 in Huron, South Dakota, Fairbank, whose real name was John King Fairbank, graduated from Harvard University and went to Oxford University in 1929 to study for a doctorate in The direction of Sino-British relations.
▲From right to left, Liang Sicheng, Fairbank, Lin Huiyin
It is precisely because of this research direction that he needs to go to China for field research. In 1931, Fei Zhengqing came to China, first studied in Beiping Chinese, the teacher is Jiang Tingdian, an expert in modern Chinese history, and then got to know The President of Peking University, Hu Shi, the architect Liang Sicheng and his wife, the philosopher Jin Yuelin, and the physicist Zhou Peiyuan, and became friends with them - "Fei Zhengqing" and his wife "Fei Weimei" (American female scholar) These two Chinese names, are all named by Liang Sicheng.
Fairbank left China in 1935 because he had to return to Oxford University to submit his doctoral dissertation and then return to teach in the history department of his alma mater. In 1941, because of the need to fight against Japan, Fairbank, who was familiar with the situation in China, was recruited by the United States Intelligence Coordination Bureau (the predecessor of the CIA), and came to China again in 1942 to engage in intelligence analysis and also served as a special assistant to the ambassador to China.
Because his profession is history and politics, and he has personally experienced the actual situation in China, he has a very accurate judgment of the current situation, and is one of the few American scholars who can predict the victory of the Chinese Communist Party. But he thus became one of the "four Johns responsible for losing China" in McCarthy's time (this logic is strange, the prediction is right to be responsible), and the Kuomintang government that fled to Taiwan also accused him of being "pro-Communist" and betraying the "Republic of China"...
However, all this has made Fairbank's reputation soar, because people are right! Since then, he has become a leading figure of American sinologists, "the number one China Tong", is the founding father of contemporary American "Chinese studies", and later American sinologists almost all have his origins academically.
Fairbank's major books are The United States and China, the former written in 1948 and later supplemented and updated, with five editions and hundreds of thousands of copies. Before Nixon's visit to China, the book was one of the most important reference books for his understanding of China and Sino-AMERICAN relations.
"The Cambridge History of China" is a huge work, is a collaboration between Fairbank and the British sinologist Cui Ruide, from antiquity to the People's Republic of China, a total of 15 volumes and 17 volumes, is a must-read book for the Western world to fully understand China.
Michael Szonyi and Mark Elliott
In 1955, Fairbank founded the Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, which was renamed fairbank center for East Asian Research in 2007 in honor of his death.
Almost all the directors of this center have Chinese names - Vogel, Kong Feili, Schwartz, Marod, Pei Yili, Ou Lide, Song Yiming... If you don't understand the original commission, you can't distinguish from their names that they are all foreigners.
There are a large number of sinologists in all major countries in the world today. For example, Timothy Brook, a Canadian sinologist who wrote the Harvard History of China, which is the same as the Cambridge History of China, can be said to be a student of Joseph Needham, because after Bu Zhengmin came to China as an exchange student in 1974, he was arranged by Needham to write the seventh volume of the History of Science and Technology in China, and has since become a sinologist.
In addition, there are Monastriev of Russia (the only scholar to translate the Spring and Autumn into Russian), Vasiliev, Blumhan (studying the I Ching), Popova (studying the history of Tang); Cheng Anna (Confucianism) and Xie Henai (Chinese economic history, intellectual history) of France; Honda Ji, Munan Zhuoyi, Ono Kazuko of Japan; Schwarro and Bai Zuoliang of Italy; Ma Yueran and Luo Duobi of Sweden; Fidelity and Roy of Britain...
▲ American Qing history expert, old handsome brother Shi Jingqian
Take the meaning of "admiring Sima Qian"
With the continuous enhancement of China's national strength and influence, the attention received has increased, and "Chinese studies" has also changed from a niche and unpopular discipline to a prominent study. According to statistics, professional researchers engaged in "Chinese studies" in the United States have developed from the scale of 100 people in the 1940s and 1950s to the current scale of 10,000 people. Ordinary "foreigners" who understand Chinese, have lived in China, and have a rough understanding of Chinese culture are even more numerous.
We are always worried about being "culturally exported" by foreign countries, in fact, it is not necessary at all, because Chinese civilization itself has a strong vitality and attraction, even in the period when China is very weak, it can attract a large number of foreigners who take the initiative to study China, let alone now?
In fact, Chinese culture is fully capable of exporting to the outside world, in addition to channels such as "Confucius Institutes", the group of overseas sinologists is also a good medium and breakthrough - they have taken the initiative to choose China as the object of study, and their understanding of China is far from being comparable to ordinary foreigners, and the level of some sinologists even exceeds that of most Chinese, and at the same time, they are familiar with the situation and psychology of their home country, and they are the best "volunteer propagandists" of Chinese civilization.
Most sinologists have a good feeling for China because they have a deep understanding of China, and they are really the best candidates to spread Chinese culture and Chinese civilization overseas - if you have the opportunity to make friends with a foreigner, you may wish to try to develop him or her into a "sinologist", and make a great contribution!
Of course, sinologists can't be exactly the same as us in everything, but we must be tolerant of this, and if we are proud of one boast and annoyed, then we can only make friends with a bunch of hypocrites in the end. As the saying goes, the stone of his mountain can attack jade, and the scrutiny from the outside may be more valuable.
For example, the "Needham's Question" is very thought-provoking – what do you think? Please write your answer in the message.