History of Sinology/Chapter 5

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Chapter 5: The Maturation of Sinology (1900–1945)

1. Introduction: A Discipline Comes of Age

The first half of the twentieth century was the great age of sinology. Between 1900 and 1945, the study of China in the West was transformed from a small, scattered enterprise — pursued by missionaries, diplomats, and a handful of university professors — into a mature academic discipline with its own methods, journals, institutions, and international networks of scholarly exchange. This was the period in which sinology produced its greatest philologists, its most ambitious works of translation and synthesis, and its most consequential methodological innovations. It was also the period in which the discipline was shattered by two world wars and the catastrophe of National Socialism, which dispersed an entire generation of German-speaking scholars and permanently altered the international balance of sinological research.

The account cuts across the national traditions surveyed in the country chapters of this volume (Chapters 7–18), tracing the interconnections, rivalries, and mutual influences that linked sinologists working in Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Stockholm, London, and the United States during the decades when the discipline reached its highest level of philological achievement. For fuller treatments of specific national traditions, the reader is referred to the relevant country chapters: Germany (Chapter 7), France (Chapter 8), the United Kingdom (Chapter 9), Sweden (Chapter 14), the United States (Chapter 17), and Russia (Chapter 16).

2. The French Golden Age: Chavannes, Pelliot, Maspero

The period opens in Paris. By the turn of the twentieth century, French sinology had accumulated nearly a century of institutional continuity, stretching back to Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s appointment to the first university chair in Chinese at the Collège de France in 1814 (see Chapter 8, section 2). Yet it was Édouard Chavannes (1865–1918) who transformed this tradition into something qualitatively new: a discipline conducted with the same philological rigour that European classicists brought to Greek and Latin texts.

David Honey, in Incense at the Altar, identifies Chavannes as “the father of modern sinology” — a judgement shared by virtually every subsequent historian of the field. The basis for this claim is not mere productivity, though Chavannes’s output was immense, but the quality and durability of his method. As Honey writes: “Nothing he wrote is outdated today in terms of either intellectual assumption, conceptual clarity, or methodological approach.” Where his predecessors had worked from imperfect assumptions about the nature of the Chinese language, an insufficient command of traditional bibliography, and without the tools of historical phonology, Chavannes brought to sinology the standards of European classical philology: precision of translation, exhaustive annotation, mastery of primary sources, and a refusal to draw conclusions beyond the evidence.

Chavannes’s masterpiece was his partial translation of the Shiji — Les Mémoires historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien (five volumes, 1895–1905) — covering the first forty-seven chapters of Sima Qian’s great history. The translation was accompanied by a learned introduction, copious notes, and appendices that remain indispensable. His monograph Le T’ai Chan (1910), on the cult of Mount Tai, broke new ground in the study of Chinese popular religion. His Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale (1913–1915), based on fieldwork conducted across Manchuria, Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Shaanxi, and Shanxi, pioneered the archaeological study of Chinese art and epigraphy in the West.

Above all, Chavannes was a teacher. His students at the Collège de France and the École Pratique des Hautes Études included Paul Pelliot, Henri Maspero, Marcel Granet, and the archaeologist-writer Victor Segalen. Together, as Zhang Xiping observed, Chavannes and the students who gathered around him “maintained Paris’s crown as the capital of Western sinology right up to the end of the Second World War.” For a fuller treatment of Chavannes’s career and legacy, see Chapter 8, section 4.

Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) was Chavannes’s most brilliant student and, in Honey’s judgement, “the greatest philologist of Chinese of this century.” His tenacity of memory, his command of Chinese bibliography, and his ability to marshal facts on almost any subject enabled him to function as the final arbiter of sinological questions for an entire generation.

Pelliot’s career was marked by extraordinary adventures as well as extraordinary erudition. During the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the young Pelliot — then barely twenty-two — distinguished himself by his courage during the siege of the Beijing legations. His Central Asian expedition of 1905–1908 took him through some of the most dangerous terrain on earth. Arriving at the Dunhuang caves in 1908, one year after Aurel Stein, Pelliot selected with his extraordinary bibliographical knowledge the most valuable manuscripts from the sealed library. Although fewer in number than Stein’s haul, Pelliot’s selections were of superior quality. When he displayed some of his finds to Luo Zhenyu and other Chinese scholars in Beijing in 1909, they immediately recognised their importance.

In 1911, Pelliot was appointed professor of Central Asian Languages, History, and Archaeology at the Collège de France, a position he held until his death. His scholarship was characterised by an almost superhuman bibliographical command and a passion for exact annotation. His commentary style — dense, seriatim discussions of individual points arising from the translation of a major text — produced works of extraordinary erudition but sometimes forbidding dryness. His annotated editions of Marco Polo’s travel narrative and the Yuan chao bi shi (Secret History of the Mongols) were among his most ambitious undertakings, though neither was completed at his death.

Pelliot’s reputation as the “academic policeman” of sinology — the scholar whose devastating reviews could make or break a career — was well earned. Yet Honey observes that his very erudition could be “burdening”: his commitment to exhaustive documentation sometimes prevented him from achieving the broader syntheses that his colleague Maspero, with his more humanistic temperament, was able to produce.

Henri Maspero (1883–1945), the son of the distinguished Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, brought to sinology a combination of philological rigour and historical imagination that made him, in many ways, the most complete scholar of the trio. Honey describes him as “scarcely less skilled as an annotator and textual commentator” than Pelliot, “but he also possessed a highly developed feel for history that allowed him to summarize his research and to state provisional conclusions.”

Maspero served at the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi from 1908 to 1920, where he conducted pathbreaking research on Vietnamese historical phonology that would prove essential to the emerging discipline of Chinese historical phonology. In 1921, he succeeded Chavannes at the Collège de France. His sole monograph, La Chine antique (1927), remains a landmark of ancient Chinese history, drawing on an extraordinary command of primary sources.

Maspero’s research on Daoism — particularly his studies of yangsheng (“nourishing life”) practices in early medieval Daoism — opened an entirely new field. Even his more technical works on phonology and grammar were infused, as Honey observed, “more by a humanistic than a scientific spirit.” His visit to Japan in 1928–1929, where he met Naitō Konan and Kanō Naoki, made him one of the first Western scholars to recognise the importance of Japanese sinological scholarship (see Chapter 19, section 1.3).

Maspero’s death was a tragedy for scholarship and for humanity. Because of his Jewish ancestry, he was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Buchenwald, where he perished in 1945 — the same year that saw the death of Pelliot from illness. The simultaneous loss of these two scholars devastated French sinology and marked the end of its golden age. For a fuller treatment, see Chapter 8, sections 4–5.

3. Henri Cordier and the Bibliographical Infrastructure

No discipline can mature without reliable bibliographical tools, and the bibliographical infrastructure of sinology was largely the creation of Henri Cordier (1849–1925). Though less celebrated than Chavannes or Pelliot, Cordier made an indispensable contribution through his magnum opus, the Bibliotheca Sinica (five volumes, 1904–1908, with a supplement in 1922–1924) — the first thorough bibliography of Western writings on China, covering publications from the earliest period to the 1920s. Organised by subject and running to thousands of pages, it became the indispensable starting point for any serious research on China in the West. Cordier also co-edited the T’oung Pao with Schlegel and later with Pelliot, and published a four-volume general history of China. Although Cordier did not read Chinese, his bibliographical achievement earned him recognition as “one of the greatest pioneers of Western sinology.”

The early twentieth century also saw the consolidation of sinological reference works that served the entire international community. George A. Kennedy’s An Introduction to Sinology: Being a Guide to the Tz’u Hai (1953) codified the philological principles necessary for utilising traditional Chinese reference works. Karlgren’s Grammata Serica (1940) and Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese (1923) gave sinologists tools for accessing Chinese historical phonology without having to wade through the Chinese Guangyun themselves. These works, together with the major dictionaries compiled by Giles, Couvreur, and Mathews, created a reference infrastructure that made sinological research accessible to a broader community of scholars.

4. Russian Sinology in the Early Twentieth Century

The Russian contribution to the field during this period also deserves attention. The arrival of Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev (1881–1951) in Paris as a student of Chavannes forged a vital link between the French and Russian traditions. Alekseev, who also befriended Pelliot, Maspero, and Granet during his years in Paris, brought the methods of the French philological school back to St. Petersburg, where he became the leading figure in Russian sinology for the first half of the twentieth century.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Russian sinology was gradually subordinated to Marxist-Leninist ideology, but Alekseev and his students managed to maintain a tradition of serious scholarship even under these constraints. The Soviet period produced significant work in Chinese historical phonology, classical literature, and ancient history — fields that were sufficiently remote from contemporary politics to escape the worst of the ideological pressures. For a full treatment of Russian sinology, see Chapter 16.

5. German Institutional Sinology: Franke, Forke, and the Hamburg School

While French sinology flourished under the protection of long-established institutions, German sinology had to build its institutional base almost from scratch in the early twentieth century. The decisive breakthrough came between 1909 and 1925, when sinological professorships were established at Hamburg (1909), Berlin (1912), Leipzig (1922), and Frankfurt (1925). By the early 1930s, Germany had built an academic infrastructure for Chinese studies that rivalled or exceeded that of any other European nation. For a detailed account of this institutionalisation, see Chapter 7, section 4.

Otto Franke (1863–1946), the first occupant of the Hamburg chair, was the senior German sinologist during the first half of the twentieth century. Honey describes his genius as lying in “historical synthesis”: the “immortal spirit” he served “with humble dedication was Cleo, not the literary muses.” His magnum opus, the five-volume Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1930–1952), was in essence a political-intellectual history of China from antiquity to 1368 that placed Confucian ideology and the concept of tianxia at the centre of its narrative. Against the mainstream German historical tradition from Herder through Hegel, Franke insisted that China was a dynamic, living civilisation whose cultural influence had shaped the entire course of East and Central Asian history.

Franke’s Berlin seminar trained most of the great German sinologists of the 1920s and 1930s, including Wolfram Eberhard, Walter Fuchs, and Walter Simon, as well as the American George A. Kennedy. His career thus illustrates a characteristic feature of the early twentieth century: the small, interconnected world of European sinology, in which a single professor could shape the direction of the field across national boundaries.

Alfred Forke (1867–1944), trained as a jurist and then employed as an interpreter in China for thirteen years, succeeded Otto Franke at Hamburg in 1923. His three-volume Geschichte der chinesischen Philosophie (1927–1938), spanning nearly two thousand pages, remains an indispensable reference. Forke embedded extensive translated passages from original Chinese texts within his analytical framework, giving readers direct access to primary sources. Maspero criticised him for paying too little attention to social and political context, and his habit of assimilating Chinese thinkers to Western categories was recognised as problematic — but the sheer scope of the work has ensured its continued utility. Forke’s translation of Wang Chong’s Lunheng (1906–1911) earned him the prestigious Prix Stanislas Julien, and his 1922 translation of Mozi became the principal source for Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti: Buch der Wendungen. For more detail, see Chapter 7, section 4.3.

The appointment of the Dutch scholar J.J.M. de Groot to the new chair of sinology at Berlin in 1912 brought to Germany one of the most formidable figures in the field. De Groot’s six-volume Religious System of China (Leiden: Brill, 1892–1910) was a work of unparalleled ethnographic richness that remains indispensable. His successor in 1923 was Otto Franke, who transferred from Hamburg.

In Leipzig, August Conrady (1864–1925) developed a distinctive approach that broke with the purely philological tradition, insisting on studying Chinese civilisation within the broader framework of world history, employing methods from general ethnology and anthropology. Among Conrady’s students was Lin Yutang, who in 1923 completed a doctoral dissertation on ancient Chinese phonology under his supervision — a little-known episode that linked German sinology to the Chinese intellectual avant-garde. Conrady also supervised the Habilitation of Bernhard Karlgren in 1915, forging a connection between the Leipzig and Stockholm traditions that would prove fateful for the discipline of historical phonology.

Among the early students of the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen was Franz Kuhn (1884–1961), who would become the most important translator of Chinese fiction into German. Over a career spanning several decades, Kuhn rendered into elegant German many of the great Chinese novels, including the Jinpingmei, Haoqiu zhuan, Yesou puyan, and works by Pu Songling. His translations were often abridged and adapted for a Western readership — a practice that drew criticism from purists but ensured wide circulation. Unlike Richard Wilhelm’s philosophical translations, Kuhn’s work introduced German readers to the narrative richness of Chinese literature, revealing a China of passion, humour, and social complexity far removed from the austere Confucian stereotype. Kuhn’s work demonstrated that the early twentieth century was not only the golden age of philological sinology but also a period of extraordinary cultural transmission, in which Chinese literature reached a broader European audience than ever before.

The intersection of sinology with Inner Asian studies was another characteristic feature of the period. Erich Haenisch (1880–1966), who trained under Otto Franke and later held chairs at Göttingen and Munich, made major contributions to Mongolian and Manchurian studies. His edition and translation of the Yuanchao bishi (Secret History of the Mongols) was a landmark of Central Asian philology. Like Pelliot, who worked on the same text from the French side, Haenisch exemplified the interdisciplinary reach of early twentieth-century sinology, which treated China not in isolation but as part of a broader Central and East Asian cultural sphere.

6. Richard Wilhelm: The Great Translator between Cultures

No figure in the history of German sinology has had a wider cultural impact than Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930). Sent to the German colony of Qingdao in 1899 as a Protestant missionary, Wilhelm devoted himself less to evangelism than to the study of Chinese classics, collaborating with the Qing loyalist scholar Lao Naixuan on the Yijing and other Confucian and Daoist texts. Over the following decades, he translated into German a breathtaking range of canonical works: the Lunyu, Mengzi, Daxue, Zhongyong, Daodejing, Zhuangzi, Liezi, and, most significantly, the Yijing (1924).

Wilhelm’s translations, published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag in Leipzig, achieved extraordinary resonance in the German-speaking world. Appearing in the aftermath of World War I, when European intellectuals were questioning the absolute superiority of Western values, his renderings of Chinese wisdom found a receptive audience among those drawn to Eastern thought as an alternative to Western materialism. Hermann Hesse read the Daodejing and celebrated its discovery; Carl Gustav Jung wrote the foreword to the 1951 English edition of the Yijing, which subsequently became a cult text of the American counterculture in the 1970s.

Honey characterised Wilhelm as having become “the Arthur Waley of Germany, although he operated in the realm of Chinese philosophy, not poetry.” Professional sinologists were not always kind: they charged that his translations sometimes sacrificed accuracy for readability and that he lacked the apparatus for scholarly use. Otto Franke pointed to specific translation errors. Yet no other sinologist — before or since — has exerted a comparable influence on the broader culture. Returning to Frankfurt in 1925, Wilhelm founded the China-Institut, established the journal Sinica, and worked tirelessly to bring Chinese culture to the German public until his premature death in 1930. For a fuller account, see Chapter 7, section 4.4.

7. Karlgren and Historical Phonology: Revolutionising the Discipline from Sweden

The most consequential methodological innovation in early twentieth-century sinology came not from Paris, Berlin, or London, but from a young Swedish linguist who applied the methods of European comparative linguistics to the Chinese language. Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978), born in Jönköping, conceived the idea while still an undergraduate at Uppsala of applying the comparative-historical method developed for studying Indo-European languages to Chinese — a language for which no university instruction yet existed in Sweden.

After studying Chinese fundamentals in St. Petersburg, Karlgren travelled to China in 1910 and, in less than two years, conducted phonological surveys of twenty-four different dialects — an achievement that still commands admiration. He then spent two years in Paris (1912–1914) studying under Chavannes at the Collège de France, where he also met Pelliot and Maspero. In May 1915, Karlgren was awarded his doctorate at Uppsala with the first part of his monumental Études sur la phonologie chinoise, which received the Prix Julien from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris.

Karlgren’s approach represented a genuine methodological breakthrough. Just as comparative linguists reconstructed proto-Indo-European by comparing cognate forms across Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Germanic, Karlgren reconstructed earlier stages of Chinese pronunciation by comparing how the same characters were pronounced in different modern Chinese dialects, using the Qieyun rhyme dictionary of 601 CE as a framework.

The importance of this work extended far beyond linguistics. Historical phonology is a fundamental tool of philological analysis: knowing how characters were pronounced at different periods enables scholars to identify loan characters, trace the evolution of word meanings, and resolve textual cruxes otherwise impenetrable. E.G. Pulleyblank famously divided the field into two periods: “BK (before Karlgren) and AK (after Karlgren).”

Wang Li, one of the most distinguished Chinese linguists of the twentieth century, assessed Karlgren’s impact: “Among Western sinologists, there have been many, but those who have exerted an influence on Chinese linguistics are few. The only one whose influence has been truly great is Karlgren.” The Études were translated into Chinese in 1940 by China’s leading linguists — Zhao Yuanren, Li Fanggui, and Luo Changpei — a collaboration that testified to the esteem in which Chinese scholars held Karlgren’s contribution.

The exchange between Karlgren and Maspero exemplified the internationalism of sinological scholarship at its best. Maspero, who had independently worked on Chinese historical phonology during his years in Hanoi, responded to the Études in 1920 with his own detailed study, Le Dialecte de Tch’ang-an sous les T’ang. Karlgren incorporated some of Maspero’s suggestions and refuted others. As Karlgren acknowledged: “My reconstructive system of 1919 thus holds good with the exception of three important points, where Maspero has introduced or at least shown the way to valuable emendations.”

This productive dialogue — linking Stockholm, Paris, and Hanoi — refined the reconstruction of Middle Chinese and illustrates how the greatest advances in this period came not from isolated individual genius but from the dense network of intellectual exchange that linked European capitals. The Collège de France, the EFEO, the T’oung Pao, and the Société Asiatique provided the institutional framework; the common commitment to philological rigour provided the methodological foundation. For a fuller treatment of Karlgren’s career and Swedish sinology, see Chapter 14.

8. British Sinology: Waley’s Literary Translations and Needham’s Beginnings

British sinology in the early twentieth century produced no philologist of the stature of Pelliot or Karlgren, but it produced something arguably more culturally consequential: a translator of genius who brought Chinese and Japanese literature into the mainstream of Western culture. Arthur Waley (1889–1966), self-taught in Chinese and Japanese, held no university appointment, never visited Asia, and worked entirely outside the institutional framework of academic sinology. Yet his translations transformed the Western understanding of East Asian literature.

Waley’s first book, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1917), was a revelation. Reprinted over a dozen times and translated into French and German, it brought Chinese classical poetry into ordinary Western households for the first time. Contemporary reviewers compared the experience to “discovering a new continent.” At a time when Western newspaper readers associated China with war, famine, and political collapse, Waley’s translations revealed “another world — an oriental paradise of morality, civilisation, compassion, honesty, and social norms.”

Waley employed a technique he called “sprung rhythm” — a free-verse form that used stressed syllables to approximate the effect of the monosyllabic Chinese line, abandoning rhyme in favour of rhythmic cadence and fidelity to imagery. This represented a decisive break with the Victorian rhyming translations of Herbert Giles, and its influence on subsequent English-language translators of Chinese poetry has been incalculable.

Beyond poetry, Waley translated the Analects (1938), the Dao De Jing (1934), and, most famously, his abridged version of Xiyou ji, published as Monkey (1942), which became one of the best-known Chinese books in the West. In Japanese literature, his translation of The Tale of Genji (1925–1933) was universally acclaimed as one of the masterpieces of English literary translation. The American sinologist Jonathan Spence summed up his achievement: “The shock Waley delivered to people will never be equalled, for most of the works he translated were unknown in the Western world.”

Honey’s assessment captures the paradox of Waley’s position: he was “the last and best of the line of self-taught sinologists fathered by nineteenth-century ecclesiastical, commercial, and political interests. But, standing outside the institutional orb of professional sinology, he drew it rather into the realm of Western literature.” For a fuller treatment, see Chapter 9, section 5.

Joseph Needham (1900–1995) was a distinguished Cambridge biochemist when, in 1937, three Chinese graduate students arrived in his laboratory, among them Lu Gwei-djen. Through them, Needham discovered that Chinese civilisation had made fundamental contributions to science and technology that were almost entirely unknown in the West. He resolved to learn Chinese and write a full history of Chinese science. During the Second World War, he served as scientific counsellor at the British Embassy in Chongqing and travelled over 50,000 kilometres through ten wartime provinces, visiting more than 300 scientific institutions. The first volume of Science and Civilisation in China would not appear until 1954, but the project was conceived and largely planned in the period covered by this chapter. For a full account, see Chapter 9, section 6.

9. The Emergence of American Sinology: Hirth, Laufer, Boodberg

The transition from missionary to professional sinology in America was symbolised by the arrival of Friedrich Hirth (1845–1927) at Columbia University in 1902. Born in Thuringia and trained in classical philology at Berlin, Hirth had spent twenty-five years in various official capacities in China before his academic career was frustrated by political dynamics in Berlin sinological circles. As Honey noted, Hirth was “the only eminent American sinologist of his generation, even if German-born and trained” — aside from Laufer.

Hirth’s appointment brought European philological standards to American sinology and established Columbia as one of the first American universities to offer serious academic instruction in Chinese studies. It also demonstrated a pattern that would recur throughout the twentieth century: American sinology’s enrichment through the recruitment of European-trained scholars. For the full American story, see Chapter 17.

Berthold Laufer (1874–1934), born in Cologne and trained under Gabelentz’s successor at Leipzig, led expeditions to East Asia for the American Museum of Natural History and settled permanently at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. His masterpiece, Sino-Iranica (1919), was a monumental study of material-cultural exchange between China and Iran. A reviewer in the Journal Asiatique praised it as “the most thorough work we possess on this subject.” His Chinese Pottery of the Han Dynasty (1909) was the first Western study of Chinese ceramics. Laufer’s extraordinary range — encompassing ceramics, jade, Sino-Iranian relations, and the history of cultivated plants — drew comparisons with Pelliot.

The missionary heritage continued to bear fruit in the generation that came of age in the early twentieth century. Homer H. Dubs (1892–1969), born in China to missionary parents, became a specialist in Han dynasty history and held a chair at Oxford — one of the few American scholars to reverse the transatlantic flow. His meticulous annotated translation of Ban Gu’s Hanshu chapters on the Western Han emperors set a new standard for the rendering of Chinese historical texts into English. L. Carrington Goodrich (1894–1986), also born in China to missionaries, became the senior figure at Columbia after Hirth’s retirement, eventually producing the monumental Dictionary of Ming Biography (1976) — a collaborative effort involving over 150 scholars — that remains indispensable for all students of the Ming dynasty.

Peter A. Boodberg (1903–1972), born in Russia and trained in European philological traditions, arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, where he established a school of sinological philology that equalled the finest European work. Honey considered Boodberg to have “equaled Pelliot’s intellectual incisiveness and strength of memory if not his international profile, and exceeded Maspero’s humanity as he unabashedly harnessed the work of the philologist to a universal humanism.” Boodberg attempted to add the philologist, in his role as curator of the records of the ages, to the ranks of philosophers and prophets seeking the best in the creative spirit and cultural heritage of all nations. Each of his works breathed a distinctive intellectual intensity, and his insistence on treating Chinese as part of a broader Eurasian linguistic and cultural continuum anticipated the comparative approaches that would become fashionable decades later. His student Edward H. Schafer (1913–1991) carried the Berkeley tradition forward with virtuoso explorations of the natural, material, and imaginary worlds of Tang China. Schafer’s works — The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (1963), The Vermilion Bird (1967), Pacing the Void (1977) — combined philological precision with poetic insight in a way that was entirely his own, creating what Honey called “a new genre of learned writing.”

10. Granet and Sociological Approaches

Marcel Granet (1884–1940) stands apart from the other great figures of this period by virtue of both his method and his intellectual lineage. While Chavannes, Pelliot, and Maspero derived their approach from the tradition of classical textual scholarship, Granet was shaped by the sociological school of Émile Durkheim and brought to sinology a fundamentally different set of questions and analytical tools.

His doctoral thesis, Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine (1919), was a brilliant exercise in sociological interpretation. Taking the love songs of the Guofeng section of the Shijing as his primary material, Granet argued that they were not personal lyrics but the residue of seasonal festivals during which peasant communities, rigidly segregated by gender in daily life, came together for ritualised courtship. The songs preserved traces of these collective celebrations, in which young men and women engaged in antiphonal singing contests that served as the mechanism for mate selection.

Honey acknowledged Granet’s originality — what he termed “textual sociology” — but noted that Granet’s approach was sometimes too cavalier with the textual evidence: “his sociological categories sometimes overpowered the particularities of the sources.” Yet Granet’s influence was enormous. His major works — La religion des Chinois (1922), La civilisation chinoise (1929), La pensée chinoise (1934) — opened Chinese civilisation to analysis by the social sciences in a way that pure philology could not. Zhang Xiping recorded the assessments that gave Granet “the temperament of a philosopher” and “the elegance of a poet.”

Granet’s death in 1940, caused by grief and despair at the German invasion of France, was mourned by sinologists and sociologists alike. His influence extended far beyond sinology: the Durkheimian approach to the study of ancient societies that he pioneered in the Chinese context has been applied, with various modifications, to many other civilisations. For a full treatment, see Chapter 8, section 5.

11. The Impact of the First World War

The First World War disrupted sinological research across Europe, though its impact was uneven. In France, Chavannes died in 1918, his health undermined by the strain of the war years. Pelliot served with the French army and was decorated for bravery. In Germany, the war interrupted careers, severed international contacts, and destroyed the colonial infrastructure — particularly the Qingdao colony — that had supported scholars such as Richard Wilhelm.

Yet the war also generated new opportunities. The post-war period saw a rapid expansion of sinological institutions in Germany, with new chairs established at Leipzig (1922) and Frankfurt (1925). The intellectual climate of the Weimar Republic, with its questioning of Western certitudes and its openness to non-European thought, created a receptive audience for translations of Chinese philosophy. Richard Wilhelm’s Yijing translation appeared in 1924 to enormous acclaim, and Chinese thought entered the mainstream of German intellectual life as it never had before.

In Britain, the war exposed the inadequacy of British oriental studies. The Reay Report (1909) had already called for the establishment of a dedicated School of Oriental Studies within the University of London; the founding was delayed by the war until 1916, when the School of Oriental Studies (later SOAS) opened its doors. In the United States, wartime intelligence needs stimulated interest in Asia, though the full impact would not be felt until the Second World War.

The war also had an indirect consequence of great significance for sinology: it hastened the end of the Chinese imperial system and the establishment of the Republic (1912), which opened China to new forms of scholarly engagement. The May Fourth Movement of 1919, with its emphasis on vernacular Chinese, scientific method, and critical re-evaluation of the Chinese tradition, created a generation of Chinese intellectuals who became interlocutors — and, in some cases, rivals — of Western sinologists. The emergence of modern Chinese archaeology, initiated by the Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson’s discovery of Neolithic sites at Yangshao in 1921 and continued by the Chinese archaeologist Li Ji at Anyang from 1928, added an entirely new dimension to the study of ancient China and placed sinologists in dialogue with the natural sciences for the first time.

12. The Interwar Flowering (1918–1933)

The interwar period witnessed the highest flowering of classical sinology. Several features distinguished this golden age:

Internationalism. The sinological community was small enough — perhaps a hundred active scholars worldwide — that personal relationships mattered enormously. Karlgren in Stockholm exchanged critiques with Maspero in Paris; Pelliot reviewed the work of scholars from every country; Boodberg at Berkeley drew on the traditions of Russian, German, and French philology. The journals — T’oung Pao, Asia Major, Sinica, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies — published in multiple languages and served as forums for international debate.

Philological rigour. The standard of textual scholarship reached its zenith. The tools were now available — Karlgren’s reconstructions of Middle and Old Chinese, Pelliot’s bibliographical command, Maspero’s historical phonology — and they were deployed with a precision and thoroughness that has rarely been matched since.

Ambitious synthesis. The period produced works of monumental scope: Otto Franke’s five-volume Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches, Forke’s three-volume Geschichte der chinesischen Philosophie, Karlgren’s Grammata Serica, Maspero’s La Chine antique, Granet’s La civilisation chinoise and La pensée chinoise. These works aspired to totality in a way that later, more specialised scholarship would not.

Institutional diversity. The centres of sinological excellence were geographically dispersed in a way that enriched the field. Paris remained the capital, but Stockholm, Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, London, Berkeley, and Leiden all harboured scholars of the first rank. This geographical diversity meant that multiple methodological approaches coexisted and competed: French philological rigour, German historical synthesis, Swedish linguistic innovation, British literary sensibility, American encyclopedic ambition. The result was a discipline of unusual intellectual vitality, in which the exchange of ideas across national boundaries was both commonplace and productive.

The role of Chinese interlocutors. For the first time, Western sinologists faced serious engagement from Chinese scholars trained in modern critical methods. The kaozheng (evidential research) tradition of Qing-dynasty scholarship had long produced work of extraordinary philological precision, but it was only in the early twentieth century that Chinese scholars began to engage directly with Western sinological methods and findings. The establishment of Peking University (1898) and Tsinghua University (1911) created institutions where Chinese and Western scholarly traditions could meet. Wang Guowei’s pioneering work on the oracle bone inscriptions, published in the 1910s and 1920s, demonstrated that Chinese scholars could make contributions to the study of ancient China that surpassed anything Western sinologists had achieved.

Chinese-Western scholarly exchange. The interwar period saw the emergence of Chinese scholars trained in Western methods who engaged directly with European sinology. Hu Shi visited Frankfurt at Richard Wilhelm’s invitation; Lin Yutang completed his doctorate under Conrady at Leipzig; Ji Xianlin served as Chinese language lecturer at the Göttingen sinological seminar from 1937 to 1945. The founding of the Academia Sinica in 1928 and the growth of Chinese universities created interlocutors who challenged Western sinologists’ interpretations and enriched the field immeasurably.

13. The Sinological Journals

The institutional consolidation of sinology in this period was accompanied by the founding and maturation of several important journals. The T’oung Pao, co-founded in 1890 by the Dutch sinologist Schlegel and the French bibliographer Cordier, was already established as the premier international sinological journal, publishing in English, French, and German. To this were added:

• Asia Major (Leipzig, 1924–1935; revived in London, 1949), founded by Bruno Schindler, the most important purely sinological journal of the interwar period.
• Sinica (Frankfurt, 1925–1943), the organ of Richard Wilhelm’s China-Institut.
• Monumenta Serica (Beijing, 1935–), founded by the Steyler missionary-sinologist Heinrich Stenz at the Catholic Fu Jen University, which attracted contributions from Wolfram Eberhard, Robert van Gulik, and Wolfgang Franke.
• Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (1936–), which signalled the emergence of American sinology as a major force.
• Artibus Asiae (Zurich, 1925–), devoted to East Asian art history.
• Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient (Hanoi, 1901–), which published the research of EFEO scholars.

These journals, together with the older Journal Asiatique (1822–) and the Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen (Berlin, 1898–), created a network of scholarly communication that sustained the international sinological community. The destruction of several of these journals during the Second World War — Asia Major ceased in 1935, Sinica in 1943 — was a devastating blow.

14. The Impact of the Second World War and the Diaspora of German-Speaking Sinologists

The rise of National Socialism devastated German sinology. When Hitler came to power in 1933, professional sinology in Germany was barely twenty years old. The entire country possessed only four sinological professorships: Hamburg (since 1909), Berlin (since 1912), Leipzig (since 1922), and Frankfurt (since 1925). The field was small, and the loss of even a few scholars was catastrophic.

The most devastating blow was the forced emigration of an entire generation. As the Princeton sinologist Martin Kern has documented, a large number of young and established German sinologists and East Asian art historians left the country, most of them for the United States. The 1933 “Act to Restore Permanent Civil Service” (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums) led to widespread dismissals of Jewish and politically suspect scholars.

Gustav Haloun (1898–1951), who had served as lecturer and assistant professor at Göttingen and Halle, was denied a full chair because of his “negative attitude toward the NSDAP.” He accepted a call to Cambridge University in 1938, where he remained until his early death in 1951. Honey devotes substantial attention to Haloun in Incense at the Altar, treating him as a master of textual criticism. His work on the Guanzi and on problems of Bactria and the Yuezhi in Chinese sources demonstrated a rigour that was new to British sinology.

Wolfram Eberhard (1909–1989), a specialist in Chinese folklore and social history, moved first to Ankara, where he held a professorship in sinology at the Turkish university, and then to Berkeley. Ferdinand Lessing (1882–1961), a specialist in Mongolian languages and Chinese art, emigrated to the United States and taught at Berkeley. Walter Simon (1893–1981), a specialist in Sino-Tibetan linguistics, fled to SOAS in London in 1938 and became professor of Chinese there in 1947. Erwin Reifler (1903–1965) emigrated to the University of Washington.

The émigrés’ contributions to their host countries were enormous — but none of them was ever recalled to Germany. As Kern noted, this one-way transfer permanently altered the international balance of sinological research, shifting the centre of gravity from German-speaking Europe to the anglophone world. The present international state of Chinese studies is, as Kern argued, “hardly explainable without reference to the broad loss of expertise and creativity in Germany, on the one hand, and to the balancing energetic development of new academic opportunities in the United States, on the other.”

The war itself compounded the damage. The sinological library of Berlin University — built up over decades by De Groot, Franke, and their successors into one of the finest collections in Europe — was destroyed in the bombing. Key journals ceased publication. The deaths of Otto Franke (1946) and Alfred Forke (1944) marked the end of the founding generation. By 1945, German sinology lay in ruins.

In France, the near-simultaneous deaths of Pelliot (1945, from illness), Maspero (1945, at Buchenwald), and the earlier death of Granet (1940, from grief at the German invasion) left French sinology devastated. The task of reconstruction would fall to Paul Demiéville, who became the central figure of post-war French sinology (see Chapter 8, section 6).

The early twentieth century also witnessed the final flowering of the great tradition of missionary sinology that had sustained the field since the sixteenth century. In the French tradition, the Jesuit Séraphin Couvreur (1835–1919), who had spent decades in Zhili (Hebei), produced translations of the Four Books, the Shijing, the Shujing, the Liji, the Chunqiu Zuozhuan, and the Yili that were characterised by a dual-language format — French and Latin side by side — and a reliability that kept them in print well into the second half of the twentieth century. His dictionaries, the Dictionnaire français-chinois (1884) and the Dictionnaire chinois-français (1890), were widely used by students and scholars alike. Couvreur’s work, described by Zhang Xiping as “reliable and elegant,” represents the last major achievement of the centuries-old tradition of Jesuit sinology. After his generation, the study of China passed definitively from the hands of missionaries to those of professional academics.

In Germany, the Steyler missionaries (Society of the Divine Word) established Monumenta Serica in Beijing in 1935, a journal that attracted contributions from many future luminaries and that continues publication today. The founding of Monumenta Serica at the Catholic Fu Jen University represented an unusual convergence of missionary and academic sinology, demonstrating that the two traditions could still produce fruitful collaboration even as the field was becoming thoroughly professionalised.

The period 1900–1945 thus forms a coherent arc. It began with the emergence of professional sinology under Chavannes and ended with the destruction of the European sinological establishment by war, persecution, and exile. In between, it produced the greatest generation of sinologists the discipline has known — a generation whose works, in many cases, remain unsurpassed. The methods they developed, the texts they translated, the tools they created, and the questions they posed continue to define the field.

Yet the very catastrophe that ended this golden age also planted the seeds of renewal. The dispersal of German and Austrian scholars across the English-speaking world enriched American and British sinology immeasurably and laid the groundwork for the explosive growth of Chinese studies in the post-war period. The opening chapter of that story — the Cold War transformation of sinology — is told in Chapter 6.

References

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