History of Sinology/Chapter 9

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Chapter 9: Great Britain — Diplomats, Missionaries, and the Translator-Scholar Tradition

1. Early British Contacts Through Trade

The history of British sinology is a history of delayed starts, institutional neglect, and the persistent tension between practical utility and disinterested scholarship. Whereas France could claim an unbroken tradition of scholarly engagement with China stretching from the Jesuit missions of the seventeenth century to the founding of the Collège de France chair in 1814, Britain’s relationship with Chinese learning was fitful, commercially motivated, and — for much of its history — remarkably thin. As Zhang Xiping observes, “the English Channel separated Britain from the continent, and its island mentality, strong sense of national superiority, and relative lack of openness to foreign cultures all contributed to a distinctive pattern of sinological development that set it apart from the continental tradition.”

British awareness of China can be traced to the Tudor period (1485–1603), but it remained almost entirely derivative. English scholars lacked the means to travel to China and depended on translations of continental works — Mendoza’s Historia in Richard Hakluyt’s English version (1588), translations of Semedo’s Imperio de la China and Martini’s De Bello Tartarico (both published in English in 1655) — for their knowledge of the Middle Kingdom. The quality of these translations was uneven, and the understanding they conveyed was correspondingly shallow.

Elizabeth I reportedly attempted to send a letter, written in uncertain Latin, to the Chinese emperor, though there is no evidence it was ever delivered. Her successor James I tried again in English; the letter survives in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. When Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) expelled the Dutch from Taiwan, the English briefly entertained the notion that his descendants might reconquer the mainland, and Charles II wrote to the “King of Taiwan” — a diplomatic initiative that was quietly abandoned when the Qing consolidated their control.

The most notable “quasi-sinologist” of the seventeenth century was Thomas Hyde (1636–1703), Bodley’s Librarian at Oxford, a distinguished Persianist who compiled the first British catalogue of Chinese books (Varia Chinesia) with the help of Shen Fuzong, a Chinese visitor who arrived in England in 1683 with the Jesuit Philippe Couplet. The catalogue, however, contained embarrassing errors — the Mengzi was classified as a popular novel. Robert Hooke, the scientist, also acquired a Chinese dictionary and spent considerable effort studying it. And John Webb, an architect with no knowledge of Chinese, published in 1668 an extraordinary treatise arguing that Chinese was the original language spoken by mankind before the Tower of Babel — the first book-length attempt by an Englishman to assign Chinese a place in the linguistic history of the world.

The eighteenth century brought intensified commercial contact but little intellectual progress. Britain’s interest in China was driven overwhelmingly by trade — particularly the East India Company’s desire to open Chinese markets — and the nation’s scholars remained content to learn about China at second hand, primarily through French sources. Zhang Xiping makes a telling observation about this period: “In the eighteenth century, the most obvious Chinese influence on Britain came from the applied arts and garden design.” The architect William Chambers, who had visited Canton as a youth, published works on Chinese architecture and garden art, and built a famous Chinese pagoda in the gardens of the Princess of Wales at Kew. Joseph Spence translated a letter by the Jesuit painter Brother Attiret describing the gardens of the Yuanmingyuan — the “Old Summer Palace” — a text that became “the earliest detailed description of this subject in English” and influenced the development of the English landscape garden. But these were aesthetic borrowings, not scholarly engagements; they reflected a taste for the exotic rather than a desire to understand Chinese civilisation on its own terms.[^fn_18c_extra]

The inadequacy of this approach was starkly exposed in 1793, when Britain finally dispatched an official embassy to China under Lord Macartney. As Zhang Xiping notes, “when Britain finally decided to send an official delegation, not a single qualified interpreter could be found in the entire country.” Macartney’s secretary, George Staunton, had to recruit two Chinese interpreters from the Naples seminary. The mission’s only lasting linguistic contribution was the young George Thomas Staunton, then eleven years old, who began learning Chinese during the voyage and impressed the Qianlong Emperor enough to receive a yellow purse from the imperial waist — a singular honour. The younger Staunton published an English translation of the Da Qing lüli (Qing Legal Code) in 1810, the first complete translation of a Chinese work into English since Wilkinson’s rendition of the Hao qiu zhuan in 1719. He also served as deputy to Lord Amherst’s embassy of 1816 — another failed mission, derailed by the refusal to perform the kowtow — and later became a Member of Parliament who vigorously advocated for the Opium War. His career embodied the characteristic British combination of linguistic competence, commercial interest, and imperial ambition.

2. Robert Morrison and the Missionary Linguists

The foundation of British sinology as a scholarly enterprise was laid not by diplomats or traders but by Protestant missionaries, and its founding figure was the Scotsman Robert Morrison (1782–1834). Morrison’s achievement was extraordinary: working largely in isolation, under hostile conditions, he created the linguistic infrastructure that made subsequent British scholarship possible.

Morrison arrived in Canton in 1807, the first Protestant missionary to reside in China. Honey, in Incense at the Altar, places him at the head of the British sinological tradition, alongside Alexander Wylie and Herbert Giles, as one of “The British Triumvirate.” Morrison’s primary motivation was evangelistic — the translation of the Bible into Chinese — but the tools he created in pursuit of this goal had lasting scholarly value. As Honey observes, “British sinology developed out of the service of Protestant missionaries in China, chiefly the Scots Robert Morrison (1782–1834) in lexicography and biblical translation, Alexander Wylie (1815–1887) in bibliography, astronomy, and mathematics, and James Legge (1815–1897) in classics.”[^7b] This trinity of missionaries — lexicographer, bibliographer, and classicist — established the three pillars on which British sinology would rest for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

Morrison’s greatest achievement was the Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815–1823), a massive Chinese-English dictionary published with financial support from the East India Company (which contributed £2,000). Zhang Xiping calls it “the most authoritative Chinese-Western dictionary of the time,” a work that “inaugurated the practice among nineteenth-century Western scholars, including other missionaries, of compiling similar reference works, thereby providing indispensable tools for modern Sino-Western cultural exchange.” He also co-translated the Bible into Chinese with William Milne, producing first the Gospel of Matthew (1810) and then the complete Bible (the “Canton-Malacca” edition, 1823). In 1818, he founded the Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca, the first institution dedicated to teaching Chinese to Westerners under Protestant auspices. During a brief return to England in 1824, he established the Oriental Translation Fund in London and became the first Englishman to teach Chinese in the capital. Honey emphasises Morrison’s role as a precursor to professional sinology: Morrison was not a scholar in the philological sense — his dictionary and translations were tools for missionary work — but he established the possibility of British engagement with the Chinese language on a serious and sustained basis.

Alexander Wylie (1815–1887), the second member of Honey’s “British Triumvirate,” was a London Missionary Society agent responsible for Bible distribution in China. His scholarly contributions, however, far transcended his official duties. Working with the great Chinese mathematician Li Shanlan in the 1850s at the Mohai shuguan (London Missionary Society Press) in Shanghai, Wylie facilitated the completion of the Chinese translation of Euclid’s Elements — the final nine books that Xu Guangqi and Matteo Ricci had left unfinished two and a half centuries earlier. This collaboration, one of the landmarks of Sino-Western intellectual exchange, was made possible by Wylie’s deep knowledge of both Western mathematics and classical Chinese. His most enduring contribution to sinology was his Notes on Chinese Literature (1867), a systematic classified bibliography of Chinese literary and scholarly works that remained a standard reference for decades.[^7c]

Morrison was not the only British missionary working on Chinese in the early nineteenth century. In Bengal, the Catholic layman Lassar and the Baptist missionary Joshua Marshman collaborated on a separate translation of the Bible (the “Serampore” edition, first complete in 1822) and on a grammar, Elements of Chinese Grammar (1814), which may be the first published grammar of classical Chinese in any Western language. The “Bengal school” was soon eclipsed by Morrison’s Canton-based work. William Milne, Morrison’s friend and collaborator, served as principal of the Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca, co-translated the Bible, edited the Anglo-Chinese Gleaner, and published the first Chinese-language periodical in Southeast Asia, the Cha shi su mei yue tong ji zhuan (1815–1821).

The development of Chinese library collections in Britain was slow and haphazard compared to France. The earliest Chinese books in England entered the Bodleian Library at Oxford through Dutch scholarly networks: a fragmentary Chinese book was received as early as 1601, and further donations from Dutch scholars followed. By 1613, the Bodleian held approximately seventeen fragmentary Chinese medical texts. The first significant public acquisition came in 1823, when George Thomas Staunton donated his collection of 186 Chinese volumes to the Royal Asiatic Society. The Cambridge University Library received its most important early acquisition when Wade donated his personal collection of over 4,300 Chinese books, including a rare Ming-dynasty woodblock edition of the Yiyu tuzhi and early Qing manuscript copies of the Ming shilu, as well as valuable Taiping Heavenly Kingdom materials. Giles subsequently supplemented the Cambridge collection and published a catalogue. The British Museum’s Chinese holdings grew more slowly than those on the Continent. Part of the collection was looted from Canton; part was purchased from French dealers. The museum did not establish a systematic acquisition programme through agents in Beijing until well into the twentieth century — nearly a century behind its European counterparts.[^fn_library]

The Stein Collection, acquired by the British Museum in the early twentieth century, transformed the institution’s importance for sinological research. Aurel Stein’s expeditions to Central Asia (1900–1901, 1906–1908, 1913–1916) brought back thousands of manuscripts, paintings, and textiles from the Dunhuang caves and other sites. The Chinese manuscripts were catalogued by Lionel Giles; the paintings were catalogued by Arthur Waley during his years at the Museum (1913–1930). These collections placed Britain at the centre of the emerging field of Dunhuang studies.

3. The Diplomat-Sinologists: Wade, Giles, and the Wade-Giles System

The second pillar of British sinology was erected by the diplomat-sinologists of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Unlike the French tradition, which was rooted in the university from 1814 onward, British sinology long depended on men who acquired their Chinese in the course of government service and turned to scholarship only upon retirement. This gave British sinology a characteristic stamp: empirical, practical, sometimes brilliant in its command of spoken and written Chinese, but institutionally precarious and theoretically unambitious.

Thomas Francis Wade (1818–1895) entered the British diplomatic service in China in 1841 and rose to become British Minister to China (1871–1883). During his years in China, he devised the romanisation system that bears his name, first published in his textbooks Yü-yen tzu-erh chi (1867) and Wen-chien tzu-erh chi (1867). The Wade system, based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect, was later refined by Herbert Giles and became the standard romanisation of Chinese names in the English-speaking world until the adoption of Pinyin in the late twentieth century. Upon his return to England, Wade donated his personal collection of over 650 Chinese books to Cambridge University and was appointed the first Professor of Chinese at Cambridge — a position created expressly to house his donation and to provide for its use. Zhang Xiping notes the irony: the professorship was, in effect, a condition of the gift rather than an expression of institutional commitment to Chinese studies.

Herbert Allen Giles (1845–1935) succeeded Wade at Cambridge and held the chair for thirty-five years (1897–1932), during which he became one of the most prolific — and controversial — figures in British sinology. A career diplomat who served in various consular posts across China from 1867 to 1893, Giles turned to scholarship with formidable energy upon his return to England. Honey treats Giles as a transitional figure: “one of the last of the consular officials to turn to academics,” who “functions as a transitional figure in the painful process that transformed British sinology from a part-time endeavor to a full-time occupation.” His output was enormous. The Chinese-English Dictionary (1892, revised 1912) remained the standard dictionary for English-speaking students of Chinese for half a century. His Gems of Chinese Literature (1884) and A History of Chinese Literature (1901) were pioneering works of literary survey. Honey notes that Giles’s “Victorian rhymes from the Chinese, along with the even more impressionistic literary effusions of Ernest Fenollosa, led on the one hand to the Vorticism of Ezra Pound, and on the other to Waley’s own variations on sprung rhythm.” His Chinese Biographical Dictionary (1898) was a monumental reference work, though superseded in accuracy by later compilations. Zhang Xiping observes that Giles’s achievements earned him an honorary doctorate from Oxford and election to the French Academy, yet his research was not always of the highest quality.

4. James Legge and the Chinese Classics

James Legge (1815–1897) occupies a unique position in the history of British sinology: he was, by universal acknowledgement, the first British scholar to win an international reputation for the quality and completeness of his translations. Chinese scholars honoured him as “the Xuanzang of British sinology” (英国汉学界的玄奘) — a comparison that speaks to the reverence in which his work was held.

Legge was a Scottish missionary of the London Missionary Society who served in Malacca and Hong Kong from 1840 to 1873. Honey devotes a full chapter to Legge, treating him as the embodiment of the “Riccian acculturation through the Classics” — the idea, descended from Ricci’s accommodation policy, that the deepest engagement with Chinese civilisation required mastery of its canonical texts. His translations of the Chinese Classics — the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Shijing, the Shujing, the Chunqiu with the Zuozhuan, and the Yijing — appeared in multiple volumes between 1861 and 1872 (with later revisions published in Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series).

Honey’s treatment of Legge emphasises his philological achievement. Legge’s grasp of the Chinese commentarial tradition — the centuries of exegesis accumulated around each canonical text — “rivaled that of native scholars in China, where he was considered a specialist on the Shih-ching in the sense of old-school Chinese exegesis on the classics.” His translations were distinguished by their fidelity to the original — sometimes to the point of awkwardness — and by the thoroughness of their annotation. As Honey puts it, Legge preferred his translations “better wooden than woolly” — a phrase that captures both his strength and his limitation. In 1875, Legge was awarded the Prix Stanislas Julien, the international prize for Chinese translation — a recognition that placed him in the company of the greatest French sinologists.

In 1876, Legge was appointed the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford, a position he held until his death in 1897. Honey traces Legge’s evolution from “missionary translator to professional sinologist” — a transformation that occurred gradually over the course of his career in Hong Kong. In his early work, Legge’s translations were motivated by the desire to demonstrate the compatibility (or incompatibility) of Confucian thought with Christian doctrine. But as his mastery of the Chinese commentarial tradition deepened, his scholarship became increasingly autonomous — driven by a commitment to accuracy and completeness that transcended any doctrinal agenda. By the time of his Oxford appointment, Legge was a sinologist first and a missionary second.[^fn_legge_extra]

The significance of Legge’s work can be measured by its longevity. More than a century after his death, his translations of the Analects, the Mencius, and the Shijing remain in wide use. They have been reprinted continuously, and no subsequent translator has entirely superseded them. Legge was succeeded at Oxford by T.L. Bullock, a former diplomat whose scholarly output was modest, and then by William Edward Soothill (1861–1935), a Baptist missionary who had spent decades in China. Soothill’s publications included The Three Religions of China (1913) and Timothy Richard of China (1924), but he was not a philologist of Legge’s calibre.

5. Arthur Waley — The Independent Genius

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) was the pre-eminent translator of Chinese and Japanese literature in the English-speaking world, and one of the most remarkable figures in the history of sinology. His career was anomalous in almost every respect: self-taught in Chinese and Japanese, he 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 and set a standard of literary quality that has rarely been equalled.

Born Arthur David Schloss in Tunbridge Wells, Waley studied at Rugby School and King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a student of the philosophers G. Lowes Dickinson and G.E. Moore. In 1913, he joined the Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, where he catalogued the Chinese and Japanese paintings in the Stein Collection. It was at the Museum that he taught himself Chinese and Japanese, working with dictionaries and original texts without formal instruction. Honey gives Waley full chapter-length treatment, calling him “the pre-eminent poet among sinologists” and “the last and best of the line of self-taught sinologists fathered by nineteenth-century ecclesiastical, commercial, and political interests.”

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.” He 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 the imagery of the original. His subsequent collections extended his range across the full span of Chinese poetry. As Zhang Xiping observes, Waley regarded the period before the Tang as the golden age of Chinese poetry and preferred the simple, natural folk-song style to the elaborate artifice of later periods. He translated 108 poems by Bai Juyi, his favourite Chinese poet, and published a biographical study, The Life and Times of Po Chü-i (1949). His relationship with Li Bai was more ambivalent: in The Poetry and Career of Li Po (1950), he criticised Li Bai’s repetitiveness and lack of moral seriousness — a judgement that, as Zhang Xiping notes, reflected “the cultural gap” between Waley’s English moral standards and the values of Tang Chinese literary culture.

Beyond poetry, Waley’s translations encompassed the full range of Chinese classical literature. His abridged translation of the Xiyou ji, published as Monkey (1942), became one of the best-known Chinese books in the West, reprinted countless times and translated into many languages. His translation of the Shijing (1937) was acclaimed as the finest English version of the Book of Songs. His translation of the Analects (1938) became the standard English version for a generation, and The Way and Its Power (1934), a translation of the Dao De Jing, demonstrated his command of early Chinese philosophical prose. His study The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes (1958) was a pioneering exercise in presenting a major historical event from the Chinese perspective — an approach that anticipated the postcolonial sensibilities of later decades. In Japanese literature, Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji (1925–1933) was universally acclaimed as one of the masterpieces of English-language literary translation.

Waley’s honours reflected his unique position in British cultural life: Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1952), honorary doctorate from Oxford (1953), Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (1953), and Companion of Honour (1956). 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, and it was precisely for this reason that these translations displayed such extraordinary influence.”[^fn_waley_extra]

Waley’s refusal to visit China or Japan — the most famous eccentricity of his career — has never been fully explained. Near the end of his life, he told a friend: “For me, the most familiar place in China is the Chang’an of the Tang dynasty, but I suspect it has changed somewhat since then.” Honey’s assessment is balanced. Waley was a literary genius who “popularized the reading of Chinese and Japanese literature in translation” and “set an almost inimitable standard that in the main remained as accurate — for his purposes — as it was readable.” But his position outside academic sinology meant that he could not train students or build an institutional legacy.

Several other figures deserve mention in any account of nineteenth-century British sinology. Samuel Beal (1825–1889), chaplain to the British fleet, became a pioneer in the study of Chinese Buddhism, publishing translations of Faxian’s and Song Yun’s travel records and a life of Xuanzang. His work paralleled that of Rémusat and Julien in France.[^extra_beal] Henry Yule (1820–1889), a Scottish military officer, produced Cathay and the Way Thither (1866) and The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1871), annotated translations that earned the respect even of Pelliot, who was notoriously parsimonious with praise.[^extra_yule] John Fryer (1839–1928), a missionary at the Jiangnan Arsenal’s Translation Bureau from 1868 to 1896, collaborated with Chinese scholars on the translation of hundreds of Western scientific and technical works into Chinese — an enterprise of enormous importance for the modernisation of Chinese knowledge.[^extra_fryer]

6. Joseph Needham and Science and Civilisation in China

Joseph Needham (1900–1995) was the most ambitious and influential British sinologist of the twentieth century, even though he came to Chinese studies relatively late in life and from an entirely different discipline. A distinguished biochemist at Cambridge — Fellow of the Royal Society, author of the three-volume Chemical Embryology (1931) — Needham discovered through three Chinese graduate students who arrived in his laboratory in 1937 (among them Lu Gwei-djen, who would become his lifelong collaborator and second wife) that Chinese civilisation had made fundamental contributions to science and technology that were almost entirely unknown in the West. He resolved to write a history of Chinese science, learned Chinese, and by the end of the 1930s had begun publishing on the subject.

During the Second World War, Needham served as scientific counsellor at the British Embassy in Chongqing and director of the Sino-British Science Cooperation Office (1942–1946). He travelled over 50,000 kilometres through ten wartime provinces, visiting more than 300 scientific and educational institutions and meeting over a thousand Chinese scholars. This experience provided both the human contacts and the documentary resources for his life’s work.

Needham’s methodology for his immense project rested on six principles, as Zhang Xiping enumerates them: the systematic collection and indexing of materials; the conduct of fieldwork and direct observation of traditional crafts and technologies; the use of experimental reconstruction to verify scientific claims found in Chinese texts; the placement of Chinese science within the framework of world history; the combination of internal and external approaches — attending both to the internal logic of scientific development and to the social and institutional factors that shaped it; and the cultivation of international scholarly collaboration.[^fn_needham_method]

The first volume of Science and Civilisation in China appeared in 1954, and the work eventually grew to seven main volumes (with many sub-volumes), covering mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, medicine, and the social context of Chinese science. Needham’s central argument was that China had been far in advance of Europe in science and technology for most of recorded history, and that the conventional Western narrative, which attributed scientific progress exclusively to the Graeco-Roman and European traditions, was profoundly misleading. He also posed what became known as “the Needham Question”: why did the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution not occur in China, despite China’s earlier technological lead? The honours that followed included the George Sarton Medal of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science (1968), election as Fellow of the British Academy (1971), and a first-class natural science award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1983). Needham’s work extended the scope of sinology from the humanities into the natural sciences — a contribution without parallel in any other national tradition.

7. Institutional Development: SOAS, Cambridge, Oxford

The institutional history of British sinology is a story of chronic underfunding, belated recognition, and dependence on external events — particularly wars — to galvanise government support. The first British university chairs in Chinese were created not through intellectual conviction but through the accidents of donation and patronage. The London chair (1837) was endowed by George Thomas Staunton on condition that Morrison’s library be housed at University College; the appointment went to Samuel Kidd, a missionary who died in 1843, after which the chair lapsed. Oxford’s chair (1876) was created for Legge. Cambridge’s (1888) was created for Wade, as a condition of his book donation. Manchester’s (1901) went to Edward Harper Parker. By the early twentieth century, Britain had five chairs in Chinese, but none was adequately funded, and the holders were almost all retired diplomats or missionaries rather than trained scholars.

The Reay Report (1909) recommended the establishment of a dedicated School of Oriental Studies within the University of London, but the founding of SOAS was delayed by the First World War until 1916. SOAS grew rapidly in student numbers but suffered from poor funding and a government that viewed it primarily as a training ground for interpreters rather than a centre of research. Zhang Xiping notes that the Chinese writer Lao She served as a Chinese lecturer at SOAS in the 1920s, compiling a textbook and recording a set of Linguaphone Chinese teaching records.

Two European émigré scholars brought continental philological standards to British sinology in the mid-twentieth century. Walter Simon (1893–1981), born in Berlin, fled Germany in 1938 and became professor of Chinese at SOAS (1947–1960). A specialist in Sino-Tibetan linguistics, his reconstruction of Old Chinese final consonants was a pioneering contribution to historical phonology.[^extra_simon] Gustav Haloun (1898–1951), trained at Leipzig under August Conrady, held chairs at Prague, Halle, and Göttingen before emigrating to Cambridge in 1938. Honey treats Haloun as a master of textual criticism whose work on the Guanzi and on the problems of Bactria and the Yuezhi in Chinese sources demonstrated a rigour that was new to British sinology.[^extra_haloun]

The Second World War demonstrated the cost of Britain’s neglect of oriental studies. During 1940–1941, only twenty-six students across all British universities were studying Chinese. Two post-war government reports attempted to address the crisis. The Scarborough Report (1947) called for properly funded departments of oriental studies, resulting in significant expansion at SOAS and other institutions. The Hayter Report (1961) called for further expansion, including the creation of area studies centres. Under its influence, SOAS established five regional research centres in 1966, and a Contemporary China Institute was founded in 1967–1968 with Ford Foundation support. The gains of the post-war period proved fragile. Under the Thatcher government’s austerity measures, SOAS’s budget was cut by 37 per cent and its teaching staff reduced by 25 per cent. The Parker Report (1986) delivered a scathing assessment of British oriental studies. Zhang Xiping’s overall verdict on the institutional history is severe: “Throughout this period, the British government’s focus on short-term commercial and diplomatic interests, its emphasis on training interpreters rather than supporting research, and its chronic underfunding of the field resulted in a level of sinological achievement that fell far behind that of France, Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan.”

A distinctive feature of twentieth-century British sinology was the contribution of Chinese scholars resident in Britain. Xiang Da was invited by Oxford in 1936 to catalogue its Chinese holdings. Lao She taught Chinese at SOAS in the 1920s. D.C. Lau (Liu Dianjue) taught at SOAS before moving to the Chinese University of Hong Kong, contributing authoritative translations of the Analects and the Mencius. The Boxer Indemnity Scholarships, established by agreement between the Republican Chinese government and the British government in 1931, channelled part of the Boxer Protocol payments into cultural exchange. The resulting University China Committee oversaw salaries for Chinese professors at Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and provided travel grants for British scholars working on Chinese topics.[^fn_chinese_uk]

8. Contemporary British Sinology

Despite the institutional difficulties catalogued above, British sinology has produced works of enduring importance, and the late twentieth century witnessed both consolidation and renewal.

Denis Twitchett (1925–2006), who held chairs at SOAS (1956–1968) and Cambridge (1968–1980), was among the most influential British sinologists of the post-war period. A historian of Tang and Song China, he co-edited (with John King Fairbank of Harvard) the multi-volume Cambridge History of China, which by the early twenty-first century had reached fifteen volumes covering Chinese history from the Qin dynasty to the post-Mao era. Though an international project, its intellectual home was at Cambridge, and its editorial direction reflected the distinctive strengths of the Anglo-American historical tradition: close attention to documentary evidence, sensitivity to institutional history, and a preference for narrative synthesis over theoretical abstraction.

Lionel Giles (1875–1958), son of Herbert Giles, spent his career at the British Museum, where he catalogued the Chinese manuscripts brought back by Stein from Dunhuang — a labour compiled over thirty-eight years. He also translated the Sunzi bingfa (The Art of War, 1910), producing what Zhang Xiping describes as “the first relatively complete and accurate expression of Sun Tzu’s military thought” in English.[^fn_lgiles] Michael Sullivan (1916–2013), an art historian who spent four years at the National Southwest Associated University museum in wartime China, produced The Arts of China (1973), the standard English-language introduction to Chinese art.

David Hawkes (1923–2009), Professor of Chinese at Oxford from 1960 to 1971, produced what is widely regarded as the finest English translation of a Chinese novel: his five-volume rendering of Hongloumeng (The Story of the Stone), published by Penguin Books between 1973 and 1986. (The final forty chapters were translated by Hawkes’s son-in-law and student, John Minford, under his supervision.) Zhang Xiping notes that the Times Literary Supplement compared it favourably to Waley’s translation of The Tale of Genji. In his essay “Chinese Poetry and the English Reader,” Hawkes analysed the fundamental obstacles to translating Chinese poetry into English — the untranslatability of tonal patterns, the destruction of duizhang (parallelism) that inevitably results from the grammatical requirements of English prose. These frank assessments of the limits of translation coexisted with an equally firm commitment to the possibility of meaningful cross-linguistic literary communication. Hawkes’s scholarship extended beyond Hongloumeng to his translation of the Chuci (The Songs of the South, 1959) — the first complete English translation of this ancient anthology — and to his studies of “Quanzhen drama,” a subgenre of Yuan zaju devoted to Daoist themes of spiritual transformation.[^fn_hawkes_extra]

No account of British sinology would be complete without mention of the Edmund Backhouse affair — what Zhang Xiping calls “a great tragedy in the history of British sinology.” Backhouse (1873–1944), an Oxford graduate who arrived in Beijing in 1898, donated approximately 27,000 volumes of Chinese books to the Bodleian Library and co-authored two widely cited works on late Qing history with J.O.P. Bland. These books were treated as primary sources by scholars for decades. The exposure came with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Hermit of Peking (1976), which revealed that Backhouse had forged many of the “court diaries” and documents on which his books were based. The scandal discredited not only Backhouse’s own work but cast doubt on an entire body of scholarship that had relied on his fabrications. The Backhouse affair served as a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on unverified sources and the importance of the kind of rigorous philological verification that scholars like Pelliot insisted upon.[^fn_backhouse]

SOAS remains the largest centre for Chinese studies in Britain, offering programmes that cover the full range of Chinese language, history, literature, religion, politics, and economics. Oxford and Cambridge continue to maintain chairs and programmes, and several other universities — Leeds, Edinburgh, Durham, Sheffield — have developed significant China-related teaching and research. A survey conducted in the early 1990s identified approximately 160 specialists in Chinese studies working in Britain, of whom roughly 60 per cent focused on modern and contemporary China and fewer than 25 per cent on the pre-modern period. This emphasis on modern studies — which Zhang Xiping interprets as a continuation of the “utilitarian tendency” (实用主义倾向) that has characterised British sinology from its origins — stands in contrast to the French tradition, which has maintained a stronger commitment to classical philology and pre-modern history.

9. Assessment

The history of British sinology is not, on the whole, a story of institutional success. Compared to France, with its Collège de France tradition; to Germany, with its chairs at Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig; or to the United States, with the massive expansion of area studies after 1945, Britain’s contribution has been modest in scale and precarious in institutional support. Yet it has been distinguished by a handful of individuals — Morrison, Legge, Waley, Needham, Hawkes — whose personal achievements rank with the finest in the history of the discipline. British sinology has been, in essence, a tradition of individual brilliance operating in the face of institutional indifference — a tradition of translator-scholars whose works have endured long after the committees and reports that failed to support them have been forgotten.

Honey’s treatment of the British tradition captures this paradox. He notes that “British sinology developed out of the service of Protestant missionaries in China” — a heritage that gave it practical linguistic competence and a tradition of close textual work, but that also limited its theoretical ambitions and its institutional support. The transition from amateur to professional sinology — from the “hyphenated missionary-sinologists, official-sinologists, or businessmen-sinologists” of the nineteenth century to the full-time academics of the twentieth — was “painful” and incomplete. Even Waley, the greatest British sinologist of the twentieth century, stood “outside the institutional orb of professional sinology.”[^fn_honey_uk]

The Chinese scholarly perspective, as represented by Zhang Xiping’s lectures, offers a complementary assessment. Zhang acknowledges the extraordinary individual achievements but insists that the overall trajectory of British sinology has been hampered by the nation’s persistent utilitarianism — its tendency to value Chinese studies for their practical commercial and diplomatic applications rather than for their contribution to humanistic knowledge. What is beyond question is the enduring value of the works that the British tradition has produced. Legge’s translations of the Chinese Classics, Waley’s renderings of Chinese poetry, Needham’s history of Chinese science, Hawkes’s Story of the Stone, and the Cambridge History of China together constitute one of the great achievements of Western humanistic scholarship.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Giles, Herbert A. A Chinese-English Dictionary. 2nd ed. London and Shanghai, 1912.
• Giles, Herbert A. A History of Chinese Literature. London: William Heinemann, 1901.
• Hawkes, David, trans. The Story of the Stone (Hongloumeng). 5 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973–1986.
• Legge, James. The Chinese Classics. 5 vols. Hong Kong and London, 1861–1872.
• Morrison, Robert. A Dictionary of the Chinese Language. 6 vols. Macao, 1815–1823.
• Needham, Joseph, et al. Science and Civilisation in China. 7 vols. (multiple parts). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954–.
• Waley, Arthur. A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. London: Constable, 1917.
• Waley, Arthur. The Analects of Confucius. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938.
• Waley, Arthur. Monkey. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1942.
• Waley, Arthur. The Book of Songs. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1937.

Secondary Sources

• Barrett, T.H. Singular Listlessness: A Short History of Chinese Books and British Scholars. London: Wellsweep, 1989.
• Honey, David B. Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology. American Oriental Series 86. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2001.
• Zhang Xiping 张西平. “Lecture 9: Development of British Sinology” (第九讲：英国汉学的发展). In Lectures on the History of Western Sinology.
• He Yin 何寅 and Xu Guanghua 许光华. Guowai hanxueshi 国外汉学史 (History of Sinology Abroad). Shanghai: Shanghai Waiyu Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2002.
• Huang Changzhu 黄长著, Sun Yuesheng 孙越生, and Wang Zuwang 王祖望, eds. Ouzhou Zhongguo xue 欧洲中国学 (European Chinese Studies). Beijing: Shehui Kexue Wenxian Chubanshe, 2005.
• Twitchett, Denis, and John K. Fairbank, eds. The Cambridge History of China. Multiple vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978–.

References

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