History of Sinology/Chapter 14

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Chapter 14: Scandinavia — Bernhard Karlgren and the Swedish School

1. Introduction: A Sinological Tradition in the Far North

The history of sinology in the Scandinavian countries — Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland — is, in its modern form, essentially the history of one man’s towering influence and the school he created. Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978), who applied the methods of European comparative linguistics to the reconstruction of ancient Chinese pronunciation, revolutionized the study of Chinese historical phonology and, in doing so, placed Sweden at the center of international sinological scholarship for much of the twentieth century. As E.G. Pulleyblank observed, the field of Chinese historical phonology can be divided into two periods: “BK (before Karlgren) and AK (after Karlgren).”

Yet Karlgren did not emerge from a vacuum. Sweden’s engagement with China stretches back to the seventeenth century, rooted in commercial, scientific, and intellectual interests that predated the rise of academic sinology by two hundred years. The Swedish East India Company, the botanical expeditions of Linnaeus’s students, the chinoiserie that adorned the royal court, and the missionary enterprises of the nineteenth century all created the cultural soil from which Karlgren’s achievement grew.

The history of Swedish and Scandinavian sinology can be divided into three broad phases: a formative period from the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth, characterized by travelers’ accounts, scientific expeditions, and missionary scholarship; a period of professional development from the early twentieth century to the 1960s, dominated by Karlgren and his students and marked by pioneering work in linguistics, archaeology, and art history; and a modern period from the mid-1960s onward, in which the focus shifted from classical to contemporary China under the leadership of Goran Malmqvist and his successors.

2. Early Swedish Interest in China (Seventeenth–Nineteenth Centuries)

2.1 The First Swedish Encounters

The earliest documented encounter between Sweden and China occurred in 1654, when Nils Matson Kioping, a Swedish traveler, accompanied a Dutch merchant-diplomat on a voyage to the Chinese coast. His travel report, published in 1667, depicted China in terms typical of the era as a land inhabited by “clever and happy people.” This was followed by a cluster of doctoral dissertations on Chinese themes at Sweden’s oldest university, Uppsala: Jonas Rocknerus’s Murus Sinensis brevi dissertatione adumbratus (A Brief Dissertation on the Great Wall, 1694) — the first Swedish academic work on a Chinese subject — Erik Rolan’s De magno Sinarum imperio (On the Great Chinese Empire, 1697), and Olav Celsius’s Exercitium academicum Confucium Sinarum Philosophum leviter adumbrans (An Academic Exercise Lightly Sketching Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese, 1710).

These three dissertations, produced at different times by different authors, reveal the progressive deepening of European Sinophilia in Sweden: the first described a physical structure, the second celebrated China as the realization of Plato’s dream of a philosopher-governed state, and the third examined Confucian thought as a philosophical and quasi-religious system potentially beneficial to Swedish society. They reflected the “China fever” that swept European intellectual life during this period.

2.2 The Swedish East India Company and Botanical Exchanges

In 1731, Sweden founded its own East India Company (Svenska Ostindiska Compagniet). Between 1732 and 1806, the Company’s ships made at least 130 voyages between Gothenburg and Guangzhou, creating a direct commercial link between Sweden and China that lasted three-quarters of a century. Several natural scientists, principally students of the great botanist Carl Linnaeus, traveled aboard these ships and published accounts of their Chinese experiences.

The most significant was Pehr Osbeck, whose Dagbok over en Ostindisk Resa aren 1750, 1751, 1752 (Diary of an East India Journey, 1757) was a substantial work containing extensive information on Chinese natural history and culture — effectively a botanical encyclopedia of China. In the same year, Linnaeus’s friend Captain Carl Gustaf Ekeberg published Kort Berattelse om den Chinesiska Landt-Hushallningen (Brief Account of Chinese Agriculture), a report on Chinese farming methods that dovetailed neatly with the physiocratic economic theories then fashionable in France. These publications did much to shape Swedish perceptions of China during the mid-eighteenth century.

2.3 Sinophilia and the Swedish Court

The most spectacular expression of Swedish Sinophilia was the construction of the Kina Slott (Chinese Pavilion) at Drottningholm in 1753 — a Chinese-style palace built as a birthday gift from King Adolf Fredrik to his queen, Lovisa Ulrika. The pavilion, which still stands on the grounds of the royal palace, housed a substantial collection of Chinese porcelain and art objects.

Queen Lovisa Ulrika was herself an important patron of Chinese studies. She assembled a collection of Chinese books, which the young August Strindberg later catalogued during his employment at the Royal Library in Stockholm, spending a year studying Chinese to produce a forty-nine-item bibliography and a pamphlet on the Chinese and Japanese languages entitled Kina och Japan.

The most influential Swedish Sinophile was Carl Fredrik Scheffer, who served as Swedish ambassador to France from 1743 to 1752 and maintained close ties with French physiocratic thinkers. Scheffer wrote extensively promoting physiocratic ideas, arguing that agriculture should be the foundation of the economy and that China offered a model of enlightened governance worthy of European emulation. In a 1772 address to the Swedish Academy of Sciences delivered in the presence of King Gustav III, Scheffer praised the Chinese system of government and presented China as an exemplar for European states.

2.4 Missionaries and the Transition to Scholarship

The waning of Enlightenment Sinophilia in the late eighteenth century was followed by a new phase of Swedish engagement with China, led by Protestant missionaries. Theodore Hamberg arrived in Hong Kong in 1847 as a representative of the Basel Mission. He learned Chinese, developed a deep understanding of Chinese society, and befriended Hong Rengan, a cousin of the Taiping Rebellion leader Hong Xiuquan. From Hong Rengan’s accounts, Hamberg composed The Chinese Rebel Chief Hung-Siu-Tshuen and the Origin of the Kwangsi Insurrection (London, 1855), motivated by his desire to arouse “sympathy for the Chinese people.” This work remains a valuable source in the early history of Swedish China studies.

Another missionary, Erik Folke, who served in China from 1887 to 1920, translated the Zhuangzi (1924) and the Laozi (1927) into Swedish and published a study of early Chinese thought, Tankare i det gamla Kina (Thinkers of Ancient China, 1922). Two former missionaries also completed doctoral dissertations drawing on their China experience: Kjetty Karlgren’s Studies in Sung Time Colloquial Chinese as Revealed in Chu Hi’s Ts’uanshu (1958) and Gunnar Sjoholm’s Readings in Mo Ti (1982).

The missionaries, unlike the merchants and travelers who preceded them, generally spoke excellent Chinese and had extensive contact with ordinary Chinese people. Their knowledge of Chinese language and society, though acquired in the service of evangelism, constituted a genuine body of expertise that contributed to the transmission of Chinese culture to Sweden.

2.5 Anders Ljungstedt and Early Historical Scholarship

In the 1830s, the Swedish historian Anders Ljungstedt produced in Macau the first Western history of the Portuguese settlement, A Historical Sketch of the Portuguese Settlements in China; and of the Roman Catholic Church and Mission in China (Macau, 1832–1834; revised edition, Boston, 1836). Ljungstedt had lived in Macau for over twenty years and drew on extensive primary sources. His work clearly articulated the thesis that “Macau is Chinese territory” and provided subsequent generations of scholars with valuable original documentation. It remained a standard reference for Macau studies for well over a century.

The first Swedish translation of Chinese poetry, Kinesiska dikter pa svensk vars (Chinese Poems in Swedish Verse, 1894), was produced by Hans Emil Larsson — who did not read Chinese but translated from German and French versions. The volume included poems from the Shijing and works by Li Bai, Du Fu, and Su Shi, testifying to Swedish literary interest in Chinese poetry even before the establishment of professional sinology.

3. Bernhard Karlgren and the Birth of Professional Swedish Sinology

3.1 Life and Formation

Bernhard Karlgren was born on 5 October 1889 in Jonkoping, in southern Sweden. He grew up in Smaland and displayed an early fascination with dialectology, publishing two articles on local dialects in 1908 and 1909 while still a student. He enrolled at Uppsala University in 1907, initially studying Russian under Professor Lundell, a Slavicist who had developed a system of phonetic notation for recording dialects.

It was the intellectual ferment surrounding historical phonology in early twentieth-century Scandinavia that shaped Karlgren’s career. Under the influence of Lundell and the broader tradition of European comparative linguistics, historical phonology had become “a very advanced discipline” that attracted brilliant young scholars. While still an undergraduate, Karlgren conceived the idea of applying the methods developed for studying European languages and dialects to Chinese — a language for which no university instruction yet existed in Sweden.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1909, Karlgren went to St. Petersburg to study Chinese fundamentals under Professor Ivanov, combining Chinese language study with comparative linguistics. He then received funding to travel to China for dialect research. He departed for China in March 1910 and returned to Europe in January 1912. In an astonishing feat of linguistic fieldwork, Karlgren achieved sufficient command of Chinese within less than two years to conduct phonological surveys of twenty-four different dialects — an achievement that still commands admiration.

On his return to Europe, Karlgren spent several months in London before proceeding to Paris, where he studied for two years (September 1912 to April 1914) under the great Edouard Chavannes at the College de France. In Paris, he also met Paul Pelliot and Henri Maspero — encounters that would prove fateful for the development of Chinese historical phonology.

3.2 The Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise

In May 1915, Karlgren was awarded his doctorate at Uppsala with a dissertation written in French: the first part of his monumental Etudes sur la phonologie chinoise (Studies on Chinese Phonology). The work received the Prix Julien for 1916 from the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris.

The Etudes represented the systematic application of European comparative-historical linguistics to the Chinese language. Using the methods developed for reconstructing proto-Indo-European, Karlgren reconstructed the phonological system of Middle Chinese (the language of the Qieyun rhyme dictionary, compiled in 601 CE) through a comparative analysis of modern Chinese dialects and the traditional Chinese scholarship on historical phonology, particularly the work of the great Qing-dynasty philologists. As David Honey summarized:

Bernhard Karlgren was the first Western sinologist to systematize the study of Chinese historical phonology through the methods of the school of historical linguistics current in Europe. “Bernhard Karlgren [was] the pioneer of the modern scientific study of Chinese historical phonology,” states Pulleyblank. “He brought a rigour to the subject that was not found among his predecessors and that has all too often been lacking among his would-be followers.”

Karlgren divided the history of Chinese phonology into two stages: “Ancient Chinese” (now usually called Old Chinese), the language of the Shijing rhymes, and “Archaic Chinese” (now called Middle Chinese), the language represented by the Qieyun and the Song-period rhyme tables. He spent approximately ten more years expanding and revising his initial dissertation, completing the full Etudes in 1926. This work was 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. 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”; “Chinese historical phonology has been influenced by Karlgren more than by anyone else.”

3.3 The Method Explained

Karlgren’s approach deserves brief explication, as it represented a genuine methodological breakthrough. His procedure was, in essence, an adaptation of the comparative method that nineteenth-century European linguists had used to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European. Just as comparative linguists reconstructed the ancestral forms of Indo-European words by comparing cognate forms in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, and other daughter languages, Karlgren reconstructed earlier stages of Chinese pronunciation by comparing how the same characters were pronounced in different modern Chinese dialects.

The key insight was that the Qieyun rhyme dictionary of 601 CE preserved information about the phonological system of an earlier stage of Chinese, and that this system could be reconstructed by combining the evidence of the Qieyun categories with the testimony of modern dialectal pronunciations. Karlgren traveled across China recording the pronunciations of characters in twenty-four different dialect areas, then systematically compared these modern forms with each other and with the categories of the Qieyun. The result was a reconstruction of the sound system of Middle Chinese — the language as it was spoken around the sixth and seventh centuries CE.

For Old Chinese — the language of the Shijing and the earliest classical texts — Karlgren relied primarily on the rhyming patterns preserved in the Shijing itself, combined with the “phonetic series” evidence inherent in the structure of Chinese characters (where characters sharing the same phonetic component were originally pronounced similarly). This second reconstruction was more speculative but no less influential.

The importance of Karlgren’s work extended far beyond linguistics. As Honey emphasized, historical phonology is not merely a technical exercise but a fundamental tool of philological analysis. Knowing how characters were pronounced at different periods enables scholars to identify loan characters (where a character is “borrowed” to represent a homophonous but semantically unrelated word), to trace the evolution of word meanings, and to resolve textual cruxes that are otherwise impenetrable. As the Qing philologist Wang Yinzhi had stated: “If the student can look for the meaning through the sound and see the appropriate character behind its loan form, then difficulties will dissolve of themselves.”

3.4 Scholarly Debate with Maspero

Karlgren’s reconstructions did not go unchallenged. Henri Maspero, who had independently worked on Chinese historical phonology and had anticipated some of Karlgren’s methods, responded to the Etudes in 1920 with his own detailed study of the Qieyun system, “Le Dialecte de Tch’ang-an sous les T’ang.” Karlgren in turn incorporated some of Maspero’s suggestions and refuted others in “The Reconstruction of Ancient Chinese” (1922). As Karlgren acknowledged: “My reconstructive system of 1919 (Phonologie chinoise, III) 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 exchange between Karlgren in Stockholm and Maspero in Paris exemplified the internationalism of sinological scholarship at its best. The two scholars, working from different national traditions and methodological starting points, refined each other’s conclusions through sustained critical dialogue. Karlgren’s reconstruction of Middle Chinese “held sway over the field for many years” until E.G. Pulleyblank proposed a fundamentally new approach, and his Old Chinese reconstruction was eventually superseded by William H. Baxter’s Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology (1992). Yet even Karlgren’s superseded frameworks remain foundational: all subsequent work in the field has been, in one way or another, a response to the questions he posed and the methods he established.

3.4 The Grammata Serica and Other Major Works

Beyond the Etudes, Karlgren’s most important works were his dictionaries and reference tools that made Chinese historical phonology accessible to working sinologists. Peter Boodberg called them “towering monuments to scholarship.” George A. Kennedy described their significance:

The publication by Professor Bernhard Karlgren of the Analytic Dictionary of Chinese in 1923 was an event of the first importance because it put into the hands of sinologists too busy to wrestle with Chinese compendia like the Guangyun a quick and easy guide to the reading of written symbols at a particular period. The publication of Grammata Serica in 1940 enlarged the field of knowledge.

The Grammata Serica — Script and Phonetics in Chinese and Sino-Japanese (1940), revised as Grammata Serica Recensa (1957), organized some six thousand Chinese characters by their phonetic components, providing reconstructed Middle and Old Chinese pronunciations for each. His Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese (1954) summarized his methods, materials, and results. These reference works became indispensable tools for an entire generation of sinologists worldwide.

3.5 Classical Scholarship and Bronze Studies

Karlgren’s scholarly interests extended far beyond phonology. He produced important translations and commentaries on the Chinese classics, including The Book of Odes (Shijing) with accompanying Glosses (BMFEA, 1942–1946), The Book of Documents (Shujing) with Glosses (BMFEA, 1948–1949), and annotations on the Zuozhuan (BMFEA, 1969–1970). He studied loan characters in pre-Han texts, compiled a lexicon of classical Chinese, and wrote notes on the Laozi and the Zhuangzi.

From the 1930s through the 1960s, Karlgren also published a series of important studies on Chinese bronzes, including “Early Chinese Mirror Inscriptions” (1934), “The Dating of Chinese Bronzes” (1937), and various studies of the collections of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm. He also wrote works in Swedish for a general audience, including Ordet och Pennan i Mittens Rike (The Word and the Pen in the Middle Kingdom, 1918) and Fran Kinas Tankevarld (From the World of Chinese Thought, 1929).

3.6 Karlgren’s Character and Influence

The current professor of Chinese at Stockholm University, Torbjorn Loden, characterized Karlgren’s personality in terms that applied equally to his scholarship: “clarity, thoroughness, goal-directedness, and forthright candor.” His prose style could be summarized in a single phrase: “terse and precise.” Karlgren’s own favorite classical Chinese text was the Zuozhuan, which he praised as “words like pearls” — a description that, as Loden observed, aptly captured Karlgren’s own scholarly manner. For Karlgren, “the task of scholarly research is to clarify facts that can be clarified, not to plunge into speculation about things that cannot.”

3.7 Institutional Legacy

In September 1918, Karlgren was appointed Professor of East Asian Languages and Culture at the University of Gothenburg, where he taught Chinese and Japanese. He served as rector of the university from 1931 to 1936. In 1939, he moved to Stockholm to become director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Ostasiatiska Museet) and professor of East Asian archaeology at Stockholm University. He held the additional position of Professor of Chinese at Stockholm from 1945 until his retirement in 1965, during which time he trained an entire generation of Scandinavian sinologists.

The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, founded in connection with the Swedish geologist Johan Gunnar Andersson’s archaeological work in China, became under Karlgren’s directorship one of Europe’s most important centers for the study of Chinese art and archaeology. Its publication, the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (BMFEA), founded in 1929, became a premier venue for sinological scholarship, with Karlgren himself contributing to nearly every volume from the journal’s inception through the 1970s.

4. Sven Hedin, Johan Gunnar Andersson, and Osvald Siren

4.1 Swedish Archaeological Contributions

While Karlgren was transforming Chinese linguistics, other Swedish scholars were making equally pioneering contributions in archaeology and art history.

Sven Hedin (1865–1952), the geographer and explorer, conducted three major expeditions to Central Asia. During his second expedition (1899–1902), he discovered the ancient city of Loulan in the Tarim Basin, a find that caused an international sensation. His third expedition (1927–1935) was the most ambitious, involving Swedish, German, and Chinese participants; its results have been published in fifty-six volumes. Hedin’s popular writings about his Asian travels attracted a wide readership and stimulated Swedish public interest in China and Central Asia.

Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874–1960), a geologist who served as an advisor to the Chinese Geological Survey from 1914 to 1924, made discoveries of world-historical significance. He participated in the excavations at Zhoukoudian near Beijing that ultimately led to the discovery of Homo erectus pekinensis (“Peking Man”). In 1921, he discovered the Neolithic site at Yangshao Village in Henan province, unearthing large quantities of stone tools and painted pottery — the first Neolithic settlement found in the heartland of ancient Chinese civilization. Between 1923 and 1924, he organized expeditions to Gansu province that identified approximately fifty prehistoric sites. These discoveries overturned the prevailing assumption that China lacked a Stone Age or prehistoric culture. His major synthesis, Researches into the Prehistory of the Chinese (1943), remains one of the most important archaeological works on Chinese prehistory produced in the first half of the twentieth century.

Andersson brought many of the artifacts he excavated to Sweden for further study. Under an agreement with the Chinese authorities, some were subsequently returned; those retained in Sweden became the core collection of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, of which Andersson served as the first director (until his retirement in 1939). He was also the founding editor of the BMFEA.

Osvald Siren (1879–1966), born in Finland but based in Stockholm, was a pioneer of Chinese art history in Europe. Originally a scholar of Swedish and Italian art, Siren turned to Chinese art during his tenure as professor at Stockholm University (1908–1925) and director of the Far Eastern department of the National Museum (1926–1943). He made five visits to China between 1920 and 1956, photographing temples, palaces, gardens, cities, and landscapes — a photographic archive of extraordinary historical value now preserved at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. His major publications included the four-volume A History of Early Chinese Art (1930), the two-volume Kinas konst under tre tusenden (Three Thousand Years of Chinese Art, 1942–1943), and studies of Chinese gardens, the walls and gates of Beijing, Chinese sculpture, and Chinese painting. As Malmqvist later wrote: “Siren’s many works on Chinese architecture, sculpture, and painting have long been universally known and need no further comment. Some of his judgments may have been superseded by later research. But it was precisely because of Siren’s work that Western scholarly interest turned toward Chinese sculpture and painting.”

5. Goran Malmqvist and the Modern Transformation

5.1 From Classical to Contemporary

In 1965, Goran Malmqvist (1924–2019) succeeded Karlgren as professor of Chinese at Stockholm University, with the significant modification that his title specified “Chinese, especially modern Chinese.” Malmqvist simultaneously established Stockholm University’s Department of Chinese, serving as its first chairman.

Malmqvist was a transitional figure who embodied the transformation of Swedish sinology from a discipline focused on the ancient to one engaged with the modern. As one commentator observed: “If we compare the two giants of Swedish Chinese studies, Karlgren and Malmqvist, we can see a transformation from a sinology focused on solving intellectual puzzles to one that functions primarily as a medium for intercultural understanding.”

5.2 From Dialectology to Literary Translation

Trained by Karlgren, Malmqvist received rigorous instruction in classical Chinese phonology and textual criticism. His early career followed his teacher’s path: he conducted dialect fieldwork in Sichuan (1948–1950), producing studies of southwestern Mandarin phonology, and undertook meticulous textual analyses of the Gongyang Zhuan and Guliang Zhuan commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals, as well as Dong Zhongshu’s Chunqiu Fanlu.

Malmqvist’s intellectual turn came in the 1970s, when he increasingly devoted himself to translating Chinese literature into Swedish. His translations encompassed an extraordinary range: classical novels (Shuihu Zhuan in four volumes; Xiyou Ji), Tang poetry, the poetry of Mao Zedong (thirty-eight poems), and the works of modern and contemporary writers including Shen Congwen, Bei Dao, Gao Xingjian, and Li Rui. He also organized and co-edited the four-volume Handbook of Chinese Literature 1900–1949, covering twentieth-century novels, short fiction, poetry, essays, and drama.

Malmqvist combined “sharp analytical ability with aesthetic sensitivity,” a quality that made him “particularly suited for scholarly research and cross-cultural mediation.” His approach to literary translation was exacting: “Translation plays a very important mediating role. A good translator, in addition to possessing a strong sensitivity to literary language and sharp expressive ability, must genuinely love the writer and breathe with his works, in order to accurately convey the spirit of the original.”

5.3 The Nobel Connection

In 1985, Malmqvist was elected to the Swedish Academy — the body responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature — becoming the first and, for many years, the only member with expertise in Chinese literature. This appointment gave the Swedish Academy unprecedented access to Chinese literary culture. Malmqvist used his position to promote Chinese literature in international circles, facilitating visits by Chinese writers to Scandinavia and translating their works. The Nobel Prize awarded to the Chinese-French novelist Gao Xingjian in 2000, whose works Malmqvist had translated into Swedish, was widely seen as reflecting Malmqvist’s long advocacy for Chinese literature on the world stage.

6. The Expansion of Scandinavian Sinology

6.1 Karlgren’s Students and the Scandinavian Network

One of Karlgren’s most consequential achievements was the training of students who went on to establish Chinese studies programs across Scandinavia. His first generation of students included Else Glahn, who compiled a bibliography of Karlgren’s works; Soren Egerod, who became professor of Chinese at the University of Copenhagen and wrote the standard biographical assessment of Karlgren; and Hans Bielenstein, the first of Karlgren’s students to receive a doctoral degree in sinology, with a dissertation on The Restoration of the Han Dynasty (1953). Bielenstein subsequently expanded his research into a comprehensive multi-volume study of Eastern Han history, becoming the first Western scholar to produce a thorough analysis of Eastern Han society. He later became professor of Chinese history at Columbia University.

Three of Karlgren’s students played particularly decisive roles in establishing Scandinavian sinology as a regional enterprise: Egerod at Copenhagen (Denmark), Henry Henne at Oslo (Norway), and Malmqvist at Stockholm (Sweden). Through these three appointments, Karlgren’s influence radiated across the entire Nordic region.

6.2 Stockholm after Malmqvist

When Malmqvist retired in 1990, Torbjorn Loden succeeded him as professor of Chinese at Stockholm University. Loden, who had studied under Malmqvist, published his doctoral dissertation on The Chinese Proletarian Revolutionary Literature Debate, 1928–1929 (1980) before turning to the study of modern Chinese intellectual history, particularly the philosophy of Dai Zhen. He translated Dai Zhen’s Mengzi Ziyi Shuzheng (Evidential Commentary on the Meanings of Terms in Mencius) into English and published studies on the social functions of Confucianism and the concept of qing (emotion) in Dai Zhen’s thought.

Under Loden’s leadership, Stockholm’s Department of Chinese consciously pursued what he called a “critical mass” approach to research, concentrating graduate students around focused themes rather than allowing the dispersal that had characterized earlier periods. Research topics in the 1990s and 2000s expanded to include contemporary Chinese economic zones (such as Bjorn Kjellgren’s doctoral study of Shenzhen, 2002), labor markets, women’s issues, philosophy, and literary linguistics.

6.3 Lund and the Development of Modern Chinese Linguistics

Lund University, Sweden’s second major center for Chinese studies, established a chair of sinology in 1989 under Lars Ragvald (Luo Si), another of Malmqvist’s students. Ragvald’s doctoral dissertation was a study of the literary critic and political figure Yao Wenyuan, titled Yao Wen-yuan as a Literary Critic and Theorist: The Emergence of Chinese Zhdanovism (1978). Although his initial research focused on contemporary Chinese literature and politics, Ragvald subsequently turned to the study of modern Chinese linguistics. Under his direction, Lund produced the first Chinese-Swedish dictionary (Hanyu-Ruidiandian), published in 2000 — a landmark in Swedish sinological lexicography.

6.4 Broader Scandinavian Developments

Beyond Sweden, Chinese studies developed at several other Scandinavian universities. In addition to Copenhagen (Egerod) and Oslo (Henne), courses in Chinese were established at Gothenburg and Uppsala universities. Stockholm University also created a Center for Pacific Asia Studies (CPAS) in 1984, reflecting the expansion of Chinese studies beyond traditional humanistic sinology into the social sciences.

The broader institutional pattern reflected a shift common across European sinology: the gradual shift from the study of classical Chinese civilization through written texts toward engagement with modern and contemporary China through social-scientific methods. This shift, which Malmqvist both exemplified and facilitated, did not entirely displace the classical tradition — Loden’s work on Dai Zhen and pre-Qin philosophy demonstrated the continuing vitality of text-based scholarship — but it fundamentally altered the center of gravity of Scandinavian Chinese studies.

7. The Swedish Contribution in International Perspective

7.1 Distinctive Characteristics

Several features distinguish the Swedish and broader Scandinavian sinological tradition:

Linguistic rigor. Karlgren’s application of comparative-historical linguistics to Chinese established a standard of methodological precision that subsequent Scandinavian sinologists have maintained. Even scholars who moved away from phonological research, such as Malmqvist and Loden, brought to their work the disciplined attention to language and text that characterized the Karlgren school.

Institutional concentration. Unlike the scattered institutional setting of American or even German sinology, Scandinavian Chinese studies have been concentrated in a small number of centers, creating communities of scholars small enough for intensive intellectual exchange but large enough to sustain doctoral programs and publication series.

The classical-to-modern transition. The shift from Karlgren’s exclusive focus on ancient China to Malmqvist’s engagement with modern Chinese literature and society was accomplished within a single generation and within a single institutional lineage — a remarkably smooth transition that owed much to the personal qualities and intellectual breadth of both men.

Cultural mediation. From the 1970s onward, Swedish sinology has been distinguished by an unusual commitment to literary translation and cultural exchange. Malmqvist’s decades-long project of translating Chinese literature into Swedish, his role in the Swedish Academy, and his personal friendships with Chinese writers made him a figure of genuine cultural significance in Sino-European relations.

7.2 Karlgren’s Global Legacy

Karlgren’s influence extended far beyond Scandinavia. His reconstructions of Middle and Old Chinese pronunciation, though now superseded in detail, established the conceptual framework within which all subsequent work in Chinese historical phonology has been conducted. His reference works — the Analytic Dictionary, the Grammata Serica, the Compendium — remained standard tools of the trade for decades. His insistence on philological rigor and empirical evidence as the foundations of sinological scholarship set a standard that transcended national boundaries.

In China itself, Karlgren’s influence was profound. Wang Li’s assessment — that Karlgren was the only Western sinologist to exert a truly significant influence on Chinese linguistics — was widely shared. Chinese scholars generally accepted Karlgren’s methods and principles even while proposing specific corrections and modifications. The 1940 Chinese translation of the Etudes, produced by three of China’s most eminent linguists, was itself a landmark in the reception of Western sinological methods in China.

8. Conclusion: From Chinoiserie to Critical Mass

The trajectory of Swedish sinology — from the chinoiserie of Drottningholm through Karlgren’s phonological reconstructions to Malmqvist’s literary translations and Loden’s philosophical studies — describes an arc characteristic of European sinological development, but with distinctly Scandinavian coloring. The small scale of Scandinavian academic life encouraged a tradition of scholarly intimacy: Karlgren trained Malmqvist, Malmqvist trained Loden and Ragvald, and through these chains of discipleship a coherent tradition was maintained even as its content underwent radical transformation.

As Loden articulated the challenge facing contemporary Scandinavian sinology: “For me and my colleagues, the main task at present is to make the best possible use of the tradition left to us by Professors Karlgren and Malmqvist, and to concentrate our energies on the most important intellectual challenges we face at the turn of the century. Upholding tradition does not mean simply continuing to plow the fields they cultivated, but finding new research topics for today and tomorrow.”

The new generation of Scandinavian sinologists is pursuing this mandate across an expanding range of fields, from the study of Shenzhen’s special economic zone to the analysis of Chinese advertising culture, from the phonology of Miao languages to the hermeneutics of the Shijing. What unites these diverse enterprises is the conviction, inherited from Karlgren and refined by his successors, that the study of China demands the same methodological seriousness, the same patience with primary sources, and the same willingness to learn from Chinese scholars that characterized the best work of the Swedish tradition from its inception.

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—. “European Studies on Chinese Phonology: The First Phase.” In Europe Studies China, edited by Ming Wilson and John Cayley, 339–67. London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1995.

Siren, Osvald. A History of Early Chinese Art. 4 vols. London, 1930.

Zhang Xiping 张西平. Ou-Mei Hanxue de Lishi yu Xianzhuang 欧美汉学的历史与现状. Zhengzhou: Daxiang Chubanshe, 2005. Lecture 10: “Development of Swedish Sinology.”

References

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