History of Sinology/Chapter 4

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Chapter 4: The Founding of Academic Sinology (1814–1900)

1. Introduction: From Amateurs to Professionals

The suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 brought the most productive phase of missionary sinology to an abrupt end. For four decades — roughly from 1773 to 1814 — the study of China in Europe was sustained by a small number of individuals working in isolation, without institutional support, and often without adequate tools. The accumulated Jesuit legacy — translations, dictionaries, grammars, correspondence — remained available in European libraries, but the living tradition of immersive, China-based scholarship had been severed. As discussed in Chapter 2, this created a significant gap in European expertise.

The founding of the first university chair of Chinese at the College de France in December 1814 marked the decisive transition from missionary sinology to professional academic sinology. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the study of China was progressively institutionalized: chairs were endowed, journals were founded, learned societies were established, and the methods of the new discipline were refined and codified. By 1900, sinology had become a recognized academic field with professional practitioners in France, Germany, Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, and the United States, with its own institutional infrastructure, its own scholarly journals, and its own intellectual traditions.

What follows is organized chronologically and thematically rather than by national tradition — country-specific developments receive fuller treatment in the national chapters (Chapter 7 for Germany, Chapter 8 for France, Chapter 9 for Britain, Chapter 16 for Russia). The aim is to identify the transnational patterns and common challenges that characterized sinology’s emergence as an academic discipline.

2. Abel-Remusat and the 1814 Chair: The Founding Moment

Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat (1788–1832) was not, by training or original intention, a sinologist. He obtained a doctorate in medicine in 1813, but his attention had been drawn to Chinese studies by a chance encounter with a Chinese herbal, which awakened his curiosity about the language in which it was written. He was entirely self-taught in Chinese, working initially with the traditional Chinese dictionary Zhengtzi tong and later gaining access to the manuscript grammars and dictionaries deposited in the imperial library, notably Joseph de Premare’s Notitia Linguae Sinicae (1728), which he gratefully acknowledged as his most important source. According to Henri Maspero, Remusat was “the first auto-didactic savant in Europe to acquire a profound knowledge of Chinese.”

At the remarkably young age of twenty-three, Remusat published an Essai sur la langue et la litterature chinoises (Paris, 1811), a work that Henri Cordier later termed “brilliant.” A second essay, published in Latin in 1813, addressed the nature of the Chinese script and such technical aspects of the classical language as monosyllabism, binomial expressions, and grammatical particles. These publications, together with his evident passion for the subject, led to the creation of a chair in Chinese at the College de France, to which Remusat was appointed on 29 November 1814. A chair in Sanskrit was endowed at the same time — a coincidence that reflected the broader phenomenon of the Oriental Renaissance, the aggressive European engagement with Asian languages and civilizations that characterized the early nineteenth century.

Herbert Franke has called 1814 “the birth-year of sinology.” Knud Lundbaek has argued more precisely that it was not until Remusat delivered his inaugural lecture on 16 January 1815 that academic sinology was formally established. Either way, the date marks a watershed. For the first time, the study of Chinese language and civilization was recognized as a legitimate academic pursuit, supported by a permanent institutional position. The word sinologie itself first appeared in French in 1814, though it did not enter the standard dictionaries until decades later.

Remusat’s inaugural address captures both the excitement and the isolation of the enterprise he was launching:

We are going to approach a desert land, still uncultivated. The language with which we shall occupy ourselves in this course is known in Europe only by name… We have no model to follow, no advice to hope for; we must, in a word, be self-sufficient, and draw everything from our own resources.

This was somewhat exaggerated — Remusat had access to the Jesuit legacy and to the earlier work of Fourmont and Bayer — but it captured a real sense of intellectual pioneering. The Jesuit infrastructure had been dismantled, and no comparably organized enterprise had replaced it.

Remusat’s course at the College de France already pointed toward the philological methods that would characterize the mature French school of sinology. Three sessions per week were divided between lectures on grammar and the explication of texts, including the Shangshu, the Laozi, the Ganying pian, the life of Confucius in both Chinese and Manchu versions, the Nestorian stele, and novels. This combination of grammatical instruction and close textual reading would remain the pedagogical model for French sinology throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.

Remusat’s lecture notes culminated in his Elements de la grammaire chinoise, ou principes generaux du Kou-wen ou style antique, et du Kouan-hou, c’est-a-dire, de la langue commune generalement usitee dans l’empire chinois (1822). Maspero described its virtues in generous terms:

Marshman and Morrison had each published a new grammar, the first in 1814 and the second in 1815, but this was the first to treat both the written language and the spoken, each occupying one part. Above all, this was the first in which the grammar was isolated to take account of the proper spirit of the Chinese language, and not just as a translation exercise where all the grammatical forms of the European languages with their conjugations, declensions, etc., imposed their individual patterns.

This point deserves emphasis. The grammars produced by the British missionaries Joshua Marshman (1814) and Robert Morrison (1815) in India and China, respectively, were important practical tools, but they analyzed Chinese through the categories of European grammar. Remusat’s grammar was the first to attempt to describe Chinese on its own terms — a methodological innovation that laid the foundation for the discipline of Chinese linguistics.

The Elements inspired Wilhelm von Humboldt to compose his famous philosophical epistle Lettre a M. Abel-Remusat sur la nature des formes grammaticales en general, et sur le genie de la langue chinoise en particulier (1827), and it served as the standard primer for French sinologists throughout the century. Remusat’s earlier Recherches sur les langues tartares (1820), the first systematic attempt to classify the non-Chinese languages of Asia — Mongolian, Manchu, Tibetan, and Eastern Turkic — established another hallmark of the French school: the insistence on placing Chinese studies within the broader framework of Asian studies.

As a translator, Remusat was less reliable. His rendering of the Buddhist travelogue Faxian zhuan (Foguoji) fell prey to what Maspero called “a debilitating habit of eighteenth-century sinologists, that of presenting paraphrase instead of rendering the literal sense.” Nevertheless, Maspero added, this particular translation was “remarquable pour l’epoque,” especially given the paucity of historical and geographical knowledge of Central Asia and India available at the time.

Remusat also conceived the plan of translating the bibliographical sections of Ma Duanlin’s Wenxian tongkao to lay the foundation for Chinese bibliography on a firm footing. Only the first volume, on the “classics,” was completed before Remusat died of cholera in 1832 at the age of forty-four. His premature death was a severe blow to the nascent discipline. Among his students — Julien, Fresnel, and Pauthier — the first was chosen as his successor.

3. Stanislas Julien: The Consolidation of French Sinology

Stanislas Julien (1797–1873) came to scholarship late, owing to the poverty of his family. Once he gained the opportunity, he applied himself with formidable diligence. He became, in the judgement of contemporaries and successors alike, the dominant European sinologist of his age; with the exception of the missionary-sinologist James Legge, no sinologist enjoyed a comparable reputation until Edouard Chavannes a generation later.

Julien’s estate funded a prize in his honor, to be awarded annually for the outstanding contribution to sinology — a prize that remains one of the most prestigious in the field. Unfortunately, according to Paul Demieville, Julien’s character was “execrable”: “He had a character as abominable as his scholarship was irreproachable. Jealous, choleric, cantankerous, he monopolized positions and drove away every competitor.” Victor Pavie coined the epithet “philological animal” (bestia linguax) for Julien and his fellow savant Francisque Michel.

After studies at the college in Orleans, Julien transferred to the College de France and devoted himself to Greek, branching out into Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Sanskrit. In 1824, six months after meeting Remusat, he began his own translation of the Mengzi (Mencius) into Latin, working partly through two Manchu versions — he had recently added Manchu to his linguistic arsenal. The translation took four months and was praised by Remusat for its meticulous methodology. As Remusat noted:

M. Julien applied himself to an assiduous reading of the text of Mencius; he studied the style of this author and absorbed all that his language offers in the way of particularity. A repeated comparison of all passages that contain some difficulty in the same writer would often suffice to provide the key to the greatest number of problems: this is what happens in Chinese as in other languages.

Julien consulted ten different editions of the Chinese text for his Mencius translation — a feat of textual comparison that surpassed even the editorial standards of contemporary classical philology. His later translation of the Dao De Jing (Paris, 1842) displayed the same concern for establishing the textual tradition before hazarding an interpretation, for he consulted all seven available editions. This emphasis on textual criticism — the comparison of variant readings, the identification of interpolations, the reconstruction of the most reliable text — was an essential methodological step that distinguished Julien’s work from that of his Jesuit predecessors and established a standard that later sinologists would strive to emulate.

In his teaching, Julien dispensed with abstract lectures on grammar and devoted himself instead to conducting his pupils through extended readings in the texts: Sanzijing, Qianziwen, Shangshu, Lunyu, Zuozhuan, and Liji. However, he insisted on attention to syntax as the key to reading, and produced his Syntaxe nouvelle de la langue chinoise (Paris, 1869) to codify this approach. The work incorporated the results of Chinese philological research, including substantial portions of Wang Yinzhi’s study of particles, the Jingzhuan shici (1798).

Julien translated most of the Classics and many works of history and literature for his students, though he never published most of these pedagogical translations. What he published in the first decade of his career was more popular in character: Yuan dramas and Ming and Qing novels, rendered in a masterful French style. As Maspero observed (with characteristically elitist condescension), Julien undertook these translations “out of the desire to study the social life of the people, something that could not be done without first-hand observation,” noting that “their banality and mediocre construction scarcely compensated the effort of the translator.” Julien’s skill in both classical and vernacular registers demonstrated a breadth of competence that was rare in his time and anticipated the later insistence that true mastery of Chinese requires command of both literary and colloquial language.

Later in his career, Julien’s interests expanded to include China in an Asian context. His translation of the life of Xuanzang (1851) and the ancillary Memoires sur les contrees occidentales (1856) were groundbreaking. With the Histoire de la vie de Hiouen-Thsang, Julien became the first sinologist to go beyond the native commentators and produce a work of independent critical judgement. Maspero considered this an important milestone in the development of the discipline. Julien’s Methode pour dechiffrer et transcrire les noms sanscrits qui se rencontrent dans les livres chinois (1861) — a systematic method for identifying Sanskrit names in Chinese transcription — served as a model for controlled cross-linguistic comparison and helped eliminate the most fanciful reconstructions of later scholars.

In sum, the modern French school of sinology was indebted to both Julien’s insistence on complete command of Chinese sources and his expanded vision of China within the Asian setting. The ascendancy of the French school that began with Remusat reached its zenith with Julien, not to be regained until the career of Chavannes (as discussed in more detail in Chapter 8).

4. The Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denis: Poetry and Decline

At Julien’s death in 1873, most of his accomplished students had already predeceased him. The one who remained to succeed to his chair was the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denis (1823–1892), who had studied Chinese under Bazin at the Ecole des langues orientales and later with Julien himself. Under Julien’s direction, Saint-Denis completed the translation of the last chapters of the Zhouli left unfinished at the death of Edouard Biot.

Saint-Denis’s principal distinction lay in the field of Chinese poetry. He was the pioneer translator of Chinese verse into French, and his Poesies de l’epoque des T’ang (1862) drew the praise of Edward Schafer, who testified that “these translations of more than a century ago are equal to most and superior to many versions of T’ang poetry made by American literary scholars today.” His translation of the Li Sao (1870) was judged less successful, but it had a notable afterlife in the literary salons of the Second Empire.

Despite these literary accomplishments, Saint-Denis’s tenure in the Paris chair represented a period of decline for French sinology. Maspero delivered a blunt verdict:

The twenty years during which he occupied the chair (1874–1892) added little to the luster of French science, which, little by little, had been eclipsed by the remarkable pleiade of English savants of this period, Wylie, Legge, Watters, Mayers, Edkins, and the American Wells Williams. D’Hervey de St-Denys lacked the surety in translation of Julien, and had little critical sense.

This surprising admission reveals how fragile the French school was in the late nineteenth century, dependent as it was on the quality of the single chair-holder at the College de France. It also highlights the remarkable achievement of Chavannes, who single-handedly restored French sinology to pre-eminence in the next generation (as discussed in Chapter 8).

5. The Pre-Professional Sinologists: Fourmont and Bayer

Before Abel-Remusat, two figures deserve mention as the earliest semi-professional sinologists in Europe: Etienne Fourmont (1683–1745) in Paris and Theophilus Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738) in St. Petersburg. Neither was a sinologist in the modern sense — both were scholars of other fields who turned to Chinese as a secondary interest — but both contributed to the institutional and intellectual preconditions that made Remusat’s work possible.

Fourmont was professor of Arabic at the College de France and a member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. His principal sinological work was the Meditationes sinicae (Paris, 1737), a grammar that drew heavily — and without adequate acknowledgment — on Francisco Varo’s Arte de la Lengua Mandarina and on the assistance of a young Chinese man, Arcadio Huang, who worked at the royal library cataloguing the Chinese collection. Fourmont also left an incomplete Dictionar Historicum Geographicum in three hefty manuscript volumes, which, along with his library catalogue, served as the earliest French exemplar of the spirit of bibliographic classification that would later grip both Cordier and Pelliot. As Cecile Leung has summarized, Fourmont’s dictionary “was to help the reader explore the geography of China and become acquainted with its history, a compelling necessity for any serious scholar of the first half of the eighteenth century, when the gathering and organization of knowledge was foremost in the minds of the intellectual elite.”

Fourmont was also apparently the earliest French sinologue to argue that Chinese was the original universal language, and he attempted to demonstrate correspondences between the Chinese calendrical system and those of other civilizations. Given his plagiarizing habits and lack of genuine philological ability in Chinese, Fourmont cannot be considered the founder of French sinology, but he may be considered its “programmatic precursor.”[^5b]

A true scholar of independent judgment and accomplishment was Theophilus Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738), a Prussian classicist self-taught in Chinese. After working as a librarian in the Royal Library in Berlin, where he copied from missionary vocabularies and old Jesuit manuscripts, he was recruited to the newly established Academy of Sciences of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg. His increasing commitment to Chinese studies led to the creation of a new position: professor of Oriental Antiquities.

Bayer’s most influential work was the Museum Sinicum (1730), a collection of theoretical essays on the Chinese language, literature, grammar, origins of the script, lexicography, and dialects, based largely on earlier Jesuit works and freely acknowledged as such. Knud Lundbaek, Bayer’s modern biographer, has contrasted the two earliest semi-professional sinologists memorably:

The personality of the two men was as different as can be imagined: here was pious and timid Bayer, there was arrogant and virulent Fourmont. Their situations were also very different: Bayer in a newly-founded Academy in the small, new modern-style capital of Peter the Great’s Russia, Fourmont in one of the famous old academies in Paris… As to their facilities for indulging in Chinese studies, as a young man Bayer had sat for less than a year in the Royal Library in Berlin, copying from a missionary vocabulary and from old Jesuit manuscripts and letters. When he came to St Petersburg in 1726 he found no Chinese books there and no works by China missionaries.[^5c]

The contrast between Fourmont’s institutional advantages and Bayer’s scholarly integrity prefigured a tension that would run throughout the history of sinology: between the well-resourced scholar who lacks genuine philological ability and the isolated scholar whose intellectual gifts outstrip his material circumstances.

6. British Developments: The Diplomat-Sinologist Tradition

British sinology developed from roots quite different from the French. Where French sinology grew out of the Enlightenment engagement with Chinese philosophy and the institutional traditions of the College de France, British sinology emerged from the practical needs of Protestant missionary work and colonial administration in East Asia.

Robert Morrison (1782–1834), a Scottish Presbyterian, was the first Protestant missionary to China, arriving in Guangzhou in 1807. His sinological achievement was primarily lexicographic: his Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815–1823), published by the East India Company in Macau in three parts and six volumes, was the first full-scale Chinese-English dictionary. The compilation of this dictionary, under conditions of extreme difficulty — Morrison worked largely alone, in a hostile environment, with few Chinese teachers and inadequate reference materials — was a feat of extraordinary perseverance. The dictionary, though superseded by later works, established the foundation for English-language Chinese studies and remained a standard reference for decades.

Morrison also produced one of the earliest Chinese grammars in English and translated the Bible into Chinese. His work was driven by missionary necessity rather than scholarly curiosity, but the tools he created served sinological as well as evangelical purposes (as discussed in more detail in Chapter 9).

The most consequential British contribution to sinological infrastructure in the nineteenth century was the system of romanization developed by Thomas Francis Wade (1818–1895), a diplomat who served in China for over thirty years before becoming the first Professor of Chinese at Cambridge University in 1888. The Wade system, later modified by Herbert Giles into the “Wade-Giles” system, became the standard method of romanizing Chinese in English-language scholarship for over a century (until its gradual replacement by pinyin in the late twentieth century).

Wade’s romanization system was the product of practical diplomatic need — British officials in China required a consistent method of transcribing Chinese names and terms — but its scholarly implications were profound. By providing a standardized means of representing Chinese sounds in the Latin alphabet, the Wade system made it possible for scholars who could not read Chinese characters to engage with sinological literature, and it established a common notation that facilitated communication among sinologists of different linguistic backgrounds. Wade’s own published works, including the textbook Yii-yen Tzu-erh Chi (1867), were designed primarily for diplomatic use but were widely adopted in academic settings.

Herbert Allen Giles (1845–1935) was one of the last of the consular officials to turn to academic sinology. After a long career in the British diplomatic service in China, he succeeded Wade as Professor of Chinese at Cambridge in 1897. Honey describes him as “a transitional figure in the painful process that transformed British sinology from a part-time endeavor to a full-time occupation.”

Giles was extraordinarily productive. His Chinese-English Dictionary (1892, revised 1912) superseded Morrison’s and became the standard reference for English-speaking sinologists. His Chinese Biographical Dictionary (1898) provided the first broad biographical reference work on China in English. He translated widely from Chinese literature, including the Zhuangzi and the stories of Pu Songling (Liaozhai zhiyi). His Victorian-era verse translations of Chinese poetry, along with the even more impressionistic literary renderings of Ernest Fenollosa, contributed to the stream of chinoiserie that would eventually feed into the Imagist movement of Ezra Pound.

Yet Giles’s work was marked by the limitations of the diplomat-sinologist tradition. His translations, though fluent and readable, often sacrificed accuracy for elegance. His scholarship, though wide-ranging, lacked the philological rigor of the French school. His feuds with other sinologists — particularly his prolonged dispute with Legge and his hostile review of Chavannes’s Shiji translation — revealed a combative temperament and a parochial defensiveness that sometimes obscured genuine scholarly differences. Giles belonged to an era of gifted amateurs who were gradually being displaced by trained professionals.

James Legge (1815–1897) occupies a singular position in the history of sinology. A Scottish Presbyterian missionary who spent thirty years in Hong Kong (1843–1873), Legge produced what remain the most influential English translations of the Chinese Classics: The Chinese Classics (5 volumes, 1861–1872), followed by translations of additional canonical works for Max Muller’s Sacred Books of the East series at Oxford, where Legge held the first chair of Chinese from 1876 until his death.

Legge’s achievement was remarkable not only for its scope but for its method. He engaged deeply with the Chinese commentarial tradition, working through the major Chinese commentaries on each classic text and incorporating their insights into his translations and notes. His grasp of the exegetical tradition rivaled that of native scholars in China, where he was regarded as a specialist on the Shijing (Book of Songs) in the mode of traditional Chinese classical scholarship. As Honey observes, “except for the missionary-sinologue Legge, no sinologist enjoyed a like reputation until Chavannes.”

Yet Legge was also a product of his age and his calling. His translations, though meticulous, were informed by the assumptions of Victorian Christianity. He initially accepted the theories of Joseph Edkins and others who traced connections between Chinese and Western religious traditions, only abandoning this view after reading Julien’s translation of the Dao De Jing. His relationship with Chinese civilization was one of respectful engagement combined with ultimate theological reservation: he admired the moral philosophy of Confucius while insisting on the ultimate superiority of Christian revelation.

Legge’s career exemplifies the “hyphenated” missionary-sinologist that characterized British sinology in the nineteenth century. His translations, whatever their limitations, remain indispensable reference works and demonstrate that the missionary tradition, at its best, was capable of producing scholarship of enduring value (as discussed in more detail in Chapter 9).

7. German Developments: From Klaproth to the Seminar fur Orientalische Sprachen

German sinology in the nineteenth century developed along distinctive lines, shaped by the German university system’s emphasis on classical philology (Altertumswissenschaft) and humanistic education (Bildung). The earliest German sinologists were typically polyglot Orientalists who came to Chinese studies from other Asian languages, particularly Sanskrit and Tibetan.

Julius Heinrich Klaproth (1783–1835), though German-born, spent most of his career in Paris and St. Petersburg. He was a polyglot of extraordinary range — he claimed knowledge of dozens of Asian languages — and his contributions to sinology were primarily in the fields of historical geography and comparative linguistics. His Asia Polyglotta (1823) was a pioneering attempt at a comparative classification of Asian languages. He was one of the first European scholars to use Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan sources in combination for historical research, anticipating the “Inner Asian” orientation that would become a distinctive feature of European sinology.

Klaproth was, however, more a compiler and controversialist than a philologist. His relationship with the Chinese language was less intimate than that of Remusat or Julien, and his scholarly reputation has been clouded by accusations of plagiarism and fabrication. Nevertheless, his work helped establish the principle that Chinese studies could not be pursued in isolation from the study of the broader Asian world.

The institutional history of German sinology begins with Wilhelm Schott (1802–1889), who was appointed to a chair at the University of Berlin in 1838 — the first such appointment in the German-speaking world. Schott’s primary field was Altaic linguistics, and his contributions to Chinese studies were modest: he is perhaps best known for his work on the Yijing and for a study of the Shuihu zhuan. But his appointment established the principle that Chinese studies deserved a place in the German university curriculum, and his position at Berlin gave the discipline an institutional foothold in what was then the most prestigious university in the German-speaking world.

Johann Heinrich Plath (1802–1874), a Bavarian scholar, pursued Chinese studies at the University of Munich without holding a formal sinological chair. His work on Chinese religion and history, though now largely forgotten, contributed to the growing European literature on China. Both Schott and Plath represented a type common in the early German academy: the scholar whose interest in China was one aspect of a broader engagement with Asian civilizations, and whose Chinese competence, though genuine, was less deep than that of the French professionals.

The first truly distinguished German sinologist was Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz (1840–1893), who held a chair at the University of Leipzig and later at the University of Berlin. Gabelentz was primarily a linguist, and his Chinesische Grammatik (1881) was a landmark in the study of Chinese syntax. Unlike earlier European grammars that imposed the categories of Latin or French grammar on Chinese, Gabelentz attempted to describe the structure of Chinese from within, developing a typological framework that placed Chinese among the world’s languages on its own terms.

Gabelentz’s linguistic approach was shaped by the German tradition of comparative and general linguistics, which had developed out of the study of Sanskrit and the Indo-European languages. His application of these methods to Chinese was original and productive, though it also carried the risk of treating Chinese as merely one more data point in a universalizing linguistic theory rather than as a language deserving study in its own right. His broader theoretical work, Die Sprachwissenschaft (1891), situated Chinese linguistics within the framework of general linguistics and argued for the equal dignity of all human languages — a position that challenged the prevailing European assumption that inflected languages were inherently superior to isolating ones like Chinese.

The founding of the Seminar fur Orientalische Sprachen (SOS) at the University of Berlin in 1887 was a decisive institutional development for German sinology. As Kubin discusses in his lectures, the SOS was established partly in response to Germany’s colonial ambitions in Africa and Asia, and partly in response to a political crisis: the suppression of a revolt in German East Africa in 1906, in which 75,000 people were killed, had provoked a domestic political backlash and a call for “scientific” rather than military approaches to colonial administration.

The SOS provided systematic instruction in Chinese and other Asian languages for diplomats, merchants, and colonial officials. Its academic standards were high — it attracted some of the best Orientalists in Germany — and it produced a generation of scholars who combined practical language skills with scholarly ambition. The SOS was, in effect, the predecessor of the modern German sinological departments, and its history illustrates the complex relationship between sinological scholarship and the political interests of the imperial state.

The first full professor of Chinese at a German university was Otto Franke (1863–1946), who received his appointment at the newly established Colonial Institute in Hamburg in 1909 (the Colonial Institute was itself a predecessor of the University of Hamburg, founded in 1919). Franke had originally trained as an Indologist and Sanskrit scholar before turning to Chinese under the tutelage of the SOS. His monumental Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches (History of the Chinese Empire, 5 volumes, 1930–1952), though it extended only to the Ming dynasty, remains the longest history of China written by a European. As Kubin observes, “Franke is a very important sinologist and historian. His Chinese history written by a German or European is the longest ever. He only wrote up to the Ming dynasty, then asked his son to continue” (as discussed in more detail in Chapter 7).

8. Russian Sinology: Bichurin and the Ecclesiastical Mission

Russian sinology had unique origins. While French sinology grew out of the Enlightenment and British sinology out of the Protestant mission and colonial administration, Russian sinology emerged from the Russian Orthodox Ecclesiastical Mission to Beijing, which was established by the Treaty of Kiakhta (1727) and maintained a continuous presence in the Chinese capital for nearly two centuries.

The Ecclesiastical Mission served a dual function: it maintained a Russian Orthodox chapel for the small community of Russian descendants in Beijing (remnants of a Cossack garrison captured by the Qing in 1685), and it provided a cover for Russian diplomatic observation of the Qing court. It also became, almost inadvertently, the principal training ground for Russian sinologists. Members of the mission were expected to learn Chinese and Manchu during their ten-year postings, and several of them developed genuine scholarly expertise.

The most distinguished product of the Ecclesiastical Mission was Nikita Yakovlevich Bichurin (1777–1853), who served as head of the mission in Beijing from 1808 to 1821 under his monastic name Iakinf (Hyacinth). Bichurin spent thirteen years in Beijing, during which he acquired an extraordinary command of Chinese and Manchu and translated a vast body of Chinese historical and geographical literature into Russian.

His published works include Zapiski o Mongolii (Notes on Mongolia, 1828), a description of Tibet and the Tangut, and several volumes of translations from Chinese historical sources. His magnum opus, Sobranie svedenii o narodakh, obitavshikh v Srednei Azii v drevnie vremena (Collection of Information about the Peoples of Central Asia in Ancient Times, 1851), was a pioneering work of Inner Asian historical geography based on Chinese sources.

Bichurin was elected an honorary member of the Asiatic Society of Paris and maintained correspondence with Abel-Remusat and Klaproth. His work established Russian sinology as a distinctive tradition with particular strengths in Inner Asian studies, Mongolian history, and the historical geography of the peoples on China’s northern and western frontiers — strengths that reflected Russia’s own geopolitical interests and geographic position (as discussed in more detail in Chapter 16).

Vasilev (1818–1900), who served in the Ecclesiastical Mission from 1840 to 1850, became the first professor of Chinese at St. Petersburg University and trained a generation of Russian sinologists. His most important pupil was Vasily Mikhailovich Alekseev (1881–1951), who studied under Chavannes in Paris and became the founder of the modern Russian school of sinology. Alekseev’s classmates in Paris included Maspero, Granet, and Pelliot; he considered Pelliot his closest friend throughout the rest of his life. The Paris connection thus established a direct link between French and Russian sinological traditions that would prove enormously productive.

9. The Professionalization of the Discipline

The transformation of sinology from a pursuit of gifted amateurs into a professional academic discipline was a gradual process that unfolded differently in different national contexts. In France, the process was relatively straightforward: the chair at the College de France, established in 1814, provided a continuous institutional base, and a second chair in modern Chinese was established at the Ecole des langues orientales in 1841. In Germany, the process was slower and more complex, complicated by the decentralized structure of the German university system and by the competition between classical Orientalism and the newer practical language training. In Britain, it was slowest of all: the Wade chair at Cambridge (1888) and the chairs at Oxford and London came late, and British sinology remained heavily dependent on the diplomat-sinologist tradition well into the twentieth century.

Several common features characterized this professionalization across national boundaries. First, an institutional base: the creation of permanent university positions in Chinese studies — chairs, lectureships, seminars — provided the essential infrastructure for sustained scholarly work, without which sinology could not attract talented young scholars, train the next generation, or accumulate the expertise needed for the discipline to advance. Second, pedagogical standards: the development of systematic methods for teaching Chinese — grammars, textbooks, reading courses — gradually replaced the ad hoc self-instruction that had characterized earlier generations, with Remusat’s grammar, Julien’s syntax, Wade’s textbook, and Gabelentz’s Chinesische Grammatik all contributing to this process. Third, reference tools: the compilation of dictionaries, bibliographies, and other reference works provided the essential scholarly infrastructure, from Morrison’s and Giles’s dictionaries to Julien’s Syntaxe and Henri Cordier’s monumental Bibliotheca Sinica (5 volumes, 1904–1924) — the last a bibliography of Western-language publications on China from the fifteenth century to 1908.

4. Critical methodology. The development of methods for critically evaluating Chinese sources — textual criticism, historical phonology, epigraphy — gradually replaced the uncritical acceptance or tendentious manipulation of sources that had characterized earlier work. This methodological refinement was the single most important intellectual achievement of nineteenth-century sinology.

The professionalization of sinology took place within the broader institutional framework of Orientalism — the academic study of Asian and Middle Eastern languages and civilizations that developed in European universities during the nineteenth century. Sinology was, in institutional terms, a sub-field of Orientalism, and sinologists were typically housed in departments or institutes of Oriental studies alongside Arabicists, Indianists, and Turkologists.

This institutional context had both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, it connected sinologists with scholars working on related civilizations and encouraged comparative perspectives. The French school’s characteristic emphasis on placing Chinese studies within the broader framework of Asian studies — exemplified by Remusat’s work on “Tartar” languages and Julien’s work on Central Asian geography — was partly a product of this institutional setting. On the negative side, the Orientalist framework tended to subordinate Chinese studies to the concerns of Indianists and Arabicists, who occupied more senior positions and commanded larger resources. The linguistic categories and scholarly methods developed for the study of Sanskrit and Arabic were not always appropriate for Chinese, and the application of Indo-European models to the analysis of Chinese language and culture sometimes produced distorted results.

Norman Girardot and Lauren Pfister have coined the term “sinological Orientalism” to describe the complex of assumptions that shaped nineteenth-century scholarship on China. As they argue, sinologists of this period, however sympathetic to China they may have been, inevitably subscribed to the same subconscious assumptions that animated the broader Orientalist discourse: the belief in European cultural superiority, the search for universal developmental schemas, and the tendency to define non-European civilizations in terms of their similarity to or difference from a European norm.

The most egregious manifestation of this tendency was what Girardot calls “cultural parallelomania” — the effort to trace Chinese civilization back to Aryan, Babylonian, or Egyptian origins. Works such as Joseph Edkins’s China’s Place in Philology: An Attempt to Show that the Languages of Europe and Asia have a Common Origin (1871) and Gustav Schlegel’s Sino-Aryaca (1872) sought to demonstrate linguistic connections between Chinese and the Indo-European languages. Edkins even identified the three Chinese words yi, xi, and wei in the Dao De Jing as the names of the Trinity. These efforts, though now recognized as pseudo-scholarly, reveal the depth of the assumption that all civilizations must ultimately be traceable to a common (and preferably Western) origin.

10. Key Journals and Institutions Founded in the Founding Century

The institutionalization of sinology during the nineteenth century was marked by the founding of a series of journals and learned societies that provided forums for scholarly publication and exchange. Among the most important were:

• Journal Asiatique (Paris, 1822), the organ of the Societe Asiatique, founded with the active participation of Abel-Remusat. It became and remained the leading French-language journal for Oriental studies, including sinology.
• T’oung Pao (Leiden, 1890), founded by Gustave Schlegel and Henri Cordier, which became the premier international journal of sinology. Its founding reflected the growing internationalization of the discipline and the emergence of the Netherlands as an important center of Chinese studies.
• Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenlandischen Gesellschaft (ZDMG, 1847), the journal of the German Oriental Society, which published sinological articles alongside work on other Asian civilizations.
• China Review (Hong Kong, 1872–1901), which served as a forum for the British China Coast sinologists and published a mix of scholarly articles and practical information.
• Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (London, 1834), with its various branch journals in China and Southeast Asia, which published sinological work alongside studies of other Asian civilizations.

These journals performed several essential functions. They provided a venue for the publication of scholarly articles, translations, and book reviews. They established standards of scholarly quality through peer evaluation. They facilitated communication among sinologists working in different countries and different institutional settings. And they created a permanent record of scholarly achievement that could be consulted and built upon by later generations.

The founding of these journals also reflected the emergence of sinology as a genuinely international discipline. By the end of the nineteenth century, the major contributions to the field were being made in France, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States, and scholars in each country were aware of and responsive to work being done elsewhere. The T’oung Pao, published in Leiden by a Franco-Dutch editorial team, embodied this internationalism and became the journal of record for the discipline as a whole.

11. The State of the Field by 1900

By the turn of the twentieth century, sinology had been transformed from a pursuit of isolated amateurs into a recognized academic discipline with professional practitioners in at least half a dozen countries. The field had its own institutional infrastructure (university chairs, learned societies, journals), its own reference tools (dictionaries, bibliographies, grammars), and its own intellectual traditions (the French philological school, the German historical-philological school, the British diplomat-sinologist tradition).

The most important intellectual achievement of the founding century was the development of methods for reading, analyzing, and translating Chinese texts with a degree of accuracy and critical awareness that far surpassed anything the Jesuit missionaries or the proto-sinologists had achieved. The cumulative work of Remusat, Julien, Legge, Gabelentz, and their contemporaries had established that Chinese texts could be studied with the same philological rigor that classical scholars brought to Greek and Latin literature. This was no small achievement, given the radical differences between Chinese and the Indo-European languages in script, grammar, and literary convention.

Yet the field also had significant limitations as it entered the twentieth century. Honey’s assessment of the state of sinology before Chavannes is worth quoting at length:

Previous to him, the field had been dominated by part-time practitioners; in the terminology of Andrew Walls, they were hyphenated missionary-sinologists, official-sinologists, or businessmen-sinologists — who stole time from their regular duties to introduce the China they knew to the West. The few professional sinologists, such as Hirth, Schlegel, De Groot, produced works admirable for the results obtained under the research conditions of the times; yet much of what they produced is today flawed in many instances, based as it was upon an erroneous assumption about the nature of the Chinese language, an insufficient base in traditional bibliography, and the handicap of lacking the tool of historical phonology — something not yet developed at the time they labored.

Historical phonology — the reconstruction of the sound system of earlier stages of the Chinese language — would become one of the most important tools of twentieth-century sinology, fundamentally transforming the interpretation of Chinese literary texts and historical documents. Its development, principally by the Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren in the early twentieth century, opened entirely new possibilities for philological analysis. But this tool was not available to the sinologists of the founding century, and its absence set real limits on what they could achieve.

The transition from founding-era sinology to the modern discipline was not a single event but a process that unfolded over the first decades of the twentieth century. Three developments marked this transition. The first was the emergence of Edouard Chavannes (1865–1918), appointed to the Paris chair in 1893 and widely regarded as the founder of modern professional sinology. Nothing he wrote is outdated today in terms of intellectual assumption, conceptual clarity, or methodological approach — a claim that cannot be made for any of his predecessors. His painstaking translation of Sima Qian’s Shiji, his pioneering work in epigraphy, and his integration of fieldwork with library-based philological research set new standards for the discipline (as discussed in Chapter 8). The second was the development of historical phonology: Karlgren’s reconstruction of Ancient and Middle Chinese pronunciation, based on a systematic comparison of Chinese dialects, the Qieyun rhyme dictionary, and Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean readings, gave sinologists a powerful new tool for analyzing Chinese texts (as discussed in Chapter 14). The third was a broadening of the field itself. The work of the China Coast sociologists, beginning in the 1870s, had begun to extend sinology beyond canonical texts and elite culture to include popular religion, social customs, and material culture. This broadening would accelerate in the twentieth century with the influence of the social sciences, culminating in the American “area studies” model pioneered by John King Fairbank (as discussed in Chapter 17).

As Perry Johansson has argued, European sinology in this period functioned as “the cross-cultural space where an indigenous Asian cultural tradition could fuse with Western scientific standards, then be safely repatriated and put to service in the project of providing cultural legitimacy to a rejuvenated Chinese state.” The founding of national studies (guoxue) institutes in China in the 1920s — at Beijing University, Qinghua, and elsewhere — was directly influenced by European sinological models, and many of the most important Chinese scholars of the twentieth century (Chen Yinke, Fu Sinian, Yao Congwu) had studied with European sinologists in Paris, Berlin, and London. The discipline that the Europeans had created as a way of understanding China was thus taken up by Chinese scholars as a way of understanding themselves — a remarkable instance of cross-cultural intellectual transmission whose consequences are still being felt today.

Bibliography

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• —. “Les Etudes chinoises sous la revolution et l’empire.” T’oung Pao 19 (1920): 59–103.
• Demieville, Paul. “Apercu historique des etudes sinologiques en France.” In Choix d’etudes sinologiques (1921–1970), 443–87. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973.
• Franke, Herbert. “In Search of China: Some General Remarks on the History of European Sinology.” In Europe Studies China: Papers from an International Conference on the History of European Sinology, 11–25. London: Han-Shan Tang Books, 1995.
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• Johansson, Perry. “Cross-Cultural Epistemology: How European Sinology Became the Bridge to China’s Modern Humanities.” In The Making of the Humanities, vol. III: The Modern Humanities, edited by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, 449–67. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014.
• Kubin, Wolfgang. Lectures on German sinology and Chinese literature. Chinese edition.
• Lundbaek, Knud. T.S. Bayer (1694–1738): Pioneer Sinologist. London: Curzon Press, 1986.
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• Maspero, Henri. “La Sinologie.” Societe asiatique, Le Livre de Centenaire, 1822–1922. Paris, 1922. 261–70.
• —. “La Chaire de Langues et Litteratures chinoises et tartares-mandchoues.” In Le College de France, Livre jubilaire compose a l’occasion de son quatrieme centenaire, 355–66. Paris, 1932.
• Remusat, Jean-Pierre Abel. Elements de la grammaire chinoise. Paris, 1822.
• —. Melanges asiatiques. 2 vols. Paris, 1829.
• Schafer, Edward H. What and How is Sinology? Inaugural Lecture, University of Colorado, Boulder, 14 October 1982. University of Colorado, 1982.
• Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
• Widmer, Eric. The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking During the 18th Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976.
• Zhang Xiping. Ouzhou zaoqi Hanxue shi [History of Early European Sinology]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007.

References

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