Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 1.pdf/3



HIS work, Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, is primarily planned as a biographical dictionary of the last three centuries. As such, there is at present no other work of the kind in any language, including Chinese, which can compare with it in comprehensiveness of conception, in objectivity of treatment, and in general usefulness.

In order fully to appreciate the excellence of this work, it seems necessary to give a general estimate of the Chinese biographical literature which forms the chief source of material for this series of eight hundred biographies. In quantity, this literature is enormous: Of the "Thirty-three Collections of Ching Dynasty Biographies" (see Editor's Note) which constitute the backbone of this source material, the four major collections alone, namely, the Ch'i-hsien lei-chêng and the three series of Pei-chuan chi, total over 1,110 chüan. In addition to these vast collections, there are hundreds of nien-p'u or chronologically arranged biographies and autobiographies. The immensity of the task of selection, translation and editing is truly appalling.

Much of this source material suffers from a number of serious defects. The Manchu conquest of China and the racial struggles and prejudices resulting from it greatly restricted the freedom of all historical and biographical writing that had anything to do with persons and events connected with the long conflicts between the two peoples. Court intrigue and political and partisan strife throughout the dynasty also were responsible for much of the suppression and distortion of biographical truth. The tyranny of the intellectual fashion of the age, the traditional prejudices against unorthodox thinkers, writers or artists, and dynastic or political support of schools of thought supposedly advantageous to the reigning house, led to distorted judgments in biographical literature. Numerous works were irretrievably lost through official prohibition and long neglect. Official "veritable" records were doctored and sometimes, re-doctored. Private works were altered and deleted in order to make publication or re-publication possible.

In recent decades, modern scholarship done much to unearth hidden documents, establish new evidence, and rectify some of the distorted versions of earlier biographers. Unexpurgated editions of suppressed works have appeared. New biographies of once defamed personages have been produced. But the process of suppression and distortion has been going on too long, and on far too extensive a scale, to make it possible for modern research fully to remedy and rectify. In many cases the truth will probably never be known.

Chinese biographical literature is, moreover, most defective in dealing with those men whose life and work brought them into direct contact with foreign countries and peoples—men like the early Chinese Christians of the 17th century, or those persons who took part in the Anglo-Chinese wars and negotiations of 1839–42, in the Taiping rebellion and its suppression, or in diplomatic relations with foreign powers from the days of the Taiping rebellion to the end of the dynasty. In writing about these men, Chinese biographers of the old school invariably failed to make use of non-Chinese sources, which in many cases are absolutely necessary to supplement the inadequate records written by native scholars ignorant of condi-