Page:Eminent Chinese Of The Ch’ing Period - Hummel - 1943 - Vol. 1.pdf/5

 the son of his Korean slave who made money for him by manipulating a monopoly on the sale of salt.

There are numerous other features of merit which greatly enhance the usefulness of this series as a work of reference for both Western and Chinese readers. Chief among these may be mentioned the more exact transliteration and transcription of Manchu, Mongol and Tibetan names than has been made before by Chinese historians; the translation of all Chinese dates into the Gregorian calendar; and the appending of a good bibliography under each entry, including Chinese and non-Chinese works. All these will be found exceedingly helpful to students of history.

So much for this work as a great biographical dictionary.

But Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period is more than a biographical dictionary. It is the most detailed and the best history of China of the last three hundred years that one can find anywhere today. It is written in form of Biographies of eight hundred men and women who made that history: This form, by the way, is in line with the Chinese tradition of historiography.

A methodical student can reconstruct in great detail a political history of modern China by culling materials from the lives of the empire-builders, statesmen, and generals who conducted the great military campaigns for territorial conquest and for suppression of anti-Manchu uprisings; the rebels who several times came near wrecking the empire; the officials who had to deal with the foreigner, about whom they knew nothing; the Chinese loyalists who kept the flame of anti-Manchu sentiment burning throughout the alien rule and who paid for their loyalty with their lives; and the many scholars, writers and artists who made these three centuries an age of great revival in learning and art. Such a history would be fuller and more interesting than any that has been written about this period in any European language.

Or, if a student is interested in the cultural and intellectual history of the period, he can find enough material in this work to write a detailed account of the intellectual and philosophical renaissance of these exciting centuries. In the lives of Hsü Kuang-ch'i and his fellow Christians, of Ku Yen-wu, Ch'ien Ch'ien-I, Yen Jo-chü, Yen Yüan, Li Kung and others, he can perceive the rise in the 17th century of a great revival of learning, even in the midst of internal disintegration and foreign conquest. In the lives of Hui Tung, Ch'ien Ta-hsin, Chi Yün, Chu Yün, Tai Chen, Shao Chin-han, Chang Hsüeh-ch'êng, Wang Nien-sun, Ts'ui Shu and their contemporaries, he can see a new intellectual movement, generally but not quite accurately known as the Movement of Han Learning. It was an age of unprecedented revival of learning and of philological and historical research, based upon a newly-perfected critical methodology which goes back to the time of Ku Yen-wu and Yen Jo-chü. And finally, in the lives of Juan Yüan, Hsü Sung, Chang Mu, Wei Yüan, Ch'ên Li, Tsêng Kuo-fan, Kuo Sung-tao, Wang T'ao, T'an Ssŭ-t'ung and K'ang Yu-wei (see under ) and their 19th century contemporaries-—in these biographies is revealed the story of the third and last period of the intellectual renaissance, a period of history coinciding with China's first defeats and humiliations in her encounters with the colonial empires of the West and with a militarized Japan. It was an age of transition, in which, while the intellectual