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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2022
Soon to celebrate his centennial year, Michael Loewe is certainly the most eminent Han historian today. Without his numerous publications—including not only such foundational reference works as The Biographical Dictionary of Qin and Western Han and Early Chinese Texts but also a wide range of more specialized studies—it is hard to imagine how the once-neglected field of Han history could have garnered such respect among scholars in allied fields in Euro-America and abroad. In these introductory remarks, we reflect on Michael Loewe's distinguished contributions to the field of early Chinese history over several decades and his extraordinary record as teacher. We draw special attention to several ways in which Professor Loewe's work continues to challenge such outdated and anachronistic paradigms as “Confucianism,” and we note the careful ways he correlates received, “found,” and excavated sources. We conclude the introduction with a set of reflections situating Professor Loewe as teacher within a distinguished Sinological lineage.
於其百歲誕辰之年，魯惟一先生無疑是聲名最為顯赫的漢代史學者。如果沒有他的著作，包括《秦、西漢歷代人物傳記辭典》、《中國古代典籍導讀》等工具書以及涉及面極廣的專門研究，漢代研究這一被忽視的研究領域難以贏得歐美乃至海外學者的重視。在此前言中，筆者對魯惟一先生數十年傑出的學術貢獻進行回顧，同時也向這位卓越的老師致敬。文中特別措意魯惟一先生如何持續地挑戰過時的範式，比如「Confucianism」。文中也強調他對傳世、「發現」與出土材料的謹慎梳理。最後，前言將作為老師的魯先生放在著名的漢學家譜系之中，並提供一些個人的回憶。
1. See the Journal of Asian History, vols. 53.1 (2019), 21–54, for Loewe’s “Consultants and Advisors, and the Tests of Talent in Western and Eastern Han” essay; 55.1 (2021), 1–30, for his “Attitudes to Kongzi in Han Times”; and also his essay “Land Tenure and the Decline of Imperial Government in Eastern Han,” in The Technical Arts in the Han Histories, ed. Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Michael Nylan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), 49–100. A fourth essay will also appear in 2022, on Cai Yong 蔡邕, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 142.3 (2022), 503–22.
2. This generosity was fully on view on April 13, 2022, when Michael Loewe, in a Zoom conversation organized by the Center for Chinese Studies at UC-Berkeley and facilitated by John Moffitt (Needham Research Institute) and Jeremy Tanner (University College London), was asked to assess the scholars with whom he worked; see www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCv9b2y5M6o&ab_channel=CenterforChineseStudies%2CUCBerkeley.
3. Michael Loewe was trained as a classicist, before he entered Bletchley Park during wartime, and such questions have never been far from his mind. He is currently at work on a comparative study of Han and Rome.
4. “The Heritage Left to the Empires,” in The Cambridge History of Ancient China, eds. Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 967.
5. See Loewe, “Dated Inscriptions on Certain Mirrors (A.D. 6–105): Genuine or Fabricated?” Early China 26–27 (2001–2): 233–56. Far from being part of some “new consensus,” as Gideon Shelach-Lavi asserts in “Memory, Amnesia and the Formation of Identity Symbols in China,” in Memory and Agency in Ancient China: Shaping the Life of Objects, ed. Kathryn Linduff, Yan Sun, and Francis Allard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 30, Loewe’s work provides a helpful set of references for the complicated processes of adaptation and amnesia in early China, even if he does not bullet-point them.
6. Comparable insights appear, for example, in Li Zehou’s 李澤厚 Lunyu jindu 論語今讀 (reprinted repeatedly, with standard editions issued by Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 1988, in complex characters, and Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2015, in simplified), as well as in his multiple works on meixue 美學 (aesthetics). Also making commendable contributions to reception history are such works as Matsukawa Kenji’s 松川健二, Rongo no shisōshi 論語の思想史 (first published in Japanese in 1994, but then, in 2006, painstakingly rendered into Chinese by Liu Qingzhang 林慶彰, the distinguished historian of classical learning in Taipei).
7. For houdai, see, e.g., Shi ji, 47.1945, 61.2127, and the early literary impersonation we know as the “Letter to Ren An.” For the letter, see The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy, compiled by Stephen Durrant, Li Wai-yee, Michael Nylan, and Hans van Ess (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016).
8. Michael Loewe has worked on the zhaomu problem in connection with shrines, in his Problems of Han Administration: Ancestral Rites, Weights and Measures, and the Means of Protest (Leiden: Brill, 2016), Part I, 1–107.
9. For example, see Han shu, 62.2725.
10. That the scare quotes have been ignored by many readers is equally true of Michael Nylan’s Five “Confucian” Classics book of 2010.
11. Michael Nylan, “Introduction,” in China’s Early Empires: A Re-Appraisal, ed. Michael Nylan and Michael Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3. The excavated manuscripts make it ever harder to delineate ritual from law, and impose the term “religion” on policymaking. See, e.g., Fan Yunfei 范雲飛, “Qin Han siji lüling yanjiu” 秦漢祠祀律令研究. M.A. thesis (Wuhan daxue, 2017), esp. chap. 3.
12. Boyarin, Daniel, “Epilogue: Theory as Askesis,” in Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (Rutgers University Press, 2019), 154CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Barton, Carlin A. and Boyarin, Daniel, Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.
13. For the classical turn, far more credit should go to Liu Xin, Yang Xiong, and Wang Mang as chief proponents of the “classical turn” utilizing new “text critical” methods. As Michael Nylan argues in a paper prepared for a colloquium on the Shi ji at the Collège de France (May 18–20, 2022), Ban Gu had a difficult time explaining the decision made by the Eastern Han courts he served to confer extraordinary honors upon Han Wudi, and Ban hit upon the ingenious solution to praise Han Wudi for his patronage of classical scholars, who were initially hired for their talent in embellishing edicts and pronouncements with archaic flourishes. There is no sign whatsoever that Han Wudi embraced any policies associated with benevolent government.
14. Loewe (personal communication). By contrast, see the Xin Sanzi jing 新三字經 (New Three Character Classic), chief editor Li Hanqiu 李漢秋 produced in Shanghai by Guangming ribao in 1994.
15. Hou’s work is an especially important attempt to try to set Chinese historical research on a new trajectory by abandoning the teleologies of “Marxist” historical studies. Hou Xudong, Chong: Xin-renxing jun chen guanxi yu Xi Han lishi de zhankai 寵：信-任型君臣關系與西漢歷史的展開 (Beijing: Beijing shifan daxue chubanshe, 2018), 167. We write in the spirit of Historians’ Fallacies (see below), which says of the examples (p. 306) it takes to task: “All examples of fallacies are drawn from the work of competent historians. Some are from the work of great historians.”
16. Loewe, “Protest and Criticism in the Han Empire,” Problems of Han Administration, 275.
17. On the question of the “Confucian” relationship to imperial power, Michael Loewe writes with his characteristic coupling of modesty and inquisitiveness: “We may nonetheless ponder whether the greater and deeper exposure to traditional learning and texts known as ru 儒 affected the frequency or style of the arguments that were being put forward in Eastern Han.” See Loewe, “Protest and Criticism,” Problems of Han Administration, 315.
18. Loewe, “Protest and Criticism,” Problems of Han Administration, 315.
19. Perhaps because so few historians know their archaeology (and vice versa), far too much deference is paid to archaeological “findings” that do not tally with the evidence from the histories, but reflect the current “common wisdom” in the Sinosphere. For one instance of faulty reasoning that nonetheless has received the imprimaturs of prestigious presses, see Li Xinwei 李新偉, “‘Zuichu de Zhongguo’ zhi kaoguxue rending” “最初的中國” 之考古學認定, Kaogu 考古 (March 2016), 86–92.
20. A Critique of Archaeological Reason: Structural, Digital, and Philosophical Aspects of the Excavated Record (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute, UCLA, 2017).
21. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
22. Histories often encourage us to find lines of development with a trend towards ever-increasing efficiency of exploitation. The important new work by Brian Lander, The King’s Harvest traces, for instance, “how states formed in East Asia and how they gradually improved their capacity to extract surplus resources from larger territories and populations” (7). Nevertheless, we must remain alive to alternative narratives depicting how humans have experimented with a range of options for organizing societies, and in some cases made the conscious decision not to opt for greater efficiency, urbanization, or unification. On this point, see David Graeber and David Wengrow’s cross-reading of the Taosi site in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux),325.
23. See Dylan Sailor, Writing and Empire in Tacitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
24. Loewe’s translation of Han shu, 21A.967 in Problems of Han Administration, 234.
25. In 2008, a monograph devoted to this forerunner of today’s EACS, European Association for Chinese Studies, was published in German, by Thomas Kampen; the monograph is open-access from de Gruyter: www.degruyter.com/database/hbol/html.
26. See n. 2 above.