When I began graduate school, a friend sent me a list of books I ought to read if I wanted to make informed choices about my graduate work. I tried to work my way through the list, but soon the demands of graduate course work took over, and the items from my friend's list remained on the shelf. If I had to write such a list today, the first item on it would be the two-volume collection Chinese History and Culture, a collection of the English-language writings of Yü Yingshi 余英時 (b. 1930). There would be a certain ironic justice in this. Many of the items on my friend's list were works by Qian Mu 錢穆 (1895–1990), a very broad-ranging historian who founded New Asia College in Hong Kong. Yü Yingshi was a graduate of New Asia College and student of Qian Mu, who returned to the college as its president in the 1970s.
Chronologically organized but not a narrative, the work explores central issues of several thousand years of Chinese history with sparkling creativity and force. Although the essays are complete in themselves, they provide an entree into the much wider world of Professor Yü’s Chinese scholarship, where details and the Chinese language texts of citations not printed in Chinese History and Culture, can often be found.Footnote 1 Yü is a historian particularly comfortable with the essay form; his articles bite off questions of appropriate size, muster convincing amounts of evidence, and avoid unnecessary excursions; each can be fairly comfortably read in one sitting. Modest, meticulous and methodical, and as comfortable with western languages as with Chinese language sources, Yü Yingshi's work constitutes a model that all should know, but few indeed may be able to follow.
The articles in the volume cluster around six or seven central questions. Identifying these themes provides the most useful introduction to the volume. The first of these to be dealt with in the volume is the nature of Chinese visions of the afterlife, a topic with which four of the articles in this volume are concerned. In the first of these, “Life and Immortality in the Mind of Han China,” published in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies in 1965, Professor Yü argued, based on literary sources, that the ancient Chinese had a concept of the afterlife, a vision of what form immortality would take. It was, to be sure, a “worldly” conception of life after death, “entrenched in the general humanistic emphasis on life characteristic of Chinese thought” (I, 42). Cautiously expressed and plausible as this idea was, some, like Joseph Needham, who emphasized above all the pragmatic quality of Chinese thought, doubted that the notion of a Chinese vision of the afterlife could be seriously sustained. In this instance, new evidence spectacularly proved the original hypothesis: the discovery, excavation, and publication of Han dynasty tombs on the 1980s. The paintings within these tombs not only demonstrated the validity of Professor Yü’s point, but provided an colorful elaboration of the vision of life after death.
A second, innovative theme here is the treatment of Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), probably the most influential Confucian thinker during the Song era. Professor Yü’s take on the Song philosopher is quite unusual, in two respects. In the first place, he supports and articulates the thesis of the scholar Chen Yinke 陳寅恪 (1890–1969)Footnote 2 that Han Yü and the Neo-Confucian movement in general were significantly influenced by contact with the Chan school and its sixth patriarch, Huineng, A second article, entitled “Zhu Xi's Philosophical System,” also points in relatively new directions. Whereas much of the work on Zhu Xi is concerned with his ontology, Yü stresses his hermeneutics, how he read texts. Given that more people likely read Zhu Xi's commentaries over the years than any other classical commentaries (because they were required for the examinations), the question of how Zhu Xi read, what weight he provided to “book learning,” and what he sought to find in classical texts is extremely pertinent.Footnote 3
Among the most exciting articles in Chinese History and Culture are those dealing with Ming history. For at least a generation, the growing commercialism of later Ming society has been an established fact of Ming history. The economic history of this commercialism has been explored, as has its impact on social and material life, in a number of creative and vivid studies. But what effect did commercialism have on the intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Here the only solution has been to look at late Ming fiction, which is full of stories of merchants, their lifestyles and dilemmas. Although useful in the classroom, fictional sources leave a deep lacuna: what did historical actors, as opposed to fictional creations, actually think about the new world they found themselves in? Yü Yingshi proposes to fill this gap by reading biographies and epitaphs of merchants, written by scholars,Footnote 4 which prove to be both numerous and revealing. In many of the accounts, the way of the merchant and the way of the scholar were regarded as equal, with both contributing to the fulfillment of the Dao in society. As Yü notes, this often represented the actual fact, with merchants intermarrying with scholars, and many who began their careers as scholars and ended up as merchants, because of the intensely competitive examination system and the limited number of government positions. To be sure, some of the epitaphs were what today we might call “sponsored” documents, cases where scholars were engaged by merchants and their descendants to write epitaphs in which merchants were accorded their own piece of the Dao. But the number of such accounts and the seriousness with which they were undertaken makes them credible sources. Moreover, as Yü argues about Wang Yangming 王陽明, Ming scholars’ loss of confidence in the prospect of ordering the world through the agency of the monarch (because of the weakness and cruelty of Ming rulers) led them to place new confidence in the capacity of ordinary men, including merchants, to bring about a moral reordering of the world. This meant that all, including merchants, could achieve sageliness. In response to a scholar who asked whether it was acceptable to engage in commercial activity, Wang Yangming wrote: “If you can manage to keep the equilibrium of your mind undisturbed, then not even engagement in commercial transactions all day long will stand in the way of your becoming a sage or worthy” (I, 295).
The five articles on Qing intellectual history that form nearly half of the second volume have been in print for awhile, but in different publications. Collected here, they constitute a nearly book-length reinterpretation of Qing intellectual history, which is both new and welcome. Qing intellectuals were philologists; their writings were meant for those inside the Chinese tradition, and their writings have been difficult to render in a way that outsiders can understand and evaluate. For many years, the dominant paradigm of Qing intellectual history came from early twentieth-century intellectuals, who wanted to see their early Qing predecessors as interested in science like their seventeenth century western contemporaries. In this view, it was the Manchu conquest and the censorship it imposed that brought to an end intellectual experimentation. Thereafter, to protect themselves from Manchu censors, it was argued, intellectuals buried themselves in apolitical texts and footnotes. One of the classic statements of this view was a short book by Liang Qichao 梁啟超 translated by Immanuel Hsu as Intellectual Trends During the Ch'ing Period. Not as widely known were the views of Qian MuFootnote 5 and Feng YoulanFootnote 6 馮友蘭, which saw the Qing growth of philology as a development of Neo-Confucian thought, a working out of the textual foundations of belief, which did not involve any radical break with the past. Each of these views has the effect of devaluing Qing scholarship: in the first instance, Qing philologists are in flight from political reality; and in the second instance (particularly in the account of Feng Youlan), they are pale epigones, mere reflections of their Song predecessors.
Yü Yingshi proposes a broader view. Positing a continuing tension within Confucian thought (and indeed many world religions) between the quest for rules of moral behavior (zun dexing 尊德性), and the quest for knowledge (dao wenxue 道問學) of the world and of the texts that contained classical insight. During the Song, Yü asserts, these two poles were in balance: Zhu Xi is today best known as a metaphysician, but in late imperial China he was equally well known for his classical commentary, the hermeneutics of which are examined in Yü’s earlier article. Beginning perhaps in the late Song and continuing through the middle of the Ming, the Chinese scholarly world focused on the metaphysical side of Zhu Xi's legacy, the search for an ontological basis for morality. By the end of the Ming however, this search nearly exhausted itself, concluding with Wang Yangming's emphasis on an innate knowledge of the good. The pendulum then began to swing in the other direction, toward a study of the texts and facts that constituted knowledge in the Chinese context. Yü labels this a move toward “Confucian intellectualism.”Footnote 7 In this view, Qing scholars were not seeking escape from Manchu persecution (though Yü does not deny that there were “external factors” which conditioned this development), nor were they simply cleaning the Neo-Confucian philological slate; they were simply trying to shore up their faith with a careful study of its intellectual roots.Footnote 8
There was therefore real and important work going on in the Qing, nothing less than an effort to determine how to understand the Confucian tradition of knowledge. The nature of this work is explored in the comparison of Dai and Zhang. Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724–77), the master philologist, is shown to see himself as a follower of Zhu Xi, whereas Zhang Xuecheng 章學诚 (1738–1801), by nature a philosopher, feels obliged to assemble a preparatory bibliography before embarking on his Wenshi tongyi 文史通義 (General Principles of History). This work, which is summarized in an article in Chinese History and Culture, has the additional advantage of offering a memorable picture of these two scholars as individual personalities, a rare snapshot in a world where scholarship consisted mostly of philological investigation. Dai Zhen and Zhang Xuecheng are particularly interesting in this regard since they are classic opposites: philologist and philosopher, splitter and lumper, fox and hedgehog (II, 89).Footnote 9
It may be that Yü has been best known in the last few decades at least for his essays in twentieth-century intellectual history, which like his other work, are thoughtful, balanced and informed by much reading. Among the more striking formulations in these articles is the notion that the twentieth century has been marked by the simultaneous (and related) marginalization of the Chinese state in the global order and of Chinese scholars within China. This second marginalization, Yü argues, was most clearly reflected in the change in the terminology referring to men of knowledge. Within the Chinese empire, they were referred to as shi 士; in the twentieth century, they become zhishi fenzi 知識分子. What was lost in the transition is the fact of assumed access to power. Shi were the first social class in traditional China, custodians of the intellectual heritage, and candidates for degrees and high office. Zhishi fenzi—intellectuals—were men who worked with their minds, one category of “the people,” at risk of being condemned for their elitism. Yü also finds the May Fourth Movement to be “neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment,” although he carefully traces the thought processes that led some in twentieth century to conclude that it was one or the other. Yü finds no single idea dominant in the May Fourth period, arguing that all May Fourth thinkers were influenced by western thought regardless of whether they aimed to conserve or overthrow the Chinese heritage.Footnote 10 Finally, he finds that the pressures of the twentieth century world have lead the Chinese to “fetishize revolution, according it a salvific power beyond the mere fact of destruction” (II, 229).
This summary of ideas can hardly do justice to a two-volume collection of a life's works. Inevitably some themes have been ignored; and my own biases as reviewer have led to the emphasis, perhaps overemphasis, of one or a other facet of this collection. There are a lifetime of insights of a powerful and well-informed mind here; sparkling examples of what can be accomplished through careful reading and thinking. This should be the first book a beginning graduate student in Chinese history reads, and the last source one should consult before taking pen in hand. The field can only be grateful to Michael Duke and Josephine Chiu-Duke, whose editorial assistance made the publication of this work possible.
