Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period/Editor's Note
EDITORS' NOTE
THE eight hundred and more biographical sketches which are included in this work were prepared during the years 1934–42 by some fifty scholars of the Orient and the Occident who are making the language, the history, or the literature of China their special study. The task of editing and co-ordinating the sketches and, in fact, of writing the majority of them, fell to a small staff in the Asiatic Division of the Library of Congress. The work grew out of the co-operation of the Library of Congress and the American Council of Learned Societies, assisted by the Rockefeller Foundation, in providing in the Library a center where advanced students of Chinese culture might have additional experience in research and in the use of historical and literary materials. It was thought tħat the most valuable experience they could derive from the use of such materials would be the preparation of contributions to a Biographical Dictionary of the Ch'ing Dynasty; for it was not difficult to foresee—what the pressure of events in Eastern Asia has now made clear—that without more detailed guides to the famous names, the great events, and the rich and almost inexhaustible literature of China, we of the West cannot hope to acquire an adequate understanding of the Chinese people.
The extensive resources of the Chinese Collection in the Library of Congress, especially in the fields of local history, biography, and the collected works of individual authors, made the Asiatic Division of the Library an appropriate place for the preparation of the Dictionary. Accordingly there were brought together there, for longer or shorter periods, several American and Asiatic scholars who used the resources of the Library to prepare, in collaboration with the editor, a much-needed work of reference, and who by friendly criticism improved each others' skills. Among them were four Fellows of the American Council of Learned Societies who each worked on the project from several months to a year. A number of other scholars living in various parts of the world contributed sketches of persons in whom they had developed a special interest.
Dr. Waldo G. Leland, the Director of the American Council of Learned Societies, and Mr. Mortimer Graves, the Administrative Secretary, took throughout a keen personal interest in the undertaking. Mr. Graves conceived the plan, encouraged it in many practical ways, and gave unstintingly of his time in counseling the editor. Without their unfailing support, and the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation in launching the enterprise, as well as the support of Dr. Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress when the project began, the Dictionary could not have been carried to completion.
It seemed reasonable, with so small a staff, to limit the scope of the work to the past three hundred years or, more precisely, to that epoch in Chinese history ruled by the Ch'ing dynasty (1644–1912). In practice, however, it was found necessary to include the names of others who, though they died in the Ming period, a few years before the Ch'ing dynasty was established, helped to mould in one way or another the life and thought of the period. Similarly, no independent sketches are included for persons who died after 1912; but it was found possible to incorporate information, sometimes in considerable detail, of many men who lived after that date, and of not a few who are still living.
A work designed primarily for Western readers need not, and perhaps should not, aspire to the completeness of biographical compendiums in the Chinese language. If it gives encouragement to more Occidentals to study the language in order to draw on these larger, more detailed, native sources, it will justify the labor that has gone into it. Since, for the purposes of this work of reference, a rigorous selection had to be made, it is inevitable that the specialized reader will note omissions of what seem to him important names, or conclude that the treatment at certain points is inadequate to his needs. On consulting the Index, however, he will probably find some mention of most of the great names of the dynasty—if only indications of the years of birth and death, the contacts they had with other men of note, or the works on which they labored or collaborated. Some names are treated briefly, or even omitted, not necessarily because they were overlooked, but because there is too little recorded about them in Chinese sources which can be taken with certainty, or too much that is based on conjecture. This is likely to be true of those persons about whom Westerners are apt to inquire most frequently—namely, artists, craftsmen, and men of independent thought who, spurning the ways to officialdom, lived in retirement and whose works, if they left any, were lost or destroyed because they failed to conform to the patterns set by their time.
Obviously a work touching upon so many crucial problems, and on the spheres of so many specialists, cannot be free from imperfections in certain details. As more documentary material comes to light concerning the names treated, and as research in China, after being disrupted by years of warfare, is resumed, it will doubtless be necessary to correct specific dates, and also the interpretation of certain events. The contributors had to rely on the documents at hand; they had to choose oftentimes between conflicting authorities; and though they would like to have tarried for months, or even years, on the solution of particular problems; they obviously could not do so, if the work was to appear within a predictable time. To apply to it, therefore, standards of perfection when, as the documents now stand, there could be no perfection, would be to deny to these, or to any writers, the privilege of writing at all. Within these limits, however, no pains have been spared to check the accuracy of the information gathered.
In the selection and presentation of the material the aim has been to strike a just balance between the needs of the general reader and those of the specializing student of history. The multiplied cross-references and the often apparently superfluous clarifications are all designed to leave the general reader in no doubt as to the meaning. Though the Chinese characters will seem to him perhaps to heckle the text unnecessarily, they will be of service to the growing number of persons who read the language. In any case, the characters can be entirely ignored, if further reference to Chinese sources is not the aim.
The system for transliterating names of persons, places and titles of books is the one devised by Thomas F. Wade for his Peking Syllabary of 1859, and slightly revised by Herbert A. Giles for his Chinese-English Dictionary of 1912. It has obvious deficiencies which must in time be remedied, but until a better system is generally approved, it seemed wise to follow the one that has been used by English-speaking people for the past eighty years. The only exceptions are the names of provinces and the more important cities, for which the Post Office spelling is used.
The letters T. and H. which appear beside most of the Chinese names indicate that the characters following them are the courtesy names (Tzŭ 字) and the literary names (Hao 號) respectively of the person in question. It is not to be assumed, however, that these distinctions are absolute, for Chinese sources sometimes use one and sometimes the other in reference to the same set of characters. The word ming 名 refers to the personal or given name which, in normal Chinese usage, and in these sketches, always follows the family name.
Place names are indicated by romanization only—there being other sources, such as G. M. H. Playfair's The Cities and Towns of China (1910), in which the Chinese equivalents can be found. Nevertheless, for places which are small and not easily identified the characters have been added
For certain descriptive terms, chiefly bibliographical, which recur frequently in these sketches, there are no exact equivalents in the English language. It was thought best, in such cases, to make use of the words which the Chinese themselves employ. The terms chüan 卷 and p'ien 篇 refer to the sections or chapters into which books were until recently divided—the former pointing back to a time when books were in the form of scrolls, the latter to a yet earlier period when books were inscribed on slips of wood. The word ts'ê 冊 might have been translated "volume" throughout, were it not for the fact that several ts'ê are often brought together in the same portfolio. For similar reasons use has been made of the term nien-p'u 年譜. Though the nien-p'u is a biography, it is hardly so in the Western sense, for in it the facts are brought together in strict chronological order under each year of the person's career—with no embellishment, and without emotive suggestions. Such works when available, were highly useful in the preparation of these sketches, and for that reason the term nien-p'u appears often in the bibliographies. Explanations of other terms may be found by consulting the Index.
In the sketches dealing with the Taiping Rebellion and its leaders the day of the month on which a given event took place may differ by one day or so from that reported in other sources. There was a discrepancy between the Imperialist and the Taiping calendars, and writers of the time referred sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other, without indicating in each instance which calendar was used.
For the convenience of readers who prefer to consult the names in their historical sequence, rather than in alphabetical order, a separate index will be found at the close of Volume II.
Numbers, like 1/2/3a, which appear in the bibliographies, refer to the sources used in compiling the Index to Thirty-three Collections of Ch'ing Dynasty Biographies, prepared by Tu Lien-chê and Fang Chao-ying, and published in 1932 as Index No. 9 of the Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series. The first number indicates the source to which reference is being made; the second, the chüan, the third, the page. A list of these thirty-three works, and the numbers, assigned to them, will be found after the indexes in Volume II. One source not included in this series, namely the 八旗通志 Pa-ch'i t'ung-chi (ed. of 1799), is referred to as No. 34.
When the letter M. is prefixed to a numeral it refers to the sources used in compiling the Index to Eighty-nine Collections of Ming Dynasty Biographies, prepared by T'ien Chi-tsung, and published in 1935 as No. 24 of the Harvard-Yenching Index Series.
The letters L. T. C. L. H. M. refer to the 歷代著录畫目 Li-tai chu-lu hua-mu (Index to Recorded Paintings of Various Dynasties), prepared by J. C. Ferguson and published (in Chinese) in 1934.
The letters W. M. S. C. K. refer to the 晚明史籍考 Wan-Ming shih-chi k'ao (A Study of Works Dealing with the Close of the Ming Period), prepared by Hsieh Kuo-chen and printed in 1933.
B. E. F. E. O. are the initials of the French Journal, Bulletin de l'École Francaise d'Extrême Orient.
For the English equivalents of Chinese offices and titles we have followed, for the most part, H. S. Brunnert and V. V. Hagelstrom, Present Day Political Organization of China (1912), or W. F. Mayers, The Chinese Government (1877).
Mention should be made of the help rendered to the editor by his chief assistant, Mr. Fang Chao-ying, who labored on the project for the entire eight-year period in which the biographies were being compiled, and who produced for these volumes more sketches than any other single contributor. Mrs. Fang, who signs her contributions with her maiden name, Tu Lien-chê, rendered a like service by her loyalty to the enterprise and her conscientious attention to many vexing details. For assistance in reading many of the manuscripts, and for valuable suggestions, the editor is indebted to Ruth Bookwalter Hummel, Miss Marybelle Bouchard, and Mr. Edwin G. Beal. For help in reading proof, and for assistance to the printer in placing the characters, acknowledgments are due to Mr. B. Armstrong Clayton.
Archibald MacLeish,
The Librarian of Congress
Washington,
March 19, 1943.