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Sinology, also referred to as China studies, is a subfield of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on China. It is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the Chinese civilization primarily through Chinese language, history, culture, literature, philosophy, art, music, cinema, and science. Its origin "may be traced to the examination which Chinese scholars made of their own civilization."
Étienne Fourmont was a French scholar and Orientalist who served as professor of Arabic at the Collège de France and published grammars on the Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese languages.
Paul Eugène Pelliot was a French Sinologist and Orientalist best known for his explorations of Central Asia and acquirement of many important Chinese texts such as the Dunhuang manuscripts.
Arthur David Waley was an English orientalist and sinologist who achieved both popular and scholarly acclaim for his translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry. Among his honours were appointment as Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1952, receiving the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1953, and being invested as a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1956.
Ziying, King of Qin was the third and last ruler of the Qin dynasty. He ruled over a fragmented Qin Empire for 46 days, from mid-October to early December 207 BC. He is referred to in some sources with the posthumous name Emperor Shang of Qin (秦殤帝) although Qin abolished the practice of posthumous names.
Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat was a French sinologist best known as the first Chair of Sinology at the Collège de France. Rémusat studied medicine as a young man, but his discovery of a Chinese herbal treatise enamored him with the Chinese language, and he spent five years teaching himself to read it. After publishing several well-received articles on Chinese topics, a chair in Chinese was created at the Collège de France in 1814 and Rémusat was placed in it.
Marcel Granet was a French sociologist, ethnologist and sinologist. As a follower of Émile Durkheim and Édouard Chavannes, Granet was one of the first to bring sociological methods to the study of China. Granet was revered in his own time as a sociological sinologist, or sinological sociologist, and member of the Durkheimian school of sociology.
Étienne Balazs was a Hungarian-born French sinologist.
Henri Paul Gaston Maspero was a French sinologist and professor who contributed to a variety of topics relating to East Asia. Maspero is best known for his pioneering studies of Daoism. He was imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II and died in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Dunhuang manuscripts refer to a wide variety of religious and secular documents in Chinese and other languages that were discovered at the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, during the 20th century. The majority of the surviving texts come from a large cache of documents produced between the late 4th and early 11th centuries which had been sealed in the so-called 'Library Cave' at some point in the early 11th century. The Library Cave was discovered by a Daoist monk called Wang Yuanlu in 1900, and much of the contents of the cave were subsequently taken to England and France by European explorers, such as Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. Knowing that the Dunhuang manuscripts were priceless treasures, Stein and Pelliot swindled Wang and bought them for very little money. They took the majority of these treasures from China to Europe.
Artus de Lionne (1655–1713), abbé and Bishop of Rosalie in partibus infidelium, in Turkey, was a French missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. He was a son of Louis XIV's Foreign Minister, Hugues de Lionne.
Erik Zürcher was a Dutch Sinologist. From 1962 to 1993, Zürcher was a professor of history of East Asia at the Leiden University. He was also Director of the Sinological Institute, between 1975 and 1990. His Chinese name was Xǔ Lǐhe (许理和).
Albert Étienne Jean-Baptiste Terrien de Lacouperie was a French orientalist, specialising in comparative philology. He published a number of books on early Asian and Middle-Eastern languages, initially in French and then in English. Lacouperie is best known for his studies of the Yi Ching and his argument, known as Sino-Babylonianism, that the important elements of ancient civilization in ancient China came from Mesopotamia and that there were resemblances between Chinese characters and Akkadian hieroglyphics.
Jan Julius Lodewijk Duyvendak was a Dutch Sinologist and professor of Chinese at Leiden University. He is known for his translation of The Book of Lord Shang and his studies of the Dao De Jing. He was co-editor of the renowned sinology journal T'oung Pao with French scholar Paul Pelliot for several decades.
Lajos Ligeti was a Hungarian orientalist and philologist, who specialized in Mongolian and Turkic languages.
Léopold de Saussure was a Swiss-born French sinologist, pioneering scholar of ancient Chinese astronomy, and officer in the French navy. After a naval career which took him to Indochina, China, and Japan, he left the service and devoted the rest of his life to scholarship. He was most famous for his studies of ancient Chinese astronomy.
The Huanglan or Imperial Mirror was one of the oldest Chinese encyclopedias or leishu "classified dictionary". Cao Pi, the first emperor of the Wei, ordered its compilation upon his accession to the throne in 220 and it was completed in 222. The purpose of the Huanglan was to provide the emperor and ministers of state with conveniently arranged summaries of all that was known at the time. Complete versions of the Huanglan existed until the Song dynasty (960-1279), when it became a mostly lost work, although some fragments did survive in other encyclopedias and anthologies. The Huanglan was the prototype of the classified encyclopedia and served as a model for later ones such as the (624) Tang Yiwen Leiju and the (1408) Ming Yongle dadian.
Otto Franke was a German diplomat, sinologist, and historian. He was the preeminent German sinologist of his time, called the "Nestor of German Sinology" by Hellmut Wilhelm. He served as a diplomat at the German embassy to the Qing empire for 13 years, before becoming the inaugural Sinology Chair at the University of Hamburg and then at the University of Berlin. His five-volume Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches, though unfinished because of World War II, remains the standard history of China in Germany decades after its publication. His son Wolfgang Franke was also a well-known sinologist who succeeded him as the Sinology Chair at Hamburg.
Fang Chao-ying 房兆楹 was a China-born American Sinologist, bibliographer, and historian of China best known for the contributions he and his wife, Tu Lien-che made to the biographical dictionaries Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1943) and Ming Biographical Dictionary (1976). He spent his professional career primarily at libraries and universities in the United States.
Jean-Pierre Drège is a French sinologist, specialising in the study of ancient books and the history of libraries, in particular Chinese manuscripts and Dunhuangology. He has been working for years in the study of the Dunhuang manuscripts.
References
- Honey, David B. (2001). Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology. New Haven: American Oriental Society. ISBN 0940490161.
- Zurndorfer, Harriet, "A Brief History of Chinese Studies and Sinology," in Zurndorfer, Harriet (1999). China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works About China Past and Present]. Honolulu: Brill; reprinted, University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 9004102787.