Rudolph was born in San Francisco three years after the 1906 earthquake that devastated the city. He developed a deep interest in China as a child.[1] He was raised by his grandmother in poverty,living at one point in a water tower and then later in a dirt walled basement as he worked his way through his university education,which took him 14 years.[2]
He received his BA in Foreign Trade in 1932,his MA in 1936,and his PhD in Chinese literature in 1942,all at UC Berkeley. He studied with sinologists Ferdinand Lessing and Peter Boodberg at Berkeley.[1]
Career
Rudolph was an instructor of Chinese at the University of Chicago from 1937 to 1940,working under Herrlee G. Creel. With Creel and Chang Tsung-Ch'ien,he co-authored the three volume textbook Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method, published in 1938,1939 and 1952 by the University of Chicago Press.[1][3][4][5]
During World War II,Rudolph headed the Chinese language section of the U.S. Navy Language School at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1943 to 1945,[1] where he worked with Ensho Ashikaga and Y. C. Chu who would later come to UCLA.[2]
From 1945 to 1947,he served as assistant professor of Chinese studies at the University of Toronto[1] and also acting director of and assistant keeper of Far Eastern Antiquities at the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology. That experience instilled in him an interest in ancient books,calligraphy,paintings,and artifacts. Offered his choice in 1947 of either a position at UC Berkeley or the opportunity to found a new department of Oriental Languages at UCLA,he chose the latter and remained at UCLA throughout his remainder of his career.[2]
After coming to UCLA,Rudolph was awarded a Fulbright Program scholarship for research in China during the culminating years of its revolution.[2] Rudolph's first trip to China was in 1948–49,just before the country largely closed to outsiders as a result of the Communist Revolution. Rudolph was in China during a time of political chaos during the final months of the Chinese Civil War. He visited various big cities such as Beijing and Chengdu,avoiding the fighting between the Communist and Nationalist armies. After the Communists took control of the large cities,Rudolph went through bookstores,purchasing a large number of old woodblock printed reference works. He left China in June 1949,stopping in Japan on his way home for additional book purchases.[6]
His second trip in 1973 was as part of the first group of American scholars to enter China just before the normalization of relations.[2]
He was fluent in Classical Chinese,Mandarin,Manchu,Mongolian,Classical Japanese,modern Japanese,German,French,Italian and Spanish and had begun learning Tibetan and Russian.[2]
When he first arrived at UCLA,the university library possessed only a single volume in Chinese,a telephone directory. By the end of that research year,it had 10,000—some of them rare,many of them important,all of them needed—the core of a functioning research library that is currently among the top ten East Asian libraries in the U.S,(today named the Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library). As of its 75th anniversary in 2024,the Rudolph Library held over 800,000 books and other items.[7]
A true bibliophile,he was never happier than when examining a rare book or manuscript—or a number of works by some famous Chinese calligrapher,separated for centuries and now brought together again by him after years of tireless searching—unless it was when he was showing someone else these latest finds. He was always as well acquainted with the campus librarians as he was with his fellow scholars.[8]
Rudolph was best known for his work on the tomb reliefs of the Western Han (Han Tomb Art of West China). He also worked on a wide range of interests including the history of Chinese printing (A Chinese Printing Manual),ancient Chinese archaeology,ancient Chinese historiography,literature,bronzes,tomb objects,tomb iconography,the salt industry,botanical works,medicine,riddles and games,the application of carbon dating to ancient Chinese artifacts,Chinese porcelain in Mexico,early (14th century) Italians in China,Manchu studies,Japanese maps,and the work in Japan of the Swedish naturalist and physician Carl Peter Thunberg in 1775 and 1776. One of the few Western scholars at the time who kept systematically abreast of ongoing archaeological efforts in China,he was asked to direct the American Council of Learned Societies' project “Abstracts of Chinese Archaeology”from 1968 to 1973.[2]
Before his retirement in 1976,he served as departmental chair for sixteen years and sat on several editorial boards. He was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships (plus one renewal),two Fulbright fellowships (plus one renewal),a Fulbright Distinguished Senior Scholar Award,two American Philosophical Society Grants,a University of California Humanities Institute Award,a Ford Foundation Grant,and an ACLS fellowship. But the honor that he was most proud of was when,in 1981,the UCLA Oriental Library was renamed the Richard C. Rudolph Oriental Library in acknowledgment of his efforts in building the collection.[2] The name was changed to the Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library in 1990.[9][citation needed]
After retiring,Rudolph took up the direction of the University of California Education Abroad Program and continued his research. He became increasingly absorbed with collecting ancient maps,paintings,printing blocks,manuscripts,rare books and porcelain,focusing especially on Chinese and Japanese printing,medicine,botany,physiology,and the reception of Western science by the East. Failing eyesight became a problem for him,as did a variety of life-threatening but largely passing ailments.[2]
Personal life
He met Mary Alice Potter at the University of Colorado Boulder,and they were married for 59 years. They had three children,Richard C. Rudolph Jr.,Conrad Rudolph,and Deborah Rudolph.[2]
Publications
A great part of this list is based on the article "A List of Publications of Richard C. Rudolph up to 1978"[10].
1938
Tsung-Ch’ien,C.,&Rudolph,R. C. (1938). Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method:Vol.I. The Hsiao Ching. (H. Glessner Creel,Ed.). University of Chicago Press.
1939
Tsung-Ch’ien,C.,&Rudolph,R. C. (1939). Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method:Vol. II. Selections from the Lun Yü. (H. Glessner Creel,Ed.). University of Chicago Press.
1940
Rudolph,Richard C. (1940). "Emu Tanggo Orin Sakda-i Gisun Sarkiyan,An Unedited Manchu Manuscript." In Journal of the American Oriental Society,60,no. 4:554--563. American Oriental Society.
1942
Rudolph,Richard C. (January 1942). “Notes on the Riddle in China.”In California Folklore Quarterly 1,no. 1:65–82.
1946
Rudolph,Richard C. (1946). "A Reversed Chinese Art Term." In Journal of the American Oriental Society,66,no. 1:15-17. American Oriental Society.
1947
Rudolph,Richard C. (1947). “Early Chinese References to Fossil Fishes.”In Isis, 36:155.
1948
Rudolph,Richard C. (1948). "Dynastic. Booty:an Altered Chinese Bronze,". In Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies,11:174-180.
Rudolph,Richard C. (1948). “The Jumar in China,”In Isis, 40:35-37.
1950
Rudolph,R. C. (1950). The Antiquity of t’ou hu. Antiquity,24(96),175–178. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00023346
Rudolph,R. C. (1950). Han Tomb Reliefs from Szechwan. Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America,4,29–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20066926
1951
Rudolph,R. (1951). Han Tomb Art of West China:A Collection of First-and Second-Century Reliefs. Berkeley:University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520351707
1952
Tsung-Ch’ien,C.,&Rudolph,R. C. (1952). Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method:Vol. III. The Mencius,Books I-III. (H. Glessner Creel,Ed.). University of Chicago Press.
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↑ Tsung-Ch'ien, Chan; Rudolph, Richard C. (1939). Glessner Creel, Herlee (ed.). Literary Chinese by the Iinductive Method. vol 2: Selections from the Lun Yü. University of Chicago Press.
↑ Reifler, E. (1953). Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method. Volume III: The Mencius, Books I-III. Prepared by Herrlee Glessner Creel, Chang Tsung-Ch’ien and Richard C. Rudolph. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952. vii, 331. $6.00. The Far Eastern Quarterly, 12(3), 340–343. doi:10.2307/2942154
ed. Kenneth D. Klein, Creating an Oriental Languages Department and Library, UCLA Oral History Program (Los Angeles 1985).
"Book Buying in China 1948-49: An Interview with Richard C. Rudolph," Journal of Asian Culture 6 (1982) 3-18.
ed. Jun Suzuki and Mihoko Miki, "Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library and Japanese Rare Books," Catalog of Rare Japanese Materials at the University of California, Los Angeles (Richard C. Rudolph East Asian Library Bibliographic Series no. 4, pp. xxxi-xxxiv.
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