On December 26, the American sinologist Shi Jingqian died at the age of 85.
Born in the United Kingdom, Shi Jingqian, whose real name is Jonathan Spencer, graduated from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and Yale University in the United States, is a well-known expert in contemporary Chinese history in the United States, a sinologist, and is known for his research on the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties. In 2010, Shi jingqian was awarded the Jefferson Chair, the highest honor in American literature by the U.S. federal government. Commentators argue that in the Western world, Shi Jingqian "is a Chinese historian with the broadest readership of our time" and "enhanced the Western understanding of Chinese history and culture." He is also the sinologist who can write historical works as bestsellers, and he is also the sinologist who is most familiar to Chinese readers.
At the age of 13, Shi Jing moved to Winchester College, one of the oldest public schools in the UK. It is said that once, Shi Jingqian mentioned to another sinologist, Wei Feide, that in 1382, the year that Winchester College was founded in Hampshire, Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, suppressed Hu Weiyong's rebellion and abolished the post of chancellor. Weifeld felt that, in a way, Shi Jingqian's ability to cross time and space in historical research was like that of an old alumnus of Winchester College, Arnold W. Weifeld. Toynbee.
It is said that during his time at Cambridge University, Shi Jingqian, as a member of the editorial board of the school magazine, once had the dream of becoming a novelist. His favorite is Woolf's work, steeped in the charm of modern stream-of-consciousness. Even later, when he became a historian, he still did not forget literature, for example, when it came to zhang Dai's "Tao An Mengyi", he mentioned Proust.
After going to Yale University in 1959 for further study, Shi Jingqian became deeply interested in Chinese history and began to study modern and contemporary Chinese history under Professor Mary Rui. It was also during this period that Fang Zhaoyao, a historian, gave him the name of "Shi Jingqian", which means that "those who study history should look up to Sima Qian". Sadly, at that time, China was already isolated from the Western world, and the ink paintings that Shi Jingqian envisioned and the ink paintings he was obsessed with had fallen into a great famine in reality. He once recalled: "China at that time was a mystery to us, and we really didn't know what was happening there. Westerners are completely ignorant of the history of such a large China, which seems to me to be tragic. ”
In 1965, Shi Jingqian received his Ph.D. in history from Yale, and his graduation thesis was Cao Yin and Kangxi: The Secret of the Career of a Royal Favorite.
Shi Jingqian's books are bestselled because of his unique perspective and "storytelling" writing style. Xu Zhuoyun once made such a joke: give Shi Jingqian a phone book, he can start from the first page of the name of the person, make up the last person's name.
However, this kind of "sword taking the side" approach in the eyes of some Chinese orthodox scholars does not affect the rigor of its historical spirit.
Some people have a biased mindset toward historians, believing that they must be like the old master and focus on a certain historical event with their whole life, so that they can be called "experts", or they must build a lofty position and put forward a set of theoretical frameworks to be considered "authoritative". But such a view clearly places historiography under a narrow professional stance and ignores the humanistic spirit of historiography itself. On the contrary, like Sima Qian, whose name pays tribute to him, Shi Jingqian follows the spirit of the "History of History" and in a sense is also committed to "the time of heaven and man". However, the "heaven" here does not refer to fate, but to the context and law behind history. At the same time, Shi Jingqian, as a latecomer, also avoided the shackles of Sima Qian's era, did not agree with the moral historiography tendency of the "Historical Record", and avoided writing history in a morally critical way.
From the beginning of "Cao Yin and Kangxi", Shi Jingqian formed his own way of writing historiography. On the surface, he wrote about people, and even the writing was very similar to a novel, but behind it was a huge amount of archival historical materials, as well as the study of the great society. He wrote about Kangxi's art of rule, outlining his inner world, and in the book "Kangxi: Reconstructing the Inner World of a Chinese Emperor", he used a first-person narrative technique to show the joys and sorrows of an emperor, and then presented the whole picture of China at that time.
From Kangxi to Zhang Dai, who experienced the pain of the destruction of the country and his family, from the Italian missionary Matteo Ricci to the Catholic Hu John, who went to a foreign country, to the ordinary peasant woman Wang Shi, Shi Jingqian's life has become the face of Chinese history. The dry history is thus transformed into a vivid story.
The Death of Wang: The Fate of the Little People Behind the Great History is the work that I see best as Shi Jingqian's writing style, stemming from Shi Jingqian's "Collection of Criminal Cases" that Shi Jingqian read in the Yale Library in the 1970s, which records a case of Wang's murder by her husband after eloping with someone in Tancheng, Shandong Province. Coupled with the relevant records in the "Chronicle of Tancheng County" and the "Fuhui Quanshu" of Huang Liuhong of Tancheng Zhixian County, the original material is only a dozen pages.
These materials, which will be ignored by the vast majority of historians, were picked up by Shi Jingqian and completed a historical reconstruction. In this work, he presents social life, Manchu laws, local taxes, and the inferior status of women with the "multi-dish and unfinished body" of the local people.
This is the norm in Chinese history, but it is always overlooked in the pen of historians. They are more concerned about the rise and fall of dynasties, the glory and survival of big people. But when Shi Jingqian takes the reader deep into the fate of the individual, those "loneliness, dreams and desires" are concretely presented.
The same is true of John Hu's Question, published in 1988. John Hu, an 18th-century Chinese Catholic and concierge of the Church of the Sacred Heart in Guangzhou, was brought to France by Jesuit priests in 1622 as an assistant. John Hu liked Paris, but resented women for worshipping in churches and walking on the streets, and even beating gongs and drums to preach the difference between men and women in Chinese characters, and was eventually sent to a mental hospital. This little man, who did not speak the language in a foreign country and was completely isolated, showed no signs of madness after returning home, so his performance in France can be seen as a kind of self-protection. And this kind of self-protection also presented China at that time to some extent.
All this Shi Jingqian has done not only gives the Western world an extra window to understand China, but also provides Chinese readers with the opportunity to examine themselves with his understanding of China. He once said that his writing purpose is only to stimulate readers' interest in learning about China, which seems to be very low and full of humility, but in fact it is very high.
More importantly, Shi Jingqian never looked at Chinese history from a Western-centrist perspective, but believed that all cultures should be understood from its own particularities. As he put it: "On the map of the whole world, China is an important and charismatic existence. Westerners need to spend a long time digesting and analyzing the data they get. Something that can be seen at a glance does not exist. The more vague and faceted our views of China are, the closer we are to the most elusive truth." From this point of view, this historian, who is like a child playing with building blocks, connecting and building the pictures scattered in the depths of history, has a pure heart that is both innocent and determined.
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