VIII
Professional study of China, especially of language,
literature, and
history, made rapid progress in the early
nineteenth century. In the
eighteenth century a few
compendia, grammars, and dictionaries had been
pro-
duced, such as G. S. Bayer's
Museum Sinicum
(St.
Petersburg, 1730) and Étienne Fourmont's
Grammaire
chinoise (Paris, 1742). The Society of Jesus,
which was
revived in 1815, continued to provide the scholars of
Europe
with raw materials from the field. The Jesuits
issued translations as well
as essays on Chinese and its
relation to other Asian tongues. J. P. Abel
Rémusat,
who in 1814 became professor of Chinese at the Col-
lège de France, inaugurated serious
study of Taoism
and Chinese medicine, and translated novels of ro-
mance and family life. He also participated in
the
organization of the
Société
asiatique in 1822. J. H.
Klaproth, an associate of
Rémusat, published the
Asia
Polyglotta
(1823) in which he divided Asian languages
into twenty-three groups and
indicated how compara-
tive studies might be
undertaken. Sir William Jones,
the father of modern Sanskrit studies in the
West,
studied Chinese language and history in his efforts to
understand India's early relations with China.
The Protestant missionaries, who started evangeliz-
ing China in 1807, compiled dictionaries in English,
studied
dialects seriously, and established educational
institutions and printing
presses in southeast Asia and
China. Robert Morrison, the first Protestant
missionary
in China (1807), published between 1815 and 1823 a
six-volume Dictionary of the Chinese Language. W. H.
Medhurst published between 1832 and 1837 his Dic-
tionary of the Hok-kien Dialect of the
Chinese Lan-
guage. Both of these
early dictionaries were published
at Macao as were other early vocabularies
and ency-
clopedias designed for the use
of missionaries. The
Chinese themselves began around 1875 to prepare
dictionaries for the use of Westerners. But the English-
speaking world owes its greatest debt to the
British
scholar Herbert A. Giles who published at Shanghai
in 1892 his
Chinese-English Dictionary, designed for
merchants and missionaries. He provided as well a
system of transliteration
which Western students still
depend upon in working with the Chinese
language.
In the nineteenth century Chinese dictionaries were
also
prepared for Portuguese, French, German, and
Russian users.
As comprehension of Chinese improved, translations
of popular literature,
classics, histories, and documents
became more numerous. Dramas, poems, and
short
stories were translated into English and French. As the
Protestant pastors and their families steadily grew in
number, they came to
exercise an enormous influence
upon the growth of scholarly knowledge and
upon the
formation of public opinion and policy in their home-
lands. Elijah C. Bridgman the first
American missionary
to China, launched a periodical called the Chinese
Repository, published in China from 1832
through
1851, which was designed to inform foreigners about
China's past and present. Bridgman also translated the
Bible
into Chinese (with M. S. Culbertson), published
in 1862. S. Wells Williams,
an American mission-
ary-scholar,
lectured on China and compiled an ency-
clopedic two-volume study, The Middle Kingdom
(1848), which remained a standard reference work until
the end of the
nineteenth century. Many of the mis-
sionaries or their children acted as interpreters in
diplomatic
negotiations with China or returned home
to teach in the universities,
advise the government, or
work in export businesses. In the learned
societies
devoted to the investigation of Chinese affairs the
views of
the missionaries commanded respect.
Knowledge of China produced a practical impact
upon the agriculture and
administration of the enter-
prising West.
Serious projects were undertaken in the
United States during the
mid-nineteenth century to
compete with China in raising silk and tea, and
experi-
ments were performed to adapt
Chinese plants and
animals to the needs of American agriculture. T. T.
Meadows, a British diplomat, published Desultory
Notes on
the Government and People of China (1847)
in which he described
the civil service system of China
and urged the institution in Britain of a
comparable
examination system for the recruitment, rating, and
advancement of civil servants. Through his statement
the problem was aired,
and in 1855 Britain created
its first civil service commission. Most of the
civil
service systems now in existence, including those
started before
the British system, owe an incalculable
debt to the Chinese example.
James Legge, in the 1850's, undertook the translation
into English of the
Confucian and Taoist texts, and
became the first professor of Chinese at
Oxford. His
pioneer translations, worked out with the aid of a
Chinese
assistant, have been criticized by modern
scholars as being ethnocentric
and inaccurate. None-
theless, they still
remain the standard English versions.
In France the Marquis d'Hervey
Saint-Denys published
a valuable anthology of T'ang poetry in 1852 that
was
influential among the literati of Europe. The Berlin
Orientalist,
Karl Arendt, rendered into German in the
1870's a number of selections from
Ming novels the
themes of which inspired poets and dramatists of the
following generation. Continental Sinologists also
wrote at length on
Chinese administration and inter-
national
affairs with increasing reliance on Chinese
sources. H. B. Morse in the
early twentieth century
organized for the English-speaking world the interna-
tional relations and commercial
administration of the
Chinese empire, mainly on the basis of Western
sources.
The study of China in relation to its continental
neighbors was given its
present structure in the works
of Sir Henry Yule. In 1871 he published
The Book
of
Ser Marco Polo the Venetian with a complete scholarly
apparatus. His documentation, drawn from his personal
travel experiences as
well as from the best available
literary sources, set a new standard for
Eurasian studies.
He also edited the works of other medieval travelers
and his studies were continued and augmented by
Henri Cordier, a French
diplomat and scholar. It was
Cordier who compiled the
Bibliotheca Sinica (1904-08)
which remains the standard
bibliography of Western
works on China. Paul Pelliot, the founder of the
lead-
ing scholarly journal
T'oung Pao (1890-), continued
the Yule tradition
but with a greater attention to
monographic research. René
Grousset, a French popu-
larizer of Asian
studies, sought more self-consciously
than his colleagues to reinforce the
literary sources
with materials derived from study of the visual arts.
The Protestants, originally hostile to Buddhism for
its outward resemblances
to Catholicism, began seri-
ously by the end
of the century to translate and study
its texts. Much of the growing
interest in the study
of Asian religions historically and on their own
terms
was due to the inspiration of Max Müller, the editor
of
the Sacred Books of the East (1875-1900). In this
collection he presents, side by side with other Oriental
books, most of the
Chinese philosophical and religious
texts in careful translations. The
availability in English
of this repository of material inspired serious
historical
and comparative studies of world religions.
Max Weber in his lengthy essays on Confucianism
and
Taoism, first published in 1916, brought China into
his sociology
of religion and more specifically into his
theoretical considerations about
the relationship be-
tween the Protestant ethic
and the spirit of capitalism.
These essays, which consider the social and
economic
as well as the religious foundations of Chinese society,
constitute one part of a series of comparative studies
designed to throw
light on the general question as to
why rational bourgeois capitalism
became a dominant
phenomenon only in the West. In
China, as in other
Asian societies, Weber concludes that the dominant
religious traditions did not possess an “economic
ethic”
compatible with capitalistic growth. He concedes
that
traditional China possessed the materialistic potential
for
capitalistic development, but contends that Confu-
cianism lacked the dynamism of ascetic Protestantism
since it
stressed rational adjustment to the world as
given rather than rational
mastery of it. Taoism he sees
as a conservative and negative force which
stressed
passive acceptance rather than innovation and activ-
ism. In his analysis of the structure and function
of
Chinese society, Weber provides startling insights into
the roles
of the bureaucracy, literati, and the kinship
system, which have inspired
numerous recent investi
gations in depth by specialists in social history. For
comparative religion, his examinations of Confucianism
and Taoism still
constitute empirical starting-points for
generalized typological concepts.
