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Aspects of Traditional Chinese Biography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

David S. Nivison
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Extract

Any historian approaching the subject of traditional Chinese biography may be confident of at least one fact: he will be overwhelmed. The sheer volume of this material available in the Chinese sources is exceedingly large.

In discussing Chinese historical writing, it is customary to point first to the chengshih, the so-called “standard histories,” dealing with all of Chinese history down to 1644. There are twenty-five histories, all bulky, in this “official” group. All contain large collections of biographies, elaborately sorted out: loyal officials, villainous officials, imperial concubines, writers, hermits, virtuous wives, and filial sons. In the History of the Ming Dynasty, that portion which is biographical in nature runs to 197 out of a total of 332 chapters–in actual pages about sixty percent of the whole. We encounter the same phenomenon outside of the “standard histories”–in local histories, for example, of which there may be several for one small district. All of this material I shall call “historical biography.”

Type
The Biographical Approach to Chinese History: A Symposium
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , August 1962 , pp. 457 - 463
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1962

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References

1 Lien-che, Tu and Chao-ying, Fang, Index to Thirty-three Collections of Ch'ing Dynasty Biographies, published in 1932 as Index No. 9 of the Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series. The collections are cited in Hummel, Arthur W., ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, II, 1103.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, the Lieh-hsien chuan (Biographies of Taoist Immortals), an ancient source book on the lives of seventy-one Taoists, translated in full by Kaltenmark, Max, Le Lie-Sien Tchouan (Peking, 1953)Google Scholar. On Buddhist priests, the Kao-seng chuan (Lives of Eminent Monks), compiled in the early sixth century by Hui-chiao (497–554), contains biographies of nearly five hundred monks, both Chinese and Indian, and covers a period of several centuries from the Han to the Liang dynasty. Professor Arthur E. Link is now engaged in preparing an annotated translation of this work. For an excellent study see Wright, Arthur F., “Biography and Hagiography, Hui-chiao's Lives of Eminent Monks,” Zinbun-Kagaku Kenkyusyo Silver Jubilee Volume (Kyoto, 1954), pp. 383–432.Google Scholar

3 Twitchett, D. C., “Chinese Biographical Writing,” in Beasley, W. G. and Pulleyblank, E. G., Historians of China and Japan (London, 1961), pp. 95–114, especially pp. 105–109Google Scholar; see also Hans H. Frankel, “The Lives of 101 Tʻang Literati: a Composite Biography and Analysis,” unpublished paper prepared for the Fifth Conference on Chinese Thought, Suffern, New York, September 1960. This conference was devoted entirely to Chinese biographical writing and to biographical studies of Chinese figures. Papers will appear shortly in the fifth symposium volume of the Committee on Chinese Thought, titled Confucian Personalities, edited by Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett. It is to be published by Stanford University Press.

4 For these and other incidents in Chang's life, see (under the appropriate dates) Shih, Hu and Ming-ta, Yao, Chang Shih-chai nien-p'u (Shanghai, 1931)Google Scholar: and Hsiao-lin, Wu, “Chang Shih-chai nien-p'u pucheng,” Shuo-wen yüch-kʻan, II (1942), 247–303.Google Scholar

5 See especially his “Yüan Tao,” part I (1789).

6 See, for example, his essay “Shuo Lin” (1789 or 1790), paragraph No. 8.