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Thesis ID: CBB001562728

Qian Daxin (1728--1804): Knowledge, Identity, and Reception History in China, 1750--1930 (2011)

Princeton University

Publication Date: 2011
Physical Details: 463 pp.
Language: English

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Biographies Mathematics Confucianism East Asia, civilization and culture Astronomy Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence Philosophy 19th century 18th century 20th century China Qian, Daxin Dai, Zhen

This study focuses on the eighteenth-century polymath Qian Daxin. Qian's peers regarded him as the greatest scholar of their dynasty, yet during the twentieth century Qian Daxin was marginalized. I argue that in order to understand Qian Daxin, as well as the reasons for his marginalization, we need to analyze the nexus of knowledge and identity, and do so according to the terms of the historical actors, not according to anachronistic, and foreign, categories imposed on the actors. This nexus of knowledge and identity has had bearing on the ways Qian Daxin thought of his scholarship, on the contents of his studies, as well as on the history of his reception in the two centuries following his death. In order to enter Qian Daxin's world I therefore begin with his biography, examining the social history of scholars during the eighteenth century via Qian's changing and intricate web of social networks. Through his scholarship on history, classics, and science (astronomy and mathematics in particular), I demonstrate how Qian Daxin thought about his own identity - mainly as an Ancient Learning adherent - and how this identity interacted with his notions of knowledge. I also shed new light on interand intra-cultural encounters (with Western Learning, for example) that were part of what Qian confronted. I maintain that Qian perceived an identity crisis, a crisis related not to political or economic anxieties but to the cultural identity of the Ru ("Confucians"), and reacted to it both in terms of scholarship and in terms of the dissemination of his scholarship. A sense of anxiety over the cultural identity of the Ru was not unique to Qian or to eighteenth century scholars; during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, similar anxieties, albeit stimulated by different circumstances, continued to be a significant factor in the shaping of Ru knowledge and later in the critique of Ru ("Confucianism") as a whole. The question of what in the past, in history, a culture should remember and what could be forgotten, as well as how past events and personalities should be remembered, was influenced by such nexus of knowledge and identity. In my examination of the reception history of Qian Daxin I posit Qian's contemporary Dai Zhen as Qian's competitor in the historical narrative. The two competed already during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for "best Qing dynasty scholar" (Dai claimed to have won first place, others claimed Qian was the best); but Dai's twentieth-century victory was in totally new - modern and Western - categories, most significantly philosophy. My study problematizes the use of such categories, explores the genealogy of "philosophy," and traces its journey from Europe, through Japan, to China. Similarly, the notion that Qian Daxin was part of a "Han Learning" group or movement, a notion that began in the early nineteenth century and persisted during the twentieth century, is reexamined and refuted. This study tries to present a more nuanced narrative of the intellectual history and historiography of the Qing and early Republican China, one that is more sensitive to the changing terminology, anxieties, and complexities of the period, through the person and image of a prominent yet hitherto unexplored scholar - Qian Daxin.

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Description Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. : doc. no. 3452628.

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