Q. Edward Wang

Beyond East and West: Antiquarianism, Evidential Learning, and Global Trends in Historical Study

From a comparative perspective, this article examines the rise of “evidential learning” in Qing China of the eighteenth century and its far-reaching influence in shaping intellectual development in modern China. It argues that parallel to the interest of humanists and antiquarians in early modern Europe, the Chinese evidential scholars of the late imperial period pursued a similarly revivalist interest in their study of Confucianism. By improving and perfecting the skills and techniques of textual and historical criticism, and by using the methods of philology, phonology, paleography, and etymology, they hoped to restore the Confucian classics to their earlier, hence (to them) truer and more authentic form. And in pursuing this common interest, these scholars formed an active scholarly community, a Republic of Letters, wherein they exchanged ideas and criticized one another’s works, much as did their European counterparts in advancing humanist and antiquarian scholarship. In reconstructing the historical context whence the Confucian classics had emerged, they also prized the importance of historical and epigraphic study and approached the understanding of the classics from a historical perspective. All this has left an enduring imprint on the endeavor by modern Chinese historians to modernize historical study since the early twentieth century. The legacy of evidential learning demonstrates that the antecedents that were often considered unique in shaping the modern historical discipline in Europe also existed in East Asia and, very likely, elsewhere in the world as well. It is time for us to go beyond the East-West binary to analyze and appreciate the interest in history—and the varied methodologies it has engendered sustaining its pursuit—as a global phenomenon.

Between Myth and History: the Construction of a National Past in Modern East Asia

The advance of modern historiography not only benefited from an augmented interest in historical veracity, which necessitated the advent of scientific method, but it also drew on persistent attempts at imagining, discovering and inventing a past for fostering nationalism. The East Asian experiment with modern historiography, which occurred from the late nineteenth century, was no exception. To be sure, in East Asia, especially in China where historical study had boasted a long tradition since the dawn of its civilisation, attempts to re-envisage a past had been seen before, though usually for a different purpose. For example, during the Song period of the eleventh century, when China proper witnessed a revival of classical culture, the literati class, known in the West as the neo-Confucians, demonstrated an unprecedented enthusiasm for political participation. In their effort to moralise the government, they invoked the memory of the ‘Three Dynasties’ (sandai) in China’s high antiquity and idealised the lives under these reigns as the paragon of all societies.1