As Michael Loewe (Lu Weiyi 魯惟一) approaches his hundredth birthday, two of his students, Michael Nylan and Trenton Wilson, have co-authored this essay for one very good reason: Michael Loewe—now long retired from his position as University Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Cambridge, but the author of no fewer than four groundbreaking essays in the last four years,Footnote 1—has always, in conversations both formal and informal, emphasized the cumulative and cooperative nature of good scholarship. Cheered by the generational turnover, rather than bemoaning a loss of “standards,” he has been generous to younger scholars coming into their own, as well as to older scholars in previous generations who labored without the benefit of electronic databases and pdfs.Footnote 2
That said, some of the themes threading through Michael Loewe's remarkable body of work seem to have been forgotten in some recent Sinological works, so we take this opportunity to remind readers of the value of a few of those themes. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the reception of Michael's work (generally laudatory) has been the willingness of some of his readers to ignore the undeniable thrust of his work when it comes to “isms” and other “presentist” views that are anathema to the trained historian. For example, Loewe was one of the first scholars to query the word “Confucianism” as accurate translation for the terms Ru 儒 and Rujia 儒家 (see below). Thankfully, several essays in this volume attest to the eagerness with which some among Loewe's many admirers forego such anachronistic views, and the contributors have been chosen to represent a mix of locations, of specializations, of ages, and of genders, in order to highlight the fact that good scholars everywhere continue to profit from Loewe's contributions, even some of his earliest.
A conscious departure from convention is the inclusion of two reception studies in this volume. Just as comparative cross-cultural studies were once excoriated by Sinologists in the early China field,Footnote 3 so, too, has the field been slow to adopt the view now widespread in Classics: that reception histories should be required reading, before advancing sweeping pronouncements positing cultural watersheds or methodological shifts. The inclusion of these studies implicitly acknowledges Michael Loewe's own pronounced interest in the question of a Chinese “heritage,” which directs us to the complicated way in which multiple pasts can exert their disparate influences on later periods. In his 1999 essay, “The Heritage Left to the Empires,” Loewe already provided a rich, albeit understated, theory of how institutions, objects, documents, practices, and ideas move through time and space, challenging any simple notion of “a” single cultural heritage or civilizational continuity. Practices from one place are “adopted or adapted” for another context unimaginable to their original communities.Footnote 4 Objects reappear in later periods only to confound later interpreters or be ascribed new meanings—or literally inscribed with new meanings.Footnote 5 Loewe knows that while educated men and women of the classical era may have seen pre-imperial bronze vessels, that familiarity did not necessarily guarantee that their inscriptions were being read and understood.
Contextualization is the primary job of the historian, of course, not to mention students of literature, philosophy, and art and archaeology.Footnote 6 For an object's post-production usage, just like a person's posthumous reputation or the cultural capital attached, detached, and reattached to certain slogans, add sedimented layers of meaning that extend the life of the person, the object, or the abstract, well beyond the time of generation. Without conscious and continual resort to such interpretive histories, our understanding of antiquity risks slipping into antiquarianism, if not the thoroughly dangerous (also unproductive) belief that there is only one empirical truth to be discovered about an artifact, a site, an idea, a person, or a family. Accordingly, the knowledge of previous interpretations provided by reception studies helps us to gauge how best to situate our own analyses along particular trajectories of intellectual inquiry, rooted in specific times, places, and traditions of learning.
In all likelihood, Michael Loewe's ability to discern the complicated nature of “heritage” relates, at least in part, to his impeccable language skills, honed first on classical Greek and Latin in school and German at home and then broadened by service as a Japanese cryptographer at Bletchley Park during World War II and by later study under Chinese tutors in Beiping, before 1949. His recollection of the Japanese surrender brings to mind the interpretive work readers of this volume continually engage in:
At the end of the war, August 1945, we started receiving messages in plain, although rather garbled, language … It turned out to be a transcript of the message that the Emperor had read to the Japanese people ordering them to surrender and bring the war to a close. The trouble was that it was written in the very formal court language of the Japanese Emperor … I have heard from Japanese I have met since the war that they heard this and hadn't the faintest idea what they were being ordered to do.
Japanese court language flowing from the radio. Zhou bronzes submitted to the Han court, after earthquakes. Oftentimes the signs do appear in “plain, although rather garbled, language.”
Loewe's sophisticated reflections on “heritage,” not coincidentally, accord with best practices, since the premier historians of the classical era were preoccupied with “later generations” (houdai 後代) and how they might receive their works.Footnote 7 Ban Gu's own table devoted to “People, Past and Recent” (Gujin renbiao 古今人表) endeavors to fix the afterlife reputations of some two thousand exemplary figures, the noble and the notorious, to improve the rhetoric of his own day and beyond. Posthumous names and generational rankings preoccupied some of the most authoritative thinkers during the early empires,Footnote 8 with the reputations assigned by succeeding generations key “signs” of an individual's inherent worth and “lingering influence” (yi feng 遺風),Footnote 9 as we can see from such compilations as the Analects (Lun yu 論語), Family Sayings of the Kongs (Kongzi jiayu 孔子家語), and The Multiple Masters of the Kong Family (Kong cong zi 孔叢子). Sima Qian 司馬遷, Yang Xiong 揚雄, and many early exegetes did much the same, in their own distinctive ways, for history was valued “as a mirror” providing ample case studies for later generations (hou dai zhi fa 後代之法).
The Problematic “Confucian” Heritage
Perhaps the most peculiar, if telling failure among Loewe's readers has been their failure to appreciate or accept what he had to say as early as Crisis and Conflict (1974), nearly fifty years ago, and has gone back to repeatedly: that we would do well to rethink the entire notion of Confucianism from the ground up, as whatever heuristic or political value the concept once held for Kang Youwei and certain Qing and early Republican-era reformers, it does not comport with the historical records we have at our disposal. As some readers will recall, Loewe made the effort in Crisis and Conflict to say that the classically trained officials were divided into two main camps: the Reformists and the Modernists. A surprising number of later readers promptly converted the Reformists into “Confucians” implacably opposed to the Modernists of Loewe's construction, magically converted into “Legalists,” despite Loewe's best efforts to shift the discussion away from this binary.
Michael Loewe begins his Dong Zhongshu, by wryly reflecting on his experience as a younger scholar half a century ago “listening to colleagues and graduate students who were quite certain that … the many centuries that preceded the foundation of the Republic in 1912 were all to be characterized by an unquestioned predominance of Confucianism.” Loewe has steadily ventured to overwrite the simplistic picture that he inherited, pointing to subtle variations and forthright disagreements in the histories. However, the continued use of scare quotes in his title of 2011 should alert us to the fact that the terrain has not shifted as much as he might have hoped. Simply put, the label “Confucian” begs too many questions, and we would do better to jettison the term altogether when referring to the early and middle periods in China.Footnote 10 What would the antique world look like to us, if we no longer presumed an ideal type or cultural ideology that no one seems able to define anyway? What would it be like to think of historical cultures in tension even, or especially, within a given political camp or master's lineage? In the main, the idea of a “Confucianism” or a “Confucian” society (like the idea of Daoism and Daoist traditions prior to the late Eastern Han communities of “Daoist religion”) continues to facilitate the application of ahistorical (or, at least unproven) categories to historical materials. Meanwhile, today's zhishi fenzi 知識分子 can style themselves “Confucian gentlemen” in the Song mode, so long as they are male, even if they cannot compose a line of poetry spontaneously, wield a brush to stunning effect, or recite whole books from memory, when prompted. In general, such fond fancies, being airy abstractions, make it far too easy to think we understand the strange grammar of sociopolitical relations in early China. If only we dig a bit deeper, we can discover that the early sources do not confirm the ideas we entertain today, nor should we expect them to, given how different were the social, political, gender, and economic conditions of the antique past. Our cynicism may not even be their cynicism.
Michael Loewe with Nathan Sivin and David Keightley, in Berkeley, California. Image courtesy of Thomas H. Hahn (fall semester, 2014).
Refusing to rely on the explanatory power of an empty signifier promptly deflates multiple imaginaries buttressed by such terms. For lack of a word, the firm divisions between virtue and law, ritual and punishment, male and female, ruled and ruler, tend to crumble. Thinking without the term “state” (as the editors of China's Early Empires: A Re-Appraisal charged their contributors to do) likewise forces researchers to think more clearly about sociopolitical conditions: Were the sources referring to the emperor, his surrogates (regents, dowager empresses, powerful favorites), the court, administrators, or rather the domain or realm or empire, or even the imperial pretensions?Footnote 11 Loewe asks us, like another good scholar of antiquity, to refuse to “look at other languages with lenses entirely constructed of our own.”Footnote 12 Much exciting work remains to be done, but certainly two of the first cultural stereotypes that would have to be overturned would be those pertaining to Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi.Footnote 13 On the subject of Han Wudi, Loewe has had something to say: that the histories portray him as the pawn of successive waiqi 外戚 consort clans rather than the strong ruler exalted in primers and textbooks.Footnote 14
The problem promptly emerges when we survey recent attempts to escape from the “structuralism” and “linear history” enjoined by most early modern paradigms (and not only Marxist). For instance, Hou Xudong 侯旭東 (Tsinghua), one of the most creative and erudite historians working today, ventures to map out alternative “relations of relationships” (guanxi de guanxi 關係的關係) for early China.Footnote 15 In a recent book-length treatment of favoritism in Western Han, Hou sharply contrasts “Confucian” (rujia 儒家) thinking with “Confucian scholars” (rusheng 儒生) to focus on what he deems a perpetual irony in Chinese history: that the “Confucian scholars” criticize the emperor for the very “private” (si 私) relationships that by rights they should praise as foundational to the Confucian development of the “public” or “public-minded” (gong 公) virtues. In Hou's history, “Confucian thought” remains no more than a vague cultural ideal, while “Confucian scholars” are private actors who in self-serving ways deploy the language of the public good to protest the private relationships of the emperor. Inadvertently, Hou's work reveals the need to make sure that all categories we bandy about derive from the texts and subtexts of the sources at hand. Despite the undeniable attractions of Fei Xiaotong's 費孝通 “differential mode” (chaxu geju 差序格局) or Hou's “vortex” (woxuan 渦旋) of favoritism, the sources never portray a specifically “Confucian” mode of acting that could provide instant modern access to the texture of the old court relations. Instead, we are left with language games playing with the vocabulary of favors, fears, or ritual duties and modes of deference.
Michael Loewe himself has noted how “an ideal background in which the authority of a legitimate emperor passed as the norm … not subject to question” could “act as a support for those who governed the empire; or … be open to exploitation by ambitious persons … seeking personal advancement.”Footnote 16 A striking feature of Michael Loewe's corpus has been a marked willingness to leave readers with this sort of unresolved assessment.Footnote 17 (A list of all the questions Loewe has posed of late supplies a future research agenda that might well occupy scholars for the next century or so.) With his typical acuity, Loewe has asked, “Did conformity with li 禮 tend to inhibit a direct criticism of a man's superior? Did a more general acceptance of the idealized past provide a ready means of decrying the present?”Footnote 18 What, after all, do we know about the capacity of the ritual language and gesture to shape the social dynamics between the critics of the powerful and those whom they would denounce? And how in the end did early imperial writers (or later writers for that matter) understand the analogy or disanalogy between past and present?
On the Fraught Relation between History and Archaeology
Michael Loewe has provided an exemplary model in yet another way, a model that we hope will go forward but is under constant threat from geopolitical forces with nationalist agendas: neither the received texts nor the excavated texts are infallible guides to the past, and each corpus must be assessed in light of the other. Today's specialists tend to study epigraphy, history of the early empires, or archaeology, and each field is the poorer for not being conversant with the allied fields outside their disciplines, especially now that increasing numbers of “found” (unprovenanced) manuscripts are surfacing, absent archaeological contexts, to raucous acclaim by some and mixtures of curiosity, cautiousness, and condemnation by others. Too few archaeologists recognize the shakiness of their theoretical models, whose separate parts can sometimes be anything but “scientific,” when based on impossibly small samples or on outmoded historical “analyses” that posit, quite improbably for the antique world, a unified “China.”Footnote 19 Historians need not feel too cocky, given how remarkably hard it is to move beyond the capital-centered narratives they've been given. Thanks to archaeology, as Michael Loewe recently observed in telephone conversations, good historians today probably know more about the early empires than many, if not all officials who sat in the capitals of Chang'an or Luoyang. Even so, there are many questions we cannot possibly answer at this remove.
Archaeologists have an immediate remedy to hand: they can consult (and then take to heart) Giorgio Buccellati's A Critique of Archaeological Reason,Footnote 20 which outlines three levels of abstraction archaeologist must utilize to “make sense” of their finds, with each “higher” level of abstraction necessarily more like a Rorschach test than a sober, evidence-based inquiry into the distant past. For historians, probably the most salutary course is still an annual re-reading of David Hackett Fischer's Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought.Footnote 21 Invoking an archaeological consensus or a historical consensus is less than helpful, when so often a “consensus” indicates no more than the presence of an echo chamber. In a relatively mature research field, it is distressing to find archaeologists and historians, unwittingly or not, still cleaving close to a barely modified Marxian analysis of “progressive, linear history,” since a short journey outside the China field would alert them to the enormous problems of imposing such frameworks onto the landscapes they would ably survey.Footnote 22
Michael Loewe's work often introduces comparative dimensions, generally in subtle ways. Loewe's profound respect for the collaborative project of Nathan Sivin and Geoffrey Lloyd surfaces throughout his writings. By his invitation, China's Early Empires included no fewer than three essays on openly comparative topics. More recently, Loewe has remarked on the difficulties of parsing the distinctive styles of Tacitus (“openly hostile and straightforward”) versus Ban Gu (“obliged to write in a far more restricted way”), in the belief that stylistic conventions do not necessarily mimic realities on the ground:Footnote 23 “we may ask how far such accounts conceal a somewhat different state of affairs; perhaps of open and uninhibited discussion; perhaps of sharp and bitter altercation; perhaps of decisions taken arbitrarily by a powerful man at court.”
Generations and Generosity
“When we read the language, it's not a dead language. It comes alive!” Michael Loewe's face lit up and his hands came alive giving form to that word as it came from his lips. And indeed it does—at least if you have the pleasure of reading classical Chinese with Michael Loewe. That comment was one of the many memorable moments that Berkeley students continue to recount after Michael Loewe's extended visit to campus in 2014. Over multiple sessions, graduate students at Berkeley gathered around the seminar table in the East Asian Library, with oversized copies of several unpunctuated editions of the Han shu 21 on the table, to read the description of the Jia liang hu 嘉量斛 and surrounding passages. “The right method is to use bronze, 1 chi square, with a circular area around it with empty spaces at the sides of the square.”Footnote 24 Michael Loewe could barely wait to show us the image of the object described so carefully in the text, and his unassuming earnestness and his incredible generosity of spirit make him an extraordinary scholar and teacher.
A recent photograph of Michael Loewe, posed here with He Ruyue and Michael Nylan, in Xi’an, during his visit to the People’s Republic of China in 2014.
For her part, Michael Nylan can barely remember a recent stay with Michael Loewe when the subject of the Junior Sinologues in the immediate post-World War II years did not come up.Footnote 25 As a young academic who thought of himself as much a European as an Englishman and was craving intellectual stimulation after his years at Bletchley and GCHQ, the speech of the wise was “a honeycomb of honey, sweet to his soul, and healing his bones.” (Both of the Frankes loom large in Loewe's memories, as does Étienne Balazs.) No less often Michael spoke of the three men whose mentorship Michael Loewe had profited most from in his early professional life in London and in Cambridge:
1. Ernest Julius Walter Simon (d. February 22, 1981), CBE, FBA was a German sinologist and librarian. Simon was born in Berlin and was educated at the University of Berlin. By 1919, Simon was already librarian in Berlin, but he fled the Nazis in 1934, at which point he came to London. An expert in classical Chinese and classical Tibetan, Simon taught Chinese at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) from 1936 to 1960, published numerous essays on linguistics, and edited the journal Asia Major for over a decade (1964–1975). Michael wrote his obituary for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 2 (1982), 44–47.
2. Anthony F. P. [François Paulus] Hulsewé (d. December 1993) (always “Ton” to Michael), a student in Leiden of J. J. Duyvendak, another famous Sinologue, was expert in Chinese law. Born in Berlin, Hulsewé spent nearly all of his childhood in the Netherlands, and then studied in China in 1931–32, with Liang Qichao's erudite brother. Most of World War II, he spent as prisoner in a Japanese camp in Batavia. In 1946, Hulsewé became Lecturer at Leiden and, two years after Duyvendak's death in 1954, Hulsewé succeeded his teacher as Professor of Chinese at Leiden, a position he held until his retirement in 1975. An obituary was provided by his colleague Erik Zürcher: “In Memoriam Anthony Hulsewé (1910–1993),” T'oung Pao 80.1–3 (1994), 1–4.
3. D. C. Lau (Liu Dianjue 劉殿爵 in Mandarin; Lau Din Cheuk in Cantonese, d. 2010), like Michael himself, had initially studied in another field. (For Michael, it was Classics, and for Lau, Western philosophy). In 1950, Lau took up a post at SOAS, determined to develop a center for the study of Chinese philosophy. Appointed in 1965 to the newly created Readership in Chinese Philosophy, in 1970 Lau became Professor of Chinese in the University of London. In 1978, he returned to Hong Kong to take up the Chair of Chinese Language and Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. On his retirement from there in 1989, he began the massive project to computerize the entire body of extant ancient Chinese works, with a series of sixty concordances we know as CHANT or ICS Concordance Series.
What strikes us both at this remove was the combined erudition of these men, also their wide range of interests and cosmopolitan backgrounds. All of Michael's mentors were men of the world; none were English, though England had welcomed two of them to its shores in difficult times.
For those who have not been lucky enough to have studied with Michael Loewe, there are fortunately a number of resources that capture something of his spirit. These include:
1. An mpg3 of an early interview with Michael Loewe, courtesy of Hal Roth (Brown University), has been prepared and will be uploaded to the Berkeley History Website.
2. A number of conversations with Michael Loewe are available on YouTube. Particularly fun to watch is that with Roel Sterckx and Jenny Zhao www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzu5NvpXf4A, a full translation of which was published in 2020 (17.3) in Kexue wenhua pinglun 科學文化評論 (Science & Culture Review), in conjunction with Michael Loewe's award (fall, 2020) from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Recently, another conversation featuring Michael Loewe has been added, thanks to the Center for Chinese Studies at UC-Berkeley.Footnote 26
3. An update on Michael Loewe's party on the occasion of his one hundred sui birthday: Select photos from the party hosted by Saint John's for his most recent birthday have been uploaded to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies webpage, accessible here: www.ames.cam.ac.uk/news/celebrating-michael-loewes-99th-birthday. The able photographer was Kelsey Granger, herself a Ph.D. candidate at Trinity College.
Acknowledgments
In closing, the record must state that a great many people helped Michael Nylan during the editing process, chiefly out of their profound respect for and friendship with Michael Loewe. The following scholars (listed in alphabetical order) rendered substantial assistance to her, as special editor for this journal issue: Stuart Aque (Chen Songnian 陳松年), Robert Ashmore (Luo Bingshu 羅秉恕), Mark Laurent Asselin (An Minhui 安民輝), Lucas Bender (Lu Bende 盧本德), Andrea Bréard (Bai Anya 白安雅), Yunqing Chen (Chen Yunqing 陳韻青), Mark Csikszentmihalyi (Qi Simin 齊思敏), Dorothee Schaab-Hanke (Sha Dunru 沙敦如), Luke Habberstad (He Lukai 何祿凱), Thomas H. Hahn (Han Tao 韓濤), Andrew Hardy (He An 河岸), John Kieschnick (Ke Jiahao 柯嘉豪), Cary Liu (Liu Yiwei 劉怡瑋), Geoffrey Lloyd (Luo Jie 羅界) Matthias Richter (Li Mengtao 李孟濤), Hal D. Roth (Luo Hao 羅浩), Shi Jian (Shi Jian 石瑊), Charles Sanft (Chen Liqiang 陳力強), Koichi Shinohara 筱原悌一, Hans van Ess (Ye Han 葉翰), Donald B. Wagner (Hua Dao'an 華道安), Ye Wa 叶娃, and Yin Shoufu 殷守甫, not to mention the rest of the contributors to this journal issue, whom I consulted frequently, if informally, on sundry matters. Only a single crotchety person (best left unnamed) refused the invitation to offer expert advice on a problem. Quite a complement for the centenarian.
Vanessa Davies, a fine Egyptologist, provided me with editorial assistance at every step of the way, since I wanted to be sure that the essays in this issue would speak as well to newcomers in the field as to old China hands. Her expert guidance was of immense comfort throughout the process. (We will have to generate a good Chinese name for her.)
Additionally, I would like to thank Albert Chung, Jianye He, and Deborah Rudolph of Berkeley's East Asian Library, for the aid they rendered at various stages in planning and executing this volume. Needless to say, to Sarah Allan and the Early China editorial board special thanks are owed, as they had the foresight to see that such a dedicated volume was welcome at this stage of the journal's life and the Early China field more generally.
