A Singular Listlessness in British Sinology? An Interview with Professor Timothy Barrett

Q: Singular Listlessness has aroused the curiosity and interest of many people. The title seems very pessimistic. Can I ask you first what made you settle for this title? Is it a hint at your conclusion?

B: The title of the book is from the nineteenth-century Chinese Novels, Translated from the Originals, by J.F. Davis, a governor of Hong Kong. Davis laments the state of Chinese studies in Britain where, "One is at a complete loss to account for the almost total ignorance . . . concerning a people with whom we carried on such large dealings."

Remarking on how far Britain has fallen behind France in its knowledge of China, Davis goes on to say, "It is not easy to explain this singular listlessness by saying that the subject was devoid of interest, for whether we consider the extraordinary nature of the government of China, or the no less extraordinary structure of its language, it would seem that it had been necessary only to know that 'such things were', in order to produce much industry in their investigation."

Davis wrote this in 1822, but the problem has still not been solved today. I hope that my book can awaken people from the illusion that there is a great tradition of British sinology. We must recognise clearly the fact that, aside from Europe, a rapid post-war expansion of Chinese studies has taken place in American universities backed by sums of money undreamed of in Britain.

Then there are the newcomers to the field, like Canada and Australia, which are trying hard to catch up, and whose provision is now on a level with ours. If we continue to have an attitude of "singular listlessness" then it will surely become impossible to keep even the trained staff working here at present.

Q: In your book you say how, when you were an undergraduate at the Chinese department of Cambridge University in the 1960s, you felt you were becoming part of some great British sinological tradition. What made you feel like that at that time and why have you had doubts since?

B: As an undergraduate at Cambridge I heard my teachers talk with respect and affection of their teachers, it was all too easy to imagine that in undertaking the study of Chinese one was becoming part of some great British sinological tradition. But in fact the supposed tradition stretched back no further: my teachers' teachers, many of them scholars of foreign origin, were the generation that had established Chinese studies in Britain on a professional footing.

They had to learn a lot more by themselves and it was hard to find a good teacher, J.K. Fairbank reveals that when he arrived at Oxford in the 1930s, eager to learn Chinese, Soothill left him to fend for himself. There is also a Cambridge tradition that Herbert Giles (of the Wade-Giles romanization system) used to chase away prospective students with a stick.

I have been looking at Giles' examination papers and they are a joke. Some of the passages for translation would be from joke books or whatever he happened to be reading at the time, and even the papers on history were a bit of a joke.

After Giles, Moule was supposed to be a good scholar, but even he set some exam papers which were pretty low standard. For example, you had to answer questions on people in Chinese history. One of them, of course, was General Gordon. From the British point of view Gordon is a very famous person in Chinese history. So obviously they had a rather limited point of view.

Q: How then did you come to have your doubts?

B: I had always been interested in the specific question that started me writing, which was the collection of Chinese books in British libraries. I had certainly been interested since the early 1980s when my wife was a librarian in Cambridge. Occasionally she would have to organize an exhibition and people would want to know things like what was the oldest book and why was it there.

These questions started to interest me and I started to see what had been written, for example, about the oldest books in the Bodleian, although always under the guidance of Professor Van der Loon, who has studied these things in great depth.

When the British Library had a conference on Chinese books, I was asked to do a general survey and I was very happy to accept the invitation and do it in as much depth as possible. I also felt looking at the development of Chinese studies in Britain was one aspect of Chinese studies to which a British scholar could usefully contribute. Compared to continental Europe, it can be seen that we have fallen way behind.

Q: That will surprise people! Anglo-Chinese contacts were made very early and there has been a flourishing trade.

B: That is true, but trade contacts were increasingly characterised by a typically strident Anglo-Saxon voice in Chinese affairs. We know enough about the few individuals who were stimulated by trading contacts to form by contrast a rather depressing picture of how much interest the average Englishman in East Asia took in the culture surrounding him.

Elizabeth I did try dispatching messages to the Emperor of China, some couched in a fashion which may be described as half-intelligent in Latin. There is no sign, though, that they ever reached their destination. Absurdly enough, the practice of addressing the Emperor of China hopefully in Latin persisted into the nineteenth century.

Fortunately, by the time that the first British merchant vessel did establish contact with the Chinese authorities in Canton in 1637, a more helpful intermediary happened to be on the scene--"Antonio, a Capher Eathiopian Abissin or Curled Head," one of a number of slaves from Macao who had managed to escape into Chinese territory.

As the British became more established in Far Eastern waters they saw little need to learn Chinese themselves. Seeing how Koxinga, the Ming loyalist, had displaced the Dutch from Taiwan, they thought his successor might reconquer the mainland and accordingly sent a letter in English in the name of King Charles Ⅱ to the "King of Tywan". It was not until after the Manchu conquest that the directors of the East India Company decided "Taiwan is good for nothing now, and we will not have to settle any factor there again."

Q: The China trade of the East India Company was very large. They must have trained personnel in Chinese for practical purposes?

B: Yes. In the eighteenth century a British employee of the East India Company did try to use Chinese studies for a more practical end but it was a complete disaster. In 1759 an employee called James Flint tried to sail north to deliver a petition to the Emperor asking for more trade ports to be opened up. The Emperor was furious and imprisoned Flint and executed his Chinese assistant.

The Company invested more in language training after this and Flint's place was taken by Thomas Bevan. When Bevan retired in 1773, however, the number of language students remained barely adequate for the Company's needs--perhaps due to the reluctance of any more Chinese to martyr themselves in the cause of British sinology.

The last two decades of the century thus found the British having to rely on members of the Danish and French houses in Canton for their dealing with Chinese officials.

When Britain at last decided to send the diplomatic mission under Lord Macartney, there was just nobody in the country who could act as interpreter. They had to go to the Chinese College in Naples, where educated Chinese might be found.

Q: On the continent, the earliest sinologists tended to come from diplomatic, colonial or missionary backgrounds. Was it the same in Britain?

B: Basically yes. By the start of the seventeenth century Catholic Europe as a whole had become involved in the attempt to bring Christianity to China. They sent missionaries who brought back a lot of knowledge. The eighteenth century in Europe was marked by a willingness to take China seriously, but the average British writer seems to have gone out of his way to debunk the notion that China was anything special. Anyone interested in China was viewed as an eccentric.

A famous example is Thomas Manning. He was a Cambridge graduate and accomplished mathematician who, after studying Chinese in Paris for two years, sailed to Canton in 1806 and tried to enter the interior through Tibet. His feelings of frustration come out strongly in his Tibet diary: "What fools the Company are to give me no commission. . . What use are their embassies when their ambassador cannot speak to a soul. . . Fools, fools, fools."

Q: Under what conditions did British missionaries and diplomats become sinologists and teachers?

B: The great missionary Robert Morrison had begun learning Chinese in London in 1805 by using dictionaries and the help of a Chinese person from Canton and became the first British teacher of Chinese to hold a class in London, some twenty years later. When he died he asked his friend Sir George Staunton to dispose of his books.

Staunton persuaded University College, London, to appoint a professor of Chinese for a period of five years in return for the books. In 1837, against the wishes of some elements, the first professor started at a salary of ￡60 per annum, which was described by one commentator as a sum "about equal to half that which an English gentleman awards to a good Cook, or a smart Valet-de-chambre!"

Then there is the missionary James Legge, who became professor of Chinese at Oxford in 1876. His translation of the whole of the Confucian classics is still useful today. Yet it was again not the university that saw any need for a professor of Chinese, rather his friends raised the money providing a salary of ￡95 per annum. Even Beigium had installed a sinologist in a university before this.

At Cambridge, Sir Thomas Wade, who had served as an interpreter and diplomat in China and is famous for the Wade-Giles system of romanization, became professor of Chinese in 1888 after donating a collection of over 650 books to the university.

Nevertheless, at the height of British imperialism, the country could afford no more than five professors of Chinese--a number it has never achieved since.

Q: The general image of Chinese collections in Britain is very bountiful, especially the Tunhuang collection at the British Library. What is the relationship of such collections to British sinology?

B: As a whole, the collections in Britain are quite good. Oxford got its first collection in the seventeenth century, but the books were from a Dutch scholar. The first catalogue to mention Chinese books in Britain appeared in 1697 and relied upon the work of a visiting Chinese person who gravely listed a popular novel as a copy of the Mencius.

The biggest collection had become the British Museum's, which had been increased in part as a result of the use of force. In 1843 Queen Victoria bestowed on the institution materials captured by her troops in Canton in 1842.

It seems, however, that the British Museum, unlike other libraries in Europe, did not have a policy for collecting or even a regular agent in Peking. When a librarian did try to make a catalogue it was dismissed by Giles as "a monument of immature Scholarship."

Even in the early part of this century the Bodleian and British Museum still had no policies for building their Chinese collections--in the 1930s Oxford still had no copy of Li Po's poems, for example. As for the Tunhuang manuscripts, they were shipped to London in 1907 by Sir Aurel Stein, but it took fifty years before the first catalogue was published.

Q: If the conditions for sinologists were so tough before the war, then what was the position of great pioneers such as Arthur Waley and Joseph Needham?

B: The British Museum was home for a time to Arthur Waley, the best known British orientalist of this century. When tempted with a chair at Cambridge he is said to have replied, "I would rather be dead."

Joseph Needham, the author of Science and Civilisation in China and founder of the Needham Research Institute, was originally an embryologist and founded the institute with donations received mainly from abroad. Although the contributions made by these people have been enormous, they would not call themselves "sinologists."

One conclusion that can be drawn from my book is that in its attempts at understanding China, Britain has always depended on the kindness of strangers, like Antonio the Caffer, and those from outside professional sinology, like Waley and Needham.

Q: One of the things you point out in your book is the amount of work contributed to famous projects by less-than-famous Chinese assistants.

B: Yes, I have become very interested in the way that a lot of advances in Chinese studies have been due to personal relationships between British and Chinese people. In Legge's case, Wang T'ao was obviously very helpful, and Joseph Needham would not have produced his work without the stimulus of Liu Kuei-jen's company.

It is also interesting to look at cases where it has gone very wrong. Jonathan Spence has written a book called The Question of Hu which refers to a Chinese man of that name who was brought back to France by a missionary trying to use him as a research assistant. Things went very badly wrong, however, and the Chinese assistant was eventually locked away in a lunatic asylum for some time.

As I point out in my book, the first case we have of somebody using a Chinese assistant was actually a Portuguese assistant using a slave--he bought some books and also bought a Chinese slave to read them. I think things have evolved since then.

Q: You mentioned that Giles would use his stick to chase away students, and you have just mentioned the attitude of Waley towards Cambridge. I also heard that David Hawkes has become a recluse in Wales and that he thinks teaching is torture. Do these people represent a general personality common to British sinologists?

B: Giles was very distinguished, but looking at some of his contributions to sinology, such as "Traces of Aviation in Ancient China", one forms an impression of a man who had absolutely no one to talk to, no one to talk him out of his own private mystical musings.

Professor Hawkes is a very good scholar, but not everybody can enjoy teaching and executive work. Such people are exceptional scholars.

Q: Why do you say in your book that when you were a student at Cambridge that was the high point of Chinese studies in Britain?

B: That was a time when Cambridge was quite generously staffed by outstanding sinologists, such as Twitchett, Van der Loon, Elvin and others. It was the right time and place to be an undergraduate. It is a pity that nearly all these people have left Britain and some have already retired.

Q: What were the conditions that enabled a big project like the Cambridge History of China to be undertaken at Cambridge, the likes of which are seldom seen these days in Chinese departments?

B: It is interesting that two of the largest projects on premodern China have come out of Cambridge: Needham's and Twitchett's. In a sense, I think that Professor Twitchett was responding to Needham's project, thinking that there was room for another sort of project that was not the work of an inspired amateur but took a more professional approach.

Q: Why then did sinology decline after that time?

B: Up to that time Chinese studies had been built up after the experience of the war, when a lack of personnel equipped with oriental languages was sorely needed. Then in the early 1980s the government cut support for universities, although it had started before that.

What happened was that when somebody left they were not always replaced. So the number of people teaching has diminished. The whole generation from the post-war period started to retire during the 1980s and that meant a lot of the leaders started to disappear and were not replaced because of the government cuts.

The worst effects were stopped only after a government report under Sir Peter Parker, but there is hardly an expansion. The future is not now as bleak as it once was, but it would be an exaggeration to call it rosy.

Q: Is that the reason why you decided to make the conference paper a book? What kind of a response did you expect when you delivered such a critical paper?

B: I was not actually at the conference because my wife was going to give birth, so somebody else read it for me. I was very happy to have a new daughter that day, but I did not get much critical reaction at the time, which is why I decided to expand the paper and publish it as a book. I want to have a bit more reaction.

It has also allowed me to make contact with people who are doing more detailed studies in this area. Perhaps in future there will be much more work done and we will have a clearer idea of how Britain's view of China developed.

[Picture Caption]

Professor Barrett's overview of British sinology has surprised many people.

Is China really such a remote and mysterious place that it must be wisely left in the hands of the necessary experts?

(Left) Left to fend for himself at Oxford in the 1930s the eminent American sinologist J.K. Fairbank later condemned European "microsinology."

Right: Due to a lack of qualified personnel, Chinese speakers were often borrowed from third countries for Britain's commerce and diplomacy with China in the eighteenth century, and the Oriental College at Naples, Italy, was one source of translators. This photo shows a class in progress in the College's Chinese department.

(Left) A huge contribution to European sinology has been made by missionaries and Britain is no exception.

(Right) At the height of empire, Britain could afford no more than five professors of Chinese. Meanwhile China was fascinated with the West, as shown by this scene of Queen Victoria and her prime minister pictured in the Shanghai illustrated periodical Tien-shih-chai Hua-pao.

Schilars like Joseph Needham whose roots lie in other fields have made some of the greatest achievements to British sinology.

Originally from Holland, Professor Piet Van der Loon has won wide respect for his sinological work in Britain.

Professor Barrett hopes his book will stimulate further work that can give us an even clearer picture of the development of the British view of China.

Is China really such a remote and mysterious place that it must be wisely left in the hands of the necessary experts?

Left to fend for himself at Oxford in the 1930s the eminent American sinologist J.K. Fairbank later condemned European "microsinology.".

Due to a lack of qualified personnel, Chinese speakers were often borrowed from third countries for Britain's commerce and diplomacy with China in the eighteenth century, and the Oriental College at Naples, Italy, was one source of translators. This photo shows a class in progress in the College's Chinese department.

（Left） A huge contribution to European sinology has been made by missionaries and Britain is no exception.

At the height of empire, Britain could afford no more than five professors of Chinese. Meanwhile China was fascinated with the West, as shown by this scene of Queen Victoria and her prime minister pictured in the Shanghai illustrated periodical Tien-shih-chai Hua-pao.

Schilars like Joseph Needham whose roots lie in other fields have made some of the greatest achievements to British sinology.

Originally from Holland, Professor Piet Van der Loon has won wide respect for his sinological work in Britain.

Professor Barrett hopes his book will stimulate further work that can give us an even clearer picture of the development of the British view of China.