Chinese manuscripts — Shahon.org

I was reading up on the history of simplified characters and I came across a small book called 1957年文字改革辩论选辑 (Shanghai: Xin zhishi, 1958) which contains a series of articles from contemporary periodicals about the writing reform. I was surprised to find two articles criticizing Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 (1911-1966), the famous archaeologist and palaeographer, for his opposing the simplification of Chinese characters. I knew about him encountering such criticism during the Cultural Revolution that eventually led to his suicide in 1966. What surprised me about these two articles that they were written by the eminent linguists Tang Lan 唐蘭 (1901-1979) and Wang Li 王力 (1900-1986).

Tang Lan’s article is titled “Is the rightist Chen Mengjia a ’scholar’?” 右派分子陈梦家是“学者”嗎？ (I am reproducing the characters as they appear in the book: you can see that this was written between the two large waves of simplification, with some characters simplified, others not). Right in the first paragraph, Tang Lan answers the question with a definite “No!” and explains that he is in fact a “counterfait scholar, in reality an overzealous and unscrupulous carreerist, an opportunist always on a lookout for personal gain, only pretending to know things, a swindler who has gained his fame by deceiving the world.” Wow! — was my reaction after reading this short introduction. But the rest of the article continues along these lines, for a total of 15 pages. And this was written by Tang Lan, one of the top palaeographers of modern China, whose works are still being used by new generations of linguists and philologists.

Wang Li’s article is called “Criticizing the rightist Chen Mengjia for his absurd views against the reform of writing” 批判右派分子陈梦家关于反对文字改革的荒謬言論. This text is not as viscious as that by Tang Lan, yet it is still a direct criticism of Chen, seeing his opposition as a covert attack on the Communist Party. I am sure in later years, after the Cultural Revolution was over and China began its economic reforms, Wang Li was not proud of this article. Since Tang Lan died in 1979, he might have not lived to regret his attitudes.

These were the kinds of attacks that eventually led to the suicide of Chen Mengjia. Many of his attackers are still alive, fulfilling important academic positions. Of course, we can claim that Chen was overly sensitive — he was a poet and an aesthete, apparently not the surviving type. But judging from the amount of criticism that survives about him from the 1950s, he must have been under tremendous pressure.

A while ago I published an article called “The story of the Chinese seals found in Ireland” (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2008, 18: 465-479) about a group of Chinese porcelain seals discovered in different locations throughout Ireland during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Since at the time there was no easily available information on the date and origin of these objects, they went down in history as one of the great mysteries. After learning from an expert that the inscriptions on them were written in the “seal script” which was in use in China at the time of Confucius, everyone assumed that the seals themselves were three thousand years old, which, of course, made their appearance in Ireland even more enigmatic. The discovery of these artefacts coincided with the period of Irish nationalism which sought to separate themselves from England as much as possible, and part of this trend was the increased belief in the Oriental origin of the Irish people. The “ancient” Chinese seals came to signify a long-lost connection between Ireland and the East.

The reality was of course much simpler, yet not less interesting. The seals were fairly new and came to Ireland shortly before their discovery. That the inscriptions on them were in the seal script had ne bearing on their age, since most seals in China use the same archaicized seal script, even today. But the story of the mystery is intriguing because it sheds light on nationalistically driven attitudes during the 19th century and an overzealous eagerness to use the seals to support contemporary theories.

This is the story in a nutshell. In any case, I am posting this here because there were a few inscriptions (out of the total sixty-one) that I was not able to read. Perhaps the images will trigger someone else’s memory and we can finally have all of them deciphered. You will see that there is some overlap between them, some characters appear in more than one inscription, and the first three inscriptions are the same. Yet I can only read part of them — the undeciphered characters are marked with a square box.