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The Heritage of Books, Collecting and LibrariesThis issue of China Heritage Quarterly appears at the end of a year of major commemorations, anniversaries and historical moments in China. These 'light and dark anniversaries', as we have called them, have been variously commented on in our March and June issues. This December 2009 issue, which marks the end of the fifth year of our publication, reflects on another anniversary, the death of the bibliophile and librarian Miao Quansun 繆荃孫 in 1919. Miao passed away in the year of the May Fourth demonstrations, a major turning point for modern China's New Culture Movement. The May Fourth was a period that saw the rise of a populist iconoclasm and the willful abandonment of many aspects of Chinese cultural traditions. While contemporary China claims a 'disavowal of revolution', a crude populism that was first commercialized in the 1910s and 20s retains a vital purchase on Chinese civic life. Miao Quansun died ninety years ago, in December 1919, and as we were preparing this issue an old friend and beloved mentor, Yang Xianyi 楊憲益, passed away in Beijing. He was ninety-four years old. The guest editor of this issue, Duncan Campbell, writes of the legacy of Miao Quansun, a man who helped create China's modern libraries and a man for whom learning was reflected in a life of reading, as well as the collecting and sharing of books. In the Features section of this issue Duncan presents further accounts by the collector Wei Li 韋力 of his search for the country's old private libraries (cangshu lou 藏書樓). Don Cohn, a translator, writer, traveller and book buyer reflects on his adventures, and misadventures, in the book markets of Reform Era China, while Huang Shang 黃裳, the modern-day collector and book writer speaks of how one book in his private collection survived the Cultural Revolution. In the new T'ien Hsia section we reproduce a number of articles related to books, libraries and collecting that were published in the pages of that journal some seventy years ago, while in Articles the Sinologist, educator and novelist Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) reflects on the dangers of industrial-scale language teaching during the recent 'China boom'. A new chapter from The Rings of Beijing introduces a Han supremacist and a reprinted work by Carrington L. Goodrich reflects the racial tensions during the Ming-Qing transition. New Scholarship contains a report on a fascinating conference on the seventeenth-century Polish Jesuits Michał Boym, Jan Mikołaj Smogulecki and Andrzej Rudomina held in Kraków, Poland, in late September this year. In National Ceremonies, research notes by the editor and Sang Ye, we describe some preliminary work on the background of new state rituals in Qufu 曲阜, Shandong province, and Shaoxing 紹興, Zhejiang, which are part of 'national commemorative ceremonies', elements of China's state-sanctioned intangible cultural heritage. The issue concludes with an envoi to 2009, a year of commemorations: Gloria and Michael Davies review the film The Founding of a Republic, a mock-historical epic produced to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of China's People's Republic.  In conclusion, I would note that this year marks another anniversary, one relevant to this journal and its home at The Australian National University. The date 13 December 2009 marked the centenary of the signing into law of the Seat of Government Acceptance Act. This act saw the state of New South Wales surrender land for the creation of the Australian Capital Territory, the location of the city of Canberra and what would be the new nation's political centre. The territory shares two historical connections with China, both of which relate also to its neighbour Japan. One of the reasons that the new parliament decided to create an inland capital for the Commonwealth of Australia was to better protect the city from potential attack from the sea. A particular fear was the Japanese Imperial Navy, which had only recently proved its ability in assaulting the coastal defences of Port Arthur (Lüshun 旅順) in the Liaodong Peninsula during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Secondly, the city plans for Canberra, created by Chicago architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, are said to have subsequently inspired an imitation in the latter-day planning of the 'imperial city' of Xinjing 新京 (formerly Changchun 長春), the capital of Manchukuo 滿州國 from 1932 to 1945. As ever, I am deeply grateful to Jude Shanahan for her patient and well-humoured collaboration in producing this issue of China Heritage Quarterly, and to Daniel Sanderson and Janos Batten for their work scanning illustrations and texts. |
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