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FOCUS ON
Wine (jiu 酒) and
Commemorating Yang Xianyi 楊憲益
In the December 2009 issue of China Heritage Quarterly we remembered the translator, poet, raconteur, friend and mentor Yang Xianyi, who passed away at the age of ninety-four on 23 November that year. At that time we announced that the March 2011 issue of this publication would commemorate Xianyi and his wife and collaborator Gladys Yang. Originally, we planned to take the heritage of Liu Ling 劉伶 (c.225-280 CE), the famously drunken member of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove (Zhulin Qixian 竹林七賢), as the theme of the issue. However, we have expanded the subject to focus on jiu (commonly translated as 'wine') and one of the most famous lines on the subject from a poem by Cao Cao 曹操, 何以解憂，唯有杜康 (he yi jie you, wei you Dukang): 'How does one dispel despondency? Wine, only wine.'
Fig.1 Yang Xianyi (Source: Tang Yu 唐瑜, Accounts from the Master of The Layabouts Lodge [Erliu Tang zhu jishi 二流堂主纪事], p.23)
In this issue then we celebrate Yang Xianyi, the Wine Sage (jiuxian 酒仙), and we remember his circle of friends known from the 1940s as 'The Layabouts Lodge' (Erliu Tang 二流堂). It is the talent and patient wit, the undiminished spirit and the political decency of these translators, editors, writers and artists that lives on despite the best efforts of the party-state to harmonise out of existence the discomforting episodes of their lives, their courageous public statements and their brave acts. Thus, in Features we include tributes to Xianyi, as well as work by the playwright Wu Zuguang 吳祖光, the calligrapher Huang Miaozi 黄苗子, the artists Ding Cong 丁聪 and Fang Cheng 方成, and the raffish writer and editor Zou Ting 鄒霆.
In T'ien Hsia Edward McDonald contributes a thoughtful article to our on-going considerations of New Sinology, and we quote the historian Frederick W. Mote who wrote about how his university built up its East Asian Studies program. We also carry a quaintly erudite study by Qian Zhongshu (or C.S. Ch'ien 錢鐘書) of Yang Xianyi's 1940s' translation of Liu E's 劉鶚 famous 'autobiographiction' Mr Decadent (Laocan Youji 老殘遊記), as well as a review by Edward Ainger of C.P. Fitzgerald's 1935 book China: A Short Cultural History.
In Articles we feature another oral history work by Sang Ye from the up-coming book The Rings of Beijing, a grimly engaging study of the all-but-forgotten Maoist-era fad for injecting chicken blood and, with permission from the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, we reproduce Yuen Ren Chao's 趙元任 absorbing 1969 essay on translation and its art.
It is a great pleasure to publish in New Scholarship an essay and translation by the Qing historian Eugenio Menegon of Boston University related to the emperor Kangxi 康熙 and one particular Jesuit beard. Eugenio's translation cornucopia fits well with a theme of this issue: the movement of ideas, language and incident across space, language and time. These concerns are also central to the work of our colleague and frequent contributor, Duncan Campbell, on Orchid Pavilion 蘭亭. In conclusion, and following on from the December 2010 issue of China Heritage Quarterly, Dr Eduard Kögel kindly updates us on the January 2011 international symposium, 'Ernst Boerschmann and Early Research in Traditional Chinese Architecture'.
As in the past two years, the pictorial theme for China Heritage Quarterly in 2011 has been kindly provided by the New York-based photographer Lois Conner. The image that appears in the left-hand corner of the screen was made in 1999 in the compound of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (Duiwai Youxie 對外友協, for short) at Taiji Chang 台基廠, central Beijing. The bronze lion, one of a pair removed from the ruined Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanming Yuan 圓明園), crouches outside a building that housed the Italian Embassy during the early Republican era. The Republic itself was founded in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution 辛亥革命 of 1911, the centenary of which is being marked throughout the Chinese world in 2011. With the abdication of the ruling house of the Qing dynasty, the Aisin Gioro, in late 1911 that revolution brought an end to Chinese dynastic politics. Subsequently, the 'awakened lion' (xingshi 醒獅) was used as an emblem on coins minted in 1912, the first year of the new Republic of China (Zhonghua Minguo 中華民國).
As ever I would like to thank my Associate Editor, Daniel Sanderson, for his editorial and design work, Duncan Campbell for his support, contributions and ideas, and Sue Chen 陳詩雯 for checking scanned Chinese texts.
Starting with this issue China Heritage Quarterly will be migrating to a new online home with the Australian Centre on China in the World (http://ciw.anu.edu.au), although its primary web address remains: www.chinaheritagequarterly.org
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