Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes (5 October 1865 – 29 January 1918) was a French Sinologist and expert on Chinese history and religion, and is best known for his translations of major segments of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, the work's first ever translation into a Western language.

Chavannes was a prolific and influential scholar, and was one of the most accomplished Sinologists of the modern era notwithstanding his relatively early death in 1918 at age 52. A successor of 19th century French sinologists Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat and Stanislas Julien, Chavannes was largely responsible for the development of sinology and Chinese scholarship into a respected field in the realm of French science.

Édouard Chavannes was born on 5 October 1865 in Lyon, France. As a youth he studied at the lycée in Lyon, where, like most students of his era, his education focused mainly on the Latin and Greek Classics. Chavannes was then sent to Paris to attend the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he and his classmates studied and prepared for the entrance exams to one of the French Grandes Écoles. Chavannes passed his entrance exams and was admitted to the Lettres ("literature") section of the École Normale Supérieure in 1885. Chavannes spent three years at the school, finishing in 1888 after successfully passing his agrégation in philosophy.

Georges Perrot, a French archaeologist and newly appointed director of the École Normale Supérieure, advised Chavannes to begin studying China after he finished his schooling. Chavannes first considered studying Chinese philosophy, which was nearer to his own educational background, but on the advice of the French scholar Henri Cordier he ultimately decided to focus on Chinese history, which up to that time had been much less widely studied in the West. Chavannes began attending Classical Chinese courses given by the Marquis d'Hervey-Saint-Denys at the Collège de France and the Mandarin Chinese classes of Maurice Jametel (1856–1889) at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes (School of Living Oriental Languages). Desiring to advance his studies with actual experience in China, Chavannes used the connections of certain friends of his to obtain a position as an attaché to a scientific mission associated with the French Legation in Peking (modern Beijing). He departed for China in January 1889 and arrived two months later.

...
Wikipedia