Chinese History: A New Manual
 |
|
| Author | Endymion Porter Wilkinson |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Harvard-Yenching Monograph 100 |
| Publisher | Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute distributed by Harvard University Press |
|
Publication date
|
2015 |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | |
| Preceded by | Preliminary edition: The History of Imperial China: A Research Guide (1973); 1st edition: Chinese History: A Manual (1998); 2nd edition: Chinese History: A Manual, Revised and enlarged (2000); 3rd edition: Chinese History: A New Manual (2012) |
Chinese History: A New Manual (Chinese: 中國歷史新手册; pinyin: Zhōngguó lìshǐ xīn shǒucè), written by Endymion Wilkinson, is an authoritative and often witty guide to Sinology and Chinese history for which he received the Prix Stanislas Julien for 2014.
At over 1.5 million words (the equivalent of nine monographs of 400 pages apiece), the New Manual comprises fourteen parts subdivided into a total of seventy-six chapters.
Each chapter introduces the published, excavated, artifactual, and archival sources from earliest times to the late twentieth century and not only examines the context in which they were produced, preserved, and received, but also suggests and comments on the best secondary scholarship in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages. The present fourth edition (green-cover) updates, expands, and corrects the third edition. Some 9,800 primary, secondary, reference works, journals, and databases are introduced in the course of the discussion (compared to 8,800 in the third edition; 4,000 in the yellow-cover edition of 2000; and 2,900 in the blue-cover edition of 1998). In addition to the greatly extended scope of the New Manual, new features are introductions to hundreds of digital resources (including 225 of the latest databases) and a wide selection of up-to-date secondary works (including citations of over 1,500 journal articles and book chapters). Interspersed throughout are short essays introducing the ancillary disciplines required for Chinese historical studies—archeology, astronomy, chronology and calendrics, codicology, diplomatics, epigraphy, genealogy, historical geography, historical linguistics, numismatics, onomastics, paleography, prosopography, sigillography, statistics, textual criticism, topology, and special branches of study such as oracle-bone script, bamboo and silk books, Dunhuang, Qingshuijiang, and Huizhou documents or the Ming-Qing archives. Other short essays address the uses of history and how to avoid errors in thought and analysis. There are chapters on translation into and out of Chinese. Throughout the New Manual lists of basic terms give standard translations.
In an interview with Carla Nappi, an historian of China at the University of British Columbia, Wilkinson discussed his experience in the field and the book's background. He became interested in China as an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the early 1960s, then spent two years teaching English in Beijing up to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. He earned a PhD from Princeton University with a dissertation on late Qing dynasty markets and prices, but when he began teaching he still felt unprepared. He did not know, he recalled, what to tell his graduate students about the Zhou or Shang dynasties, about which he felt his knowledge would hardly "fill an eye dropper." On a research fellowship at Harvard University, Wilkinson mentioned to John Fairbank, a senior Harvard scholar, that he was gathering notes on Chinese history. Fairbank offered to publish them, and the 1973 Research Guide appeared in due course.
...
Wikipedia