Endymion Porter Wilkinson
| Endymion Wilkinson | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
|||||||
| Born |
May 15, 1941 Lewes, England |
||||||
| Nationality | British | ||||||
| Fields | Sinology, Chinese history, Japan, Southeast Asia | ||||||
| Institutions |
SOAS, University of London European Commission Harvard University Peking University |
||||||
| Alma mater |
Cambridge University (B.A., M.A.) Princeton University (Ph.D) |
||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||
| Chinese | 魏根深 | ||||||
|
|||||||
| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Wèi Gēnshēn |
Endymion Porter Wilkinson (born May 15, 1941) is an English diplomat, Sinologist, historian of China, and authority on East Asian affairs. He served in Beijing as the European Union Ambassador to China and Mongolia from 1994 to 2001. In 2013 he published Chinese History: A New Manual, an authoritative and often witty guide to Sinology and Chinese history for which he was awarded the Prix Stanislas Julien for 2014. A new edition (the 4th) appeared in 2015.
Wilkinson was born in the parish of Westmeston near Lewes, England and educated at Gordonstoun School and King’s College, Cambridge where he studied History and Oriental Studies (BA 1964; MA 1966). Shortly before graduation he was recruited by the Chinese government to teach English in Beijing at the Peking Institute of Languages. His two-year contract (1964–1966) ended just as the Cultural Revolution was beginning. From Beijing he went to Princeton University where he completed a PhD in 1970 under James T.C. Liu and Frederick W. Mote. This was later published as Studies in Chinese Price History.
From 1970 to 1974, Wilkinson was lecturer in the History of the Far East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (the official history of SOAS refers to him as “the most promising Sinologist of the early 1970s”). However, when he began teaching there he still felt unprepared. He did not know, he recalled many years later, what to tell his graduate students about the Zhou or Shang dynasties, about which he felt his knowledge would about "fill an eye dropper." As a research fellow at Harvard University in 1971, 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. During these years he also translated two books from the Chinese: one popular (The People’s Comic Book); the other, academic (Landlord and Labor in Late Imperial China).
...
Wikipedia