Paul Thompson (sinologist)
| Paul Mulligan Thompson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 10, 1931 Xingtai, Hebei, China |
| Died | June 12, 2007 (aged 76) London, England |
| Citizenship | UK |
| Known for | Reconstruction of the text of the Book of Shenzi |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Linguistics |
| Institutions | School of Oriental and African Studies |
| Doctoral advisor | Hellmut Wilhelm |
Paul Mulligan Thompson (10 February 1931 – 12 June 2007) was a British sinologist and pioneer in the field of Chinese computer applications.
Paul Thompson was born at Xingtai in Hebei province, China, where his Northern Irish parents worked as missionaries with the China Inland Mission. He attended the Chefoo School, a Christian boarding school at Yantai in Shandong province, until November 1942 when the staff and students were interned at the Temple Hill Japanese Internment Camp. A few months later, in the summer of 1943, Thompson and his family were moved to the Weixian Internment Camp in Shandong (modern Weifang city), where they remained until liberated by American paratroopers in 1945. His family then moved back to Northern Ireland, and Thompson completed his schooling in Belfast.
After leaving school he travelled widely, and studied at the Free University of Amsterdam, the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis (where he married his wife, Marcia Cole, in 1952), and the U.S. Army Language School at Monterey, California, but he did not obtain a degree from any of these institutions. He also worked for several years as an interpreter in Japan and a teacher in Taiwan. In 1959 he was accepted into the University of Washington at Seattle, where he obtained a BA in 1960, and studied for his PhD on the lost book of Shenzi under Hellmut Wilhelm.
After receiving his PhD he taught at the University of Wisconsin from 1963 to 1970, and then in 1970 he was appointed to a position at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where he remained until his retirement in 1996. He was a key figure, together with D. C. Lau, Angus Graham and Sarah Allan, in making SOAS a world-renowned centre for the teaching of Chinese philosophy during the 1970s and 1980s.
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