New Developments in

Asian Studies
AN INTRODUCTION

Edited by

Paul van der Velde and Alex McKay

Q Routledge
Taylor &.Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK

in association with the

INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ASIAN STUDIES

Leiden and Amsterdam
almost the whole picture, while the non-Chinese countries have shrunk to
amorphous islands scattered indiscriminately around her periphery.18
Similarly, Qing state historiography conceived world-history as an across-
the-board projection of the Middle Kingdom onto the past, thereby being
instrumental in the making of China’s self-image of the ‘Empire immobile’
(Alain Peyrefitte). This particular tendency was epitomized in various
imperially sanctioned editions of the general history of China moulded on
Zhu X i’s (1130-1200) standard history entitled The String and Mesh o f the
Comprehensive Mirror fo r the Aid o f Government (Zi-zhi tong-jian gang-
m u).{9 In these chronicles, the historical narratives from the legendary
emperors down to the founding of the Qing empire were cut into pieces and
reassembled into a chronologically ordered collection of exemplary cases,
thus making up textbooks of political ethics with strong moralistic overtones.
Furthermore, as for the way of dealing with the ‘not we’ groups in Qing
history-writing, a tendency toward an increasingly exclusive pattern of
constituting historical identity is conceivable. This tendency is indicated, for
instance, by the debate about the question whether or not Buddhist monks
were to be considered human beings in the sense of being entitled to
biographical entries in local gazetteers.20 It reflects the mounting cultural
solipsism, coupled with a condescending attitude toward anything non-
Confucian and foreign, which is a characteristic trait of the ‘long’ eighteenth
century spanning from 1684 (subjugation of Taiwan) through 1839 (outbreak
of the Opium War). Paradoxically, it was just during this period that the
Chinese empire saw its largest expansion ever and Chinese civilization
reached a peak of splendour.21
To conclude, it appears that the question of the Chinese backward-
looking attitude needs to be reassessed in regard to the self-cocooning
tendency of state and society in late imperial China. This will also bring into
perspective the transformation of Chinese historiography after the encounter
with Western historical thought.22 However, if we generalize and postulate a
Chinese inborn love of Making It Old, then we will be committing the same
fault as the authors of a Chinese twelfth century historical atlas, in which
China is shown as an unchanging entity throughout the ages, protected by the
Great Wall to the north from time immemorial.23

T he sis 2
H in d er ed by the T r a m m els of C om pa r t m e n t a l ize d T im e ?

The second view I want briefly to discuss here concerns the notion of
compartmentalized or boxed time. This notion was introduced in view of the
traditional Chinese method of dating, either by the year of the ruler’s reign
era, or by the sexagenary cycle. In Chinese historiography, the sexagenary
cycle was used for counting not only the days, but also the years; in the latter
case, often used jointly with the era names. According to the thesis under
discussion, the usage of this dating system, instead of a single era-count
system running through history as in the West, indicates a notion of time
allegedly radically different from the abstract notion of time in Western
thought, i.e. compartmentalized time. A characteristic feature of the
perception of time as compartmentalized has been seen in the attribution of
corresponding symbolic values, as terrestrial parts, colours, music tones, etc.
to each time compartment, resulting in a spatio-temporal framework of
symbolic correspondences, which has imaginatively been described by
Marcel Granet in his famous work La Pensee Chinoise (1934). Forming the
basis of Chinese chronology, compartmentalized time is thought to have
prevented Chinese historians from perceiving time as continuous time or as a
‘stream’, thus generally hindering the development of historical
consciousness.24
This conclusion provokes some critical remarks. First, it must be
remembered that the single Christian era system as used today by counting
the years BC in reverse order is a relatively recent development dating from
the late eighteenth century. Second, it seems to be an anthropological
universal to remember the past in terms of compartmentalized time, which
we are doing when speaking of the ‘Quattrocento’, the ‘roaring Twenties’,
the ‘Reagan era’, etc. Third, it has been pointed out that the spatio-temporal
framework of symbolic correspondences, as described by Granet, is a greatly
idealized concept; if at all, it held on the Chinese mind only for a rather short
period.25 Fourth, in Chinese historiography, the joint chronological system of
era names and the sexagenary cycle gave rise to the early development of
chronological tables, which had the twofold purpose of giving an overview
of the succession of rulers and o f ascertaining the synchronicity of historical
events. The earliest extant examples of synchronized tables are to be found in
Si-ma Qian’s Records o f the Grand Historian (Shi ji). Since their
development preceded similar tables in the West, it has even been argued that
compartmentalized chronology was not a hindrance, but rather a stimulus to
the development of historical consciousness.26
However that may be, it appears that compartmentalized time versus
continuous, ‘streaming’ time indicates a difference in a technical, rather than
in a philosophical sense. One is tempted to draw a comparison to our daily
used watches that are equipped either with a digital indication or with a
traditionally round dial; reckoning the revolution of time measurement
brought about by the invention of the modern mechanical clock in the early
fourteenth century, the difference between these two time indications should
also not be overdramatized.
 Any discussion of the Chinese notion of time inevitably encounters the
issue of cyclical versus linear time perception. For long, the discussions
about this issue revolved around two poles, foremost represented by Granet
and Joseph Needham, respectively; the latter argued that linearity dominated
the Chinese perception of time throughout history.27 More recently, the
controversial discussion has been brought to a certain end by Derk Bodde,
who concluded his in-depth study of cyclical and linear thinking in Chinese
culture by stating that evidence can be found for both modes of thinking,
though specifying this conclusion to the effect that ‘Chinese cyclical thinking
was considerably more widespread and influential than was Chinese linear
thinking’.28 Meanwhile however, the general discussion on historical thought
has moved beyond the dichotomy of linear versus circular time perception,
which tends to overlook the fact that both linear and circular concepts of time
can be found across cultural borderlines.29
In the Chinese context of time perception, an inspiring, new perspective
has recently been introduced by pointing out that Chinese religion conceived
of two kinds of time, namely ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ time.30 These concepts must
not be confused with the distinction of inner and outer time in the Western
philosophical discourse. In Chinese culture, outer time refers to the
progression of cosmical, calendrical time, governed by the duality of yin and
yang, whereas inner time is apprehended as a gestational process, as the time
of immortals and fairy realms beyond our present-day world, thus not
corresponding to the duration of calendrical time. The distinction between
the two different concepts of inner and outer time, which has perceptively
been explained with regard to Daoist ritual, found also expression in China’s
‘greater tradition’, namely in the two different arrangements of the trigrams
or hexagrams of the Book o f Changes, the so-called sequences of ‘Antedating
Heaven’ (xian-tian) and of ‘Later Heaven’ (hou-tian), which symbolically
represent respectively the shaping of the universe inside chaos and the
ceaseless natural processes after the physical world having come into
existence.31
How about applying the distinction between inner and outer time to
Chinese historiography? Indeed, I think this perspective is worth further
investigation. Let us just consider the cycle of five hundred years. Probably
grounded in the observation of a particular planetary conjunction, it was
believed that after every five hundred years a sagely king would arise. First
mentioned by Mencius (c. 372-289 BC), this cycle was explicitly referred to
by Si-ma Qian in his account of his motives for writing Shi ji. It further
influenced the conception of the ‘Correct succession to the true Way’ (dao-
tong) developed by Han Yu (768-824) and the Song Neo-Confucians, thus in
fact having a crucial impact on the development of historiography in the late
imperial period. To conclude, it seems not at all far-fetched to conceive the
five hundred years cycle as a cycle of inner time in Chinese historiography;32
the implications apropos of this view still need to be worked out, however.

T hesis 3
H i s t o r i o g r a p h y a s a ‘M i r r o r ’ ( J i a n )

An overriding concern for Chinese historians throughout all ages was to draw
moral lessons from history, formulated in terms o f ‘praise1 and ‘blame’ (bao
- bian). According to the traditional Confucian view, the basic principle of
praise and blame was articulated by Confucius in the Spring and Autumn
Annals (Chun-qiu), which is said ‘to serve as a bright mirror for enlightened
kings’ (wei huang-wang zhi ming-jian). In Chinese culture, the idea of
history as a mirror (jian) can be traced back to the Ode no.255 Tang from the
Book o f Odes (Shi-jing), which contains the frequently cited line: ‘The
beacon of Yin [i.e. the Shang dynasty] is not far-distinct’. Apparently, this
line is referred to and elaborated in the following passage in the Book o f
Documents.33 ‘Let not men look only into water; let them look into the glass
of other people. Now that Yin has lost its mandate, ought we not to look
much to it as our glass, and learn how to secure the repose o f our time?’
More than one thousand years later, the idea of history as a mirror became
epitomized in Si-ma Guang’s (1019-86) great chronicle, the Comprehensive
A idfor Government (Zi-zhi tong-jian).
Thus, it has been maintained that Chinese historical thinking is aptly
captured in the notion of the mirror, which implies ‘a normative co-mirroring
between the past and the present. This is a creative manifestation by the
present of historical significance of the past, on the one hand, and shaping of
the present by the normative significance of the past thus found, on the
other.’34 No doubt this is a perceptive characterization of the Chinese idea of
the mirror as a metaphor for history.
However, it should not go unnoticed that, for pre-Song times, the
metaphor of the mirror obviously still carried variant connotations, being
variously understood in different contexts. Its inherent ambiguity becomes
evident, for instance, in view of a Tang bronze mirror, which contains a
rather long inscription (156 characters), dated the tenth year of the Kai-yuan
era (722).35 As we can learn from the inscription, the mirror was
manufactured for the ancestral temple of the prominent Lii family in
Yunzhou in present Shandong province. Hung up in the temple, it served as a
precious talisman mediating desires and good wishes between the living and
the dead, thus symbolically bridging past and present. This is the overarching
meaning of the mirror metaphor; the other three uses of this metaphor derive
from the inscription. Giving an overview of the Lii family history in a highly