On the Beginning and Transformation of Modern Chinese Historiography

Abstract

After the First Opium War (1840-1842) there were increased academic interests in studying the history and geography of China’s northwestern borderlands, introducing foreign history and geography and writing the modern history of China. Such interests, however, were no more than reflections of the times in history studies and could hardly improve the whole picture of historiography. At the turn of the 20th century, Liang Qichao published “The Introduction to Chinese History” and “The New Historiography”, which marked the emergence of a new trend of thought in historiography and should be deemed the beginning of modern Chinese historiography. Soon after, the “national quintessence school” (guocui xuepai) called for preserving the quintessence of Chinese culture and attempted to bridge Chinese and Western scholarship. Then the “Reorganization of National Heritage” (zhengli guogu) Movement came, urging to re-arrange traditional scholarship. Hu Shih (1891-1962) explicitly put forward the goal of “compiling a history of Chinese culture,” helped dissolve the boundary between modern and traditional historiography and indicated the approach to the transformation from ancient to modern historiography from a perspective of discipline classifications. This “new trend” of Chinese historiography, centering on new materials, new methods and new issues specified the research path for the early stage of modern Chinese historiography

Keywords

• modern chinese historiography
• new historiography
• the “re-organizing the national heritage” movement
• liang qichao