15 MARCH 1946, Page 8

INTERPRETERS OF CHINA

By D. R. GILLIE

THE Chinese scholarship of France has always been second to none. The heirs of French humanism have been steadily labouring to make the most isolated of the great civilisations com- prehensible in terms of general experience and thought. Their work may for years remain the domain of specialists, but it ultimately percolates into schoolbooks and newspapers and remoulds the ordinary man's views about the Far East and even himself. It is, therefore, a grave misfortune that within five years three of the greatest French Chinese scholars, Marcel Granet, Henri Maspero and Paul Pelliot, should have died with their task far from completed —the first two undoubtedly as the direct result of the German occupation of France.

The last of the three, M. Paul Pelliot, who died on October 26, 1945, at the age of 67, was the great specialist in the history of the contacts between China and the rest of the world—Europe, India and Islam. He first attracted attention as a young man of twenty- three during the siege of the Pekin legations in 190o, when, to the horrified astonishment of his companions, he was seen to set out alone for the Boxer outposts and enter into amicable conversation with them. Some hours later he returned laden with ice and peaches—he had told the Boxer commander that nothing else was in short supply in the Legation quarter—and valuable information. He was to become the one man equally familiar with the Chinese, Indian, Turkish, Persian and European sources for the history of China's foreign relations during the long centuries of her imperial greatness. Following in the footsteps of Sir Aurel Stein, he ransacked the library of the ruined monastery of Tuen Hwang in a remote part of Chinese Turkestan, purchasing for the Bibliotheque Nationale 1,5oo manuscripts (none of them later than the eleventh century A.D.) These manuscripts from Central Asia are mainly Buddhist, but they are also Manichaean, Nestorian and even Judaic. Pelliot played a most important part in casting light on Manichaeanism, the strange devitalising religion which came into existence in Mesopotamia through the contact of Christianity with fire-worshipping Zoroastri- anism ; which influenced French history through the Albigenses and English literature through that part of the plot of Paradise Lost which does not derive from the Old Testament, which was only once a state religion—in the ninth-century Mongolia of the Uigurs—and of whose lost texts two have been found incorporated in the Taoist canon of China. Pelliot became the great authority on such varied topics as the old Central Asian route, which was opened up by the Han Emperors in search of a breed of horses that would enable them to defeat the Huns and was subsequently trodden by those who taught Buddhism to China, Korea and Japan ; on the Chinese pilgrims to medieval India ; and on the medieval relations of the Popes and the French kings with China. A restless searcher of libraries, carrying his vast learning perfectly ordered in his handsome head, he published during his lifetime no book but innumerable articles" in learned periodicals, and has left behind him almost no notes, but a number of completed or almost completed manuscripts on a great variety of topics. One of these, his only lengthy work, will appear in England as the commentary on the travels of Marcc Polo, in the great edition prepared by Professor Moule now in process of publication by Routledge. The other essays will prob- ably fill three or four volumes.

Henri Maspero, the son of the great egyptologist, died in Buchen- wald concentration camp on March 15, 1945. He and his wife were deported by the Germans in July, 1944, in one of the last trainloads of prisoners to leave France. The two Masperos had been taken because the Germans were unable to find their eldest son, very active in the Resistance and himself to meet his death fighting in the Vosges in the ranks of the American Army. Madame Maspero, considerably younger than her husband, survived ten months of Ravensbriick. While sick of dysentery in the infirmary of Buchen- wald, starving and sharing with four other men a shelf covered by three palliasses, Henri Maspero, at the request of his companions, lectured on his life-work. He gave courses on Taoism, on Chinese Buddhism, on Greco-Buddhist sculpture and on Tibetan Lamaism. One of his last students took his notes on Buchenwald camp toilet- paper. They have unfortunately been lost.

While Pelliot's subject was the relations of China with the west and with India, Maspero's was the stuff of Chinese life through the centuries—her sciences, her administrative system, her religion (above all Taoism) and her history. But his Chinese scholarship was never separated from other domains of thought. He studied astronomy and medicine in order to understand Chinese astronomy and Chinese medicine (a strange body of doctrines, which had the advantage over the West in starting from the circulation of blood but made no progress, because the successful dissection of criminals' bodies only confirmed the view of Chinese physicians that the bodies of good men—which were never dissected—were quite different from those of bad ones). In Chinese economic history and administrative history Maspero was the pioneer, and it is hoped that he left his great work on Chinese political institutions sufficiently advanced to be publishable. Almost alone amongst western scholars he traversed the jungle of the literature of Taoism, that native Chinese religion 'of personal salvation which prepared the way for the Chinese reception of a greater religion of the same kind, Buddhism. For the non-specialist perhaps his most remarkable work is his essay on the Chinese language (Conferences de l'Institut de Linguistique de l'Universite de Paris, 1933), in which he explains, with the admirable lucidity of the French genius, the mechanism of a tongue which is almost without grammatical conceptions as we know them in Western languages, and the effects of this characteristic on Chinese thought. Like Pelliot, he wrote very numerous short works and articles, and, apart from his early history of the finances of Ptolemaic Egypt, published only one full-sized book, the first volume of his history of ancient China, to which can probably be added from his manu- scripts the second, covering the period of the Han dynasty. Unlike Pelliot, he thought with his pen, and he has left a great mass of manuscript notes rich in ore for a skilful searcher.

Marcel Granet died in Paris at the age of 56 in 1940. His health had been weakened by wounds received in the last war. The defeat of the French Republic was a double blow to the patriot and the Left-wing republican and rationalist. It certainly hastened his death. Salt was rubbed into the wounds when a German officer was billeted in his house. Sceptical about the historical content of ancient documents, he was deeply convinced that they reflected the thoughts and feelings of those whose deeds they might represent. The rationalist was astoundingly sympathetic to early religious beliefs. It may be that in his account of primitive Chinese peasant religion he was influenced by his political convictions to some degree, just as some British scholars have been in their portrayal of an early British pacifist people worshipping at Stonehenge and in the earthworks of Wiltshire. But the fire of his imagination revives the very warmth of the spring suns that rose in China three thousand years ago, when he describes the joy of the villagers meeting by the riverside for their equinoctial festivals and taking up their places for the wedding dances.

Out of the Book of Odes and other early Chinese classics, edited and re-edited for centuries to prove that Confucian teaching reflected an immemorial antiquity of tradition, he has extracted evidence of religious crises provoked by and accompanying profound social and political changes, and of the evolution of a society where the father had no part in his children to one in which filial piety was the central principle of morality. His chief books, The Ancient Festivals and Songs of China, Chinese Civilisation and Chinese Thought, have all been translated into English. Like Pelliot he was sparing of paper when preparing his books, so that his notes for his promised work Le Roi Boit (which was to explain the development of the idea of the Emperor's majesty, its religious and social significance) are to a great extent references to ancient texts. It is therefore doubtful if the book can be reconstituted, but a series of lectures delivered at Oslo awaits publication by the Norwegian Institute of Comparative Civilisation, and his students should be able, from their notes, to give to a larger public the ideas which he developed in his last years.

Marcel Granet's historical methods are of importance in any study of man's efforts to create social and political institutions. He is probably the only Professor of Chinese who has induced a scholar whose main subject is ancient Rome to study the Chinese language in order to follow his lectures with greater profit. It will probably be he, a bristling and cantankerous disputant, a rich mind powerfully stimulating those of others, who will leave the deepest mark of these three great scholars on thought about human societies.