Tan Qixiang

Tan Qixiang a Chinese historical geographer and historian of the twentieth century (1911-1992), the founder of the modern discipline of Chinese historical geography and the chief editor of the most authoritative historical atlas of China ever produced. His scholarship mapped the changing territorial extent, administrative divisions and physical features of the Chinese world across three thousand years.

Early Life and Education

Tan Qixiang was born on 22 February 1911 in Jiaxing, in Zhejiang province, into a family that valued education. He showed an early interest in geography and history and read widely in the classical literature as well as in modern subjects. As a young man he entered university at a time when the study of geography was being reorganised along modern lines in China.

He studied in the department of history at Fudan University and then transferred to the department of geography, where he came under the influence of the leading geographers of the day. He was drawn to the boundary between the two fields, to the study of place and region in history, and he decided to devote himself to historical geography, a subject then scarcely developed in China.

His combination of historical and geographical training was at the time unusual and gave him the tools for a new kind of inquiry. He read the older geographical works and the dynastic histories with a geographer's eye for location, distance and the transformation of the land, and he began to publish studies that clarified long-disputed questions of ancient topography.

The Historical Atlas of China

Tan Qixiang's greatest achievement was the great historical atlas of China, an eight-volume work that he conceived, organised and edited over several decades with the collaboration of many scholars. The atlas presents the political boundaries, administrative divisions, capitals, physical features and key localities of each major period, drawn in careful detail from the documentary sources.

The atlas filled a fundamental need of Chinese historiography. Before its appearance, the student of the past had to assemble a picture of ancient geography from scattered references in the histories, atlases of varying reliability and the notes of earlier scholars. The new work provided a single, systematic and rigorously documented reference in which the location of places and the extent of territories could be established with confidence.

The compilation required the reconciliation of a vast and often contradictory body of evidence, including the dynastic histories, the geographical monographs, the local gazetteers, inscriptions and archaeological discoveries. Tan Qixiang and his team established principles for the handling of disputed identifications, and the atlas was received as a landmark of scholarship that transformed teaching and research across the field.

Contributions to Historical Geography

Beyond the atlas Tan Qixiang wrote influential studies of many particular questions of Chinese historical geography. He examined the shifting courses of the great rivers, above all the Yellow River and its frequent changes of channel, and he studied the history of the lakes and of the coast, showing how the physical landscape of China had altered over the centuries through both natural processes and human action.

He wrote on the origins and development of ancient cities and on the geography of the frontier regions and the peoples who lived beyond the settled core. He studied the historical geography of the major administrative units and the changing relations between the central government and the provinces, and he clarified the location of many places named in the classical texts.

His work also addressed the historical geography of ethnic and linguistic communities and the movement of populations. He was attentive to the evidence of climate, agriculture and settlement, and he brought the findings of the natural sciences to bear on historical questions in a way that anticipated the later development of environmental history.

Teaching, Projects and Institutions

Tan Qixiang spent much of his career at Fudan University, where he founded and directed a research institute devoted to historical geography. He trained a large number of students who became the teachers and researchers of the next generation, and he built up a research programme that combined textual scholarship with cartography and with the study of place names.

He was active in the great scholarly projects of his time, contributing to the compilation of standard works of reference and to the editing of source collections, and he served on the committees that oversaw the development of geography and history in the universities and academies. His organisational ability matched his scholarship, and he was able to coordinate the labour of many hands on long and complex undertakings.

He insisted on the unity of history and geography as a single field of understanding. For him the historian who ignored the land and the geographer who ignored time were alike incomplete, and he urged his students to master both the documentary and the spatial methods of their subject. This conception gave Chinese historical geography its modern shape.

Influence and Legacy

Tan Qixiang is regarded as the founder of modern Chinese historical geography. The atlas that bears his name remains the standard work of its kind, consulted by historians, geographers, archaeologists and officials, and it is difficult to imagine the study of Chinese history without it. His maps have shaped the picture of the Chinese past for generations of readers.

His studies of rivers, cities and frontiers established methods and set questions that later scholars have continued to pursue, and his institute at Fudan became a centre for the training of historical geographers. He demonstrated the importance of precise spatial knowledge to historical understanding and raised the technical standards of the whole field.

He died on 25 August 1992 in Shanghai. He is remembered as a scholar of extraordinary diligence and exactness who spent his life in the patient reconciliation of texts and maps, and as the man who gave China a scholarly image of its own changing landscape across three millennia. His work endures as a foundation of the historical sciences in China.

See also

• Historical geography
• Historical atlas of China
• Fudan University
• Yellow River