Wang Guowei

Wang Guowei a Chinese scholar of astonishing range (1877-1927) whose work spanned classical philology, history, archaeology, literary criticism and the philosophy of art, and who is regarded as one of the founders of modern Chinese scholarship. He combined rigorous textual method with a philosophical sensibility, and his essays on literature and aesthetics remain among the most admired in the language.

Early Life and Intellectual Formation

Wang Guowei was born in 1877 in Haining, in Zhejiang province, the son of a scholarly family of modest means. He received a traditional classical education but was drawn to the new learning that was sweeping through China at the end of the nineteenth century, and he read widely in Western philosophy and science.

He studied in Shanghai and later travelled to Japan, where he encountered the currents of German idealism, especially the thought of Schopenhauer and Kant. This exposure to Western aesthetics and metaphysics, applied to Chinese materials, gave his early writings a philosophical depth unusual among the scholars of his generation.

He worked for a time as a translator and editor, and he taught at schools and colleges, all the while developing the independent intellectual programme that would occupy the rest of his life. He was a shy and withdrawn man, more at home among texts than among people, and he devoted himself to study with a singular intensity.

Literary Criticism and Aesthetics

Wang Guowei's most celebrated early work is a short book of criticism on the lyric poetry of the Song and earlier periods. In it he advanced a theory of aesthetic experience centred on the idea of a realm without a self, a state in which the poet and the world are no longer divided and in which genuine beauty becomes possible.

He contrasted this with a poetry of surface and contrivance, and he used the distinction to arrange the poets of the tradition in an order of merit that was both severe and original. The book is written in a condensed, aphoristic style and is often compared to the classical treatises of Chinese criticism, whose form it revived while filling it with new content.

He also wrote on the philosophy of art and on the nature of the tragic in literature, applying the categories of Western aesthetics to Chinese drama and fiction. His essays on the novel and on the theatre helped to raise those genres from the low estimation in which traditional scholars had held them, treating them as serious objects of critical and philosophical study.

Philology, History and Oracle Bones

In the middle of his career Wang Guowei turned from literary criticism to the exacting disciplines of history and philology. He worked on the ancient texts and on the material remains of early China, and he attained a mastery of the sources that few of his contemporaries could equal.

He made major contributions to the study of the oracle bones, the inscribed carvings from the Shang dynasty that had been discovered only a short time before. By careful comparison of the inscriptions with the transmitted histories, he helped to establish the reliability of parts of the ancient record and to reconstruct the royal genealogy and chronology of the Shang kings.

He also worked on the manuscripts and documents of the border regions and on the early history of the northern peoples, and he wrote on the history of the Mongols and of the institutions of the Yuan and Ming periods. His method combined the analysis of the classical books with evidence drawn from inscriptions, manuscripts and archaeology, and it became a model for the new critical scholarship.

The Method of the Two Evidences

Wang Guowei is associated above all with a method he described as the double attestation or mutual corroboration of the received texts and the material record. The method required that a proposition about antiquity be supported both by the transmitted literature and by the newly recovered inscriptions, so that the old sources and the new evidence might mutually confirm and correct one another.

This approach, arising from his work on the oracle bones and the ancient classics, transformed the study of early China. It allowed scholars to sort the reliable from the legendary, to date events and texts with new confidence, and to reconstruct the history of the Shang and Zhou periods on a firmer basis than the books alone permitted.

He was also keenly interested in the principles of scholarship itself, in the standards of evidence and proof by which historical claims should be judged, and in the relation between the humanities and the exact sciences. His methodological writing influenced a whole generation of historians who sought to place the study of China on a scientific footing.

Later Years, Death and Legacy

Wang Guowei held academic posts in the last years of his life, including a position at the Qinghua University in Beijing, where he was one of the leading figures of the scholarly community. He continued to work intensively on the classics and on ancient history, even as the political world around him dissolved into warlord conflict and intellectual controversy.

The dissolution of the old order and his attachment to the imperial house weighed heavily on him. In 1927, amid the turmoil that followed the northern expedition and the rise of radical politics, he took his own life by drowning in a lake near the gardens of the old summer palace in Beijing. His death shocked the intellectual world and became the subject of much speculation and mourning.

He is remembered as the greatest Chinese scholar of his generation and as a bridge between the classical learning of the imperial age and the critical methods of the modern university. His work on literature, aesthetics, philology and ancient history is still studied, and his name is attached to the methodological ideals that helped to create the humanistic scholarship of twentieth-century China.

See also

• Oracle bones
• Chinese philology
• Criticism of lyric poetry
• Qinghua University