[
    {
        "id": 209721,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1982",
        "page_number": 378,
        "title": "RAS-1982",
        "content_text": "356\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nconfusing intermixing of columns is an unfortunate example of false economy.\n\nMy last few negative comments are directed against purely mechanical aspects of Sagart's monograph. In sum I consider them minor by comparison with the strong plus values I put on the work as a whole. He has made a genuine contribution to our growing body of data on Chinese dialects and this is much more important than the negative suggestions I have made concerning format. No one should do further work in Hakka without touching base with Sagart's study.\n\nJOHN MCCOY\n\nScience in Traditional China: A Comparative Perspective. Joseph Needham, Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1981, x+131pp., appendix 2pp.\n\nIn this volume Dr. Needham extensively compares the various scientific approaches of China, India, Persia, Arabia, Israel and the West. In the \"Introduction\", he observes that the Chinese mind was too algebraic (rather than geometrical) to accept Indian Vaiseshika theories about atoms. In this I think he is correct, but I would like to comment on his remark that the philosophy of China has always been an organic materialism. China Mainland scholars always exaggerate the status of dialectical materialism in Chinese thought, while Taiwan professors overstress the significance of subjective idealism in the Chinese history of ideas at the cost of neglecting creative materialists like Wang T'ing-hsiang# of the Ming dynasty. Fortunately, I received my education in Hong Kong and the U.S. and so have avoided having political prejudices projected onto\n\nonto philosophy. Needham, however, seems to be overwhelmed by the Mainland bias.\n\nWestern scholars tend to liken the Chinese organicism of the Book of Changes (B), Hua-yen Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism to the organicism of Leibniz and Whitehead. However, organicism may be combined with both idealism and materialism, which in fact run in parallel throughout Chinese history.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210979,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 41,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "affectation is a well-known chapter of our eighteenth-century cultural history, and it is also a political paradox. For those aristocrats and nobility who had been indulging in Chinese art and Chinese festivities were to meet their fate in 1789 and 1793. They were to be crushed by a major revolution to which China had contributed through the intellectual battles waged by the Philosophes against the monarchy. And this was no longer a dinner party à la chinoise.\n\nA major intellectual and cultural encounter had definitely taken place between China and France. But was it France alone? The addiction to chinoiseries was equally popular with the English nobility and gentry. German Philosophes were as keen as their fellow Frenchmen to achieve genuine universality through China. Such was the message of Leibniz's 'Chinese latest news' (Novissima Sinica), an essay advocating the dispatch to Europe of Chinese Confucian missionaries so as to balance the impact of Christian missionaries to China. Yes, China was then valued as a model for the whole of Europe, to quote the title of a suggestive essay by Louis Maverick.\n\nNevertheless, there is something definitely French in the magnitude, in the style, in the rhetoric of France's encounter with China. France was more deeply committed to China than any other European country in the eighteenth century, and this reflects the specifically acute crisis of French society and the French political regime at that time: a crisis in which French intellectuals were most actively involved. The attraction of China, eccentric and artificial as it was, was part of the French ideological upheaval which contributed so decisively to the French Revolution.\n\nThe concern for China was also very French in its claim to achieve theoretical universalism, to think and to reason for the whole of humankind in the grand Cartesian tradition. From fashionable chinoiseries to high-level intellectual achievements, such as those of Voltaire, Diderot and Gournay, the whole thing was conducted with a typical French sense of sensationalism; it was a well-staged intellectual play lasting for almost a century, with the whole cultural elite in the cast. Other peoples simply act; the French always like to perform, and to find a public for it.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212412,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 354,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "331\n\nConfucian-Christian synthesis through an overview of the publications of Fathers Ricci, Semedo, and Magalhaes (Chapters 2 and 3). However, the flow of the presentation is marred by the author's frequent interruptions to correct, with the benefit of nearly four centuries of sinological research and hindsight (p. 72), factual and interpretive errors of these pioneers of Sinology. Consequently, the reader has to struggle to piece together and get a grasp of their views.\n\nBeginning with the geographical and historical treatises of Martini in Chapter 4, the focus of the book shifts to the impact of the Jesuits on European scholarship, particularly through expanding geographical knowledge, stimulating revision of accepted biblical chronology to take into account the Chinese chronology, and fueling the search for a universal language. In reviewing the influential works of proto-Sinologist Fr. Athanasius Kircher (Chapter 5), the author contrasts the Hermetic orientation of Kircher with the accommodative approach of his fellow Jesuits who were missionaries in China, setting the stage for both the growing tension around the theological implications of the latter that was to culminate in the Rites Controversy and a major change in the content of Jesuit accommodation under the influence of Hermetism in the closing decades of the 17th century. The author's critiques of Fr. Kircher's views are somehow less obtrusive than is the case where the views of the early Jesuit missionaries in China are concerned.\n\nSeveral of the best parts of the book follow the author's discussion of the search for a universal language (Chapter 6) and a key to the Chinese language (Clavis Sinica) (Chapter 7), focusing on the writings and correspondence of proto-Sinologists Fr. Kircher, Müller, Mentzel, and Leibniz, and China missionary Fr. Bouvet, the last great proponent of Jesuit accommodation in the century. However, the author's penchant in this section for taking pokes at others for using 20th-century attitudes to judge the shortcomings of some of his subjects (pp. 215, 227-28, 231, and 236) is rather annoying, especially in view of the fact that he indulges in the same type of thing (p. 220).\n\nIn Chapter 8, the focus shifts back to the Jesuits in China. Here the author discusses the culmination of Ricci's version of accommodation in the 1687 publication of Confucius Sinarum philosophus and the European reactions to it. This work is a Latin translation of a",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212413,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 355,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "332\n\nbiography of Confucius and three of the Four Books of early Confucianism; namely, Ta-hsüeh, Chung-yung, and Lun-yü. While the discussion (based on the author's private correspondence with T. Korai Kitao) of the European influences in the portrait of Confucius standing with a temple of learning in the background is very interesting, the suggestion that Confucius is holding his own spirit tablet (pp. 271, 274, and 276) may be worth further investigation. The author's running criticism of the translations of the Ta-hsüeh and Chung-yung gets in the way of his presentation of Jesuit views and interpretation. One wonders why he did not include the Lun-yü in his discussion, particularly since Leibniz was particularly fond of this work (pp. 287-88).\n\nChapter 9 is devoted to the writings of Fr. Bouvet who arrived in China in 1688 and significantly revised the content of accommodation by discarding Ricci's Confucian-Christian synthesis in favor of a 'Chinese-Christian synthesis' focusing on the pre-Confucius portions of the I-ching. The author gives a clear picture of the different social and political circumstances under which Ricci and Bouvet laboured and how this influenced their approaches to accommodation. He shows the impact of Hermetism on Bouvet's fascination with and interpretation of the hexagrams of the I-ching as hieroglyphs which encoded the ancient and pristine religion of man. The discussion of the dissemination of Bouvet's views to Europe through his correspondence with Leibniz is most interesting, though the reading is somewhat tedious.\n\nChapter 10 brings down the curtain on the 17th century and the Jesuits with an examination of the extremist views found in the new accommodative compositions of Le Comte and Le Gobien which brought the Rites Controversy to a head and provoked the impeachment of their works in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1700. Finally, a four-page conclusion provides a succinct and adequate summary of the author's main points.\n\nMELVIN P THATCHER\n\nCecil Beaton: Chinese Diary and Album New edition, O.U.P., Oxford, 1991 also, same author: India Diary and Album New edition, O.U.P., 1991\n\nCecil Beaton (1904-1980) was well-known, particularly in the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    }
]