[
    {
        "id": 210974,
        "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": 36,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "11\n\nCHINA IN THE EYES OF THE FRENCH INTELLECTUALS\n\nJEAN CHESNEAUX\n\nThe following lecture, given originally in Canberra, was presented there as the \"Morrison Lecture\" for the year 1987, as a contribution to the memory of that remarkable person, G. Morrison, who crossed Australia on foot and China on foot at the end of the nineteenth century, so as to win the most influential position (at that time) of permanent correspondent in Peking for the London Times for a quarter of a century.\n\nIn Hong Kong, the name George Morrison, if not forgotten, is certainly less prominent than in Canberra, where the Morrison Lecture has been every year an important event for the last fifty years. May I consider these remarks on the lasting impact China has made for three centuries on French intellectuals, as a kind of unofficial “Victor Segalen Lecture\". Victor Segalen, an equally remarkable person, a traveller, a navy officer, an anthropologist, a poet, an archaeologist, visited Hong Kong several times in the early years of this century, between his travels in Eastern Polynesia and his archaeological expeditions in northern China.\n\nMay I add a personal footnote, before beginning the lecture. I am all the more happy to pay tribute to Victor Segalen, in the present circumstances, for it seems that, at least in France, very few persons have actually extended their intellectual work, cultural interests and actual movements, both to the South Pacific and to China. Being another such person, the name of Victor Segalen is for me a very appropriate reference.\n\n* This is the 1987 George Ernest Morrison Lecture delivered originally at the Australian National University, and, with slight amendment, to the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society on 27th February, 1987. It is reprinted with the permission of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. Professor Jean Chesneaux is a sinologist of international repute, and author of, among many books and articles, The Chinese Labour Movement, 1919-1927 (Stanford, 1968), Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1971), and China from the 1911 Revolution to Liberation (New York, 1977, with Francoise la Barbier and Marie-Claire Bergere).",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
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    {
        "id": 210975,
        "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": 37,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "To be invited to give this lecture in memory of George Ernest Morrison, that remarkable Australian, is not only a pleasure and an honour; it provides a very appropriate occasion to review the unique position China has held for more than three centuries in the eyes of French intellectuals. Morrison, himself quite fluent in French and well versed in French literature, was very familiar with some distinguished members of the French intelligentsia who visited China during those ‘Morrison years', such as Loti, Segalen and Claudel. He also knew well how prestigious China had been in the eyes of French intellectuals of an earlier period, namely French Jesuits and French Philosophes of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Their writings occupy a distinctive position on the shelves of Morrison's own library, once in Peking and later transferred to Japan. These early French books with their old-fashioned print and leather binding indicated, and Morrison was fully aware of it, that a major intellectual encounter had taken place between France and China. For the Philosophes, for Voltaire, Diderot and other contributors to the Great Encyclopedia, China was a powerful war machine which they directed against the backwardness, the tyranny, the impotence of the Versailles monarchy. As seen in the very title of a well-known French Ph.D. dissertation, China played an essential role in the formation and growth of the esprit philosophique in eighteenth century France.\n\nChina, in the view of these philosophes, was an empire ruled by an intellectual elite, namely the Confucian literati. In our subsequent Western political culture, our universities being no exception, ‘mandarin' has become a symbol of bureaucratic rigidity, almost a dirty word. But such was not the case in the eighteenth century. Voltaire praised very highly the Confucian degree holders he called Talapoints, a strange word which has since vanished entirely. China was seen as being ruled by men of wisdom, and this was an obvious contrast to the practices of the French monarchy and its corrupt, incompetent, uneducated officials. China was supposed to be at least as advanced as France, on the way towards Enlightenment, towards l'Age des Lumières.\n\nThese peoples [said Diderot], gifted with a 'consentement unanime, are superior to all other Asiatics in antiquity, intellect, art, wisdom, policy, and in their",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
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    },
    {
        "id": 210981,
        "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": 43,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "18\n\nLes yeux fixés au large et les cheveux au vent Nous nous embarquerons pour la Mer des Ténèbres Avec le coeur joyeux d'un jeune passager.\n\nLL\n\nJust as in the old days we would leave for China Our eyes looking out to sea and our hair streaming in the wind We shall sail henceforward for the Sea of Darkness Cheerful and lighthearted as a young traveller.\n\nThis is a major reversal, from the China ‘trip' into the Sea of Darkness. This is a remarkable and prophetic insight on the part of Baudelaire, a poetic formulation which is most relevant to our present-day intellectual crisis. We shall refer to it again a little later.\n\n—\n\n12\n\nAs the nineteenth century went on, as French political involvement in China and Vietnam became more effective, it was not unusual for French intellectuals to visit China and to empathize with her but always as isolated individuals. Such a one was Father Huc,1 a Catholic missionary whose minority voice, uncertain as it was, insisted on the specific values of Chinese culture and habits. China was a source of inspiration for diplomats posted there, such as Eugene Simon, whose book La Cité chinoise is a minor classic modelled on Fustel de Coulanges's standard essay La Cité grecque, and later Paul Claudel, a young consul in Tianjin, expressing his emotions in Connaissance de l'Est, a collection of poems in the Symbolist manner. French visitors to China included naval officers such as Pierre Loti, who had witnessed approvingly another sack of Peking by Western Allied forces after the Boxer Rebellion, or Victor Segalen, poet and archaeologist. Later still, intellectuals turned into revolutionaries, such as the young André Malraux who was involved in the 1926-27 Communist revolution in Canton, and who drew on this experience for his two major novels, Les Conquérants and La Condition humaine. Huc, Simon, Claudel, Segalen, Loti and Malraux had indeed very little in common except that they were somehow marginal figures on the French intellectual scene of their time. Even for those who were later to achieve international fame, such as Claudel and Malraux, China had not been much more than an",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
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    },
    {
        "id": 210982,
        "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": 44,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "19\n\naventure de jeunesse as had been the case of young René Leys, the intriguing adventurer, the mythomaniac hero of Segalen's best novel, the secret lover of China's last Empress.\n\nSegalen's novel may allow me to say one more word on his unusual cultural itinerary, which began in Polynesia where he was searching for old Polynesian myths and also for Gauguin's manuscripts, and which ended up in China with René Leys and his cryptic poems Stèles. China and the Pacific probably fascinated Segalen because of their mutual irreducibility. They utterly contrast one with the other, one in its historical as well as geographical compactness, the other in its marine immensity and its tiny, highly diversified societies. It is hardly surprising that so few Western intellectuals have combined an active interest in both. My own intellectual detours between Chinese studies and the problems of the Pacific have probably brought me closer to Segalen's rather unique position.\n\n15\n\nAll these lively but isolated figures have left us with highly valuable literary contributions. However, they expressed little interest in China's historical fate and political plight. They were concerned with China's essence. China for them, or most of them, was a kind of cultural and aesthetic curiosity. And I am not sure that Malraux does not fall into this category, whatever the political setting of his novels. The powerful voice of Victor Hugo, combining artistic concern and political involvement and condemning from his Guernsey exile the sack of the old Summer Palace in Peking in 1860, has remained distinctly isolated:\n\nSomewhere in a dark corner of the world, there was a marvel of the world and this marvel was named the Summer Palace... It was a kind of frightening unknown masterpiece of Asian civilisation on the horizon of European civilisation.\n\nAll the treasures of our cathedrals would not match this formidable Museum of the East.\n\nTwo bandits once entered the Summer Palace... One of the victors filled his pockets, whereas the other filled his treasure chests... In the face of history one",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
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