Professor Emeritus Walter Simon

Abstract

Until well within the second quarter of this century, academic sinology in Britain remained the province of a few isolated, if brilliant, amateurs, men who had retired to scholarly pursuits after a lifetime of activity in some other field. They occupied university chairs with distinction, but never attracted many pupils and consequently never established a tradition of exact, professional scholarship. That such a tradition, sound and solid, though still young, exists today, is above all the merit of two scholars who, having left Germany in the years before the second World War, devoted their lives to the service of learning in their adopted country. The late Gustav Haloun enjoyed a short but memorable tenure of the Chair at Cambridge. At London, Walter Simon, whom his friends, colleagues, and former pupils greet with respect and affection on his eightieth birthday with this volume of essays, inspired a new academic professionalism, which was Germanic in the rigour of its philological exactitude, but at the same time humane in its appreciation of the civilization to which the study of language is the key. His immediate monument is the present Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Far East at this School, and it is appropriate that we should take this opportunity of honouring his life's work among us. But the ‘school’ to which he gave life is by no means confined to London. Scholars whom Simon taught or influenced occupy chairs of sinology and other teaching and library posts in this country, in Australia, Canada, and the United States.