Some Japanese Influences on Chinese Classical Scholarship of the Ch'ing Period

Abstract

AC CURATE AND UNBIASED history of scholarship can at times be as important as scholarship itself. But if this is especially true of Sinology, it is by the same token especially difficult for the sinologist to accomplish. On the one hand he finds himself all but lost in the wilderness of a vast and largely unindexed literature; on the other he may well have his judginent guided by national allegiances and recent events, both influences difficult to evade, but nevertheless quite inimical and at times fatal to true scholarship. No problem in the study of the relations of China with her cultural colony Japan can possibly be approached without keeping this dilemma in mind, nor without a firm resolve that one's critical faculties be not impaled on its horns.