The Reception of the Modern Historiographic Footnote in Twentieth Century China

Abstract

Abstract In the first half of the twentieth century, it took a long time for modern historiographic footnotes to be accepted as a standard practice of Chinese historiography in professionalization. Although the word “footnote” as a foreign loanword entered Japanese and Chinese dictionaries as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, in the 1920s and 1930s, most historical journals did not adopt footnotes as a typical style requirement. In 1928, when Academia Sinica started publishing its flagship history journal, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, footnote style was not required. However, some linguists and archaeologists published their papers in this journal with modern footnotes. Gradually, this practice was also accepted by historians. Though many scholars published their works with footnotes in the West, once they returned to Japan, the vertically printed publications pushed them back to the Japanese tradition of no footnotes. However, since the 1930s, footnotes have been accepted more widely. In the 1950s, with the publication of state-sponsored history journals, the modern academic style with footnotes was gradually established. Marxist historians played a vital role in accepting and implementing footnotes by citing classical Marxist works in a standard format to guarantee quotation accuracy.