2 What do the natives call Sinology? If it exists there, they must have a native word for it. Die Ausländer usually, and curiously, have employed the Chinese world Han-hsüeh as their translation of “Sinology,” but this clearly is chop-suey. At home, the term of course designates only one of the narrowest and most specialized, and in fact one of the latest to develop, of the market-towns of the central provinces. The whole realm of learning of civilized man traditionally was called “hsüeh-wen,” a term as broad in scope as the term t'ien-hsia for the empire. Sinology then should imply all of the subject matter of traditional learning though not, of course, necessarily only the traditional ways of pursuing it. In the recent century or so, at the same time that the t'ien-hsia concept was becoming difficult to maintain under the limiting conditions of international reciprocity, the term kuo-hsüeh has come to be used to designate the realm formerly called hsüeh-wen. I propose that the alien residents of the realm should use kuo-hsüeh as the Chinese name for Sinology. This word is usable any place, as long as the language is Chinese, for it will always mean Chung-kuo-hsüeh (a “non-sayable” word), or Chung-kuo ti kuo-hsüeh (“sayable” but too lengthy), for speakers of Chinese always invoke an inviolable extra-territoriality;—eavesdrop on any such persons, conversing anywhere in the world, and note whom they mean when they say “wai-kuo-jen,” or what they mean when they say “kuo-hsüeh.” This term, then, I think serves very well in our time to designate our intellectual realm. And I see no particular reason to abandon “Sinology,” its semantic analogue, when speaking English. The usual complaint against it was that it was misappropriated by the early explorers, and that their followers have tended to perpetuate a kind of misuse of it. I believe that the word will survive. The serious issue is not that of names, but of content.
