¹ A variety of studies have been devoted to French Sinology. The one essay that dominates the rest by its comprehensiveness and erudition is Demiéville, Paul, “Aperçu historique des études sinologiques en France,” Acta Asiatica 11 (1966), 56–110Google Scholar; rpt. in Demiéville, Choix d’études sinologiques (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 433–87. Out of modesty, presumably, Demiéville does not say a word of his own, considerable, contribution. (The same is true of his essay on teaching Chinese at the École des Langues Orientales, cited in n. 36.) One should also cite Henri Cordier (1849–1925), an ardent bibliographer and exacting historian of Sino-European relations, who published (in T'oung Pao and elsewhere) a series of essays on French Sinology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries featuring abundant quotes from archival materials.

² Demiéville, “Aperçu historique,” 62.

³ Voltaire's use of Jesuit writings in his critique of European absolutism and of Catholicism is the best known example of such misappropriation. The Beijing Jesuit Amiot, a particularly prolific author in the second half of the eighteenth century, told at one point of the missionaries’ being disgusted with working for Europe and seeing their writings quoted in “works of darkness aimed at combatting the very religion we are preaching at the risk of our lives”; see Louis Pfister, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les jésuites de l'ancienne mission de Chine, 1552–1773, vol. 2 (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique, 1934), 839.

⁴ The quality and dependability of this information also improved with time: compare, for example, the descriptions of China's administration and government in Le Comte's Nouveaux mémoires, which still contain many odd or fanciful remarks, and Du Halde's Description de la Chine—not to mention a number of pieces in the late-eighteenth-century Mémoires concernant les Chinois discussed below.

⁵ Demiéville, “Aperçu historique,” 72, describes Fourmont as “un pédant médiocre et brouillon.” Nicolas Fréret, on the other hand, was a serious scholar with wide interests (and a resolute opponent of figurist theories); however, he does not seem to have actively pursued his Chinese interests beyond a 1718 memoir on Chinese writing in which he explained what he had been able to study with Arcade Hoange.

⁶ One important example of such publications is the Histoire générale de la Chine, translated from Zhu Xi's Tongjian gangmu 通鑑綱目 by the Jesuit Joseph de Moyriac de Mailla (1669–1745), published in thirteen volumes by Le Roux Deshauterayes in Paris in 1777–1785, which remained influential until the twentieth century.

⁷ Fourmont's efforts were published after Prémare's death, in Meditationes sinicæ in 1737, and in Grammatica duplex in 1742. Though Fourmont did not acknowledge it, he was heavily indebted not only to Prémare's manuscript but also to the work accomplished in Paris by Hoange and Fréret.

⁸ It had been rediscovered and hand-copied by Abel-Rémusat in the 1810s, and in the next few years several other copies were made by hand. For a detailed history of the manuscript and published versions of the Notitia, see Kwa, Paul, “Prémare's Notitia Linguae Sinicae, 1728–1893: The Journey of a Language Textbook,” East Asian Publishing and Society 10.2 (2020), 159–200Google Scholar.

⁹ Another questionnaire in fifty-two items, with elaboration and comments, was sent by Turgot sometime after Ko and Yang's return to China: see “Questions sur la Chine adressées à MM. Ko et Yang,” in Œuvres de Turgot, new ed. with various supplements (Paris: Guillaumin, 1844), vol. 1, 310–21. These are first of all an économiste's questions, with a clear physiocratic slant, rather than a Sinologist's, and the comments reveal quite a good command of the topics on the part of Turgot. There are also demands for sending seeds, samples, etc. Only the last three questions deal with Chinese history (to wit, the Kaifeng Jews, the Miao aborigines, and the Manchus’ degree of acculturation to Chinese ways).

¹⁰ For an in-depth analysis of the Mémoires and a detailed enumeration of their contents and sources, see Dehergne, Joseph, “Une grande collection: Mémoires concernant les Chinois (1776–1814),” Bulletin de l’École française d'Extrême-Orient 72 (1983), 267–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ The Jesuit order had been prohibited in Paris as early as 1762 and in the whole of France two years later: when Ko and Yang departed in 1765 they had the status of secular priests, but became Jesuits again after they had joined the Beijing mission the next year.

¹² On which see Henri Cordier, “La suppression de la Compagnie de Jésus et la mission de Peking,” T'oung Pao, ser. 2, 17.3 (1916), 271–347, and 17.4–5 (1916), 561–623. On the post-suppression mission, see also Marin, Catherine, “La mission française de Pékin après la suppression de la Compagnie de Jésus en 1773,” Transversales 107 (2008), 11–28Google Scholar. Things calmed down after Lazarist Fathers arrived from Paris to take charge and managed to maintain harmonious relations with their ex-Jesuit colleagues.

¹³ One of the main arguments for resisting attempts at seizing the Jesuit mission possessions in Beijing was the claim that they did not belong to the Catholic church but had been acquired through the generosity of the French crown and of the Chinese emperor.

¹⁴ Quoted in Cordier, “La suppression de la Compagnie de Jésus,” Part 1, 309–11.

¹⁵ For details see Landry-Deron, Isabelle, “Le Dictionnaire chinois, français et latin de 1813,” T'oung Pao 101.4–5 (2015), 407–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The main innovation in relation to the missionary glossaries was a classification by character radicals, not by alphabetical order of romanization.

¹⁶ “Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat” is how he signed his own works; but in much of the literature, even during his own times, Abel and Rémusat are used as his first and last names. On various aspects of his personality and career, see most recently the essays by Pierre-Étienne Will, Isabelle Landry-Deron, Mark Elliott, Nathalie Monnet, Georges Métailié, Frédéric Obringer, and Anne Cheng in Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs: Deux cents ans de sinologie française en France et en Chine, edited by Pierre-Étienne Will and Michel Zink (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2020).

¹⁷ Manchu, let us recall, was one of the official languages of the Qing state, and would remain so through the fall of the empire. Abel-Rémusat's chair at the Collège de France was called “Langues et littératures chinoises et tartares-mandchoues,” and the same intitulé was maintained through 1918 (when Henri Maspero took over the chair), though in effect using Manchu as an aid for Chinese studies fell into abeyance after Stanislas Julien. A number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuits were proficient in Manchu, and they used translations of Chinese text into Manchu, supposedly easier to understand, for their own translations into Latin and French; a manual on the language, the Elementa linguae Tartaricae (anon., attributed to Ferdinand Verbiest), appeared in Paris in 1696, and was used as a blueprint for Amiot's Grammaire tartare-mantchou (first published in the Mémoires concernant les Chinois in 1788). For all of this, see Mark Elliott, “Abel-Rémusat, la langue mandchoue et la sinologie,” in Will and Zink, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs, 49–69.

¹⁸ In Abel-Rémusat's time the collection contained not only the books contributed by missionaries in the Ancien Régime, but also the contents of several private libraries—including Henri Bertin's prestigious collection—that had been confiscated during the French Revolution.

¹⁹ The role of the Cabinet des manuscrits orientaux (which in fact holds a large quantity of printed books as well) has been central to the history of French Sinology, and Orientalism in general. To give but one example, it took care of the Dunhuang manuscripts brought back by Pelliot in 1909. It has regrettably been dismantled during the 2000s and integrated into the BnF Department of Manuscripts.

²⁰ See Nathalie Monnet, “Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832): un autodidacte et ses livres,” in Will and Zink, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs, 71–116, in particular 98–107.

²¹ See Walravens, Hartmut, “Les recherches sur l'Extrême-Orient au début du XIX^e siècle ou Paris, Mecque des orientalistes allemands,” Revue germanique internationale 7 (2008), 33–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Though he had been appointed to a chair in Bonn, he had convinced the authorities to allow him to stay in Paris, the only place with enough resources to do his work. He lived there for the rest of his life, and much of his published output is in French. Not everybody liked him in Paris, some even suspecting him of spying for the king of Prussia (who was funding his chair in Bonn).

²³ The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was created the following year. Several publications in French (by Klaproth, Stanislas Julien, and others) were funded by and printed in Paris for the Oriental Translation fund of Great Britain and Ireland, created in 1828.

²⁴ A number of his reviews, programmatic essays, biographical sketches, polemical essays, and other shorter pieces (though some are quite substantial) were reprinted in the four volumes of his Mélanges asiatiques (1825–1826) and Nouveaux mélanges asiatiques (1829); an extra volume of Mélanges posthumes appeared in 1843.

²⁵ Nowhere has the articulation between the pioneering work of the Jesuits and the academic Sinology inaugurated by Abel-Rémusat been better encapsulated than in the following assessment by Édouard Chavannes: “One keeps marveling at the enormous amount of work then accomplished by a few French men of religion; confronted with a civilization made intimidating by its antiquity, its variety, and its expanse, these pioneers were able to open up the thoroughfares which allowed their successors to cast a general look at this immense domain and direct their investigations.” See Chavannes, La sinologie (Paris: Larousse, 1915), 5.

²⁶ Regarding Daoism, Le livre des récompenses et des peines (a partial translation of the Taishang ganying pian 太上感應篇, with lengthy notes and comments) appeared as early as 1816; in its introduction Abel-Rémusat states his intention to prepare translations of the main “philosophical and religious works” of the two traditions, starting with the Daodejing. He was not granted the time to fulfill this program, unfortunately.

²⁷ Demiéville, “Aperçu historique,” 79. The translation of Faxian's work, which had been completed and prepared for publication by Klaproth and Clerc de Landresse (1800–1868), a former student of Abel-Rémusat, after the latter's death, is titled Foe Koue Ki ou Relation des royaumes bouddhiques de Fa hian. One of Abel-Rémusat's important works on China's neighboring regions is his Histoire de la ville de Khotan (1820), which is mostly based on the relevant materials in dynastic histories.

²⁸ The text appears in full in Mélanges posthumes, 221–52, as “Discours sur le génie et les mœurs des peuples orientaux.” It has led a recent author to see in Abel-Rémusat a forerunner of Edward Saïd: Messling, Markus, “Philologie et racisme: à propos de l'historicité dans les sciences des langues et des textes,” Annales HSC, 2012.1, 173–74Google Scholar.

²⁹ Thus James Legge, who inaugurated the first Chinese chair at Oxford in 1876, and Thomas Wade, who did the same in Cambridge in 1888, and was succeeded by Herbert A. Giles, also a former diplomatic agent in China, in 1897.

³⁰ On the rare occasions when Julien met actual Chinese in Paris he conversed with them in writing. See in particular the well-known testimony of Wang Tao 王韜 (1828–1897), Legge's assistant for the translation of the Chinese Classics, who visited Julien in 1868 on his way to England, in his Manyou suilu 漫遊隨錄, juan 2.

³¹ His work on the grammar of the Chinese written language should also be mentioned, as well as a number of projects (on the classics and histories, in particular) he never completed but for which he left partial manuscript translations that we know he used in his lectures.

³² Most recently, Jean-Pierre Drège did not hesitate to entitle his extended essay on Julien (to which the present account is much indebted) “Stanislas Julien (1797–1873), savant éminent, était-il un ‘vilain homme’?,” in Will and Zink, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs, 167–221. The phrase “vilain homme” (nasty person) was first applied to Julien by Henri Cordier in an obituary published in 1906.

³³ Drège, “Stanislas Julien,” 201–19, recounts in great detail these disputes, some of which were lifelong affairs.

³⁴ See Karine Chemla, “L'histoire des sciences dans la sinologie des débuts du XIX^e siècle: les Biot père et fils,” in Will and Zink, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs, 411–37. Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862), the father, was a Collège de France professor of mathematics and had studied the history of Chinese astronomy. He edited his son's translation of the Zhouli and ensured its posthumous publication in 1851.

³⁵ The only one available in France at the time was Joseph Callery (1810–1862), a former missionary with a somewhat sulfurous reputation and a brilliant linguist, without whose assistance Théodose de Lagrené (1800–1862), the French ambassador in 1844, would have been totally lost in his negotiations.

³⁶ On all of this see Paul Demiéville, “Le chinois à l’École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes,” in Cent-cinquantenaire de l’École des Langues Orientales (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1948), 129–61. (The first part of this essay offers the best description of the Chinese language I have ever seen.) Also see the contributions to Un siècle d'enseignement du chinois à l’École des Langues Orientales 1840–1945, edited by Marie-Claire Bergère and Angel Pino (Paris: L'Asiathèque, 1995). The École was profoundly reformed in 1869 with a view to restoring its original vocation as an institution teaching practical languages, whenever possible with the help of native coaches (“répétiteurs indigènes”). In 1874 it was allowed to move from its cramped quarters inside the Bibliothèque Nationale to a private mansion rue de Lille (still used for its research programs). The adjective “nationale” replaced “spéciale” and “vivantes” was added to “langues” in 1914, hence the acronym ENLOV, used until the École became INALCO in 1971.

³⁷ In his “Aperçu historique,” 81–82, Demiéville—himself a profound connoisseur of Chinese poetry—finds d'Hervey's translations of Tang poetry and of Qu Yuan's 屈原 Lisao 離騷 (published in 1870) not particularly elegant or philologically exacting, but remarks that he was the first to introduce the French public to this genre—and, it seems, with some success. On the life and career of d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, also see Angel Pino's detailed study in Bergère and Pino, Un siècle d'enseignement du chinois, 95–129, whose presence in that volume is justified by the fact that d'Hervey stood in for Julien at the École during the year 1869–1870. Pino devotes some space to the book for which d'Hervey's name is still renowned today, at least in some circles—a treatise on dreams published anonymously in 1867 and titled Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger, known to Freud and extolled by the Surrealists.

³⁸ See Missions au pays de la soie: l'ambassade Lagrené (1843–1846) entre science, commerce et diplomatie, edited by Mau Chuan-hui and Pierre-Étienne Will (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 2017).

³⁹ See Leon d'Hervey de Saint-Denys, La Chine devant l'Europe (Paris: Amyot, 1859), a general description of China followed by an account of the Opium wars and of the most recent incidents, for which British aggressiveness and insensitivity are held essentially responsible; and Guillaume Pauthier, Histoire des relations politiques de la Chine avec les puissances occidentales depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu'à nos jours, suivie du Cérémonial observé à la cour de Pé-king pour la réception des ambassadeurs, traduit pour la première fois dans une langue européenne (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1859), which is centered on the question of etiquette and rituals. Both books are verbose and somewhat rambling, and neither has much scholarly merit, but they display a sincere concern with defending China against prejudice and countering European propaganda.

⁴⁰ Édouard Chavannes, La sinologie, 7–8. (This fifteen-page essay is extracted from La science française, Paris: Larousse, 1915, published for the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition that took place the same year.)

⁴¹ He mentions d'Hervey de Saint-Denys and two lesser figures: Gabriel Devéria (1844–1899), a former interpreter who taught at the École des Langues Orientales, and Camille Imbault-Huart (1857–1897), who spent twenty years in China as an interpreter and consul and is remembered for his publications on Taiwan and on Chinese poetry.

⁴² Cordier also taught the history and geography of East Asia at the École des Langues Orientales for more than forty years. Demiéville, who attended his courses, describes him as a “living card index” (un fichier vivant) in “Aperçu historique,” 99.

⁴³ As we saw, despite the mention of “tartares-mandchoues” Manchu had ceased being taught or used after Stanislas Julien.

⁴⁴ Chavannes made the 1907 five-month trip in North China in the company of his former student and ardent admirer Vassilii Alekseev (1880–1951), whose journal was published in Moscow in 1958; see Serge Elisseeff's (1889–1975) lively review in T'oung Pao 50.5 (1963), 575–92. Alekseev, who according to Elisseeff was regarded by his colleagues as “the brightest representative of the French Sinological school in Russia,” was interested above all in the productions of Chinese folk culture, whereas Chavannes would rather concentrate on the monuments of antiquity.

⁴⁵ Besides the traditional method of rubbing, Chavannes was among the first to use photography as a tool of archeological survey in China. When embarking on his famed mission to Central Asia in 1905, Pelliot had hired a professional photographer, Charles Nouette. (Chavannes's photographer was Chinese.) Chavannes's research on ancient sculpture was pursued by one of his students, the writer and navy doctor Victor Segalen (1878–1919), who in 1914 was commissioned to explore Shaanxi and Sichuan together with two colleagues, studying and photographing monuments of Han and Tang sculpture; several publications based on their investigations appeared in the 1920s and 1930s.

⁴⁶ The five volumes, with extensive commentary and several appendixes, appeared between 1895 and 1905; they were republished in 1967–69 with an extra volume 6 covering chapters 48–52, in part based on Chavannes's drafts. According to Demiéville, “Aperçu historique,” 95, the Musée Guimet in Paris holds an unannotated rough draft of the complete Shiji translation dating to Chavannes's first stay in China. Interestingly, Chavannes's Mémoires historiques appears to have been an important source for Max Weber's Taoism and Buddhism.

⁴⁷ See Édouard Chavannes, Les documents chinois découverts par Aurel Stein dans les sables du Turkestan oriental (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913). Aurel Stein had shipped all his materials in Chinese to Chavannes so that he could examine and catalog them. The same scenario was repeated after Stein's 1913–1915 expedition: this time Henri Maspero was the recipient (in 1920) of nearly a thousand documents on wood and paper. His manuscript was ready by 1936, but due to funding difficulties it was only published in 1953 by the British Museum as Les documents chinois de la troisième expédition de Sir Aurel Stein en Asie Centrale. For details see Michel Soymié, “Les documents d'Asie centrale dans l’œuvre de Maspero,” in Hommage à Henri Maspero 1883–1945 (Paris: Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1984), 61–67.

⁴⁸ See Zhang Guangda, “À propos d’Édouard Chavannes: le premier sinologue complet,” in Will and Zink, Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs, 223–29.

⁴⁹ As of 1886, EPHE was comprised of five “Sections,” three for mathematics, physics, and natural science and two for humanities, namely “Sciences historiques et philologiques” (Fourth Section) and “Sciences religieuses” (Fifth Section). As we shall see below, in 1947 a sixth section of “Sciences économiques et sociales” was added. (The sections for mathematics and physics were closed in 1986.)

⁵⁰ See, among many others, the essays in Paul Pelliot: de l'histoire à la légende, edited by Jean-Pierre Drège and Michel Zink (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belle-Lettres, 2013). The best, and at the same time quite entertaining, testimony on Pelliot the man, with his imposing personality and little foibles, is due to Denis Sinor (1916–2011), who was a favorite student between 1939 and 1945 and seems to have enjoyed the confidence of this standoffish and rather overbearing “maître.” See “Remembering Paul Pelliot, 1878–1945,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119.3 (1999), 467–72.

⁵¹ One important aspect of the training that most EFEO “pensionnaires” greatly benefited from was working with the Chinese and Vietnamese literati they were able to hire as assistants despite their rather low pay—a fruitful (even though criticized by some as typically “colonial”) method encountered in many other contexts as well. The BEFEO has appeared regularly from 1901 to the present, with an interruption during the Pacific and First Indochina Wars in the 1940s and early 1950s. For a review of Sinological work during the first twenty years of EFEO, including regular reports on the contemporary situation in China, see the (unsigned) contribution by Paul Demiéville in BEFEO 21 (1921), 366–87.

⁵² Demiéville (“Aperçu historique,” 102) says that Pelliot made T'oung Pao “a kind of Sinological court” (Une sorte de tribunal de la sinologie).

⁵³ Sinor, “Remembering Paul Pelliot,” 470.

⁵⁴ From Beijing Pelliot went to Shanghai and Wuxi, then sailed to Hanoi, returning to Beijing in May 1909, and to Paris (where his sponsors were impatiently waiting for him to celebrate) via Russia in October of the same year. Much has been written on Pelliot's mission in Central Asia. For two recent and extremely detailed accounts, using Pelliot's diary (published in 2008 as Carnets de route 1906–1908) and his private papers held at Musée Guimet, see Éric Trombert, “La mission archéologique de Paul Pelliot en Asie Centrale (1906–1908),” in Drège and Zink, Paul Pelliot, 45–82 (including a day-by-day chronology of the expedition), and Jean-Pierre Drège, “La mission de Paul Pelliot au Turkestan chinois et en Chine (1906–1909): les clefs d'un succès,” in Will and Zink, Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs, 263–331.

⁵⁵ Pelliot's notes were of such quality and precision that their publication between 1981 and 1992 was a big event among Dunhuang specialists, all the more so since many of the inscriptions he had copied had become damaged in between.

⁵⁶ For details on Pelliot's dealings with Chinese officials and scholars, who were generally captivated by his fluency in Chinese and vast erudition, see Rong Xinjiang and Wang Nan, “Paul Pelliot en Chine (1906–1909),” in Drège and Zink, Paul Pelliot, 83–119. After the expedition Pelliot continued to exchange with his Chinese colleagues and sent them a large number of photographs of the documents held in Paris, as he had promised to do, in several installments. Among the scholars of note with whom he exchanged correspondence for many years are Luo Zhenyu 羅振玉 (1866–1940), Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927), and Dong Kang 董康 (1867–1947). He also had particular respect for Chen Yuan 陳垣 (1880–1971). In general, his familiarity with the research published in China was exceptional among Western Sinologists and much valued by his Chinese colleagues.

⁵⁷ At Pelliot's and Luo Zhenyu's urging, the imperial government was alerted and decided to bring back to Beijing what remained in Dunhuang. (Only part of it was retrieved, however, and there was a lot of actual plundering.)

⁵⁸ There was some important prewar research, however. For example, many of the sources used in Demiéville's Concile de Lhasa (on which see below; though the book was published in 1952, the research dates from the 1930s) are Dunhuang documents. Demiéville was helped in his research by the librarian and scholar Wang Zhongmin 王重民 (1903–1975), who spent several years in Paris preparing a preliminary catalogue of the Pelliot collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale before moving to the Library of Congress and ultimately becoming head of the Library Science Department at Peking University.

⁵⁹ His last series of Collège de France lectures was devoted to the legendary figure of Prester John. On Pelliot's work in such “margins of Sinology,” see Michel Tardieu, “Les chrétiens d'Orient dans l’œuvre de Paul Pelliot,” in Drège and Zink, Paul Pelliot, 471–88.

⁶⁰ Tardieu, “Les chrétiens d'Orient,” 483, speaks of “une bibliographie protéiforme, quasi-insaisissable.” The one attempt to draw up a complete catalog of Pelliot's publications is Hartmut Walravens, Paul Pelliot (1878–1945): His Life and Works—A Bibliography (Bloomington: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 2001), which lists 866 items.

⁶¹ Sinor, “Remembering Pelliot,” 471. In his obituary in T'oung Pao 38.1 (1947), 1–15, Pelliot's co-editor Duyvendak noted that he “wrote like many Chinese scholars, sui-pi 隨筆.”

⁶² Pelliot was one of only three European Sinologists to be thus honored by IHP (there was also an honorarium), the other two being Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978) and F.W.K. Müller (1863–1930). Pelliot had been a corresponding fellow of Peking University since 1923. When he received the invitation from Academia Sinica he was at Harvard, where he had been invited to help organize the newly established Harvard-Yenching Institute. (Some time later he was invited to become its director, but he declined and suggested Harvard hire Serge Elisseeff instead.)

⁶³ See Wang Fansen 王凡森, “Bo Xihe yu Fu Sinian” 伯希和與傅斯年, in his Fu Sinian: Zhongguo jindai lishi yu zhengzhi zhongde geti shengming 傅斯年——中國近代歷史與政治中的個體生命 (Taipei: Lianjing chuban gongsi, 2013); Chinese translation of Fu Ssu-nien: A Life in Chinese History and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). These considerations (less the last one) featured in a 1931 letter to Pelliot asking him to contribute to a Festschrift in honor of Cai Yuanpei's sixty-fifth birthday.

⁶⁴ For details on Pelliot's dealings with his Chinese colleagues, see Sang Bing 桑兵, “Bo Xihe yu jindai Zhongguo xueshu jie” 伯希和與近代中國學術界, Lishi yanjiu 1997.5, 115–38, and Wang Fansen, “Bo Xihe yu Fu Sinian.”

⁶⁵ The best account of Maspero's life and oeuvre is his obituary by Paul Demiéville in Journal Asiatique 234 (1943–1945), 245–80, which includes an exhaustive list of his publications and lectures.

⁶⁶ See Jacques Gernet, “La vie et l’œuvre,” in Hommage à Henri Maspero, 15–24, here 16.

⁶⁷ At Chavannes's death in 1918 the Collège de France suggested to Pelliot (then serving in Northeast China) that he annex Chavannes's domain—that is, Sinology proper—to his own chair; but Pelliot advised that Chavannes's chair be maintained and offered to Maspero.

⁶⁸ The EFEO library in Hanoi, which during the first half of the twentieth century developed into a world-class collection on the cultures of East Asia, including an outstanding collection of Chinese books, was transferred to the Vietnamese government in 1956. Before this took place, however, part of the collections could be moved to other centers in Southeast Asia and to the new EFEO library in Paris. The Vietnamese archive assembled and safeguarded thanks to the exertions of the “colonial” EFEO members remained in Hanoi and is now one of the treasures of the Vietnam National Museum of History (itself a continuation of the EFEO Louis Finot Museum).

⁶⁹ Then and later Maspero wrote reviews of most of Karlgren's main publications. (As it happens, Karlgren's seminal works on historical phonology were published in French.)

⁷⁰ The English version includes a useful introduction by Denis Twitchett, discussing Maspero's accomplishments and summarizing the advances made in the field since the original publication of La Chine antique. Incidentally, in a tribute written a little later, Twitchett spoke of Maspero as “perhaps in our century the most illustrious name of Sinology”—a distinction generally reserved for Pelliot; see Hommage à Henri Maspero, 13. Edwin Pulleyblank comments in a review essay on why despite its obsolescence in several respects Maspero's synthesis remains a unique effort and still deserves to be read; see “La Chine Antique Revisited,” Pacific Affairs 53.1 (1980), 115–19.

⁷¹ Maspero's writings on Daoist religion are found in vol. 2 of the three-volume Mélanges posthumes sur les religions et l'histoire de la Chine (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). Also note an important text on “La religion chinoise dans son développement historique” in vol. 1. These and other essays on the subject have been collected in Henri Maspero, Le taoïsme et les religions chinoises (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). For a learned assessment of Maspero's Daoist studies by one of his most eminent successors, see Max Kaltenmark, “Henri Maspero et les études taoïstes,” in Hommage à Henri Maspero, 45–48, as well as his preface to Le taoïsme et les religions chinoises. Maspero's understanding of “la religion chinoise” as a non-contradictory blend of many beliefs and doctrines was novel at a time when scholars tended to see everything through the same Confucian lenses as their sources. His very last publication, a review of vol. 2 and 3 of Otto Franke's Geschichte des chinesischen Reiches (1936–37), contains a vivid passage on the “intensely religious” Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties period, with all the popular fervor and agitation in Daoist and Buddhist festivals and “democratization” of purification and immortality practices—something, Maspero regrets, that Franke completely missed, ensconced as he was in a perspective heavily dependent on Zhu Xi's Tongjian gangmu. See Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 45 (1942), col. 260–66.

⁷² According to later testimonies, Maspero had been in contact with the underground résistance, but he himself never said a word of it, not even to his wife, and in all probability the Germans were not aware of it. In 1943, Maspero, Pelliot and several colleagues were arrested by the Germans and spent about ten days in prison, nobody knowing exactly what was the cause, and why they were released. Though Pelliot does not seem to have belonged to a resistance network, he behaved openly as a “patriot” (he was a sort of patriotic conscience among his colleagues at the Collège de France and at the Société Asiatique, which he chaired at the time), encouraged his students to join the “maquis,” and did not conceal his hatred of the Vichy regime and, especially, of the invaders: to a German scholar who wished to visit him he responded: “When we have won the war.”

⁷³ For excellent assessments of Granet's work, see: Maurice Freedman's introduction to his translation of Granet's La religion des Chinois (The Religion of the Chinese People [New York: Harper and Row, 1976]); and Yves Goudineau, “Introduction à la sociologie de Marcel Granet” (Ph.D. dissertation, Paris X University, 1982), as well as “Marcel Granet (1884–1940): un ethnographe de la Chine ancienne,” Préfaces 7 (1988): 119–25, and several other essays by the same author.

⁷⁴ This was to be his only stay in China, if one excepts a short visit to Beijing in 1919 after he had served—like Pelliot and several other Orientalists—on the French military mission of assistance to the anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia. In his letter of support in 1911, Chavannes noted that Granet had followed his courses at the Collège de France and EPHE for two years (he must also have learned the basics of the language at the École des Langues Orientales), and asserted that, although his Chinese was still limited, a stay in China would allow him to make rapid progress—which it did, at least as far as reading texts is concerned: one is indeed stunned how fast he mastered the tools and sources of Sinology. See “Dossier de mission en Chine de Marcel Granet,” edited by Goudineau, Yves, Gradhiva: revue d'histoire et d'archives de l'anthropologie 14 (1993), 101–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁵ See in particular his conclusion to La religion des Chinois (1922), on religious feeling in modern China, which he acknowledges is principally based on his own observations, therefore inevitably limited. Granet would also refer on occasion to customs or practices attested in non-Han groups from the Chinese frontiers in order to illustrate or confirm some of his points. This was from secondary sources, however, very far from Maspero's immersion in and personal contact with Vietnamese or Chinese populations to understand their beliefs and practices. Granet had been soundly trained in the analysis of ethnographic materials by Durkheim and Mauss and had extensive knowledge of the relevant sources.

⁷⁶ Maspero commended highly this cleaning up of the Shijing in a review of Granet's first book, Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine (1919), of which the 1912 T'oung Pao article offered a prolegomenon. (The book was ready by 1914 but its publication was delayed by the Great War, during which Granet spent three years in the trenches and was wounded and decorated.)

⁷⁷ One of the most damning criticisms I know of is the review (or more appropriately, savaging) of Granet's La civilisation chinoise by the famous scholar and geologist V.K. Ting (Ding Wenjiang 丁文江, 1887–1936), who also takes Granet to task for his Shijing translations and the theories he derived from them in his first books. The text starts ominously: “A Chinese historian well-acquainted with European Sinological literature is never tired of saying that all Sinologists are incompetent pedants.” While Ting makes clear that this is unjust regarding the work of such scholars as Pelliot or Karlgren, he then adds: “But Prof. Granet's new book with its facile generalisations and erroneous reading of Chinese texts tends to prejudice the mind of Chinese scholars against European Sinology.” See Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin 34 (1931): 161–76 (the text is in English). For a more recent example, see Léon Vandermeersch, Wangdao ou la voie royale: Recherches sur les institutions de la Chine archaïque, vol. 1 (Paris: École française d'Extrême-Orient, 1977), 239–60, disproving most of the conclusions offered in Catégories matrimoniales et relations de proximité.

⁷⁸ See Goudineau, Yves, ”Lévi-Strauss, la Chine de Granet, l'ombre de Durkheim: Retour aux sources de l'analyse structurale de la parenté,” Cahiers de l'Herne 82 (2004)Google Scholar, special issue on Lévi-Strauss, 165–88. Likewise, Granet's handling of myths in Danses et légendes clearly influenced Lévi-Strauss's four-volume Mythologiques (1964–1971).

⁷⁹ The two works were commissioned to be part of a series named “L’évolution de l'humanité,” sponsored by a “Centre international de synthèse” and aimed at a general audience. They are regularly reprinted.

⁸⁰ For a detailed history of IHEC see Ge Fuping and Pierre-Étienne Will, “Paul Pelliot et l'Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises (1919–1945),” in Drège and Zink, Paul Pelliot, 271–312.

⁸¹ The only activity associated with IHEC before 1926 seems to have been a course on Chinese civilization delivered at the Sorbonne by Granet (who had been recommended by Pelliot when the latter decided to remain aloof) and Louis Laloy (1874–1944), a former Chavannes student who among many activities (he was secretary general of the Paris Opera from 1913 to 1940) specialized in Chinese music and literature.

⁸² This was when the Chinese government resumed the payment of its Boxer annual installments following a period of moratorium after China had joined the allies against Germany in 1917.

⁸³ For Louis Laloy, see n. 81, above. Arnold Vissière (1858–1930), who had a twenty-year experience with China as interpreter and diplomat, was an exacting professor of Chinese at the École des Langues Orientales from 1899 to 1930. Louis Finot (1864–1935), an Indianist and Southeast Asia archeologist, and for many years director of EFEO in Hanoi, was at the time professor at the Collège de France. Paul Boyer (1964–1949), a Russia specialist, was general administrator of the École des Langues Orientales.

⁸⁴ A further course on Chinese science, which was planned to be entrusted to invited Chinese scholars, could be set up only erratically due to the difficulty of finding adequate candidates. Starting in 1927–28, a course on Chinese law was taught every year by Jean Escarra (1885–1955), a professor of law who seriously studied Chinese and from 1921 spent long periods in China as an advisor to the Republican government.

⁸⁵ Having just been appointed head of EPHE in replacement of Marcel Mauss (dismissed as a Jew), Granet was called for an interview with the newly appointed Vichy Minister of Education. A patriot and a socialist, Granet could only detest the representatives of the newly installed Vichy government and their policies. The meeting is said to have been extremely tempestuous. Back at his home in the southern suburbs in the evening (which he had to reach on foot because the trains were not running), he died of a heart attack. His widow, Marie Granet (1892–1990), a high school teacher, a socialist militant, and a strong personality, participated actively in the Résistance, of which she later became an archivist and historian.

⁸⁶ On January 25, 1945—only months after the liberation of Paris and while the war was still going on—Pelliot gave a talk at the Chinese Art Society of America in New York City, on “Orientalists in France During the War.” Apart from listing those who had died or were missing (such as Maspero, of whom nothing had been heard since September of 1944), this intensely patriotic speech offered a general view of the dire straits in which French Oriental Studies had found themselves under German occupation, of the current general state of exhaustion, and of the difficulties ahead. The text is found in Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America 1 (1945/1946), 14–25, following Pelliot's obituary by Serge Elisseeff.

⁸⁷ See Bulletin de l’École française d'Extrême-Orient 19.5 (1919), 65–75, and Journal Asiatique 210 (1927), 152–55, respectively. Maspero does not seem to have reviewed Granet's other books.

⁸⁸ The visitor was the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), like Granet a stalwart of the Mauss school, who at that time was running for a Collège de France chair. Like Maspero, he was arrested by the Gestapo shortly thereafter and died in Buchenwald—one day before Maspero. See Halbwachs, Maurice, “Ma campagne au Collège de France,” Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines 1999.1, 189–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar (here 226).

⁸⁹ I have not found mention of Japanese students. Chinese students are a particular case, if only by their numbers during the interwar period. Not a few Chinese studying in France were first trained at the Institut franco-chinois in Lyon, which functioned in tandem with the Université franco-chinoise in Beiping—both were operating largely with Boxer funds. Others had various backgrounds, in China, in France, or elsewhere. Among them, over forty students or former students of IHEC defended and often published French dissertations dealing with Chinese topics (only part of these qualifying as “Sinology,” however) between the 1930s and 1950s. A few former IHEC students did enter the French academic system after the war and made careers there. See Stéphanie Homola, “Le dialogue entre étudiants chinois et sinologues françois à l'Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises (1927–1968),” in Will and Zink, Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs, 509–38.

⁹⁰ For a detailed and affectionate appreciation of des Rotours, see Holzman, Donald and Twitchett, Denis, “The Life and Work of Robert des Rotours,” T'ang Studies 13 (1995), 13–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹¹ The most detailed biographical account of Demiéville through 1945 is Christine Nguyen Tri, “Paul Demiéville, les Langues'O et les études chinoises,” in Bergère and Pino, Un siècle d'enseignement du chinois, 173–210.

⁹² The entries are by alphabetical order of the Chinese terms (in Japanese pronunciation)—the first entry of fascicle 1 being “A” 阿. The Hōbōgirin had a checkered history. The project was stopped after the first three fascicles, plus a supplement, published between 1929 and 1937, due among others to the Pacific War. It was resurrected in the 1960s and housed in a detached temple of the Shōkokuji 相國寺 in Kyoto, becoming the Japan branch of EFEO. For over three decades the Hōbōgirin Institute was a center of East Asian religious studies visited by countless scholars from every country, who all retained (or still retain, like the present writer) fond memories of this magical place where scholarship and friendship flourished. Five new Hōbōgirin fascicles appeared between 1967 and 2003, with entries that increasingly took the form of substantial monographs. The editors were Jacques May (1927–2018), Anna Seidel (1938–1991), and Hubert Durt (1936–2018)—a Swiss, a German, and a Belgian, the first two having been trained in Paris and the third in Brussels under the famous Indianist and Buddhologist Étienne Lamotte (1903–1983). Subsequently it was decided to completely reshape the project, abandoning the alphabetical pattern (only the letter “D” had been reached) and preparing conference volumes concentrating on particular topics. For details, see Iyanaga, Nobumi, “A History of the Hōbōgirin: Dictionnaire envyclopédique du bouddhisme d'après les sources chinoises et japonaises,” The Eastern Buddhist 481 (2017), 7–22Google Scholar.

⁹³ A third one, a translation of vernacular Buddhist poems extracted from Dunhuang documents, was published posthumously in 1982 by IHEC as L’œuvre de Wang le Zélateur.

⁹⁴ Demiéville announced a second volume devoted to a “commentaire doctrinal” and to the history of the Dhyāna/Chan school, but it never materialized.

⁹⁵ According to the introduction, the manuscript was ready on the eve of the war. Before preparing it for its eventual publication in 1952, Demiéville was able to integrate some new findings of his Tibetan colleagues (Marcelle Lalou, Jacques Bacot, Rolf A. Stein) into the text, making for even more numerous and longer footnotes.

⁹⁶ During which he was joined at the Maison Franco-japonaise by his friend and teacher Henri Maspero, who spent a fruitful year and a half in Japan in the late 1920s.

⁹⁷ As Demiéville explains in some detail in his introduction, he also benefitted from the vast literature in Japanese on Chan Buddhism in general and Linji in particular, with which he was intimately familiar.

⁹⁸ A large selection of Demiéville's essays, reviews, and annual summaries of Collège de France lectures, has been published (in fac-simile form) in two thick volumes: Choix d’études sinologiques (1921–1970) and Choix d’études bouddhiques (1929–1970) (Leiden: Brill, 1973). Both volumes include a near-complete bibliography of his writings, including the many reviews and bibliographical notes he freely published in T'oung Pao, which he edited or co-edited from 1947 to 1975: this was “his” journal, as it had been Pelliot's before him. When Jacques Gernet and Erik Zürcher took over in 1975, T'oung Pao reverted to a more conventional pattern, and in time it has had to adapt to the present “peer review” epoch. Pelliot and Demiéville certainly did not need peer reviewing: they had no peers.

⁹⁹ On Demiéville's linguistic versatility and vast culture in the literatures of many countries, in music, in the arts, etc., see his obituary by Donald Holzman, Journal of the American Oriental Society 99.3 (1979), 553–55.

¹⁰⁰ On Balazs, see the essays in Actualité d’Étienne Balazs (1905–1963): témoignages et réflexions pour un centenaire, edited by Pierre-Étienne Will and Isabelle Ang (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 2010), which also provides a comprehensive bibliography of Balazs's writings, including unpublished pieces and translations of his works. See also Zurndorfer, Harriet, “Not Bound to China: Étienne Balazs, Fernand Braudel and the Politics of the Study of Chinese History in Post-War France,” Past & Present 185 (2004), 189–221CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The obituary of Balazs by Demiéville in T'oung Pao 51.2–3 (1964), 247–61, is especially valuable because the two were close friends and Demiéville quotes from a number of Balazs's letters to him.

¹⁰¹ It was published serially as “Beitrage zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte der T'ang-Zeit (618–906),” Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen 34 (1931), 1–92; 35 (1932), 93–165; and 36 (1933), 1–62.

¹⁰² Apart from his leftist inclinations and abhorrence of the Nazi regime, the exact reasons why Balazs left in 1935, and then went into hiding in 1940, are not known with precision. The political commitment of his German wife may have played a role. Balazs's former assistant Françoise Aubin's (1932–2017) interesting study on his politics, “Sinologie et politique. Autour d’Étienne Balazs (1905–1963),” Études chinoises 27 (2008), 147–61, shows that to the end of his life Balazs dabbled in critical Marxist politics, moving in Marxist oppositional circles and publishing texts under pseudonyms. His hatred of bureaucratic capitalism, in both Communist and capitalist countries, is reflected in his articles on the Chinese imperial polity.

¹⁰³ A third instalment, devoted to the Treatise on Law in the Jinshu 晉書, was found in draft form at the death of Balazs and was sent to A.F.P. Hulsewé (1910–1993) for edition and publication, but nothing came of it. The manuscript can now be regarded as lost.

¹⁰⁴ The publication in China of the literature on “sprouts of capitalism” at the same time seems to have contributed to this turn.

¹⁰⁵ The Sixth Section became the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 1975.

¹⁰⁶ Before joining the Sixth Section Balazs had given some lectures at IHEC and at the EPHE's Fifth Section, but these were more “Sinological” and much less attended than his Sixth Section seminars.

¹⁰⁷ Balazs himself travelled to Japan in 1957 to meet his colleagues there; it was to be his only personal contact with East Asia, and the trip was marred by his first heart attack—six years before the one that was fatal—necessitating a six-week stay in a hospital.

¹⁰⁸ See in particular Sung Biographies, edited by Herbert Franke (1976), and Bibliographie des Song/Sung Bibliography, edited by Yves Hervouet (1978), an analytical and descriptive bibliography of Song writings.

¹⁰⁹ Maspero's concern with economic matters went back early in his research, but it developed more consistently with the preparatory work he did for the sequels to La Chine antique he envisioned. Several important essays on land property and taxation systems have been reprinted in vol. 3 of his Mélanges posthumes (1967).

¹¹⁰ Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy: Variations on a Theme (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); La bureaucratie céleste (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). Both selections were translated into several languages.

¹¹¹ Granet was in many ways his principal influence: see Stein's “Souvenir de Granet,” Études chinoises 4.2 (1985), 29–40.

¹¹² The fullest account of R.A. Stein's life and oeuvre is Liying, Kuo, “Rolf Alfred Stein (1911–1999),” Cahiers d'Extrême Asie 11 (1999–2000), x–xxxCrossRefGoogle Scholar, including a detailed bibliography.

¹¹³ On the somewhat shady circumstances of this creation, and more generally on the history of the Beijing French center until it was closed in 1953, see Ge Fuping, “Le Centre franco-chinois d’études sinologiques de Pékin et la sinologie française,” in Will and Zink, Abel-Rémusat et ses successeurs, 539–71.

¹¹⁴ D'Hormon lived in Beijing through 1955, at first as a diplomatic and economic adviser to the Chinese government. He made a point of not putting his name on the many translations he either published or helped to see through (including the Guoyu 國語 and the Honglou meng 紅樓夢). He is also said to have significantly helped Granet in his translations of the Book of Odes during Granet's stay in Beijing.

¹¹⁵ Among these programs were a series of investigations on popular religion and local customs conducted under Yang Kun 楊堃 (1901–1999), a Yenching University professor and former Granet student, as well as a series of Sinological indexes. The latter program hosted the team previously in charge of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, closed in 1941 by the Japan-controlled local government.

¹¹⁶ He arrived in Beijing in early 1948 and stayed until 1950. The Institute continued its activities under increasing control and pressure on the part of the new PRC authorities until it had to close in 1953. Fortunately, the larger part of its Chinese library was allowed to be shipped to France, where it is now part of the IHEC Library.

¹¹⁷ It was so very early on. One of Stein's first publications was an 83-page article on Tibetan divination slips, “Trente-Trois Fiches de Divination Tibétaines,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 4.3–4 (1939), 287–371.

¹¹⁸ Stein was also instrumental in setting up documentary and library resources for Tibetan studies in Paris. In a general way, he envisioned (and practiced) Tibetology as the study of a living culture—a threatened one in many respects—not as an appendix to Indology or Sinology.

¹¹⁹ An English translation was published by Stanford University Press in 1990 as The World in Miniature: Container Gardens and Dwellings in Far Eastern Thought. There is also an Italian translation (1987).

¹²⁰ The three-volume Festschrift edited by Stein's American student Michel Strickmann (1942–1994) is titled Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R.A. Stein (Brussels: Institut belge des hautes études chinoises, 1981–1985).

¹²¹ Kaltenmark first substantial publication, a study of the Confucian apocrypha (chanwei 讖緯), appeared in Hanxue, the Centre's periodical, in 1947. His next publication, “Le dompteur des flots,” a book-length essay on the cult of the Han general Ma Yuan 馬援, appeared in the same periodical in 1948.

¹²² Lao tseu et le taoïsme, an essay for the general public enriched with attractive illustrations, appeared in 1965 in a series called “Maîtres sprituels” (Éditions du Seuil); it has been often reprinted and there are several translations. For a complete list of Kaltenmark's works up to the late 1980s (excluding book reviews), see Hussein, Farzeen Baldrian and Seidel, Anna, “Max Kaltenmark: A Bibliography,” Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie 4 (1988), 8–17Google Scholar.

¹²³ For Schipper's career and oeuvre, see Goossaert, Vincent, “In memoriam Kristofer M. Schipper (1934–2021),” T'oung Pao 107.3–4 (2021), 221–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among his many publications are Le corps taoîste (Paris: Fayard, 1982), which was translated into several languages, and the three-volume The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang, co-edited with Franciscus Verellen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

¹²⁴ For a detailed account, see Will, Pierre-Étienne, “Jacques Gernet (1921–2018),” T'oung Pao 106.5–6 (2020), 487–524CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁵ For a selection of reprinted essays, see Jacques Gernet, L'intelligence de la Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

¹²⁶ The original edition was subtitled “action et réaction.” In the 1991 revised edition it became “la première confrontation.” The English translation (1985) is titled China and the Cristian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures. There have been several other translations, including two into Chinese.

¹²⁷ There was an exception, however: as early as 1900 courses on China and East Asia in general were offered at the University of Lyon, though on a very modest scale and with a strong commercial and colonial orientation—for centuries Lyon had been indirectly connected with the East through its silk industry, and more recently its Chamber of Commerce (which was funding the courses) had supported efforts to establish direct commercial relations with China. The first lecturer, made full professor in 1913, was Maurice Courant (1865–1935), who had been Chavannes's classmate at the École des Langues Orientales and started his career as an embassy interpreter in China, also becoming a specialist of Korea. Today Courant is mainly remembered by Sinologists for his catalog of Chinese books at the Bibliothèque Nationale (only recently made obsolete by the digitization of the BnF catalog). In Lyon he was instrumental in helping set up the Institut Franco-chinois (1921–1946), which prepared Chinese students to higher education in France. See the extended essay by Bouchez, Daniel, “Un défricheur méconnu des études extrême-orientales: Maurice Courant (1865–1935),” Journal Asiatique 271 (1983), 43–150Google Scholar.

¹²⁸ See Diény, Jean-Pierre, “Yves Hervouet (1921–1999),” Études chinoises 17.1–2 (1998 [1999]), 325–45Google Scholar.

¹²⁹ André Lévy is the only French Sinologist of note who was born and raised in China. His father, the owner of a jeweler's shop in Tianjin, took his family back to France when the Japanese invaded in 1937. During the war the young Lévy joined the “maquis” of the French Resistance in the Auvergne mountains. He started studying Chinese (as well as Japanese and Sanskrit) after the war.

¹³⁰ Of the five volumes of the final, descriptive catalog—as opposed to the preliminary lists drafted by Pelliot and Wang Zhongmin before the war—the first, which had been prepared by Jacques Gernet and Wu Chi-yu in the 1950s, appeared in 1970; the second, which was entrusted to Bibliothèque Nationale scholars, never materialized; the last three were published by Soymié's team between 1983 and 1995. For an account of Soymié's life and oeuvre and a detailed list of his publications (a not inconsiderable part of which appeared in Japanese), see Drège, Jean-Pierre, “Michel Soymié (1924–2002),” BEFEO 89 (2002), 6–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³¹ More than forty of Diény's articles in revised and edited form feature in his Images et représentations du monde dans la Chine ancienne: choix d’études (1962–2006), 2 vols., edited by J.-P. Diény and Pierre-Henri Durand (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 2012); vol. 2 includes a complete list of his publications.

¹³² There were other scholars than those cited in this essay, of course, but they were not many.

¹³³ By creating Chinese (or Oriental) departments: contrary to the situation in America, for example, generalist departments of history, literature, economics, etc., remain extremely reluctant to welcome specialists of China, or any other non-Western cultural area.

¹³⁴ Today EFEO members spend only part of their tenures in the field. Otherwise they operate in France (mostly in Paris) and complement their research activities by teaching courses in universities.

¹³⁵ Chesneaux was imprisoned several months in Vietnam after a visit to Viet Minh positions. He had already known the prison in Paris as a member of the student Résistance, but contrary to Maspero, he escaped deportation thanks to the liberation of Paris.

¹³⁶ Chesneaux, who left the French Communist Party in 1969, became for a time a devoted Maoist before turning to environmentalism and cultural criticism. He abandoned the China field in the 1970s.

¹³⁷ They include, among others, Lucien Bianco, Marie-Claire Bergère, Alain Roux, and Marianne Bastid (all retired now).

¹³⁸ Guillermaz, who had been appointed French military attaché in China in 1937 and spent the years 1941–1943 in Chongqing, returned to Nanjing in the same capacity in 1946, remaining there until 1951. He also advised the French delegation at the Geneva conference on Vietnam in 1954. He retired from active duty in 1958, the year he agreed to set up a Chinese documentation center at EPHE, and in time became a “Directeur d’études” with his seminar and students. In 1964 General de Gaulle entrusted him with the uncomfortable task of visiting Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan to inform him that France was about to establish diplomatic relations with mainland China. The same year he became the first military attaché to the new French embassy in Beijing (with the rank of general), and he stayed there through 1966. Though superseded by later research in some respects, his Histoire du Parti communiste chinois, 1921–1949 (Paris: Payot, 1968, English edition 1972, new edition 1975) and its sequel Le Parti communiste chinois au pouvoir, 1949–1972 (Paris: Payot, 1972) remain standard reference works.