Cycles of Cathay:1 Sinology, Philology, and Histories of the Song Dynasty (960–1279) in the United States CHRISTIAN DE PEE University of Michigan
[email protected] Abstract: This article offers a critical assessment of the field of Song history in the United States as it has developed since World War II. By placing the development of Song studies in the United States within the wider context of the philologi- cal tradition of European sinology, the development of academic discourse in Republican China and Meiji Japan, and the social-scientific methods preferred of postwar area studies, this essay recovers narrative strands that have been commonly omitted from accounts of the historiography of China in the United States. By their partial resumption of the philological methods of sinology, cul- tural historians of imperial China have created a filiation that is distinct from the new medievalism in the historiography of Europe and that complicates recent discussions of the methods and politics of social history and cultural history. So the complete identity of the medieval Persian list of “Catayan” words of Nasir-al- Din and Ulugh Beg, published by Graevius, with the Chinese cycles and chronological series, was established for the first time by Golius and with it, the identity of China and Catay. Incidentally it had led [in 1655] to the first printing (from wood) of Chinese characters in Holland, which were really the first properly printed characters in Europe.2 1. The name “Cathay” derives from “Khitay” (Khitan, Qidan), the pastoral people who founded the Liao dynasty (907–1125) in what is now the Northeast of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Mongolia.