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That Zhe Xian 谪仙 Designates a Banished Immortal and Not One Degraded by His Own Doing

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That Zhe Xian 谪仙 Designates a Banished Immortal and Not One Degraded by His Own Doing 302 Frontiers of History in China 2013, 8(2) that zhe xian 谪仙 designates a banished immortal and not one degraded by his own doing. The preface, a quarter of the book, is a two-part synthesis. Sections 1 to 6 present elements from the Liexian zhuan 列仙传 of Han (first century BCE), and sections 7 to 11, hagiographic elements in the Shangqing tradition, with Wang Ziqiao as the central figure of the Perfecteds appearing to Yang Xi 杨羲 in his visions. The latter is often mentioned in the Zhengao 真诰 as the Master of the Jinting Paradise 金庭, and Tiantai had a summit named Jinting. Thomas Jülch demonstrates the Buddhist influence on Sima Chengzhen, thoughts already exposed by Livia Kohn. Sima Chenzhen belonged to the Double Mystery trend, with well-known Buddhist connotations. Moreover, many facts of Wang Ziqiao’s life are found in the life of Buddha in the Lalitavistara translated into Chinese by Dharmarak a in the third century, the two sharing a princely origin, both in conflict with their respective fathers and already awakened conscious before their births. To emphasize this influence, Thomas Jülch translates and analyzes in a third chapter the “Notes on Tiantai Mountain”, a monograph by Xu Lingfu 徐灵府 at the end of the Tang that was collected in the Buddhist Canon. Though it describes a sacred topography and geography linked to Buddhism before and during the time of Sima Chengzhen, it also uses Taoist and other sources perhaps to create the cult of Wang Ziqiao on the mountain. For his translation Thomas Jülch studied three editions, allowing him to discover that the version in the Buddhist Canon, the most known and used, contains errors. Finally, Thomas Jülch introduces the “Monograph on Tiantai Mountain” based on important sources for the history of Taoism on Tiantai. Parts of it are translated (pp. 93–96) with the Chinese text under each paragraph. Catherine Despeux Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales E-mail: [email protected] Sun Huei-min, Zhidu yizhi: minchu Shanghai de Zhongguo lüshi, 1912–1937 (Institutional Transplantation: The Chinese Lawyers in Republican Shanghai, 1912–1937). Taibei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2012. ISBN 978-986-03-2954-4. 413pp. NT$350. DOI 10.3868/s020-002-013-0021-9 Sun Huei-min’s book is the latest among a number of scholarly works on the role Book Reviews 303 of the legal profession in Republican China. While some of the issues addressed in this book were covered in those other works, the author has provided more details and introduced new issues, partly through primary sources that were not taken up earlier. Alison Connor’s works (“Legal Education during the Republican Period: Soochow University Law School,” Republican China 19, no. 1 (1993): 84−112; “Lawyers and the Legal Profession During the Republican Period,” in Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip Huang, eds., Civil Law in Qing and Republican China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), for instance, did not use the Shanghai Bar Association (SBA)’s annual reports, while Xiaoqun Xu’s works (“The Fate of Judicial Independence in Republican China, 1912–1937,” China Quarterly, no. 149 (1997): 1–28; Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) did use the SBA’s annual reports but not the SBA’s archives. In contrast, Sun has used both the annual reports and the archives of the SBA, which enriches the discussion. This, along with the use of other primary sources from Chinese archival and printed sources, the British parliamentary papers, and the Japanese language sources, lays a solid empirical foundation for the study at hand. Besides consulting English-language secondary works, including Melissa Macauley’s book on legal scribes in late imperial China (Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), Sun has paid close attention to a substantial body of Chinese language secondary works on Republican-era Chinese lawyers. All this helps to situate Sun’s book at the forefront of the research. As for the book’s thesis, Sun has chosen to adopt the notion of “institutional transplantation” to describe and analyze the phenomenon of the Chinese legal profession emerging and growing in the Republican era, and in Shanghai in particular. Referring to the transplantation of the lawyer system from the West to China, the notion might not be as elegant or satisfying as alternative theoretical frameworks such as professionalization or the state-society relationship, but it perhaps fits Sun’s wide range of topics, which are directly and indirectly related to the emergence of Chinese lawyers in Republican Shanghai. The book is organized in seven chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 traces the gradual Chinese exposure in the late nineteenth century to the concept of legal defense and to the practice of lawyers acting in court in the West, which serves as a long-term historical background far predating 1912. Chapter 2 describes the development of Western-style legal education in China at the turn of the twentieth century, which offers a useful explanation as to where the first generation of Chinese lawyers came from. Chapter 3 deals with the appearance of Chinese lawyers in Shanghai and Nanjing in the wake of the 1911 Revolution, and the competition among the initial organizations of lawyers in .
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