LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA * AN INAUGURAL LECTURE DELIVERED ON 28 NOVEMBER 1961 BY DENIS TWITCHETT Professor o f Chinese in the University i f London SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES CG UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 3 3 0 .9 1962 '291082 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER IN T ’ANG AND SUNG CHINA AN INAUGURAL LECTURE DELIVERED ON 28 NOVEMBER 1961 BY DENIS TWITCHETT Professor o f Chinese in the University o f London SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 1962 Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4 GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAIROBI IBADAN ACCRA KUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG © Copyright by Denis Twitchett 1962 Distributed by Luzac & Co. 46 Great Russell Street, W. C. 1 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD BY VIVIAN RIDLER PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA he t e a c h in g of C hinese in London dates back to T 1825, when Robert Morrison began to hold classes at the London Oriental Institution in Barrett’s Buildings in the City. This antedated the beginnings of Chinese instruction elsewhere in England by some decades, but was relatively late by European standards. In St. Petersburg Manchu had been taught since 1733 and Chinese since 1741, in France an academic tradition stemming from the Paris Jesuits was long established, and in Germany teaching was available both in Berlin and in Munich. Morrison’s classes were held in collaboration with the Indianist Gilchrist, who had for some years previously offered classes in Sanskrit and Bengali at the Oriental Institution in Leicester Square. They were a great success, and continued until Morrison returned to Canton in 1828. He himself was a considerable scholar, who produced a wide range of aca­ demic writings including a Chinese-English dictionary which remained unsurpassed in Europe until the eve of the twentieth century. He also helped to found the Anglo-Chinese College at Malacca, at which many of the early Protestant mis­ sionaries— including the greatest of them all, James Legge— were trained. Morrison also was not only the first person to teach Chinese in London, but had an indirect connexion with the founda­ tion of the Chair which I hold. During his lifetime he had accumulated a very considerable Chinese library, and upon his death in 1835 his friend and executor Sir George Staunton, to whom I shall revert in a moment, offered his books to University College on condition that a Professor of Chinese should be appointed for five years. The College— not without some reluctance— accepted this offer in 1837.1 The Rev. Samuel Kidd, a missionary who had been a teacher at the Anglo-Chinese College but had been forced by ill-health 4 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL to retire, was elected and appointed Professor at a salary of £60 per annum. The library duly passed to University College, and on the foundation of the School of Oriental Studies was transferred to this School to form the nucleus of our Chinese collection. Kidd’s first pupils registered in 1838-9. He had some ambi­ tion to establish the study of Chinese as a proper academic discipline rather than as a mere course of practical language training, but he was not himself a distinguished scholar. He compiled a catalogue of the Royal Asiatic Society’s collec­ tion of Chinese books2 which contains some highly eccentric entries, such as the great early romance San-kuo chih yen-i listed under 'statistical works’, the collection of supernatural tales Liao-chai chih-i compared with the Faerie Queene, and the great Chinese erotic masterpiece Chin p'ing mei as 'containing a description of Chinese manners and customs, especially with reference to courtship and marriage, the design of which is to promote virtue and discourage vice . .’. He also wrote a sizeable volume which went to great lengths of ingenuity to prove the relationship of the Chinese language and culture with Ancient Egypt and with the 'common primordial lan­ guage of mankind’. In 1843, when the renewal of his appoint­ ment was under discussion, Kidd died, and his Chair was allowed to lapse. Shortly afterwards, in 1845, Sir George Staunton began an agitation for the endowment of a Chair at the rival Anglican foundation of King’s College. Staunton himself might well be termed the father of English sinology. When in 1792 the British Government determined to send an embassy to the Chinese court under Lord Macartney, the latter sent Sir George Staunton, father of the sinologue, to Naples to recruit Chinese interpreters from the College of the Propaganda Fidei. Sir George, a remarkable Anglo-Irishman who had been in turn physician, attorney, and an officer under the East India Company, had subjected his son to an extra­ ordinary course of education. In 1792 he was eleven years ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 5 old, already spoke fluently French, German, Latin, and Greek, was a regular attendant at the meetings of the Royal Society and at lectures on botany, chemistry, and mineralogy. He too was taken on the trip to Naples, and on the long homeward journey began the study of Chinese from one of the interpreters who proved, as he later said, ca very cross master5. Staunton accompanied the mission as a page to Lord Macartney, and acted as interpreter and copyist of documents, being the only member of the mission who knew Chinese. The story of how he attracted the attention of the aged Chien-lung emperor is well known. Later he received through his father’s interest an appoint­ ment as a writer and later as supercargo to the East India Company’s establishment at Canton, where he remained until 1816, rising eventually to be head of the Select Com­ mittee. Late in 1816 he was a member of Lord Amherst’s embassy to Peking, and on the termination of the embassy in 1817 retired from public life, having amassed a sizeable private fortune. He settled down as a country gentleman in Hampshire and embarked on a leisurely career as member of Parliament for a Cornish pocket borough. During his years of service in Canton he wrote a number of extremely valuable works on China, including a transla­ tion of the Ch’ing penal code which remains standard even today, a century and a half after its publication. On his return from the East he deliberately abandoned his own Chinese studies, though he kept up his interest in scholarly matters and became a founder-member of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1826, donating to the library his collection of Chinese books which included some rare items. His interest in Chinese affairs on the other hand was maintained, and in the 1830’s he spoke frequently in the House of Commons on Chinese matters. He also served as a member of the East India Committee of the House of Commons, strongly oppos­ ing the terms proposed for the ending of the company’s monopoly of the China trade. After the Reform Bill he and 6 LAND TENURE AND THE SOCIAL Palmerston, a fellow Anglo-Irishman, sat as joint members for South Hampshire, and there is some evidence that he exerted considerable influence not only upon Palmerston’s China policy, but also upon Sir Henry Pottinger and Lord Aberdeen, all of whom approached him for advice during the Opium War. He was influential enough to be able successfully to raise the required endowment for the Chair at King’s College from a wide variety of sources. The Anglican clergy, who had high hopes of the new mission field opening up in China, subscribed liberally. Somewhat more cautious subscriptions came from people officially involved in Chinese relations and from the members of the various companies involved in the opium trade, who had more realistic hopes of profit from the newly opened ports. The total endowment was less, how­ ever, than Staunton had hoped for, and brought in to my predecessors— and continues to bring in to me— a total of £ 79 . 16s. 4d. per annum? The first professor, J. Fearon, was a retired interpreter from Canton, who had later become first Registrar-General of Hong Kong. At the end of 1846 Staunton was able to report that he already had two pupils. He had, however, few more, nor does he seem ever to have written anything. On the expiry of his appointment in 1851 he was not re-appointed, and in 1852 he was replaced by the Rev. James Summers, a retired missionary.4 Under Summers, Chinese teaching enjoyed a boom for a few years. In 1854, again through Staunton’s influence,5 the Foreign Secretary asked the College to nominate students as supernumerary Chinese interpreters for service in Hong Kong6 and within five years Summers had trained 21 men for such posts. In 1859 King’s College held out high hopes that student interpreters in even greater numbers would be needed following the establishment of an Ambassador to Peking.7 The establishment of the embassy, however, had the reverse ORDER IN T’ANG AND SUNG CHINA 7 effect to that which had been expected. The first batch of trainees was taught by Summers at King’s, but since he himself spoke Cantonese and Shanghai dialect, they found themselves completely at a loss when they eventually reached Peking, and had to begin their studies all over again. In consequence the initial training of consular and foreign ser­ vice personnel in London was rapidly abandoned.8 Even more disastrous was Summer’s advice to the Foreign Office that men destined for service in Japan should first be sent to Peking to learn the correct pronunciation of the Chinese characters used for writing Japanese.9 Poetic justice overtook Summers in this respect, for in 1873 he accepted an appointment in Tokyo from the Japanese Government,10 and remained in Japan until his death in 1891.