China's Philological Turn

Ori Sela clearly and persuasively argues for the importance of the philological turn in the late eighteenth century, explaining fully the larger moral and intellectual justification for the turn and its significance for the whole course of Chinese intellectual history. This book also treats an extremely important figure in the history of Chinese scholarship, Qian Daxin. Sela makes clear both the remarkable range and depth of Qian’s philological scholarship and the crucial moral and ethical importance that Qian saw in what has often been dismissed as dry pedantry. -- Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University
In China’s Philological Turn, Sela explicates the superlative classical scholarship championed by the literatus Qian Daxin (1728–1804). Among the leading classicists in Qing China, Qian and his students and colleagues were forgotten after the Opium War. Overlapping the prisms of society, ideas, and science, Sela reexamines China’s eighteenth-century philological revolution and convincingly shows that modern historians have generally overlooked the ‘philological turn’ from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. -- Benjamin A. Elman, Princeton University
In this rich and lucidly argued account of the mid-Qing revolution in Chinese intellectual thought and identity, presented on its own terms and within the contexts of social history and the history of science, Ori Sela definitively lays to rest outdated understandings of China's relation to the modern world. It is a timely reminder of the contemporary resonance of historical understanding. -- Joanna Waley-Cohen, Julius Silver Professor of History, New York University and Provost, NYU Shanghai
A well-researched work and offers a new standard for the comprehensive study of high-Qing polymaths. For years
to come, it will be an important reference for conceiving the relationship between Han learning and Song learning, philology and science, social network and scholarly pathway. * East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine *