This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China

by Peter K. Bol

This book traces the shared culture of the Chinese elite from the seventh to the twelfth centuries. The early T'ang definition of 'This Culture of Ours' combined literary and scholarly traditions from the previous five centuries. The late Sung Neo-Confucian movement challenged that definition. The author argues that the Tang-Sung transition is best understood as a transition from a literary view of culture - in which literary accomplishment and mastery of traditional forms were regarded as essential - to the ethical orientation of Neo-Confucianism, in which the cultivation of one's innate moral ability was regarded as the goal of learning. The author shows that this transformation paralleled the collapse of the T'ang order and the restoration of a centralized empire under the Sung, underscoring the connection between elite formation and political institutions.

Genres: History, China

533 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1992

About the author

Peter Kees Bol is a Harvard College Professor and the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. His research is centered on the history of China’s cultural elites at the national and local levels from the 7th to the 17th century. He is the author of "This Culture of Ours": Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China, Neo-Confucianism in History, coauthor of Sung Dynasty Uses of the I-ching, co-editor of Ways with Words, and various journal articles in Chinese, Japanese, and English. He led Harvard’s university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research; in 2005 he was named the first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis. He also directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a world gone mad...

...before Zhu Xi (1130-1200) rectified everything...

...the story of three concepts, Shi (a ruling status group), Wen (culture/literature/writing.pattern), and Dao (the way/the truth)...

...and what some dudes thought about them.

Featuring:

Chapter 4: Han Yu

Chapter 5: Fan Zhongyan

Chapter 6: Ouyang Xiu

Chapter 7: Wang Anshi and Sima Guang

Chapter 8: Su Shi

Chapter 9: Cheng Yi

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn’t care for this one, which is probably why it took me forever to get through. The meat of the book is the long passages in translation, to which Bol’s commentary rarely adds much. It’s also a prime offender of the translation sin of choosing a single idiosyncratic English phrase and then sticking with that one translation everywhere the original phrase appears; especially irritating when the phrase is as awkward as the eponymous one here.

[Bernard English · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the later chapters much more as thinkers such as Wang An-Shih, Ssu-ma Kuang, Su Shih, and Ch'eng I get extended treatments. Many of the thinkers (who were not exclusively philosophers) seem to have sociological theories which perhaps don't get enough recognition because the arguments are firmly anchored to Han culture.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intellectual history done right.