Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography

Epilogue The Future of a Pastime

141 Epilogue The Future of a Pastime On October 13, 1928—a little over a year after Wang Guowei’s suicide —Dong Zuobin and other members of the Academia Sinica began to excavate a site northwest of Xiaotun village, hoping to find any oracle bones that might have eluded decades of peasant excavators. They were unsuccessful. But after Li Ji took over the digs the following year, the team unearthed quantities of artifacts as well as the remains of temples and royal tombs that suggested the site was indeed Yinxu, the last Shang city. This moment marked the triumphant arrival of a patriotic archaeology, whose purpose was to substantiate the great age of Chinese civilization and undermine the less Nationalistic implications of the “doubting antiquity” movement.1 Indeed, after impressing contemporaries with the audacity of his views, Gu Jiegang and his supporters were increasingly marginalized by the newly constituted archaeological community. Under the leadership of Fu Sinian, who courted government patronage of the Institute of History and Philology, scholars rallied around the idea that preserving Chinese prehistory would contribute to national solidarity.2 The decision to begin the new institute’s excavations in Anyang were a nod to the powerful significance of the Shang in the national imaginary.3 It also was a logical starting point since there had been antiquarian attention to the location for years—like the visits by Luo Zhenyu and his brother less than two decades earlier. In fact, one might argue that many of the activities of the new Institute were designed to try to catch up with Luo. Not only did Fu Sinian seek to build a collection of Yinxu relics, including oracle bones, but he also tried to retrieve as many Qing court documents as possible.4 The kind of historical and archaeological research he promoted, in other words, had striking over- 142 Pastimes laps with precisely the areas of scholarship pioneered by Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei. The influence of these twentieth-century antiquarians was felt in other ways as well. Several of their close associates gained prominent positions in universities, museums, and research institutes. When Fu Sinian divided the Institute of History and Philology into separate departments, he put them under the direction of two of Wang Guowei ’s Qinghua colleagues: Li Ji assumed control of the departments of archaeology and anthropology, and Chen Yinke was placed in charge of the department of history. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, Chen was asked to direct the new Institute of History and Philology in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (replacing the Academia Sinica, which moved to Taiwan), but he refused and ended his career at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou. Ma Heng became head of the National Palace Museum in 1934 and helmed that institution until his retirement two decades later. Given these overlaps of personnel between history and archaeology , it is not surprising that the two fields developed in tandem. Fu Sinian asserted that even though it stood apart from other subfields, “archaeology is a part of history,” while the Marxist archaeologist Yin Da (1906–1983), who participated in the Anyang excavations, affirmed, “archaeology is structurally a part of history, since it uses material artifacts as historical resources for research, in order to understand human history.”5 Li Ji believed that even archaeological fieldwork is a form of historical studies, using “natural science methodologies” to “collect the historical materials of human history.”6 As a summation of these viewpoints, the account of the development of Chinese archaeology by Wei Juxian (1898–1990), a 1927 Qinghua graduate, begins by noting its relationship to history.7 Indeed, Lothar von Falkenhausen argues, “nowhere else in the world is archaeology as closely enmeshed in a millennia -old living tradition of national history” as in China.8 One of the causes of this overlap is surely the fact that both fields share a common genetic link in their indebtedness to jinshi practices. When scientific archaeology was introduced to China, historians could already claim expertise in studying bronzes, jades, and other materials—precisely the legacy of artifact studies. As the generation of historians trained in the early twentieth century assumed leadership roles in new state institutions, their accounts of antiquarianism emphasized its scientific legacies. Ma Heng defined antiquarianism as the process of conducting historical research on The Future of a Pastime 143 “the textual patrimony of ancient humanity,” a category that included...