Pastimes: From Art and Antiquarianism to Modern Chinese Historiography

Chapter 6 Luo Zhenyu and the Dilemmas of the Private Scholar

103 6 Luo Zhenyu and the Dilemmas of the Private Scholar Three hundred years of Qing philology began with Gu Yanwu, and culminated in Luo Zhenyu. —Wang Guowei, afterward to Yinxu shuqi kaoshi, 1915 After the abdication of the last Qing emperor Puyi (1906–1967) in 1912, many talented scholar-officials lost their professional identities . For every former bureaucrat who made a fortune in banking or was admitted into bureaucratic service of the new Republic, scores more found work as editors, in the trades, or even as managers of rickshaw companies. The capital was soon teeming with impoverished Manchus , whose pathos was captured by the writer Lao She (1899–1966). Jinshi scholars like Luo Zhenyu were among those who had to find new careers. With his expertise in ancient artifacts admired by even political opposites like Hu Shi (1891–1962), he was invited to join research institutions and to lecture on archaeology and other topics.1 But having become frustrated with the inadequacies of state museums and schools as a Qing official, and identifying himself as an yilao (loyalist), he preferred to remain a private scholar until virtually the end of his life, when he died in Puyi’s service in Manchukuo.This political choice placed him far to the right of mainstream intellectual life in the late 1920s and 1930s. His contemporaries recognized that his form of professionalized jinshi encouraged systematic studies (particularly on new classes of artifacts), preserved rare research materials, and made them available to the public through publication. But his commercial activities made them deeply uncomfortable, particularly since they seemed unpatriotic—many of his best clients were Japanese—and because they compromised his reputation as a disinterested scholar. 104 Pastimes Luo Zhenyu’s work as an art dealer, publisher, and scholar in the post-1911 period raises a number of interesting questions over the evolution of antiquarian practices. We can interpret his insistence on his rights as a private scholar, with virtually no formal institutional affiliations for the most active decades of his professional life, in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, his stance was a logical extension of traditional jinshi practices, which were always dependent on the commercial market in antiquities and favored the activities of individual scholars over corporate institutions like museums. On the other hand, in an age when the power of state sponsorship for historical and archaeological research appeared to be growing, this attitude placed him at variance with many of his colleagues and left him open to criticism of commercialism and intellectual dishonesty. His biography, therefore, raises interesting questions about the modern legacies of jinshi. In the Republican world, could an antiquarian be an entrepreneur and private scholar? And if so, what were the consequences for scholarship? The Educational Reformer Luo Zhenyu never intended to become an art dealer or publisher. A talented young student, he hoped to ascend the Qing bureaucratic ladder and pursue jinshi as a genteel pastime. But his early opportunities, particularly his access to the education that would make examination success possible, were hampered by his humble birth. He finally became a bureaucrat after attracting attention for his entrepreneurial zeal in his first area of professional specialization, namely educational reform in the last decades of the Qing. Huai’an, the city in Jiangsu where Luo Zhenyu was born, was esteemed in the Qing for its classical academies and cultured residents. But it had nothing near the cultural cachet of more cosmopolitan cities of the province like Hangzhou and Suzhou, where Pan Zuyin, Wu Dacheng, and Ye Changchi all came from. His father Luo Shuxun (1842–1905) served three times as district magistrate, but also once worked, unprofitably, as manager of a friend’s pawnshop. Burdened by helping to pay off his father’s debts, Luo stayed home and supported the family rather than joining his brothers in Hangzhou to study for the imperial examinations. Even though he entered the county school as the seventh-highest ranked candidate, he never progressed beyond the lowest degree.2 Like many young men in the late Qing, he initially embraced jin- Luo Zhenyu and the Dilemmas of the Private Scholar 105 shi as a counterpart to the examination curriculum and the hallmark of a serious scholar. But he had no access to antiquities or even a family library, a luxury that scholars like Wang Yirong (who reminisced about studying in the “long halls of my grandfather’s house...