Yu Yue

This article is about the Qing dynasty scholar. For articles with similar names, see Yuyue (disambiguation).
Yu Yue
俞樾

Yu Yue in the Portraits of Chinese Scholars of the Qing Period
Born December 1821 (1821-12)[1]
Died February 5, 1907(1907-02-05) (aged 85)[1]
Other names
Academic background
Influences
Academic work
Era Qing Dynasty
Main interests Philology, textual studies
Notable works List of Yu's works
Notable ideas
  • Non-political environment
  • Research-based classics studies
  • Phonology and textual studies
  • more
Influenced Zhang Taiyan
This is a Chinese name; the family name is Yu.
Yu Yue
Chinese 俞樾

Yu Yue (Chinese: 俞樾; 1821–1907), courtesy name Yinfu, hao Quyuan,[2] was a prominent scholar and official of Qing Dynasty China. An expert in philology and textual studies, he taught and wrote prolifically on the classics and histories.[4] Yu Pingbo was his great-grandson;[5] one of his most important disciples was Zhang Taiyan.[2]

Scholarly career

Yu Yue hailed from Deqing, Zhejiang, and later moved to Renhe, now a subdistrict of Hangzhou.[2]

In 1850, Yu passed the imperial examination as metropolitan graduate, and was appointed junior compiler[6] in the Hanlin Academy. He then served successively in a variety of academic posts in the imperial bureaucracy, and was later promoted to educational instructor[7] of Henan, not long before his resigning from this position and withdrawing to Suzhou, where he became a private teacher and devoted himself full-time to classical studies.[8] From 1868 on, he was director of the Gujing Academy (詁經精舍), which he headed for more than 30 years. Yu's analyses of the classics are widely admired for their philological acumen, and he has had a large influence on both Chinese and foreign students of the Chinese classics, particularly in Japan.[8]

Notable thoughts

Yu's philosophy was inclined to the teachings of Wang Niansun and Wang Yinzhi, who interpreted Confucian classics in a practical way.[2] In the 1860s, Yu was intimately involved in restoring the Gujing Academy, a sishu (private academy[9]) established by Ruan Yuan in 1800 yet destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion. As opposed to the then dominant goal of education—namely education as pathway towards an official career—Yu aimed to provide a non-political environment for classics studies and stressed philology and historical research during his teaching, an intellectual tradition initiated by Gu Yanwu and Dai Zhen.[3]

Yu allowed considerable freedom in readings of texts, which to a great extent stimulated Zhang Taiyan's creative thinking and developments to classical writings. He believed that the most important techniques in rendering the classics readable for contemporary readers were restoring original word and sentence orders (sometimes altered in transmission), establishing the proper senses of individual words, and most importantly being more aware of the use of phonetic loan words.[10] Yu believed that many of the difficulties encountered in reading the classics were due to a failure to recognize the use of loan characters—an often quite challenging task, requiring an intimate knowledge of ancient Chinese phonology—and in his commentaries, he often raises the possibility of this phenomenon to suggest alternate readings.[8]

Yu maintained links with both the traditional philological school and scholars of new thoughts—to name a few, Song Xiangfeng and Zhuang Cunyu from Changzhou, who explored political messages carried in classics including the Gongyang Commentary and the Spring and Autumn Annals.[2] He also exchanged ideas with late-Qing reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. Liang referred to Yu as one of the few orthodox scholars that survived the academic downfall during this period,[11] yet Yu was actually not very much stuck into the so-called orthodox Confucianism: unlike Kang Youwei's speculative method in interpreting the Analects, Yu supported a more textual and factual approach; furthermore, instead of focusing merely on Confucian thoughts, Yu tended to put more emphasis on the Hundred Schools of Thought, which decentered the Confucian hegemony in the pre-Qin period.[3]

Major works

Chinese Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Youtaixianguan Biji (右台仙館筆記) — an important Classical Chinese novel of the late-Qing period that very much reflected Yu's modernity consciousness.[12]
Chaxiangshi Congchao (茶香室叢鈔) — scholarly notes
Chunzaitang Suibi (春在堂随笔) — essays
Liangzhe Fengyongji (兩浙風詠集), vol. 4[15] — artistic essays
Quyuan Zishu Shi (曲園自述詩) — poems
Yu Quyuan Suibi (俞曲園隨筆) — essays
Yu Yue Zhaji Wuzhong (俞樾箚記五種) — essays

References

Notes
  1. 1 2 Yu Yue on Chinese Wikipedia (this version)
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 "Persons in Chinese History: Yu Yue". ChinaKnowledge. Retrieved 16 December 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 Murthy, V. 2011.
  4. 1 2 Blader, S. 1998.
  5. ↑ Bartke 1997.
  6. ↑ Junior compiler, Chinese: 編修; pinyin: biānxiū
  7. ↑ Educational instructor, Chinese: 提督學政; pinyin: tídū xuézhèng
  8. 1 2 3 Slingerland, E. 2003.
  9. ↑ Sishu, Chinese: 私塾, old-style private (Confucian) school. See Yang, Dongping (2013). Chinese Research Perspectives on Educational Development. p. 144. ISBN 9004249249.
  10. ↑ Phonetic loan words, Chinese characters that are used with the intended sense of another word with a different graphic form but similar pronunciation; especially in pre-Qin texts, before the Chinese written language was standardized, this phenomenon was quite common.
  11. ↑ 「清學之蛻分期，同時即其衰落期也。……然在此期 中，猶有一二大師焉，為正統派死守最後之壁壘，曰俞樾，曰孫詒讓，皆得流於高郵王氏。」, cited in Qingdai Xueshu Gailun [Introduction to the Academics of the Qing Period].
  12. ↑ Han, Hongju & Wei, Wenyan (2012). "Yu Yue's Modernity Consciousness as in His You Tai Xian Guan Bi Ji". Journal of Zhejiang Normal University: Social Sciences. 37 (2). doi:10.3969/j.issn.1001-5035.2012.02.011.
  13. ↑ Chunzaitang Quanshu, Cambridge University Library.
  14. ↑ Author List for Yu Yue, USF Ricci Institute Library Online Catalog
  15. ↑ Liangzhe Fengyongji, Cambridge University Library.
Bibliography
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