This is a bilingual website for the study of The Story of the Stone 石頭記, China’s greatest work of fiction and one of the enduring masterpieces of world literature. The book remains at the centre of Chinese culture and commentary even today.…
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This reader provides an introduction to the background and relevance of New Sinology, as well as offering guided readings using selections from classical/ literary Chinese, Republican-era texts and High Maoist and post-Maoist works that can help users gain an understanding of the abiding influence of certain kinds of language, habits of mind and currents of thought, literature and culture that powerfully underpin the modern Chinese or Sinophone world.…
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This Glossary has its origins in adolescent readings of Lin Yutang (林語堂, 1895-1976), the not uncontroversial essayist, editor and translator. In The Importance of Living (1938), Lin included a critical vocabulary of key Chinese terms which he hoped would help elucidate certain aesthetic concepts discussed in the book.…
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As Pierre Ryckmans notes in ‘The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past‘, the Fifty-seventh George E. Morrison Lecture that he presented in July 1986:
… the vital strength, the creativity, the seemingly unlimited capacity for metamorphosis and adaptation which the Chinese tradition displayed for 3,500 years may well derive from the fact that this tradition never let itself be trapped into set forms, static objects and things, where it would have run the risk of paralysis and death.…
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When I was serving in the Metropolitan Library I came to know an eminent man who had in his possession a treasured autograph manuscript of his father’s writings that he kept stored away in his book trunks.…
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To what should we compare human life?
It should be compared to a wild goose trampling on the snow.
The snow retains for a moment the imprint of its feet;
the goose flies away no one knows where.…
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