(Book by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao)
Book by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao
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Chang Hsüeh-ch'eng was born in 1738 and was a native of China's coastal province of Chekiang. Both his father and his grandfather had been government officials, and they handed on to Chang an avid interest in history and literature, a belief in strict adherence to the principles of historical accuracy, and the conviction that one must write and teach on the basis of one's principles without regard for popular esteem.
Although Chang achieved the highest civil service examination degree in 1778, he never held high office and, in fact, spent much of his life on the verge of poverty. Chang's best-known publications are his local histories (ti-fang chih) and two major collections of his essays on historiography (Wen-shih t'ung-i and Chiao-ch'ou t'ung-i). Chang was a methodical historian, and he developed his own indexing system in order to assure proper attention to detail and accuracy. He became one of the most enlightened historical theorists during the Ch'ing dynasty. The last years of Chang's life marked a sad close to a life of brilliant thought. Few of his contemporaries accepted Chang's "radical" ideas, and he found himself in extreme poverty without the support of a patron. He died in 1801 with few friends and almost no disciples, and it was not until the late 19th century that Chinese scholars began to fully appreciate his genius.
(Book by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao)
Relating his thoughts to the political conditions of his day, Chang firmly supported state control of scholarship and even endorsed the Emperor's literary inquisition of the late 18th century.
Unlike many Ch'ing historians, Chang spurned pedantic historical writing and urged historians to search for general interpretations through specific factual information. It was Chang's argument that history was an evolutionary process of individuals and political and cultural institutions. He felt that historical development was underlain by a basic principle or "path" (tao), which was the human potential for living an ordered, civilized, and moral life. Chang believed, furthermore, that the ideal society was one in which there was a total integration of the intellectual-literary world and the political-institutional world, in which scholars would be officials, and in which culture and state were synonymous. In this idea Chang was applying the thoughts of the great Ming philosopher Wang Yang-ming, who had advocated a "unity of thought and action. "
To Chang the good historian was a sage who could "apprehend the essential character of the past and present" and "understand the principles by which the world is ordered. "
