What is it about?
This paper examines the background of the first English translation of the Chinese text, Chao Ju-kau's Zhu fan zhi (completed in circa 1225). One translator, W. W. Rockhill, was an American diplomat who contributed to the American Open Door policy in Asia in the early twentieth century. The other translator, Friedrich Hirth, worked for the Chinese Maritime Customs before serving as a faculty at the Chinese Department of the Columbia University. Hirth and Rockhill emphasized the Arab connections, while Chinese intellectuals underscored the Chinese contribution. The paper is concluded by a warning of the nationalist claim of global history.
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Why is it important?
The paper shows the contested understanding about the South China's maritime history, before South China Seas becomes a contested political issue.
Perspectives
To write the paper, I checked the private letters between Hirth and Rockhill. Both the two 20th-century American intellectuals identified the 13th-century Chinese officer Chao Ju-kua as their “friend.” Both Hirth and Rockhill identified themselves as supporters of China and its civilization. Their scholarship proves a cosmopolitan past of China, but Chinese nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s would rather wish to find a historical China that was a colonial empire before the rise of the West.
Dr Huei-Ying Kuo
Johns Hopkins University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Charting China in the Thirteenth-Century World:, JSTOR,
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv5vdf1q.11.
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