Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Qing Loyalists and the Formation of Modern Chinese Culture: (Saffron Asian Art & Society)

This volume investigates the roles as politician, antiquarian, art dealer, and publisher, of Luo Zhenyu (1866~1940) who, together with his circle of Qing loyalists (yilao), established modern historical and intellectual practices in late dynastic and early Republican China. Luo himself took the lead in defining Chinese culture at a critical moment in history, when an abundance of new materials, such as oracle bones and manuscripts from Dunhuang, were coming to light, and when new techniques could be employed in their publication. History has portrayed Luo Zhenyu and his loyalist circle as traitors twice over: first as obsolete remnants of an incompetent Qing government, then as collaborators in the Japanese puppet state of Manzhouguo (Man-chou-kuo, 1923~1945). Art-historical scholarship has hitherto equated Qing loyalists' cultural production with outmoded traditions, in direct opposition to modernisation. In contrast, this project considers the engagement with traditional culture by dispossessed loyalists as essential not just to the constitution of modernity in China, but also to the conceptualisation of East Asian art as a whole. In this edited volume, eight chapters explore tradition as articulated through ethnic and political identifications by figures who engaged in 'modern' practices such as publishing, collecting and the burgeoning fields of archaeology, art history and intellectual history. The chapters are organised according to three major themes: New Ways of Looking at The Past, Circulating Objects of Knowledge, and Qing Loyalists: Reviled Pasts and Unstable Present. One of the strengths of this volume lies in a breadth of inquiry that breaks through conventional disciplinary boundaries. Any historical treatment of Luo Zhenyu, the Qing loyalists and other minority constituencies of early twentieth-century China, inured to the vagaries of collaboration and resistance, must negotiate a thicket of overlapping histories. In this spirit, this examination of Luo Zhenyu and his yilao circle will confront the taboos surrounding their reviled past to reveal a complex but crucial aspect of Chinese cultural history.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements 13; Foreword Roderick Whitfield 15; Contributors 17; Introduction: A Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Yilao and Modern Chinese Culture Yang Chia-Ling 18; 1 Luo Zhenyu and the Formation of Qiwu and Qiwuxue in the First Decade of the Republican Era Wang Cheng-hua 32; 2 Luo Zhenyu and the Predicament of Republican Period Antiques Collecting Shana J Brown 58; 3 'Returning to the Classics, Trusting the Ancient:' Luo Zhenyu's Exploration of Traditional Chinese Identity in Modern China Pai Shih-mi ng 74; 4 New Literati and the Reproduction of Antiquity: Contextualizing Luo Zhenyu and Wang Guowei Robert Culp 98; 5 Luo Zhenyu and the 'Legacy of the Southern School' in Japan and the West Tama ki Maeda 122; 6 A Newly Made Marketable 'Leftover': Luo Zhenyu's Scholarship and Art Business in Kyoto (1911~1919) Hong Zai xin 142; 7 Deciphering Antiquity into Modernity: The Cultural Identity of Luo Zhenyu and the Qing Loyalists in Manzhouguo Yang Chia -Ling 172; 8 Dilemma of Loyalty: Qing Loyalists and State Succession in the Early 20th Century Shao Dan 210; 9 Circle of Luo Zhenyu Yang Chia -Ling 228; 10 Chronology of Luo Zhenyu (1866~1940) YANG Chia -Ling & Roderic k Whitfield 238; 11 Publications of Luo Zhenyu Yang Chia -Ling & Roderic k Whitfield 283; Index 297

About the Author :
EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS. Yang Chia-Ling (volume co-editor) is lecturer in Chinese art at University of Edinburgh. She received her degrees from National Taiwan University and University of Warwick and a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (SOAS). She was a visiting scholar at Academia Sinica, Taipei and the University of Heidelberg, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in Art History at the University of Chicago. Dr Yang was Lecturer in Chinese Art at the University of Sussex and at SOAS, before her appointment in Edinburgh. She is the author of New Wine in Old Bottles - Art of Ren Bonian in Nineteenth-Century Shanghai (2007, Chinese translation 2011) and co-author with Yu Hui and Roderick Whitfield of Classical Chinese Art: Selected Catalogue of the Paintings and Calligraphy, Wou Lien-pai Museum (2011). She researches principally on Chinese painting, archaism in modern Chinese art, visual culture in Shanghai and its interactions with Japan and the West in the 19th and 20th centuries. Roderick Whitfield (volume co-editor) is Percival David Professor, Emeritus, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He studied with Cheng Te-k'un and Denis Twitchett at Cambridge, and with Wen Fong and Shujiro Shimada at Princeton. From 1968 to 1984 he was Assistant Keeper in the Department of Oriental Antiquities, The British Museum, and from 1984 onwards Professor of Chinese Art and Archaeology and Head of the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art. Currently he is a Fellow of the Palace Museum, Peking, and Fellow of the Dunhuang Academy. He has written extensively on Chinese painting and on the Buddhist art of Dunhuang (The Art of Central Asia: the Stein Collection at the British Museum. Tokyo: Kodansha International, three volumes. 1982-85; Dunhuang: Caves of the Singing Sands, London: Textile and Art Publications, 1996; Cave Temples of Mogao, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2000). With Professor Youngsook Pak, he has also written on Korean art (Korean True-View Landscape Paintings by Chong Son (1676-1759), London: Saffron, 2005; Handbook to Korean Art series, London: Laurence King Publishing, 2002). Contributors to this volume: Shana J Brown, Shao Dan, Hong Zaixin, Tamaki Maeda, Pai Shih-ming, Wang Cheng-hua, Roderick Whitfield and Yang Chia-Ling