''Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644–1912)'' (''ECCP'') is a

biographical dictionary A biographical dictionary is a type of encyclopedic dictionary limited to biographical information. Many attempt to cover the major personalities of a country (with limitations, such as living persons only, in ''Who's Who'', or deceased people onl ...

published in 1943 by the United States Government Printing Office, edited by

Arthur W. Hummel, Sr. Arthur William Hummel Sr. (March 6, 1884 – March 10, 1975) was an American Christian missionary to China, head of the Asian Division of the Library of Congress, noted Sinologist, and editor of Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, a biographic ...

, then head of the Orientalia Division of the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

. Hummel's chief collaborators were Dr. Tu Lien-che (杜聯喆) and Dr. Fang Chao-ying (房兆楹), Chinese scholars who were married to each other. The two volumes in 1103 pages comprise some 800 biographical sketches on leading figures of the

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-spea ...

(Ch'ing) (1636–1912) in China. The articles cover Han Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, and other Inner Asian figures, as well as some Europeans. Each article includes a short list of sources and secondary scholarship. There are three indices—personal name, book names, and subjects.

Pamela Kyle Crossley Pamela K Crossley (born 18 November 1955) is a historian of modern China, northern Asia, and global history and is the Charles and Elfriede Collis Professor of History, Dartmouth College. She is a founding appointment of the Dartmouth Society of ...

, professor of Chinese history at

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

, wrote
free software
to either search and read the articles online or to download the text for offline use. Since the work uses the Wade-Giles system, which is now unfamiliar to many readers, the software also supplies pinyin romanization. Crossley is also author of the historiographical preface to the new pinyin edition of the work, ''Eminent Chinese of the Qing Period '', published in 2018 by Berkshire.

History of the project

Hummel, who had developed his Chinese language skills while a missionary in China, was Chairman of the Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies from 1930 to 1934. He worked with Mortimer Graves, Executive Director of the Council, to plan a biographical dictionary of the Qing, and gained financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Plans were put into action when Hummel joined the Library of Congress in 1934. A younger colleague recalled that Hummel's concern with clarity and precision led him to read the entire text of ''ECCP'' aloud to search for better language. The printer for the volume did not know Chinese. Dr. Tu compiled a master file of every Chinese character in the text. These characters were then cast in Hong Kong, one for each time a character appeared. The characters were then placed in individual wooden frames and numbered by Dr. Tu. The printer put them one by one into the typesetter by hand. The ''ECCP'' is nonetheless nearly free of errors. The preface by

Hu Shih Hu Shih (; 17 December 1891 – 24 February 1962), also known as Hu Suh in early references, was a Chinese diplomat, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, and politician. Hu is widely recognized today as a key contributor to Chinese libera ...

, a leading scholar who had been China's Ambassador to the United States, praised Hummel and the more than fifty scholars who worked for nine years on the project These scholars came from the United States, Europe and Taiwan. Among them were Knight Biggerstaff; Meribeth E. Cameron; Ch'i Ssu-ho; John K. Fairbank; L. Carrington Goodrich;

; George Kennedy; Li Man-kuei; Hiromu Momose;

Nancy Lee Swann Nancy Lee Swann (b. 9 Feb 1881 Tyler, Texas; d. 15 May 1966 El Paso, Texas) was an American Sinologist and curator of the Gest Memorial Chinese Library at Princeton University from 1931 until her retirement in 1948. Her best known scholarly public ...

; Teng Ssu-yu, who prepared many of the articles on the

Taiping Rebellion The Taiping Rebellion, also known as the Taiping Civil War or the Taiping Revolution, was a massive rebellion and civil war that was waged in China between the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Han, Hakka-led Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. It laste ...

; Earl Swisher; C. Martin Wilbur;

Hellmut Wilhelm Hellmut Wilhelm (10 December 1905 – 5 July 1990) was a German Sinologist known for his studies of both Chinese literature and Chinese history. Wilhelm was an expert on the ancient Chinese divination text '' I Ching (Yi jing)'', whic ...

; J.C. Yang.

Reception and reputation

The review in the journal ''

Pacific Affairs ''Pacific Affairs'' (''PA'') is a Canadian peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes academic research on contemporary political, economic, and social issues in Asia and the Pacific. The journal was founded in 1926 as the newsletter for th ...

'' said "In genuine scholarship, in the wide range of events covered, in intimate accounts of leading happenings, in the voluminous amounts of Chinese source materials employed, the ambitious scale and the success of these two volumes surpass any other single attempt made by the Western world to understand China in over half a century.C.K. Yang, ''Pacific Affairs'' 19.1 (March 1946), p. 109
/ref>

References

External links

Qing Research Portal
Online version of ECCP with ongoing inclusion of edited articles. * Full text: volume 1, volume 2 {{Authority control Qing dynasty Sinology Books about China Biographical dictionaries 1943 non-fiction books