Paul Thompson; A brilliant sinologist, he found the key to ancient Chinese texts
Hyfler/Rosner
June 27, 2007 Wednesday
Paul Thompson: A brilliant sinologist, he found the key to
ancient Chinese texts
BYLINE: Sarah Allan
Paul Mulligan Thompson, sinologist, born February 10 1931;
died June 12 2007
The distinguished sin- ologist Paul Thompson, who has died
at the age of 76, was the author of The Shen Tzu Fragments
(1979), a brilliant, pioneering work of textual scholarship.
In it he compiled a modern, critical edition of the hundreds
of "fragments" - or quotations in other Chinese texts - that
testified to the existence of the text of the Shen Tzu, a
work of political philosophy completed c275BC that had been
lost in direct transmission for more than a thousand years.
Paul traced every single fragment of quoted text, determined
its authenticity, collating it with other versions of the
same piece of text, and finally established a critical
edition of the surviving fragments that was authoritative.
Even greater than this accomplishment was his creation of a
method of scholarship that could be used to establish modern
critical editions of all ancient Chinese works, whether
still extant or not. The importance of this work has also
been recognised in China: when the Shanghai museum recently
announced the imminent publication of an unearthed fragment
of the Shen Tzu, brush-written on strips of bamboo from the
period in which the original work was compiled, they cited
Paul's book as the definitive reference.
Paul belonged to four different countries, but China, the
land of his birth, was the enduring strand in his life. His
parents were Irish missionaries with the China Inland
Mission, and he was born at Shunde (Xingtai), in Hebei
province, north-eastern China. At the time of the Japanese
invasion in 1937, he was attending an English school at
Chefoo (present-day Yantai, in Shandong province), and
living with his mother, two brothers and sister, while his
father was away on missionary work in the interior.
At first, the Japanese allowed the school to continue, but
after Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the internment of
Japanese-Americans in the US, conditions became more severe.
They were eventually moved to Weixian internment camp (in
Shandong), where they remained until liberated by American
paratroopers in 1945. Paul always said they had had enough
to eat and, as a child living with his family, he did not
feel any particular hardship. When the war ended, his family
returned to Northern Ireland, and he completed secondary
school in Belfast
His higher education was as unconventional as much of his
life. After spells at the Free University of Amsterdam, the
University of Minnesota at Minneapolis (where he met and
married Marcia Cole in 1952), the US army language school at
Monterey, California, a stint as an interpreter in Japan,
and a few years teaching in Taiwan, he still had no BA. None
the less, the great German sinologist, Hellmut Wilhelm,
accepted him at the University of Washington at Seattle in
1959. Awarded a BA the following year, he went on to write
his PhD, the earliest version of his Shen Tzu Fragments.
After a period of teaching at the University of Wisconsin
(1963-70), Paul joined Professors DC Lau and AC Graham at
the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London
in 1970. Soas soon became the centre of classical Chinese
learning in the western world; it was also an
extraordinarily convivial place. Lau had a dry, ironic wit
that some people found intimidating and Graham was oblivious
of social norms, but Paul had a natural social grace that
made the most awkward student or visitor feel comfortable.
He also had an extraordinary breadth and depth of erudition;
one subject of conversation thus led easily into another,
and long hours were spent in the student bar and Chinese
restaurants, discussing everything under the sun, but often
returning to Chinese philosophy and how to understand
particular lines of ancient texts.
Paul was a true Chinese junzi , a term usually translated as
"gentleman"; that is, he was graceful, kind, intellectually
curious, good-hearted, a generous and loyal friend, and
reluctant to conform to the petty demands of bureaucracy. To
a younger colleague, he was a magnificent model, if not
quite the mentor approved by institutions.
His teaching was also blissfully free of convention. One of
his former students, Vivienne Lo, has written: "He had that
quality that I imagine of the ideal, old-style English
education: concerned for personal enrichment in the broadest
sense, inspiring us to apply an intel lectual vitality to
whatever life would bring rather than training for vocation
. . . He was barely concerned with examinations, giving us
broad hints about what would be on the paper, in favour of
engaging us in lively conversation on whatever garden path
the particular text we were reading would lead us up."
Paul became interested in the potential of computers for
producing editions of ancient Chinese texts early on. Before
the problem of easily inputting Chinese characters using an
alphabetic keyboard had been solved, he created a system
that was, in some ways, more sophisticated than those now in
use. These are based primarily on statistical tabulations of
frequency, which aid the computer in generating a list of
the most likely characters, from which the person typing
must choose. Paul's system would also have incorporated
sophisticated grammatical analysis. After his retirement in
1996, he continued living in London and worked on using the
potential of computers to produce rigorous editions of
excavated and other ancient Chinese texts in a visually
transparent manner.
He is survived by his wife, Marcia, daughter Aidan and sons
Brian and Kevin.
Sarah Allan
Paul Mulligan Thompson, sinologist, born February 10 1931;
died June 12 2007
Thompson: a true Chinese junzi