Jottings from the Granite Studio

The field of Chinese history is twice saddened this month; another great has gone from us. K.C. Liu, distinguished professor of Qing history, passed away at his home in Davis, CA yesterday. I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Liu and his wife several times. When I first started here, I would often be out jogging and see the professor and his wife taking their walks together. When we graduate students would meet him, whether in the hallways of the department or at the annual K.C. Liu lecture and dinner, he was always a wonderful listener and a source of inspiration for all of us. I suppose lay people might not understand, but for a history geek like me, talking Chinese history with K.C. was like a 3rd stringer on the high school team getting to play a casual game of catch with Tom Brady. I consider it a great honor to have met and discussed history with such a giant in the field. He will be greatly missed by all of us here.

One of K.C.’s former students, Richard Smith, wrote this moving remembrance for H-Asia.

I write to report with great sadness the passing of my good friend and steadfast mentor, Professor Kwang-Ching Liu, of the University of California, Davis, who died peacefully in his sleep on September 28, 2006. His death is not only a great loss to all of us who knew him personally but also to the scholarly profession more generally. Few China specialists, especially those of my generation, lack a sense of deep indebtedness to K.C. (as we all affectionately called him). In his relentless dedication to the promotion of scholarship, the nurturing of talent, and the encouragement of scholarly cooperation, both domestically and internationally, K.C. reminds me of his own extraordinary teacher at Harvard, the late John King Fairbank, another good friend and collaborator/mentor of mine. Fairbank once wrote to me that he considered K.C. to be “the foremost historian of nineteenth century China,” and Professor C. Martin Wilbur, another distinguished historian of Fairbank’s generation, described K.C. simply as “the scholar’s scholar.”

Born in Beijing in 1921, he attended the Anglo-Chinese College of Fuzhou, which was supported by an American Methodist mission. Two or three years later, after his Japan-educated father arranged for him to receive private tutorial lessons in English from a USC graduate, he attended the Diocesan Boys’ School (DBS) in Hong Kong. According to one of K.C.’s students who taught at DBS many years later, “the older teachers there remembered their brilliant student Liu Kuang-ching . . .[and] told me he came out number one in the colony-wide school examinations.”

From age 18 to 21, K.C. studied at Lianda, the National Southwest Associated University in wartime Kunming. There, he became a student of Professor Lei Haizong, a profoundly learned comparative historian trained at the University of Chicago, who taught K.C. (by K.C.’s own account) “to have a broad vision of history.” From another influential mentor at Lianda, Professor Shao Xunzheng, K.C. learned (again, in his own words), “modern Chinese history and especially the methodology of [a] strict chronological treatment of events.”

Always an excellent student, K.C. had the opportunity to attend Harvard University in 1943, where he received a B.A. in 1945, graduating magna cum laude as well as Phi Beta Kappa. He then entered graduate school in European history, studying with Professor David Owen, who had directed his undergraduate honors thesis on “T.H. Green and his Age.” Indeed, K.C.’s first publication in English was an article on “German Fear of a Quadruple Alliance, 1904-1905,” a paper initially written for Sidney B. Fay’s seminar, which later appeared in the _Journal of Modern History_ in 1946.

Eventually, K.C. gravitated to Chinese history, where John Fairbank was just beginning to carve out a field, training a small group of promising graduate students that included not only K.C., but also Rhoads Murphey, Joseph Levenson, Benjamin Schwartz, Marius Jansen, and Albert Feuerwerker. K.C.’s great strength, as Fairbank would later describe it, was then, and would remain, a “genius for spotting sources and imagining research topics.”

In 1998 Professors Yen-p’ing Hao and Hsiu-mei Wei produced a festschrift for K.C., titled Tradition and Metamorphosis in Modern Chinese History: Essays in Honor of Kwang-Ching Liu’s Seventy-fifth Birthday. This massive work occupies two full volumes, and contains a total of forty-nine articles in both Chinese and English, as well as several appendices. A review of this work in the well-known Mainland journal Lishi yanjiu (Historical research) explicitly credited K.C. with creating a valuable and extremely influential paradigm for the study of modern Chinese history in the 21st century–a model emphasizing finely grained historical research aimed at illuminating large issues of both continuity and change. It also credits him with anticipating in his scholarship the domestically oriented approach to Chinese studies that has come to be known in the field as a “China- centered” perspective (Zhongguo zhongxin guan), in contrast to the old “Western impact”
paradigm.

In offering a summary of K.C.’s virtues as both a scholar and a teacher, I can do no better than to quote a document that Professor Fairbank gave to me in 1988. It says in part:

“[Professor Liu's] widespread influence in the field of Modern Chinese History has stemmed from qualities both of mind and heart . . . . Gifted with wide-ranging curiosity and an extraordinary talent for finding source materials and imagining how they could be used to enlarge our understanding of history, he has been a catalytic agent stimulating research in major areas of China’s early modernization and relations with the West. A considerable host of researchers around the world is indebted to Professor Liu’s inspiration and assistance. . . . All of them will testify, I believe, to his outstanding characteristic of devotion to the pursuit of research without the thought of his own self-aggrandizement. His ambition has been sparked by creative imagination, a capacity to see in a flash how sources can be used, and a willingness to labor long and hard to make them more available. In the formative stage of Chinese history studies during the decades after World War II, this special bent for exploring and mapping the field gave K.C. Liu broad influence. As his teacher and colleague at Harvard I have wanted to describe the special qualities that … I believe have characterized his whole career–a concern to explore and round up the field of research materials and make them more readily available, [and] a true teacher’s desire to help students and colleagues master their sources and produce results.”

But let me end with a more personal remark by K.C.’s talented and devoted wife, Edith, who, when asked to comment on her husband’s extraordinary relationship with his students, friends and colleagues, cited Chaucer’s tribute to the Clerk of Oxford: “And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.” He will be sorely missed.

Richard J. Smith
Rice University