Ancient China: Studies in Early Civilization Essays on various aspects of Chinese civilization from its beginnings through the Han dynasty to honor Herrlee Glessner Creel on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. |
About the author (1978)
T. H. Tsien was born Tsuen-hsuin Tsien on December 1, 1909 in the Jiangsu Province of eastern China. As a youth, he edited a student publication advocating the overthrow of the warlords who had been savagely partitioning the country. Soon afterward, he and his teacher were arrested by a local warlord's henchmen. Tsien was released, but the teacher was executed. Tsien joined the Nationalist Army, which in 1928 helped defeat the warlords and unified China. He studied Chinese and Western history and library science at the University of Nanking and received an undergraduate degree in 1932. He later went to work in the Nanjing branch of China's national library. In 1937, he fled Nanjing just before the Japanese massacre there and settled in Shanghai, where he joined the national library's branch there. In 1941, he smuggled 30,000 rare books to safety amid the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. He packed the books into 102 wooden crates and labeled them as new books purchased by the Library of Congress. In the guise of a bookseller, he created false invoices to accompany the shipments. The crates left the Port of Shanghai a few at a time with the last one leaving China on December 5, 1941, two days before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. In 1947, he was dispatched to the United States to retrieve the books, but the outbreak of civil war between China's Communists and its ruling Nationalists prevented his return. Accepting an invitation from the University of Chicago library to catalog its Chinese holdings, he received a master's degree in library science from the university in 1952 and a Ph.D. in library science and East Asian studies there in 1957. Over the coming decades, he built the university's collection of East Asian books into one of the foremost in the United States. He wrote several books during his lifetime including A History of Writing and Writing Materials in Ancient China, Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions, and Collected Writings on Chinese Culture. In 1999, he received the Distinguished Service Award from the National Library of China. He died on April 9, 2015 at the age of 105. At his death, he was an emeritus professor of East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago and an emeritus curator of the university's East Asian library.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Ancient China: Studies in Early Civilization |
| Author | Irene Bain |
| Editors | David Tod Roy, Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, Tsuen-hsuin Tsien |
| Contributors | Herrlee Glessner Creel, Göran Malmqvist |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Chinese University Press, 1978 |
| ISBN | 9622011446, 9789622011441 |
| Length | 370 pages |
| Subjects | › › History / Asia / General Social Science / Anthropology / General Social Science / Archaeology |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |