Date: Thursday 30 September 2021

Time:  4:30—5:30pm
Venue:  AM102, Kelburn Campus
In-person attendance:  Register Here
Online attendance:  Zoom Link

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Abstract
Towards the very end of his long and prolific life, the influential (and loyalist) late-Ming/early-Qing thinker and historian Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 (1610-1695) turned his mind to the experiences of his own difficult life and the network of men that had sustained him over the years.

His brief biographical accounts of these friends and acquaintances, some 117 of them, all dead by the time Huang memorialised them, entitled Recollecting Friends of Old: A Record (Sijiu lu 思舊錄), proved to be his last sustained piece of writing. It is a remarkable text that weaves a collective portrait of the scholarly world of the late imperial period in China during a time of cataclysmic dynastic collapse. On the basis of a translation of this text that he recently completed, Duncan will discuss aspects of Huang’s practice as a biographer and the nature of the friendships that he formed over the course of his life.

About the speaker

Duncan M. Campbell Duncan M. Campbell has taught Chinese language and literature (classical and modern), history and civilization at the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, and the Australian National University in Canberra. In 2015-16 he was the June & Simon K.C. Li Director of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies and Curator of the Chinese Garden with The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, USA. The bulk of Duncan’s research concentrates on the literary and material culture of late imperial China, with particular reference to the late Ming-early Qing period (1550s-1660s). Within this field, one focus is a group of writers and scholars born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province who lived through this cataclysmic dynastic transition. Specific areas of research interest include gardens and their literary and pictorial representation, letter writing and diaries, travel and travel writing, aspects of print culture, the history of the late imperial private library, biographical and autobiographical writing, and literary translation. Duncan’s The Dumbarton Oaks Anthology of Chinese Garden Literature, co-edited with Alison Hardie, was published in 2020

Zoom URL: https://vuw.zoom.us/j/94484776600