Philology Strikes Back: Consolidating a Discipline in the Mid-Qing (1644–1911)

This article examines the features that demonstrate philology’s consolidation as a discipline and summarizes these features or markers in a concise manner, so that they may, perhaps, be employed in other cases, even outside the Sinological sphere. These markers include shared scholarly ethos and epistemological stance; shared methodology; shared sources, doubts, and research questions; shared social infrastructure; shared argumentation style and terminology; and, in conclusion, a shared sense of identity. I argue that during the Qing, and especially from the second half of the eighteenth century, philology gradually, but quickly, became consolidated, systematized, and professionalized; it was also prioritized as the chief means of attaining—and a harbinger of—facts, truth, and “big ideas.” In the penultimate section I demonstrate how such markers are relevant also when we move from premodern philology to the formation of modern physics in early twentieth-century China.