3 days ago
Qiu Xigui obituary
Qiu Xigui, who has died aged 89, first made his mark as a paleographer, a scholar of ancient writing, through researching Chinese 'oracle bones'. These are divinations inscribed on animal scapulae – shoulder blades – or turtle plastrons – the bottom part of their shells. The characters they employ are the earliest known forerunners of the modern Chinese writing system.
Their appearance in the antiquities market led to the excavation from the late 1920s of the last capital of the Shang dynasty (c1600-1050 BC) at Yinxu, near Anyang, in Henan province.
This spectacular discovery set the stage for an attempt to reconstruct the history of Chinese early civilisation on the basis of archaeological and paleographic evidence that is still central to Chinese humanities research, and gave Qiu the opportunity to develop a systematic approach to identifying and tracing the evolution of countless ancient Chinese characters.
As with their counterparts today, they combine semantic elements with phonetic ones. Pictographs or ideographs were used to form characters, which were then borrowed, along the lines of a rebus picture puzzle, to write words with the same or similar sound values. Then, further semantic elements might be added to distinguish these phonetic borrowings from the original character. Even though this basic system of character formation is still reflected in the modern script, both the spoken language and writing evolved in a complex manner over the next 3,000 years, making the ancient script difficult to decipher.
Qiu's analytic method was outlined in his book, Wenzixue Gaiyao, first published in 1988, and translated into English as Chinese Writing (2000). He was renowned for his rigorous standards of proof and for publishing articles in which he corrected previous mistakes when he discovered them.
In one instance, a pedicab driver with a high school diploma and a passion for paleography wrote to him after reading one of his articles offering a different interpretation of a character. Realising his mistake, Qiu not only corrected himself, but helped the man to get admitted to Fudan University, in Shanghai.
Born in that city, Qiu was a teenager when the Communist party came to power in 1949. His family was classified as 'petty bourgeois' because his father had invested money in the factory where he worked. However, Qiu passed the competitive university examination and was admitted to the history department of Fudan in 1952.
In his first year, he took a class with Hu Houxuan, a pioneering oracle bone scholar, and devoted himself to the study of ancient writing. In 1956, when Qiu graduated, he accompanied Hu when the latter moved to the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Then, in 1960, Qiu was appointed to teach at Peking University.
Like most intellectuals during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution periods, Qiu spent periods of time labouring in the countryside and criticising himself at meetings. Nevertheless, with the help of older colleagues, he found ways to continue doing his paleographic research.
In 1972, just as the Cultural Revolution was beginning to wind down, construction workers at Changsha Mawangdui in Hunan province happened upon a tomb. When it was excavated by archaeologists, they discovered that it had been perfectly sealed and contained the preserved corpse of a woman, including her soft tissue and the textiles in which her body was wrapped. Her son's tomb, which was closed in 168 BC, was nearby and contained more than 20 manuscripts brush-written on silk, including two copies of the Daoist classic known as the Laozi, and the Book of Changes (the Yijing, or I Ching), as well as other texts.
In 1974, Qiu joined a small group charged with transcribing the Mawangdui manuscripts into modern characters. His responsibility was the Laozi, and his research on these manuscripts aided in the transcription of earlier manuscripts brush-written on slips of bamboo – the Guodian Chu slips, taking their name from the ancient state of Chu – that were found in a tomb in Guodian, Hubei province, in 1993.
That tomb, which also included sections of the Laozi, has been dated to around 300 BC. Thus, the manuscripts, which included many philosophical texts, were probably written down during the lifetime of Confucius' most famous disciple, Mencius. They were recorded in a regional style, and when they were published with transcriptions in 1998, they carried annotations by Qiu.
In 2005, Qiu was invited to Fudan to head a new Centre for Research on Excavated Classics and Paleography. Since the discovery of the Guodian tomb, many more bamboo and silk manuscripts have been unearthed. Accordingly, this institution focuses primarily on their decipherment and interpretation. Qiu's intellectual leadership is evident in the lively academic discussions posted online by his graduate students.
Qiu also promoted international scholarly cooperation, teaching and mentoring many foreign students, both at Peking University and at Fudan. In 1982-83 he taught paleography at the University of Washington in Seattle, and in 2000 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago.
I first met Qiu Xigui in 1984 in Beijing, when I was teaching for Soas University of London. By the time we invited him to London in 1992, he had already been diagnosed with glaucoma, and while magnifying glasses, computers and his devoted students helped him to continue his work, eventually he became totally blind. Even then, he continued his work by dictating his ideas to his students.
He is survived by his wife, Dong Yan, and his son, Qiu Shi.
Qiu Xigui, paleographer, born 13 July 1935; died 8 May 2025
