The violent and unpredictable upheavals of the twentieth century affected countless millions of lives much for the worse, creating victims enough for little sympathy to be spared for those whose chief loss was to their reputations, as a result of backing what turned out to be the wrong side. Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940), following the convention of continued loyalty to the dynasty under which he was raised, found himself at the end working for a puppet government generally recognized internationally as a distasteful sham. Yet it is not the least of the virtues of this handsome and informative volume that it establishes beyond doubt that the Qing loyalist phenomenon was not some barely detectable backwash against the onward surge of progress and modernity but a substantial counter-current that indeed helped shape the modern perception of the Chinese past, especially the material past.
The eight contributions to this volume go in more or less two by two, after a couple of pages of foreword by Roderick Whitfield and an introduction of a dozen or so pages by Yang Chia-ling. Wang Cheng-hua and Shana J. Brown survey the possibilities for collectors that arose at the fall of the Qing, while Pai Shih-ming and Robert Culp look more broadly at what antiquity meant to Luo and his friends; Tamaki Maeda and Hong Zaixin examine Luo's relation with Japanese art scholars and dealers; and finally Yang Chia-ling and Shao Dan look at the last years of Luo's life in the context of the culture of Manzhouguo, the puppet state of Japanese Manchuria. Every essay offers a wealth of detailed research, always richly illustrated – no list of figures is given, but by my rough count there must be at least 110 small or full-page illustrations scattered throughout the volume, from the beginning almost to the end. Despite the place of publication there is an occasional hint of a somewhat transatlantic perspective: Yamanaka & Company (p. 67) did indeed have offices in Beijing, New York and Japan, but also from 1900 in London, where they were by no means the first Japanese dealers, but where even so by 1920 they had earned Royal Warrants from both George V and Queen Mary. Yet in fact the way in which the essays shift from ancient China to the international business of twentieth-century art and back is one of the most intriguing aspects of the book. Doubtless only a team of experts drawn from a number of backgrounds and expressing a number of slightly different outlooks could have provided as comprehensive a treatment of Luo and his world as that put together here. Doubtless, too, its exhilarating scope will stimulate further exploration of the complexities of the globalization of Chinese antiquity.
The volume is rounded out by three extremely useful research aids, compiled by the editors together or (in the case of the first) by Yang Chia-ling alone. Reviewing a study dedicated to an old style scholar like Luo inevitably lures this reviewer at least into a catalogue of potential “Addenda and corrigenda” more in the spirit of Luo's age than of engagement with the ideas in the body of the work. It is to the credit of the editors that they have managed not only to produce an intellectually stimulating collection but also provided a careful compilation of the basic information needed by any future student of the life and times of its subject. If they have made such an old-fashioned scholar as Luo surprisingly exciting, then perhaps the following paragraphs may restore a note of pedantry – though at the outset it should be pointed out that the editors leave nothing of real substance to complain about, and that they have succeeded in creating a book that is both readable and rigorously scholarly.
The first additional piece is an alphabetical listing of the “Circle of Luo Zhenyu” (pp. 228–37), in itself no doubt a time-consuming enough task, even if inevitably the size of such a circle is rather a matter of judgement – should one also perhaps include, for example, the Japanese sinologist and political activist Yamamoto Ken 山本憲 (1852–1928) who, according to his autobiography, met Luo in 1897 and corresponded with him thereafter? Similarly the “Chronology of Luo Chen-yu (1866–1940)” adheres to the Chinese convention of an annalistic biography in maintaining a fair degree of concision – and one cannot complain that the eight main essays do not fully compensate for this in the wealth of biographical information they contain. But might not mention of Wu Hufan (pp. 266–7) have elicited a reference to the monograph on this figure by Clarissa von Spee?
The most challenging compilation, however, has clearly been the last, the “Publications of Luo Zhenyu”, (pp. 283–96). It is worth pointing out that the set of complete writings of Luo published by the Xilingshe in Hangzhou in 2005 runs to 180 volumes, so an exhaustive bibliography was probably out of the question from the start. As a result Luo's many contributions to periodicals are not in view here, though he is listed elsewhere as a prominent contributor to organs such as Guang Cang xuehui zazhi 廣倉學會雜志 and Guoxue jikan 國學集刊, to name but two. But should anyone feel moved in future to try to push forward yet further the considerable labours already expended here by the editors, the following points may merit consideration. First, though it would extend such a project considerably to try to account for the many republications of his works that have taken place since his death, it is worth noting at least that reprinting did take place already within his lifetime. Thus the SOAS edition of his Shiliao congkan chubian 史料叢刊初編, originally published in 1924, derives via the library of Luo's friend Sir Reginald Fleming Johnson (1874–1938) from a reprinting that took place together with the publication of its supplement in Dairen in 1935. Second, Luo's habit of including his own works in larger series under his editorship has to be kept in mind too. Under 1934, his final revision of a study of Tang military men, Tang zhechong fu kao bu shiyi 唐折衝府攷補拾遺, was actually included in the series Baijuezhai congkan 百爵齋叢刊 listed immediately below; their place of publication was therefore identical. Third, Luo's indications of date sometimes need to be correlated carefully with the Western calendar: I have seen the Zengding lidai fupai tulu 增訂歷代符牌圖錄, listed here under 1925, dated more precisely to 4 January 1926. The entry under 1914 for Luo's republication of a couple of fascicles retrieved in Japan belonging to a very early printing of the sixth-century agricultural manual Qimin yaoshu 齊民要術 would also seem to require attention, no doubt as a result of the sort of inadvertence that is inevitable in a task as demanding as this.
And lastly, one slim yet separately published work appears to have been overlooked, though quite pardonably so. Paul Pelliot, in T'oung pao 29, 1932, p. 217, succinctly reviews a work of 31 pages in all by Luo entitled Benchao xueshu yuanliu gailue 本朝學術源流概略, An Outline of the Development of Scholarship under the Current Dynasty, published in Dairen in 1930 by the Chinese–Japanese Culture Society. Perhaps significantly, this was only the third review devoted by Pelliot to a publication by Luo, even if in his own scholarship he cites his writings quite freely. The French scholar does take the opportunity to extract from this survey and pass on to his readers one item of bibliographical information of which he had been unaware, but otherwise his introductory sentence says it all: “Appréciation de tendances extrêmement conservatrices”. Luo Zhenyu wished devoutly that the Chinese imperial era had never ended; as it was, he literally traded on its past cultural production to sustain his resistance to modernity. In the end, as this work shows, the international scope of his trading, and the new opportunities for promoting China's heritage through publication, ended up creating something rather novel and unfamiliar that could not have existed in the old world of Manchu dominion under which he was born and raised. In this paradox lies the fascination of his life, and of this fine collective volume. The contributors and editors are to be warmly congratulated on filling an important gap in our knowledge.
