Prof. Dr. Enno Giele Classical China Studies
Classical – this refers to times and cultural forms that are established in hindsight as pathbreaking and exemplary, such as the classical philosophy or sculpture in Greece or the classical music in Europe.
In China, this is the time of the Warring States and the first empire of the Qin and Han dynasties from the 5th c. BCE through the 2nd c. CE. It was then that not only the „timeless“ ethics and political theories of so-called Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism but also empire-wide standards of writing, education, communication and transport, administration, military service, coinage, trade, new agricultural technology, and much else developed. China became a global player for the first time and through the famous Silk Routes reached out into Central Asia and indirectly also to Europe.
Our section is also responsible, however, for teaching about the adjacent premodern periods in China, from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages. Especially in the field of Chinese Archaeology such enormous progress has been achieved in recent times, that this has changed the narratives about the origins of Chinese culture and has implications even in the modern political discourse. Therefore, these developments, too, have to be part of the training of young sinologists. This is also reflected upon in courses on the history of the discipline.
Research
Our research focus is on the ancient and medieval history and the prehistory of China—understood as an accumulation or sequence of cultures, language groups, societies, and states—as well as on the entanglements of these with their neighbors in Asia. Method-wise we are availing ourselves of a broad range of philological and historiographical text analyses, comparative linguistics, archaeological-material approaches, as well as questions from institutional, social, economic, and environmental history. To name just a few topics: The materiality of ancient writing supports; the system of communication in the early empire; the introduction of the donkey as beast of burden to Northwest China; Iranian loanwords into Chinese; the grammar of Classical Chinese; the coin economy of the Qin; or the early expansion of the Chinese empire to the South dominated by monsoon climate.
Teaching
In teaching, our seminar topics are determined by our research interests as listed above. Additionally, topics of general interest related to pre-modern China are also dealt with in seminars, such as genomics, geology, conceptions of time, migration, mythology, colors, slavery, cartography, digital tools (AI, GIS, online encyclopedias). Furthermore, we are teaching language courses in Classical Chinese and text reading seminars about traditional sources as well as inscriptions and manuscripts. Regularly on offer are an introduction to Chinese History and survey lecture courses on East Asia in World History (up to 1850) and Cultural Foundations of East Asia. These latter two are co-taught together with colleagues from Japanese Studies and East Asian Art History. We also often co-teach comparative or theory-building seminars together with colleagues from other cultural historical or archaeological disciplines, such as Prehistorical, Classical, and Near Eastern Archaeology, Egyptology, Ancient and Medieval European History, Buddhist Studies, etc.).