Renowned and revered Chinese historian and paleographer Li Xueqin passed away peacefully at the age of 86 on 24 February.
Over his long and illustrious career, Professor Li Xueqin served as Senior Professor of Liberal Arts at Tsinghua University, Beijing, Director of Tsinghua University’s Unearthed Research and Protection Center, Director of the National Museum of Chinese Writing, Anyang, Academic Advisor of the Bulletin of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology, and many other professional positions. Among his diverse research interests, he focused on Chinese history, archaeology, paleography, and philology with ground-laying contributions to the studies of oracle bone inscriptions, ancient bronze vessels, excavated bamboo manuscripts, and Early Chinese Civilization, just to name a few, through his prolific publications. His active promulgation of “Moving beyond the age of ‘Doubting Antiquity’” (a reference to the eponymous critical-philological movement led by Gu Jiegang [1893–1980] in the Republican Period) and “Revaluation of ancient Chinese civilization” and insightful promotion of Comparative Archaeology and Comparative Study of Civilizations have left a profound mark in Chinese academia and beyond.
In addition, Professor Li Xueqin presided over major research projects like the state-funded “Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project” and the modern editing and preliminary study of the Tsinghua University collection of excavated bamboo slip manuscripts of the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE), commonly referred to as the “Tsinghua Bamboo Strips.” Amid all these projects, he spared no effort in promoting research and development of Sinology as an academic field that knows no boundaries. Under his support and guidance, Hong Kong Baptist University Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology and Tsinghua University’s Unearthed Research and Protection Center joined force to organize two major conferences on the Tsinghua corpus, namely the International Conference on Tsinghua Bamboo Strips and the Book of Odes, held between 1-3 November 2013 at HKBU and the International Conference on the Tsinghua Bamboo Manuscripts between 26-28 October 2017, jointly organized with Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Macau and held at Hong Kong and Macau. The two high-impact conferences are instrumental in deepening interest in and understanding of the Tsinghua Bamboo Strips.
The passing away of such an accomplished scholar and academic leader has left a vacuum that cannot be filled. All members of JAS have shared this grief with the academic community and the society at large. Perhaps we may find some consolation in the thought that the immense scholarship that Professor Li left behind, together with his lifelong pursuit of knowledge, will be a source of inspiration for generations to come.
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