Suchergebnisse

As in all living scholarly traditions one can see in traditional Chinese historiography a wide range of divergent opinion as to what history is and how it should be written. On one point, however, all schools of Chinese historiography agree, and this is the clear awareness of the evaluative character of their trade. The historian of every school was an arbiter who, by passing judgment assessed the value of, and gave meaning to, events. This consciously evaluative character of Chinese historiography demanded self-reliance and courage on the part of the historian, who was not only the keeper of documents and the recorder of events; his assessments assumed normative status like the sentences of a judge.

Speaking in a very general way, youth and age have been taken in traditional Chinese literature as two stages in a continuous development of which the first represents the preparation and the last the goal. Respective values attached to these stages were derived from this concept. In a civilisation where literature, even polite literature, was to a large extent an amateurish pursuit of the scholar-official, this evaluation does not come as a surprise, particularly since it will not be easy to find another civilisation which was as strongly ideology-motivated as was the Chinese. Established attitudes concerning youth and age were thus, in general, accepted and taken for granted also by the poet.