Hanlin Academy
The Hanlin Academy (Chinese: 翰林院, pinyin: Hànlín Yuàn, literally "brush wood court") was an academic and administrative institution founded in eighth century Tang dynasty China by Emperor Xuanzong.
Membership in the academy was confined to an elite group of scholars, who performed secretarial and literary tasks for the court. One of its main duties was to decide on an interpretation of the Confucian classics. This formed the basis of the Imperial examinations, which aspiring bureaucrats had to pass to attain higher-level posts. Painters working for the court were also attached to the academy.
Academy members
Among the academicians of Hanlin were:
- Li Bai (701-762)
- Bai Juyi (772–846)
- Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072)
- Shen Kuo (1031-1095) - chancellor.
- Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940)
1900 fire
The Academy and its library were severely damaged in a fire during the siege of the Foreign Legations in Beijing in 1900. The rebels had on June 23 set fire to dwellings south of the British Legation, a 'frightening tactic' aimed against the Legation's defenders. The Hanlin Academy stood, in the words of British commander-in-chief Sir Claude Macdonald, only an arm's length from the British building walls'.[citation needed] On June 24 the fire spread to the Academy:
The old buildings burned like tinder with a roar which drowned the steady rattle of musketry as Tung Fu-shiang's Moslems fired wildly through the smoke from upper windows.
Some of the incendiaries were shot down, but the buildings were an inferno and the old trees standing round them blazed like torches.
An attempt was made to save the famous Yung Lo Ta Tien, now spelled Yongle Dadian, but heaps of volumes had been destroyed, so the attempt was given up.
— Eyewitness Lancelot Giles, son of Herbert A. Giles
The Manchu authorities blamed the British for the fire's spread to the Hanlin Academy. The British said a change in the wind's direction had caused the fire to spread, blaming the Boxer rebels or the regular Manchu soldiers for the initial fire: "the Chinese set fire to the Hanlin, working systematically from one courtyard to the next."[1] wind shifted,
Many ancient texts were either destroyed by the flames or removed (construed variously as looting or rescue) in their wake, including the last surviving volumes of the Yongle Encyclopedia.[2]
The Academy operated continuously until its closure during the 1911 Xinhai Revolution.
References
- ^ "BOXER REBELLION // CHINA 1900". HISTORIK ORDERS, LTD WEBSITE. Retrieved 2008-10-20.
- ^ Diana Preston (1999). The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of China's War on Foreigners That Shook the World in the Summer of 1900. pp. 138–140. ISBN 0-8027-1361-0.
See also
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