 I'm Paul Webley, I'm the director of SIRS, I'd like to welcome you all in the audience here tonight, particularly those who've travelled a long way to be here and Professor Tim Barrett's friends and colleagues, and a particularly warm welcome to Tim's family, his wife, and I think both of his daughters are here, one of whom I've just discovered is a double SIRS alum, so great to welcome her back as well. Now we have guests from many institutions here tonight, we have lots of people, it's a full house. Some of you have travelled a long way to be here, some of you have taken a lot of trouble, and we really appreciate that. It all adds to the sense of occasion that is a SIRS inaugural. It's a ceremony, it's a reed to passage, a rather special reed to passage, I'll come on to that in a moment for the speaker. It's a celebration, it's an enjoyable intellectual event for the whole SIRS community. Now just to make sure it's an enjoyable event, can I just do a bit of simple housekeeping at the outset. So do turn off your mobile phones, and I always model this, and I'm very bad at turning off my mobile phone, so people always wonder what on earth I'm doing, but anyway they are, it's turned off now. So do turn them off. The other thing is, do note where the fire exits are. We tend not to plan fire alarms for the evening, so if the fire alarm does go off, that means there is a fire. So don't panic, but do leave by the fire exits. Now I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture. It's the first one of the 2013-14 inaugural lecture series. It's special in all sorts of ways, because although it's part of an inaugural lecture series, this is Professor Barrett's last lecture at SIRS before he retires next month after 27 years of service. So it's a valedictory address as well as an inaugural. I can't think when we've ever had that before, so it makes it very special. The other thing that makes it special is Tim has just given me a heaven bank note for £10,000, which I thought was an ordinarily generous of him. I didn't know we paid people this amount of money at SIRS, but he assures me that actually I can't cash it until I go to heaven, which on the face of it seems unlikely ever to happen, but I think that typifies Tim's thoughtfulness, not least also the dedication in the book, which I really appreciate, Tim. Lots of people are, I know, tremendous admirers of Tim intellectually, but also personally because of his kindness and thoughtfulness. Thank you so much. Professor Barrett will be introduced by Dr Jochen. She's a lecturer in modern history at the University of Essex. She was one of Professor Barrett's PhD students at SIRS, so welcome back. In the past 20 years she's lived in London, Jerusalem, Beijing, Hong Kong, and she's one of only a handful of historians of the People's Republic of China who've worked on the use of new oral and archival evidence. Her new book, Forgotten Voices of Mouth's Great Famine, 1958-62, an oral history, is published by Yale University Press this month, is the first to allow survivors of China's most devastating capacity to tell their stories, and she's currently creating the world's first oral history of 20th century China online, Dacarachy. So she will do the introductions. And the voter thanks will be delivered by Professor Michelle Hawks, and I think probably for everybody here Michelle needs no introduction, but he's Professor of Chinese here at SIRS. His research is in the field of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, looking especially at social context of literary production and different literary media. Most recently he's been working on Chinese internet literature. He's written some excellent stuff on that. He's currently President of the British Association for Chinese Studies, and he's a much more important, he's Director of our new China Institute, and has been for the last six weeks I believe Michelle, and he's already making an enormous difference. I knew it was a brilliant appointment and he's confirmed that. We're very grateful to both of you for being part of today's events. At the end you'll be invited upstairs to a reception in the Brunei suite for some wine and canapes. So I'll pass over to Dr Shun to introduce Professor Barrett. Over to you Dr Shun. Tonight we are here to celebrate the Professorship of Tim. That's why we've all got dressed up in this funny outfit wearing hats. Tim's official hats in SIRS is Professor of East Asia History, but he's much more than that. I'm sure many of you would agree that Tim is a legend in the field of Chinese studies. He's undisputably a first-class scholar. Unlike many who I call Ford factory academics, we constantly struggle at the end of production lane producing REF outputs that very few people read. Throughout Tim's academic career he wrote previously few books and articles, but everything he has written is very thoughtful, compact and solid. Just in winter the independent reviewer calls Tim a clever writer who knows how to add perspective to the narratives, march the same way good droughts men create depths to their drawings. Tim's book The Woman who discovered printing as beautifully compact but formidably well researched. It belongs immediately to that fine tradition of English writing about China initiated by Arthur Whaley. One other reviewer praised the book as fascinating, provocative, broad and ultimately stimulating. I think that sentence sums up all Tim's work. For those of us who were lucky enough to study with Tim, he is first and foremost a wonderful person as well as a great teacher. I believe Frank Decorter who cannot make it tonight, but he was Tim's first PhD student. This is what he said about Tim. Tim was a wonderful supervisor when I joined SOAS as a PhD student in 1987. A great head of department when I became a postdoctoral fellow three years later and always a true friend and outstanding scholar. A number of our team's former students, we still refer to him as Sage and Master. In Lao Zi Dao De Jin, 22, it reads Bu Zi Jian Gu Ming Bu Zi Shi Gu Zhang Bu Zi Fa Gu You Gong Bu Zi Jin Gu Chang It translates as the Sage does not reveal himself, therefore he shines brightly. He does not affirm himself, therefore he radiates out. He does not appropriate himself, therefore he achieves. He does not magnify himself, therefore he increases. I think this is Tim. As my PhD supervisor, Tim was never petrolising, but he knows how to inspire. He was always full of enthusiasm about my research. Whenever I went to ask him about something, he always had interesting to say, and he always turned out to be bright. He was also extremely generous with his time. I still have very fond memory about my very first supervision with him. He took me on this grant tour of Seoul's library and showed me all the essential material reference books in the China reading room, and then he introduced me to all the key people in the school. While I was writing my thesis, he always carefully read everything I wrote, and he even corrected my punctuations. I was terribly moved by that. For a while I was also Tim's teaching assistant, and I used to find myself being mesmerised by his lectures. He has this extraordinary ability to create a classroom atmosphere which is relaxing and exciting, ironic, and yet at the same time serious. His lectures were always a magnificent flow of irradiation and entertainment, packed with useful insights, advice, and jokes. Hearing I was coming tonight to Tim's lecture, one of his former master students told me about the very first lecture he heard from Tim. This is what he said. As the lecture went on, Professor Barrett's face would turn ever more towards the ceiling. His reddening visage, contrasting with the bushy white here, the very image of the very image of mountain-dwelling immortal. His lectures were filled with the stuff which university dreams are made. The hour passed so pleasurably and so quickly. I could go on and on, but I think I'm going to stop here because I believe Tim has something very important and interesting to see tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my greatest honour to introduce, to present to you Professor Barrett. The title of his lecture tonight is three things I learned about China. Thank you. First of all, three thank yous to Professor Webley for allowing me a valedictory inaugural series and to Payal and all her team who made it happen. Secondly, to all of you for finding time to come, often from rather far away. My hope is that the occasion might be something like a mobster's funeral, providing neutral ground for the meeting of many, though I must stave off inertia long enough myself to say my piece. Some of you may find it no more than a series of clichés, my apologies. Clichés are only really clichés when everybody knows them. Thirdly, to Shun. I asked her to introduce me because I wanted to say something about her. Academics are not usually called upon to demonstrate bravery and we do not list deeds of valor in our CVs. But she has gone alone into the archives of an authoritarian state to expose its past derelictions and that was courageous and I want to affirm my appreciation of that in public. As it happens, the first scholar to take up my chair in 1951 was a brave man, Major Charles Boxer, wounded at the fall of Hong Kong. He did not stay, leaving for a professorship in Portuguese, more suited to his expertise in the history of European expansion. He was succeeded in 1954 by my predecessor Bill Beasley, whose life we celebrate in a couple of weeks. But he stayed long enough to acquire the first of at least half a dozen honorary degrees since he never attended, let alone graduated from, any form of higher education institution whatsoever. So, though some teaching of Chinese history by a part-timer took place in Soas during the 1940s, the regular teaching of East Asian history has been a development only of my own lifetime. It started very much from scratch and on the basis of no academic tradition whatsoever. Even during this time it has existed mainly on sufferance, like most Asian and African humanities. The 1947 Scarborough Commission aimed to alleviate the deep British ignorance of Africa and Asia that had cost this nation so dearly in World War II. But when the money ran out in 1952 before the training for the requisite posts had been completed, the UK had to wait until 1961 for a new impetus. And the Hater report of that year, since funds were lacking for any investigations, save those provided by the Rockefeller Foundation for a trip to the USA, followed the American Cold War lead in privileging area studies over humanities. The notion, for example, that anyone in the late 20th century might be motivated by an African or Asian form of religious belief was so alien to the report, it almost forgot to mention religion entirely, with the result that the little band of British teachers in these fields, all nine of them, had to write to the Times to point out that they considered their studies, quote, invaluable for grasping some of the profounder issues involved in accounting for differences of cultural outlook and practice. The erratic stop and go approach to promoting knowledge of the wider world did not cease there, but it did remain consistently blinkered in its outlook. I suspect that the far-seeing and widely experienced Sir Peter Parker, deliberately included in the title of his 1986 report, The Stultifying Terms of Reference to Which He Had to Work, Speaking for the Future, a review of the requirements of diplomacy and commerce for Asian and African languages and area studies. The thought that the contemplation of the Chinese humanities might be of educational value, a form of study fit to engage intelligent young minds on its own merits, did occur to some, but seems even today entirely beyond the comprehension of government circles. I cannot think of anyone in government in Britain who has ever found it within themselves to articulate that idea, let alone endorse it. Why? One obvious answer might be to be blunt, what we now term institutional racism. This would not necessarily have to be the yellow parallel nonsense of the late 19th century, but a simple by-product of the often quite laudable desire on the part of friends of China, if not Chinese themselves, to portray the country in terms of victimhood. Such portrayals have an unfortunate way of stripping the portrait of their culture. Is that African refugee perhaps also a poet? Is that South Asian flood victim also the guardian of an ancient musical tradition? The answer is in so-as, maybe, in the newspapers and on the news almost never. Now it's true that if pushed an educated 20th century Britain could find something nice to say about China. Even if before the Second World War it was normally seen, if not as a great reservoir of sin and ignorance, as in most of the missionary writing that dominated popular factual reading on China, then at least as a great reservoir of disease and suffering, as in the fiction of Somerset Maugham's The Painted Vale or of Nora Loft's Chinese finale, the basis of the John Ford film Seven Women. But even when Britain's were trying to be positive, one common way of validating the importance of China was to refer to childhood memories. As Robert Bicker's points out, China and childishness were so closely linked in the early 20th century British psyche that a continued interest in China was taken as an indicator of abnormal, perhaps arrested development. Even the most sympathetic British observer of the Chinese at this time cannot resist speaking of their gaiety as of children. Thus, Osbert Sitwell, off to vaping as it then was in 1939 as sympathy for China in the face of Japanese aggression reached new levels, recalls how at the age of six or seven, I observed high above me the coral buds and blossoms of a flowering tree, a cherry perhaps or peach and as I looked, knew suddenly that it hailed from China or Japan. Later on he asked and it did indeed come from China. Little Osbert's precocity is easily explained. He goes on to say he was related to Reginald Farer, one of the most celebrated plant collectors of his age, who died pursuing his dreams of undiscovered new varieties in Yunnan. More typical one fears was the childhood experience of Gordon Bottomley, recalled in his breakfast this year being Ying's autobiography of a Chinese girl. When I was a child, my chosen plate at breakfast time was blue and Chinese, with a primitive version of the then ubiquitous willow pattern. Were images of China really so banal? In short, yes. A couple of years ago, I decided it was time to review my collection of late 19th and mid 20th century British writing on China, with a night my suspicion that in many homes books may be acquired but not always read. My youngest daughter had just graduated but was at a loose end, so I asked her to scan in the cover of any book on China that seemed to advertise its contents other than solely by its title. What did China mean to British illustrators who presumably had some idea of their intended market? Out of the 55 volumes of this sort, I did turn up quite unsurprisingly a couple of dragons and a couple of great walls. But I also turned up a couple of junks, a lion dog, fishing cormorants, and indeed a good number of images for China, including at least nine volumes that simply used Chinese writing on the cover. But by far the largest grouping was composed of those covers that related precisely to the world of the willow pattern. 25 in all displayed either together or severally the Chinese built environment of pagodas, pavilions, gates and watchtowers or little figures in traditional garb and pigtails or cultivated gardens of exotic plants. Can it really be that the British well into the middle of the last century thought of China in largely ceramic terms as a world contained within an admittedly quite well populated dinner plate? What other reason could there be after all why Winston Churchill, in Jonathan Fenby's words, consistently expressed surprise at the importance America placed on China, wish he dismissed to Roosevelt as 425 million pigtails? As his representative to China continues Fenby, Churchill sent out a veteran military man who, quote, expected to find China full of whimsical little people with quaint customs who carved lovely jade ornaments and worshipped their grandmothers. It's true that Britain has occasionally been seen as potentially the very place to study China and much of the rest of the world from abroad. The American China scholar Owen Latinmore, another founding father without any university education, in a lecture delivered here in 1970 pointed to the immense pool of experts that Britain could draw upon by comparison with America as a result of its earlier experience as a colonial power. And certainly the Scarborough Commission came just at the right time for many Britons with direct experience of Asia and Africa to find posts. But its estimation of the prospects was, one fears, somewhat influenced by wishful thinking, occasioned by vicious political persecution in his home country. I cannot comment on imperialism as a useful preparation for Asian and African studies in general, but certainly, as far as concerns China, Latinmore was simply wrong. The conclusion reached in an inaugural delivered in 1993 at this podium by Hugh Baker, the most knowledgeable authority on Hong Kong to have taught at SOAS, was that the 150 years during which that enclave existed as a crown colony contributed very little to Anglo-Chinese relations. In his words, is it not the case that like dynamic prosperous chop sui for food and like dynamic pigeon for language, Hong Kong has proved to be a block, a limbo for international understanding, a buffer state dedicated to failure to understand. To sum up so far, the first thing I learned about China was that popular misconceptions do real harm. At a time when French, German and eventually American scholarship was creating a respectable tradition of Chinese studies reflected in internationally recognized publications, our universities found room only for three or four ex-missionaries or ex-consuls who, with one or two exceptions, did not succeed in raising academic standards very far. This was hardly possible when no one in authority seems to have taken them at all seriously, at least as anything other than language providers for more future missionaries and consoles. The rise of Hitler did in the 1930s sweep a couple of professionally trained sinologists into the British orbit. But it was Cambridge rather than SOAS that picked up the slightly more historically oriented of these new arrivals. So when in the year of my birth Chairman Mao managed to smash images of the willow pattern world for good, new misunderstandings were ready to establish themselves in short order. Such total change, after all, seemed to render all knowledge about China useless, especially when the progress of communism reached the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to 1976, when eradicating the heritage of the past turned to an orgy of persecution and destruction that rather undermined the earlier assessment of the gifted American historian Joseph Levison that Confuciuson Company had been safely parked in the sterile isolation of a museum existence. On top of this, the past three decades or so are very different policies that have transformed China into a leading world economic power have again produced a rather different fervor for change. Inducing China's citizens to dwell in the present and throw their energies into improving their lot on their own initiative. No wonder a good number of heads of British educational institutions are keen to boast that their course is on Mandarin and business management and particularly the latter once they discover that language learning at tertiary level is not for the faint-hearted. Capture the very essence of what a Britain will need to go out and get rich in the fabulous Orient without wasting time on what they take to be the arcane trivialities of soas courses. One cannot but smile. Nothing at all prevents a soas graduate from getting rich in China. But when problems arise, as they almost inevitably do in the tricky Chinese environment, at least the soas graduate can retreat to the hills and read tongue poetry while contemplating what next. After all, in a land in which an 11th century poem can provide the lyrics for a completely contemporary songstress like Faye Wong, that makes sense. Some vice-chancelors are vaguely aware that there is a bit more to China than the China market, especially those who have acquired an institute or a statue at least of Confucius. The assumption, however, that the few words attributed to that figure as all we know and all we need to know about China before the arrival of the West is alas deeply flawed. I'm afraid there is just no escape from taking Chinese history seriously. All of it. Vice-chancelors who recall hearing as students of the reported barbarities of the Red Guards may be surprised to learn how ineffectual all that destruction was. About 10 years into the process of reform, two Chinese scholars undertook an extensive survey to see what had become of traditional Chinese values. Some of the 18 values asked about had indeed been jettisoned in the rush towards prosperity, but ahead of them all, ahead even of the diligence and frugality that seemed to hold the key to future success, came confidence in China's long historical heritage. Such confidence need not, of course, be equated with the detailed knowledge held by the entire citizenry. I have myself been shocked to overhear an evidently prosperous Mandarin speaker confide to his lady friend that he knew nothing of the immensely famous poet whose tomb they were about to visit. I mean envarished to hear a most obliging taxi driver who had conveyed me across what was in parts a building site to see an eighth century inscription berated by its custodian for knowing nothing of his own history. In this case, particularly poignantly, for the inscription was written by his remote ancestors, not speakers of Chinese, to declare in public to Chinese visitors that their recent alliance with the Tibetan enemy had just been one of those things. But these men, however, were of an age to have had their education adversely affected by the Cultural Revolution. For the most part, in parting outline knowledge of over 3,000 years, it seems well within the capacity of Chinese education. Now, given the particular abundance of sources for more recent times, I can see why some in Britain have succumbed to the temptation to confine their teaching on China to the post-Mongol period. Favouring study of the recent past was very justified from the words of Confucius. The period also allows consideration of the current big question in comparative history as to how and when China and Europe, now seen as very much on a par economically in Renaissance times, came to diverge and where China might be heading now. This is certainly a much more interesting question than how did we lose China, and the answer is much more elusive than simply blaming O in Latin more. Ready, we find it being argued that the beginnings of the situation described for the 16th century must be traced back well over a millennium ago. One can foresee other difficulties too. If in trying to sell something to a Frenchman, he might happen to mention Joan of Arc, I'm not sure how helpful it might be to mutter that we don't do medieval that we have some vague knowledge about Huguenots. To my mind, an awareness of the totality of Chinese history is in good manners. The most famous teacher that has probably ever been at SOAS, C.C. Xu, a better known to millions of Chinese as the novelist Lausier, after describing plainly at first hand the casual racist abuse suffered by Chinese in London in the 1920s, concludes, in most English schools, China is not dealt with in history courses. So the only people who know anything about China are businessmen and missionaries who've been there. Since these two groups naturally have a far-from-favourable opinion of China, it's not surprising that their stories should cast China in an unfavourable light. So in this Chinese view, at any rate, to deprive someone of history is to deprive them of human dignity. There's certainly a moral case of restitution, of course, not only with regard to China. But for present purposes, it is only the Chinese propensity for reflection on long periods of time that seems to me to explain the events of my own lifetime. Chinese views of history are diverse and do not themselves do easy summary, so I select a couple of examples. Beyond the field of religious history where destruction even killings are not uncommon, the cultural revolution in its large-scale assault upon China's historical legacy was somewhat unusual. Yet iconoclastic attitudes can readily be found a generation earlier in the 1920s, the first period in which the Chinese tradition was called into question by apparently westernised young Chinese. The only problem, as one Chinese scholar in America has noted, was paradoxically that it was elements in their own tradition that caused them to be, in his phrase, totalistic anti-traditionalists. True in the past, in the 11th century, for example, the slogans might not have concerned the creation of a new China, but the resurrection of a very ancient one, that of an idealised golden age of sage rulers in remote antiquity. But most of the gap in between was, in some circles at least, dismissed out of hand as illustrating nothing more than steady decline. Some even wanted the study of history removed from the higher education curriculum altogether. My own belief is that this radical attempt to resurrect the mind of Confucius at the expense of all that had happened since was ultimately derived from desperate efforts at a slightly earlier period to reconnect with the mind of the Buddha in the midst of an apparent catastrophic decline in Chinese Buddhism, an effort responsible for the rise of Zen. So perhaps some good came with these earlier attempts to fly in the face of history. The anti-historical attitudes of the cultural revolution are thankfully now but a distant memory and historical studies have revived spectacularly in China. The erudition even of younger colleagues there puts me to shame. One type of historical writing, again with antecedents in the 1920s that has attracted particular attention in this country, not without reason, is the so-called history of national humiliation in which the opium wars take a paradigmatic place and references to ancient Chinese tales of long-term revenge feature disturbingly prominently. The first thing to be said about this, of course, is that it is by no means a uniquely Chinese phenomenon. Henry Ford said history is bunk, but only an idiot would believe that memories of the Alamo, of Pearl Harbor and of 9-Eleven have had no influence at all on American views of Latin America, East Asia and the Muslim world. But here too, earlier contemplation of the Chinese past sets this trend within a much deeper tradition of historical commentary. Those who sought assurance in the long-term rhythms of Chinese history and looked for patterns in its unfolding had about two millennia ago started by positing cycles of change as steady as those of the seasons. But the occasional anomalous user-patience soon introduced from vocabulary of calendar computation the notion of the intercalary period. The Chinese reconciliation of the lunar and solar year is not like ours affected by having months of different lengths with the occasional leap year, but by less frequent but more drastic insertions of an entire intercalary month to get the two cycles back in line. Yet various disasters in the form of repeated foreign invasions prompted this expedient to be used more and more so that in the end whole ages were written off, ending up with a dystopian vision of history, very close to that of the would-be revivers of Confucianism. With the sole difference that for the latter, ideological purity was something that had been lost relatively early, if the introduction of Buddhism had introduced further corrupting influences. So thought reform was in essence a purely Chinese affair, but here it was more straightforwardly the intrusion of foreigners that had cumulatively destroyed true Chinese culture. But then China was all about foreigners from the start. The very name of the place, even if originally it meant little more than the Midlands, rather than bearing all the weight we know attached to the title Middle Kingdom, begs the obvious question middle of what. The same characters could be used in other situations, for example in talking of the central portion of ancient India, or even with regard to Vietnam. Though I feel that references to China there as the Northern Court smacks somewhat of the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight and they are terming the rest of the UK the North Island. China did not develop from something as small as a city-state like Rome, surrounded from the start by hostile neighbours and allegedly obliged therefore to conquer the world in self-defence. But the situation was not so very different. At the start of the dynasty under which Confucius lived, what we see is China as a network of cities surrounded by alien populations who were only assimilated after about a further half millennium. This picture only applies in any case to the ancient heartlands of China around the lower Yellow River. For the map of China on the printed page, even today this leads us and is especially deceptive when it tries to represent the Chinese past. Our cartography tends to privilege the population centres on the plains, which today are almost everywhere occupied by speakers of Chinese languages. But a three-dimensional model would show a far more interesting pattern, also observable in neighbouring parts of Southeast Asia, wherein the people of the plains maintain a culture separate from that of the people of the higher river valleys, who in turn live a life and speak a language quite different from that of the dwellers upon the mountain slopes, who may well be different again from dwellers upon the mountain tops. In the south of Yunnan, for example, on the border with Laos, there may be handshinies in the towns, but the dye cultivate the valleys and the honey the slopes, leaving the hilltops to the yaw, with the meow finding land where they can as late arrivals from further north. Over the border in Laos, the ethnic groups differ, but the pattern is much the same. I have noticed that in the second half of the first millennium of the common era, it would seem that many valley and upland areas were not truly part of China, even in eastern provinces that are always cartographically depicted as having been under direct Chinese rule since the Hand Dynasty. Indeed, despite the natural focus of western historians on the legendary Great Wall and the potential conquerors of China lurking beyond it, as often as not they establish themselves inside, the peoples of the south also put up a stiff resistance and in early modern times still required the attention of Chinese armies reportedly often considerably larger in size than the contemporary one that the Spanish deemed adequate for the subjugation of England in 1588. Given the ability of involuntary denizens of China's ostensible borders to resist census takers over the course of history, one wonders at what point the speakers of Chinese languages cease to be a minority in their own land. That one leaves aside those peripheral polities that into modern times have declared allegiance both to China and to other neighbouring powers and take the borders of the current nation state as the criterion for what constitutes China, then it can only be that Chinese have been a minority people within those borders during much of their history. So to sum up, the second thing I have learned is that to grasp the cultural resources at China's disposal, we have to deal with the whole of Chinese history, not just the period familiar to western observers, and then we have to look at the larger, non-Chinese context as well, linguistically taxing this maybe, but recent studies of topics like the historical dimension of Sino-Japanese relations, an area vital to future regional if not global peace, make it essential rather than merely desirable. This is not to deny that much can be gained from looking at purely modern phenomena as solely of the Chinese tradition itself, its ideas and its institutions, but the intricate involvement of Chinese and non-Chinese peoples over the long course of history is precisely what has bequeathed to our modern world of nations states with well-defined borders, all too many troublesome points of conflict. Just ask the Dalai Llamar if you want any further explanation. But the troubles his holiness faces with Beijing also fall squarely into an area of conflicts over state authority with regard to the unseen world that outside observers have found especially problematic and which again become clearer in the light of history. Before plunging back centuries in time, let's start with the following passage in the autobiography of the modern painter Qi Baishu. On the fifth of the fifth month, I sent a letter by messenger to my old teacher only to see the messenger hurrying back with the sad tidings that he had passed away seven days ago. Words could not describe my sorrow. He was not only my teacher but also my bosom friend. How could I not help feeling a sense of extreme loss and debt unpaid? I went over my old paintings and took out the ones that he had liked, about 20 of them, mounted them myself, put them in a paper box that I specially made for the purpose and burned them in front of his coffin. Just to remind you, one of Qi's paintings, certainly an outsize one, was sold recently for the equivalent of $65.5 million. In case you've not seen, the Chinese observance is directed at the departed. Burning transfers material from this world to the world unseen. Typically this involves simulacra, burning paper money or credit cards or other goods, something that can be discussed as a form of religion or at least a sacrifice. So did Qi, an unsophisticated man, originally a carpenter, waste his labour out of ignorant superstition? Many of his Chinese contemporaries would have said yes and many more in our time. But paper money for the dead still sells in our Chinese supermarkets, even notes denominated in pounds for the Chinese deceased here. And Qi's act of reciprocity still makes sense to many who accept the premise of continuity between seen and unseen worlds. That the spirit world is populated chiefly by former denizens of our world, hierarchically stratified in power and influence like ours, is an axiom that can be traced back long before imperial times in China, even if Confucius famously cancelled prudence with regard to so opaque a realm. Though the basic approach was simply to keep on good terms with departed family, there were those who aspired to advance their status through a direct link with the presiding power at the apex of the unseen system. Yet I doubt that this course commended itself to the majority. Equally the notion of the Tao and in Buddhism, conceptions of the absolute as a greater something within which we live and move and have our being allowed perhaps all spirits to be cut down to size, but not in effect for the average man or woman in the patty field. And in Buddhism it was certainly held that the hierarchy of gods and the spirit world was, like all existence, not immutable, that gods could be replaced like office holders in a bureaucracy once their allotted span was up. The gods are rather small fry. The view is explicitly that seen and unseen worlds together constitute a realm subject to karma which is not of ultimate concern. Given China's imperial political tradition, asserting this above the battle stance and glossing over as far as possible the consequences for the spiritual standing of the emperor was certainly wise. For it was not just that the experience of empire bureaucratised the spirit world of the Chinese imagination, but conversely that unseen authority lent an odour of sanctity to the whole human exercise of government. But matters do not stop there. Just as relationships of reciprocity between teacher and student or filial duty from child to parent do not change from realm to realm, relations of subordination remain the same also. It was noticed a quarter of a century ago that medieval mandarins claiming the authority of the emperor did not hesitate to tell minor local spirits what to do. Anthropologists have found that the notion that higher officials can control lesser gods persisted into modern times too. But for the smooth operation of the whole system a degree of stability was required. Some level of ambiguity could be tolerated. Local spirits, like local militia leaders might be accommodated as promoting the public good or else suppressed by the central authorities like subversive bandits as expedient. Yet in times of complete turmoil it could be that the authority within the whole system was re-envisioned. A new rival empire was heralded that replaced the seen and unseen imperial hierarchy and took upon itself the role of arbiter of religious acceptability, usually displaying the power of the new order by cracking down hard, reasserting the monopoly of the centre over sanctioned violence. To me this explains both the great yellow turban uprising of the late 2nd century CE and the typing rebellion of the 19th. It's pointless to ask whether these were political or religious movements, concepts of authority in China did not observe the distinction given the continuity of relations across the seen unseen divide. And the authority of the emperor at the top of the visible hierarchy gave him the confidence to pronounce on matters that even pokes might hesitate to consider within their competence. I have always liked the case noted by Sir Alfred Lyle, a distinguished administrator of the British Raj who took to perusing the Peking Gazette to find out how his Chinese colleagues dealt with religious issues that had once been his responsibility in India. He found that a certain Tibetan incarnation had behaved so badly in Manchewis that he was forbidden in 1845 to reincarnate himself. Yet an investigation of 1876 determined that he had nevertheless done so. With perfect aplomb it was decided that in view of the good conduct he'd shown while in the reincarnation proceeding that which had provoked the first degree. This dignitary's obstinate reappearance should be condoned to the extent that he should be allowed to take up the religious life though not the trappings of his status. Such is the authority that the Chinese state has inherited and not only with regard to Buddhism. I notice that the chief theorist of the Protestant state controlled three self-movement of the 1950s found the notion of sin problematic in that it entailed the possibility that the Communist Party might be sinful, for example. Mercifully, the somewhat Orwellian interpretation of authority I have outlined does not encompass the totality of the Chinese political religious heritage any more than the views of Chinese history I have outlined form all that was thought about the past. The problem is that those who chose to propose a different view tended to veil their ideas in a language less than transparent. Something that can be quite subtly done in classical Chinese the language historians have to learn as well as Mandarin. Should I remain in this world long enough I would hope to have more to say on this though weighing up the nuances of the sources in a style that is generally reckoned to take seven years or so to learn is not a simple matter. On this third topic then, the nature of spiritual authority in the Chinese tradition, my learning continues. So let us conclude overall by pointing instead to one or two practical implications of what I've been talking about. I have in short proposed that in prison by our own past we are ill-prepared to cope with a world power too big to be viewed through the lenses we currently use. I have suggested specifically that both our notions of China and of religion do not work well when viewed in the full light of history. It's time to get serious. Liam Byrne regrets that only 2,245 students are studying A-level Chinese less than 1%. I suspect that this is a wildly optimistic figure by which to judge current trends. British education is marketed internationally so this A-level attracts native speakers of other Chinese languages from Southeast Asia who are happy to study Mandarin in English to say nothing of PRC citizens in our schools happy to notch up another A-star. Otherwise, given the nature of league tables any British head teacher will be a naive and a fool to enter too many students for a language markedly more difficult than rivals like Spanish. It's our universities that must for the foreseeable future carry the burden of teaching competing as they must in a market dominated by the world view of 17-year-olds. They know little about East Asia from their school work and are more familiar through manga and anime with Japanese culture than with anything Chinese. This will be an uphill slog and those desiring posts in areas like Chinese history and Japanese and Korean history too in which one cannot count on human cupidity to attract seekers after a possible lucrative career would be well advised to look to endowments to support teaching. But the other end of your age is no more divided along strict territorial lines than this one. The Great Wall of China has been no more effective in isolating China than Hadrian's Wall in isolating Scotland. To revert briefly to matters religious that have since the arrival of our first Scottish King in London read a Bible containing about 800,000 words of which a fair proportion derive from non-European languages. But in China, there are getting on for 40 million characters worth of material translated from Indian languages in the Chinese Buddhist canon. The comparative historical isolation of Europe even if we throw in translation from Arabic too seems undeniable. Yet no one gives endowments to support East Asian history especially if broadly conceived to cover long-term interaction with its larger environment because no one identifies with such a broad sweep of territory. One fears that it may fall as all too often to so as to redeem the Eurocentrism of the rest. I'm very sorry about that. What I've tried to do today is give you a notion as to why forking out the money might be a good idea. Whether there will be a fourth professor of East Asian history here is not for me to say. To any successor, I would just say this. It's hard work but a great learning experience. Thank you very much. I'm honoured to have been asked to present the vote of thanks on this occasion and to have this opportunity to speak in general about Tim Barr's contributions to our beloved institution and our equally beloved field of study. Allow me to start by doing something that strikes me as rather an appropriate representation of the context we work in here at SOAS. Namely by quoting the century, and this is entirely coincidental by the way, the century is all Chinese philosophical texts known as the Dao Du Jing in the English translation that features on a website called www.Marxist.org. A famous passage reads, approach it and there is no beginning. Follow it and there is no end. Chinese wisdom has long grasped the fact that beginnings and endings are always relative and therefore there is no contradiction in the fact that Tim Barratt's valedictory lecture tonight, his last public lecture for SOAS, has indeed been announced as being his inaugural. In fact I suspect Tim of having crafted the announcement in that way on purpose. Or even if he did not do so on purpose he might still have brought it about for as the Dao Du Jing also teaches us the master acts without doing anything. Things arise and he lets them come. When his work is done he forgets it. That is why it lasts forever. We of course will not forget the many contributions that Tim has made to Chinese studies both here at SOAS and in the UK. Tim has always been an eloquent spokesperson for the field of Chinese studies at a whole and East Asian studies by extension. Tim has never failed to remind us even today of the need to get serious with the study of China in this country. Tim is more qualified than most to make this kind of judgment. Having written the history of British psychology in his wonderful book, Singular Listlessness and having served on many bodies that looked at the field as a whole perhaps most significantly as chair of the 2001 RAE Asian Studies panel. If Tim says in his lecture that and I quote, we are ill-prepared to cope with a world power too big to be viewed through the lenses we currently use then I concur with him wholeheartedly. And I add, as he did as well casting all modesty aside for a moment that if there is one institution in the UK that is capable of presenting new lenses through which to view China, it certainly is so as. Since nowhere else in Europe do we find such a large and vibrant community of China scholars as the one we have here and which, I have to say this, has now joined forces under the eages of a brand new so as China Institute. An initiative which I know Tim has supported wholeheartedly. Personally I've always felt that Tim's work sets a model of the kind of qualities that characterise serious research and teaching in what is nowadays called language-based area studies. His research easily crosses the boundaries between established disciplines as most aptly epitomised by the fact that he is a professor of history working in an apartment for the study of religion. Moreover, he has been one of only a handful of colleagues outside the languages and cultures faculty who have always persisted in offering at least some teaching on the basis of original Chinese language materials. As a colleague he's always taken an interest in the work of China scholars across the departments and I remember well that when I joined SOAS in 1996 he was one of the very first people to come knocking on my door and find out what it was I was working on. In his writing, Tim has often been critical of the standards of British psychology when compared to the European mainland. But I would add that perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of British psychology has always been its hospitality towards scholars coming from the European mainland and Tim's generous and collegial attitude towards people such as myself certainly epitomises that very important quality. Tim told me that the main reason why he asked me to present the photo thanks tonight was because he knew I would keep it short. So I shall simply end here by stating that I'm sure I speak on behalf of all present when I thank Professor Tim Barrett for his wonderful inaugural valedictory and to wish him the very best in the next stage of his life and learning.