CUHK Research: Changing the world

In 1992, Professor Ho’s team completed the development of Extant Han and Pre- Han Traditional Chinese Texts Database and subsequently edited the Ancient Chinese Texts Concordance Series , with information about where the words can be found and in which sentences. In 2000, the Institute uploaded the 8-million-word database, which is called CHANT (Chinese Ancient Texts Database 漢達文庫 ), onto the internet. “We also provide online programmes to enable users to retrieve information in more than 1,000 titles of traditional and excavated ancient Chinese texts,” says Professor Ho, also Director of D. C. Lau Research Centre for Chinese Ancient Texts at CUHK. CHANT has received funding of nearly HK$22 million from the Research Grants Council and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange since the 1990s, one of the biggest granted to humanities studies in local universities. CHANT records more than 100,000 annual users and counts 80 prestigious universities including Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, and Peking University among its subscribers. ICS researchers also developed the Lexicon Database ( 「中國古代詞彙」電子資料庫 ) by digitising words and phrases in ancient Chinese texts. “We have challenged some longstanding academic arguments by utilising the Lexicon Database,” Professor Ho says. Utilising the database to challenge longstanding arguments He said for instance, the conventional view in academic circles that the bamboo version of the Wenzi ( 《文子》 ), an ancient Chinese text, which was excavated from a tomb in Hebei Province in 1973, was written in the second half of the Warring States period (476—221 BCE). Utilising the Lexicon Database, Ho noted a phrase “ chao qing ” 朝請 on slip no. 2212 in the bamboo version of Wenzi , is a Han dynasty custom which was used in Han legal documents under which feudal princes were required to pay respect to the emperor. Based on this and other textual evidence, Ho concludes that the Wenzi dates to the Former Han dynasty, a view that gradually finds footing in Wenzi -scholarship. Hence, the text was probably written between the beginning of the Former Han dynasty and the closure of the tomb, in 55 BCE. “Therefore, Wenzi can’t be a book written during the Warring States period. My argument, which was presented in a paper in 1998, was cited by many academics around the world. It challenged some longstanding conclusions shared by academics,” he says. “Over recent years, our achievements have drawn widespread attention from overseas academics. Our research centre is expanding its scope of study to cover more ancient Chinese texts in the hope of making a bigger impact,” Professor Ho says. There aremany electronic databases of ancient Chinese texts in other countries, but their investment in time and effort pales in comparison to ours. 43