SCHOLARSHIP, LITERATURE, AND THE ARTS 305
centuries when, particularly under the Ming, the period of foreign domina-
tion in north China was regarded as a barbarian interruption between Sung
and their own time. It was only under another foreign dynasty, that of the
Manchus, that Chin authors received more attention and their works were
reprinted or collected from various sources. One indicator of the position of
the Chin period in Chinese intellectual and literary history is the inclusion of
Chin works in later anthologies and florilegia. Here we find a notable ab-
sence; it does not seem that any of the Chin Confucians was accorded a place
in the Great Tradition of Confucian scholarship. It is hard to decide whether
this is due to the bias of later generations or to a real difference in quality.
In sheer bulk the output of Chin intellectuals was considerable, exegetical
scholarship as well as poetry and prose.'
6
Unfortunately, the great majority of
literary works produced under the Chin are known to us only by their titles;
the works themselves have been lost. This again points to a conscious neglect
in regard to posterity, and it remains a matter for speculation whether or not
this was justified. Tradition, after all, also implies selection, and the select-
ing process in Chinese tradition bypassed the Chin. The towering figure of
Chu Hsi (1130—1200) eclipsed whatever the more conventional exegetes in
north China had to contribute.
Intellectual conservatism, content with rehashing T'ang and Northern
Sung thought, seems to have been a characteristic of Chinese philosophy
under the Chin. Although the states of Sung and Chin were not hermetically
sealed off from each other, the free flow of communication and scholarly
contacts was drastically reduced, and certainly not many Southern Sung
books became known among Chin intellectuals. The basic works by Chu Hsi
were, in fact, introduced to the north only after the fall of Chin in 1235,
when a Sung scholar, Chao Fu, had been taken prisoner by the Mongols.
57
The provincialization of the northern scholars was, therefore, partly the
result of this lack of communication. But this was not the only factor that
might explain the relative unproductivity of the north.
Apart from the destructive effects of prolonged warfare during the first
decades of the Chin state, the brain drain that followed the transfer of the
Sung capital from K'ai-feng to Hang-chou must be taken into account. K'ai-
feng, for two centuries an imperial capital, was reduced to the status of a
provincial town, and for many years Sung visitors who passed through K'ai-
56 The new two-volume edition of the Chih shih published by the Kuo-feng yen-chiu yiian (College of
National Defense) in Taiwan in 1970 contains in vol. 2 a bibliography of works written under the
Chin. This bibliography, compiled by Yang Chia-lo, lists no fewer than 1,351 titles (including
inscriptions on stone).
57 On the slight acquaintance of Chin scholars with Southern Sung Neo-Confucianism, see Wing-tsit
Chan, "Chu Hsi and Yiian Neo-Confucianism," in Yiian thought:
Chinese thought
and
religion
under the
Mongols, ed. Hok-lam Ch'an and Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York, 1982), pp. 199—200.
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