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Jonathan D. Spence enjoys a special place of eminence among historians of China. He is perhaps the leading Western scholar of China today. Born in England in 1936, he received his graduate education in Chinese history at Yale University, where he has also spent his professional academic career. At Yale he has served as chair of the Council of East Asian Studies, chair of the Department of History, and director of the Division of the Humanities. Currently, he is Sterling Professor of History.
Spence is one of the most respected writers of history in our time. Reviewers use such words as elegant and immaculate to describe his prose. He is the author of a remarkable body of work, including the following mentioned in the interview below: The Death of Woman Wang (Penguin, 1978), the tragic story of a seventeenth-century Chinese farm woman; The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (Penguin, 1985), a creative portrait of the brilliant sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary; Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-hsi (Vintage, 1988), a life of the Ch'ing emperor crafted from his own words; The Question of Hu (Vintage, 1989), the story of the unfortunate trip to France in the 1720s of John Hu, a Chinese research assistant, whose inexplicable behavior resulted in his confinement in an insane asylum; The Search for Modern China (Norton, 1990), a massive text of the last four centuries of Chinese history; God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (Norton, 1996), an account of the Taiping Rebellion and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of the 1850s and 1860s as portrayed through its leader, Hong Xiuquan, "God's Chinese Son"; and The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (Norton, 1998), a series of "sightings" that traces how the West has viewed China since the thirteenth century. Donald Yerxa and Karl Giberson interviewed Spence on November 19, 1998, in the Green Room of the Boston Public Library.
DONALD YERXA: You've spent most of your adult life in the United States, but you were born and educated in England. Would you tell us something about your life before you came to Yale in 1959?
I was born just before World War II, so I grew up in the emotional atmosphere of that war. My father was in combat most of the war, so I had a child's view of what that was all about through the family. I went to local schools in Berkshire in central England, but then very early, following the English system, I went off to boarding school just before I was eight. For the next ten years, I was in two different boarding schools, where I had a pretty intensive education. In both cases, it was a Protestant education—Anglican. To some extent, I grew up with the Bible as orchestrated by my schooling. It was massively a Western humanist education. When that was over, I spent two years in the army, not as a volunteer, but in the national service. And when that was over, I went to Cambridge, where I again studied very much Western history. And it was in 1959, when I graduated from Cambridge, that I got this offer of a two-year fellowship to Yale [the Clare-Mellon Fellowship], about which I really had no anticipation at all.
YERXA: So you hadn't been planning on doing graduate study in the United States?
It was really a startling development. I had never been to the States, and I knew almost nothing about the country, except both of my parents subscribed to the New Yorker. So I had a sort of dazed vision of the brilliance of American fiction and poetry through the New Yorker. The writers I knew about—whose books my father had in his library—were Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, and James Thurber. These to me were the American mythic writers of extraordinary brilliance. And so it was with that rather inadequate training that I plunged into American education—an M.A. program. And it was an open program, just to accumulate a number of courses and then go back to England. I had been offered this fellowship, so I was looking around at Yale for something that might be really unusual and interesting to study for the master's. I have to confess that I thought I ought to do more physics, so I thought of trying to do some aspect of physics that I really knew nothing about.
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