Born in Tianjin, China in 1917, Ping-ti Ho's native place was Jinhua, Zhejiang where his ancestor Ho Ji (1188-1269) founded the "Beishan (Northern Mountain) School," a sub-school of Neo-Confucianism in the Song dynasty. He was graduated from Qinghua University in 1938 and won a Boxer fund scholarship through national competition held in 1943. From 1946 to 48, he studied at Columbia University where he received his Ph.D. in British and Western European history in 1951. He began his teaching career at the University of British Columbia in 1948. In 1963, he moved to the University of Chicago where he served as the James Westfall Thompson Professor of History from 1965 until his retirement in 1987. Subsequently, he has been made a Visiting Distinguished Professor of History and Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Among his awards and honors are elected life membership in Academia Sinica (1966) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1979). He also became Honorary Member, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1997) and received honorary LL.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1975), and L.H.D. from Lawrence University (1978) and Denison University (1988.) In 1975-76, he was the first Asian-born scholar ever to have been elected as President of the Association for Asian Studies.
|
|
|
|
Professor Ho's first two major books, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 (1959) and The Ladder of Success in Imperial China, Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368-1911 (1962) were almost immediately hailed as the standard works in the field of economic and social history of early modern China after their publication. The former was the outcome of years of study of some 4000 available editions of Chinese local histories and a vast body of other primary sources, which enabled him to redefine such key fiscal terms as the ding (adult male) and the mou (Chinese acre)", thus prompting a revision of all previous attempts of reconstruction of China's historical population and land problems. The latter was based, among various kinds of primary sources, on the ancestral data of some 35,000 successful candidates of the civil service examinations of Ming and Qing times. It sheds new lights on the social composition of the ruling class and various social and institutional factors that were related to elite social mobility. Professor Denis Twitchett of Princeton University praises, in a review, these two books because they "provide the English reader with the best outline of the social and economic history of Ming and Ching China available in any language,...the author combines first-rate Chinese scholarship with a real understanding of modern Western historiography..." (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,1965.) Both works have been translated into Italian, Japanese, and Chinese languages.
In the field of early Chinese history, Professor Ho's pioneering work, The Cradle of the East: An Inquiry into the Indigenous Origins of Techniques and Ideas of Neolithic and Early Historic China, 5000-1000B.C.(1975) covers an extraordinary range of issues. In his 30-page review article,"Ping-ti Ho and the Origins of Chinese Civilization," Professor David Keightley of the University of California, Berkeley concludes: "Whether the series of indigenous 'firsts' the author discerns in the evidence will stand the test of time or be superseded by new archaeological finds, no judgment is yet possible."(Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 1977.) Cumulative archaeological finds of recent decades have of course superseded some of his data, but they seem to have strengthened rather than invalidated his overall theme.
Most of Dr. Ho's Chinese publications deal with traditional land returns, the "huiguan"(Landsmann organizations), and the loess and the origins of Chinese agriculture. In recent years, his research interests have been focused on the origins, characteristics, and abiding influence of what he calls the man-centered Sinitic civilization. His theory of the military treatise "Sunzi" as being China's earliest individually written work extent, and the new dating of Laozi, the man and the book, based on reconfiguring the intellectual apprenticeship of Grand Historians Sima Tan and Sima Qian of the Former Han may have influence on some major revisions in ancient Chinese intellectual history.
Dr. Ho is one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals in the recent half-century. Professor Keightley has remarked that he is " One of the those rare scholars who has taken all Chinese history for his province"(1977). He is indeed an all-round historian with a global perspective. (William Sheh Wong, Asian Studies Librarian, University of California, Irvine).