From June 26 to July 4, the inaugural World Young Sinologists Summer Institute was held at Yenching Academy, Peking University. The event was jointly organized by Peking University’s One Thousand Books in One Century Academic Classics Translation Project and Yenching Academy, with the aim of cultivating a new generation of high-caliber sinologists with cross-cultural perspectives.
The opening ceremony was held at the PKU Second Gymnasium on the afternoon of June 29, and PKU Vice President Chu Xiaobo delivered a welcome address.
Over 30 young sinologists from more than 10 countries joined the one-week summer institute, listening to lectures on diverse topics delivered by 10 distinguished scholars from China and abroad (list attached). On the World Youth Sinology Forum at the summer institute, the young sinologists fully demonstrated their academic interests and expertise. They also paid visits to the Museum of Peking University History and the Palace Museum, immersing themselves in Chinese history and culture.
The closing ceremony was held at the PKU Second Gymnasium on the evening of July 3. At the event, the young sinologists shared their takeaways. Jiang Guohua, vice chair of the PKU Council and director of “One Thousand Books in One Century” project delivered the closing remarks and presented certificates of completion to all participants.
As the co-organizing institution, Yenching Academy engaged in the summer institute across all stages. YCA Dean Dong Qiang joined the summer institute as a mentor and attended the opening and closing ceremonies. Among the participating young sinologists there were also YCA Scholars and alumni, including Jonah Dunch from the 2025 Cohort, Altan Erdem Aras from the 2023 Cohort, Cristian de Silveira from the 2023 Cohort, and Joseph Walsh Millette from the 2019 Cohort. Jonah Dunch, Cristian de Silveira, and Joseph Walsh Millette submitted papers and gave presentations at the World Youth Sinology Forum. The Academy’s administrative team was instrumental in executing the program, arranging venues, equipment, accommodation, catering, and organizing sub-events.
On the afternoon of June 30, Dean Dong Qiang delivered a lecture titled “My Views on the Translation and Dissemination of Tang Poetry”.
Prof. Dong started his lecture with the book Tang Shi Zhi Lu, which he co-authored with Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. Le Clézio expressed appreciation for Tang poetry from the perspective of a non-Chinese writer and selected poems by Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Bai Juyi, and Li Shangyin, on themes of natural landscape, women, friendship, wine, and aesthetics. The book’s French title “Le flot de la poésie continuera de couler” endows Tang poetry with the image of a running river, and its Chinese title “Tang Shi Zhi Lu” literally means the road of Tang poetry—Tang poetry is an inexhaustible living wellspring of Chinese and world’s literature and culture.
Dean Dong reviewed the translation trajectory of Tang poetry in the West over the past three centuries. He mapped out the dissemination systems in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and delineated the boundary between academic translation and popular dissemination. The professor also explored diverse possibilities of cross-cultural transformation of classical poetry. Dong first focused on Marquis d’Hervey de Saint Denys (1822‒1892), a pioneering French sinologist who had never been to China. Nevertheless, d’Hervey leveraged his mastery of Chinese to translate Tang poems and bridge the Chinese and Western literary traditions, emphasizing that poetry is an enduring literary tradition of Chinese culture. Thanks to the translation of d’Hervey, the French academic circles turned the eye from The Book of Songs to Tang poetry, and the literary and humanistic values of Tang poetry were widely acknowledged. Interestingly, Judith Gautier (1845‒1917), a contemporary of d’Hervey in French sinology was known for adapting the Chinese originals through a Western imagination. Yugeng (1843‒1905) the Qing ambassador to France, authored an introduction to Gautier’s signature adaptation work, Le livre de jade, serving as an official endorsement from China for the book. Gautier’s work then gained a wider readership in the West and produced profound impacts on European arts. For instance, Gustav Mahler (1860‒1911) used Tang poems—the German version translated from Gautier’s French adaptation—in his symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, bringing Tang poetry to a wide Western audience, though sacrificing textual fidelity.
Prof Dong observed that coexistence of “scholarly sinology” and “imagined sinology” in the 20th century has in fact prepared the ground for dissemination of Tang poetry in the West. Chinese-French artist François Cheng (1929‒) presented the empty-space art of the Chinese language to the Western audience in a novel three-tier format consisting of Chinese, textual notes, and translation. The distinctive format stood in dialogue with emerging structuralism and later deconstructionism, allowing diverse ways to interpret Chinese poetry. Tang poetry gained popularity across the Western literary landscape. In the United States, poets and sinologists worked side by side on the translation of Tang poems. In Europe, Ezra Pound (1885‒1972) was fascinated by the Chinese characters through the window left open by the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa (1853‒1908), redirecting the Western aesthetics of poetry. The British diplomat W.J.B. Fletcher (1879‒1933) translated hundreds of Tang poems into English and compared them with literary masterpieces of English literature and with classics from other cultural traditions, bringing Tang poems to a general readership and establishing them as part of the world literary heritage.
Dong believed that diverse translations constitute a mosaic of world literature. Both scholarly renditions and imagined adaptations are blossoms of Tang poetry, faithful to the original texts and full of poetic genius. He hoped that all the young sinologists at the summer institute could draw on the spirit and bring Chinese culture to a wider audience, as a spiritual heritage for the entire humanity.
At the forum session on July 3, Cristian de Silveira presented his latest research on how artificial intelligence reshapes Buddhist visual culture.
Silveira noted that AI-generated Buddhist images, digital murals, and Buddhist-themed cultural and creative images are the dominant Buddhist visual content circulating online, seen across short-video platforms, social media, and online religious communities both in China and abroad. However, a large proportion of AI-generated Buddhist images that do not conform to Buddhist doctrines and iconographic rituals have been widely spread online and accepted by the general public, posing cultural risks. The lack of knowledge of Buddhist iconographic conventions and religious rituals among the general public results in a diminishing reverence for traditional culture. As visually stunning AI-generated Buddhist images overshadow religious essence, the audience grow inclined to judging religious imagery based on visual appeal instead of the sacredness of said imagery.
He argued that millennia-old Buddhist iconographic norms and aesthetic of sacred art are reshaped in the digital era. Contemporary visual art is characterized with dematerialization. Algorithmically-generated images are eroding the cultural, ritual, and sacred values of traditional hand-made Buddhist imagery. Artificial intelligence has redefined the boundary between authenticity and the spiritual significance of religious art, and has reshaped the landscape of Buddhist visual culture. It is a humanistic imperative to investigate how digital culture reshapes religious authority in the contemporary world.
On the afternoon of July 3, Jonah Dunch gave a presentation titled “Honor and Disgrace: Debate between Xunzi and Songzi”, analyzing the fundamental divide between Xunzi and Songzi on honor and disgrace.
Dunch first introduced Song Xing’s core argument on “regarding insult as no disgrace”. In Song Xing’s philosophical framework, worldly conflicts were generated from people’s obsession with honor and disgrace. Accordingly, he offered a remedy to eliminate conflicts by dissolving the perception of honor and disgrace. Dunch reconstructed Xunzi’s refutation: Xunzi argued that conflicts came from instinctive human emotions of like and dislike, not from the perception of honor and disgrace. Xunzi refuted that Song Xing’s theory reversed the proper priority between human nature and value cognition. Dunch noted that the debate between Xunzi and Song Xing was not merely a scholarly discussion. Song Xing’s fundamental logical flaw lay in “the misuse of names that disrupts proper naming” and confused concepts of moral honor/disgrace and disgrace derived from external circumstances. Moral honor and moral disgrace hinge on one’s morality, in no relation to humiliation from external circumstances. The Confucian social order is grounded morality. Song Xing’s theory blurred the boundary between essence and naming of honor and disgrace, undermining the social ethical judgment. Xunzi and Song Xing held fundamentally different views on orderly rule. Song Xing advocated stopping conflicts by eliminating perception of honor and disgrace, whereas Xunzi insisted on channeling human desires and regulating social conflicts by ritual and moral cultivation. By citing Xunzi’s philosophy, Dunch cautioned that an uncritical acceptance of Song Xing’s theory, which distorted Confucian morality and contradicted human nature and orderly rule, would cause the collapse of social value system.
By comparing English translations of Xunzi’s work, Dunch’s research demonstrated moral psychology and name-reality logic in Xunzi’s refutation of Song Xing and showed that Confucian thought on honor and disgrace set up a rigorous theoretical framework for individual cultivation and social governance. Dunch’s research offered a new perspective for the cross-textual study of pre-Qin thoughts.
Joseph Walsh Millette presented a paper titled “Rarely-seen Inscription and Ordinary Image: Text-image Corroboration in a Recovered Buddhist Votive Stele of Northern Wei”. The presentation was centered on the research outcomes of frontier art history concerning the inscription-imagery relationship in stone carvings of the Northern Dynasties.
Buddhist votive stelae of Northern Wei are important physical remains for the study of religious culture, artistic aesthetics, and ethnic integration in the Northern Dynasties. Scholarship to date has largely focused on either iconographic analysis or textual study of inscription, and the disjunction between texts and images precludes the reconstruction of a complete historical scene. Millette offered a novel perspective for the related research, based upon the case study of a recovered Buddhist votive stele of Northern Wei. Lay Buddhist images of the Northern Dynasties are usually patterned and standardized, thus highly hegemonized; by contrast, inscriptions on stelae offer diverse firsthand information on local society. Combined, texts and images facilitate the reconstruction of historical landscape. Millette examined the votive stele’s details, revealing what the inscription could offer to fill the lacuna left by the formulaic imagery. The inscription provides critical data, including the donor’s identity, his/her devotional aspirations, the date and place. With the inscription, researchers could distinguish one stele from another, despite the hegemonized images. As a young sinologist, Millette examined ancient Chinese stone carvings from perspectives of archaeology, art history, paleography, and history.
Peking University’s One Thousand Books in One Century Academic Classics Translation Project is grounded in the research resources of PKU and more than ten top-tier universities and colleges around the world. The Project aims to translate 1,000 Chinese works in humanities and social sciences published since the 1920s, and is committed to disseminating Chinese intellectual outcomes and traditions, promoting mutual learning among cultures, and providing support for young sinologists. The summer institute was a successful experiment under the Project, creating a platform for young international sinologists and Chinese scholars. Young scholars from China and around the world were invited to join the translation work under the Project and be a part of the dissemination of Chinese civilization at large.
Invited lecturers for the summer institute:
Chen Pingyuan, Professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University
Deng Xiaonan, Boya Chair Professor Emerita, Peking University
Dong Qiang, Dean of Yenching Academy and Boya Distinguished Professor of French at the School of Foreign Languages, Peking University
Michael Friedrich, Professor at the Asia-Africa Institute, University of Hamburg, Germany
Imre Galambos, Professor at University of Cambridge/Zhejiang University
Imre Hamar, Professor of Chinese at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
Barend ter Haar, Professor at University of Hamburg, Germany and Visiting Chair Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Peking University
Xia Xiaohong, Professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Peking University
Yang Lihua, Dean of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Peking University
Shu Chunyan, Publishing Director at De Gruyter Brill in charge of Area Studies
