The Study On Tong Shu Ye's Historical Research

Tong Shu-ye was a self-taught historian. There were distinctive characteristics in his growth path and historical research. He was born in the declining bureaucrat family and isolated in the traditional family education in his early years. Until youth, he began to contact the new things and new idea. With the excellent memory and comprehension , he soon embarked on the road of academic research and made lots of achievements in the research of prehistory, Spring and Autumn Period history, ancient Chinese economic history and ancient orient society history. Tong had a sensitive and oversuspicious disposition, however, his heart was actually pure. The complex personality had deep impact on his academic research, interpersonal and personal lives.Viewing his tortuous life, this paper attempted to discuss Tong's historical achievements and historical thoughts through the interpretation of his individual chronicle, letters, academic works and other related historical materials. He had academic achievement in many fields, but this paper only analyzed his history research in three aspects: first, his role in doubting and distinguishing the prehistory ; secondly, his contribution to the study of the Spring and Autumn Period history; thirdly, his consideration and utilization of historical materialism .On the one hand, Tong accepted Gu Jiegang's doubtful view about prehistory and returned prehistory from reliable historical account to original legends. On the other hand, he could make use of the ancient literature to construct the Pre-qin history. Therefore, he not only improved Gu Jiegang's theory that Chinese ancient history was formed by theory of "Cenglei' as theory of "separation and evolution", but also he finished his work, The Spring and Autumn Period History, which embodied his view of economic interpretation of history and "Xizhou Clanlaw Feudalism". Some interpretations on the historical phenomenon of this period were unique. Tong was keen to the new thoughts and the new things, never repelling them. Although he was famous in doubting and distinguishing the prehistory, and be good at the close textual research, he still absorbed the research achievements of "Conception of History" and applied it to the textual research.The founding of New China and the improvement of individual living conditions were important factors for Tong to believe in the Marxism-Leninism classics. He unscrambled revolutionary teacher's words devotionally, applied them in his own academic research and making some achievements and dogmatism mistakes as well. It was related with the time limitation .He proposed that we should regard the Marxism theory with the developing view and revised the "Soviet version" Marxism, which was extremely commendable in that time when dogmatism filled the air.With frequent political activity, Tong Shu-ye's body and mind were influenced deeply. He had to undertake the arduous teaching duty and the history research task, when suffering the political pressure .The serious neurosis and tuberculosis dually tortured him. However, all of them had not extinguished his academic enthusiasm. At the last moment of his life, he answered a curtain call in his life stage as the masterpiece, The Studies of ChunQiu ZuoZhuan. It was the most important book in his works, in which Tong Shu-ye consciously applied the historical materialism to the ancient history textual research . Furthermore, it had many penetrating opinions.Due to space limitations, this article could not completely summarize Tong's all historical achievements and history thoughts, only selecting several representative aspects. However, we can still learn the survival pressure which Chinese scholars had to face and the lofty spirit of overcoming all difficulties and devoting to the academic research in the earlier period of 20th century from Tong's tough life and his representative academic achievements.