A Study On Karl Friedrich August G�'tzlaff As A Missionary Sinologist

Karl Friedrich August Giitzlaff (1803-1851), is the first German missionary who came to China since the early 19th century. He, undertaking different activities in China at that time, is immensely remarkable for his complex status. Except being enthusiastic in missionary work, he actively carried out Chinese study with the tool of Chinese language. He had composed a great deal of influential writing on China and continually offered related information to the western world, thus giving impetus to the rebuilding of China’s image in the western horizon. In this aspect, he could be called "a missionary sinologist". Based on the text material of Gutzlaff, this dissertation attempts to analyze his main concern and peculiar understanding about Chinese language, Chinese literature and Chinese people or so, and moreover, to extract his multifaceted view of China. The paper hopes to offer a clearer view of the China in history from the culture of "the other" in order to learn from the history. The main part of this paper includes four chapters. The first chapter, on one side, is to verify and describe his life story, expounding different activities he undertook with varied identities; on the other, it is to screen and collate his names and pen names. The second chapter discusses his study on the Chinese spoken and written language, that is, to use methods of comparison and structure analysis or so in order to make a deep analysis of Chinese language from the macro and micro perspectives respectively; besides, to point out the progressiveness and limitation of his language view. The third chapter looks into his study on Chinese literature, mainly on Chinese traditional novels, and to analyze the his perspective of Chinese literature and study motivation based on the translation and review text of the Chinese classical novel masterpiece like "Honglou Meng". The fourth chapter generalizes and analyzes his observation and understanding of Chinese people and social customs, thus investigating the objectivity and limitation of his research.