Dear Member of the Tang Studies Community,
Many of you have no doubt heard the sad news that Professor Edwin Pulleyblank passed away on April 13, 2013. It is important that we mark the passage of a truly great scholar of middle period China, one who made important contributions to the study of the language, culture, and history of Tang China.
His research opened fields and remains required reading decades after publication. Professor Pulleyblank’s monograph The Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan (Oxford, 1955) has informed generations of scholars on the causes of that transformative event. Similarly, his seminal article on mid-Tang intellectual history (“Neo-Confucianism and Neo-Legalism in T’ang Intellectual Life, 755-805” in Arthur Wright, ed., The Confucian Persuasion ) gave an interpretive perspective on the period that set the stage for vigorous scholarly debate. Of course, scholars of medieval ethnography and international relations owe a debt to his work on non-Han communities both within and beyond the borders of the empire. Finally, we would draw attention to Professor Pulleyblank’s methodological contributions. His studies of Chinese historiography and his many decades of scholarship in Chinese historical linguistics have enriched the work of all subsequent researchers.
As members of the T’ang Studies Society, we all also owe him an institutional debt. Professor Pulleyblank was a life member of the Society and served on its Board of Directors for fifteen years. Indeed, his name appears on the Society’s Articles of Incorporation as a founding member of our Board of Directors.
It is with sadness, then, that we express our gratitude to him and offer our condolences to his family for their loss.
Respectfully,
Anna M. Shields, President
Anthony DeBlasi, Secretary-Treasurer
Christopher M. B. Nugent, Editor
