The Beginnings of Chinese Civilization

After almost 60 years, first as the father and later as dean of Chinese archaeology, Li Chi has left indelible contributions to the science of humankind and of history, and his thinking still dominates his discipline in China. Born in Hupei, he grew up at home and in Peking at a time when the old country, forced by encounters with the West, was taking its initial steps on the long road to modernisation. Li Chi studied in the USA and gained a Phd from Harvard University in 1923. In 1949 he founded the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Taiwan University in Taipei, the first university programme in China to train professional archaeologists. In the early 1960s he was instrumental in the organisation, under Academia Sinica, of a committee on the ancient history of China to launch the preparation of a multi-authored, interdisciplinary volume on ancient Chinese history, the first draft of such an effort in Chinese historiography. By the time of his death the first drafts of this volume were beginning to appear.