By MARGALIT FOX April 21, 2015<\/p>\n
T. H. Tsien, a scholar of Chinese books and printing who in 1941 risked his life to smuggle tens of thousands of rare volumes to safety amid the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, died on April 9 at his home in Chicago. He was 105.<\/p>\n
His death was announced by the University of Chicago, with which he had been associated since the late 1940s. At his death, he was an emeritus professor of East Asian languages and civilizations there and an emeritus curator of the university\u2019s East Asian library.<\/p>\n
One of the world\u2019s most renowned scholars of Chinese bibliography and paleography \u2014 the study of ancient writing \u2014 Professor Tsien (pronounced chee-AHN) was the author of scores of books and articles, many in English, about the august history of the written word in China. As he was fond of reminding people, movable type originated in China centuries before Gutenberg.<\/p>\n
Professor Tsien, who was born in China in the twilight of the reign of its last emperor, was a young librarian there during the Japanese occupation, which lasted from 1931 until the end of World War II. Working in secret, he was charged with keeping a trove of precious volumes, some dating to the first millennium B.C., from falling into the occupiers\u2019 hands.<\/p>\n
The Library of Congress in Washington agreed to take some 30,000 volumes, but the difficulty lay in getting them out of Shanghai. By 1941, the city\u2019s harbor and customs office were under the control of the Japanese, who would have seized the books and very likely destroyed them. Had Professor Tsien\u2019s work been uncovered, he would almost certainly have been executed.<\/p>\n
Determined to get the books out of China at all costs, Professor Tsien could not have done so, he later wrote, had it not been for a turn of fate.<\/p>\n
Tsuen-hsuin Tsien was born on Dec. 1, 1909, in the Jiangsu Province of eastern China. As a youth, he edited a student publication advocating the overthrow of the warlords who since the 1910s had been savagely partitioning the country. Soon afterward, he and his teacher were arrested by a local warlord\u2019s henchmen.<\/p>\n
Young Mr. Tsien was released; the teacher was executed. Mr. Tsien joined the Nationalist Army, which in 1928 helped defeat the warlords, unifying China.<\/p>\n
At the University of Nanking (now Nanjing), Mr. Tsien studied Chinese and Western history and library science, earning an undergraduate degree in 1932. He later went to work in the Nanjing branch of China\u2019s national library.<\/p>\n
In 1937, at grave risk, Mr. Tsien fled Nanjing with more than a dozen family members just before the Japanese massacre there. The massacre, known ever after as the Rape of Nanking, resulted in the killing of more than 300,000 civilians and the rape of more than 80,000 women. Settling in Shanghai, he joined the national library\u2019s branch there.<\/p>\n
In the wake of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, some 60,000 rare books, among China\u2019s foremost cultural treasures, had been moved from Beijing to Shanghai for safekeeping. After Japan seized Shanghai in 1937, the books \u2014 including those Mr. Tsien would smuggle out of China \u2014 were secreted in the city\u2019s French Concession and International Settlement.<\/p>\n
Long-term plans for the volumes were essential, but the question remained: How to get them past customs?<\/p>\n
Mr. Tsien agonized over the problem for the next few years. Then, in 1941, an old schoolmate of his wife\u2019s came for a visit. The schoolmate had a brother who happened to be a customs agent. Mr. Tsien recruited the agent to his cause.<\/p>\n
Covertly packing 30,000 of the books into 102 wooden crates, Mr. Tsien labeled them, on the agent\u2019s advice, as new books purchased by the Library of Congress. In the guise of a bookseller, he created false invoices to accompany the shipments.<\/p>\n
The crates left the Port of Shanghai a few at a time, moving through customs when Mr. Tsien\u2019s confederate was on duty. The last one left China on Dec. 5, 1941, two days before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n
At the Library of Congress, the books were microfilmed for posterity \u2014 an enterprise, entailing more than a thousand rolls of film, that has made them accessible to scholars worldwide.<\/p>\n
In 1947, Mr. Tsien was dispatched to the United States to retrieve the books. But the outbreak of civil war between China\u2019s Communists and its ruling Nationalists precluded his returning home. By MARGALIT FOX April 21, 2015 T. H. Tsi … Continue reading
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