Sinologist's dictionary recounts Chinese history from 'a to 'z'

Professor of Chinese politics in Australia hopes his scholarly work will remedy misconceptions about both China's past and present

As a young student at Cambridge University's Gonville and Caius College, Kerry Brown was fascinated by an elderly man who would shuffle into the college hall on most nights to eat dinner.

That man was Joseph Needham, regarded as one of the greatest Sinologists of the 20th century.

"I would sit fascinated as this great man took his place ... usually alone," Brown recalls over lunch at the University of Sydney's Darlington Centre. "It was an amazing feeling just to be in the same room as him."

Following Needham's death in 1995, The Independent newspaper in the United Kingdom wrote: "The results of Needham's 50 years of intensive Chinese studies are enshrined in what is perhaps the greatest work of scholarship achieved by one individual since Aristotle.

Brown has followed in Needham's footsteps as a writer and editor and is the author of 11 books on China over 10 years, if you include his PhD on the Inner Mongolia autonomous region. The former diplomat and fluent Mandarin speaker is today a professor of Chinese politics and executive director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Brown's passion for China did not start at Cambridge, despite the presence of Needham.

"No, I graduated with an MA in English literature," he says with a laugh. "China came later."

But if he were to pick a point in time when he was first exposed to China, he says it was the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Although Brown was not even 10 years old when Mao died, the event made a major impact on him.

"I can still remember watching the coverage on television and being fascinated by the size of the country and the massive outpouring of grief," he says.

Brown was born in 1967 near Canterbury in the south of England.

"No one in my family had any involvement in China," he says. "My mother was a housewife and my father a company representative." At school, Brown describes himself as having been no more than a "reasonable" student, although there were certain topics where he was keen to knuckle down.

"I remember back in primary school I set myself the task of memorizing all the British kings and queens from the late Saxon period to the present day; a period covering about 1,200 years," he says.

Looking back, Brown says it was probably the highlight of his whole school career - being able to stand up in front of the class and rattle off each monarch and the dates they were in power.

And after all these years can he still remember them? "Alas, I still do," he says.

In many ways this exercise helped Brown in one of his greatest achievements, editing the Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography. This mammoth three-volume set is the first publication of its kind since 1898.

The project began in 2008 and involved over 100 leading scholars of Chinese history from around the world to tell the stories of the major figures in the nation's long history.

Brown says that the dictionary was born from a "simple impulse".

"As someone who had studied mostly contemporary China, and in particular China from Mao onward, I have only glanced at the previous eras and dynasties of the country's history ... one that goes back 5,000 years," he says.

Brown explains that the main challenge in the compendium was to find some manageable way to conceptualize this history while not becoming overwhelmed.

"It is intended to offer a simple route for those who want to learn the context of that history and want to do so in a way that is manageable, does not get lost too quickly in abstraction and detail, and shows at least the main contours of the last millennia," he says.

"It is, in fact, written for people like me, of whom there are an increasing number, who did not come to the engagement and study of imperial China originally as specialists and have had to acquire a working knowledge of this history quickly."

He says there is a common "misunderstanding" in the West of China's aspirations.

"That is down to the fact that we are woefully ignorant of China's history," he says, adding that he hopes that the dictionary will help to bridge some of these misunderstandings.