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Citation: Asian Review of World Histories 12, 2 (2024) ; 10.1163/22879811-bja10077

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We all know what makes the world go round – money. Indeed, money lies at the core of the research and teaching of the Swiss-German sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel, to whom this special issue is dedicated on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

For many people celebrating their seventieth birthday, talk of money probably calls to mind the idea of small change carried in the pocket. In today’s China, that habit belongs to history. China leads the world in cashless payment methods, just as it led the world in the use of paper money during the early modern period – the period when the groundwork was laid for the still unfolding process we call globalization. This very period has proved to be Hans Ulrich Vogel’s primary interest, but to say so obscures somewhat the broad sweep of his research across the centuries, from archaeological sites of ancient China and down to the modern world, and from texts such as the Lunyu 論語, Mengzi 孟子, and Zhuangzi 莊子 to the Yantie lun 鹽鐵論,¹ from the Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 to the Rulin waishi 儒林外史 and the Lao qida 老乞大.² Here the image of Günter Netzer playing “from the depth of space” (“aus der Tiefe des Raumes”) leaps to mind immediately.

In the same vein, our opening remark about money as Vogel’s main research field should be modified to the extent that money, the idea of it, must be understood in its largest sense to view it as the leitmotiv that runs through Hans Ulrich Vogel’s research interests and activities.

There are several aspects to be considered here. One is the material aspect. It is telling that the DFG Research Group, initiated and conducted by Vogel between 2005 and 2014, does not speak of money in the singular, but prefers the unusual plural form in its title – “Monies, Markets, and Finance in China and East Asia, 1600–1900.” First, this calls to mind the bimetallic currency system used in China from the early fifteenth century onward: silver, which circulated in ingots, and coins of copper (to be more precise, bronze), or brass (a changing copper-lead-zinc-tin alloy). But this is not all. Here comes into focus a special field of knowledge, one in which Hans Ulrich Vogel is undoubtedly the leading expert worldwide: the use of cowries and salt monies as currencies in Southwest China.

This unique expertise comes to full fruition in Vogel’s opus magnum, his fascinating study on Marco Polo’s Le devisament dou monde. In fact, our key reason for believing that Marco Polo actually was in China comes from Vogel’s meticulous research, which established that, of all non-Chinese authors, Marco Polo is the only one to provide evidence of cowry and salt currencies circulating in Yunnan and Tibet under the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368).³ Vogel corroborated this iron-clad argument with detailed inquiries into a host of passages in Le devisament, elucidating the book’s superb account of Yuan paper currency, unrivaled among other medieval authors whether European, Persian, or Arabic, and showing that all the book’s information on monies, salts, and revenues accords neatly with the findings of modern historical research delving into Chinese source materials.

Throughout the realm of sinology, Hans Ulrich Vogel is known to be the expert on salt in China. The foundation of this reputation was laid with his habilitation thesis, submitted in 1989 and published in 1990.⁴ There followed research articles exploring various facets of salt production, among them the “fire wells” (huojing 火井),⁵ the well-known salt lake of Xiezhou 解州 (Shanxi Province),⁶ the deep-drilling technique employed in the Sichuan salt wells, and the types of fuel used in the salt works of southwest China.⁷ This string of greatly illuminating case studies was enriched by a number of translations of Chinese research articles and his arduous revision of the monographic work Aobo tu 熬波圖 (The boiling of [ocean] waves, with illustrations) by Chen Chun 陳椿 (preface dated 1334) and translated by Yoshida Tora 吉田寅.⁸

Salt monies and salt production lead us to yet another area of Vogel’s vast field of research: mining. As an outcome of a fellowship from the Needham Research Institute in 1986, Vogel was assigned to author the volume on mining in Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China. This volume, monumental in itself, would be a fitting capstone to Needham’s entire endeavor, and we fervently look forward to seeing it.

For Vogel, the history of monies, economies, and societies was always inseparably related to the history of science and technology. He thus showed an intense interest in Georgius Agricola’s “classic” on mining, De re metallica (1556), and its reception in China. Inquiry into this original subject remained obstructed because the Chinese translation, Kunyu gezhi 坤輿格致 (Investigations of the earth’s interior), carried out from 1638 to 1640 by Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666) and his Chinese collaborators, was lost for more than 350 years. The story of its sensational rediscovery echoes the plot of a late imperial China story, which tells of an audacious entrepreneur who spends his entire fortune on a fruitless search for a new ore deposit and then, broke and about to give up, finds a huge vein on his last day of searching. We can imagine Hans Ulrich Vogel’s excitement when he read a newspaper notice of 26 April 2015 reporting that a copy of the Kunyu gezhi had been discovered in the Nanjing Library. This was the starting point of “Translating Western Science, Technology and Medicine to Late Ming China,” the ongoing research project for which Vogel obtained a substantial DFG grant (2018 to 2025) and to which he presently devotes his scholarly efforts. Along with the Kunyu gezhi, the project also focuses on the Taixi shuifa 泰西水法 (Hydromethods of the Great West; 1612); in a wider sense, it is also connected to a second project underway, this one a translation of Wu Qijun’s 吳其濬 Diannan kuangchang tulüe 滇南礦廠圖略 (Illustrated survey of mining sites and smelting works in Yunnan), the earliest extant monographic survey of mining in China (ca. 1845).

But what do the reception and influence of Western knowledge through Jesuit translations have to do with the overall topic of “money”? A candid answer: In the age of globalization, “knowledge” is money, the very stuff that makes the world go round. And just as there are various types of money, there are different types of knowledge: scientific knowledge, technological knowledge, propositional knowledge, and “useful (and reliable) knowledge,” this last being an area to which Vogel has paid and continues to pay great attention.

So far, we have only considered the material side of money. But there is yet another side to it, may it here be called the symbolic side. As is well-known, from antiquity onward, Chinese coins used to be round with a rectangular hole in the middle – round Heaven and square Earth. Heaven and Earth denote the arena of all human activities, in the past and the present, for the individual and the community. In Chinese, these two pairs of opposed notions – past and present, individual and community – will in some way evoke the notion of “history and society,” which essentially is the name of the chair at the University of Tübingen that Hans Ulrich Vogel held for almost thirty years – Chinese History and Society. His eye-opening study into the “Unrest and Strikes at the Metropolitan Mints in 1741 and 1816”⁹ represents the epitome of what the holder of this chair was concerned with.

There are research activities by Vogel that, according to Chinese traditional categorization, clearly fall under the category of heaven, and others that fall under the category of earth. His studies on metrosophy and metrology are a case in point for the first category, while under the second we find his investigation of the Taiping land policy (1981) and, even more so, the pioneering conference volume on concepts of nature from a cross-cultural perspective, which he jointly edited with the sociologist Günter Dux (Brill, 2010).

Finally, there is a niche that combines both categories, heaven and earth, the round that must go into the square (“das Runde muss ins Eckige”) – football, or better its Chinese predecessor kickball (cuju 蹴鞠). Kickball, deep-drilling technology, and above all Marco Polo’s travels in China – these are Vogel’s favorite topics for lectures and with them he has sparked enthusiasm in the wider public, thereby fulfilling the “Third Mission” of universities in a formidable manner.

Vogel’s interest in football sets him apart from Winston Churchill, to whom the famous dictum “No sports” is attributed. But when being asked what it takes to be become a good sinologist, to complete a study of Sinology, and to keep abreast of the abundant research undertaken by sinologists in the West and in China, Japan, and around the world, he might borrow Churchill’s slogan: “blood, sweat, and tears.”

Vogel got to know the arcana of sinology in Freiburg, Berlin, and Zurich, followed by his apprentice years in Taiwan and Hong Kong, at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and as mentioned above, at the Needham Research Institute, before becoming lecturer at the Institute of Chinese Studies at the University of Heidelberg (1987–94).¹⁰ Three professorial replacements at Heidelberg and a visiting professorship at the Technical University of Berlin offered an optimal springboard for his appointment to chair professor at the Department of Chinese Studies at the University of Tübingen in 1994.

By then Hans Ulrich Vogel was already known throughout European sinology: fluent in crisp English, knowledgeable, detail-rich, hardworking, up-and-doing, avid for knowledge – in short, a rising star in the sinological firmament. The arena in which he gained his reputation was the annual meetings of coordinators of a large Erasmus student exchange program (participating institutions: Oxford, Cambridge, SOAS, Leiden, Leuven, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Paris VII, INALCO, Venice, Napoli, Heidelberg, and Munich). Vogel administered this program at Heidelberg and, moreover, organized an intensive course (“Spring School”) under its framework.

During the twenty-seven years at Tübingen, Vogel not only accepted various offers of visiting professorships and fellowships to Leuven, Erlangen, and Macau,¹¹ but also served for six years as visiting lecturer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (1999–2005). A long-term obligation that Vogel undertook in addition to his full schedule was the editorship of the journal Science, Technology, and Medicine in East Asia, a post he held from 1999 to 2016. There were hardly any years without his involvement in projects financed by third-party funds that he had raised.¹² The two flagship projects were already mentioned above: the ongoing “Translating Western Science, Technology and Medicine” project, the other is the DFG Research Group “Markets, Monies, and Finance” (2005–14).

All these projects entailed a stream of guest lectures, workshops, and conferences that greatly contributed to developing the international and interdisciplinary atmosphere at the Tübingen Department of Chinese Studies, an atmosphere enriched by scholars of high caliber, eminent experts in the fields of archaeology, mining history, geography, global history, the history of science and technology, numismatics, the history of East-Western encounters and exchange, historiography, meta-history, and the philosophy of money. It’s a long list and on it can be found the late Peter J. Golas (1937–2019), the late Mark Elvin (1938–2023), Jane Kate Leonard, George Brian Souza, Arturo Giráldez, Akinobu Kuroda, Lothar von Falkenhausen, and the late Werner Burger (1936–2021), among many others.

It was mainly due to the DFG Research Group “Monies, Markets, and Finance” that Tübingen’s status as one of the major sites of sinology/Chinese studies in Germany was secured – a spectacular rise from humble beginnings, beginnings aggravated by a two-year vacancy of the chair before Vogel arrived in 1994. The institutional structure of the new era was expanded through Vogel’s tenacity: He arranged for a third professorship for modern and contemporary China (the Greater China Studies Chair, to which Gunter Schubert was appointed in 2003) and prevented the abolishment of the second professorship (the professorship for Chinese Language, Literature and Philosophy to which Achim Mittag was appointed in 2005).

However, it was in yet another respect that Vogel truly proved a master of strategic insight. Clearly recognizing the winds of change that set in with the Bologna process, Vogel was quick to set his sights on introducing the Bachelor-Master curriculum, doing so in defiance of an outcry throughout the field of Chinese studies that six semesters couldn’t be enough to acquire more than a bare minimum of elementary Chinese. Vogel’s innovative and far-sighted answer was a fully integrated semester in China for all students who have Chinese studies as a major. In 2000, in order to provide for such study abroad, Vogel and Copenhagen (his cooperation partner) founded the European Centre for Chinese Studies at Peking University (ECCS).

It was a big gamble and one that paid off splendidly. Joined by Würzburg and Frankfurt in the following years, ECCS became a success story. When Erlangen joined in 2018, the three other partner universities had already left, each for different reasons, while Tübingen continued. By then more than a thousand students, almost five hundred of them from Tübingen alone, had spent one or two semesters at Peking University under the auspices of the program, in many cases finding the experience to be the highlight of their student lives. Moreover, the integrated semester provided the basis for Tübingen’s rise to being one of Germany’s universities best-known for excellent education in Chinese language teaching. Together with branch offices in Kyoto and Seoul, the ECCS constituted Tübingen’s triad representation in East Asia, which was unique in German academia, and formed an integral part to the university’s internationalization strategy.¹³

After becoming a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001, China experienced booming years. The Tübingen Department of Chinese Studies also enjoyed a heyday. It greatly benefited from the reputation and high esteem that Hans Ulrich Vogel had acquired in the university at large and, in particular in the former Faculty of Cultural Studies,¹⁴ for which he had served as Dean in the academic year 1995–96. His reputation and esteem profited not only the Department of Chinese Studies but also the Department of Korean Studies. After the termination of the chair in Korean Studies in 2003, Vogel saw to it that funds from the departments of Chinese and Japanese studies were available for Korean language instruction, so that in 2010, with the appointment of You Jae Lee as junior professor, the Department of Korean Studies was restored like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Vogel also gave a powerful impetus to the merging of six departments in 2008 to form the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies. Being absorbed at that time in conducting the “Monies, Markets, and Finance” Research Group, he stepped back from a leading role in founding the institute, but his powerful support safeguarded the ultimate success of this far-sighted initiative. The same is true for two other processes that led to important innovations, one within the Department of Chinese Studies and the other beyond. The first one concerned the establishment of the four-year BA study program “Chinese Studies With a Professional Focus,” paired with the establishment of Chinese teachers’ education (B.Ed. and M.Ed.), and the other the founding of the China Center Tübingen (CCT) as a central institution of the university in 2016.¹⁵ In addition, he masterminded the development of the Master study program “China and the Dynamics of Globalization,” with its premodern track being taught in English.

For most of the years from 2001 to 2020, a halcyon period for the Department of Chinese Studies, Vogel served as head of the department. With his courteous decisiveness, paired with an ability to get students actively involved in all departmental matters, he kept the institution alive and happy and feeling good about itself. Even as it grew, it maintained an atmosphere of conviviality among students and colleagues alike. As head, Vogel also put great effort into ensuring comprehensive access to CrossAsia, in particular to the monumental database of Chinese Academic Journals (CAJ) and built up an excellent collection of reprints and editions of Qing archival documents.

This miniature portrait would be utterly incomplete without acknowledging Hans Ulrich Vogel’s passionate devotion to being an academic teacher. He has supervised about forty Master theses and almost twenty doctoral theses, a pair of impressive totals, and with his courses in Classical Chinese at the Master level and his seminars geared toward the translation work of a chosen text he has mounted very serious scholarly enterprises. An enthusiastic champion of the documentary language of the Qing period, Vogel took over the teaching of this obligatory class for all Master students. And from these classes there grew the idea of compiling a new textbook of Qing documentary language, a project undertaken with a former doctoral student and a current one and now near completion as its two volumes undergo the process of publication.¹⁶ It promises to become the capstone of a most remarkable career of teaching Classical Chinese.

In this volume of the Asian Review of World Histories – a journal reflecting in many ways our jubilarian’s academic interests and foci – we present work by a roster of contributors who have had the privilege of working with and learning from Hans Ulrich Vogel. There are many more who would have wished to join in. We can only kindly ask them to hold out, hoping that there will still be many anniversaries and other occasions to contribute to a Festschrift dedicated to Hans Ulrich Vogel.

Altogether there are twelve papers and in good cosmological tradition they are arranged geographically, from topics solely concerned with China proper to those that incorporate other world regions to those taking a purely global perspective.

The special issue opens with two contributions on aspects of legal practice in China; one discusses legal aspects of river hydraulics (Iwo Amelung) and the other the death penalty (Harro von Senger). Proceeding to China’s border regions, the two following papers focus on questions related to resources of different kinds: Huang Fei inquires into sulfur manufacturing at hot springs, while Nanny Kim discusses silver ores and deposits in Southwest China. The next paper still focuses on Asia with Lothar von Falkenhausen describing the salt-making festival of Shiogama in Japan.

The second part of the issue is dedicated to topics that connect China and Europe and places beyond, mainly in the context of the Jesuit China Mission. Three contributions deal with the Kangxi court: Han Qi on Matteo Ripa, Antonio de Saldanha on the Eulogium Europeorum doctorum, and Han Qijin on two letters in the Zhihao haoxue lu 知好好學錄 (Records of knowing how to appreciate good learning) of Zhu Shi 祝石 (1602–1684). Two case studies then discuss very concretely aspects of mutual knowledge transfer between Europe and China: Sabine Kink’s article on the suction-lift pump and Ulrich Theobald’s study of aspects of Sinification in Western music during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The issue concludes with two papers that take us to the Pacific Ocean hemisphere: Arturo Giráldez with Analiese Richards discuss Chinese mercury, American silver, and Californian sea otters, and Angela Schottenhammer presents interesting insights into the medical situation on board galleons crossing the Pacific Ocean in the eighteenth century.

Each contributor looks back on different experiences with Hans Ulrich Vogel, experiences united by fruitful cooperation, by learning from and working with a colleague of great accomplishment. These valuable experiences shine through all the papers and bear witness that Vogel’s work has truly made the scholarly world go round in more than one field – and that hopefully it will do so for a long time. Hence ad multos annos, Hans Ulrich Vogel!