Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy

Planning to establish the Preparatory Office began in 1988, when Dr. Ting Pang-hsin and 15 other fellows of the Convocation of Academia Sinica proposed to set up the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy. Professor Wu Hung-I of National Taiwan University was invited both to chair the Advisory Committee and to head the Preparatory Office in the fall of 1989. The Office began to operate during the following March. In July 1992, Professor Wu resigned from both posts for health reasons. Dr. Ting Pang-hsin chaired the Advisory Committee between 1992 and 1995, and Professor Tu Wei-ming was appointed the new chairman of the Committee. Professor Tai Lien-chang, a member of the Advisory Committee since 1989, assumed the Directorship of the Preparatory Office in 1992. He retired from the post in May 1997. Dr. Chung Tsai-chun has headed the Preparatory Office since then.

Situated by the side of the Ssu-fen Brook in Academia Sinica, the Preparatory Office of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy presently has 23 researchers. With more than one hundred and forty thousand holdings in its library collection, the Preparatory Office aims to advance the study of Chinese literature and philosophy and to lay the groundwork for the founding of the Institute. The Preparatory Office recruits researchers who specialize in the following five fields: classical Chinese literature, modern Chinese literature, Confucian classics, Chinese philosophy, and comparative philosophy. It also sponsors group research projects and provides a forum for intellectual exchange between scholars both in and out of Taiwan.

Major Research Accomplishments

In the past ten years, the researchers of the office have developed a number of group projects, including studies on:

the poetics of tz'u
contemporary Taiwanese literature
Mencius
Confucianism in the modern world
the ideas of Liu Tsung-chou
religion and the 21th-century Taiwan
Ming-Ch'ing drama
literary theory and popular culture (from the forties to the sixties)
the digitalization of Tao-tsang
dynastic decline and literary innovations
the Yang-chou School of the Ch'ien-chia periods of the Ch'ing

The Preparatory Office has also sponsored international conferences on a regular basis, invited visiting scholars from overseas, and collected manuscripts and other materials pertaining to literary and philosophical interests. In addition, the Preparatory Office issues two serials, Bulletin of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy and Newsletter of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, as well as a variety of monographs. Through these accomplishments, the Preparatory office is continuing to prepare for its eventual establishment as an Institute in the near future.