葛兆光教授2011年出版的《宅兹中国：重建有关中国的历史论述》英文版Here in ‘China’ I Dwell: Reconstructing Historical Discourses of China for our Time，由Jesse Field与秦方合作翻译，近日在Brill出版社出版。至此，《宅兹中国》一书已经有繁体字版（2011年由台北联经出版事业公司出版）、韩文版（2012年由韩国Geulhangari Publishing Co出版）与英文版（2017年Brill出版社）。日文版由井泽耕一等教授翻译，也将于今年年底在东京的东方书店出版。
Preface
This book is about large issues. It is about China, East Asia and the world; politics and academia; acceptance and rejection; national and regional histories. I never thought I would write such a small book about such large issues. As long as I have been an academic, I have been going back and forth doing solid research in various fields relating to pre-modern China, including ancient documents, religious history, intellectual history and literary history. Although, at times, I read new Western and Oriental works, and occasionally touched on the histories and cultures of Japan and Korea, sometimes I couldn’t help theorizing a bit from on high, as it were. Still, I have always felt that to write things up properly, I should do so on a firm basis. I never wrote with any strength or forcefulness unless I was working directly from archival material. Reasoning from theory always seemed to me like so much hot air. Hence, I never had the heart for it.
But, during these many years of my work, I began to feel more and more that there was no getting around the big issues.
In the fall of 2000, at Leuven University where I wrote the last pages of An Intellectual History of China, I had hoped to take a breather. As I wrote in the introduction, the eight years it had taken to produce the book had exhausted me. I wanted to make some adjustments to my life and work habits. What I failed to foresee was that research on questions of intellectual history had once again come back and induced angst. The final section, “China in the Year 1895,” of An Intellectual History of China stirred in me a deep sense of foreboding, which drove me to look at what happened after 1895.
After 1895, the Great Qing Empire began to exit “all under Heaven” and enter instead the “ten thousand nations.” The Heavenly court, celebrated for its stability in the ancient classical texts, was gradually reorganized and pushed into a world in which consciousness of both China and the West was emerging. I had to face the impact of views on Asia, China and the world. Why “Asia”? What, in the final analysis, is “China”? How does China face the world?
It seems that question after irresolvable question lurked behind conventional wisdom.
In 2002, I wrote “Imagination and Actuality: Who Recognizes Asia? On ‘Asianism’ in China and Japan from the Late Qing to the Early Republic” (now included in this book, making it the earliest completed section), and delivered it at the history department of National Taiwan University during a conference on the formation of cultural East Asia. I remember that the conference was hosted by Professor Lin Yusheng, and I shared the stage with Professor Koyasu Nobukuni of Japan. Sensitive readers would have deduced from the title that my paper was contentious, and it was delivered with no little strength of feeling. The feelings were two-fold. First, finishing An Intellectual History of China and entering the world of modern Chinese intellectual history had inspired new thinking which I had originally hoped to develop into a third volume On the Evolution of Knowledge, Ideology and Faith in China between 1895 and 1989. But, given the flood of material available and the overabundance of issues, I could only begin again by asking the questions one by one with a full sense of the critique in mind. Second, with academic debates in Japan, Korea and Taiwan growing more heated when it came to topics like China and Asia, and these imbricating mainland Chinese academia as well, how could such geographical concepts, not having been carefully critiqued, constitute “a historical world” that all could agree upon? These questions demanded answers, and not answers shaped by political ideology, but answers advanced through historical and cultural positioning.
If these questions had remained confined to the groves of academe in foreign countries, I could naturally have been at ease in my homeland. But the truth is that, for more than a hundred years, Chinese academia has been responding to the impact of ‘Western tides’. Some topics had, in the domestic arena, taken on a Chinese garb and were being translated into Chinese. Therefore, the question was whether these subjects, being left to ferment in Chinese and then used again, at times willfully, to interpret history, had stayed within the bounds of reason, or had been translated too rigidly. I found it hard to decide. So I simply had to delve further into these questions, which I began to do by investigating the field of East Asian history using material from Korea and Japan. I especially wish to record here that in 2006, when I left Tsinghua University in Beijing for Fudan University in Shanghai, I made it my mission to open courses on these subjects at the newly set up National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, thus commencing research on topics such as “looking at China from its borders,” “history of cultural exchanges,” and “critiques of Chinese studies.” The handling of these subjects, in turn, influenced the arrangement of chapters in this book.
The Chinese title for this book is taken from the inscription on a bronze ritual wine vessel (called hezun) dating to the Western Zhou era (late second millennium B.C.E), the piece in question having been discovered at Baoji, in Shaanxi province in 1963. The inscription is about how King Wu of the Zhou constructed the new eastern capital, Luoyang, after the destruction of the Shang. While Zhong guo 中国, the last two of the characters inscribed, probably refer to the region around Luoyang — the fabled “Tian zhi zhong” 天之中 (midst of Heaven) -- my use of the inscription text is more symbolic. Not only do the characters zhong guo appear here together for the first time, but the first character in the set, zhai 宅 -- which at the time meant “to settle on a place to live” -- today makes us think of the word’s more popular usage akin to something like “hidebound.” These connotations, new and old, may help us to reconsider how the scholar who makes his home in China would have to honor the position of China even while transcending the limits of Chineseness to forge a new discourse of history related to China in the context of Asia and the world.
In conclusion, I may say in passing that, at the time of writing this preface, I was a visiting professor at Princeton University. It had so happened that, 60 years ago, Hu Shi had taken up rooms here for a time (when he was the director of the East Asia Studies Library). Naturally, I often flipped through Hu Shi’s work. Just as I began, by sheer chance, I came across his 1929 piece, “A Proposed Song for Chinese Science Society,” the last two lines of which run, “Fear not that the truth is without end, but rejoice in the knowledge that every inch advanced is another inch possessed.” I am deeply moved by these words, and on that note, conclude this Preface.
April 2010, Princeton University, USA