Wu Han

Wu Han entered Tsinghua University’s history department in 1931 and chose Ming history as his field. After graduating in 1934, he stayed on to teach and research the subject. A later account describes Ming studies in China at the time as held back by scattered materials and a shortage of researchers; Wu produced dozens of scholarly papers. With colleagues in a history research society, he pursued economic and social history, combining historical frameworks with source work. In his 1936 study “Textile Workshops in the Fourteenth Century,” he distinguished several forms of Ming-era production and analyzed factories in which capitalists supplied premises, raw materials, and machinery and hired workers. In a 1955 report on the emergence of capitalism in China and coastal trade under the Ming, he interpreted the dispute over maritime prohibitions and their relaxation as a conflict of class interests.

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Wu devoted himself not only to research but also to editing classical works and making historical knowledge accessible. In 1954, following Mao Zedong’s suggestion, he organized work to punctuate and divide into paragraphs Sima Guang’s Zizhi Tongjian and the Xu Zizhi Tongjian. He later began a similar project on the Twenty-Four Histories; by his death, the first four dynastic histories were the only ones completed. He also planned and edited short popular-history series. Rather than organizing children’s textbooks solely by dynastic sequence, the project presented selected historical figures and events as stories suited to young readers. The Chinese History Little Series comprised 147 titles and the Foreign History Little Series 59; foreign-history and geography series followed in 1962.