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Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes〔Birth name as given in Noël Péri's obituary of Chavannes.〕 (5 October 1865 – 29 January 1918) was a French sinologist and expert on Chinese history and religion, and is best known for his translations of major segments of Sima Qian's ''Records of the Grand Historian'', the work's first ever translation into a Western language. Chavannes was a prolific and influential scholar who was one of the most accomplished sinologists of the modern era, notwithstanding his relatively early death in 1918 at only fifty-two years old. A successor of 19th century French sinologists Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat and Stanislas Julien, Chavannes was largely responsible for the development of sinology and Chinese scholarship into a respected field in the realm of French science.〔Péri (1918): 73.〕 ==Life and career== Édouard Chavannes was born on 5 October 1865 in Lyon, France. As a youth he studied at the ''lycée'' in Lyon, where, like most students of his era, his education focused mainly on the Latin and Greek Classics. Chavannes was then sent to Paris to attend the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he and his classmates studied and prepared for the entrance exams to one of the French ''Grandes Écoles''.〔 Chavannes passed his entrance exams and was admitted to the ''Lettres'' ("literature") section of the École Normale Supérieure in 1885.〔 Chavannes spent three years at the school, finishing in 1888 after successfully passing his ''agrégation'' in philosophy.〔 Georges Perrot, a French archaeologist and newly appointed director of the École Normale Supérieure, advised Chavannes to begin studying China after he finished his schooling.〔 Chavannes first considered studying Chinese philosophy, which was nearer to his own educational background, but on the advice of Henri Cordier he ultimately decided to focus on Chinese history, which up to that time had been much less widely studied in the West.〔 Chavannes began attending Classical Chinese courses given by the Marquis d'Hervey-Saint-Denys at the Collège de France and the Mandarin Chinese classes of Maurice Jametel (1856–1889) at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes (School of Living Oriental Languages).〔〔Honey (2001): 45.〕 Desiring to advance his studies with actual experience in China, Chavannes used the connections of certain friends of his to obtain a position as an attaché to a scientific mission associated with the French Legation in Peking (modern Beijing).〔 He departed for China in January 1889 and arrived two months later.〔name="c115">Cordier (1917): 115.〕 In 1891, Chavannes briefly returned to France where he married Alice Dor, the daughter of a well-known optometrist in Lyon, before returning to China with her.〔Cordier (1917): 116.〕 Together they had a son, Fernand Henri Chavannes, who later became a highly decorated flying ace during World War I, and two daughters.〔de la Vallée Poussin (1918): 147.〕 Chavannes stayed in China until 1893, when he returned to France to take up the position of Professor of Chinese at the Collège de France, which had been vacated upon the death of the Marquis d'Hervey-Saint-Denys in November 1892.〔 Although Chavannes had only been studying Chinese for five years, the quality and value of his early Chinese scholarship had already been widely recognized in the academic community, and convinced the regents of the Collège de France to give the position to him.〔 Chavannes opened his tenure with a lecture entitled "Du Rôle social de la littérature chinoise" ("On the Social Role of Chinese Literature").〔Laufer (1918): 202.〕 During his tenure at the Collège, Chavannes was widely active in French academic circles: he was a member of the Institut de France, was an honorary member of a number of foreign societies, served as a French co-editor of the noted sinological journal ''T'oung Pao'' from 1904 until 1916, and was elected President of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1915.〔〔Laufer (1918): 205.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Édouard Chavannes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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