谭英华/Tan Yinghua

Prof. Tan Yinghua (1917-1996), ancestral home in Hunan, is a famous contemporary historian who is well versed in both ancient and modern knowledge of China and western countries. In the 1940s, Mr. Tan received a Gengzi Scholarship and a master's degree in history from Wuhan University. In the early 1950s, despite a young age, he became one of the few full professors in the History Department of Sichuan University.

 

Mr. Tan is one of China’s topnotch scholars in the study of history of western historiography, whose researches cover multiple areas such as Chinese Tang History, Tibetan History and World History. Over the years, he devoted himself to the study of hundreds of schools of thoughts and related masters in the history of Western historiography. As early as in the 1960s, he had compiled teaching materials on the history of western historiography and made foundation-laying contributions to the researches in this field. After the Ten Chaotic Years, Mr. Tan returned to the rostrum and was among the first batch of master student supervisors in World History in our country after the Cultural Revolution. One of his graduate students became the PRC’s first student awarded a doctorate in History by Oxford University. As one of the earliest scholars in the study of history of western historiography in the New China, entrusted by the Ministry of Education in 1985, he held a concurrent post as the Associate Editor-in-chief of History of Western Historiography, a unified textbook for China’s higher learning institutions.

Mr. Tan's main works include: Collation and Reading Notes of "Shihuo Records" of the Two Books of Tang (Shihuo Records, an article in historical records depicting an era’s economic system, economic life change and development), Historiography and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (collation and annotation), Update of Western Historical Thought in the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries, On Macaulay’s Historiography and On Carlyle's Historiography, plus several quality papers on the history of Tibet. Mr. Tan has a high level of philosophical accomplishment and is proficient in English. Thanks to sound philosophic deposits and graceful wording, his papers have produced profound influence.

Mr. Tan is meticulous in scholarly research, with profound academic accomplishment; he is straightforward by nature, indifferent to fame and fortune. Due to specific historical reasons, he weathered through rough and bumpy period, and his academic career got stranded several times. After the reform and opening up, Mr. Tan made painstaking efforts in writing and tried his best to make up for the losses. However, suffered from a serious disease in 1988, his academic life was ended unfortunately. There are still a plenty of his thoughts, knowledge and research results accumulated for years which have not been sorted out and published yet.

Prof. Tan Yinghua's teaching and research laid a solid foundation for Sichuan University’s study of world history, history of western historiography and historical theories. The national first-class status held by our University currently in teaching and research of historical theories and history of western historiography is inseparable from the pioneering work of Mr. Tan.