Bernhard Karlgren - Career As Sinologist

Career As Sinologist

Karlgren returned to Europe in January 1912, first staying in London, then in Paris, before arriving in Uppsala, where he produced his doctoral dissertation in 1915. (Although his dissertation was written in French, most of his subsequent scholarly works were in English.)

In 1939, Karlgren succeeded the founding director Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874–1960) as director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Östasiatiska Museet), a post he held until 1959. This public museum was founded in 1926 on Andersson's pioneering discoveries of prehistoric archaeology made in China in the 1920s, and later expanded to cover later periods as well as other parts of Asia. Karlgren had been in close contact with Andersson for many years, and also succeeded Andersson as editor of the museum's journal, the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (BMFEA, 1929-) and continued in this position until the 1970s. Karlgren himself first published many of his own major works in this annual journal, or as books in the monograph series of the museum.

In 1946, Karlgren began a far-reaching attack on the then rather loosely argued historiography of ancient China. Reviewing the literature on China's pre-Han history in his article Legends and Cults in Ancient China, he pointed out that "a common feature to most of these treatises is a curious lack of critical method in the handling of the material". In particular, Karlgren criticised the unselective use of documents from different ages when reconstructing China's ancient history. "In this way very full and detailed accounts have been arrived at—but accounts that are indeed caricatures of scientifically established ones."