British sinologist and historian (born 1922)
Michael Arthur Nathan Loewe (born 2 November 1922) is a British sinologist, historian, and writer who has authored dozens of books, articles, and other publications in the fields of Classical Chinese as well as the history of ancient and early Imperial China.
Life and career
Loewe was born on 2 November 1922 in Oxford, England, to a distinguished Anglo-Jewish family.[1] His great-grandfather Louis Loewe (1809–1888) was a Prussian Silesian professor of Oriental studies and theology who served as the personal secretary of the British Jewish businessman, financier, and philanthropist Moses Montefiore. Loewe's father, Herbert Loewe, was a professor of Semitic languages who taught at both Cambridge University and Oxford University. Loewe's mother, Ethel Victoria Hyamson, was the sister of the British official and historian Albert Hyamson. His elder brother Raphael Loewe (1919–2011) was a professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at University College London. Loewe was married to Carmen Blacker, a scholar of the Japanese language.
Loewe attended secondary school at The Perse School in Cambridge, then entered Magdalen College, Oxford. Following the outbreak of war with Japan in December 1941, Loewe was assigned to learn Japanese at the secret Bedford Japanese School run by Captain Oswald Tuck RN. He was on the first course, which began in February 1942 and lasted for five months. Towards the end of the course some training in cryptography was given. After completing the course Loewe was posted to Bletchley Park, where he worked in the Naval Section until the end of the war.[2] He studied Mandarin Chinese in his spare time.[3] During a six-month stay in Beijing in 1947, Loewe became interested in traditional and historical Chinese topics, which he began studying at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London after returning to Britain.[3] He received a first class honours degree in Chinese in 1951, and in 1956 he left the government to serve as a Lecturer in the History of the Far East at the University of London. From 1960, he stayed in the Kyoto University Research Centre for the Cultural Sciences for his research. His mentor in Kyoto was Shikazo Mori. On his way from the UK to Kyoto, he purchased the "Documents of the Han dynasty on wooden slips from Edsin Gol"[4] at Taipei, and started research about it. Shikazo Mori and he organized a reading circle of the wooden slips from Edsin Gol, and his study became his book "Records of Han Administration" later.[5][6] SOAS awarded him a Ph.D. in 1963, and he subsequently joined the faculty at Cambridge, where he taught until retiring in 1990 to focus solely on research and scholarship. He is a fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
Honours
A unique award in Loewe's honour exists at Cambridge: the "Michael Loewe Prize" may be awarded annually to one or more undergraduate candidates who have achieved distinction in literary Chinese.[7]
