Hugh Stimson

Professor of Chinese Linguistics 

Hugh Stimson, B.A., Ph.D. Yale University, you are an expert on Chinese linguistics, phonetics, and Chinese poetry. and in these fields you are a legend. You are the author of many recondite articles on Chinese phonology: you have written on Peking archaisms, on phonological domains in the Peking dialect and on a guide to the pronunciation of medieval Chinese, among many similar subjects. You have written major Chinese texts for the learning of Modern Spoken Chinese—two volumes—and Written Chinese—three volumes. But beyond all of this you are a citizen of the realm of poetry, the translator of many extraordinary Chinese poets including Wang Wei, Du Fu and Li Bai; and your precise, understated English has managed to convey the subtleties of Chinese poetry to citizens of another linguistic realm. 

After more than 40 years at Yale, no one can quite imagine you retiring from your central place in East Asian—one colleague described it as if “one of the painted men in the fresco above the circulation desk at Sterling were to hop down and step out for a weekend in New York.” You have given generations of China scholars an awareness of the fun to be had in every age and variant of Chinese, the sense of the intermingling of the ancient and modern, the keys to a vast kingdom in which many of your acolytes are now happily and forever lost. As the old poem implies, being a Daoist in the mountains involves a lot of roaming around and plucking of magical herbs. Your colleagues would like to pluck some of them now, and offer them in tribute to you, a scholar who is a link in the great China tradition that began here with Yung Wing and Samuel Wells Williams in the nineteenth century, and will continue in the work of as yet unknown young people who will benefit from Yale’s new ties with China.