The Confucian Chronology
14-03-2014 Was The Confucian Chronology First Applied In China Or In The South Seas?
On 14 March 2014, at 2:30 a.m., the Malaysian Chinese Research Centre (MCRC) hosted a seminar entitled “Was the Confusion Chronology first applied in China or in the South Seas?” The speech was delivered by Professor Claudine Salmon, Director of Research Emeritus at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris.
The seminar, which was chaired by Dr Ching Ting Ho and attended by various UM academics, was held at the Meeting Room II, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, University of Malaya.
In her talk, speech, Professor Claudine Salmon challenged the view of Chinese scholars who often credit Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao as being the first reformists to introduce a Confucian calendar in the mid-1890s in the Qiang Xue Bao《强学报》. She explained that, according to the testimony of the former students of Tjioe Ping Wie, a Surabaya-born reformist(周平为), the use of Confucius chronology (i.e. using Confucius’s birth date as the starting point of a new conceptual timeframe) in the South Sea region dates back as early as the 1880s. During this time, the diasporic Chinese community in these parts had created the Confucian calendar as a way to consolidate their communal identity amidst a foreign community.
