China's Conquest of Taiwan in the Seventeenth Century (PDF)

to life." This is no small achievement for a historian. In a similar vein, the author's biography of Guo Songtao, by using Guo's massive diary and other sources, presents the historical figure's "daily life, "not only an account of the man's inner life but also a description of what the routes he traveled and how he traveled. The biography is richer for its lively descriptions of the man and his time that serves well to understand China's bumpy road to join the rest of the world. Thirdly, the author's work on historiography is gaining considerable currency among historians and literary scholars across the Taiwan Strait. His book on the historian Chen Yinke is the first of its sort. Indeed, it takes arduous effort to do justice to the complicated personality and his enormous learning. In addition to overcome the difficulties for a pioneering work so admirably, the author also judiciously defends some of Chen's important arguments with sufficient evidence and reasoning. His Shizhuan tongshuo (On Historiography) and Shixue jiuzhang (Nine Approaches to Historiography) are noted as much by their eloquent reinterpretation of some major Chinese and Western historians and their works as by their refined literary and modern style of Chinese writing. The author is a rare historian with literary talent. He writes with clarity, and his scholarly works are often delightful to read. His early excellent training in Chinese classics provided him with immediate access to the more difficult sources for research.The last but not the least, the author has important findings in early Taiwanese history as well. In his lengthy article published in 1983, he invalidates the revisionist view which questions Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong)'s Ming-loyalism. He powerfully concludes that Zheng was a "revolutionary traditionalist" who "transformed sheer violence into a political movement in an unprecedented way. He politicized the entire region." Recently, the author extends his research into environmental history. The author has received many distinguished honors, including Exchange Scholar, Committee on Scholarly Communication with PRC, National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. (1981-82); "Scholar of the Year Award," Virginia Social Sciences Association (1993);Virginia Tech Alumni Award of Recognition for Research Excellence (1994); Winner, List of 2% Outstanding Academic Titles, Choice, the publication of Association of American Research Libraries (2001);Professor Emeritus, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (2003-); Honorary Chair Professor, Xiamen University, P.R.C.