The purpose of this reading group is to promote Chinese classics by creating an easy going environment for studying and discussing classical Chinese texts. The plan is to organise ERG in series, where each series covers a certain historical period. It is challenging to cover any Chinese historical period comprehensively with a few sessions. Therefore it is not what we should attempt here. What we want do here, is to lead people to read some selected representative historical stories and (fractions of) texts. So at the end of each series, hopefully our attendees can take home with a rough skeleton of the history, and some representative inventions/thoughts/texts/people from the covered period.
Ideally one series lasts for one term. For example, we will focus on pre-Qin period for the Easter term of 2013.
The Format
The ERG session usually lasts for 1 hour, and consists of two half-hour slots. Each slot will be lead by one chair, and with different focus:
During the first half-hour slot, we will read one or a few historical stories from the ongoing historical period. It can be any representative stories, examples including 成语故事 (Cheng Yu Gu Shi), 三十六计 (San Shi Liu Ji), 孙子兵法 (Sun Zi Bing Fa), etc.
For the second half-hour slot, we will read about literature. This part can be general introduction to a book, e.g. 易经/Yi Jing. It can also be a poem or fraction from a book, which means we can read in more details and potentially trigger more discussions.
Note both historical stories and poetry should be selected from the ongoing historical period if possible, i.e. if we are reading about the Qin/秦 Dynasty in the session, then both the stories/literature should be selected from roughly the Qin/秦 Dynasty.
The historical context should be briefly introduced in the first slot. We can do this in a fast/brief way, a time line plus some important people/events should be enough.
Series 1: history and literature from pre-Qin period
We will focus on pre-Qin period in our first series. The pre-Qin period is an excited age in Chinese history, numerous different/competing schools of thoughts emerged and got strengthened. This series will be run during the Easter term, 2013.
We divide the pre-Qin period into 4 finer historical periods: 神话时代，夏商，西周，东周. We plan to cover these 4 periods with 4 reading sessions sequentially. During each session, we will pick a representative historical story, and a book/poem from the ongoing period (e.g., 神话时代).