Xia Nai
- This is a Chinese name; the family name is Xia.
Biography
Xia Nai (or Hsia Nai; Chinese: 夏鼐; pinyin: Xià Nǎi; Wade-Giles: Hsia Nai; born in 1910 in Wenzhou, southern Zhejiang, China) is a Chinese archaeologist. He majored in economic history at the elite Tsinghua University in Beijing (BA, 1934), winning a scholarship to study abroad. He went to University College London and studied Egyptology earning a doctorate that was finally awarded to him in 1946. In the meantime, he had returned to China joining the staff of the Central Museum and then in 1944 joining the Department of Archaeology of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (1943-1949), becoming acting director in 1948. When the Institute moved to Taiwan in 1949, Xia stayed behind in China, teaching at Zhejiang Univerity for a year before joining the Chinese Academy of Sciences (1950-1982), eventually becoming director of its Institute of Archaeology.
During the Cultural Revolution, he was complicit in destroying China's cultural heritage, among other things joining the Anti-Right Campaign in 1957 which persecuted many scholars like Chen Mengjia and Zeng Zhaoyu and caused them to commit suicide. Yet, he later claimed that 1949-1979 represented the "Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology." He proclaimed that archaeology was to "serve the politics of the proletariat" - in other words, the goals of the Communist Party. In 1979, in the xenophobic spirit of the era, he also threatened L.S. Vasil'ev, who proposed that the Chinese zodiac was borrowed from the West.[1]
Further reading
K.C. Chang, 'Xia Nai (1910-1985)', in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 88, No. 2 (June 1986), pp. 442-444.
E. Field and Wang Tao, 'Xia Nai: the London connection', in Orientations, June 1997.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- ↑ Enzheng Tong. "Thirty years of Chinese archaeology" in Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology
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