A Few Posts from Paris 4 – Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales

Another post from Paris – a quick note as I happened to pass the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales. This, I assume is the successor to the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes, founded in in Paris in 1795, that trained a stunning future generation of French Sinologists including the great (but infamously arrogant) inter-war Sinologist and survivor of the Boxer’s siege of Peking in 1900 Paul Pelliot (1878-1945) who, among other things, catalogued the wonders of the cave-temples of Dunhuang and Henri Maspero (1882-1945) who revealed much of the history of Daoism in China. By the 1850s just about every major continental European university had an Asian or oriental studies department and this movement was to gain pace in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the interests of empire largely overrode mere academic curiosity. However, as far as I know Paris was among the first, if not the first, to have a full department and institute.