Friedrich Hirth (1845-1927) zwischen Sachsen, China und New York Aus den Anfängen einer globalen Sinologie

Abstract

Friedrich Hirth was an active German Sinologist in the second half of 19th Century. He raised some influential hypotheses concerning the history of Central Asia, e.g. Ashide Yuanzhen and Tonyukuk could be the same person, which made the worldwide Turkologists debate with each other for more than a century. This paper is going to analyse the intellectual genealogy of Hirth, and reveal the fact that his methodology in researching can be traced back to the great French Sinologist Joseph De Guignes (1721-1800), who had proposed many theories by building connections between ethnic groups in the European horizon with those in the Oriental literature, such as Xiongnu, Rouran and Tujue with Huns, Avars and Turks.