On Xie Gelan's Chinese Sculpture Research

Victor Segalen is regarded as a well-known poet in China.On the contrary his research on Chinese stone statuary remains unknown.Yet he was the first westerner to discover Huo Qubing’s tomb and to study its stone statuary-statuary which is about 200 years older than Chinese sculptures then known in Western countries.He named one of the sculpture of the tomb "Horse trampling a barbarian of Xiongnu" and used the Chinese historical text "the emperor Han Wu-ti ordered artisans to make the tumulus like Mount Qilian" to explain the unique form of Huo Qubing’s tumulus.His research influenced other subsequent research.In this paper I present Segalen’s research on the stone statuary of Huo Qubing’s tomb as an example.First I will discuss the methods used by Segalen to study Chinese statuary-methods that he learnt from his professor Edouard Chavannes.Then I will study and comment on Segalen’s research on the statuary of Huo Qubing’s tomb and on other "pure" Chinese sculptures.I will finally present his influence on other sinologists’ research on the stone statuary of Huo Qubing’s tomb,and will show how his ideas entered China via Japanese scholars and returned from overseas through articles from Chinese scholars working abroad.