The Oriental Institute, 1936-1940

Academic Excellence of Asia Field and Summer Programs

The UH Oriental Institute was among the first of its kind globally. The institute funded faculty research and publication, and made possible specialized graduate-level study of Asia using primarily English-language instruction.

By the late 1920's, the strength of UH's curriculum in Asian language, history, philosophy, geography, and other fields made the university a world leader in what was then called "Oriental Studies." In 1936, a path-breaking Oriental Institute was established to coordinate faculty and courses from across the university, and to provide a centralized point for graduate student funding. Faculty maintained tenure lines in their home departments, while courses as well as scholarships were administered by the Oriental Institute.

The Institute's programs made it possible to study specialized topics in Asian literature, history, philosophy, and other subjects in English, and as part of a degree program aligned to US academic expectations. They offered what we might consider a "great books" curriculum, focusing largely on pre-20th century texts and currents of thought. This approach reflected one of the most significant intellectual movements in China at that time, namely the National Essence movement which aimed to preserve, reinterpret, and transform traditional intellectual culture.

The Institute was innovative in providing faculty with generous time to focus on research and publication. A textbook series was envisioned, to be authored by Oriental Institute faculty, that would provide Asian philosophical, literary, religious, and other texts in English translation for US university students. While the textbook series never materialized in the short period of the Institute's operations, several Institute scholars later went on to publish acclaimed English-language sourcebooks and anthologies at other universities, proving that the American public was indeed hungry for greater knowledge about Asian culture and traditions. The University of Hawai'i was ahead of its time in anticipating the postwar era when Asian philosophical, literary, and historical texts would become common across the US undergraduate curriculum.

Academic Excellence of Asia Field and Summer Programs

By the late 1920's, UH's global leadership in Asian studies was apparent. The Institute of Pacific Relations held its annual meeting every summer in Honolulu, which attracted leading figures in diplomacy, business, and academia. The idea grew to support a similar cohort of Asia-focused academics year-round. UH seemed a natural choice, given the university's existing strengths in Asian studies.

A 1929 survey by the IPR showed UH ranking third among US universities in offering courses dealing with China and Japan, enrolling over 300 students. After the founding of the Oriental Institute, some 400 students registered for classes in Fall 1937. By 1938, some 762 students were taking classes at the Oriental Institute, out of a total UH student body of 2,726 students.

Nationally, the inclusion of Asian literature, history, culture, and language in the US university curriculum was on the rise. Columbia faculty member Berthold Laufer, writing in the Bulletin of the American Council of Learned Studies (1929), stated that "a truly humanistic education in no longer possible without a more profound knowledge of China. We advocate with particular emphasis the study of the language and literature of China as the key to the understanding of a new world to be discovered, as the medium of gaining a new soul, as an important step forward into the era of a new humanism that is now in process of formation."

Gregg M. Sinclair (1890-1976)

In 1928, Gregg Manners Sinclair (BA Minnesota '12, MA Columbia '19) joined the UH English Department. Sinclair, who had previously lived in Japan, offered courses on Asian and World Literature, teaching versions of "world masterpieces in English translation."

In 1933, Sinclair was invited to lead a program to bring faculty from the continental US and worldwide to Honolulu every summer, to teach courses on Asia, part of the new summer-term School of Pacific and Oriental Affairs. Funded in part by the Carnegie Institute, the program included evening lectures that drew a public audience eager to learn more about Asia and the Pacific.

With the success of the summer school, Sinclair saw the potential for UH to become a world leader in Asian Studies, and lobbied for the creation of an Oriental Institute that would focus on Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian languages, philosophy, literature, history, and religious studies.

Establishment of the Oriental Institute

In 1935, the UH Board of Regents voted to establish an Oriental Institute, under the directorship of Gregg Sinclair. The idea was to focus on graduate education. Asian Studies was growing nationally given increasing business and other engagement between the US and Asia. The study of Asia was also seen a a way to add diversity to US higher education, introducing students to important non-Western traditions. The Oriental Institute was an audacious and ambitious program to create new programs for UH unlike virtually any other university worldwide, which would offer graduate degrees in Asian literature, philosophy, history, and religion. A textbook publication program, which would create a series of books in English of translations of Chinese, Japanese, and other primary sources, was envisioned as helping to fund other initiatives of the institute.

The target student for the Oriental Institute wanted to develop expertise in Asian history, religion, literature, and other subjects despite entry- or mid-level language skills. Language training was emphasized, but fluency was not a precondition to graduate study, and promising applicants from China were not always admitted.

During the four years the Institute was operating, roughly half a dozen students were admitted, all on financial support, studying towards the MA. (A PhD was planned but not realized.) Each student was given a scholarship of $1,000, worth roughly $20,000 in 2022 dollars (however, the overall cost of living in Honolulu was much lower at that time). Faculty were given release time from teaching for research and publication.

A planned free-standing building was never funded, but the Institute was given generous space in the UH library building, George Hall.

Oriental Institute Students and Faculty

George Hall, home to the university library and the Oriental Institute

Students at Oriental Institute study Buddhist sutras, from left, Richard Gard, Ralph Reid, and Hortense Spoehr. The texts were assigned by visiting faculty member Dr. Johannes Rahder. Photo from the 1938 Ka Palapala yearbook.

The Oriental Institute only graduated a few students, among them Edward H. Schafer (1913-1991), far left, who became a Song Dynasty specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. Other students above are Richard Gard, Betty Ruth Lawrence, Laurence P. Dowd and John Shively. Another student (not shown) was Elizabeth Lawrence Cless (1916-1992), Radcliffe cum laude BA studying South Asian fine arts. She later served as director of the Claremont Colleges’ Center for Continuing Education.

Over the period of the Institute's operations, faculty included both current UH faculty like Shao Chang Lee, Kenneth Ch'en, and Shunzo Sakamaki (1906-1973) , while adding noted scholars like Wing-Tsit Chan and Yuen Ren Chao. Johannes Rahder (1898-1988), a specialist in Sanskrit and Pali, was visiting from Leiden University. Rahder returned to UH for a year after the war before moving to Yale University in 1947.

Wing-Tsit Chan arriving in Honolulu

Bruce Lee reading A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, c. 1960's. Lee studied philosophy and drama at the University of Washington

Wing-Tsit Chan 陳榮捷 (1901-1994) was was recruited in 1936 to join the Oriental Institute. A Harvard PhD, Chan became one of the most famous specialists in Chinese philosophy in the U.S. After teaching at UH, he joined the faculty at Dartmouth College and Columbia. His Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), hailed on publication as "the first anthology of Chinese philosophy to cover its entire historical development," was started while he was at UH. It became a highly popular textbook and is still used in undergraduate philosophy classes. Similarly, the popular textbook Chinese Literature: A Historical Introduction (1961), was published by another short-term UH faculty member, Shou-Yi Chen, after he left UH for Pomona College.

Linguist, philologist, translator, and poet Yuen Ren Chao 趙元任 (1892-1982) joined the Oriental Institute and lived in Honolulu for two years, from 1938-40, before moving to the continental US. Among other accomplishments, Chao was known for recording the standard pronunciation for government-released records in the 1920's and for inventing a single phonetic system to represent the pronunciation of all Chinese dialects. He also translated Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky into Chinese (which he did by inventing new characters) and was a hit popular music composer. His wife, physician and best-selling cookbook author Dr. Buwei Yang 杨步伟 (1889-1981), had fond memories of their "pretty bungalow" in Honolulu, where "a tall tree in our neighbor's house dropped ripe mangoes into our yard."

Another Oriental Institute faculty member was Honolulu-born Kenneth Kuan-Sheng Chen 陳觀勝 (1907-1993), UH BA '31. After receiving his undergraduate degree (he served as class president in 1928 and was a member of the Chinese Students Alliance), he earned an MA from Yenching University in Beijing and a PhD in philosophy from Harvard. He became a specialist in Buddhist thought and taught at UH, Yenching, UCLA, and Princeton.

Oriental Institute faculty and spouses enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, 1937. The invitation from Sinclair specified black tie. The caption below notes that Stanley Porteus (1883-1972), a notorious racist psychologist on the faculty of UH for many years, was invited but not present at the dinner. Although Porteus and his courses were incorporated into the Oriental Institute, he was rarely mentioned by Sinclair in correspondence, and appears to have little contact with the majority of the Institute's faculty and students.

The first East-West Philosopher's conference was convened in summer 1939 by the Oriental Institute. Participants included, left to right: Wing-Tsit Chan; Yale philosopher Filmer Northrop (1893-1992); Junjiro Takakusu 高楠順次郎 of Tokyo Imperial University (1866-1945); George P. Conger of Minnesota (1884-1960); and UH Japan specialist Charles A. Moore (1901-1967).

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