Michael Loewe also known as M. A. N. Loewe, is a British academic and renowned sinologist who has authored dozens of books, articles, and other publications in the fields of Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...

 and ancient Chinese history.

Loewe attended The Perse School

The Perse School

The Perse Upper School is an independent secondary co-educational day school in Cambridge, England. The school was founded in 1615 by Dr Stephen Perse, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and has existed on several different sites in the city before its present home on Hills...

 in Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

 and Magdalen College

Magdalen College, Oxford

Magdalen College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £153 million. Magdalen is currently top of the Norrington Table after over half of its 2010 finalists received first-class degrees, a record...

, Oxford. In 1942, he left Oxford to serve as a specialist officer in the British Government Communications’ Headquarters working with Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 issues, while studying Classical Chinese in his spare time. Oxford's School of Oriental and African Studies awarded him a first class honours degree in 1951, and in 1956 he left the government to serve as a Lecturer

Lecturer

Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...

 in the History of the Far East at the University of London

University of London

-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...

. Oxford awarded him a PhD

PHD

PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in 1963, and he subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

, where he taught until retiring in 1990 to focus solely on research and scholarship. He is a fellow of Clare Hall.

Honours

• Royal Asiatic Society
  Royal Asiatic Society
  The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland was established, according to its Royal Charter of 11 August 1824, to further "the investigation of subjects connected with and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to Asia." From its incorporation the Society...
  
  , member.
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
  
  , honorary member.

A unique award in Loewe's honour exists at Cambridge: the "Michael Loewe Prize" may be awarded annually to one or more undergraduate candidates who have achieved distinction in literary Chinese.

Selected Works

• Imperial China: the Historical background to the Modern Age. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966.
• Records of Han Administration; volume I: Historical Assessment; volume II: Documents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
• Everyday Life in Early Imperial China during the Han Period. London: B.T. Batsford, 1968.
• Crisis and Conflict in Han China. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974.
• Ancient Cosmologies. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975.
• Ways to Paradise: the Chinese Quest for Immortality. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979.
• Divination and Oracles. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981.
• Chinese Ideas of Life and Death: Faith, Myth and Reason in the Han Period. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982.
• (as co-editor) The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• The Pride that was China. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1990.
• Early Chinese Texts: a Bibliographical Guide. Berkeley: the Society for the Study of Early China and the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993.
• Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• (as co-editor) The Cambridge History of Ancient China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Han and Xin Dynasties. Leiden: E.J.Brill, 2000.
• The Men who Governed China in Han Times. Leiden: E.J.Brill, 2004.

External links

• Michael Loewe Scholarship Fund, Cambridge University.