Wèi Yuán 魏源 (1794–1857)
Late-Qīng statecraft scholar, geographer, classicist, and lay Buddhist; one of the principal figures of the jīngshì 經世 (“statecraft / practical learning”) movement in early-nineteenth-century China and a pioneer of Chinese knowledge about the modern West. Zì Mòshēn 默深 (with which he is most often cited), also Hànshì 漢士 and Liángtú 良圖. Native of Shàoyáng 邵陽, Húnán. Passed the jǔrén 舉人 examination in Dàoguāng 2 (1822) and the jìnshì 進士 in Dàoguāng 24 (1844); held minor sub-prefectural posts in Jiāngsū but spent most of his career as a personal secretary (mùyǒu 幕友) to leading reformist officials, especially Hè Chánglíng 賀長齡 and Lín Zéxú 林則徐.
His major works divide into three streams. (1) Statecraft and historical geography: the Shèngwǔ jì 聖武記 (1842, “Records of Imperial Military Achievements”), a critical history of Qīng military campaigns; and most famously the Hǎiguó túzhì 海國圖志 (1842/1843, with expanded editions in 1847 and 1852, the last in 100 juǎn), the foundational Chinese encyclopaedic survey of foreign countries — written in direct response to the Opium War and explicitly programmed under the slogan shī yí chángjì yǐ zhì yí 師夷長技以制夷 (“learn the foreigners’ superior techniques in order to control them”). The Hǎiguó túzhì circulated widely in Japan from the 1850s and became one of the principal stimuli for late-Tokugawa modernisation. (2) Classics: the Shī gǔ wēi 詩古微 and Shū gǔ wēi 書古微, important late-Qīng Jīnwén 今文 reconstructions of the early text-history of the Shī and Shū; and the Lǎozǐ běn yì 老子本義. (3) Late Pure Land devotional writing: the Jìngtǔ sì jīng 淨土四經 (1854) — the four classical Pure Land scriptures arranged with prefaces by Wèi Yuán — within which the Wúliángshòu jīng huìyì 無量壽經會譯 KR6p0001 is his synthetic recension of the larger Sukhāvatīvyūha, conflating five extant Chinese translations into a single coherent text. He took the lay-bodhisattva-precepts dharma-name Chéngguàn 承貫 (under which he signs the 1854 preface), and was during his last years a serious devotional practitioner under the influence of Yúnqī Zhūhóng’s 袾宏 Pure Land legacy.
Sources: Qīngshǐ lièzhuàn 清史列傳 juǎn 73; Liú Géngshēng 劉耿生, Wèi Yuán niánpǔ 魏源年譜 (1985); Mitchell 1972, “The Limits of Reformism: Wei Yuan’s Reaction to Western Intrusion.” Modern Asian Studies 6.2; Leonard, Wei Yuan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World (Harvard, 1984).