The Key to Chinese Civilization

Dekuan Huang is Professor, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University. He is a former president of Anhui University and the Chairman of the Chinese Writing Society. He completed his PhD in Chinese paleography from Jilin University, China, and has been engaged in the study of Chinese language and characters for around three decades. He is also Deputy Director of Unearthed Research and Protection Centre, Tsinghua University. By unearthing and explicating many important documents, he has made a major contribution to the study of the Chinese civilization. He has many publications to his credit, for example, A History of Chinese Philology, Annotated Genealogy of Ancient Chinese Characters, Collected Papers on the Theory of Chinese Characters, Chinese Characters Interpretation and Cultural Tradition, Development of Ancient Chinese characters, and so on. Professor Huang has been a member of the Committee of Chinese Education and the Committee of Social Science of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Part 1: Formation and Evolution
The Formation and Evolution of Chinese Characters
The Main Body of Chinese Characters: The Pictophonetic Structure
Part 2: Textual Analysis and Interpretation
Method and Practice: The Explication of Ancient Chinese Characters
The Cultural Interpretation of Chinese Characters
Part 3: Norm and Research
The Normalization of Chinese Characters and Philological Life
The Research of Chinese Characters: Past and Future