Richard Caspar Rudolph

Richard Casper Rudolph; (May 21, 1909 - April 9, 2003) was an American professor of Chinese Literature and Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles. According to Lothar von Falkenhausen, "He was one of the first generation of serious China scholars trained in the United States."

During World War II, Rudolph headed the Chinese language section of the U.S. Navy Language School at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1943 to 1945,

His second trip in 1973 was as part of the first group of American scholars to enter China just before the normalization of relations.

He enjoyed examining rare books, manuscripts or works by Chinese calligraphers, and also loved sharing his latest finds with others. He was widely known among the campus librarians as well as with his fellow scholars.

Rudolph was best known for his work on the tomb reliefs of the Western Han (Han Tomb Art of West China). He also worked on a wide range of interests including the history of Chinese printing (A Chinese Printing Manual), ancient Chinese archaeology, ancient Chinese historiography, literature, bronzes, tomb objects, tomb iconography, the salt industry, botanical works, medicine, riddles and games, the application of carbon dating to ancient Chinese artifacts, Chinese porcelain in Mexico, early (14th century) Italians in China, Manchu studies, Japanese maps, and the work in Japan of the Swedish naturalist and physician Carl Peter Thunberg in 1775 and 1776. One of the few Western scholars at the time who kept systematically abreast of ongoing archaeological efforts in China, he was asked to direct the American Council of Learned Societies' project “Abstracts of Chinese Archaeology” from 1968 to 1973.

After retiring, Rudolph took up the direction of the University of California Education Abroad Program and continued his research. He became increasingly absorbed with collecting ancient maps, paintings, printing blocks, manuscripts, rare books and porcelain, focusing especially on Chinese and Japanese printing, medicine, botany, physiology, and the reception of Western science by the East. Failing eyesight became a problem for him, as did a variety of life-threatening but largely passing ailments. .

1938

Tsung-Ch’ien, C., & Rudolph, R. C. (1938). Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method: Vol. I. The Hsiao Ching. (H. Glessner Creel, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.

1939

Tsung-Ch’ien, C., & Rudolph, R. C. (1939). Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method: Vol. II. Selections from the Lun Yü. (H. Glessner Creel, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.

1940

Rudolph, Richard C. (1940). "Emu Tanggo Orin Sakda-i Gisun Sarkiyan, An Unedited Manchu Manuscript." In Journal of the American Oriental Society, 60 , no. 4: 554--563. American Oriental Society.

1942

Rudolph, Richard C. (January 1942). “Notes on the Riddle in China.” In California Folklore Quarterly 1, no. 1: 65– 82.

1946

Rudolph, Richard C. (1946). "A Reversed Chinese Art Term." In Journal of the American Oriental Society, 66 , no. 1: 15-17. American Oriental Society.

1947

Rudolph, Richard C. (1947). “Early Chinese References to Fossil Fishes.” In Isis, 36: 155.

1948

Rudolph, Richard C. (1948). "Dynastic. Booty: an Altered Chinese Bronze,". In Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 11:174-180.

Rudolph, Richard C. (1948). “The Jumar in China,” In Isis, 40: 35-37.

1950

Rudolph, R. C. (1950). The Antiquity of t’ou hu. Antiquity, 24(96), 175–178. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00023346 Rudolph, R. C. (1950). Han Tomb Reliefs from Szechwan. Archives of the Chinese Art Society of America, 4, 29–38.

1951

Rudolph, R. (1951). Han Tomb Art of West China: A Collection of First-and Second-Century Reliefs. Berkeley: University of California Press.

1952

Tsung-Ch’ien, C., & Rudolph, R. C. (1952). Literary Chinese by the Inductive Method: Vol. III. The Mencius, Books I-III. (H. Glessner Creel, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.