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Speech at the Banquet for honored guests (with pictures)
Confucius would certainly not have heard of Hong Kong. Even in late Oing times, that 'barren island with scarcely a human habitation', as Lord Palmerston, who was from this College and will have known this room, described it after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, wasn't even properly represented in official maps of the period.

But Confucius did say something about the more northerly non-Chinese tribes that were on the fringes of the cultural heartland of the China of his time. This saying is recorded, not in the Analects on which you draw but in a longer historical narrative of about the same period. In discussion with a nobleman from a non-Chinese tribe, he was forced to concede that the nobleman preserved administrative traditions of greater authenticity than those of his own, the Chinese state:

"After [he had been to see him]. he announced to people: "l have heard it said 'When the Son of Heaven fails in administration, the learning [needed to redress the situation] may reside with the barbarians." This is true, added Confucius."

This acknowledgement that those on the periphery of the Chinese heartland may have had something has been quoted often enough down the centuries. It was used by the Manchu emperors for example, in defence of their imperial project in and beyond China. It was cited leading Chinese intellectuals at the time of their greatest humiliation, the low point of the 1890s, when China looked to the West for technological know-how, And much nearer to home, it was quoted by a Chinese history professor from Peking University, to a graduate reading group in my room in the Faculty of Oriental Studies. A research student of mine put this professor right about a very rare poetic usage that was already, probably, archaic by 400 BCE, but which had been revived for literacy effort in an epigraphical text of the eight century A.D. This professor, was so impressed by my research student's erudition that he quoted Confucius about learning residing with the non-Chinese. And he still recalls the incident. Incidentally, the word for non-Chinese in this quotation has a very long history: in the respected translation by James Legge, the first Professor of Chinese at Qxford, it is !?Dwild tribes'; but the nineteenth century it was a term that referred to any non-Chinese, and not least to the British.

All this invites a long perspective. And surely that is what we may appropriately invoke tonight. China is used to long perspectives, in institutions, in cultural traditions, in dynasties. When the great emperor Taizong inaugurated a period of unprecedented dynastic wealth and stability in the 630s, he told his courtiers that he hoped his dynasty, the Tang, would last for seven hundred years, longer than the Zhou dynasty in which Confucius lived. The Tang did not, as it happened, make three hundred years. Cambridge is about to reach 800, while Oxford is of course a little older. One likes sometimes to remind Chinese friends of the age of our ancient universities.

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