Peter Tsung Kei Wong 王棕琦, B.A., M.Phil., CUHK, Ph.D., Princeton

Presidential Assistant Professor, City University of Hong Kong

Fellow (Title A), Trinity College, Cambridge

Peter.Wong@cityu.edu.hk / tkw33@cam.ac.uk

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As a philologically informed historian, my research explores the interaction between textual culture, classical scholarship, historiography, poetry, philosophy, and political culture in early China. I also have general interests in the history of reading, the history and philosophy of science, and the history of universities.

I am writing a trilogy that offers a new history of the co-emergence and co-evolution of the book culture, early empires, and classical tradition of China from the third to the first century BCE.

The first volume, based on my 2025 award-winning dissertation, is titled The Big Book Theory: The Unlikely Rise of Long Books and Its Consequences in Ancient China. The multi-chapter big book as a textual form is so firmly established in our modern imagination that its prominence seems natural, timeless, and universal. In ancient Greece, voluminous literary works, such as Herodotus’ Histories, were already prevalent by the fifth century BCE. But the big book was a latecomer and a rare species in the textual ecosystem of ancient China. For centuries, Chinese writers, politicians, philosophers, and historians relied primarily on short, self-standing essays—each generally under two thousand words and written on bamboo strips sewn together like a sushi mat—without dissatisfaction. What, then, motivated the merchant Lü Buwei (291–235 BCE) to compile a numerologically structured, 100,000‑word book on the eve of Qin’s unification of China? What challenges did one encounter when producing the first big book with an inexperienced team? And how did one persuade an audience long accustomed to short essays that an unprecedentedly long book—distributed across numerous scrolls—actually constituted a coherent textual system greater than the sum of its parts, rather than a random set of unrelated essays? Above all, what new opportunities, mentalities, worldviews, and experiences arose from the exponential expansion of textual space? The Big Book Theory traces how, from 239 to 26 BCE, the belated and unlikely emergence of the big book in China sparked a big bang, transforming Chinese textual culture, political culture, historiography, philosophy, and classical studies. 

This project has been recognized with the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship from Princeton University, the 2024 Young Scholar Award from China Times Cultural Foundation, and a Junior Research Fellowship from Trinity College, Cambridge.