PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON THE PRAGUE SCHOOL OF SINOLOGY II

The aim of this study is to analyse the lives and works of 22 Czech and Slovak Sinologists around Professor Jaroslav Prusek, the members of the Prague School of Sinology from the 1950s to the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in 1968, and partly also later. The Prague School of Sinology became admired by many in the West owing to its achievements in the realms mainly of modern and traditional Chinese literature, linguistics and partly of history and philosophy, but up to now these were not satisfactorily analysed in the scholarly literature. It shows the 'reality and myth' around this extraordinary phenomenon in the history of European Sinology.