College Record 2017

indirect successor and I have always considered it a great honour. He and Sylvia
were very helpful in preparing our way into Oxford, making us feel really welcome.
More importantly, I now got to know him quite well on a more personal level, since
we both frequented the Chinese studies coffee mornings with great regularity. From
‘Professor Dudbridge’ he now became ‘Glen’. He sometimes mused on my very
‘different’ way of presenting information, and I suspect that had I been his student he
would have tried to root my sloppiness out. Luckily, we could maintain a much more
relaxed interaction, in which he would enjoy telling stories about his research as well
as the slightly more distant sinological past of the field that we share. Through him
British and Dutch Sinology came to life in very different ways from its published
research, though always in a respectful way. I especially enjoyed his more recent
reflections on the tensions between more empirical and more conceptual approaches
to the past, which he called ‘Crunchy and fluid ways to think about Chinese history
and literature.’
From the obituary compiled for the University College Record by Dr Robin Darwall-
Smith, its Archivist, by his kind permission and that of Dr Tao Tao Liu and Professor
Barend Ter Haar. Glen Dudbridge contributed ‘Some memories of the College’s
early days’ to the fiftieth-anniversary Wolfson College Record in 2016.
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