Abstract

In ancient China, there was no subject such as aesthetics. As an academic discipline, aesthetics was introduced into China from the West in modern times. To the Chinese, it is even a double-importing process, i.e. in addition to bringing in the aesthetics as a discipline eventually from the West, the Chinese also learnt from the Japanese the way to translate it. It is called bigaku in Japanese, and thus called meixue in Chinese, with the same two characters but different pronunciations, and literally means the study of beauty, or a discipline of beauty. A new subject is considered to be established in China since then, which might be seen as aesthetics proper. Chinese scholars in the early 20th Century generally accepted this understanding and they frequently mentioned that aesthetics as a young subject in China.