Wang Nai Liang Collection

Author: Editorial Group of "Collected Works of Wang Naiqiang", School of Environment, Peking University
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: A Review and Prospect of Learning Geography
I have been engaged in teaching and researching geography since 1941, which has been more than half a century. It is rather absurd when people ask me what geography is, what its main research objects are, why society needs geography, and why it seems to have emerged earlier in history than many other sciences. I cannot answer these questions clearly and confidently. To be honest, studying geography was not my original intention. In high school, I wanted to study physics in the future. After entering university, I took general physics in my freshman year and did not perform too poorly. However, when I took intermediate physics in my sophomore year, I suddenly realized that I was not good at abstract thinking, and that studying physics or mathematics would not lead to a broad future. Since I was still unwilling to leave the field of science, I chose the Department of Geographical Sciences, which at that time combined geology, geography, and meteorology into one department. During my junior and senior years, I specialized in geography because I felt that geography was more descriptive, and I had self-proclaimed a certain strength in this area, so I made this choice. Among my classmates from high school who wanted to study physics, many did, though of course, many did not end up in the physics department. One of my closest friends among them switched to meteorology. He became one of the founders of modern meteorology in China (people in the field prefer to use the term atmospheric physics, which naturally includes meteorology). I often thought that if he had fulfilled his wish and entered the physics department, his later achievements would not have been so great.
After graduating from the geography department, I still did not fully understand what the specialty of geography was. The professional courses included physical geography, economic geography, human geography, and regional geography of China and foreign countries. The relationship between the courses was loose, and there was no clear foundation for one course based on another. The content of the same course was also unclear in terms of mutual dependencies. Regional geography courses were just a pile of data, and the explanation of the interdependence between regional elements was far from sufficient. At the same time, I took the geomorphology course from the geology department, which was then called physical geography. The content of geomorphology was also included in the physical geography course of the geography department and was a major part of it, but it was still too brief and far less rich than the content of physical geography in the geology department. From that time on, I decided to focus more on geomorphology in the future and lost interest in other departments of geography. Although I stayed at the university to teach after graduation and my teaching was mainly regional geography, I could only pile up some data.
Between 1948 and 1951, I was fortunate enough to pass the government-funded study abroad examination organized by the then Nationalist government and was selected as a Sino-French exchange student in geography. Chinese students going to France were provided with tuition and living expenses by the French government, while French students coming to China were provided with the same by the Chinese government. I first studied French for a year before going to the University of Paris to attend classes. According to French tradition, geography was placed in the faculty of arts. I went there to listen to Professor Cholley's course on geomorphology. He was an excellent speaker, and his main theory was Davis's cycle of erosion. At the same time, at the faculty of science in the University of Paris, I saw a "Laboratory of Physical Geography and Dynamic Geology," where there were two main professors who were both experts in sedimentology, along with a lecturer and experimental staff. The two professors were: Pr