Movie stars, pop idols, teenage heartthrobs and party-hopping socialites, move over. Here comes the professor.

Since the launch of his latest book in Shanghai earlier last month, Yi Zhongtian, the 59-year-old, unassuming associate professor of history at Xiamen University, has been hogging the centre stage in town. The first print run of 550,000 copies of the book, a collection of his series of lectures on the romance of the "Three Kingdoms" in a CCTV programme, has reportedly been sold out.

Never being shy, the professor seems to relish the public limelight on his life, his book and his lectures. And while the book has brought Professor Yi fame and, possibly, fortune, it has also stirred a storm of controversy surrounding his propriety in the arcane world of mainland academia.

Having watched many of Professor Yi's highly opinionated and eminently entertaining lectures on television, I have become one of his many fans. Critics have accused him of crowd pleasing, which they condemned as unbecoming of a serious scholar. As a student of history, I disagree with the basic premise of such criticisms.

In our school, teachers often urged students to think creatively about historical events. We were asked to analyze the motives and thought processes of the principal figures in arriving at their decisions that shaped the course of history. We were also encouraged to ask the question, "What if it happened the other way?"

These are exactly the same elements that have made Professor Yi's discourse so captivating to the general public, because he has succeeded in bringing out the drama in one of the most turbulent periods in China's long history.

On television, he is obviously not supposed to provide all the footnotes of his research, and therefore he should not be criticized for failing to comply with the strictest requirements for delivering a scholastic paper.

After all, Professor Yi is not unique among historians in doing what his critics charge to be "popularizing" history. The late Barbara Tuchman (1912-89), a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote several highly popular historical books, including A Distant Mirror (1978) and The March of Folly (1984), that we laypersons can enjoy and understand.

In Practicing History, a collection of her essays, Ms Tuchman describes the historian as a storyteller who too often discovers a thesis only after the material is thoroughly studied and understood. "Historians must learn when to stop research and start writing it," she wrote. "It is an act of creation."

Although historians have questioned some of Ms Tuchman's dissertations, her enlightening approach to the study of history has widely been held in high regard. She received a number of honorary degrees and was a lecturer at Harvard University, the University of California and US Naval War College.

Professor Yi seems to believe that in history, character is fate, which is one of Ms Tuchman's central themes in The March of Folly. And he knows when to exposit his thesis. If delving into the personalities of major historical figures seems too "creative" to some of his colleagues in academia, Professor Yi has remained unfazed.

In a candid interview on CCTV, Professor Yi said he was not particularly troubled by the criticisms levelled at him, usually by unsigned critics, in newspapers and the many chat rooms on the Internet. "Very few of those criticisms actually merit my response," he said.

In that interview, Professor Yi won the admiration of his many fans not so much with his eloquence, for which he is well-known, but by coming across as being honest to himself. On the question of money, with an obvious reference to the royalty income from his latest book, Professor Yi rhetorically asked: "Why should Chinese intellectuals be condemned to a life of poverty? When will society begin to accord intellectuals their due respect and reward?"

He went on to relate a real-life experience that has helped strengthen his practical view about money, a topic few intellectuals in China are willing to discuss, at least in public. He recalled that upon visiting the widow of a colleague who had just passed away, he was horrified to find that she was living in abject poverty. "There was no furniture to speak of in her home," he said. "She borrowed a few wooden stools from her neighbour for us to sit."

Professor Yi said he is going to reach the mandatory retirement age at Xiamen next year, and he was holding out little hope that any other university will hire him to teach. Universities, he said, abhor controversy.

It is widely estimated that Professor Yi stands to gain at least a few million yuan on royalties from his book. It's money well earned. I am waiting for the second print run to buy my copy.

Email: jamesleung@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 09/05/2006 page4)