CONFUCIUS AND ACCOUNTANCY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 305, 24 December 1937, Page 10

CONFUCIUS AND ACCOUNTANCY

A CHINESE CLAIM. “Although accountancy as an organised profession is of comparatively recent birth, the practice of accounting is known to go tar back into antiquity,” remarks "The Certified Accountants’ Journal” (London). “The claim, however, that it originated in China nearly 3000 years ago is new to us. This claim is made by Mr. Thomas Le C. Kuen, president of the Association of Chinese Accountants and Auditors, of Hongkong, who has sent us a cutting from a local newspaper in which he is reported to have made this interesting statement. Mr. Kuen says that as a result of several months’ research work into the history of Chinese accounting, he was fully convinced that accounting originated in China, for in books written by Mencius, an intimate disciple of Confucius, it is stated that ‘Confucius was an accountant to the Government before he became a Minister of the epuntry.’

“It is interesting to know that the accountancy profession can boast so distinguished a past member, but it does not, we think, necessarily follow that China saw the birth of accountancy. Much depends, perhaps, upon what we mean by ‘accountancy’; if the expression is understood simply to mean the keeping of accounts, then it is certain that accountancy was practised centuries before the time of the great Chinese philosopher (who lived 551-479 8.C.). The Sumerian clay tablets in the British Museum and other collections contain records of accounts that were prepared about 2,090 years before Confucius kept accounts for his Government; and it is known that account keeping of a less simple kind was practised in ancient Greece and Rome about the time of Confucius, or earlier. A system resembling in its essentials that in use to-day appears to have originated in Italy in the fifteenth century when Frater Luca Pacioli published his treatise on double-entry book-keeping. “To say at what point on the scale of the evolution of account keeping ‘accountancy’ started would be extremely difficult. We should certainly require more evidence than is in our possession to be convinced that it originated in China in the time of Confucius.”