- Gu Hongming
Gu Hongming (Chinese: 辜鴻銘;
Wade-Giles : Ku Hung-ming;courtesy name : Hongming; ordinary name: 湯生 in Chinese or Tomson in English) (1857 - 1928) was an Malaysian Chinese man of letters. In some articles, he also name himself Amoy Ku.Life
He was born in
Penang ,Malaysia , the second son of a superintendent of a rubber plantation who married a Portuguese girl, hisancestral hometown being Tong'an, Fujian province,China . The owner of the plantation was fond of Gu Hongming and took him toScotland for study when the boy was 10. Known as Hong Beng ("Hongming" inMin Nan dialect) during his studies in Europe, Gu earned a degree in Literature at theUniversity of Edinburgh , and earned a diploma inCivil Engineering at theUniversity of Leipzig . Subsequently, he went to Paris to study law.After his graduation, he worked in the then colonial
Singapore government for some time. He went to China in 1885, and worked in the think tank of the ranking officialZhang Zhidong for 20 years. He occupied a variety of posts during his career, and in 1915 became a professor atPeking University . In 1924 he taught inJapan as a guest professor for three years. Then he came back toBeijing and lived there until his death.He was familiar with French, Italian,
Ancient Greek ,Latin , Japanese and Malay, as well as Chinese, English and German.An advocate of monarchy and Confucian values, preserving his
plait even after the overthrow ofQing Dynasty , Gu has become a kind of cultural curiosity late in his life. Many sayings and anecdotes have been attributed to him. Few of them can be attested. Literary figures as diverse asRyūnosuke Akutagawa ,Somerset Maugham andRabindranath Tagore were all drawn to visit him when they came to China. Today Gu is often treated as a "cultural oddity". No scholarly edition of his complete works is available.Works
His English works include:
*"Papers from a Viceroy'sYamen : a Chinese Plea for the Cause of Good Government and True Civilization" (1901)
*"ET nunc, reges, intelligite! The Moral Cause of the Russia-Japanese War" (1906)
*"The Story of a ChineseOxford Movement " (1910)
*"" (1915)He acquired Chinese only after his studies in Europe, and was said to have a bad Chinese hand-writing. However, his command of the language is far above average. He penned several Chinese books, including a vivid memoir recollecting his days as an assistant for Zhang Zhidong. He translated some of the
Confucian classics into English, notably "The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius" and "The Universal Order or Conduct of Life"; and renderedWilliam Cowper 's narrative poem "The Diverting History ofJohn Gilpin " into classical Chinese verse (known as 癡漢騎馬歌).References
*Huang Xingtao 黃兴涛 (1995). "Wenhua guaijie Gu Hongming" (文化怪杰辜鸿铭 "Gu Hongming: a cultural eccentric"). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company.
*Kong Qingmao 孔慶茂 (1996). "Gu Hongming pingzhuan" (辜鴻銘評傳 "A biography of Gu Hongming"). Nanchang: Baihuazhou wenyi chubanshe.External links
*zh icon [http://www.guoxue.com/master/guhongming/ghm007.htm Biography and related articles]
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