Gu Hongming

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Gu Hongming (1857-1928) in his old age.

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.

[edit] Life

He was born in Penang, Malaysia, the second son of a superintendent of a rubber plantation, his ancestral hometown being Tong'an, Fujian province, China. The owner of the plantation was fond of Gu Hongming and took him to Scotland for study when the boy was 13. Known as Hong Beng (Hongming in Min Nan dialect) during his studies in Europe, Gu earned a degree in Literature in the University of Edinburgh, and earned a diploma in Civil Engineering in the University of Leipzig.

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 official Zhang Zhidong for 20 years. He occupied a variety of posts during his career, and was a professor at Peking University late in his life.

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 of Qing 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 as Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Somerset Maugham and Rabindranath 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.

[edit] Works

His English works include:

Papers from a Viceroy's Yamen: 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 Chinese Oxford Movement (1910)
The Spirit of the Chinese People (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 rendered William Cowper's narrative poem The Diverting History of John Gilpin into classical Chinese verse (known as 癡漢騎馬歌).