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. In some articles, he also name himself Amoy Ku.

1 Life
2 Works
3 References
4 External links

Life

He was born in Penang, Malaysia, the second son of a superintendent of a rubber plantation who married a Portuguese girl, 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 10. Known as Hong Beng (Hongming in Min Nan dialect) during his studies in Europe, Gu earned a degree in Literature at the University of Edinburgh, and earned a diploma in Civil Engineering at the University 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 official Zhang Zhidong for 20 years. He occupied a variety of posts during his career, and in 1915 became a professor at Peking University. In 1924 he taught in Japan as a guest professor for three years. Then he came back to Beijing 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 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 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, 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.

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).

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.