1. Gu Hongming was a Chinese scholar born in British Malaya man of letters.
13 Facts About Gu Hongming
1. 2.
Gu Hongming was born in Penang, British Malaya, the second son of a Chinese rubber plantation superintendent, whose ancestral hometown was Tong'an, Fujian province, China, and his Portuguese wife.
3.
Gu Hongming then earned a diploma in Civil Engineering at the University of Leipzig, and studied law in Paris.
4.
Gu Hongming returned to Penang in 1880, and soon joined the colonial Singapore civil service, where he worked until 1883.
5.
Gu Hongming went to China in 1885, and served as an advisor to the ranking official Zhang Zhidong for twenty years.
6.
Gu Hongming served in the Imperial Foreign Ministry from 1908 to 1910, then as the president of the Nanyang Public School, the forerunner of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
7.
Gu Hongming resigned the latter post in 1911 as a sign of his loyalty to the fallen imperial Qing government.
Related searches
Zhang Zhidong 8.
Gu Hongming was fluent in English, Chinese, Hokkien, German, Russian and French, and understood Italian, Ancient Greek, Latin, Japanese and Malay.
9.
Gu Hongming acquired Chinese only after his studies in Europe, and was said to have bad Chinese hand-writing.
10.
Gu Hongming penned several Chinese books, including a vivid memoir recollecting his days as an assistant for Zhang Zhidong.
11.
Gu Hongming's character appeared in the drama "Towards the Republic" and "Awakening Age".
12.
Gu Hongming translated some of the Confucian classics into English:.
13.
Gu Hongming rendered William Cowper's narrative poem The Diverting History of John Gilpin into classical Chinese verse.