10 Facts About Lu Zhengxiang

Lu Zhengxiang was a Chinese diplomat and a Roman Catholic priest and monk.

Lu Zhengxiang was twice Premier of the Republic of China and led his country's delegation at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Lu Zhengxiang studied at home until the age of thirteen, when he entered the School of Foreign Language in Shanghai, specializing in French.

Lu Zhengxiang continued his education at the school for interpreters attached to the Foreign Ministry, and in 1893 he was posted to St Petersburg as interpreter to the Chinese embassy.

Lu Zhengxiang returned to the cabinet as Foreign Minister from November 1912 to September 1913, and reformed the Foreign Ministry: abolishing the complicated bureaucracy of the imperial commissions, requiring knowledge of foreign languages at all levels, and instituting modern civil service examinations for recruits.

Lu Zhengxiang managed to avoid being identified with any particular faction within the new government, but this relative political isolation meant that he was little able to influence policy, and he again resigned.

Lu Zhengxiang became Foreign Minister for the fourth time on 30 November 1917.

Lu Zhengxiang served until 13 August 1920, with deputy minister Chen Lu becoming acting minister during his absence for the peace talks in Paris.

Lu Zhengxiang's planned departure was postponed during the Chinese Civil War, and Dom Lu died in Bruges, Belgium on 15 January 1949.

Lu Zhengxiang's best known work, published in 1945, is an autobiography in French, Souvenirs et pensees, summarizing his diplomatic and political career and his subsequent religious vocation, in which Christianity appears as a completion of the Confucian tradition of "pacifying the universe".