15 Facts About Ray Huang

Ray Huang was a Chinese-American historian and philosopher who was an officer in the National Revolutionary Army and fought in the Burma Campaign.

Ray Huang worked with Joseph Needham and was a contributor to Needham's Science and Civilisation in China.

Ray Huang was born in Ningxiang, Hunan Province, in 1918.

Ray Huang's father, Huang Zhenbai, was an early member of the revolutionary group Tongmenghui but became less active in the group over the years.

Ray Huang grew up in Hunan and went on to study electrical engineering at Nankai University, Tianjin, in 1936.

Ray Huang was appointed a Second Lieutenant Platoon Leader in 1941 and was posted as a staff First Lieutenant stationed in India in 1942.

Ray Huang then was a Staff Major in the New First Army in the Burma Theater from 1943 to 1945.

Ray Huang went to the United States to study Chinese history.

Ray Huang was appointed visiting associate professor at Columbia University in 1967, and a professor at the State University of New York, New Paltz Branch, from 1968 to 1980.

Ray Huang was a research fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard in 1970.

Ray Huang worked with the leading American Sinologist John K Fairbank.

Fairbank liked concentrated analysis in short time frames and limited areas, but Ray Huang liked synthesis covering broad time periods.

In 1972, Ray Huang went to Cambridge University and assisted Joseph Needham, who was more sympathetic to Ray Huang's research approach, in Needham's monumental work on the history of Chinese science and technology.

Ray Huang's chosen field of study became financial administration in Ming China, and he published one of his major works, Taxation and Finance in Sixteenth Century Ming China, in 1974.

Ray Huang returned to Cambridge in the mid-1970s and contributed two chapters to the Ming Dynasty Volumes of The Cambridge History of China.