Gu Hongming in his time known as Ku Hung-ming (Chinese: 辜鴻銘; Wade-Giles: Ku Hung-ming; Pinyin: Gū Hóngmíng; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Ko͘ Hông-bêng; courtesy name: Hongming; ordinary name: 湯生 in Chinese or Tomson in English) (18 July 1857 – 30 April 1928) was a British Malaya born Chinese man of letters. He also used the pen name "Amoy Ku".
He returned to Penang in 1880, and soon joined the colonial Singapore civil service, where he worked until 1883. He went to China in 1885, and served as an advisor to the ranking official Zhang Zhidong for twenty years.
Leo Tolstoy, whom he had befriended, and Gu were both opposed to the Hundred Days' Reform, which was led by prominent reformist intellectuals of the time, including Kang Youwei.[4]
From 1905 to 1908, he was the director of the Huangpu River Authority (上海浚治黃浦江河道局) in Shanghai. He 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. He resigned the latter post in 1911 as a sign of his loyalty to the fallen imperial Qing government. In 1915, he became a professor at Peking University. Beginning in 1924 he lived in Japan and Japanese-administered Taiwan for three years as a guest lecturer in Oriental cultures. Then he returned to live in Beijing until his death on 30 April 1928 at the age of 72.
An advocate of monarchy and Confucian values, preserving his queue even after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, Gu became a kind of cultural curiosity late in his life. In 1934, writer Wen Yuan-ning wrote: "That ostentatious display of his queue is very symptomatic of the whole man. He is cross-grained: he lives by opposition."[5] Many sayings and anecdotes have been attributed to him, few of which can be attested. Literary figures as diverse as Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Somerset Maugham and Rabindranath Tagore were all drawn to visit him when they were in China. No scholarly edition of his complete works is available.
He was fluent in English, Chinese, Hokkien, German, Russian and French, and understood Italian, Ancient Greek, Latin, Japanese and Malay. He acquired Chinese only after his studies in Europe, and was said to have bad Chinese hand-writing. However, his command of the language was far above average. He penned several Chinese books, including a vivid memoir recollecting his days as an assistant for Zhang Zhidong.
His character appeared in the drama "Towards the Republic" and "Awakening Age".[6]
^"The Late Mr. Ku Hung-Ming," in Wen Yuan-ning, and others, "Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Modern Chinese Celebrities," edited by Christopher Rea (Amherst, MA: Cambria Press, 2018), p. 72.
