Ch ien Mu

Ch'ien Mu was a Chinese historian, educator, philosopher and Confucian. He is considered to be one of the greatest historians and philosophers of 20th-century China. Ch'ien, together with Lü Simian, Chen Yinke and Chen Yuan, was known as the "Four Greatest Historians" of Modern China (現代四大史學家). Ch'ien was born in 1895 in a prestigious family in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. His ancestor was said to be Qian Liu, founder of the Wuyue Kingdom during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. He received little formal education, but gained his knowledge on Chinese history and culture through traditional family school education and continuous self-study. He started his teaching career as a primary school teacher in his hometown when he was eighteen. In 1930, he was invited by another famous historian Gu Jiegang to be a lecturer in Yenching University in Beijing. He taught at several other universities like Tsinghua University and Peking University until 1937, when Beijing was occupied by the Japanese army. He wrote extensively on Chinese classics, history and Confucian thought. Unlike many 20th-century Chinese intellectuals influenced by the New Culture Movement of the 1910s who were skeptical of traditional Chinese thought and Confucianism, he insisted on the importance of traditional values of Chinese culture. In 1949, he moved to Hong Kong and co-founded New Asia College with help from the Yale-China Association, along with Tang Chun-i, Tchang Pi-kai and other scholars. He served as the president of New Asia College from 1949 until 1965. This college has graduated many great scholars and outstanding members of various communities. After New Asia College became a member college of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and moved to Sha Tin, he resigned. He said that he wanted to devote more time to his scholarship, but he also felt that the college lost its freedom and might eventually disappear. He then founded New Asia Middle School as a non-profit-making Chinese secondary school at the former campus of the college. In 1967, he moved to Taipei and became a fellow of the Academia Sinica in 1968. He continued to research and write on various topics of Chinese history, culture and education. He died in Taipei in 1990 at the age of 95. His complete work was published in 54 volumes.