Gu hongming biography

Gu Hongming was born in Penang, British Malaya (present day Malaysia), the second son of a Chinese rubber plantation superintendent, whose ancestral hometown was Tong'an, Fujian province, China, and his Portuguese wife.
Gu Hongming (born Gu Tangsheng) was born in Penang, Malaysia in 1857, to a plantation superintendant, whose ancestral hometown was in Tong'an, Fujian province.
Gu Hongming in his time known as Ku Hung-ming was a British Malaya born Chinese man of letters.

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Known for his ultraconservatism and eccentricity, Gu Hongming (1857-1928) remains one of the most controversial figures in modern Chinese intellectual history. A former member of the colonial elite from Penang who was educated in Europe, Gu, in his late twenties, became a Qing loyalist and Confucian spokesman who also defended concubinage, footbinding, and the queue. Seen as a reactionary by his Chinese contemporaries, Gu nevertheless gained fame as an Eastern prophet following the carnage of World War I, often paired with Rabindranath Tagore and Leo Tolstoy by Western and Japanese intellectuals.

Rather than resort to the typical conception of Gu as an inscrutable eccentric, Chunmei Du argues that Gu was a trickster-sage figure who fought modern Western civilization in a time dominated by industrial power, utilitarian values, and imperialist expansion. A shape-shifter, Gu was by turns a lampooning jester, defying modern political and economic systems and, at other times, an avenging cultural hero who denounced colonial ideologies with formidable intellect, symbolic performances,

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Gu Hongming – zapomniany „mędrzec Wschodu”

Gu Hongming – the forgotten sage of the East

The article discusses the biography and thought of Gu Hongming. Gu Hongming was a Chinese thinker who won recognition in European academic circles. Still, he was not popular in China. When he lived and studied in Europe on his young years, he acquired broad knowledge on European culture and literature. Afterwards, he became the adviser to Zhang Zhidong, an eminent Chinese politician during the late Qing dynasty who was the promoter of moderate reforms. After his death and the birth of the republican China, Gu Hongming was active as a publicist and teacher in Beijing University. During that time he was often labelled as backward and conservative by his Chinese contemporaries.
The article provides the analysis of complexity of his views that cannot be easily labelled as it was done by many from his contemporary thinkers. His attitude towards China and Western civilization was quite complicated and it should be understood in the background of European conservative thought, romanticism,

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Ku Hung-ming

Chinese writer

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".

Life

Gu Hongming was born in Penang, British Malaya (present day Malaysia), the second son of a Chinese rubber plantation superintendent, whose ancestral hometown was Tong'an, Fujian province, China,^[1] and his Portuguese wife.^[2]^[3] The British plantation owner was fond of Gu and took him, at age ten, to Scotland for his education. He was then known as Koh Hong Beng (the Min Nan pronunciation of his name). In 1873 he began studying Literature at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in the spring of 1877 with an M.A. He then earned a diploma in Civil Engineering at the University of Leipzig, and studied law in Paris.^[where?]

He returned t