by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/11/20
Yan Fu
Born: 8 January 1854, Houguan county (now Minhou), Fujian, Qing China
Died: 27 October 1921 (aged 67), Guanhang, Fuzhulang, Fuzhou, Fujian, Republican China
Alma mater: Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Notable work: Gong Jin'ou
Title: President of Fudan University
Term: 1906-1907
Predecessor: Ma Xiangbo 馬相伯
Successor: Xia Jing'guan 夏敬觀
Political party: Kuomintang
This is a Chinese name; the family name is Yan.
Yan Fu (simplified Chinese: 严复; traditional Chinese: 嚴復; pinyin: Yán Fù; Wade–Giles: Yen² Fu⁴, IPA: [jɛ̌n.fû]; courtesy name: Ji Dao, 幾道; 8 January 1854 — 27 October 1921) was a Chinese scholar and translator, most famous for introducing western ideas, including Darwin's "natural selection", to China in the late 19th century.
Life
On January 8, 1854, Yan Fu was born in what is modern day Fuzhou, Fujian Province to a respectable scholar-gentry family in the trade of Chinese medicine. In his early years, Yan Fu’s father greatly encouraged Yan Fu to obtain a high education and prepare for the Imperial examination. However, the death of his father in 1866 caused an abrupt change to these plans. A year later, Yan Fu entered the Fujian Arsenal Academy (福州船政學堂) in Fuzhou, a Western school where he studied a variety of subjects including English, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, astrology and navigation. This was a turning point in young Yan Fu’s life as he was able to experience first-hand contact with Western science, thus inspiring the enthusiasm that carried him through the rest of his career.
After graduating with high honors in 1871, Yan Fu went on to spend the next five years at sea. He first served aboard the training ship Jianwei (建威) and later on the battle cruiser Yangwu (陽武). In 1877–79 he studied at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, England. During his years there, he became acquainted with China’s first ambassador Guo Songtao, and despite their age difference and status gap developed a strong friendship. Benjamin Schwartz mentions in his biography that "they often spent whole days and nights discussing differences and similarities in Chinese and Western thought and political institutions".[1]
Guo Songtao (Chinese: 郭嵩焘, also written 郭崧濤; pinyin: Guō Sōngtāo; Wade–Giles: Kuo Sung-t’ao; 11 April 1818 – 18 July 1891) was a Chinese diplomat and statesman during the Qing dynasty. He was among the first foreign emissaries to be sent abroad by the Qing government, as a result of the Tongzhi Restoration.
Guo was born in Xiangyin, Hunan in 1818. As a young man, Guo studied at the Yuelu Academy in Changsha, where befriended Zeng Guofan. In 1847, Guo was awarded the highest degree in the imperial exams and soon afterwards he became a bachelor in the Hanlin Academy. In 1853, he was called to assist Zeng Guofan in joining the Xiang Army to suppress the Taiping Rebellion in their native province of Hunan. During the suppression of the Taipings Rebellion, Guo distinguished himself as a prominent advocate of the local likin tax as a means of financing the campaigns. In 1852 his forces recaptured Nanchang, Jiangxi from Taiping forces. He later also assisted Li Hongzhang's Huai Army in their campaigns against rebels in the Anhui province.
He called for foreign languages to be taught at a government school in 1859.
Guo became an important member of China's Self-Strengthening Movement in the 1860s and 70s and distinguished himself for his advocacy of a moderate and peaceful foreign policy. Guo became the first Qing minister to be stationed in a western country. He served as Minister to Britain and Minister to France from 1877 through 1879 as part of the United Kingdom's demands after the Margary Affair for an Imperial commissioner to be posted to Britain...
In July 1877 while serving as Chinese Minister to Britain, Guo led an entourage of legation officials on a visit to the Ipswich engineering works of Ransomes and Rapier to see the manufacture of steam locomotives, railway equipment and other engineering products. He travelled from London to Ipswich by train and expressed his deep admiration for Britain’s railway system, commenting that the distance travelled during the two-hour train journey would have taken two or three days in his own country.
He subsequently became a great proponent of railways and other modern engineering development in China, incurring the wrath of conservative and anti-railway Court officials, who resented his representations. In early 1878 he was also appointed Minister to France (concurrent with his British appointment) and moved to Paris, but in late 1878 he was ordered to return to China. Upon his return, fearful for his life because of his pro-foreign views, he returned to his home province and virtually retired from public life, spending his time writing and teaching in an academy.
-- Guo Songtao, by Wikipedia
His return to China, however, did not bring him the immediate success he was hoping for. Though he was unable to pass the Imperial Civil Service Examination, he was able to obtain a teaching position at the Fujian Arsenal Academy and then Beiyang Naval Officers' School (北洋水師學堂) at Tianjin. During this time, Yan Fu succumbed to the opium addiction that had sprung up in China.[2]
It was not until after the Chinese defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95, fought for control of Korea) that Yan Fu became famous. He is celebrated for his translations, including Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology.[3] Yan critiqued the ideas of Darwin and others, offering his own interpretations. The ideas of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" were introduced to Chinese readers through Huxley's work. The former idea was famously rendered by Yan Fu into Chinese as tiānzé (天擇).
Yan Fu served as an editor of the newspaper Guowen Bao.[4] He became politically active, and in 1895, he was involved in the Gongche Shangshu movement, which opposed the Treaty of Shimonoseki ending the First Sino-Japanese War.
The Gongche Shangshu movement (simplified Chinese: 公车上书; traditional Chinese: 公車上書; pinyin: Gōngchē Shàngshū) was a political movement in late Qing dynasty China, seeking reforms and expressing opposition to the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. It is considered the first modern political movement in China. Leaders of the movement later became leaders of the Hundred Days' Reform...
Although the movement was unsuccessful in asking the Qing Government to start reforms, many people in the traditional Chinese community began to realise the importance of reforms. Leaders of the movement such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong and Yan Fu started publishing newspapers in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities, thus raising the attention of the emperor, who later invited them to enter the government to implement reforms. Although both the movement and later the reforms in 1898 failed, many scholars in big cities turned from supporting the traditional thinking to support reforms or revolution.
-- Gongche Shangshu movement, by Wikipedia
In 1909 he was given an honorary Jinshi degree.[5] In 1912 he became the first principal of National Peking University (now Peking University). Today the university holds an annual academic conference in his honor.[6]
He became a royalist and conservative who supported Yuan Shikai (袁世凱) and Zhang Xun (張勛) to proclaim themselves emperor in his later life.
Yuan Shikai (Chinese: 袁世凱; pinyin: Yuán Shìkǎi; 16 September 1859 – 6 June 1916) was a Chinese military and government official who rose to power during the late Qing dynasty. He tried to save the dynasty with a number of modernization projects including bureaucratic, fiscal, judicial, educational, and other reforms, despite playing a key part in the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform. He established the first modern army and a more efficient provincial government in North China in the last years of the Qing dynasty before the abdication of the Xuantong Emperor, the last monarch of the Qing dynasty, in 1912. Through negotiation, he became the first official president of the Republic of China in 1912.
This army and bureaucratic control were the foundation of his autocratic rule as the first formal President of the Republic of China. He was frustrated in a short-lived attempt to restore hereditary monarchy in China, with himself as the Hongxian Emperor (Chinese: 洪憲皇帝). His death shortly after his abdication formalized the fragmentation of the Chinese political system and the end of the Beiyang government as China's central authority.
-- Yuan Shikai, by Wikipedia
Zhang Xun (simplified Chinese: 张勋; traditional Chinese: 張勳; pinyin: Zhāng Xūn or; Wade–Giles: Chang Hsün; September 16, 1854 – September 11, 1923), courtesy name Shaoxuan, was a Qing loyalist general who attempted to restore the abdicated emperor Puyi in the Manchu Restoration of 1917. He also supported Yuan Shikai during his time as president...
Zhang served as a military escort for Empress Dowager Cixi during the Boxer Uprising. He later served as a subordinate of General Yuan Shikai in the Beiyang Army. He fought for the Qing at Nanjing in 1911, and then after the fall of the Qing, he remained loyal to Yuan Shikai. Despite serving as a general in the new Republic, he refused to cut his queue, as a symbol of his loyalty to the Qing. He was called the "Queue General". He seized Nanjing from the KMT in 1913, defeating the Second Revolution. Despite allowing his troops to savagely loot the city, Zhang was named a field marshal by Yuan.
Between 1 July 1917 and 12 July 1917, Zhang Xun proclaimed himself Prime Minister of the Imperial Cabinet by entering Beijing to reinstate the deposed Puyi as Emperor of the Qing dynasty. However, Zhang Xun's proclamation in July 1917 was never recognized by the Government of the Chinese Republic, most of the Chinese people, or any foreign countries. Other generals loyal to the Republic subsequently thwarted Zhang and forced Puyi to abdicate again. Zhang then took refuge in the Dutch legation and never participated in politics again.
-- Zhang Xun, by Wikipedia
He also participated the foundation of Chouanhui (籌安會), an organization which supported restoring monarchy. He laughed at "New Literature Revolutionaries" such as Hu Shih (胡適).
Hu Shih (Chinese: 胡適; pinyin: Hú Shì; Wade–Giles: Hu Shih; 17 December 1891 – 24 February 1962), also known as Hu Suh in early references, was a Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat. Hu is widely recognized today as a key contributor to Chinese liberalism and language reform in his advocacy for the use of written vernacular Chinese. He was influential in the May Fourth Movement, one of the leaders of China's New Culture Movement, was a president of Peking University, and in 1939 was nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature. He had a wide range of interests such as literature, philosophy, history, textual criticism, and pedagogy. He was also an influential redology scholar and held the famous Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本; Jiǎxū běn) for many years until his death.
Hu became a "national scholar" through funds appropriated from the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program.The Boxer Indemnity Scholarship (Chinese: 庚子賠款獎學金; lit.: '[Year] Gengzi Indemnity Scholarship') was a scholarship program for Chinese students to be educated in the United States, funded by the Boxer Indemnity [zh]. In 1908, the U.S Congress passed a bill to return to China the excess of Boxer Indemnity, amounting to over 17 million dollars. Despite the fierce controversies over returning the excess payment, President Theodore Roosevelt's administration decided to establish the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program to educate young Chinese generation. President Roosevelt recognized this program as a chance for “American-directed reform in China” that could maximize U.S's profit by improving the U.S- China relations, bridging China with American culture, and promoting U.S's international image...
Since its inception, the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program has been called "the most important scheme for educating Chinese students in America and arguably the most consequential and successful in the entire foreign-study movement of twentieth century China."
-- Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, by Wikipedia
On 16 August 1910, he was sent to study agriculture at Cornell University in the U.S. In 1912 he changed his major to philosophy and literature, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After receiving his undergraduate degree, he went to study philosophy at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he was greatly influenced by his professor, John Dewey. Hu became Dewey's translator and a lifelong advocate of pragmatic evolutionary change, helping Dewey in his 1919–1921 lectures series in China. He returned to lecture in Peking University. During his tenure there, he received support from Chen Duxiu, editor of the influential journal New Youth, quickly gaining much attention and influence.La Jeunesse[a](or New Youth, Chinese: 新靑年) was a Chinese magazine in the 1910s and 1920s that played an important role in initiating the New Culture Movement and spreading the influence of the May Fourth Movement. Founded by Chen Duxiu during the early Republic of China period, the publication was both an instrument of and witness to the revolutionary changes that swept through China during the era. Over its history, the magazine became increasingly aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, eventually becoming its official theoretical journal. It was shut down by the ruling Nationalist government in 1926...
Influenced by the 1917 Russian October Revolution, La Jeunesse increasingly began to promote Marxism. The trend accelerated after the departure of Hu Shih, who later became the Republic of China's Education Minister. Beginning with the issue of September 1, 1920, La Jeunesse began to openly support the communism movement in Shanghai, and with the June 1923 issue it became the official Chinese Communist Party theoretical journal. It was shut down in 1926 by the Nationalist government. La Jeunesse influenced thousands of Chinese young people, including many leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.
-- New Youth, by Wikipedia
Hu soon became one of the leading and influential intellectuals during the May Fourth Movement...The May Fourth Movement was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement which grew out of student protests in Beijing on 4 May 1919.
Students protested against the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, they especially protested against its decision to allow Japan to retain territories in Shandong that had been surrendered by Germany after the Siege of Tsingtao in 1914. The demonstrations sparked nation-wide protests and spurred an upsurge in Chinese nationalism, a shift towards political mobilization, a shift away from cultural activities, a move towards a mass base and a move away from traditional intellectual and political elites.
Many radical, political, and social leaders of the next five decades emerged at this time. In a broader sense, the term "May Fourth Movement" is often used to refer to the period during 1915–1921 more often called the New Culture Movement.
-- May Fourth Movement, by Wikipedia
and later the New Culture Movement.The New Culture Movement was a movement in China in the 1910s and 1920s that criticized classical Chinese ideas and promoted a new Chinese culture based upon western ideals like democracy and science. Arising out of disillusionment with traditional Chinese culture following the failure of the Republic of China to address China's problems, it featured scholars such as Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Hengzhe, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, He Dong, Qian Xuantong, Liu Bannong, Bing Xin, and Hu Shih, many classically educated, who led a revolt against Confucianism. The movement promoted:
• Vernacular literature
• An end to the patriarchal family in favor of individual freedom and women's liberation
• The view that China is a nation among nations, not a uniquely Confucian culture
• The re-examination of Confucian texts and ancient classics using modern textual and critical methods, known as the Doubting Antiquity School
• Democratic and egalitarian values
• An orientation to the future rather than the past
The New Culture Movement was the progenitor [parent] of the May Fourth Movement. On 4 May 1919, students in Beijing aligned with the movement protested the transfer of German rights over Jiaozhou Bay to Imperial Japan rather than China at the Paris Peace Conference (the meeting setting the terms of peace at the conclusion of World War I), transforming what had been a cultural movement into a political one.
-- New Culture Movement, by Wikipedia
He quit New Youth in the 1920s and published several political newspapers and journals with his friends. His most important contribution was the promotion of vernacular Chinese in literature to replace Classical Chinese, which was intended to make it easier for the ordinary person to read. The significance of this for Chinese culture was great—as John Fairbank put it, "the tyranny of the classics had been broken". Hu devoted a great deal of energy, however, to rooting his linguistic reforms in China's traditional culture rather than relying on imports from the West. As his biographer Jerome Grieder put it, Hu's approach to China's "distinctive civilization" was "thoroughly critical but by no means contemptuous." For instance, he made a major contribution to the textual study of the Chinese classical novel, especially the 18th century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, as a way of establishing the vocabulary for a modern standardized language. His Peking University colleague Wen Yuan-ning dubbed Hu a "philosophe" for his wide-ranging humanistic interests and expertise.
Hu was the ROC ambassador to the U.S. between 1938 and 1942. He was recalled in September 1942 and was replaced by Wei Tao-ming. Hu then served as chancellor of Peking University, which was then called National Peking University, between 1946 and 1948. In 1957, he became the third president of the Academia Sinica in Taipei, a post he retained until his death. He was also chief executive of the Free China Journal, which was eventually shut down for criticizing Chiang Kai-shek.
-- Hu Shih, by Wikipedia
On October 27, 1921, after returning to his home in Fuzhou only a year earlier to recuperate from his recurring asthma, Yan Fu died at the age of 67.
Translation theory
Statue of Yan Fu at Tianjin
Further information: Chinese translation theory
Yan stated in the preface to his translation of Evolution and Ethics (天演論) that "there are three difficulties in translation: faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance" (譯事三難:信達雅). He did not set them as general standards for translation and did not say that they were independent of each other. However, since the publication of that work, the phrase "faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance" has been attributed to Yan Fu as a standard for any good translation and has become a cliché in Chinese academic circles, giving rise to numerous debates and theses. Some scholars argue that this dictum actually derived from Scottish theoretician of translation, Alexander Fraser Tytler.
Though Yan Fu's classical prose did its best to meet the standards of "faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance", there were those who criticized his works for not being accessible to the younger generations. In particular, a famous liberal from the May Fourth Movement, Cai Yuanpei, stated in an article written in 1924: "...[Yan Fu's translations]...seem to be old-fashioned and his literary style is difficult to comprehend, but the standard with which he selected books and the way he translated them are very admirable even today".[7] Other critiques of his work arose as Chinese scholars became more aware of Western learning.
Translated works
Yan Fu's translation of Evolution and Ethics
Yan Fu was one of the most influential scholars of his generation as he worked to introduce Western social, economic and political ideas to China. Previous translation efforts had been focused mainly on religion and technology. Yan Fu was also one of the first scholars to have personal experiences in Western culture, whereas many prior scholars were students in Japan who then translated Western works from Japanese to Chinese. Yan Fu also played an important role in the standardization of science terminology in China during his time serving as the Head of the State Terminology Bureau.
In 1895 he published Zhibao 直報, a Chinese newspaper founded in Tianjin by the German Constantin von Hannecken (1854-1925), which contains several of his most famous essays:
• Lun shi bian zhi ji 論世變之亟 (On the Speed of World Change)
• Yuan qiang 原強 (On the Origin of Strength)
• Pi Han 辟韓 (In Refutation of Han Yu)
• Jiuwang jue lun 救亡決論 (On our Salvation)
Later, from 1898 to 1909, Yan Fu went on to translate the following major works of Western liberal thought:
• Evolution and Ethics Thomas Henry Huxley as Tianyan lun 天演論 (On Evolution) 1896-1898
• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith as Yuan fu 原富 (On Wealth) 1901
• The Study of Sociology by Herbert Spencer as Qunxue yiyan 群學肄言 (A Study of Sociology) 1903
• On Liberty by John Stuart Mill as Qunji quanjie lun 群己權界論 (On the Boundary between the Self and the Group) 1903
• A System of Logic by John Stuart Mill as Mule mingxue 穆勒名學 (Mill’s Logic) 1903
• A History of Politics by Edward Jenks as Shehui tongquan 社會通詮 (A Full Account of Society) 1903
• The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu as Fayi 法意 (The Meaning of the Laws) 1904-1909
• Primer of Logic by William Stanley Jevons as Mingxue qianshuo 名學淺說 (An Outline of Logic) 1909
See also
• Translation
References
• Benjamin I. Schwartz (1964). In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• (in Chinese) Shen Suru 沈蘇儒 (1998). Lun Xin Da Ya: Yan Fu Fanyi Lilun Yanjiu (論信達雅:嚴復翻譯理論硏究 "On faithfulness, understandability and elegance: a study of Yan Fu's translation theory"). Beijing: Commercial Press.
• Wang, Frederic (2009). “The Relationship between Chinese Learning and Western Learning according to Yan Fu (1845-1921).” Knowledge and Society Today (Multiple Modernity Project) Lyon, France.
Notes
1. Benjamin I. Schwartz (1964). In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pg 29
2. Benjamin I. Schwartz (1964). In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Pg 32
3. Yan Fu. Britannica.com.
4. Hegel, Robert E. "The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century" (book review). Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), ISSN 0161-9705, 07/1983, Volume 5, Issue 1/2, pp. 188–191 - Cited p. 189.
5. Lin, Xiaoqing Diana. Peking University: Chinese Scholarship and Intellectuals, 1898-1937. p. 41.
6. First Yan FU Academic Forum held at PKU. Peking University.
7. Huang, Ko-wu (2003). "The Reception of Yan Fu in the Twentieth-Century China." University Press of America. 25-44
External links
• (in Chinese) Detailed biography and with related essays
• (in Chinese) Some of his works on-line, including the translation of Evolution and Ethics