Gu Hongming's Eccentric Chinese Odyssey

By Chunmei Du

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, and calculated pranks. A cultural amphibian, Gu transformed from an "imitation Western man" to "a Chinaman again," and reinterpreted, performed, and embodied "authentic Chineseness" in a time when China itself was adopting the new identity of a modern nation-state.

Gu Hongming's Eccentric Chinese Odyssey is the first comprehensive study in English of Gu Hongming, both the private individual and the public cultural figure. It examines the controversial scholar's intellectual and psychological journeys across geographical, national, and cultural boundaries in new global contexts. In addition to complicating existing studies of Chinese conservatism and global discussions on civilization around the World War I era, the book sheds new light on the contested notion of authenticity within the Chinese diaspora and the psychological impact of colonialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812295955

Book preview

Gu Hongming’s Eccentric

Chinese Odyssey

ENCOUNTERS WITH ASIA

Victor H. Mair, Series Editor

Encounters with Asia is an interdisciplinary series dedicated to the exploration of all the major regions and cultures of this vast continent. Its timeframe extends from the prehistoric to the contemporary; its geographic scope ranges from the Urals and the Caucasus to the Pacific. A particular focus of the series is the Silk Road in all of its ramifications: religion, art, music, medicine, science, trade, and so forth. Among the disciplines represented in this series are history, archeology, anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. The series aims particularly to clarify the complex interrelationships among various peoples within Asia, and also with societies beyond Asia.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Gu Hongming’s Eccentric

Chinese Odyssey

Chunmei Du

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Du, Chunmei, author.

Title: Gu Hongming’s eccentric Chinese odyssey / Chunmei Du.

Other titles: Encounters with Asia.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019] | Series: Encounters with Asia | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018051855| ISBN 9780812251203 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 0812251202 (hardcover: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Gu, Hongming. | Gu, Hongming—Psychology. | Scholars—China—Biography. | Eccentrics and eccentricities—China—Biography. | Identity (Psychology) | East and West. | Confucianism—Relations—Christianity. | China—Intellectual life—19th century. | China—Intellectual life—20th century.

Classification: LCC CT3990.G8 D8 2019 | DDC 920.051—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051855

For my parents who wished for me to "read ten thousand

books and travel ten thousand miles"

Contents

Chapter 1. An Inscrutable Eccentric

PART I. INTELLECTUAL JOURNEY

Chapter 2. In Search of the Spirit of the Chinese People

Chapter 3. The Rise of a Spokesman from the East

Chapter 4. Clash of Religions

PART II. PSYCHOLOGICAL PASSAGE

Chapter 5. How an Imitation Western Man Became a Chinaman Again

Chapter 6. Projections on a Chinese Screen

Chapter 7. To Reverence the King

Chapter 8. A Trickster’s Trip on a Möbius Strip

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Gu Hongming’s Eccentric

Chinese Odyssey

Chapter 1

An Inscrutable Eccentric

(dong xi nan bei zhi ren)

Born in the South (Penang), educated in the West (Europe), married to a woman from the East (Japan), and now working in the North (Peking)

Noted for his ultraconservatism and eccentricity, Gu Hongming (1857–1928) remains one of the most controversial figures in modern Chinese intellectual history.¹ Born a colonial elite in Penang, Gu spent a decade of his formative years in Europe, learning to be what he called an imitation Western man.² In his late twenties, however, he became a Qing loyalist and Chinese spokesman who defended the Manchu monarchy, Confucian morality, and Chinese traditions until the end of his life. Having received a thorough Western training, including a degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1877, Gu was deeply influenced by European Romanticism and conservatism. After his so-called conversion to become a Chinaman again,³ Gu devoted his life to translating Confucian classics into English and interpreting the spirit of the Chinese people to the Western world through numerous English writings.⁴ He foresaw the disastrous long-term consequences of industrialism and imperialism, then at their peak, and called for a revival of Confucianism as the antidote for modern Western civilization. Attacked by leading Chinese intellectuals during his lifetime for being an ultraconservative, Gu’s sharp critiques of Western industrialism, materialism, and militarism nevertheless gained him international fame as the principal defender of Confucianism in China, especially after World War I.⁵

Gu Hongming flaunted the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic norms of the day. He enjoyed a daily rickshaw ride, showcasing his queue after the 1911 revolution when everyone else was embracing Western culture as a symbol of progress. He called Empress Dowager Cixi a virtuous and beloved mother of the nation when most people saw her as reactionary, corrupt, or deviant. He defended concubinage with the famous analogy of one teapot matching multiple teacups, rather than vice versa. He relentlessly announced his sexual escapades involving prostitutes and singsong girls. He frequently insulted foreigners everywhere, from a random Scottish man in a movie theater to the faculties of Peking University. After meeting the English writer W. Somerset Maugham, he wrote the visitor a set of love poems in calligraphy as a farewell gift. In a 1921 New York Times interview, he said Westerners were all barbarians.⁶ Gu Hongming’s conservative ideas and unusual behaviors were eccentric, to say the least.

Is Gu Hongming a Chinese sage⁷ and an Eastern prophet,⁸ or a crazy⁹ fraud and a lunatic of a dangerous kind?¹⁰ This study examines the controversial scholar’s intellectual and psychological journeys across geographical, national, cultural, and racial boundaries. Adopting a global-historical approach, I first reevaluate Gu’s roles in transcultural exchanges during the major crisis of the World War I era. He engaged in intensive debates and dialogues with Western sinologists, missionaries, and travelers to China, and forged a unique intellectual and life trajectory as a diasporic professional and global scholar. In addition, I try to unfold a trickster-sage figure who danced between critical intellectual engagements and symbolic public performance, fighting modern Western civilization with pranks and lampoons in a time dominated by industrial power and empire building. Gu Hongming’s defense of China was both personal and national, and his resistance of the West was as much psychological as intellectual. For an examination of the fascinating odyssey of this Chinese trickster-sage, let’s begin with his life journey.

A Biographical Sketch

Gu Hongming was born in the British colony of Penang in 1857. Located off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, the island of Penang had been a British colony since 1786 and, at the time of Gu’s birth, it was part of the Straits Settlements, together with Malacca and Singapore.¹¹ Under British rule, the island transformed from a small jungle into a commercial center and multiethnic zone where Malay, European, Chinese, and Indian cultures interacted and mingled.

Gu came from a wealthy Chinese family that had originally emigrated from Fujian, where the majority of Chinese immigrants to the Straits Settlements originated. Gu’s clan belonged to the elite group of Straits-born Chinese and for several decades remained one of most prominent Chinese families in Penang.¹² His great-grandfather Gu Lihuan (Koh Lay-huan), one of the earliest settlers in Penang, was appointed as the first Chinese Kapitan by Captain Francis Light in May 1786, when Light claimed Penang for the British East India Company.¹³ Most of Gu Lihuan’s descendants worked as political and commercial intermediaries between the British and the Chinese communities in the colonies, amassing a considerable fortune from their position.¹⁴ Gu Lihuan’s second son, however, was sent back to China for education and succeeded in earning the prestigious palace graduate (jinshi) degree in the Qing government’s civil service examinations, and later became a Qing official in Taiwan.¹⁵ This branch of the Gu clan has been influential in Taiwan since the era of Japanese occupation. Its descendants include the prominent economic tycoon Gu Xianrong (Koo Hsien-jung), who helped Gu Hongming (his cousin) when he was in financial difficulty after the 1911 revolution and hosted Gu’s visit to Taiwan in 1927.¹⁶ Gu’s father, Gu Ziyun (Kaw Chee Hoon), worked for a plantation owned by a prominent Scottish entrepreneur named Forbes Scott Brown.¹⁷ Gu’s elder brother, Gu Hongde (Kaw Hong Take), set up a company that built Western style houses in the new treaty port of Fuzhou in 1864. He later expanded his construction business to Hong Kong and was successful enough to be awarded the title of Justice of the Peace (Taiping shenshi) in 1886.¹⁸ Gu Hongming appeared to have maintained a close relationship with his elder brother, continuing his visits before and after his sojourn in Europe and helping to support the brother’s family after the latter’s death on Hainan Island in 1901.

In many ways Gu Hongming was brought up in a familial, political, and sociocultural environment quite distinct from that of the Chinese literati of his generation in Qing China. Together with his family, Gu lived in the Brown estate in Sungai Nibong, outside downtown Penang, and had close interactions with the Brown family members. Such a hybrid living experience separated him from the children of poor immigrant families, especially the recent coolies living in downtown Penang.¹⁹ He claimed that he had little or no education before going to Scotland, and the only thing that he learned while climbing coconut trees and swimming rivers in the plantation jungles of Penang was Malay songs.²⁰ But he actually received two to three years of formal education, from age twelve to age fourteen, in the Penang Free School, the oldest English school in the Straits Settlements. Established in 1816 to train intermediaries for colonial rule, the school admitted students of different races and religion.²¹ Also, unlike other elite children of his age in China, who were under pressure to master Confucian classics and succeed in the civil service examinations, Gu read the works of John Milton, from which he proudly recited later in his life, claiming that it was done in the similar manner as the mastery of Confucian writings, through memorization without understanding the meaning of one single word of it.²²

As some English education was considered beneficial to a career in the colony, Gu’s English education was typical among local elite Chinese families; his brother and cousins were also alumni of the school. In contrast to the literati in Qing China, most of Gu’s family members were nearly illiterate in classical Chinese, spoke Southern Fujian (Minnan) dialect and the Hokkien-Malay creole known as Baba Malay, and appeared to be Peranakan, a term for a creolized Chinese group whose language and culture integrated both Chinese and Malay elements.²³ In their choice of career, Gu’s family exemplified the priority placed on material wealth over scholarship in local Chinese communities throughout Southeast Asia. A degree of proficiency in English was considered desirable because of its instrumental value, while mastery of the Chinese classics was not regarded as necessary or valuable. Gu grew up in essentially a colonial and culturally hybrid setting, with different political, social, and value systems from those encountered in the Qing empire, where the centuries-old negotiation between Manchu rule and Confucian cultural and bureaucratic practices presented a different set of issues. As a consequence, while the trajectory of Gu’s life would eventually resemble and overlap with that of many intellectuals from the mainland, especially those who received a European education and went on to pursue careers in China, Gu’s colonial origins would continue to shape his thinking throughout his life in subtle but significant ways.

In 1870–1871, Gu went to Scotland with his guardian, Forbes Scott Brown.²⁴ This fourteen-year-old Chinese boy left Penang for Europe wearing a queue. For about three years, Gu Hongming stayed in Leith, at the time a small port town and now part of the city of Edinburgh. He joined Brown’s two Eurasian sons, who were about the same age as he, at the Leith Academy, a small private school partly funded by Brown and headed by his son-in-law Peter Gardner.²⁵ Later in life, Gu spoke highly of the Leith Academy’s curriculum and textbooks in which no political economy and useful knowledge of shoddy reading matter were allowed, and only pure high class literature was included.²⁶ Gu passed the matriculation examination and started attending the University of Edinburgh in 1873, at the age of sixteen. Although Chinese biographers have often pointed to this as evidence of Gu’s precocity, it was in fact not uncommon among Edinburgh freshmen to enter at this age.²⁷ Gu studied in the Faculty of Arts, which required two years each of Humanity (Latin), Greek, and mathematics, and one year each of logic and metaphysics, moral philosophy, natural philosophy (physics), and rhetoric and English literature.²⁸ The Edinburgh curriculum in the arts provided a solid ground for Gu’s training in the Western classics.²⁹ He excelled in Latin, winning third prize in his first year. He read the works of Virgil, Horace, Livy, Cicero, Tacitus, Lucretius, and Plautus, as well as books on Roman history, literature, and the antiquities, and frequently quoted from them in his later writings. In his Greek class, Gu admired Professor John Stuart Blackie, the only professor who was original and inspiring in his teaching,³⁰ from whom he learned selected portions by Xenophon, Homer, Thucydides, Plutarch, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Lucian.³¹ Among the English literary greats whom Gu identified as influences were Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and, most of all, Alfred Tennyson. Additionally, the Scottish Enlightenment, especially the school of common sense realism, still dominated Scottish thought during Gu’s college years and had a strong influence on his later interpretation of Confucianism.³² Prominent Enlightenment thinkers included Thomas Reid, Francis Hutcheson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and Dugald Stewart, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh from 1785 to 1819, all of whom were on the reading list for Gu’s moral philosophy class. Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysic of Ethics and John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism were also part of Gu’s required reading.³³ The famous Scottish essayist, philosopher, and historian Thomas Carlyle had a particular influence on Gu’s political and cultural beliefs. Carlyle was appointed the university’s rector in 1865, and his writings were influential in the Victorian era and popular among Edinburgh University students.

Gu Hongming distinguished himself from the other Chinese of his generation who spent considerable time in the West by his young age at his first encounter with the West, the length of his systematic study of Western learning, and the depth of his engagement with Western classical culture. He went to Edinburgh as an adolescent from an overseas settlement with little formal training in classical Chinese culture and without a clear political or religious agenda. Gu was neither burdened by Chinese tradition nor preoccupied with the conflict between history and value that supposedly occupied the minds of Liang Qichao and others of his time.³⁴ Nor did he feel responsible for the search for the secret of Western material progress as illustrated by the case of Yan Fu, an influential scholar and translator, especially during the Self-Strengthening movement.³⁵ For Gu, it was personal intellectual interests combined with career concerns that directed his path of study and formulated his philosophical orientations. He was deeply drawn to Greece and Rome as the origins of Western civilization, and to classical European traditions. Gu received a liberal arts education and had a more thorough classical training in Western literature and culture than most Chinese students at the time, who studied more technical and pragmatic subjects, such as science, engineering, medicine, and law. The reforming Qing government during the Self-Strengthening movement sent hundreds abroad to become specialists in applied technical subjects without much concern for the humanities. In April 1877, Gu Hongming graduated from the University of Edinburgh with the degree of master of arts, equivalent to an undergraduate degree today, as one of seventy arts graduates that year.³⁶ Over the next two years, Gu continuously traveled and studied in Europe. He improved his proficiency in other European languages, including German, French, and Italian, and further devoted himself to German literature, especially the works of Goethe.³⁷ Many unverified sources suggest that Gu received a master’s degree in civil engineering from Leipzig University and several doctoral degrees from institutions in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and even Turkey.³⁸ However, much remains unknown about the details of Gu’s activities during his last two years in Europe.

Gu Hongming returned to Penang by the summer of 1879, after a ten-year sojourn in Europe. A few months after his departure from Scotland, he lamented, Faces familiar in my infant years; But now grown alien to my traveled eyes.³⁹ He was now an adult of twenty-three who spoke fluent English, wore a Western suit, and no longer had a queue. By this time his parents and Scottish guardian were all deceased. Soon after his arrival in Penang, Gu left again and went to stay with his brother in Fuzhou. For about two years he worked as a private secretary to Sir Thomas Wade in the British Legation in Beijing, followed by a short stint at the Office of the Colonial Secretary in Singapore.⁴⁰ At the end of 1881, Gu was in Hong Kong, where he was hired as an interpreter by the well-known British geographer Archibald Ross Colquhoun, who later wrote very negative portraits of Gu after he left Colquhoun’s expedition. Many details on Gu’s activities between 1882 and 1885 remain obscure. He was probably living between Fuzhou, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, where his brother had relocated. During this time, Gu continued to learn mandarin and classical Chinese and wrote for English newspapers. In 1885 Gu reached another turning point in his life when he became a private secretary to Viceroy Zhang Zhidong, a powerful Qing official.⁴¹ This began Gu’s professional career in China, one that lasted more than forty years. Gu Hongming was drawn to Zhang by the latter’s fame as an erudite scholar, which fit the idealized conception of a Confucian scholar-official that he was forming. Gu served as one of Zhang’s loyal private secretaries from 1885 until the latter’s death in 1909, two years before the fall of the Qing dynasty. His work as a member of Zhang’s staff (mufu) involved translating, consulting, and dealing with Western affairs.⁴² Among the famous visitors that Gu hosted were Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the future Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and Japanese prime minister Itō Hirobumi.⁴³ Gu’s position and income were not very high.⁴⁴ Nor did his personality gain him many friends on the staff. Yet he remained useful. When Viceroy Zhang transferred from Canton to Wuchang in 1888, Gu was one of the five secretaries selected to accompany him.⁴⁵ From late 1905 to 1910, Gu was director of the Huangpu Conservancy Board in Shanghai, an agency established under the Boxer Protocol of 1901 to improve the Shanghai harbor.⁴⁶ In 1908, as a vice director of the newly founded Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Waiwubu Yuanwailang) in Beijing, Gu delivered a four thousand–character memorial address to the Guangxu Emperor in which he urged extreme caution against westernization, including the adoption of Western-style legal and political practices,⁴⁷ and in 1910 he was awarded an honorary jinshi degree in humanities.⁴⁸

Around 1910 Gu started working at the Imperial Polytechnic College (Nanyang Gongxue) in Shanghai, predecessor of today’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University,⁴⁹ and continued his absolute support of the Qing monarchy. He attacked both the snob-literati in China, represented by Kang Youwei, who wanted to replace the civilization of China with an imitation paper civilization from the West, and the mob-literati, represented by Sun Yat-sen and consisting of foreign-educated students who became fanatic about destroying Chinese civilization through revolution.⁵⁰ During the 1911 revolution, Gu was driven out of the school by radical students who attacked his raging antirevolutionary publications in foreign newspapers in China and posted placards calling for his extermination.⁵¹ His family took refuge in the French settlement and then stayed in a soap factory owned by a sympathetic Austrian in Shanghai.⁵² By late 1911 Gu had gone to Qingdao and Beijing, joining other loyal Qing subjects and former colleague-friends. Starting in March 1912, if not earlier, the unemployed Gu stayed in the Austro-Hungarian Legation in Beijing, with the help of Minister Arthur von Rosthorn, while his family remained in Shanghai for another few months.⁵³ Gu Hongming never served the Republican governments in his remaining years and continuously denounced the revolution, the Republican system, and Western learning while gaining a reputation for his staunch support of Confucianism, the Manchu monarchy, footbinding, and concubinage. His political and cultural conservatism can be attributed to both his intellectual and ideological beliefs and his personal experience as a former colonial figure. Perhaps due to his strong criticisms of the revolution and his attacks on the new Republican government of Yuan Shikai as incapable, extravagant, and utterly corrupt,⁵⁴ Gu felt so unsafe in 1913 that he made plans to move to Taiwan permanently.⁵⁵ This plan never materialized, however, and starting around 1915 Gu taught at Peking University as a professor in the Department of English Literature.⁵⁶ During the notorious two-week Manchu restoration coup by Queue General Zhang Xun in July 1917, he was appointed senior vice secretary of foreign affairs.⁵⁷ Gu’s conservative positions and high-profile public displays irritated the radical students and faculty at Peking University during the ongoing May Fourth movement. The rebellious youngsters confronted him inside and outside the classroom. Gu was at a very low ebb, and left Peking University in the early 1920s.⁵⁸

For most of the period of October 1924 through July 1927, Gu lived in Japan while teaching at the newly founded Great Asiatic Culture Association (Daitō Bunka Kyōkai).⁵⁹ On his way to Japan in September 1924, he visited Korea, where he was entertained by Admiral Baron Saitō (Saitō Makoto), the governor-general of Korea. Invited by his clan member Gu Xianrong, Gu also visited Taiwan via Japan for a month during November and December 1924; there, he visited colonial officials and local schools and gave many lectures to a variety of groups.⁶⁰ In June 1925 Gu briefly returned China to meet the warlord Zhang Zuolin in Manchuria to discuss the possibility of working as his political advisor. But he was said to have declined the offer and soon returned to Tokyo.⁶¹ Gu’s stay in Japan in his very last years was partly due to his admiration for Japan, which he called the heir to the true Chinese civilization, and partly due to his financial difficulties after the revolution. He depended on writing, teaching, and occasional help from friends and sympathizers to support his family. While some anecdotes suggest his indulgence in the entertainment world, his daily living conditions were also said to be moderate at most, and in one contemporary’s words, he lived and died a very poor man.⁶² Gu Hongming died in Beijing on April 30, 1928, just before he was to have assumed the post of president of Shandong University.⁶³ He did eventually meet the last Qing emperor in person a few months before his death, considering it the proudest day of his life. He was said to have been in a state of awe-stricken speechlessness, and the memory of this day consoled the old man’s soul . . . when he lay dying.⁶⁴

A Polemical Figure

Gu Hongming’s life and ideas have posed a challenge to scholarly consensus since his own time. To some, he was a harmless and insignificant miscreant, a malicious character. To others, he was a patriotic nobleman who saved face for China on international stages during a humiliating time—a folk hero.⁶⁵ During his lifetime, Gu’s numerous writings and their translations into Western languages, his lecture tours in the Japanese empire, and his interactions with renowned world critics of modernism including Rabindranath Tagore and Leo Tolstoy stimulated heated debates on the values of Eastern traditions. Dissatisfied with sinologists’ versions, especially the one by renowned missionary and scholar James Legge,⁶⁶ Gu retranslated into English three of the Four Books, a major part of the Confucian canon, and thus created arguably the first systematic English translation by a Chinese.⁶⁷ His versions were published in various languages including English, German, French, and Japanese, by major publishing houses in Asia, Europe, and the United States.⁶⁸ During the Boxer Uprising in 1900, Gu published a series of articles triggered by the chaos, later compiled into Papers from a Viceroy’s Yamen that denounced Western powers’ policies toward China as unjust, immoral, and unwise.⁶⁹ Another book that created a stir among European readers was The Story of a Chinese Oxford Movement: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism in China (known in Chinese by the title Qing liu zhuan). Drawing from John Henry Newman’s Oxford movement, Gu’s Chinese Oxford Movement referred to the conservative political movement led by Viceroy Zhang Zhidong and others against liberalism and the modern European ideas of progress and new learning.⁷⁰ First published in 1910, a year after Zhang’s death and a year before the Chinese Revolution, the work expressed Gu’s grief over the failure of the movement and the desperate fights of his colleagues and himself. In 1915 Gu compiled his previous English speeches and articles into The Spirit of the Chinese People, his most influential English work, in which he elaborated his theories on Confucianism and the Chinese culture. Two years later, in Vox Clamantis: Essays on the War and Other Subjects, Gu blamed the outbreak of World War I on the nature of Western civilization, especially its foundation in material progress and industrialism.⁷¹ Compared to his English publications, Gu’s Chinese writings were less substantial and compiled into two collections, Zhang Wenxiang mufu ji wen (Reminiscences of a Chinese Viceroy’s Secretary) (1910)⁷² and Du Yi caotang wenji (Literary Collection by the Pastoral Hall of Reading I Ching) (1922).⁷³ The former was a two-volume collection of over seventy short anecdotes of his twenty-year experience on the staff of Viceroy Zhang Zhidong, some written in very colloquial style. The latter collection consisted of more formal writings in classical language, including proposals, letters, or memorials to government officials or the emperor, as well as Chinese versions of his published English works. In all his works, Gu proclaimed that only Confucianism could save modern Western civilization from its moral bankruptcy and chaos, and that the new China emulating the West also needed to restore Confucianism for its own regeneration. He continued his support of monarchical rule and Confucian ideology with no ambiguity.

Outside China, Gu Hongming emerged as the most well-known exponent of Confucianism and Chinese tradition in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Together with other prominent advocates of the decline of the West and Eastern spirituality, the Confucian sage and his messages were welcomed enthusiastically and reproduced in the Western world, especially in Germany.⁷⁴ Leonard Nelson, a principal leader of German neo-Kantian philosophy, considered Gu the most noble and wise man of the time.⁷⁵ English novelist W. Somerset Maugham and American architect Frank Lloyd Wright reported reading about Gu’s works in English.⁷⁶ Their initial interest turned into meetings with the author in person during their visits to China. Bernard Leach, an eminent British artist who had lived in Asia for many years, said he was greatly indebted to Gu’s introduction of the Chinese traditions, especially through his translation of the Confucian classic Zhongyong.⁷⁷ Chinese students in the West also remembered encountering Gu’s works frequently.⁷⁸ Best known for his advocacy of the Chinese civilization as the remedy to the bankruptcy of modern Western civilization, Gu echoed popular sentiments among Western intellectual elites of the time and provided accessible, authentic, and useful ingredients for their self-critique. His success was largely due to the rise of antimodern sentiments among Westerners in the post–World War I era as well as his talents as a popularizer of Chinese culture for a general Western audience.

In early twentieth-century China, cultural conservatives were among the few who held a more sympathetic attitude toward Gu Hongming. Following Gu’s The Story of a Chinese Oxford Movement, Harvard-educated literature scholar Mei Guangdi defended the true conservatism of Confucianism, critiquing the demoralizing modernism represented by Li Hongzhang.⁷⁹ Mei later became a leader of a group affiliated with the journal Critical Review (Xueheng), a major opponent of the New Culture movement. Wu Mi, another active member of the group and also a Chinese disciple of neo-humanism, wrote a commemoration of Gu Hongming shortly after his death. While seeing his ideas as less insightful compared to his American mentor Irving Babbitt, Wu Mi nevertheless celebrated Gu’s firm belief in Chinese moralism and denunciation of Western utilitarianism and imperialism.⁸⁰ Another rare positive portrait of Gu came from T’ang Leang Li, a European-educated overseas Chinese journalist from Java who worked for the Nationalist Party and foreign press agencies. T’ang identified Gu as the intellectual leader of the opposition to the modernization movement, and called his criticisms against the Western system valid and a useful corrective to the uncritical acceptance of Western ways of the half-educated Chinese in the treaty ports.⁸¹ Gu’s principal Chinese defender, however, was Lin Yutang, an influential writer and scholar educated at Harvard University and the University of Leipzig. In 1934 Lin compiled a special edition on Gu Hongming in the literary journal Renjian shi (The World of Men), stating that a reactionary is also worth studying.⁸² The collection included nine articles by Gu’s former students and Western associates, such as Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, Leo Tolstoy, and W. Somerset Maugham.⁸³ In From Pagan to Christian, often considered an autobiography, Lin celebrated Gu’s first-class mind, creative interpretations of Confucian classics, and role in his own spiritual voyage from a Christian Chinese to an authentic Chinese world.⁸⁴ Lin’s admiration of Gu Hongming was not a random thought, as he claimed in the book’s Editorial Words. These two men had much in common. Both received a thorough English education and only acquired classical Chinese learning on their own as adults after some disillusionment with the West.⁸⁵ Lin Yutang also became known for translating Confucian classics into English and introducing Chinese culture to the Western world, while Gu had achieved a similar reputation a few decades earlier.⁸⁶ Like Gu, Lin believed in Confucianism’s universal character and role in modern society, which he saw even among maturing modern Chinese who have received a Western education.⁸⁷ And ultimately, Lin might have also felt like somewhat of an outcast among his contemporaneous May Fourth writers for introducing classical Chinese literature and a traditional Chinese attitude to Westerners, just like the eccentric Gu, whom no one really understood or cared about.⁸⁸

Despite these sympathetic voices, overall Gu Hongming’s ideas met with indifference at best or outright hostility in China. Few of his English writings were translated into Chinese or introduced to Chinese readers until the 1990s. His works were largely inaccessible to general Chinese readers because of language barriers and were completely discarded by modernist intellectuals during the New Culture movement, who were busily engaged in introducing Western trends and critiquing Chinese traditions. In June 1918 Chen Duxiu, a founder of the Chinese Communist Party, denounced the reactionary Gu Hongming in the famous magazine The New Youth (Xin qingnian, La Jeunesse) that he also founded. In his Interrogation and Re-interrogation letters to another influential and rival journal, Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany), Chen criticized the editor for being Gu’s accomplice by translating and publishing his works that celebrated Confucianism and despotism and opposed Republicanism and constitutional monarchy.⁸⁹ When the editor of Dongfang zazhi pointed out the differences among the positions of Gu Hongming, Kang Youwei, and Zhang Xun, as well as their own, Chen insisted on the legitimacy of grouping Gu together with the other reactionaries.⁹⁰ Li Dazhao, another founder of the Chinese Communist Party and prominent intellectual leader, warned of the dangers of Gu’s ideas and called his view of the constitutional rule pernicious (xie).⁹¹ He further attacked Gu’s claims for Chinese superior spirituality, stating [By] considering the Chinese habit of being unhygienic to be evidence of a Chinese preference of the spiritual to the material, . . . isn’t he trying to make the world filthy? He continued, "For the fact that Europeans paid much attention to Gu’s ideas, we should feel ashamed rather than being proud just because