At the turn of the twentieth century, China was losing a war it had been fighting for decades, not on the battlefield but in the minds of its own educated class. After successive military defeats to Western powers, the argument for radical Westernization had become almost impossible to resist. Reformers like Wei Yuan had urged China to “learn the barbarians’ superior techniques to control the barbarians.” By the time of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, prominent intellectuals such as Hu Shi, the Columbia-educated philosopher and literary reformer, had gone further still, arguing that only a wholesale adoption of Western institutions, culture, and technology could save China from irrelevance. Newspapers multiplied, study societies formed, and a generation of young Chinese came to regard their own inheritance with something close to contempt.
Gu Hongming fit none of these camps and respected none of them.
A scholar born between worlds
Gu Hongming (July 18, 1857 to April 30, 1928) was, as he liked to say, a man of all directions: “born in the South Seas, educated in the West, married in the East, and serving in the North.” His origins were genuinely complicated. He was born in Penang, then a British colonial possession in the Malay Peninsula, to a father who managed rubber plantations and a mother of Portuguese descent. His great-grandfather had been the first ethnic Chinese to serve as a senior official under British colonial rule in the region. From childhood he read Shakespeare. As a teenager he was sent to Europe.
He graduated from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Leipzig, accumulated what contemporaries described as thirteen doctoral degrees and honorary titles across multiple disciplines, and achieved fluency in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, and Malay. By almost any measure, he was the most deeply educated Chinese person of his generation. He was also, after returning to China in 1880 at age twenty-four, the last person one might have expected to become a ferocious defender of Confucian civilization.
Yet that is what happened. Back in China, something in Gu’s interior life shifted. He grew his Qing queue, the long braid that Manchu rulers had imposed on Han Chinese men as a mark of submission. He took a position in the colonial administration, then moved into the office of Zhang Zhidong, the senior Qing official who led China’s “self-strengthening” modernization effort, serving as translator and political aide. In his spare hours he read his way through the classical Chinese canon with the same systematic intensity he had applied to European philosophy, beginning with the Kangxi Dictionary, the great imperial reference work compiled under the Qing dynasty’s second emperor.
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He ended up somewhere unusual: a man with a deeper command of Western thought than most Westerners, who had concluded that Chinese civilization was not behind the West but simply different from it, and that the difference was worth defending at full volume.
Confronting Europe’s ‘Yellow Peril’ doctrine on its own terms
The late nineteenth century was not a hospitable moment for that argument. In 1895, German Kaiser Wilhelm II had given public voice to the “Yellow Peril” theory, warning that East Asian peoples posed an existential threat to European civilization and urging white nations to unite against them. The theory spread quickly through Western popular culture and political commentary, feeding an existing market for racial contempt toward China that had been deepened by the Qing dynasty’s military failures and by the work of Western missionaries and Sinologists who routinely mistranslated or misrepresented Confucian texts.
Gu was enraged. He believed these men had defaced something precious, and he responded in the only medium that could reach European and American readers: polished, idiomatic English prose.
His essay “Civilization and Anarchy,” published in English, brought a direct rebuttal of Western racial and cultural prejudice to a Western audience. He argued that Chinese civilization possessed profound moral depth that Europeans were systematically misreading, and that military weakness did not equal cultural inferiority. The essay earned him a reputation as the first Chinese intellectual to mount a sustained, credible counterattack against Yellow Peril ideology in the Western public sphere. He did not soften his arguments for Western sensibilities; he sharpened them against Western intellectual standards.
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Translating Confucius for an audience that assumed he was irrelevant
Gu’s most enduring contribution was also his most painstaking. He translated the Analects of Confucius, the Doctrine of the Mean, and the Great Learning into English and German, making him the first Chinese scholar to bring Confucian classics to Western readers in languages that could compete with existing European scholarship on equal footing.
Where Western missionaries and professional Sinologists had produced wooden, literal renderings that made Confucius seem archaic and alien, Gu translated by philosophical equivalent, weaving in references to Goethe, Schiller, and the art critic John Ruskin to give European readers a handhold into concepts that had no direct counterpart in their own traditions. In his preface to the Analects, he stated his purpose plainly: he wanted Western readers to examine their prejudices about China and correct their misconceptions. The results were translations that read like original scholarship rather than linguistic exercises.
In 1913, Gu and the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore were reportedly nominated together for the Nobel Prize in Literature, according to accounts that have circulated in Chinese literary histories, though the Nobel Committee’s nomination records for that period remain restricted.
Beyond translation, Gu published essays and books including Spirit of the Chinese People, which made the positive case for Chinese cultural values to an international readership. In 1883 he had published an essay in the English-language newspaper the North China Herald under the title “Chinese Scholarship,” a piece that reverberated through Western intellectual circles.
Leo Tolstoy wrote to him after reading it, saying the essay had deepened his interest in Confucius, Mencius, and Laozi. The two men maintained a correspondence in which they discussed world culture and political affairs. When Ito Hirobumi, Japan’s prime minister and the principal architect of the Meiji constitutional order, visited China and suggested dismissively that Confucius was obsolete, Gu was among those present. He reportedly replied without hesitation: “The teachings of Confucius are truths that hold across all ages, like mathematics. Three times three was nine a thousand years ago, and it is nine today. Japan could not have developed as it has without Confucian teaching.” Ito, by contemporary accounts, had no answer.
His international standing grew to be remarkable for a Chinese intellectual of the era. Mahatma Gandhi reportedly called him “the most noble Chinese.” The British novelist W. Somerset Maugham visited him in Beijing. Tagore came. The Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa made the trip. The saying circulated in Western expatriate circles that a traveler to China might skip the Forbidden City but could not responsibly skip Gu Hongming. He gave ticketed public lectures at the Six Nations Hotel in Beijing’s Legation Quarter, the diplomatic enclave where foreign powers maintained their embassies, charging two yuan per seat at a time when tickets to see the celebrated Peking Opera performer Mei Lanfang cost 1.2 yuan. He sold out every time.
The queue as political statement: What the ‘Last Braid in China’ was actually saying
After the 1911 revolution that ended the Qing dynasty, cutting one’s queue became a visible declaration of revolutionary loyalty. Gu not only refused to cut his; he wore it into lecture halls at Peking University, where he had been appointed professor of English literature in 1915. He arrived in a traditional long gown and a melon-skin skullcap, his thin braid hanging behind him. The writer Zhou Zuoren, in his memoir of the Peking University years, described him as having “the looks of a Westerner, with deep-set eyes and a high nose, a tuft of yellowish hair braided into a small queue.”
Students laughed when he entered. Gu paused, then told them: “My queue is on the back of my head. Yours is in your heart.”
The room went quiet.
Chen Duxiu, the radical intellectual who founded the journal New Youth and helped launch the New Culture Movement, mocked Gu as a reactionary fossil. The ridicule was widespread. Gu absorbed it and continued wearing his gown.
His explanation of the queue was analytical rather than sentimental. He wrote that foreign friends found his loyalty to the Qing dynasty baffling, then explained what that loyalty actually signified: “I am loyal to the Qing not for the dynasty’s sake, but through the dynasty to China’s religion, to the civilization of the Chinese people.” The distinction mattered to him enormously, though most contemporaries dismissed it without engaging with it.
His argument about cultural self-respect proved prescient. He told his fellow Chinese: “Western people will never respect us more because we cut our braids and put on Western suits. When we Chinese Westernize ourselves into foreign ghosts, Europeans and Americans will only despise us further. They will respect us only when they understand who the real Chinese are: a people with a civilization entirely different from theirs, and in no way inferior to it.”
That argument has never been resolved.
By Zi Tenglan
