Ku Chieh-kang (1895-), a professor and historian known for his critically analytic investigations of Chinese antiquity. His best known work, the Ku-shih pien [discussions on Chinese ancient history], was published in seven volumes between 1926 and 1941.

Born into a scholarly Soochow family, Ku Chieh-kang was exposed to the study of classical texts at a very early age. From his grandfather, a student of Han-hsüeh, the rigorous discipline of Ch'ing philology, Ku learned the rudiments of the classical curriculum. His grandmother taught him the vivid folklore of Soochow, which was later to turn his interest to the classical Chinese stage and which gave him many valuable insights into the development and transmission of oral traditions, insights which he later applied to the corpus of Chinese canonical texts. Even as a boy, Ku evidenced an interest in history, the Tso-chuan being his favorite classic. He also began to fill notebooks with lists of discrepancies discovered in the classics and his own juvenile efforts to resolve these conundrums. On one occasion, Ku's questioning cost him dearly: he lost a high-school scholarship for criticizing the Han commentator Cheng Hsuan (127-200). This experience merely intensified Ku's devotion to his special studies and his distaste for hypocrisy and ignorance.

In 1906 Ku had entered the newly founded primary school in Soochow. He then went to middle school, where he remained until 1913. Most of his teachers were unimpressive, and the curriculum was ordinary. However, Ku's studies of the classics under his grandfather's direction continued. At school, he became a close friend of Yeh Sheng-t'ao (q.v.), who, years later when he was editor in chief of the K'ai-ming Book Company, published a number of Ku's works. Not all of Ku's time was devoted to study. For a short time he participated in politics as a member of the She-hui-tang [socialist party] . However, the lure of classical and historical research, combined with the natural skepticism of the historian and the diffidence imposed on him by a speech defect, soon obliged him to drop politics.

In 1913 Ku enrolled at the preparatory school of National Peking University, but he seems to have spent more time attending the theater than studying. Theater did, however, revive his interest in folklore, and he soon began to gather material on the history of the Chinese theater and on different versions of plays performed by various companies. From such researches, combined with his early experience of folklore, Ku developed a feeling for the mechanism of the transmission of oral tradition. He later applied these ideas about the accretion of material around a theme in the traditional drama with great brilliance to the classical accounts of Chinese history, notably the stories of Yao, Shun, Yü, and their predecessors. At Peking University, Ku came under the influence of Chang Ping-lin (q.v.), then recognized as the greatest living philologist and a leading exponent of the ku-wen [old text] school. Chang's lectures introduced him to the complexities of the controversy between the ku-wen school and the chin-wen [new text] school. Ku found Chang a disappointing teacher. He was much more impressed by the K'ung-tzu kai-chih k'ao of K'ang Yu-wei (q.v.), the leader of the chin-wen school, who dared speculate that the old texts were, in fact, Han forgeries. Ku did not, however, espouse the chin-wen school, for he considered that school too willing to "twist the past in favor of present changes." In 1917 Hu Shih (q.v.) returned from the United States, and in him Ku found a mentor and a friend. A circle of scholars formed about the two men to engage in critical discussions and lively correspondence concerning history and the classics. The fruits of these interchanges were published between 1926 and 1941 in the series Ku-shih pien [discussions on Chinese ancient history]. At the university, Ku also made a number of other friends who were to distinguish themselves in later years, including Mao Chun and Fu Ssu-nien (q.v.).

After graduation in 1920, and a brief stint as a cataloguer in the university library, Ku was appointed an instructor in Chinese on the recommendation of two of his teachers, Ma Yü-tsao and Shen Chien-shih. His career was interrupted, however, when in 1922 he found it necessary to return to Soochow to care for his ailing grandmother. Thanks to Hu Shih, he was put on the payroll of the Commercial Press in nearby Shanghai as an editor in Chinese history. In the spring of 1924 he returned to Peking, where he worked in the research institute of National Peking University. These were years of joy for Ku, who for the first time had literally at his fingertips all the rare books necessary for his researches. In his "autobiography" of 1926 Ku remarks that he won his colleagues' admiration for frequently remaining all night in the reading room, but adds that he did it for only one reason, his own pleasure. Unfortunately for Ku, the worsening political situation and personal problems obliged him to give up this ideal post, and in 1926, on the recommendation of Shen Chien-shih and Lin Yü-t'ang (q.v.), he went to Amoy University as a research professor. However, he ran afoul of Lu Hsün (Chou Shu-jen, q.v.) and was obliged to depart. Lu Hsün commemorated the incident by caricaturing Ku as a stammering, red-nosed pedant in his story "Li-shui" [controlling the waters], in which Ku, identified as Niao-t'ou hsien-sheng ("Mr. Birdhead," an obscure structural pun on the character for Ku's surname) is represented as arguing against the historicity of Yü the Great on the grounds that Yü contains the graphic element meaning "insect" and that insects generally do not engage in works of water conservancy. The satire has a basis in fact, for in 1924 Ku had argued on such grounds that Yü was a mythic and not a historical character. Ku's ill-fated theory had received immediate and sarcastic criticism, and even such staunch supporters as Hu Shih and Ch'ien Hsuan-t'ung (q.v.) came to his help only as peacemakers.

From Amoy, Ku moved on to National Chung-shan University in Canton. In 1929 he went north to Yenching University, where he was appointed professor of Chinese history. At Yenching, Ku directed the Pei-p'ing yenchiu-yuan li-shih-tsu [history division of the national Peiping research institute] and also served as director general of the Yü-kung hsüeh-hui [Yü-kung society], a learned organization devoted to the study of Chinese historical geography and deriving its name from the "Yü-kung" [tribute of Yü] chapter of the Book of History. Ku edited and contributed frequently to its official publication, Yü-kung. Ku was also the editor of the militantly nationalistic and anti-Japanese journal T'ung-su tu-wu [the popular reader]. In addition, he organized a group to study China's borderlands, the Pien-chiang yen-chiu-hui [borderlands research association]. Ku had to flee Peiping after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the subsequent Japanese occupation of north China. He was invited by the Sino-British Cultural and Educational Endowment Fund to study educational problems in China's northwest. He left Peiping in July 1937 and went as far as Kansu and Tsinghai before arriving at Chungking in September 1938.

During the war years, Ku headed the Institute of Chinese Cultural Studies of the refugee Ch'i-lu University in Chungking. He founded the Chung-kuo shih-hsüeh-hui [Chinese history research society] in 1943 and served as editor in chief of its journal, Shih-hsueh tsa-chih [history magazine]. After the war, he appears to have spent some time teaching at Chen-tan University in Shanghai. In December 1954 he took part in the second session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. In 1956 he apparently participated in meetings of the League for Democratic Action.

Ku was the author or editor of many articles and books. The best known among the latter is the seven-volume Ku-shih pien (1926-41), written and compiled under the encouragement of Hu Shih. Ku edited the first three volumes and the fifth volume. The Ku-shih pien amounted to a reevaluation of China's traditional history and of traditional methods ofhistorical investigation and interpretation. Perhaps Ku's most striking contribution was his analysis of how, as one advanced through time, traditions pertaining to ever more ancient times made their appearance much as latecomers to the theater have to take seats farther and farther back in proportion to the tardiness of their arrival. His autobiographical preface to this work was translated by Arthur W. Hummel for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Leiden and was published in 1931 as The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian. Among Ku's other works are the Han-tai hsueh-shu shih-lueh [a brief intellectual history of the Han dynasty], published at Chengtu in 1944 and reprinted in Shanghai in 1955 as Ch'in-Han ti fang-shih yü ju-sheng [magicians and literati of Ch'in and Han], notable for its close study of the inception and later development of the "Five Elements" theory; and ChHn Shih-huang-ti (the first emperor of unified China, 221-207 B.C.). He also edited the unpublished manuscripts of the skeptical Ch'ing historian Ts'ui Shu (ECCP, II, 770-77), which appeared under the title Ts'ui Tung-pi i-shu in 1936. Ku collaborated with a number of other scholars in joint works. These include the Chung-kuo chiang-yü yen-ko shih [history of China's borderlands], written with T'an Ch'i-hsiang and Shih Nien-hai, and the Pen-kuo shih [history of China], written with Wang Chung-ch'i. In 1955 he and a number of other historians produced the Chung-kuo shang-ku shih yen-i [the saga of ancient Chinese history]. A series of Ku's addresses, essays, and lectures called Shih-lin tsa-chih [miscellaneous notes on history] was begun in 1963. Ku also took the humble position of punctuator and annotator of the by now familiar "Yü-kung" chapter of the Book of History as a part of the anthology Chung-kuo ku-tai ti-li hsueh ming-chu hsuantu [selected masterpieces of ancient Chinese geographical writing], prepared under the supervision of one of his former disciples, Hou Jen-chih.