Ting Wen-chiang (13 April 1887-5 January 1936), known as V. K. Ting, professor of geology at Peking University (1931-34) and secretary general of the Academia Sinica (1934-36) who was best known for his achievements as founder and first director (1916-21) of the China Geological Survey.

Born into a gentry family in T'aihsing, Kiangsu, V. K. Ting received a traditional education in the Chinese classics. He came to the attention of the hsien magistrate, Lung Chang, who persuaded Ting's parents to allow their 15-year-old son to go to Japan in the company of the Hunanese scholar Hu Yuan-t'an (q.v.). In Tokyo, Ting met many other Chinese students who were interested in politics, and in the 18 months he spent in Japan he devoted his time to political pursuits and did not enroll at any school. One of Ting's student friends was in correspondence with Wu Chih-hui (q.v.), who was then in Edinburgh, Scotland. After Wu wrote that opportunities for education in Great Britain were superior to those in Japan, Ting persuaded his parents to allow him to go to Great Britain. He sailed for Europe in the spring of 1904.

After spending some time at Edinburgh studying English, V. K. Ting left Scotland for a preparatory school in England. In 1906 he attended classes at Cambridge University briefly, but found it too expensive. He then went to Glasgow, where he prepared to take the entrance examinations for the medical school of the University of London. After failing the examinations, he enrolled in 1908 at the University of Glasgow, where he majored in zoology and geology. He was graduated in 1911, by which time he had become a Social Darwinist and a scientific positivist.

During his seven years in Great Britain, Ting became an enthusiastic traveler and made several tours of Western Europe. Having decided that on his return to China he would travel through the interior provinces, he left England in the spring of 1911 and arrived in Indo-China early in May. Traveling on the newly completed Haiphong-Kunming railway, he entered China by way of Yunnan province and, proceeding through Kweichow and Hunan to Hankow, reached Shanghai and his native district late in July, less than three months before the outbreak of the revolution that ended Manchu rule in China.

After the establishment of the republic early in 1912, V. K. Ting spent a year in Shanghai teaching at the Nanyang Middle School. In February 1913 he went to Peking to serve as head of the geology section in the department of mining administration of the ministry of industry and commerce. In that capacity he took part in the first intensive geological investigation ofsouthwest China, departing early in 1914 for Yunnan province by way of Hong Kong and Annam. In his extensive geological surveys in Yunnan, Kweichow, and parts of Szechwan, Ting paid close attention not only to the coal, tin, and copper resources but also to fossil remains and to the tribal customs of the non-Chinese peoples of the region.

Upon his return to Peking early in 1915, Ting wrote up his findings, including a study of the Chinsha (Kinsha) River, which flowed from the Tibetan plateau through Yunnan province to the Yangtze. In the final years of the Ming dynasty, this river had been described by the famous geographer and explorer Hsu Hung-tsu (ECCP, I, 314-16), in a diary entitled Hsu Hsia-k'o yu-chi. Ting had become deeply interested in Hsu's diary and had taken a copy of it with him to Yunnan in 1914. In the course of his geological investigations, Ting had passed by many of the sites noted by Hsu in his diary and had confirmed Hsu's claim that the Chinsha River was the true source of the Yangtze. Some years later, as a result of his continuing interest in Hsu Hung-tsu, Ting published a revised edition of the Hsu Hsia-k'oyu-chi in three volumes (1928), which included his chronological biography of Hsu and an atlas indicating the routes taken by Hsu in his explorations of the region.

In 1916, largely through the efforts of V. K. Ting and his associates, the China Geological Survey (Chung-kuo ti-chih tiao-ch'a-so) was set up by the ministry of agriculture and commerce. Ting became its first director and held that post until 1921, when he was succeeded by the Belgian-trained geologist Wong Wen-hao (q.v.). The Geological Survey soon achieved an international reputation. Not only did it succeed in its dual purpose of training competent personnel and conducting geological and mineralogical surveys throughout China, but it also began in 1919 to publish valuable scientific reports on its findings in a bulletin (Ti-chih hui-pao) and in two series of its memoirs ( Ti-chih chuan-pao] .

In the winter of 1918-19, V. K. Ting joined a group which accompanied Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (q.v.) on his trip to Europe as an unofficial delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. The party also included Carsun Chang (Chang Chia-sen), Chiang Fang-chen, and Hsu Hsin-liu (qq.v.). This trip marked the beginning of a close friendship between Ting and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, and the broadening of Ting's interests to include government and philosophy may well have stemmed from it.

Among the geological investigations conducted by V. K. Ting as head of the Geological Survey was a mining survey in southeastern Jehol province, near the site of the abandoned Pei-p'iao coal mine. The survey indicated that the mine would be operated profitably, and in 1921 a group organized the Pei-p'iao Coal Mining Company as a private enterprise. Ting resigned from office to become general manager of the new company, which soon grew into a flourishing industry with an annual output of 144,758 tons. He soon was drawn into closer contact with political and military affairs. The colliery was located within the sphere of influence of the Fengtien military clique, headed by Chang Tso-lin (q.v.), and Ting had to learn to be alert to the frictions between rival warlords and political factions. He traveled regularly among Pei-p'iao, Mukden, Peking, and Tientsin, and he recorded his observations in a number of articles, signed with the pen name Tsung-yen, which appeared first in the Nu-li chou-pao [endeavor] and later as a book entitled Min-kuo chün-shih chin-chi (1928).

Ting's association with the Nu-li chou-pao marked his entrance into the field of political journalism. Because they were deeply disturbed by the tendency toward political chaos in China, Ting, Hu Shih (q.v.), and others began publishing this weekly magazine, which was devoted to the discussion of political questions and reforms in the government. In the second issue (14 May 1922) there appeared a statement entitled "Wo-men ti cheng-chih chu-chang" [our political proposals], written by Hu Shih and signed by 16 intellectuals with such divergent opinions as Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei, Wang Ch'unghui, Liang Shu-ming, Li Ta-chao (qq.v.), and Ting. Stressing the need for "good government" in which "good men" should take an active part, the statement proposed a peace conference between the various factions in north and south China, the reconvening of the 1917 National Assembly, and the drafting of a new constitution. In a later issue of the magazine (No. 67), Ting elaborated on this theme. Influenced to some extent by the Confucian political ideal of the nineteenth-century scholar-statesman Tseng Kuo-fan (ECCP, II, 751-56), Ting argued that good government depended upon the vigorous leadership of a few men of the utmost integrity and ability. He attributed the then current political evils in China to the fact that truly talented and virtuous men were neither willing nor able to assume an active role in the government. Political and military affairs were not the only topics which claimed V. K. Ting's attention. In February 1923 his friend Carsun Chang published in the Tsinghua Weekly a lecture entitled "Jen-sheng kuan" [philosophy of life], in which he stated that the development of science in the West had resulted in a materialistic and morally degenerate civilization. Declaring that science, with its orientation to the external world of matter, was powerless to solve the basic spiritual problems of human life, Chang asserted that a philosophy of life must rely not on the determination of scientific laws but on man's intuition, his free will, and the cultivation of his inner mind. V. K. Ting, angered by this attack on scientific method, published in the Nu-li chou-pao (15 and 22 April 1923) a refutation of Chang's arguments entitled "Hsuan-hsueh yu k'o-hsueh" [metaphysics and science]. Citing the Austrian physicist Ernest Mach and the English mathematical statistician Karl Pearson, Ting sought to defend the role of scientific method in intellectual life and to deny that it was a cause of moral decay in the West. He argued that a scientific outlook was essential rather than detrimental to a philosophy of life. The controversy between Chang and Ting came to involve many of the leading minds of the day. By the end of 1923 a two-volume collection of articles written by Ting, Chang, and the later participants in this debate had been published as K'o-hsueh yu jen-sheng-kuan [science and the philosophy of life] .

As his reputation as an astute observer of conditions in north China grew, V. K. Ting began to consult with prominent military and political leaders. In July 1925, through the introduction of Lo Wen-kan, he had an interview with Wu P'ei-fu (q.v.) at Yochow, and in August of that year he spent a week at Hangchow in consultation with Sun Ch'uan-fang (q.v.). Ting resigned as general manager of the Pei-p'iao Coal Mining Company in the winter of 1925 and then served briefly as one of the three Chinese members of the advisory committee of the Anglo-Chinese Boxer Indemnity Commission headed by Lord Willingdon. In May 1926 he was invited to Shanghai for further consultation with Sun Ch'uan-fang, who prevailed upon Ting to assist him in a project to develop a "Greater Shanghai." With the official title of director of the port of Woosung and Shanghai, Ting proceeded with plans to organize the hitherto separately administered districts in the Chinese part of the city as a single entity under a single municipal government, which would be in a better position to develop new port facilities and to negotiate for the abolition of foreign concessions in the city. Within the next eight months (May-December 1926) Ting also introduced modern sanitation systems and secured an agreement with the foreign consular corps in the International Settlement by which control of the Shanghai Mixed Court was restored to China. The "Provisional Agreement for the Rendition of the Shanghai Mixed Court" (31 August 1926), negotiated on the Chinese side by Ting and Hsu Yuan, the Kiangsu provincial commissioner of foreign affairs, extended Chinese jurisdiction into the International Settlement and thereby constituted a step toward the eventual abolition of extraterritoriality in China. On 31 December 1926, as the Northern Expedition forces marched toward Shanghai, V. K. Ting resigned from office and went to Dairen, where he worked on his edition of Hsu Hung-tsu's travel diary. He returned to his geological pursuits in 1928, when he went to Kwangsi to make a survey of the tin and coal resources in the northern and central parts of the province and to make a detailed study of the limestone formations at Map'ing. In November 1928 the China Geological Survey commissioned him to make the most comprehensive survey of his career, a geological investigation of southwest China. Early in 1929, after organizing a team of investigators, Ting proceeded southward from Chungking through Kweichow province to the Kwangsi border, and thence back to Chungking. In addition to supervising extensive surveys of the mineral resources and compiling detailed geological maps of the region, he found time to study the non-Chinese tribes of the region, particularly the Lolo of Kweichow. From the materials he began to gather while on this expedition, he later compiled a book of Lolo texts with Chinese translations. A part of this work was published posthumously in 1936 as the Ts'uan-wen ts'ung-k'o, the first volume in a monograph series of the Academia Sinica's institute of history and philology. In 1931 V. K. Ting was appointed professor of geology at Peking University by the new chancellor, Chiang Monlin (Chiang Meng-lin, q.v.). Although his three years (1931-34) there were among the happiest of his life, Ting, like many of his colleagues, became increasingly apprehensive about the course of events after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. In the spring of 1932 he joined with Fu Ssu-nien, T. F. Tsiang (Chiang T'ing-fu, qq.v.), Hu Shih, and other professors in organizing the society that began, on 22 May, to publish the Tu-li p'ing-lun [independent critic]. Ting contributed sixty-four articles to the Tu-li p'ing-lun during its three years of publication. The majority of these articles described his travels, but some were devoted to discussions of Japan and of plans to resist a Japanese invasion.

During the summer vacation of 1933 V. K. Ting attended the sixteenth congress of the International Geological Society in Washington, D.C. On the way back to China he spent some six weeks in the Soviet Union. While traveling through the United States at the onset of the New Deal and in the Soviet Union near the end of the first Five Year Plan, he noted with interest the large-scale experimentation in government economic planning in these countries. These observations wrought a change in his thinking which began to be reflected in his writings in 1934. He sought to adapt his earlier concept of an able and virtuous ruling minority to his new political ideal of a "modern dictatorship," pressing for a rapid and systematic modernization of the country under vigorous, centralized leadership. He argued that such modernization could only be achieved by a unified government headed by a decisive leader and administered by efficient technocrats. Under the supervision of an enlightened and public-spirited dictatorship, teams of scientifically trained experts selected on the basis of their specialized abilities would be able to study, coordinate, and execute plans for the scientific reconstruction of China. It was, perhaps, with such ideas in mind that Ting gave up teaching at Peking University and in June 1934 accepted Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei's invitation to succeed Yang Ch'uan (q.v.) as secretary general of the Academia Sinica in Nanking. According to Hu Shih, Ting saw in the Academia Sinica an organ which could assist China's national development by stimulating and coordinating scientific research throughout the country. The Council of the Academia Sinica was established to coordinate the research activities of the academy's various institutes with those of other academic institutions and government agencies. On 27 May 1935 the National Government promulgated the constitution of this council; on 20 June some 30 members representing China's leading scholarly bodies were elected to the council; and on 7 September V. K. Ting was elected honorary secretary.

In addition to his administrative duties at the Academia Sinica, Ting was called upon to assist the National Government in plans to develop China's resources and to strengthen its defenses. As one of the planners of the Canton-Hankow railway, then in the late stages of construction, Ting concerned himself with the development of coal resources near the railway in Hunan. After arriving in Changsha from Nanking on 2 December 1935, he went to the T'an-chiashan colliery in Hsiangt'an hsien to inspect the mines. He spent the night of 8-9 December at an inn in Hanyang in an unventilated room which was heated by a charcoal stove. On the morning of 9 December he was found unconscious from coal-gas fumes and was taken to a local hospital. A week later he was moved to Hsiang-ya Hospital in Changsha, where he died on 5 January 1 936. He was survived by his wife, nee Shih Chiu-yuan, and by six brothers, the most prominent of whom was Ting Wen-yuan (d. 1957; T. Yueh-po), president of T'ung-chi University in Shanghai from 1947 to 1950. V. K. Ting was active in a variety of fields, but was best known as one of China's leading geologists. As founder of the China Geological Survey, he helped to bring into being China's first institute of modern scientific research; and as its first director he not only promoted the professional study of geology but also stimulated the development of the allied fields of paleontology and archaeology. Working with such colleagues as Wong Wen-hao and Li Ssu-kuang and with such Western advisers as the Swedish geologist J. G. Andersson and the French scientist-priest Teilhard de Chardin, Ting helped to create the conditions that made China a center for research on the neolithic period and led to the discovery of Sinanthropus Pekinensis (see P'ei Wen-chung) in 1927. Even after his resignation from the Geological Survey in 1921, he continued to take an interest in its development. In 1929, with financial assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, he helped to found the Geological Survey's Cenozoic Research Laboratory, of which he became honorary director; and he later was instrumental in setting up the Soil Laboratory, Fuel Laboratory, and Hsi-shan Seismological Station. Apart from his activities in the Geological Survey, the Academia Sinica, and other official institutions, Ting played a leading role in organizing a number of learned societies and publications in China. He was one of the founders of the Geological Society of China (Chung-kuo ti-chih hsueh-hui) in January 1922, and he took part in editing and publishing its bulletin (Chung-kuo ti-chih hsueh-hui chih). Also in 1922 he arranged for funds to publish a bulletin of paleontology (Chung-kuo ku-sheng-wu chih), which he edited, and in 1929, he helped found the China Paleontological Society (Chungkuo ku-sheng-wu hsueh-hui). A practicing scientist with broad experience in his field, V. K. Ting was the author of numerous articles on the subject of geology, of both general and technical nature, which appeared in a variety of scholarly journals both in China and abroad. As a geologist, however, Ting's best known work was an atlas of China, the Chung-hua min-kuo hsin ti-Vu, which he compiled in collaboration with Wong Wen-hao and Tseng Shih-ying. Among the best modern atlases ever printed in China, it contained both physical and political maps based on thousands of Chinese and foreign maps of China and supplemented by the findings of the Geological Survey. Published at Shanghai in 1934 by the Shun Pao in commemoration of the newspaper's sixtieth anniversary, this work was commonly known as the "Shun Pao Atlas." Among Ting's non-technical writings was a draft chronology of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, which Ting began to compile after Liang's death in 1 929. In was published in 1 958 in Taiwan under the title Liang Jen-kung hsien-sheng nien-p'u cKang-pien chu-kao (3 volumes). Ting was also the author of two works relating to his travels abroad and in China: the Alan-yu san-chi, miscellaneous field notes on his travels through interior China; and the Su-o lu-hsing chi, a collection of essays describing his journey through Russia in 1933. Both of these works were later (1956) reprinted in Taiwan as part of the third volume of the Chung-yang yen-chiu-yuan yuan-k'an [annals of the Academia Sinica], a volume published in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of Ting's death.