Feng Ch'eng-chün (1887-9 February 1946), historian and translator, was best known for introducing Western methods of historiography to the study of Chinese history in China through his translations of the works of European sinologists and Orientalists.

Hsiak'o, Hupeh, was the birthplace of Feng Ch'eng-chün. After receiving a traditional education in the Chinese classics, he went to Europe in 1903 at the age of 17. He studied at the University of Liege in 1905-6 and at the University of Paris from 1906 to 1910, majoring in law. After graduation in 1910, he attended the College de France. In Paris, Feng used his spare time to tutor French students of sinology in Chinese. Thus, he became acquainted with several noted sinologists, who gave him copies of their books and articles. These provided the basis for much of his later translation work. Feng was interested in the history of Chinese legal institutions, and he began to investigate such problems as foreign influences on Chinese cultural and material life and the evolution and development of Chinese institutions. He believed that a knowledge of the foreign institutions and cultures which had influenced China was a prerequisite for the study of the history of Chinese institutions. For instance, he held that the elimination of mutilation as a punishment in the sixth century in China was primarily due to the transmigration and cause-and-effect doctrines of Buddhism.

After spending some eight years in Europe, Feng Ch'eng-chün returned to China in 1911 and served for a year as secretary of diplomatic afl'airs in the Hupeh provincial government. He then became secretary of the new Parliament when it convened in Peking in 1913. When the Parliament was dissolved in 1914, he was transferred to the ministry of education as an assistant secretary in the bureau of higher and special education at Peking, where he served from 1914 to 1927. He also lectured at National Peking University from 1920 to 1926 and at National Peking Normal University in 1928-29.

Although Feng translated a number of Western works on social and political philosophy, such as Gustave LeBon's Les opinions et les croyances [I-chien yü hsin-liang), La desequilibre du monde (Shih-chieh chih fen-luan) , and La psychologie politique {Cheng-chih hsin-li), his most important work was the translation of Western sinology and Oriental studies, through which he introduced Western methods of historiography to the study of Chinese history in China. The first work he translated was Edouard Chavannes' Les voyageurs chinois (Chung-kuo chih lü-hsing chia), a booklet about Chinese travelers to foreign lands from the Han to the early Ch'ing periods. When it was presented to him by Chavannes in Paris, Feng paid little attention to it because it was a translation from Chinese sources and thus did not appear to merit careful reading. After he became engaged in teaching and research, however, he was confronted with many difficulties, especially the identification of non- Chinese names which appeared in Chinese histories and literature. Some of these names were identified in Chavannes' work. Feng discovered that some Western studies of Chinese history were not merely translations; rather, they represented a new discipline which could contribute to Chinese scholarship. Thus, he decided to translate this work of Chavannes into Chinese with his comments "to show students an example of methods of research." The translation was published in 1926. For several years, Feng continued to translate French works, especially those dealing with Chinese intercourse with Southeast Asia and with China's northwestern regions. In 1930 and 1931 he published translations of two articles by Gabriel Ferrand, '"Le K'ouen-louen et les anciennes navigations interoceaniques dans les mers du Sud" ("K'un-lun chih Xanhai ku-tai hang-hsing k'ao") and "L'Empire sumatranais de Crivijava" ("Su-men-ta-na kukuo k'ao"). Others works translated by Feng between 1928 and 1933 were Georges Maspero's La Royaume de Champa (Chan-p'o shih), Gustave Schlegel's "Les peuples etrangers chez les historiens chinois" ("Chung-kuo shih-ch'eng chung wei-hsiang chu-kuo k'ao-cheng"), Victor Segalan's "Premier expose des resultats archeologiques obtenus dans la Chine occidentale par la Mission Gilbert de Voisins" ("Chung-kuo hsi-pu k'ao-ku chi"), and Joseph Mullie's "Les anciennes villes de I'empire des Grands Leao au royaume mongol de Barin" ("Tung-mengku Liao-tai chiu-ch'eng t'an-k'ao chi"). Feng corrected and commented on the Western studies and carefully rendered into Chinese many non-Chinese names which had been identified in them.

Feng's interest in the identification of non- Chinese names in Chinese sources also led him to study Western works on Buddhism, which contain a rich vocabulary of Sanskrit names that are useful for reading Buddhist terms in Chinese. He pointed out that Chinese Buddhist literature frequently had been used by European and Japanese scholars as a source of historical information not available elsewhere, but that it had been neglected by Chinese scholars. Accordingly, in the winter of 1927 he took a month to translate an article on the 16 Lohans by Sylvain Levi and Edouard Chavannes, "Les Seize Archat" ("Fa-chu-chi chi so-chi O-lou-han k'ao"), after spending more than a year in searching and checking the sources.

Most of Feng's other early translations and writings relate to Buddhism, including the Etudes Bouddhiques {Fo-hsUeh yen-chiu), by Przyluski, Levi, and Pelliot, which was published in 1928; Li-tai cKiu-fa fan-ch'ing lu, published in 1934, a collection of 200. biographies of translators of Buddhist sutras from Han to T'ang, based on Chinese sources supplemented by recent Western studies; and Levi's several works on the lankara, mahamayuri, and saddharma smrityupasthana sutras. Feng's interest in the history of other foreign religions in China is indicated by his several books and articles on Manichaeism and Xestorianism and on the Jesuits in China.

Although most of these works were published after 1929, all of the manuscripts were completed before that year. In 1929 Feng suffered a stroke which paralyzed him. He could not mov^e without help and had to give up teaching. When his health improved, he received grants from the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture (1 932-39j to translate a number of Western works on Chinese relations with other countries and on Mongol history. During the period from 1930 to 1936, he produced no fewer than 20 monographs. These included translations of Paul Pelliot's "Deux itineraires de Chine en Inde a la fin du VHIe siecle" iChiao-kuang Yin-tu liang-tao k'ao), Leonard Aurousseau's La premiere conquete Chinoise des pays Annamites {Ch'in-tai ch'u-p'ing Nanyüeh k'ao), Edouard Chavannes' Documents sur les Tou-kiue ( Turcs) occidentaux [Hsi T'u-chueh shih liao), sections dealing with the Mongols in Rene Grousset's Histoire de rextreme-orient [Alengku shih lüek), D'Ohsson's Histoire des Mongols {Meng-ku shih), Lucien Bouvat's Timour et les Timourides [T'ieh-mu-erh ti-kuo), Pelliot's "Les grandes voyages maritimes chinois au debut du XVe siecle" {Cheng Ho hsia hsi-yang k'ao), A. J. H. Charignon's Le livre de Marco Polo [Ma-k'o-po-lo hsing-chi), and the first 50 biographies in Louis Pfister's Notices biographiques et bibliographiques sur les jesuites de I'ancienne mission de Chine [Ju hua yeh-su-hui shih lieh-chuan). He also wrote two books on Mongol history: Yuan tai pai-hua pei (1933), a study of some 30 colloquial versions of Mongolian edicts in stone inscriptions, and the Ch'eng-chi-ssu-han chuan (1934), a biography of Chingis Khan. His translations of articles on the history and geography of Central Asia and the South Seas were included in two collections, the Shih-ti ts'ung-k'ao (1931-33) and the Hsi-yü nan-hai shih-ti k'ao-cheng i-ts'ung (1934-56). Almost all of Feng's works were published by the Commerical Press in Shanghai. After 1936 Feng did not produce many translations, but devoted his time to writing and to collating and editing early Chinese works on foreign travels—the major, sometimes the only, contemporary records of many of the countries of Southeast and South Asia. These include his collation of two texts of early fifteenth-century travels, the Ying-yai sheng-lan by Ma Huan and the Hsing-ch'a sheng-lan by Fei Hsin, two accounts by men who accompanied Cheng Ho on his famous maritime expeditions to the South Seas between 1405 and 1433. These were published in 1935 and 1936, respectively. He also published editions of the Chu fan chih by the thirteenth-century author Chao Ju-kua, which is the most comprehensive account of the foreign countries and of various products traded from abroad during Sung times, and the Hai lu, a travel record based on the observations of Hsieh Ch'ing-kao ( 1 7651821), a Chinese who worked for 14 years on Western ships and who visited several Western countries. Both of these appeared in 1937. Feng also collated several other works, including the Hsi-yang ch'ao-kung tien-lu, a record of foreign tribute missions to China, but none of these manuscripts were published.

One of Feng's major compilations during this period was the Chung-kuo nan-yang chiao-t'ung shih, published in 1937, a comprehensive treatise on Chinese intercourse with Southeast and South Asia from Han to Ming times and a historical account of individual countries in this area. He also compiled two dictionaries of geographical names. These were the result of his lifelong research in matching foreign names transcribed in European languages with those transliterated in Chinese sources. Hsi-yü timing, a bilingual list of place names from Central and Western Asia to Europe and Africa, was published in 1930 by the Sino-Swedish Expedition to the Northwest and again in 1 955 from a revised manuscript. Feng's work on the South Seas, "Nan-hai ti-ming," which covers Southeast and South Asia, was not published.

Because of Feng Ch'eng-chün's physical disabilities, after 1931 his translations and writings were dictated by him to his eldest son, Feng Hsien-shu, a graduate of Fu-jen University who died in 1943 after his arrest by the Japanese for participation in anti-Japanese activities. Some of his later writings were dictated to his second son, Feng Hsien-chi, who is mentioned as Shuyin in his father's books written after 1935. Although many of Feng Ch'eng-chün's friends and several of his children moved to the interior during the war years, he remained in Feiping because of his physical condition. During this period he contributed only a few articles to journals. In 1945, when the universities moved back from west China and a temporary associated university was set up in Peiping, he was appointed a professor of history. He held this position for only a short time; he died of a kidney infection in February 1946 at the age of 60. Feng had ten children, five sons and five daughters.