Ku Hung-ming (1857-30 April 1928), European-educated scholar and long-time subordinate of Chang Chih-tung who was known as a trenchant critic of the Westernization of China and a staunch defender of traditional Confucian values.

The ancestors of Ku Hung-ming had come from T'ungan, Fukien, near Amoy. However, his family had resided for generations before his birth in the state of Kedah in northern Malaya. Ku's great-grandfather, Ku Li-huan, had served in Kedah while that state was still under the rule of Siam. When the British extended their influence further into the Malay peninsula, Ku Li-huan moved from Kedah to Penang, where he was appointed by the British to a post in the local government. He died in 1862 leaving eight children, of Whom the third son was Ku Ling-ch'ih, Ku Hung-ming's grandfather. Ku's father, also of Penang, was Ku Hsia-feng, who was the manager of a British-owned rubber plantation. Ku himself was born in Penang.

Little is known of Ku's early life. At about the age of ten, after his father's death, he was taken to Edinburgh by a Scottish friend of the family. He subsequently matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, from which he received the M.A. degree in April 1877. As preparation for the degree, he had studied and mastered the complete classical university curriculum of the time, including Latin, Greek, mathematics, metaphysics, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, rhetoric, and English literature. Before returning to Malaya, Ku studied in Leipzig, where he appears to have obtained a diploma in civil engineering, and lived for several months in Paris. About 1880 he returned to Penang.

Ku found employment in the government of the Straits Settlements. At this time, at the urging of a high official of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, Ku began to study classical Chinese and to wear a queue and Chinese clothes. In 1881-82 he served the British explorers Mahab and Colquhoun as an interpreter. He accompanied them on their journey from Canton to Mandalay, but abandoned them in Yunnan when their progress became difficult. Little is known of Ku's activities in the next two years, except that he went to live in Hong Kong.

In 1885 Ku met Yang Yü-shu, a subordinate of Chang Chih-tung ^ECCP, I, 27-32). Chang, probably impressed by Yang's account of Ku's knowledge of Western affairs, made Ku a member of his personal staff'. Ku remained an associate of Chang for 20 years, until 1905, during which time he never seems to have risen beyond the status of private secretary and adviser. He did much interpreting and translating, but his relations with Chang were never intimate. He was not admitted to Chang's inner circle of advisers until 1898, and he frequently complained that Chang never followed any of his suggestions. Chang considered Ku generally correct in principle, but lacking in common sense. However, certain of Chang Chih-tung's ideas about Europe and America probably were derived from Ku's thought. Among these are the notions, expressed in Chang's Ch' uanhsueh-p'ien [exhortation to study] of 1898, that the absence of a wealthy middle class in China vitiated the idea of popular legislative assemblies and that democracy was a bad thing. Both of these ideas had been vigorously developed by Ku in a letter to Chang in 1896.

While serving Chang, Ku had occasion to engage in a number of polemical disputes with resident European and American missionaries and businessmen through the medium of the treaty-port English-language press. In 1891, when anti-missionary riots were disturbing the Yangtze valley, Ku wrote an article attacking missionary enterprise entitled "Defensio populi ad populos," which was published in the North China Daily News. The article dispassionately analyzed the avow^ed objectives of missionary endeavor, which Ku defined as: "I. The moral elevation of the people, H. The intellectual enlightenment of the people, HI. Works of charity." Ku observed that, far from attracting the "morally higher, better and nobler" Chinese, it was an open secret that "only the worst, the weak, the ignorant, the needy, and the vicious" were "what the missionaries call converted." He pointed out that for missionaries to pose as champions of the cause of science and enlightenment against the background of the religious persecutions of Europe was an hypocrisy which made "the educated Chinese intellectually despise the foreigner." He attacked missionary orphanages and hospitals as inefficient and concluded by appealing to the "common sense, the sense of justice among disinterested foreigners, to say whether the time is not come ... to undertake, if not the entire withdrawal, at least some modification of the missionary enterprise in China." Ku's appeal to reason, which was summarized and commented on at length in the London Times, was answered during the subsequent months by numerous letters to the editor, almost all of them expressing outrage and shock. In 1900 Ku broadened his attack to include the eight anti-Boxer powers, whom he denounced as wanting in wisdom, morality, and justice in a series of articles in the Yokohama Japan Mail, which he published in 1901 as Papers from a Viceroy's Yamen. During the Boxer troubles Ku also had occasion to exercise his pen in defense of the empress dowager. Prince Tuan, and the Boxers themselves. In a poem of several stanzas called "Prince Tuan and His Brave, Braw, Bonnie Laddies," Ku wrote: "To the lords of convention 'twas Prince Tuan who spoke:/ E're the King's crown go down there are crowns to be broke;/ Then each Boxer lad who loves fighting and fun,/ Let him follow the bonnets of bonnie Prince Tuan/ .... Then away to the hills, to the lea, to the rocks,/ E're I own a usurper I'll crouch with the fox;/ And tremble, ye de'ils in the midst of your glee,/ Ye hae no seen the last of my bonnets and me." Another series of articles by Ku was carried in the Japan Mail in 1904 under the title "Et Nunc, Reges, Intellegite! The Moral Causes of the Russo- Japanese W'ar." Ku attributed the Allies' mistakes in Asian policy to their attempts to substitute force for reason in dealing with Chinese and Japanese.

During this period, Ku also published translations of Chinese classics, including The Discourses and Sayings of Confucius: A Special Translation, Illustrated with Quotations from Goethe and Other ]Vriters, published in 1898, and a translation of the Chung-yung [doctrine of the mean] entitled The Conduct of Life, which was published in 1906 after serialization in the Japan Mail two years earlier.

In 1905 Ku Hung-ming was appointed a secretary in the ministry of foreign affairs at Peking. Shortly afterwards, he was made director of the Huang-p'u-chiang chün-hsieh chü [Whangpoo conservancy board] in Shanghai, in which capacity he served until 1908. He exposed certain misappropriations connected with dredging work performed by Dutch contractors, and, during the subsequent scandal, he proved his charges and won high praise from Chou Fu, then governor general at Nanking. In 1908 Ku left Shanghai for service in Peking as an assistant department director in the ministry of foreign aflfairs. While serving in this capacity, Ku sent a long memorial to the throne urging extreme caution in modernization and stressing the need for fixed rules of government to guarantee governmental stability. In 1909 Chang Chih-tung died, and Ku received the degree of chin-shih by special decree. Ku then wrote The Story of a Chinese Oxford Movement, in which he compared Cardinal Newman's fight against "liberalism" in the Church of England with Chang's fight against "the intensely materialistic civilization of modern Europe" in China, regretting the failure of both movements and expressing the fear that in^moral force would triumph in both China and Europe. The book was translated into German by Richard VVilhelm in 1911 as Chinas Verteidigung gegen europdische Ideen: Kristische Aufsdtze. It made a deep impression on neo-Kantians at the University of Gottingen, where it became required reading in the faculty of philosophy. In 1910 Ku composed and published anonymously Chang W'en-hsiang mü-fu chi-wen [reminiscences of a secretary to Chang Chih-tung].

Ku resigned from office in 1910 and served the following year as principal of Nanyang College in Shanghai. During the revolution of 1911 he proclaimed his loyalty to the Manchu cause. After the emperor abdicated, Ku retired. He lived in Shanghai and then moved to Peking. He retained his queue and remained loyal to the Manchu cause. In 1914 an English translation of the Chang Wen-hsiang mu-fu chi-wen appeared in the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, evidently written by Ku under the curious pseudonym Ardsheal. In 1915 Ku published The Spirit of the Chinese People, in which he defined the Chinese people as deep, broad, and simple, and possessed of a "Divine Duty of Loyalty," above all to the king, but also to the head of a family. He believed that the "Divine Duty" was perfectly expressed in the philosophy of Confucius, which he recommended to Europe, then in the throes of the First World War, as a cure for British "mob-worship" and German "might-worship" and as a substitute for Christianity, which, Ku averred, "has become ineffective as a moral force." Ku played a role in the abortive restoration ofJuly 1917 {see Chang Hsün) , when he accepted an appointment as senior undersecretary of foreign affairs under Liang Tun-yen. The restoration lasted a scant two weeks, however, after which Ku returned to more pedestrian pursuits, including a stint of Latin teaching at Peking University.

In 1919 Ku wrote two articles for Millard's Review of the Far East denouncing the vernacular literature movement {see Ch'en Tu-hsiu; Hu Shih) . His attitude was shared by Lin Shu and Yen Fu (qq.v.). He was particularly violent and bitter in his references to students just back from Europe and the United States who were, in his view, destroying overnight the world's oldest civilization. Ku also wrote weekly pieces for the North China Standard. In 1924 he went to Japan to deliver a series of lectures for the Daito bunka kyokai [eastern culture association] .

In 1927 he returned to China to serve as an adviser to Chang Tso-lin (q.v.), and in 1928 he was nominated principal of Shantung University. He died at Peking on 30 April 1928. About 1887 Ku married a Japanese girl, Yoshida Sadako, a geisha then serving in a Canton teahouse. Ku was devoted to her, and she bore him several children before she died in 1905. He later remarried, and at his death he left his second wife and their three children in utter poverty. Word portraits of Ku appear in W. Somerset Maugham's On a Chinese Screen (1922), in which Ku figures in the story "The Philosopher," and in Francis Barrey's Un sage chinois Kou Hong Ming; notes bibliographiques. Maugham described Ku as "an old man, tall, with a thin grey queue, and bright large eyes under which there were heavy bags. His teeth were broken and discoloured. He was exceedingly thin, and his hands, fine and small, were withered and claw-like .... There was in him none of the repose of the sage. He was a polemicist and a fighter." In 1922 Lo Chen-yü (q.v.), a fellow Manchu loyalist, published a collection of Ku's literary works under the title Tu'i ts'ao-t'ang wen-chi.