Lin Wen-ch'ing (5 September 1869-1 January 1957), known as Lim Boon Keng, a successful doctor, entrepreneur, and public figure in Singapore who abandoned his lucrative career to serve as president of Amov Universitv from 1921 to 1937.

Born in Singapore to a family of Fukien ancestry, Lim Boon Keng displayed such academic brilliance as a youth that he became the first Chinese to win the Queen's Scholarship, which was awarded him at his graduation from secondary school in 1887. The scholarship provided a course of study at a British university, and Lim elected to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In 1891 he received the B.M. and CM. degrees with first-class honors. After a year's additional study at Cambridge, he returned to Singapore in 1893 and established a medical practice. Lim was an immediate success, not only because of his medical skill but also because of his linguistic versatility. He had mastered Fukienese, Malay, and English, not to mention Cantonese, Swatow, and Tamil, and thus could talk to almost any patient in his native idiom. Lim's success was so pronounced that in 1895, at the age of only 26, he was named to the Legislative Council of Singapore. In 1896 Lim married Margaret Huang. Her father was Huang Xai-shang, a Christian scholar and one-time civil governor of Fukien province who became an associate of Sun Yat-sen. Lim and Huang became close friends, and Lim appears to have aided his father-in-law in spreading the doctrines of revolution. In 1900 Lim rendered signal service to the anti-Manchu revolutionary movement. When Miyazaki Torazo, a Japanese friend of both Sun Yat-sen and K'ang Yu-wei (q.v.), visited K'ang in Singapore to promote cooperation between him and Sun, a misunderstanding led to his arrest by the local authorities. Sun^ Yat-sen hurried to Singapore to protest this action, and Lim Boon Keng soon managed to secure the release of Mivazaki. When Sun Yat-sen organized the Singapore branch of the T'ung-meng-hui in 1907, Lim immediately joined the new organization. Lim Boon Keng was also known as one of the few Singapore-born Chinese who evinced genuine interest in the study and propagation of traditional Chinese culture. He and Song Ong Siong 1869-1941), who subsequently became the first Chinese in Malaya to receive the honor of knighthood, founded the English-language Straits Chinese Alagazine and the Philomathic Society and established courses of instruction in the traditional Chinese classics. In addition to these activities, Lim took an active part in the founding of Chinese banks in Singapore and the development of Malay rubber production, and he became vice president of the Singapore Chamber of Commerce. For a time, he also served as a lecturer at the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore. The British later recognized his achievements by creating him a member of the Order of the British Empire.

After the outbreak of the ^Vuchang revolt on 10 October 1911, Sun Yat-sen returned to China from Europe by way of Singapore. Sun later invited Lim to Nanking and appointed him chief of the department of health in the provisional republican government established early in 1912. ^Vhen the government was moved to Peking after Sun's resignation as provisional president, Lim returned to Singapore, where he resumed his medical and educational activities.

In 1921 the entrepreneur Tan Kah Kee (Ch'en Chia-keng, q.v.) founded Amoy University in Fukien with an initial contribution of SSSl million, and later in April he offered Lim Boon Keng the presidency of .Amoy. Lim did not hesitate in sacrificing his lucrative medical practice to accept Tan's offer, for the post afforded him the opportunity to fulfill his lifelong ambition to promote good education for Fukienese youths living in both China and Southeast Asia. Lim was given the freedom to administer Amoy University as he chose, and he generally was considered to be an intelligent and progressive president. When Amoy University came under National Government jurisdiction in 1937, he resigned from office. In spite of his many duties at Amoy, Lim did not abandon his other interests. He worked to foster the study of Confucian ethics and the activities of the Chinese Medical Association. In 1929 he completed an English translation of the poem Li sao by Ch'ü Yüan (c. 338-288 B. C.) which he published as The Li Sao, an Elegy on Encountering Sorrows, with prefaces by H. A. Giles and Rabindranath Tagore. Although less accurate than the James Legge rendering of 1895 and equally unliterary, Lim's edition is distinguished because of the copiousness and usefulness of its annotations, especially the painstaking identification of flora and fauna. In 1930 Lim became the chief editor of the Chinese Nation, an English-language weekly published in Shanghai. In the next few years, he wrote many articles for this paper and several books, including The Chinese Crisis from Within, Tragedies of Chinese Life, and The New China. The University of Hong Kong awarded him an honorary LL.D. in recognition of his achievements in education and literature. Soon after Lim Boon Keng's retirement in 1937, the Sino-Japanese war began. Because he was nearly 70, Lim chose to live quietly in Singapore during the war. He remained there during the Japanese occupation and was forced to serve as a member of the local "peace maintenance committee." However, he took no active part in committee operations, and the British authorities exonerated him from all blame. He died in Singapore in January 1957, at the age of 87.

Lim Boon Keng had five sons and one daughter. His eldest son was Robert K. S. Lim (Lin K'o-sheng, q.v.). His second son, Francis Lim, became a mechanical engineer, and his third son, Walter Lim, became a banker in Singapore. Lim Boon Keng was the brother-in-law of Wu Lien-te (q.v.), who married Ruth Huang.