Yen Fu (8 January 1854-27 October 1921), naval officer who became the foremost translator-commentator of his day. Through his translations, the works of such Western thinkers as Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith were introduced to China.

The only son of a practitioner of Chinese medicine. Yen Fu was born in Houkuan hsien, Foochow fu, Fukien. He began his formal education at the age of five and at nine studied with a private tutor, Huang Shao-yen, who was well versed in both Han Learning and Neo- Confucian doctrines. Following his father's death, financial difficulties forced Yen to discontinue his classical education. He sat for the entrance examination to the newly established Ma-chiang Naval Academy attached to the Foochow Shipyard, a scholarship which provided maintenance for both students and their families. After gaining admittance with top marks, he was allowed to choose between the School of Xaval Architecture, where the French language and French instruction prevailed, and the School of Navigation, where the language of instruction was English. His choice of the School of Navigation was to determine the course of his intellectual development. The English language was to be his medium of access to Western ideas, Great Britain was to become his model state, and English ideas were to dominate his intellectual outlook. During a five-year course at the school, he studied English, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and naval science under English and French instructors. He supplemented this curriculum by studying the Hsiao-ching [book of filial piety] and the Sheng-yü kuang-hsun [the imperial instructions and profound teachings]. He also practiced the composition of examination essays. After being graduated summa cum laude in 1871, Yen Fu was assigned for practical training on the warship Chien-wei. The following year he visited Japan after being transferred to another warship, the Yang-wu. In 1874 he assisted the minister of naval affairs, Shen Paochen (ECCP, H, 642-44), his fellow provincial and patron, in drafting reports for the Chinese government following an investigation of the murder by Formosan aborigines of certain Ryukyu islanders under the legal protection of Japan shipwrecked on the Formosan coast. Yen Fu was one of the earliest Chinese students sent by the Ch'ing government to study in Europe. Upon arrival in 1877, Yen entered a school at Portsmouth, England. He then transferred to the Greenwich Naval College, where he studied mathematics, chemistry, physics, and naval science. Apart from one trip to France, Yen devoted the whole of his two years' stay in the West to study in England. His performance in class was more than satisfactory, but he completely neglected practical training at sea so that he could devote time to examining the British political system and the theories which lay behind it. He seems to have been obsessed by the question of the bases or secret of W^estern wealth and power, a question which preoccupied the best minds of his generation and which was to underlie most of his own subsequent study. The answer, he determined to his satisfaction, lay in the manner in which the British judicial and political system operated. He was much impressed by the British jury system, which, in his opinion, guaranteed impartial justice for the people. He believed that the important differences between China and the West had to do with despotism and constitutionalism. Under a despotic ruler there was no national accord because the people were forbidden to participate in politics. Under the representational system of election, the strength of local government served to unite public benefit with self-interest of the people. Because of these political observations. Yen came to regard the Chinese as "coolies" and Westerners as "patriots." It was probably Yen Fu's eager search for understanding which attracted the attention of China's first minister to England (later concurrently minister to France), Kuo Sung-t'ao (ECCP, I, 438-39), who was responsible for the Chinese students of naval science in Europe. Despite differences in age and rank, the two often held long discussions on the differences between Chinese and Western political systems. Kuo was so favorably impressed by the young Yen that he wrote to an official in Peking describing Yen as better qualified than himself to hold the post of minister to Great Britain — praise which was regarded as extravagant and absurd by officials in Peking.

After graduation from the naval college at Greenwich in 1879, Yen Fu returned to China, where he began to experience a series of frustrations which was to lend an edge of personal resentment to his general dissatisfaction with the plight of China. He taught for a year at the Foochow Naval Academy. In 1881 Li Hung-chang (ECCP, I, 464-67), the governor general of Chihli (Hopei), who had become chief manager of China's naval affairs after Shen Pao-chen's death in 1879, appointed Yen dean of the newly founded Peiyang Naval Academy in Tientsin. Yen, however, was not taken into Li's confidence, and his critical comments on China's weakness as reflected in her loss of the Ryukyu Islands to Japan won him the distrust and displeasure of the official class. Because his W^estern training did not qualify him for an important position in the government bureaucracy, Yen decided to seek advancement through the conventional channels provided by the traditional civil service examination system. In 1885 he purchased the chiensheng degree and then sat for the chü-jen examination in Fukien, but failed it. He made two more attempts to pass the examination in 1888 and 1889, but without success. At this point, Li Hung-chang made some conciliatory gestures to the disappointed Yen, promoting him to the position of vice chancellor of the Peiyang Naval Academy in 1889 and to the post of chancellor in 1890. Yen was granted the title of expectant tao-t'ai in Chihli in 1892 on the recommendation of the ministry of naval affairs. Aware, however, that he had no real power or prestige, he made a fourth and final attempt to pass the chü-jen examination in 1893, but again he was unsuccessful. Thwarted by his repeated failures with the examinations, chafing under the limitations of his position in the academy, and disturbed by Japan's defeat of China in 1895, Yen Fu turned his energies to writing. Some of his ideas had taken shape long before they found expression. In England he had become familiar with Darwinism and with works of Herbert Spencer. Early in 1881 he had read Spencer's Study of Sociology, a sort of prolegomenon to the study of sociology, and in this book he had found similarities between Western and Chinese thought. In his opinion. Study of Sociology contained the essence of the Confucian scriptures Ta-hsueh [the great learning] and Chungyung [doctrine of the mean] in the idea that good government depends on the principles of investigation of things, sincerity, and moderation. Spencer's work surpassed its Chinese counterparts only in precision and accuracy resulting from scientific discipline. In 1895 Yen Fu published four important essays which first appeared in a Tientsin newspaper and which later were reprinted in the Shih-wu-pao, the reform magazine edited by Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (q.v.) in Shanghai. Yen first attacked the conservatives' insistence on preserving the old world. He considered that history developed according to definite laws which were beyond human control. The isolationist policy adopted by the conservatives was impracticable and nothing short of fantasy. As aggression by the West on backward China was irrevocable, the Chinese could only accept this fact and strive to strengthen their own country on the pattern of their opponents. The strength of the West lay not in weapons and technology, but in the realm of thought and knowledge. He attributed the great advances in Western knowledge to the contributions of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. The importance of these two men to Western thinking was, in Yen's estimation, comparable to that of Isaac Newton in physics. Darwin's contribution was his conception of the struggle for existence and natural selection, while Spencer's lay in the application of Darwin's theories to the social sciences. Using Spencer's standards for judging the strength of a nation and its people by their physical, intellectual, and moral qualities. Yen proposed a threefold reform program. To improve his people's physical stamina he advocated prohibition of opium smoking and foot binding. To enlighten the people's minds, he suggested replacing the writing of eight-legged essays with Western learning. And to regenerate the nation's virtue, he recommended establishing a parliamentary system as the most effective way of arousing patriotism in the Chinese when confronted by their foreign enemies. Yen Fu's commitment to democratic principles of government, however, was not immediate but ultimate, for, with the viewpoint of a social evolutionist, he conceived the emergence of any polity as a gradual process. The condition of the Chinese people could not be changed overnight, and they were not yet ready for self-government. What was needed in the immediate future was an enlightened elite who could educate the people and render them capable of moving toward self-government over a long span of time.

Thus, the years 1895-98 saw Yen Fu setting to work as an educator and intellectual publicist. In 1896 he participated in the establishment of a Russian-language school in Peking and the T'ung-i School in the same city. He also helped Liang Ch'i-ch'ao establish the Shih-wu pao in Shanghai. In 1897, together with Hsia Tseng-yu and others, he founded two newspapers in Tientsin, the Kuo-wen pao, a daily, and the Kuo-wen hui-pien, issued every ten days to provide news summaries of the Kuo-wen pao. These two papers had the declared aims of reflecting and transmitting opinions between officialdom and the people, and providing information about foreign countries. In comparison with other embryo Chinese newspapers at the time, the scale of operations of these two newspapers was quite impressive, for they had correspondents stationed in almost every province in China as well as major cities in the West. They were closed down after the 1898 coup d'etat.

Because he believed that education was the first step on China's way to strength, Yen Fu set out to improve the content of education. He found translation, interlaced with commentaries, a most effective medium, and it was on his role as a translator-commentator that his subsequent national fame and contribution were to rest. Yen's first translation had appeared in 1892—-a rendering of Alexander Michie's Missionaries in China, an attack by a Westerner on the methods of missionaries in China. In 1895 he embarked on the translation of the first two chapters of Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays under the title T'ienyen lun, and in 1897 he published the results in the Kuo-wen pao. The publication of these translations as a book in 1898 was a resounding success and instantly won Yen recognition as a serious writer on national affairs. The work also illustrated Yen's method, it being more than a translation of Huxley's lectures as published in 1893. An appreciative preface by Yen's literary mentor Wu Ju-lun (ECCP, II, 870-72) testified to Yen's high stylistic achievement. Yen's footnotes and commentaries were often as long as the direct translation of the original text, and the work as a whole was both an exposition of Spencer's essential views as opposed to those of Huxley and an adaptation of social Darwinism to China's needs. While approving of Spencer's ethic of self-assertion and enlightened self-interest, Yen rejected Huxley's idea of protecting human ethical values against the efforts to create an evolutionary ethic. Turning to China's needs, Yen contended that she could overcome her weakness by asserting herself in the universal struggle for existence. A master of classical Chinese, he skillfully coined such elegant phrases as t'ien-yen [evolution], wu-ching [the struggle for existence], and t'ien-tse [natural selection], which immediately were adopted by young reformers. Despite his personal association with reformers, Yen Fu was, by and large, an outsider to the constitutional movement of 1898. Although he agreed with the reform program in principle, he disagreed with K'ang Yu-wei (q.v.) and his associates about the timing of constitutional government in China. He believed that the intellectual and moral level of the Chinese people was not yet high enough for representative government. In September 1898, as the reform movement was approaching its climax, Yen had an audience with the Kuanghsü emperor, who ordered him to submit a copy of his open "Ten Thousand Word Memorial" published in the Kuo-wen pao earlier in the year. This memorial, in which Yen suggested that the emperor make inspection tours within and beyond China's boundaries in order to win the confidence of the people and to establish friendly relations with other nations, probably never received imperial perusal, however; for shortly after the audience, Yen learned of the conservatives' plan to crush the reformers in Peking and returned in haste to Tientsin.

In his search for the sources of national strength, Yen Fu had long been aware of the importance of economics. His reading of Adam Smith's works dated back at least to 1895. He began translating Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1897 and completed the task in 1900. As in the case of T'ien-yen lun, the translation from Smith, entitled Chi-hsileh (later changed to Yüanfu), was favored with a preface by Wu Ju-lun. In this translation Yen reiterated the idea that the wealth and power of the state can only be achieved by a release of energies and capacities of the individual. He attributed England's wealth to Smith's principle of economic individualism, which had encouraged the release of the economic energies of the people. Between 1898 and 1900 Yen Fu was also engaged in the translation of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, a tract aimed at defending the liberty of individuals against society and upholding the value of freedom as an end in itself. Yen again adapted ideas in the original text to his own concerns. Liberty was interpreted by Yen as the right to a free struggle for existence. It contributed to the improvement of men's moral, physical, and intellectual powers, a prerequisite, in his eyes, to the advance of the wealth and strength of the state.

Yen Fu served as chancellor of the Peiyang Naval Academy until 1900, when the Boxer Uprising broke out in Chihli. He then terminated his naval career by leaving Tientsin for Shanghai. He took part in the formation of a "Society for the Study of Logic" and held various offices for short periods of time. In 1901 he became one of the two Chinese members on the board of directors of the Kaiping mining company. When Wu Ju-lun became chancellor of Imperial University at Peking in 1902, Yen was appointed director of the university's newly established translation bureau. He held the post without much enthusiasm and finally resigned in 1904. That winter he went to London in an official capacity to settle litigation regarding the Kaiping mines. He also visited France, Switzerland, and Italy. Upon his return to China, he helped Ma Liang (q.v.) establish the Fu-tan Academy, and in 1906 he served briefly as its principal. He then was invited by En-ming to supervise the Anhwei Normal School, where he stayed one year. In 1908 he was appointed chief editor of the Bureau of Terminology, a post he held until 1911. He was awarded the chin-shih degree by the Ch'ing government in 1909 and was appointed a member of the advisory council for political affairs in 1910.

In the meantime. Yen Fu continued to expend most of his energies on translation. In 1903 he published a translation of Herbert Spencer's Study of Sociology under the title of Ch'un-hsueh i-yen. His main purpose in translating this work was to discredit then-current revolutionary propaganda. As a follower of Spencer's theory that the law of natural evolution determines the development of human societies. Yen believed that the drastic political reorganization advocated by the Chinese revolutionaries and reformers at that time would only bring harm to the country. In 1 904 he published translations of Edward Jenks' A History of Politics under the title of She-hui Cüng-cfv ümi and of Charles Louis Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois under the title of Fa-i. He also made Chinese versions of two important books on logic: A System of Logic by John Stuart Mill appeared in 1905 as Mu-le ming-hsueh, and Primer of Logic by William S. Jevons was published in 1909 as Ming-hsueh ch^ien-shuo. In Yen's view, logic was the disciplinary foundation of Western knowledge. Yen Fu was unsympathetic to the revolutionary movement at the turn of the century. During a 1905 conversation with Sun Yat-sen, Yen insisted that because the Chinese people were backward in both moral and intellectual outlook, the evils banished in one area might simply reappear in another. The immediate task was to transform the national character through education. In Yen's opinion, revolution was a destructive force and would delay the evolution of Chinese society. It would be harmful to the people because it would deepen the conflicts among the various nationalities in China.

It is not surprising that Yen Fu was unhappy when the Chinese republic was established. The political and social chaos which followed the revolution reinforced his conviction that the majority of the Chinese people were incapable of using their political rights properly. In addition to deploring the actions of the revolutionaries and the militarists, he charged K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao with responsibility for the chaotic conditions then prevailing. He saw the need for a strong government to remedy the turbulent situation. The only form of government suitable for China was one strong enough to maintain order within her own territory, which had to be defended against foreign aggression. Any means used to achieve the goal of national security could be justified in view of the deplorable situation. Yen Fu's extreme views on government to some extent explain his connection with Yuan Shih-k'ai during the first years of the republican period. Yen and Yuan seem to have known each other at least as early as 1902, when Yuan figured prominently in national politics as the governor general of Chihli and concurrently commissioner for north China trade. Because of his respect for Yen, Yuan intended to enlist him as an adviser. Yen declined several offers because he disapproved of Yuan's personal character as a politician. Nevertheless, when appointed chancellor of Peking University by Yuan in 1912, Yen accepted the post. In 1913 he became an adviser on legal and foreign affairs to the president's office. When Yuan's campaign to become monarch was in full swing during 1915, Yen was a member of the Chengchih hui-i [political conference] and the Constitutional Conference. Eventually, his name was listed as one of the "six gentlemen" of the Ch'ou-an-hui [society to plan for stability]. Although Yen later claimed that YangTu (q.v.), the leading spirit of the Ch'ou-an-hui, used his name without approval, Yen never publicly repudiated the monarchical plan as a whole. Because of his evaluation of Yuan Shih-k'ai as a political leader, however, he was reluctant to give his wholehearted support to the movement, and he refused Yuan's bribe to write an essay refuting Liang Ch'i-ch'ao's article "How Strange the so-called Question of the Form of State," which vehemently repudiated the monarchical plan. After Yuan's death, Yen Fu went into complete retirement and grew increasingly pessimistic about the contemporary situation.

After 1916, Yen Fu developed a tendency to reject Chinese imitation of Western culture and to seek the restoration of the culture of Chinese antiquity. This change of thinking emerged gradually, becoming increasingly apparent as he advanced in age. His interest in Chinese antiquity gradually led him to advocate revival of the Chinese traditions of the pre-Ch'in period. In order to perpetuate the cultural heritage of China, he maintained, it was mandatory for students of all grades to study the Confucian classics, which in his view would enable the younger generation to cultivate proper moral sentiments and to learn to esteem the sages of the past. When the Confucian Society petitioned Parliament in 1913 to adopt Confucianism as the state religion. Yen Fu supported this course of action. The outbreak of the First World War dealt another blow to his already shaken confidence in the West and contributed to his final reappraisal of its culture as a whole. In 1918 he wrote: "In my old age I have seen the Republic during the seven years of its existence and an unprecedented bloody war of four years in Europe. I feel that the evolution of their [Western] races in the last three hundred years has only made them kill one another for self-interest, without a sense of shame. Today, when I reconsider the way of Confucius and Mencius, I feel it is broad enough to cover the whole cosmos and to benefit the entire world." These views ran contrary to the ideas then prevalent among intellectuals in China. Yen Fu opposed the May Fourth Movement, whose main aims, science and democracy, he had championed more than a quarter of a century earlier. He considered the students' attempt to voice their opinions in national politics as useless and the vernacular style as vulgarization of the Chinese language. Suffering from asthma and declining in health, he wrote little except a number of letters to one of his former students, in which he expressed his growing apprehension over the course of contemporary affairs. He found his only consolation in the Chuang-tzu. In 1920 he returned to his home town, Foochow, from Peking and died there on 27 October 1921. Among his deathbed instructions to his children was the injunction: "Though the old traditions may be modified, they must never be overthrown." As a translator-commentator. Yen Fu made an indelible imprint on modern Chinese intellectual history, his only rival being a fellow provincial, Lin Shu (q.v.), who performed a role similar to Yen's in the field of literature. Yen's standard for translation was expressed in the three-word motto "hsin, ta, ya," meaning fidelity to the original, intelligibility of expression, and elegance of style. Such prominent men as Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Lu Hsün, Hu Shih, and Mao Tse-tung all acknowledged Yen's influence on their thought. Although his use of the classical language made his works difficult to read for the generation which came after the May Fourth Movement, many of the concepts of social Darwinism which he first introduced to China continued to captivate Chinese minds. In this sense. Yen did much to spur intellectual transformation of the Chinese people. Paradoxically, the effects of the ideological changes resulting in social and political reforms were not what he had anticipated. In addition to his translations. Yen excelled in writing poetry in the traditional style. Two collections of his poems were published: the Yen Chi-tao shih-wen ch'ao of 1922 and the Yüyeh-Cang shih-chi of 1926. Yen was also the author of a commentary on the annotations made by Wang Pi (226-249) to the Tao-te ching ; this work was published in Japan in 1 905 as Yen-shih p'ing-tien Lao-tzu. A similar treatise devoted to the Chuang-tzu appeared under the title Chuang-tzu p'ing-tien. Five of Yen's most important translations were collected and published under the title Yen-i ming-chu ts'ung-k'an. In 1959 a selection of his prose and poetry was published in Peking under the title Yen Fu shih-wen hsüan, and in 1965 a number of his translations were reprinted in Taipei. An excellent study by Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power : Yen Fu and the West, was published in 1964.

Yen Fu was survived by his second wife, a concubine, five sons, and four daughters. Yen's first wife, whom he had married at the age of 12, died in 1892. A granddaughter, Isabella Yiyun Yen, became a professor of Chinese and linguistics at the University of Washington at Seattle, where she completed an important work on Chinese syntax, A Grammatical Analysis of Syau Jing, published in 1960.