Wang Guowei

Wang Guowei, styled Jing'an, was born in 1877 at Haining in Zhejiang and was one of the greatest scholars of modern China. As a young man he learned Japanese and English and studied the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and he was the first to bring Western aesthetics into Chinese literary criticism. He later turned to ancient history, using newly discovered oracle bones and the Dunhuang manuscripts to open new fields in the history of the Shang, ancient script and the history of drama, and proposed the 'method of twofold evidence'. With Liang Qichao, Chen Yinke and Zhao Yuanren he was one of the 'four great mentors' of the Tsinghua Institute of Chinese Studies. In 1927 he drowned himself in Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace in Beijing.