維新的露西

With all that 子曰詩云, I hope I don't appear to be a staunch supporter of ancient Chinese classics because I'm not. When I compare Chinese classics with the great books of the West, I'm not overly proud because the quality just doesn't compare. I won't be making such an audacious statement if I didn't know many smarter people than I feel the same way. In the early part of 1900s, Chinese cultural elites all advocated the abolishment of the Chinese written language and one of the reasons was our classics were worthless and they didn't want the future generations to waste time on them. Although the effort to Latinize Chinese failed, Chinese language reform was a great success, today when I see anything written in classical Chinese, I just throw up my hands and don't bother to decipher the unpunctuated riddles.

The modernization movement is called 維新.  The well known leaders were 康有為，梁起超。 In 1919, a huge nation wide movement know as May 4th or 五四運動 broke out. All our culture heroes had something to do with this movement. The strange thing is all these great minds seemed to follow an identical Republican like agenda: building up of the military, industrialization, language reform, etc. The two great banners were science and democracy. Where did this stuff come from? Where did 康有為 get the idea of constitutional monarchy that he tried to pitch to Emperor 光緒？ Was there a Lucy with the right DNA in the evolution of this doctrine?

I think Lucy was 王韜 (1829-97), he was originally from Shanghai and spent his most productive years in Hong Kong. 王韜 was best known for helping translate Chinese Classics into English and the Bible to Chinese. He was the first Chinese to give a speech at Oxford in 1868 and was a already world traveler by the time he returned to in Hong Kong.  Thank heaven for wiki, here's a link to 王韜.

王韜 founded the 1st Chinese newspaper 循環日報 (Universal Circulating Herald) in Hong Kong on Hollywood Road 荷李活道 (the name has nothing to do with Hollywood, CA). From 1874-1884, he wrote more than 1,000 (uncensored by Chinese) editorials covering all the aforementioned reformist topics. This newspaper was widely read by mainland and overseas Chinese, it was quite possible 康有為 was a reader in the 1880s when he started to absorb the western ways wholesale.  康有為 also visited Hong Kong in 1879 and it would be unlikely that he didn't read the only Chinese newspaper as an impressionable young man. When 孫中山 first arrived in Hong Kong, he was shocked by how clean and nice Hong Kong was compared to China, I imagine 康有為 might have the same reaction 4 years earlier and couldn't help wondering why China was such a mess.

孫中山, the founder of the republic, was a student in Hong Kong (1883 on). In a speech he made in HKU many years later, he said the biggest influence in his life was the years in Hong Kong.  Before Sun entered Hong Kong Medical School in 1887, he was a student at 拔萃(1883)  and 中央(1884-),  he must have read the editorials of  循環日報 written by 王韜 with great interest. Before 孫中山 was a complete revolutionary, he wrote a letter to 李鴻章, 王韜 was the old master in Shanghai that helped him write 上李鴻章書. (Allegedly,  李鴻章 got impatient because 孫 couldn't make himself understood in Mandarin, otherwise, the young 孫 could end up as a Qing Dynasty official! The less colorful and more likely version is 李鴻章 was too busy to read the letter.)

To be fair, 盛世危言 by 鄭觀應 was the most influential reformist book (which also advocated constitutional monarchy), published two decades after 循環日報 in 1894 in Macao.  I'm just wondering out loud why such a great talent 王韜 is not a household name today. I'm so curious about 王韜 that I'm googling for all I'm worth for his original books and articles and can only find snippets and secondhand information. *Please leave comments if you know where to find his original writings online.

(You may notice a lot of weasel words in this entry, that's because I haven't done any serious research on this. Please feel free to post corrections.)