Wen Yuan-ning

Wen Yuan-ning (Chinese: 溫源寧 1900-1984), born Oon Guan-neng, educated at the University of Cambridge with B.A. Hons. and LLB, was a well-known professor of English language and literature in Peking in the 1920s, teaching at universities such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, where his famous students included Liang Yuchun (梁遇春) and Qian Zhongshu. In the 1930s and 1940s Wen was also a literary figure, legislator and diplomat. In the 1930s Wen was a contributing editor to the Shanghai-based English-language weekly The China Critic (Zhongguo pinglun zhoubao 中國評論週報). In 1935, he became editor-in-chief of the T'ien Hsia Monthly,^[1][2] an English language periodical on Chinese culture published first in Shanghai and then in Hong Kong until 1941 with the fall of Hong Kong to Japanese occupation; from 1935 into the war years he was a member of the Chinese National Legislative Assembly (Li-fa Yuan); and he was appointed Ambassador to Greece in 1947 by the Republic of China and served in that role until his recall in 1968. He retired to Taipei where he taught English literature at what is now Chinese Culture University.

Wen Yuan-ning was the author of the book "Imperfect Understanding" (Kelly and Walsh,Shanghai, 1935). It is a collection of seventeen brief, satirical profiles of prominent Western-educated Chinese celebrities of pre-war Republican China.^[3] The essays in the book were excerpted from fifty essays that appeared in a column Wen edited for "The China Critic" in 1934 called "Unedited Biographies" (later "Intimate Portraits"). Subjects of these celebrity sketches include Hu Shi, Wu Mi, Xu Zhimo, Zhou Zuoren, Wellington Koo, Gu Hongming, Han Fuju, Ma Junwu, Mei Lanfang, George T. Yeh, Y.R. Chao (Zhao Yuanren), Emperor Puyi, Feng Yuxiang, Lim Boon Keng, Ling Shuhua, Wang Delin, Lao She, Wu Zhihui, Feng Youlan, and Liu E.^[4]

Wen Yuan-ning was born in Bangka off Sumatra, formerly of the Dutch East Indies and now Indonesia, of an immigrant Chinese Hakka family with the Hakka family name of OON, instead of WEN. He grew up in Bangka and Singapore and went on to study in England where he registered at Cambridge under the Hakka name of Oon Guan-neng. After he moved to China post World War I, he took the mandarin name of Wen Yuan-ning.

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