Wang Yun-wu

Biography

The first thing to say about this man is that he hardly went to ordinary schools. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a hardware shop, and in the evenings he attended English classes.

Wang Yun-wu was born on 9 July 1888 in Shanghai, into a family from Xiangshan county in Guangdong province, where for generations they had worked the land. He was the youngest child. At three his mother took him back to Xiangshan, at seven he began his lessons, at first with his eldest brother. The brother soon fell ill and died, and the parents decided that their remaining children should be trained for trade. So the boy ended up in the shop. From 1905 he studied at an English-language school in Shanghai, where he took world history, geography and mathematics, and then helped his father manage a trading firm’s warehouse. At the same time he taught at an evening school, and in 1906 he got a post as English teacher at the China Public School (Zhongguo Gongxue), where one of his pupils was Hu Shih. Hu Shih later wrote that he had been strongly influenced by teachers who valued the analysis of grammar. Wang read widely and studied by correspondence, first engineering and then law.

In 1911 he wrote for a newspaper, supporting the anti-Manchu cause. After the Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the Qing dynasty, Sun Yat-sen noticed him; in 1912 he served as secretary to the provisional president in Nanjing, then worked in Beijing at the Ministry of Education under Cai Yuanpei, taught English and joined the Kuomintang. In 1916 he was a commissioner for suppressing opium smoking in three provinces. In 1927 he left the party by not re-registering.

In 1921, on the recommendation of Hu Shih, Wang Yun-wu became head of the editorial and translation department of The Commercial Press in Shanghai (Shangwu Yinshuguan), and later its general manager. Under him the press brought out dictionaries, encyclopedias and book series, among them the Wanyou Wenku, a collection of 4,000 volumes. He looked for ways to put order into the lookup of characters in dictionaries and libraries; the result was the Four Corner Method (Sijiao Haoma), in which a character receives a numerical code according to the shapes of its four corners. His Great Dictionary (the Wang Yun-wu Dictionary) was compiled on this system. He also introduced methods of scientific management at the press, and output rose markedly.

In 1932, during the fighting in Shanghai, Japanese bombs destroyed the press and the Oriental Library, one of the largest private libraries in the country. More than 3,500 employees lost their jobs. Against advice, Wang borrowed money from banks to support them, and within two years he had rebuilt the company and raised its output two and a half times. The press went on publishing through the war with Japan.

During the war years he became a prominent independent politician, a member of the People’s Political Council; in 1946 he headed the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and in 1947 he became vice-president of the Executive Yuan, the government cabinet. From 31 May 1948 he was minister of finance in the cabinet of Weng Wenhao. On Chiang Kai-shek’s instructions he carried out a currency reform that introduced the “gold yuan”, and it ended in hyperinflation. In the autumn of 1948 he travelled to the United States for the session of the International Monetary Fund; a few months later the cabinet resigned. In November 1948 he flew with his family from Nanjing to Guangzhou, leaving a great many books behind in Nanjing and Shanghai. Several hundred thousand library cards he left in the keeping of Pan Xulun. From 1949 he lived in Taiwan: adviser to the president, vice-president of the Examination Yuan, vice-president of the Executive Yuan. He taught at National Chengchi University, and in 1963, briefly, from 1 July to 16 September, he served as acting head of the Executive Yuan. At the end of 1963 he left that office and became an adviser to the president.

From 1964 he chaired the Taiwan branch of The Commercial Press. In 1972 a foundation for the Yunwu Library in Taipei was set up with his funds, and he gave it his whole collection; with later donations, the memorial collection holds about 90,000 volumes. In the same year he opened the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei on behalf of the government.

He died on 14 August 1979 in Taipei. He is buried in Shulin, now part of New Taipei. In 1987 his portrait appeared on a Taiwanese two-dollar stamp.