On July 16, the literary and historical scholar Dai Jun and Yang had a conversation at the Jinniu store of the Sisyphus Bookstore in Chengdu. The event revolved around Mr. Dai Jun's new work, "String Recitation: The Past of Church University Scholars". Dai Jun is a senior newspaper editor, now retired, after 2000 transferred to the Republic of China academic history and scholar research, the author of "Discovery of Li Zhuang", "Republic of China Cloth Crown", "Li Ji Biography", "Wind Through Huaxi Dam" and so on. The guest of honor, Yang Zao, is a doctor of literature from Peking University and is now an associate researcher at the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Based on the live recordings, some of the content is sorted out for the benefit of the reader.
Dai Jun: Thank you for coming to listen to an old man talk about the past of HuaxiBa. Although it was more than seventy years ago, it is connected with today's Chengdu, the future Chengdu, and the current life of each of us. Huaxi Dam should be the beginning of modernization in Chengdu and even in the southwest, Chengdu's first stethoscope, the first bicycle, the first radio, the first case of modern women's midwifery... It all started from there, and without that step, we wouldn't be where we are today; without that, Chengdu wouldn't have become the best district in West China.
Why would I care about such a topic? More than forty years ago, I was a young intellectual, and the next morning I went to the countryside and ran to the top of the highest mountain of our production team, hoping to see what the world was like on the other side of the mountain. After retiring in previous years, an outbound trip was arranged once a year. I want to look at the important nodes in the emergence of human civilization, such as the Two Rivers Civilization, the Egyptian Civilization, the Greek Civilization, the Indian Civilization and so on. It is not known whether this goal can be fully achieved in my lifetime. But just a limited number of outings, realize that the similarities between human beings are greater than the differences, and many of the problems faced by people of different skin tones, different regions, and different languages are common. The differences and conflicts between civilizations come from the exchange and integration of civilizations. There can be no opposition without communication. It's like the tribal era when human childhood was old and dead. President Xi has said many times, "The Pacific Ocean is large enough to accommodate the development of China and the United States." This refers not only to geospatial space, but also to psychological space. During President Xi's visit to the United States in 2015, CCTV produced a large documentary film, "The Bond", which tells the stories of missionaries and sinologists such as Xavier, Matteo Ricci, John Tang, Luo Mingjian, Wei Sanwei, Ru Lian, Schwartz, Shi Jingqian, Fairbank, Joseph Needham, Kong Feili and other missionaries and sinologists. This film breaks through the long-term confrontation between Eastern and Western cultures, the dichotomy between tradition and modernity, emphasizes the mutual reference between civilizations, and restores the common sense of world history. I also wrote in this book that the son of Rui Tao'an, a professor at Jinling University's Theological School, is Rui Xiaojian, who was the US ambassador to China in the 1990s, born in Nanjing, raised in Chengdu, and studied in Shanghai. After returning to the United States to go to college, he has been to many countries in the world. He said that people all over the world, everywhere, are good and cunning, gentle and vicious, and should not be easily labeled ideologically. There are a lot of such stories in the book, but the host only gave me fifteen minutes. I can only simply demonstrate my PPT to everyone, and then ask Teacher Yang Zhao to say more.
Dai Jun (left) and Yang Zhao
Chengdu has two of the most glorious histories, I think not only the Shu Han in the Three Kingdoms period, the Shu Han in the Three Kingdoms period was a short-lived regime, neither as good as Eastern Wu, nor as good as Northern Wei. There are two more glorious periods in Chengdu, one is that after the Tang Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty migrated three times, bringing economic prosperity and cultural rise, extending to the Former Shu and later Shu and even the Two Song Dynasties. The other is the period of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, when the country's culture and education moved westward. The most important history of this period in Chengdu is the period when Huaxiba Five Universities were founded. At that time, Chengdu people were very proud, just like Shanghai people did not say "Shanghai", preferred to say "Shanghai"; Hangzhou people did not say "Hangzhou", but said "on the lake"; then Chengdu people said Chengdu said "on the dam". Huaxi Dam refers to Chengdu. Recall that during that period, the five best Christian universities in China were in Chengdu, and a large number of scholars and masters were also gathered. Liushahe once said, "To understand Chengdu during the Ming and Qing dynasties, you have to go to wide and narrow alleys." To understand Chengdu during the Republic of China, you have to go to Huaxi Dam. "Many people today do not know the historical status and impact of Huaxi Dam.
This map shows several large blocks of Christianity, and there are three main blocks of Christianity: Roman Catholicism is what we usually call Catholicism, mainly referring to the Latin-speaking region; Protestantism is what we call Christianity, mainly referring to the Anglo-Saxon cultural circle that speaks English; and Eastern Orthodoxy is Orthodoxy, mainly referring to the Slavic region. The main relationship with Huaxiba is Protestantism, which is found in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Protestantism runs 13 universities in China. In the 1920s, anti-foreign religions were in various places, and the tide of nationalism was surging. The Kuomintang regime in Nanjing, the capital, had to respond to the people's demands for the repossession of the clerical power. Ordered the church university to be converted into a private university and filed with the Ministry of Education of the National Government. The main measures are: First, the president, who was originally a foreigner as the principal, was later changed to Chinese as the principal, and the foreigner became the dean; the proportion of teachers has changed, and Chinese teachers have been increased; the head of the department, the dean of the college and other educational administrators are all Chinese. Second, funding, in addition to continuing to be donated by overseas catholics, the Nanjing government and local governments have also allocated a small amount of funds; third, curriculum design, the original theology is a compulsory course, changed to elective courses, prayer and etiquette is completely voluntary.
West China Union University, "Union" is not "Union", and many books have errors. After the abolition of the imperial examination in 1905, the five Christian participants of the Anglo-American and Canadian countries prepared to build a university in Chengdu, hence the name West China Union University, and on March 11, 1910, west China Union University officially opened. The school is structured in imitation of the Oxbridge University system, with colleges as the mainstay. What is the Oxford system? For example, there is a West China Kindergarten of Sichuan University in the Guangming Road Community of West China, which is the former site of the Guangyi School, which was donated by the British Anglican Church, and the school building has a house supervisor, and students eat, entertain and study there. Later, it was the Faculty of Letters of West China Union University. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, a large number of academic celebrities, such as Chen Yinke, Li Fanggui, Xiao Gongquan, Qian Mu, Gu Jiegang, etc., all attended classes there.
This is the old school gate of West China Union University, and now this school gate can be seen on Renmin South Road, but it has only been restored in the past few years, and it is enlarged on the basis of the original. The location is also not in the original location. The original location was by the Jinjiang River. The approximate range of Huaxi Dam is the northernmost part of the Jinjiang River, the southernmost side is the First Ring Road, the easternmost is Nantaizi Street, and the westernmost is Washmian Bridge Street. This is the map of the huaxi dam area in Chengdu now, and the white in the middle is Renmin South Road, which was built in 1958, and there was no road originally. Originally, chengdu had only four bridges, one in the southeast, south, and northwest. Every plant and tree of West China Union University is transported by ship to the dock and then picked ashore.
This is the scenery of Huaxi Dam in 1920. There are a few cows on the grass leisurely nibbling on the grass, which is the first batch of cows in Chengdu, the first to be introduced from the Netherlands by Ding Kesheng, a professor of biology at West China Union University and a Canadian. During the War of Resistance, Song Meiling sent a few more. This is the earliest source of milk that Chengdu people drink now. There were piano rooms around the meadow, so some people at that time called this scenery "playing the piano to the cow".
Which five universities were there during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression? In the early stage, it was the School of Medicine of Central University, Qilu University, Jinling University, Jinling Women's College of Arts and Sciences, and West China Union University; later, the School of Medicine of Central University moved away and then moved to Yenching University. Joseph Needham, British science counselor in China and historian of Chinese science and technology, called the five universities in Bashang "five Christian universities", and fairbank, the American cultural counselor in China and a famous sinologist, called them "the united universities of Chengdu". But today people only know that Kunming has the Southwest United University, but they don't know that there are also some famous universities in our land.
Comparison of chengdu Huaxiba Church Five Universities and Southwest United University
Here, I have a comparative chart of the five universities in Bashang and the Southwest United University, from the size of students, the setting of colleges and departments, full-time and part-time teachers, the characteristics of the disciplines, etc., the five universities in this land are not inferior to the Southwest United University in Kunming, at least they have their own characteristics.
Wen Youzhang and Wu Yaozong
At that time, the missionaries also had different political colors, there were red missionaries who tended to support the revolution, the tall one was the Canadian Humanistic Children's Medal, and his "Pine Forest Villa" was a secret stronghold of the Ccp's Southern Bureau. He was later hailed as an "old friend of the Chinese min"; the shorter was Wu Yaozong, who later became the leader of the Christian "Three-Self" Patriotic Association.
The Rei Tao An family
There are also missionaries with the ideals of Christ. In the book, I write this chapter with the term "nostalgia for the other." This is Mr. Rui Tao'an, we may not know him, but we know that hong kong Chinese University was formerly known as Chongji College, New Asia College, etc., the founder of Chongji College is Rui Tao'an, his two sons grew up in Huaxiba, speak a Chengdu dialect, but also eat spicy hot. The two children, the older brother Rui Xiaowei, a sinologist at the University of Chicago, who spent his life in Tang and Song poems, and the younger brother Rui Xiaojian, who was the U.S. ambassador to China in the 1990s. These people, including Bu Kai and his ex-wife Pearl Buck, were originally sent to China to spread the "gospel" of Christ, but they were influenced by other cultures and deeply loved the Chinese culture in the local area. When they left, with sadness and nostalgia, they began to become ferrymen of Eastern and Western cultures. It was the child Just now, Rui Xiaowei, who taught sinology at the University of Chicago, translated ten volumes of "Jin Ping Mei" all his life, and after translating it, he got Parkinson's, and later this pile of books accompanied him until his death a few years ago.
Bu Kai, Pearl Buck's family
Mr. Bukai, the American, we don't know him, only his original wife, Pearl Buck, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her "Earth Trilogy." Mr. Bu Kai, an agricultural economist, founded a school of thought, and the purpose of the "China Land Survey" he organized and compiled was to clear up China's family background. Pearl Buck's writing material is exactly the "corner residue" collected when she went to northern Jiangsu with her husband to do rural research. This Bu Kai and Mr. Yang Zhao have a relationship, his grandfather Mr. Yang Rulun was a student of Bu Kai, the university thesis is "Sichuan Huayang County rice, wheat, corn, sweet potato four crops production costs research.". The school of agricultural economics and technology, or productivity school, pioneered by Bu Kai, studied land, seeds, scale of production, and agricultural cooperative relations... It is the pioneer who paid attention to the "three rural issues".
The motto of Yanda University, "Because of the truth, be free, and serve", is also the journalistic ideal of Yanda. At that time, the journalism department of Yanda University was the best journalism department in the whole Far East and the cradle of talents of the Ta Kung Pao. I write about four news people at Yenching University. One of them is Tang Zhenchang, a native of Chengdu. At that time, the Chengdu Confucian Temple (now Chengdu Shishi Middle School) was a male dormitory of Yenching University, and Tang Zhenchang's family was also near there. There were originally two people in Chengdu, one was the Li family (Ba Jin family) in the north and the Tang family in the south. Mr. Tang Zhenchang's research topic after graduating from university is "On Press Freedom", and this concept also runs through the journalistic practice of him and his classmates. Freedom of the press was a weapon used by the Communist Party and its allies against the Kuomintang's authoritarian centralization. They opposed the Kuomintang censorship system, quoting a passage from Karl Marx's "Commentary on Prussia's Recent Censorship of Books and Newspapers": "You praise nature's pleasing diversity and endless rich treasures, and you do not ask the rose to emit the same fragrance as the violet, but why do you demand the richest thing in the world, the spirit, which can only have one form of existence?" ”
Wu Yifang, president of Jinling Women's College of Arts and Sciences, is a great little-footed woman, a Chinese woman who signed the declaration of the founding of the United Nations. The 999 roses she cultivated, that is, 999 graduates of the Golden Women's University, including female generals, female scientists, female conductors, and ordinary virtuous wives and mothers. Liang Qichao said, "Changing a nation starts with the mother." Wu Yifang's women's education, especially the Department of Home Economics and Sociology of Jinnu University, is a very successful practice.
The School of Dentistry of West China Union University has the best dentistry in the Far East, and now the West China School of Stomatology of Sichuan University is still the top level in China. At that time, it was brought by the Canadian Lin Ze.
Why should I pay attention to this history? Chengdu is a highly internationalized city, where did the earliest internationalization begin? It starts with the Huaxi Dam. There is a Canadian primary school on the dam that accommodates children from foreigners. At that time, students in Ottawa, Canada, would have a "silver hair party" every year. Now there is a photo exhibition about that period of history in The town of Xinyi in Chengdu. Three U.S. vice presidents have visited Chengdu during their tenures: Wallace on June 22, 1944, George Bush in October 1985, and Biden on August 21, 2011. They have all given lectures at Huaxiba. The architecture of Huaxiba is a combination of Chinese and Western architectural styles in the Republic of China. In 2013, the State Council announced the seventh batch of national key cultural relics protection units, and the early building complex of Sichuan University, except for one administrative building on the Wangjiang campus, the remaining seven are in Huaxiba. The Sichuan University Museum is not one of the best museums in Chinese universities, it has 50,000 cultural relics, the most important of which more than 40,000 are from West China Union University.
I will introduce this paragraph first, and then ask Dr. Yang Zhao to introduce it.
The scene of the event
Yang Zhao: Thank you Teacher Dai Jun for your wonderful speech, and I am honored to be invited as a guest of honor. There are several reasons, one is because my own book "Read Early" was published in the same publishing house as Dai Jun's book in the same publishing house, and the second is that my own family history has a certain relationship with the Department of Agricultural Economics of Jinling University described by Teacher Dai Jun.
If you are singing a play here today, Teacher Dai Jun is the protagonist, and his script is the book "String Recitation fu Li Song". His speech just now is very wonderful, if you have read this book, you must get a lot of things from it that you can't see in other books. But maybe some of your friends here have not yet read this book, and my task is to be a curtain to lay out the background of Teacher Dai Jun's book so that everyone can better understand the meaning of this book.
Anyone who has followed the history of Chinese universities knows that the first modern university in China was the Beijing Normal University Hall in 1898. Friends here may ask: this year is the 120th anniversary of Zhejiang University. Last year was the 120th anniversary of Sichuan University. Hunan University also commemorates more than 2,000 years of school anniversaries. How to understand?
There are three lines in the development of Chinese universities:
One vein is the only university named by the state or the state, that is, the Beijing Normal University Hall in 1898, and the Tongwen Hall, which was established earlier than it, was later incorporated into the Beijing Normal University Hall, but Peking University did not take the founding day of the Tongwen Hall as its founding day, but put the 1898 Year, the year when the Qing government promulgated the "Statute of the University Hall", and the Beijing Normal University Hall was officially opened as its founding commemoration.
The second vein: Many universities are now commemorating their own more than 100 years of history, and their algorithms are mainly to take the academies established in the provinces in the late Qing Dynasty as predecessors, such as the establishment of Zhejiang University is the establishment of Qiushi College, and Sichuan University is based on the establishment of The Chinese and Western Academy as its founding symbol. However, these colleges could only be regarded as secondary schools at that time, including Tsinghua, which at first was only a preparatory school for studying in the United States, and then slowly developed into a university. In order to show that they do not forget the fundamentals, and in order to appear to have a long history, these universities push the history forward. But strictly speaking, their predecessors, the academies, were not universities in the modern sense when they were founded.
The third thread is the subject of today's discussion— the church university. Church universities are completely relocated according to the establishment of Western universities, including teachers and textbook systems that are almost exactly the same as in the West. So, if we're going to look for a particularly Westernized model in Chinese universities, it's definitely a church university.
From Kyoshi University to Peking University, national universities are characterized by relative politicization. As we all know about the May Fourth Movement, Peking University's participation in peking is actually not the earliest, but once the May Fourth strike began, there was a saying called "don't stop, look at Peking University", why? Its status dictates. This has led to the fact that the students of Peking University are particularly prone to political figures, such as Fu Sinian, Luo Jialun, Duan Xipeng, Luo Zhanglong, etc., who are well known to everyone, who later entered the political field.
College of Agriculture, Jinling University
In contrast, the other two veins, especially the church university branch, pay more attention to the academic and social aspects. Why did Jinling University establish the best agricultural faculties in China? We are a big agricultural country, but why is it that foreigners initiate research on agriculture?
I think the reasons are: First, the West has gone through the process of how to build a modern society, and has already had a ready-made model of these faculties of research, so it is willing and convenient to transplant this thing to China, and from the beginning, the intention and promotion of church universities is not the same as that of Local Universities in China. Second, church universities generally have relatively sufficient funds and donations, so they will promote this replication program more smoothly. Third, it has close ties with foreign universities themselves, such as Jinling University and Cornell are sister schools, and their students often go to Cornell to study for a master's or doctoral degree in agriculture and then return to China, for example, Yenching University's School of Journalism is related to the Missouri School of Journalism, and they will also go to further education. Therefore, the degree of internationalization of these universities is much higher than that of local Chinese universities.
The development of Chinese universities has such three contexts, if you carefully compare, you will find that these three schools of school policy, such as why Tsinghua appears "professors govern the school", while Peking University has always been an official governance, the game between the president, faculty and students, entangled, there is a source. Where a flower grows from, what the flower will look like is closely related to the soil.
The development of Chinese universities reached an inflection point in 1937, that is, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, and a large number of schools moved inland, including national universities, but also church or private universities. In the course of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, several cultural centers were formed, and Teacher Dai Jun said in his book "Wind Through Huaxi Dam" that in addition to the familiar Kunming, there are "three dams", one is the ancient road dam in Hanzhong, one is the Shaping dam in Chongqing, and the other is the Huaxi dam in Chengdu.
Among these education centers, Kunming and Chengdu are the two most famous places in the post-war period, the most concentrated educational resources, and the two places with the most achievements. It is said that when Shen Congwen visited the United States in the 1980s, someone asked him this sentence: Why did the number of talents graduated from the Southwest United University in eight years exceed the sum of the three schools of Tsinghua, Peking University, and Nankai before the war? Shen Congwen replied with two words--"freedom." This word is also established for Huaxiba, and not only freedom, but also due to the relationship between church universities and Western countries such as the United States, Huaxiba can obtain funds, talents, and exchange resources far exceed Kunming. It is only the collection of the top universities in Kunming's Southwest United University, so it attracts the attention of the outside world.
Kunming is more famous than Chengdu, and it is also because the Southwest United University has cultivated a large number of literary talents. Have you noticed that there are not as many literary talents in Chengdu as in Kunming, which is related to the direction of education. At the beginning, the church university paid more attention to the cultivation of relatively practical talents, so the dissemination of anecdotes, the account of literature, and the Huaxi Dam were indeed inferior to Kunming, which led to the "Myth of the Southwest United Congress" that appeared later during the "Republic of China Fever" not being copied in the Huaxi Dam, but this does not mean that the Huaxi Dam is not as important as Kunming, on the contrary, the importance of the Huaxi Dam needs to be further excavated and discussed. Kunming and Chengdu are an important division in the history of modern Chinese universities.
Everything is good and bad, there are advantages and disadvantages, together with the War of Resistance, the internal relocation of universities is of course a bad thing, a large number of school buildings, materials, talents in this process of loss of a lot, but at the same time it brings a benefit, because China's development since modern times is very uneven, the late Qing Dynasty Sun Baoxuan made a comparison, he said that the distance between Qingjiangpu and Shanghai in northern Jiangsu is 50 years, and the distance between the interior and Qingjiangpu is also 50 years. In other words, before the founding of the Republic of China, the distance between Sichuan and Shanghai was more than 100 years, and the Republic of China was established for more than 20 years, and this situation has not fundamentally changed. If there had been no war, those famous universities in China would have settled in Kunming, Chengdu, Yibin, Northwest and other places, which was something that had not been thought of before. The inward migration of colleges and universities may be a certain misfortune for education across the country, but it is definitely a fortunate thing for the mainland, and it is important that the movement of universities has brought China's educational resources to a certain balance. From Teacher Dai Jun's book, we can see many examples, such as the Familiar Jintang Navel Orange, Happy Merlin, and the earliest cows in Chengdu, etc., all due to the inward migration of the school, and the facts here are numerous.
Now Huaxi Dam
I studied a little bit of Zhejiang University during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which stayed in Zunyi for seven years, and the Zunyi campus of Zhejiang University was often open to the public. Many Zunyi people said in reminiscence articles: I never thought that I would walk into the campus of a university, and I would see how college students would take classes, do experiments, and how university teachers would give lectures. This scene greatly stimulated the young minds of these Zunyi children at that time, and stimulated them to be more motivated in their subsequent learning and work. When I went to Zunyi last year, they told me that the quality of the college entrance examination in Zunyi is still one of the best in Guizhou.
A school may only be in a place for a few years, but the impact it leaves behind is profound. I don't know much about Huaxiba and the surrounding situation, and I hope to ask Teacher Dai Jun this question later. Yu Qiuyu has an essay called "Holding Shame on Shanxi", I can also borrow this title, I am a bit "ashamed of Huaxi": because my mother is a Chengdu native, I spent two or three years in Chengdu when I was a child, how many times I passed through Renmin South Road by car and bicycle, but I never thought that this is Huaxi Dam, here and China's modern history, education history how closely related, as a person who has been in Chengdu for so long, I really have a sense of shame.
Let's look at the PPT put by Teacher Dai Jun just now, which is still full of black hair when the photo interview, and now it is gray hair. He has spent so much energy and time to bring us so much information that has been submerged under the sea of history, can we borrow this historical nourishment to re-examine our city and re-examine the Huaxi Dam?
Dai Jun took a group photo with the interviewees
Our topic today is called "Huaxike and Chengdu People", at that time we discussed in the group for a long time, why set this topic? At the beginning, for example, four universities borrowed a campus building from West China Union University and reopened and reopened the university here, and they were guests of Huaxi Dam. But with the passage of time, with the study of Tibetan studies, the study of the situation of ethnic minorities in southwest China, the outflow of biological resources, the investigation of agriculture, etc., they have become Chengdu people, and they have contributed to the various undertakings of Chengdu and even Sichuan and even China.
In particular, many Chengdu students, who used to go to a good university, may have to go to Shanghai, Beijing, or even go abroad, but in those years they were very convenient to get a good education at their doorstep. My own ancestors are a good example, my grandfather was a Gaoyou native of Jiangsu Province, who went to Jinling University High School in Nanjing, moved to Sichuan with the attached middle school, and then went to Jinling University and went to the Department of Agriculture. My grandmother was a native of Fushun, Sichuan, she came to Chengdu from Fushun, Sichuan, and also entered the Department of Agriculture of Jinling University, a grade shorter than my grandfather, and the two of them met and fell in love in Huaxiba and started a family. My grandfather later became an English teacher in a middle school and also had political experience, but my grandmother was an agricultural expert all her life and worked in the Agricultural Science Institute all her life.
Looking back now, this is the legacy of Huaxiba's university education at that time. The family structure of our family is very illustrative of this problem, a boy who came down the river, and a native girl from Sichuan, who went to the same school, graduated from the same school, and then stayed in Sichuan and served Sichuan for a lifetime. My father and myself both grew up in Sichuan, and we both have very strong feelings for Sichuan, and I think this is a metaphor that can illustrate the impact of the Anti-Japanese War Inland Migration University on Chengdu.
The content of this book is very rich, you can talk about a variety of issues, but on the question I am concerned about, please ask Teacher Dai Jun to answer, that is, the relationship between West China University and the local area, how do we understand and look at it?
The five presidents of the Church University
Dai Jun: Why should I study the Huaxi Dam? It is to feel that that period of history is like a spring, although it is invisible on the ground, it has actually been flowing underground and has been nourishing us. For example, in agriculture, Southwest United University did not have an agricultural college, and it could not train Shen Zonghan and Shen Liying, wheat breeding experts who set off the "Green Revolution in South China", and the National University probably would not train experts and flower experts engaged in gardens, because the main contradiction at that time was the problem of filling the stomach. But in Chengdu's Happy Merlin, you must have been there, and you must have noticed that there is a stone stele inscribed with "Happy Merlin", and the payment is Chen Junyu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Mr. Chen Junyu, like Mr. Yang Zhao's grandfather, was a student of the Agricultural College of Jinling University, who came to Chengdu during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, had no livelihood, and raised funds to set up a garden by himself, cultivated some tree seedlings and flowers to sell, and earned some money. Mr. Chen Junyu was born in Jinling, just like "Dream of the Red Chamber" and Ba Jin's "Home Spring and Autumn", everyone has everyone's troubles, especially children. The courtyard was deep, black and rumbling, and the twilight was heavy. After school, Chen Junyu likes to play with flowers and plants, cats and dogs, and play with florists. When I went to college, I asked my parents if there was a major in planting flowers and grass in China, and it turned out that there was really one. The Department of Horticulture of the College of Agriculture of Jinling University has a "art planting major", which specializes in garden design in addition to flower cultivation. Chen Junyu, a graduate of Jinling University, later became the first and only Meihua academician of the Republic. He did two main things, there are a large number of poems in China that chant plum blossoms, but there is no study of plum blossom genealogy. He filled that gap. There is a poem, "Plum blossoms rejoice in the snow", but wrong, plum blossoms are afraid of freezing and do not like the snow, plum blossoms since ancient times but the Yellow River, who led plum blossoms across the Yellow River? Meihua academician Chen Junyu.
There is also the People's Park in Chengdu, then called Shaocheng Park, the transformation was also started by Mr. Cheng Shifu, his father Cheng Dequan was a general of heilongjiang in the late Qing Dynasty, built China's first park in Qiqihar, and then built a botanical garden in Suzhou after "anyway". He sent his son to the United States to study landscape architecture. Longquan peach is also introduced by students of the Department of Biology of West China Union University. The citrus in Jintang is an improved variety of the Department of Horticulture of Jinda Agricultural College.
Church universities and national universities have different focuses, looking up at the sky and bowing down to the ground, just like Kant said, "The Big Dipper in the sky, the moral law of the heart", both far-sighted and practical. At that time, every church university had a social service point, Yenching University was in Chongyi Bridge, Pengxian County, JinDa was in Huayang Zhonghechang, Jinnu University was in The Red Arch Building, running night schools and agricultural schools to eliminate illiteracy, promote science and technology, preach health knowledge, send medicines and medicines... Every summer, the five universities run "frontier service groups" to organize teachers and students to go to Maowen, Lifan, and Heishui to serve the border people. Mr. Gu Jiegang served as the general counsel of the "Summer Frontier Service Group" of five universities.
Li Fanggui, Chen Yinke, Wu Mi, Xiao Gongquan, Qian Mu, Gu Jiegang
Yang Zhao: Asking Teacher Dai Jun a relatively challenging question, and it is also a question that I have always thought about: In modern times, Chinese intellectuals have very complicated feelings in the face of Western civilization, on the one hand, they admit that Western civilization is more adapted to the development of this world than we are, and at the same time, its liberation of human nature, the freedom and comfort of life, are far more than traditional society. But on the other hand, as a Chinese, many people will worry in their hearts that learning from the West will lead to inequality of sovereignty and even cultural aggression.
For example, when Mr. Wang Shixiang graduated from Yenching University, when he went to apply for a position in the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, Fu Sinian said a word: How can a graduate of Yanda University enter us? Hu Shi holds a master's degree in agronomy from Cornell University, but he also often says that Chinese universities will soon be replaced by several church universities if they do not work hard. They have a vague fear in their hearts that our right to education and cultural leadership will not be transferred to outsiders because of the existence of church universities. There are many games in this development, whether it is Qian Mu, Chen Yinke, Wu Mi, there are many back and forth between national universities and church universities, and their mentality is sometimes very complicated.
At this point, ask Mr. Dai Jun, what typical examples do you have in your research to illustrate this problem?
Dai Jun: Prejudice comes from misunderstanding. Mr. Chen Yinke is the professor of the professor, the master of the master, when Chen Yinke was in class in Chengdu, the back listening included Mr. Lin Sijin of Chengdu who was a good friend of his father Chen Sanli. Mr. Chen Yinke also had prejudices against the church university, he was only able to go to Yenching University because he could not do it, he should have gone to Lizhuang Town, Nanxi, Sichuan, but he could not go. He escaped from Hong Kong in 1943 and traveled all the way to Guangxi. At that time, I heard that the conditions of Li Zhuang were too poor, and the two daughters of the archaeologist Mr. Li Ji died of illness in Kunming and Li Zhuang respectively, Mr. Chen Yinke was not in good health, and his wife Tang Yun and the younger daughter Mei Yan were sick. So he finally got hired by Yenching University and came to Chengdu. From his letters to Fu Si Nian during that period, he saw that he was somewhat reluctant.
In 1944, Chen Yinke suddenly lost sight in both eyes and suddenly collapsed. At this time, Yenching University, from president Mei Yibao to every student, reached out to help. He was provided with the best medical conditions at that time, waiting for him in turn, cooking and feeding him, reading books and newspapers, taking medicine and boiling medicine; helping his family carry water to cook, and leading the children to do their homework. At that time, Liu Shi (Shi Quan), who organized his classmates to help Mr. Chen, began to conceive a thesis "The Political Situation of the Late Qing Dynasty Before and After the Sino-Japanese War" during that time, and Liu Shi was the first person, and even the only one, who personally supervised mr. Yin Ke to complete the writing of a master's thesis on modern Chinese history. The lost and recovered paper, published in the 1990s, was hailed as the best study of that period of history. "Not only obey his knowledge, but also admire his writing", classmate Tang Zhenchang wrote: "What people have not said, what people have not said, no one has yet to reply, there is no constraint of looking left and right, this is the true meaning of 'independent spirit, free thought' taught by Mr. Yin Ke in his lifetime, and I respect him more as a fellow scholar." ”
For this feeling, Mr. Chen Yinke once praised Mei Yibao in person, "I didn't expect that your church school would still exist. In his later years, Mei Yibao recalled that this comment was the highest praise for his school.
Mr. Wu Mi is a "ministry professor", and it is also condescending to go to Chengdu to teach Yenching University. At the beginning, in Peiping, he had a criticism of the church university. After arriving in Chengdu, he began to live in Shaanxi Street, and later felt that the accommodation conditions were too poor, so he changed to Wenmiao Back Street. When he went deeper into it, he felt joy. He teaches two courses, "World Literature" and "Literature and Life" at Yenching University in Chengdu, and often discusses the national war situation with teachers and students in his spare time. He once wrote in his diary: "In the school of Yan University, the area is very small, but it is washed and clean, and the ground is dust-free", "There are 400 students, two-thirds of whom are from Pingjin, who speak Beijing, crisp and pleasant", "The students are enthusiastic and clean and polite", "Teachers and students are intimate, sensitive, and the natural atmosphere of communication between men and women is beyond his school's reach." He participated in the Christian fellowship activities organized by yenching University students, and he realized that it was also a kind of student mutual aid group, an interest group after class, helping each other, criticizing and inspiring wisdom. He once wrote a couplet for the boys' dormitory of the Temple of Literature, which was: "The restoration of the school and the unity of the state; the beginning of the people's salvation cause."
At that time, the church university on the dam was an exile school in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and the teachers and students were compatriots who went to the country with the Chinese people; at that time, the donor countries behind the Protestant school, Britain, the United States and Canada, were all allies in the joint fight against fascism, and at that time, the West China Union University Museum on the dam was visited every day by non-commissioned officers of the Allied forces who aided China, the sports field often had various ball games with the Allies, and a field hospital of the US army was built on the floor of the inpatient department of the newly completed West China Union University Medical College. At that time, Chengdu was an international metropolis. Nor do people think that church universities are much different from ordinary national universities.