Ding Wenjiang is a biography
Ding Wenjiang (1887-1936), also spelled Zaijun, pen name Zong Yan, was a famous geologist, political commentator and educator from Huangqiao Town, Taixing, Jiangsu Province. His short life was spent wandering between science, industry and politics, and he was known as the "father of modern Chinese geology", "Chinese Huxley" and "Xu Xiake of the twentieth century". From 1911 to 1929, San entered Guizhou to investigate geology and anthropology, and had a lot of insight into the economic development of the southwest region. Cai Yuanpei said: "Proficient in science and good at doing things, such as Mr. Jun, is a rare figure in our country now. German geologist Grab said that "Ding Junzhi is a man, not special, has extraordinary ability, and has a far-sighted vision, the courage and courage of Hongyi, and the ability to do what he sees!" British scientist Russell said: "Ding Wenjiang is the most talented Chinese I have ever seen." ”
Ding Wenjiang was regarded as a child prodigy at an early age. "At the age of five, he became a fu, recited it, read it for four years, and completed the Five Classics and the Four Books." At the age of eleven, he composed "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Han Gaozu and Ming Taizu", "thousands of words at the beginning and end, Wang Yang indulged in indulgence, the teacher was a hand, and Mo Nengyi was a word". Taixing ZhiXian LongZhang heard of his wisdom, personally produced the interview question "Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty Tong Southwest Yi Theory", Ding Wenjiang waved it, Long Zhang read the volume "great sigh, Xu is a national instrument, that is, Ri Na as a disciple, and strongly persuades to travel to study in a foreign country to become his ambition." With long Zhang's persuasion and help, the fifteen-year-old Ding Wenjiang was able to take charge of Dongying. Two years later, Ding Wenjiang was extremely dissatisfied with the failure of students studying in Japan and transferred to the United Kingdom to study. After two years, he completed the secondary school course and was successfully admitted to Cambridge University. But Cambridge was highly tuitionable, and six months later transferred to the University of Glasgow, where he received a double degree in geology and zoology in 1911.
At the end of his nine-year career in the West, Ding Wenjiang could have arrived in Shanghai by boat and returned home for a reunion at an early date, but chose to land at haiphong, a northern Vietnamese port, transferred to a car and train into the southwest of the motherland, and used a compass to measure sketches along the way, measured altitude with a barometer, and initially understood the geographical and geological situation in southwest China.
In early June 1911, Ding Wenjiang entered Guizhou for the first time. The diary said: "What I see every day is not a bare stone mountain, no water, no soil, no trees, no people's homes, or very deep canyons, and on both sides of the river are hundreds to three thousand feet." Only in the branches of the canyon, or near the falling pond of stones, there are occasionally a few villages. The so-called cities are in such shallow and wide canyons, such as Guiyang, or in the middle of relatively large ancient sinkholes, such as Anshun. From Yizikong Yi at the junction of Yunnan-Guizhou to Zhenyuan at the end of the upper reaches of the Yuanjiang River, a thousand miles away, passing through Langdai, Zhenning, Anshun, Anping, Qingzhen, Guiyang, Longli, Guiding, Qingping, Shibing, Huangping, Zhenyuan twelve prefectures and counties, with a population of more than 10,000, only Guiyang and Anshun counties... There are no more than a hundred towns and villages along the way. The 1,000-mile road that the statistical route passes through, from west to east, through the province, the residents on the roadside, a total of less than 160,000 people, if you remove the two big cities of Guiyang and Anshun, the rest are only more than 40,000 people! ...... And because of the 'three-mile flatness of the earth', there is no shadow of the wheel in Tong Province. ”
The day of arrival at the yellow fruit tree coincided with the market. "At that time, I saw many women in strange costumes that caught my attention. The first was one with a pleated skirt, a cool hat on the head and a short jacket with large sleeves, which was tied inside the skirt, but also buttoned. The lining is a cotton cloth with white flowers on a blue background, and the feet are barefoot and wear straw shoes. The people at the hotel told me it was Zhongjiazi. I saw that although most of their clothes were old, they were washed very clean, their skin was very white, their figure was about one hundred and fifty-two or three centimeters, and their movements were very lively, which gave me a good impression. The second type is to wear a long collar jacket. ...... This is the so-called green shoots. The third type of person's dress format is roughly the same as the second type. The skin of the figure is also similar, but the body is covered, wearing a red and white flower cloth, even the leggings are like this. This is the so-called flower seedling. They buy and sell, all in Chinese, and still speak their own vernacular to their own people... This first contact with the indigenous peoples of the Southwest sparked my interest in ethnography. ”
In the Huangguo tree, Ding Wenjiang also found an interesting phenomenon: "Everyone has a wooden shell more than a foot long inserted in the left waist. At first I thought it must have been a knife carried by a barbarian, but there was no handle. Take a look at them, it turns out to be a small scale of silver scales. I wonder why everyone should carry this thing in a place where 'no one has three or two silver'. After waiting for a while, I saw that they took it out and used it, and what they weighed was not silver, but copper money! In the western part of Guizhou, the use of money does not need to be counted, but a few pounds and a few pairs, and it is the same as using silver. ”
What surprised him even more was the way the low-level laborers in Guizhou ate salt: "When I went from the two ends of the river to Yangsong, I 'sharpened' halfway through. One of the masters shouted, 'Lady boss! Take some water and put it in a salt bowl'. An old woman in her fifties came out and said slowly, 'There is no water in the salt bowl!' The hydration was released too quickly. You're too light, just pick it up and put it in your mouth and sip it'. Sure enough, the master picked up the salt according to her words and sipped it. In less than a moment, I saw this piece of salt going in and out of the mouths of each of the nine masters! (The quotations are all from Ding's "Travelogues ii")
Ding Wenjiang deeply sighed at this: Guizhou's "no one has three or two silver" is a fact that is obvious to all, and at this point Guizhou is not even comparable to Yunnan. Yunnan has salt wells, copper and tin mines, while Guizhou has almost nothing.
Through travel and investigation, Ding Wenjiang found that the map of China in circulation at that time ignored the mistake that the Dianqian Yidao had been rerouted two hundred years ago: "A post road that runs through two provinces has been wrong on the map for more than two hundred years, and no one has found it, which shows the regression of our geography in these two hundred years." Twenty years later, he edited the first modern Chinese atlas of complete and informative and epoch-making significance, with reference to the cartographic survey data and ideas accumulated during his study tour. This "New Map of China's Provinces" was later used as a basis for the Sino-Indian border negotiations in the 1950s.
Shortly after returning to his hometown, Ding Wenjiang went to Beijing to participate in the qing court's last examination for study tour graduates, and was awarded the title of "GezhiKe Jinshi". After teaching at Nanyang Middle School in Shanghai for a year, he was invited to go north and became the chief of the geology section of the Minerals Department of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of the Beiyang Government. He believes that in order to find out the family background and change the country's poor appearance, it is necessary to cultivate geological talents and further promote geological surveys. He immediately took the lead in the establishment of the Geological Survey institute and the geological research institute that undertook the teaching task, and concurrently served as the director. It is the first geological research institution in China and the earliest scientific research institution established in modern China. In October 1913, after his examination and comprehensive assessment, thirty students entered the Institute of Geology. In order to solve the problem of lack of teachers, Ding Wenjiang successively hired the German geologist Sauerge and the editor-in-chief of "Swedish Geological Exploration" Anderson for the Institute of Geology; Li Siguang and Philippe for the Geology Department of Peking University. In February 1922, Ding Wenjiang, Zhang Hongzhao, Weng Wenhao and others initiated the establishment of the Geological Society of China and founded the journal "Chronicle of the Geological Society of China". At the first annual meeting of the Geological Society of China in 1923, Ding Wenjiang was elected president and was regarded by the geological community as "one of the greatest leaders in this period of reclamation". From 1928 to 1930, he went to Guangxi, Guizhou and Sichuan twice to conduct geological survey work, and obtained a large number of results. Since 1931, he has been recruited as a professor at Peking University and has trained a group of geological elites. In 1934, he was invited to serve as director general of the Academia Sinica. In 1935, in order to find the mineral deposits along the Guangdong-Han Railway, he personally led a team to do field surveys. In January 1936, he died of cerebral hemorrhage induced by gas poisoning on changsha investigation road.
Ding Wenjiang is almost complete. In addition to geology, it also covers paleontology, geography, cartography, anthropology, history, archaeology, and minority linguistics. Not only in science, but also in philosophical thought, political writing, political practice and the development of industry. Zhu Jiahua commented that Ding Wenjiang was "not only an authentic scientist, but also extremely capable of administration, and a rare genius among scholars." In 1921, Ding Wenjiang served as the general manager of the Beipiao Coal Mine in Chaoyang County, Rehe Province (now Beipiao, Liaoning), and adopted measures such as equity ratio reform, technological reform, and reduction of enterprise operating costs for the lifeless coal mines.
In May 1926, Ding Wenjiang was appointed by the warlord Sun Chuanfang as the general office of the Songhu Commercial Port Supervision Office. Soon, the Northern Expeditionary Army approached Jiangsu and Zhejiang, Sun Chuanfang opposed the Northern Expedition and courted the Feng clan, ding Wenjiang was extremely disgusted, so he resigned on December 31. After only eight months as the inspector, Ding Wenjiang accomplished two major things. The first is to establish the scale of "Greater Shanghai": from Wusong to Longhua, from Pudong to Huxi, for the first time in his tenure, a pattern of unified administration, unified finance, and modern public health has been formed. The second is to take back from foreigners the shanghai court of trial and achieve the last major harvest in foreign relations since the Opium War.
In terms of ideological guidance and political theory writing, the most prominent ones are in co-founding the "Effort Weekly" and "Independent Review" with Hu Shi and others, advocating "good people politics" and opposing dictatorship and cultural retrofuturism. The "Kexuan Controversy" with Zhang Junjie is an important chapter in the history of modern Chinese philosophy and thought, and has influenced and inspired the thinking of generations of Chinese. Ding Wenjiang is also known as the "Huxley of China".
Ding Wenjiang has a strong southwest complex. From traveling to the southwest in 1911, to going to the southwest to investigate minerals in 1914, and then to leading a team to carry out large-scale and long-term geological surveys in Yun, Guizhou and Sichuan from 1929 to 1930, it has always been related to the development and progress of the southwest region. In addition to geological surveys, we also conducted investigations and studies on the ethnic cultures of southwest China. The first is the physical anthropological survey, which is mainly based on the anthropometric measurement of the Yi people; the second is the cultural anthropological survey, which is mainly based on the study of ethnic minority costumes, languages and writings, and the representative results are "Cui Wen Cong Carving". Ouyang Zhesheng, a professor in the History Department of Peking University, believes that the study of Yi in China began with Ding Wenjiang.
One of Ding Wenjiang's greatest contributions to the southwest, especially Guizhou, is that he has found the crux of development: the inconvenience of transportation. He once clearly pointed out that the "Sichuan-Guangzhou Railway" is the only way to develop the Great Southwest and solve the bottleneck of development. The Qin-Chongqing Railway, which began planning in 1913, was originally planned to pass from Sichuan to Guangzhou via Yunnan, but did not plan to pass through Guizhou. In a letter to Hu Shi on August 3, 1929, Ding Wenjiang said: "As a result of the investigation, I believe that this road should not pass through Yunnan, and the only road is in Guizhou. "Ding Wenjiang analyzed that the altitude of Guizhou is half lower than the average of Yunnan, and through Guizhou, the railway only needs to go up half of the high mountains, and the coalfields in Dading and Qianxi in Guizhou are very valuable." If the railway is connected, these coal fields can become the rich source of the southwest. He was ready to "make a concrete plan for the transportation and economy of the southwest, even if it cannot be implemented for a while, it will always be useful in the future -- when future generations come, all plans will not be able to go beyond my plan." In 1913, Ding Wenjiang and his assistants jointly published the "Preliminary Survey Report on the Sichuan-Guangzhou Railway Route", which fully demonstrated the topographic data, proposed routes, cost estimates and economic benefits of the "Sichuan-Guangzhou Railway", believing that the completion of the railway would have a huge impact on the economic development of the southwestern provinces. Twenty-three years after Ding Wenjiang's death, in 1959, Guizhou's first true railway, the Qiangui Railway, was completed and opened to traffic. In December 2014, the Guizhou-Guangzhou high-speed railway was officially opened for operation, and on the basis of Ding Wenjiang's original plan, it achieved a leap in the quality of Guizhou's southbound traffic to the sea.