Many people know Time magazine in the United States, but they do not know that the founder of Time, Henry R. Luce, was actually born in China. Today, let's talk about why Luce was born in China.
Of course, where a child is born is determined by his parents. And his father, Luce Sr., was a man with an indissoluble relationship with China.
In the biography of Luce, this story is recorded:
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor broke out, and the United States officially declared war on Japan. Luce was having lunch with his wife at his apartment in New York. Upon hearing this news, Luce immediately rushed to the editorial office to order that the time to be printed be revised. Meanwhile, he made a phone call to his father and told him the news. Luce was 73 years old and seriously ill, but he was still excited. The U.S. declaration of war on Japan undoubtedly sent a positive signal of the impact on the Chinese war situation, saying: "All of us will now understand what we mean to China, and what China means to us."
That night, the elder Luce died, at a moment when China's fate took a turn.
Luce's father's Chinese name was Lu Siyi, a high-caliber yale graduate who joined the Presbyterian Church after graduation, and his ideal was to become a priest. What kind of organization is the Presbyterian Church? The Presbyterian Church, also known as Calvinism, is a larger sect of Christianity that arose in Switzerland during the Reformation in the 16th century and was founded by Calvinism. Some radicals in the townspeople at that time advocated the election of elders by the believers to run the church according to bourgeois democratic ideas, hence the name. Lu Siyi followed the North American Presbyterian Church to China.
The missionaries who came to China during that period were well known to everyone, because there was a well-known article that appeared in this person's name: "Farewell, Stuart Redden." Stuart Redden was the founder of Yenching University, one of the predecessors of what is now Peking University. Because of his Christian background at Yenching University, Luce was appointed vice president and chairman of the founding committee at the beginning of the school. The buildings in the school are all condensed with the sweat of old Luce. In his memoirs, Stuart Redden called the founding of Yenching University "the realization of a dream." The realization of this dream, in addition to the painstaking planning and operation of Principal Stuart Layden, Lu Siyi also contributed to it. Without the huge amount of money raised by Lu Siyi, this beautiful dream could not have become a reality.
The first stop for Luce to China was not Yenching University, but Dengzhou in Shandong, which is today's Penglai. In Dengzhou, Lu Siyi became a member of the Shandong Presbyterian Mission. In a distant and unfamiliar land, he and his wife began a new life. Just seven months after they arrived in Denju, Little Luce was born. It can be judged that they were pregnant with little Luce when they were in the United States.
Because of growing up in a church family, Little Luce attended Mass from an early age, learned to improvise at the age of five, was a devout missionary parent, grew up in missionary circles in the Eastern world, and had contact with religious Chinese, but these experiences did not lead him to the path of his parents. He was a man with a great passion for worldly life, a natural interest and sensitivity to business and journalism, and he was destined to be a different person and go out of his own way. In 1912, when Luce was 14 years old, he left China. During this period, China issued two events that affected the course of history, one was the Boxer Rebellion and the other was the Xinhai Revolution. These experiences had an important impact on his early memories. Perhaps, all of this had a subtle influence on his founding of Time.
I don't know who first translated time into the Chinese word "era". The reason for choosing the word time is actually inspired by an advertisement. At that time, in order to come up with a name, Luce and his classmate, who is also another founder of "Time", Hadton meditated for a long time, and tried various names, but they all felt that it was not ideal. One night, on the subway home, he was bored browsing the ads on the subway, and suddenly his eyes lit up, and a headline came to his eyes: time for retire, or time to change. Luce remembered the word time firmly. He hadn't slept well all night in excitement. The next morning, Luce suggested to Hatton the word as the name of the publication, which he immediately agreed to.
On March 3, 1923, the first issue of Time magazine came out, and a great era began, and a media empire was dismantled. Unfortunately, Luce never set foot on Chinese soil after leaving China.