Member Directory,
1847 - 1922
John C. Ferguson
Chinese Government Official
Centurion, 1915–1945
Robert W. de Forest and William Barclay Parsons
Napanee, Ontario, Canada
Clifton Springs, New York
Age forty-nine
Newton, Massachusetts
Century Memorial
John Calvin Ferguson. [Born] 1866. Educator, journalist, authority on Chinese art and culture.
He went to China in 1887 at the age of twenty-one to found Nanking University and spent most of the ensuing 56 years in that country. He returned finally on the exchange ship Gripsholm in 1943 after a long period of internment by the Japanese in Peiping [Beijing]. No American had longer or deeper relations with China or the Chinese governments. They began in the old Manchu days, the days of the Empire, and extended to his capture by the Japanese.
Consider the record: After founding Nanking University and serving as its President for nine years, he was called by the Chinese Government in 1897 to be president of a new government technical college, Nanyang College. In 1902, following the Boxer outbreak, he was appointed Secretary to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce. From 1903 to 1905 he occupied the post of Chief Secretary of the Imperial Railway Administration and in 1911 was appointed Foreign Secretary of the Board of Posts and Communications. In 1915 he was made Counsellor to the Chinese Department of State, from 1917 to 1928 served as advisor to the Presidents of the Chinese Republic and finally to the Executive Yuan of the National Government of China.
He was active in the development of a new journalism in China. As owner and publisher of the Shanghai daily newspaper, Sin Wan Pao, from 1899 to 1929—at that time the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the country—and of the English-language Shanghai Times, he exercised a powerful influence over and gave great encouragement to the new group of young Chinese journalists.
In the interpretation and appreciation of Chinese art and culture, he had world renown. His books are monumental contributions to scholarship of Chinese art and culture. He was the only non-Chinese to sit with the committee of Chinese scholars who examined the art treasures of the Imperial palaces when they came to light after the deposition of the Manchu dynasty in 1911.
This was a man and well might he write, as he did at his home in Peiping on May 14, 1928, these verses found with his will:
Mourn not for me!
I’ve had my chance;
Lived a long life
Full of Romance.
Lay me to rest
Under green sod;
Go to your work;
Leave me to God.
Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia
Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1945 Memorials
