Ch'ien Mu was born in Chekiang province in the year 1895. He was educated at home by private tuition, and after teaching in primary and middle schools, received his first Univer-sity appointment as a Lecturer in Chinese Literature at Yenching University in 1930. After one year he was appointed to a profes-sorship in Chinese History at Peking National .University—which he held until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. During the war he made for the southwest, and in straitened circumstances continued the struggle to preserve China's intellectual life, like so many intellectual leaders of China who had moved to the west, holding professorships in Chinese History first at the South-west Union University in Yunnan, and later at the West China Union University in Ch'eng-tu. For the first years after the war he remained in the southwest at the University of Yunnan in Kunming, in 1947 returning east to take an appointment as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Chiang-nan University in Wu-hsi, the lower Yang-tse Valley. In 1949 he left China for Hong Kong, where, having gathered a most eminent group of Chinese scholars, and with the finan-cial help of Chinese business men, he founded the New Asia College in Kowloon, of which he has been the President for six years.
For the past two and a half years he has also been an Honorary Fellow of our Institute of Oriental Studies.
Through these long years of activity his pen has not lain idle. By his long list of publications he has won recognition in China, and abroad as one of that country's foremost scholars in historical research.
His thorough scholarship and openness to new ideas, combined with a sound critical ability, have made him a stabilising force in the intellectual ferment of these times and won for him a world-wide confidence in the integrity and reliability of his work.
Citation written and delivered by Professor Gordon King, Pro-Vice-Chancellor.
