Английская Википедия:Hu Xiansu

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Файл:Hu Hsen Hsu and Hu Shih.jpg
Hu Xiansu and Hu Shih, Hu Shih dubbed this picture "the nemesis friends" due to the friendship between the pair despite disagreements over culture and politicsШаблон:Sfn

Hu Xiansu or Hu Hsen-Hsu (Шаблон:Zh, 24 May 1894 – 16 July 1968) was a Chinese botanist and traditional scholar. He was the founder of plant taxonomy in China and a pioneer of modern botany and paleobotany research in the country.Шаблон:Sfn

In the 1940s, Hu played a key role, along with Wan-Chun Cheng, in identifying the modern existence of the Metasequoia glyptostroboides (dawn redwood) of the long thought extinct genus Metasequoia.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn

Apart from botany, Hu was also a prominent contributor towards literature, co-founding The Critical Review, a major Chinese-language journal promoting traditional Chinese culture and values during the New Culture Movement.Шаблон:Sfn Hu also served as the first principle of what is now Jiangxi Normal University between 1940 to 1944.

Early life

Hu Xiansu was born on 24 May 1894 in Xinjian (now Xinjian district, Nanchang), Jiangxi to Hu Chengbi and Chen Caizhi. Considered a prodigy, he was reading the Three Character Classic and the Thousand Character Classic at the age of three, at four he knew thousands of characters, at five he finished learning the Analects and knew more than ten thousand characters.[1][2]

His father died of sickness when he was nine. He was raised by his widowed mother thereafter.[1][2]

In 1906 Hu went to the Hongdu Middle School in Nanchang.

Education and career

Hu studied a preparatory course at the Imperial University of Peking (now Peking University) in 1909. In spring 1912 the Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing Empire, discontinuing the operations of the university and ending Hu's studies there. Hu went to the United States in December 1912 and enrolled in the University of California (now University of California, Berkeley). During his years in Berkeley, Hu became an active member of the newly founded Science Society of China and joined the editorial board of the Society's journal Science. At the same time, Hu read extensively literature works in English. In May 1916, Hu graduated with honors in botany. In 1918, he became a faculty member of National Nanking Higher Normal School (now part of Nanjing University).[1]

In 1920 and 1921, Hu conducted large-scale plant collections in Zhejiang and Jiangxi, naming the new genus Sinojackia in 1920, the first Chinese to do so. In 1922, Hu and Ping Chih founded the first biology department in Chinese public universities (Previously, only missionary universities in China had biology departments). In 1923, Hu and colleagues published their textbook Advanced Botany, which was the first such textbook compiled by Chinese scholars and became widely used in universities around China.[2]

Hu went to the United States again in 1923 and received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1925. His doctoral dissertation, under the supervision of dendrologist John George Jack, is the first comprehensive survey of plants in the whole of China.

After his wife died in Nanking in 1926, Hu resigned from the Department of Biology of Southeast University and became a full-time research fellow at the Institute of Biology of China Science Society. In 1928, he moved to Beijing and co-founded the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology, a major scientific institute in China. Hu directed the botanical branch of the Fan Memorial and from 1932 served as the director of the Institute until 1949. Meanwhile, he taught part-time in the biology departments of Peking University and Beijing Normal University. Hu founded the Lushan Botanical Garden in Jiangxi in 1934. Through Hu's influence, Lushan Botanical Garden established wide exchange networks with botanical gardens and research institutes around the world. In 1936, fearing for the likelihood of a potential outbreak of war in northern China, Hu established the Yunnan Institute of Agriculture and Forest (later renamed Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences) in southwestern China.Шаблон:Sfn[3]

In 1934, Hu named the new plant family Torricelliaceae, becoming the first Chinese botanist to describe a new family. Over his career, Hu named and described several hundred new species of plants.Шаблон:Sfn

Hu co-authored The Miocene Flora of Shandong Province, China between 1938 and 1940 with Ralph W. Chaney, it was the first work investigating China's Cenozoic fossil plants, and is considered the cornerstone of current knowledge of Asian Cenozoic plants.Шаблон:Sfn

Along with his colleagues at the Science Society of China, Hu was a key leader of the first biological research institute in the country, and played an important role in founding the Botanical Society of China, serving as its second president. Hu later established the first plantation for botanical research at Mount Lu in Jiujiang, and initiated or conducted large-scale survey of flora of China.

Between 1940 and 1944, he was the founding principle of the National Chung Cheng University (now Jiangxi Normal University). In the 1940s, he played a key role, along with Wan-Chun Cheng, in identifying the modern existence of the genus Metasequoia in Sichuan,Шаблон:Sfn co-naming the newly discovered species of Metasequoia, the glyptostroboides, which was previously known only from fossils.Шаблон:Sfn The name of this species was derived from its resemblance to the Chinese swamp cypress (Glyptostrobus).

Hu helmed the effort advocating the creation of a national botanical garden in China, which would eventually become the China National Botanical Garden, earning him the title "father" of the project upon its eventual completion in 2022.[4]

In the 1950s, Lysenko's anti-Mendelian doctrines in genetics (Lysenkoism) dominated biological science and agricultural practices in ChinaШаблон:Efn. The Mendelian doctrine and its practitioners were shunned. Despite this environment, Hu was openly critical of Lysenkoism, stating it as pseudoscience. For this Hu was publicly denounced, and the textbook which he wrote containing related material was banned. Later on Hu was not elected as an Academician to the Chinese Academy of Sciences despite his contributions to Chinese sciences, something partially attributed to his opposition to Lysenkoism.[5]

Between 1950 and 1968, he served as a researcher at the Institute of Plant Taxonomy and the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Later life and death

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"Tomb of the Three Elders", burial site of Chen Fenghuai (left), Hu Xiansu (center) and Ren-Chang Ching (right) at the Lushan Botanical Garden

In May 1968 during the midst of the Cultural Revolution, Hu's workplace informed him that his salary had been suspended. His home was repeatedly ransacked; the books, calligraphy, and paintings he had collected throughout his lifetime were confiscated by the workplace. As an intellectual, one of the groups targeted during the Cultural Revolution, Hu endured repeated struggle sessions, in which he was ordered to wear a Kuomintang flag to signify his past relation. On 15 July, he was notified to go to his workplace the next day to attend extended struggle sessions, the stress that the news caused on Hu was massive; in the early morning of 16 July 1968, Hu was found dead on his bed, having suffered a heart attack.[6][7] Hu's funeral was held in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery on 15 May 1979. He was buried at the Lushan Botanical Garden at Mount Lu on 15 May 1984.Шаблон:Botanist

Notes

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See also

Notes

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Works cited

External links

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