May 19,2020 marked the 118th anniversary of the birth of Jiang Liangfu (1902-1995), a professor of Chinese classics of Hangzhou University, part of present-day Zhejiang University since 1998.

Thanks to the studies done under the tutelage of Wang Guowei, Liang Qichao, Chen Yinque, Zhao Yuanren while being a student at Tsinghua University and Zhang Taiyan while working in Shanghai, Jiang received rigorous training in both eastern and western ways and specialized in Poetry of Ch , Dunhuang, philology, and history. In particular, he focused on Dunhuang. He published 24 books which amount to a total of 12.5 million words, quite a lot if one considers the years when personal computers were not yet everyday writing tools. Most of his writings were done during the decades after he came to work at Hangzhou University, that is, after he was 50 and at his private office at home. His home was a four-room apartment on the ground floor of a two-story building on the compound of staff residences of Hangzhou University. The building still stands today.

Many of Jiang’s students are now prominent scholars in China. They remember the master clearly. Ren Ping, a professor and doctoral tutor, recalls that the master wore thick glasses and while reading, put the book so close to his face that it looked as if he were sniffing the book. Ren’s wife Tao Qiuying recalls that the master read voraciously.

Jiang could do a study of anything he read. After finding the boy readingThe Dream of Red Chamber , a classical novel written in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), his father asked the boy to do a book report. The boy formulated a complete who’s who chart of all the characters in the novel. It was his first study project.

As a professor, Jiang tried hard to build a graduate course with an encyclopedic curriculum. In the early 1980s, the master put forward a reading list that included so many important tomes that his colleagues thought it to be too ambitious and unrealistic and his graduate students felt both excited and dizzy about the list, happy because they knew what the master wanted them to be academically and dizzy because they knew they could hardly read them all during a graduate course.

However, the master did not assign books for his doctoral students to read. Instead, they were asked to develop their own book lists and presented them to him for advice. Jiang reviewed their lists and marked the must-read books and checked off the books that he thought were not worth their efforts.

Ji Weiqiang, now 64, worked as a secretary for Jiang Liangfu for about three and a half years in the early 1980s. He says that Jiang was a walking encyclopedia about all things in his specialty. Ji first heard of the reputation from his own tutor. And after working for the master, he witnessed how the master could talk citing all kinds of references off his fingers.

Jiang Liangfu developed index books for younger students to do academic studies. This methodology he had learned from his masters Wang Guowei, Liang Qichao and Chen Yinque. Wang emphasized a complete research for a study project. Liang and Chen, both students of Harvard, taught Jiang how to use quantitative tools.

Jiang’s academic achievement is attributed to his total dedication, says his granddaughter. Jiang lived in Hangzhou for about 40 years. During his stay in the scenic city, one of the major tourist destinations back then, he rarely went out for sightseeing even though the West Lake was nearby. His granddaughter says that he dedicated himself totally to academic studies and teaching obligations. A late bloomer, he published his academic study results essentially in the last three decades of his lifetime.