Ding Wenjiang

Ding Wenjiang

Ding Wenjiang , mostly VK Ting quoted from the earlier transcription Ven Kiang Ting ( Chinese  丁文江 , Pinyin Dīng Wénjiāng ; born March 20, 1888 in Taixing , Chinese Empire ; † January 5, 1936 in Changsha , Republic of China ) was a Chinese geologist , Zoologist, archaeologist and politician . He is considered to be the founding father of geology in China, was mayor of Shanghai and general secretary of Academia Sinica (1934 to 1936).

Life

Ding studied geology, geography and zoology in the United Kingdom ( bachelor's degree in Glasgow in 1911) and, after his return in 1913, was the founder of the China State Geological Institute, which he headed from 1916 to 1921, and of the Geological Society of China in 1921 and its vice-president. Also in 1921 he became director of the Beipiao mining company and in 1925 head of the Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, negotiating with foreign representatives on behalf of the provincial government over their rights in Shanghai with a contract in 1926. As the first professor in Beijing (1931 to 1934) he trained the following Generations of Chinese geologists. He was also an anthropologist and geographer - co-editor of a new map of China (with Weng Wenhao and Zeng Shiying) and its provinces - and director of the Institute of Geology at the Ministry of Commerce and Agriculture. He died of coal gas poisoning in the hospital after field research in a coal mine. According to his will, he was buried on Mount Yuelu.

Among other things, he published on the Lower Carboniferous in China and the geology of the Yangtze Delta. In his essay Mythology and Science (1923), in a dispute with Zhang Junmai, he opposed the view that science is irrelevant to philosophy. At the Geological Survey he was involved in archaeological excavations from the Stone Age by Johan Gunnar Andersson , who was with the Geological Survey from 1914 to 1925.

He was the editor of Paleontologia Sinica. He wrote a textbook on zoology. His geological exploration reports, mostly unpublished, were partially published posthumously in 1947.

literature

• Charlotte Furth: Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture, Harvard University Press, 1970 (Chinese edition 1987)
• Hans Becker: VK Ting †. In: Geologische Rundschau. Volume 27, No. 3, June 29, 1936, pp. 310-311
• Magnus Fiskesjö, Chen Xingcan: China Before China: Johan Gunnar Andersson, Ding Wenjiang, and the Discovery of China's Prehistory, exhibition catalog, Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. Stockholm: MFEA monographs no.15, 2004. ISBN 91-970616-3-8 .
• Magnus Fiskesjö: Science across borders: Johan Gunnar Andersson and Ding Wenjiang, In: Stevan Harrell, Charles McKhann, Margaret Swain, Denise M. Glover (editors): Explorers and Scientists in China's Borderlands, 1880–1950. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011
• There is a Chinese biography of Hu Shi (Taipei 1960, 1986).

Web links

Commons : Ding Wenjiang  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Ding Wenjiang, A pioneering chinese geologist, University of Glasgow 2012

References and comments

1. ↑ Under this name he was registered in Glasgow
2. ↑ According to Becker, Geolog. Rundschau 1936, also in Germany. He also learned German in Glasgow

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Ding is the family name here, Wenjiang is the first name.