HU SHI, CORNELL CLASS OF 1914, may be counted among the most important alumni Cornell University has ever produced; some say he is the most important of all. Yet there still remains a discrepancy between name and recognition, between historical impact and local Ithaca lore.

A brief sketch of Hu Shi (or Su Hu, as he styled himself here for a while) must include his birth, which can be safely assumed to have taken place in Shanghai on Dec. 17, 1891.

HU SHI, CORNELL CLASS OF 1914, may be counted among the most important alumni Cornell University has ever produced; some say he is the most important of all. Yet there still remains a discrepancy between name and recognition, between historical impact and local Ithaca lore.

A brief sketch of Hu Shi (or Su Hu, as he styled himself here for a while) must include his birth, which can be safely assumed to have taken place in Shanghai on Dec. 17, 1891. This was a time when Charles Darwin was much discussed in intellectual circles east and west, and the end of the authoritative and aristocratic Chinese imperial system became foreseeable. The first Chinese newspapers started to take hold, and the creation of a public sphere of opinion would permeate the entire country. A few years later, in 1910-11, public opinion would play a huge role in the process of China's revolution. In fact when Hu Shi was asked, in 1942, what he liked best about the United States, he answered: "The press!"

Hu Shi was in Beijing around the time of the Chinese revolution, studying at one of the newly established universities. He applied for a scholarship, which brought him to Cornell University in the fall of 1910 where he embarked on studies in agriculture. He abandoned that field rather quickly to address the more existentialist questions offered by history, philosophy, and the arts. He was hailed as the "incurable optimist" by his close friend Elmer Eugene Barker in his Personal Recollections of a Great Humanist's Intellectual Development of 1962. Hu graduated with his B.A. in 1914 after four years of undergraduate and one year of graduate studies. In his later Cornell years, he lived in a rooming house for instructors at the edge of Cascadilla Gorge, one of the two beautiful ravines that border the Cornell campus.

Hu went on to receive his Ph.D. from Columbia two years later. His thesis was on the development of logical thought in ancient China, a comparative analysis in which John Dewey's pragmatism (Dewey was his teacher at Columbia) figured most prominently as a theoretical model. Returning home to China, Hu Shi (now Dr. Hu) taught at Peking University, the intellectual center of China's literary renaissance movement. Hu is directly credited with sparking this renaissance, and Ithaca's Cayuga Lake figures rather prominently in this development. According to Hu's belief in the "immortality of words," a canoe ride on the lake changed the intellectual fortunes of an entire nation.

As the story goes, a party of Chinese Cornellians entertained guests from other campuses, including a female student from Vassar College. When the group decided to go boating on Cayuga Lake, a freak storm almost brought disaster upon them, resulting in their "thorough drenching." Subsequently, they built a fire on land to dry their clothes, and in true Chinese fashion, Hoong C. Zen (Class of 1916), a member of the group, composed a poem of traditional diction to commemorate the incident. Zen's antiquated style of expression so infuriated Hu Shi, to whom the poem was respectfully submitted for criticism, that Hu started a vigorous discussion about the pros and cons of contemporary modes of expression. The discussion resulted in his call for abolishing the terse and, as perceived by most Chinese, incomprehensible language of the traditional literati and substituting it with the vernacular language, which he claimed was much more suited to debating pressing contemporary issues.

The impact of this discussion, already started earlier in the 1890s but greatly amplified by Hu from Ithaca, was a complete paradigm shift in the way the new nation of China would henceforth communicate. In a magazine article published in China, Hu demanded that all literary matter be written in the common language of everyday use. The article propelled Hu, at age 27, into the top 12 most influential celebrities of his country. It is hard to underestimate the impact of this literary renaissance. When the Chinese minister of education in 1920 ordered that all textbooks and popular educational reading matter be rewritten in the vernacular tongue, an entire nation was finally able to access a regular, modernized education.

Hu's influence did not end with the literary revolution he helped to bring about. Being extremely interested in politics and the economy, Hu was sent to America by the Generalissimo Jiang Kai-shek as ambassador (1938-1942). Legend has it that he was once asked to become president of China, to which he responded that he was a scholar who couldn't keep his own desk clean, let alone run an entire country. Hu returned to the United States to live in New York in the 1950s and served as the Chinese delegate to the United Nations and the curator of the Gest Library at Princeton University and was a highly productive scholar. Hu Shi passed away in 1962, two years before the Cultural Revolution would sweep his native country clean of everything considered to hamper the progress of the socialist revolution. Both his son Tsu-wang and his grandson Fu Victor graduated from Cornell University in 1942 and 1978, respectively.

Throughout his life, Hu received numerous honors, awards, and medals as well as 30 honorary doctorates. As literary output goes, his published writings were compiled into 37 volumes. A bibliography of his unpublished writings fills up to 32 pages. A postage stamp was issued in his honor, and there are buildings named after him.

The Wason Collection has a huge amount of material on Hu Shi, including pieces handwritten or collected by him. For example, while in Japan, Hu purchased original letters of famous Chinese literati and officials. These 16 volumes are unique testimonies to the literary and political life in 18th- and 19th-century China. The very first edition of the famed Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng) is among the items constituting the Hu Shi Collection in the Rare and Manuscript Collections. Rubbings, autographs, and photographs complete the materials on the Cornell alumnus, whom Martin W. Sampson, one of Cornell's most respected English professors, honored by saying: "If in 2,000 years Cornell should cease to exist, it may well be remembered as the place that educated Hu Shi." At the time this statement was made, Hu was still in his 30s.