Wan-go H. C. Weng

Wan-go H. C. Weng was born Weng Xingqing in 1918. Accounts of his birthplace differ: the obituary in the Valley News and an article on New York UniversityNew York UniversityNew York University is a private university in New York City, founded in 1831, and one of the largest private universities in the United States.Open the full entry’s Orphan Film Symposium website give Shanghai, and a 2020 report by The Paper quotes a fax in which he wrote that his family came from Changshu but that he was born in Shanghai; an article by Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry gives Changshu.⁠[1][2][3][4]

His nephew Weng Yijun said in a 2019 interview with The Paper that Wan-go Weng was the third son of Weng Yijun’s grandfather and that Weng Yijun’s father was Wan-go Weng’s elder brother; Wan-go Weng’s birth parents died during the Cultural Revolution.⁠[5]

Weng Yijun said in interviews with The Paper that Weng Tonghe had no son, so his second brother Weng Tongjue gave him his son Weng Zenghan as heir; Weng Zenghan’s eldest son Weng Ansun inherited the family collection and, having no son, adopted Weng Zhilian, the elder brother of Weng Yijun’s grandfather, from the line of Weng Tonghe’s eldest brother Weng Tongshu; Weng Zhilian, having no son, in turn adopted Weng Xingqing. The Huanqiu Renwu article says that Weng Zhilian, Weng Tonghe’s great-grandson, lived in Tianjin and, finding the dry northern weather good for keeping them, moved part of the finest items there, the rest staying in the Weng family’s old house in Changshu; he died in 1919, childless, and adopted his younger brother’s son, Wan-go Weng. The press release of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, calls Weng Zhilian Weng Tonghe’s great-grandson and Wan-go Weng’s adoptive father.⁠[5][3][6][7]

Accounts of when he inherited the collection differ: in a 2020 report by The Paper, Weng Yijun says that he received the family collection at only two, and relays his words that at two he had unknowingly become heir to this great family property; the Valley News obituary says that he inherited his ancestor’s art collection in 1919; and a 2019 press release of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, says that he inherited the objects in 1948 and brought them to the United States. The Huanqiu Renwu article says that the finest items kept in Tianjin passed to him.⁠[3][1][7][6]

His relationship to Weng Tonghe is also described differently: The Paper and Fu Xinian’s memorial article call him Weng Tonghe’s descendant in the fifth generation; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Voice of America and the article on New York University’s Orphan Film Symposium website call him Weng Tonghe’s great-great-grandson; the museum’s press release also calls him a member of the 19th generation of the family. The press release says that as a boy he watched and listened as relatives admired and discussed works of art at home; the Valley News obituary says that his early education included classical art and the stewardship of the Weng collection.⁠[3][8][9][10][2][7][1]

In 1936 he entered the electrical engineering department of Jiaotong University in Shanghai.⁠[3][1]

Because of the Japanese invasion his family sent him abroad to study. In 1938 he went to the United States to study electrical engineering at Purdue UniversityPurdue UniversityPurdue University is a public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and Indiana’s land-grant university. Established and named by the Indiana legislature in 1869, it began classes in 1874. Today the Purdue system comprises main campuses in West Lafayette and Indianapolis, regional campuses and an online university.Open the full entry, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering; the Valley News obituary gives 1940 as the year of his master’s degree. A 2009 Voice of America report says that he left China in 1937 to study in the United States; the other sources give 1938.⁠[1][3][9][4][10]

In 1940 he took a job in New York and worked briefly as an engineer before turning to oil painting and film. He later studied art at the University of Wisconsin and taught himself filmmaking at the Harmon Foundation, a non-profit organization in New York; Yanqiu Zheng, a history professor at Misericordia University, said at a 2021 Columbia University event that the China Institute in America in New York guided him toward educational film.⁠[3][1][6][2][4]

After the attack on Pearl Harbor he worked in Hollywood under the director Frank Capra on films for the United States Army, among them the 1944 World War II propaganda film The Battle of China.⁠[1][4]

Zheng Zhong’s article “Visiting Wan-go Weng at Laixi Ju,” quoted in a 2020 report by The Paper, says that he married Cheng Huabao in 1944; the Valley News obituary says that he met and married his wife, Virginia Dzung (1920–2003), during his years in Hollywood.⁠[3][1]

In the early 1940s he began making documentary and educational films about Chinese art, society and history; The East in the West (1947) depicts Chinese students in the United States.⁠[4]

In 1948 he returned to China. The Huanqiu Renwu article says that he went to the United States to study in 1938 and came back nine years later; seeing the unrest, he hired a coal ship to carry the books and papers kept in Tianjin to the relatively safe Shanghai and later sent all of them to the United States by sea. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, says that he brought the collection to the United States for safe keeping in 1948, months before the founding of the People’s Republic of China; the Voice of America says that he returned to retrieve his collection in 1948, during the final days of China’s civil war. The Valley News obituary says that he and his wife returned to China in 1948, shipped their collection to New York and could not return to China for the next thirty years.⁠[6][11][1][10]

Weng Yijun recalled that he first met his uncle in 1948, when he was about three years old.⁠[5]

In the late 1940s he filmed several city films in China for the educational series “Land of China,” on Peking, Nanking, Tientsin and Changshu. The Changshu film, A Town by the Yangtze, shot on 16mm Kodachrome and ten minutes long, with his own first-person English narration, presents the small city of his ancestors, its tradition of poets and scholars and the daily life of its farmers and fishermen; it was distributed in the United States from 1951. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, dates the colour film to 1948. In 2018 MediaPreserve digitized it for the Columbia University Libraries from the original film rolls and optical soundtrack.⁠[2][4][12]

In 1955 he became a citizen of the United States.⁠[1][5]

Most of his films were sponsored by non-profit and philanthropic organizations, among them the China Institute in America, and were distributed on the American educational film circuit; in the 1950s he made a series on Chinese arts and crafts, and he also made sponsored films on subjects such as the libraries of New York City and the American flag. He served as a filmmaking consultant to the United States Department of State, and with his wife he subtitled American films into Chinese, among them Ben-Hur, West Side Story, The Sound of Music and 2001: A Space Odyssey.⁠[2][1]

From March 21 to May 26, 1968, the China House Gallery of the China Institute in America held an exhibition of works from private and museum collections, and the same year the China Institute in New York published his 44-page catalogue, Gardens in Chinese Art from Private and Museum Collections.⁠[13]

The architect I. M. Pei invited him to help create a multimedia exhibition for Expo ’70, the world’s fair in Osaka, Japan; he made a set of short films on traditional Chinese crafts for the fair.⁠[1][2]

His filmmaking career culminated in the series China: The Enduring Heritage (1972–1976), which museums and universities used; in the 1970s he also made a series on Chinese history. His film on Buddhism in China (1972) won a gold award at the 1973 Atlanta International Film Festival.⁠[1][2][3]

Weng Yijun said that well before the 1970s his uncle had come to know many American museums and had given works to several of them, and that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago both hold pieces from him. A 2020 report by The Paper says that the fine Tang manuscript of the Lingfei jing from the Kaiyuan era (the 43-line version), one of the earliest masterpieces of calligraphy in the Weng family collection, has been transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In the 1970s he began writing books, the first being China: A History in Art, written with Bradley Smith.⁠[5][3][1]

In 1977 he and his wife moved to Lyme, New HampshireNew HampshireNew Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by Quebec, Canada, to the north, Vermont across the Connecticut River to the west, Massachusetts to the south, and Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east; its capital is Concord. One of the original 13 colonies, it became the ninth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on June 21, 1788, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 1,377,529.Open the full entry, where they built a house of his own design and he devoted himself to the study of Chinese art and the ordering of the family collection; the Huanqiu Renwu article says that after retiring he designed and built Laixi Ju himself. Zheng Zhong’s article quoted in the 2020 report by The Paper says that before he retired at 60, he and his wife, reciting lines by Tao Yuanming about a nature that had always loved hills and mountains, bought a hundred mu of land in the woods on a hillside in Lyme and built a house, and named a nameless stream below the slope the Laixi to continue the story of Lao Laizi associated with the Caiyi Hall of the old family house in Changshu.⁠[1][6][3]

In 1979, when China and the United States resumed relations, he and his wife made the first of many visits to China, reuniting with family and friends, and travelled widely, meeting experts in Asian art and photographing works of art that were often rarely seen. Weng Yijun recalled that his uncle waited until 1980 to return and was among the first groups to do so, and that on his first visit he stayed at the Beijing Hotel.⁠[1][5]

In 1982 Abrams in New York published The Palace Museum, Peking: Treasures of the Forbidden City, 319 pages, by Wan-go Weng and Yang Boda. Weng Yijun said that the first English-language book on the Palace Museum was his uncle’s work, for which he came with a photographer to take the pictures, and that its first edition in the United States sold out at once.⁠[14][5]

From 1982 to 1986 he was president of the China Institute in America; a 2020 report by The Paper and the article on New York University’s Orphan Film Symposium website say that he was its president in the 1980s, and Fu Xinian’s memorial article says that late in life he became its director, working mainly to build exchanges between Chinese and American cultural figures and to help Chinese cultural figures visit the United States. Weng Yijun recalled that around 1990, while he was head of the China Institute, he held an exhibition of bamboo carving there, bringing Chinese bamboo carving to the West, and that what he gave to I. M. Pei was a bamboo carving.⁠[1][3][2][8][5]

After the Weng library was taken to the United States the public knew nothing of it and believed it had been destroyed in the war; in 1985 the books appeared in an exhibition of Chinese rare books at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The cultural-relics expert Fu Xinian then went to the United States, examined them at Laixi Ju and judged their bibliographic value to exceed that of the Song and Yuan editions held by American libraries, including the Library of CongressLibrary of CongressThe Library of Congress is the library of the United States Congress. Founded in 1800 and housed on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., it answers reference requests from Congress, the public and other federal agencies.Open the full entry and the Harvard-Yenching Library.⁠[6]

In May 1985 several authorities on Chinese painting and calligraphy came to his retreat in the mountains to examine the Weng collection. The press release of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, says that the gathering at his New England home was attended by six of the world’s most respected authorities on Chinese painting; Zheng Zhong’s article quoted in the 2020 report by The Paper says that in that year the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a symposium on Chinese poetry, calligraphy and painting, to which Xie Zhiliu, Xu Bangda, Yang Renkai, Yang Boda, Wang Jiqian and Huang Junshi were invited. In 1986 he painted a handscroll, Elegant Gathering at the Laixiju Residence (1985), to commemorate the gathering; the museum’s 2019 press release presents the work.⁠[7][3]

In the autumn of 1987 Fu Xinian visited the United States at the invitation of the China Institute in America on Weng’s arrangement; Weng arranged his visits to American museums, and he and his wife Cheng Huabao received Fu at Laixi Ju for three days.⁠[8]

In 1990 he gave the Weng ancestral house in Changshu to the city; it is now the Weng Tonghe Memorial Hall.⁠[3][5]

In 1997 Purdue University awarded him an honorary doctorate in fine arts. In 1998 he published Chen Hongshou: His Life & Art, on the painter, which won a National Book Prize in China the same year. His other books include Chen Hongshou, Weng Tonghe wenxian congbian (documents on Weng Tonghe), Meiguo Guluofu cang Zhongguo lidai shuhua mingji jingxuan (selected masterpieces of Chinese painting and calligraphy in the Guluofu collection in the United States) and a volume of his Chinese poetry.⁠[1][6]

At the end of 1999 he signed a contract for the transfer of the Weng library on condition that it be transferred whole, not auctioned or divided, to a national public library, with a reserve price; apart from Chen Hongshou’s playing-card designs Shuihu bogu yezi, which he kept for his book on Chen Hongshou, all the rare books he held in the United States went back to China. Weng Yijun said that the first choice had been the National Library in Beijing, but that for various reasons the books went to the Shanghai Library.⁠[3][5]

On April 28, 2000, the Weng library arrived at the Shanghai Library: 80 titles in 542 volumes, comprising 11 Song, 4 Yuan, 12 Ming and 26 Qing printed editions and 27 manuscripts and drafts by noted scholars, bought for US$4.5 million paid by the Shanghai municipal government; several of the Song editions, including the Jiyun and the Dingmao ji, are unique copies. Fu Xinian’s memorial article describes the transfer as a sale on concessionary terms (“juanshou”) and says that the books included 14 Song and Yuan editions, among them eight Song editions: the Jiyun, Shaozi guanwu pian, Changduan jing, Chongdiao zuben jianjie lu, Dingmao ji, Huichang yipin zhiji, Zhu Dongpo xiansheng shi and Xinkan Songshan jushi wen quanji.⁠[3][6][8]

From March 10 to August 1, 2007, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, held the exhibition Through Six Generations: The Weng Collection of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, showing thirty rarely seen works, among them a Southern Song handscroll by Liang Kai, Wang Hui’s Ten Thousand Li up the Yangtze River, more than fifty feet long, and letters by Wen Zhengming to his sons, together with works by Weng Tonghe and by Wan-go Weng himself; two short films made for the exhibition show the 88-year-old collector telling the stories of his life and the collection.⁠[11]

In December 2008 he exhibited 50 paintings and scrolls at the Beijing World Art Museum.⁠[10]

In 2009 the Huntington Library near Los Angeles showed 41 works from the Weng collection; the Voice of America report says that the collection’s story is the story of the Weng family’s fortunes during 150 turbulent years of Chinese history. One of the most impressive works was a 16-meter scroll by the 17th-century painter Wang Hui, the oldest an ink scroll by Liang Kai, a 13th-century court painter of the Southern Song, and there were works by Weng Tonghe and by Wan-go Weng himself; the report also quotes June Li, a curator at the Huntington. Then 91 and living in rural New Hampshire, he said in an interview that without a sense of history one would not keep things so long; the report says that he described many of the works as priceless and part of a legacy, apart from their monetary value, and he said that as long as he had enough money to live on he did not connect his collection with money.⁠[10]

In 2010 he gave the Ming painter Wu Bin’s painting of the purification gathering at the Shaoyuan garden to Peking University, since the garden’s site lies on the university’s campus; Weng Yijun recalled that Hou Renzhi, then nearly 100 and in hospital, came out specially to meet him.⁠[3][8][5]

In December 2011 Zhongxi Book Company published the eight-volume Diary of Weng Tonghe, edited by Wan-go Weng and proofread by his nephew Weng Yijun, using the family’s manuscript of the diary as its base text, priced at 680 yuan; then over ninety, he also supplied Weng Tonghe’s early diaries.⁠[15]

He sold the Southern Song painter Liang Kai’s Portrait of the Daoist Lord to the Shanghai Museum on concessionary terms; Fu Xinian’s memorial article dates this to 2014, reports by The Paper to 2016.⁠[8][3][5]

In December 2015 he gave the manuscript of the Diary of Weng Tonghe and the manuscript of the Wengshi wenxian congbian to the Shanghai Library free of charge; the gift included the diary manuscript in 47 volumes.⁠[3][6][8]

In July 2018 he signed an agreement with the Shanghai Museum to give Shen Zhou’s Ming copy of Dai Jin’s Xie An at the Eastern Mountain and Wang Yuanqi’s Qing hanging scroll illustrating poems by Du Fu. The same year Wang Hui’s 53-foot scroll 10,000 Miles along the Yangzi River (1699) was given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in honour of his 100th birthday and shown there on its own from July to September 2018. Fu Xinian’s memorial article says that because Chinese experts disagreed about the scroll’s authenticity it stayed in the United States, together with some ordinary Ming and Qing paintings.⁠[3][8][9][5]

In December 2018 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced the gift of 183 objects from the Weng collection, named for him: 130 paintings, 31 works of calligraphy, 18 ink rubbings and four textiles, spanning thirteen centuries and five dynasties and especially rich in Ming and Qing works; the museum called it the largest and most significant gift of Chinese painting and calligraphy in its history. In the preceding decade he had given the museum another 21 works. A 2020 report by The Paper says that on July 28, 2018, his 100th birthday, he announced a gift of 183 objects to the museum; reports by The Paper in 2019 and 2020 say that in July and December 2018 he gave the museum, on two occasions, Wang Hui’s Ten Thousand Li of the Yangzi River and 183 works of painting, calligraphy and other objects from the family collection. The museum’s 2021 exhibition page says that his gift of 2018 and 2019 comprised more than 230 objects.⁠[9][3][5][12]

The gift drew wide attention and public controversy in cultural circles. Weng Yijun responded that the family opposed using rumours to cast suspicion on and attack others, and that Boston had been chosen because it is a cultural centre of the West and near Wan-go Weng’s home, and because the United States is governed by law and such gifts face many legal requirements and strict review.⁠[3][5]

In 2019 the Shanghai Museum held an exhibition of paintings from the former Weng family collection, Laixi Huabao, showing three paintings he had given or sold to it. From October 12, 2019, to August 9, 2020, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, showed Weng Family Collection of Chinese Painting: Family and Friends, the first of three exhibitions, with 19 works from the gift, curated by Nancy Berliner, in its Asian Paintings Gallery; the works presented in the press release include Wen Zhengming’s Nine Letters to Home, Portrait of An Qi in His Garden (1698) by Wang Hui and Jiao Bingzhen, Chen Hongshou’s Li Bai’s Night Revel in Peach and Plum Garden (1650), Hou Genyang’s Children Playing with Crickets, Shen Zhou’s Suzhou Series album and the character hu (tiger) written by Weng Tonghe in 1890 or 1902 for his great-grandson Weng Zhilian. The gift’s credit line is in memory of Virginia Dzung Weng.⁠[5][7]

Weng Yijun said in September 2019 that in the six months to a year after his 100th birthday his uncle, then 101, had been in very poor health, was largely unaware of outside events and could no longer recognize members of his own family.⁠[5]

He died at his home in Lyme, New Hampshire, at 2 a.m. (US Eastern Time) on December 9, 2020, aged 102; Fu Xinian’s memorial article says that he died peacefully in his sleep, without suffering. The family planned no memorial service, and the obituary suggested gifts to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the Lyme Community Foundation, CommunityCare of Lyme or the Wan-go HC Weng Memorial Fund at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in lieu of flowers.⁠[1][3][8]

He gave his film collection to Columbia University’s C.V. Starr East Asian Library: about 739 film elements, mostly 16mm, spanning 1944 to 1980, with prints or master elements for most of his professional work and home movies; by 2020 more than 150 films had been digitized. On March 12, 2021, Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the C.V. Starr East Asian Library held an online event on his films, at which his daughter, a physician, also spoke.⁠[4][2]

In January 2021 Fu Xinian wrote an article in his memory, published by The Paper on March 10, 2021. From April 3, 2021, to March 7, 2022, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, showed Weng Family Collection of Chinese Painting: Travel and Home, the second of the three exhibitions, with about 20 works on travel and home, among them works by Luo Pin, Wang Hui and Shen Zhou, and his 1948 colour film A Town by the Yangtze.⁠[8][12]

On December 22, 2025, the Shanghai Library and the Shanghai Center for the Protection of Ancient Books issued a statement calling online claims that the library had auctioned the Weng books for profit pure rumour: since the Weng library was transferred to it whole in 2000, the library had never disposed of any of the books in any form; they are kept in its rare-book stacks and serve readers through exhibitions, lectures and publications. The library demanded that those responsible delete the false information and said it would pursue their legal liability.⁠[16]

He had a daughter and a son, and was survived by three grandchildren and a great-grandson. A 2009 Voice of America report says that his son, born in New York in 1952, works in Hollywood as a sound editor and is the seventh generation entrusted with the collection.⁠[1][10]

Weng Yijun relayed his words that he was not a collector but only a keeper of the collection, that these things would certainly all be given away one day and that museums are where painting and calligraphy belong; Weng Yijun considered that his uncle’s idea was to turn a private collection into a public one. The Huanqiu Renwu article says that he once remarked in an interview that he lived for the family collection and that the collection had become his life.⁠[3][5][6]