Zhong-Yi Wu

Zhong-Yi Wu was born in 1888; his family home was in Liuhe, a town in Taicang, Jiangsu, 65 kilometers from Shanghai.⁠[1][2]

His father, Yi-Feng WuYi-Feng WuYi-Feng Wu was the father of the school founder Zhong-Yi Wu and the grandfather of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu.Open the full entry, was a xiucai, a holder of the junior degree in the imperial civil service examination system. The National Academy of Sciences memoir states that Yi-Feng Wu was at first more interested in his male heirs but soon recognized his granddaughter Chien-Shiung Wu’s vivid imagination and great intelligence and stimulated and supported her curiosity.⁠[3][4]

He began his education at a traditional Chinese school and later entered the Nanyang Public School in Shanghai.⁠[4][5]

That school was founded in 1896 and was the forerunner of Jiao Tong University.⁠[6][4]

He was an engineer by training. The entry in the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography counts him among the first Chinese to receive a Western-style education and states that, besides technical training, he acquired an understanding and appreciation of democracy, human rights and equality for women. The entry in Women in World History calls him a former engineering student, the National Women’s History Museum’s biography calls him an intellectual and engineer, and an article in the South China Morning Post calls him an engineer and businessman; the China Daily article states that he received a modern education in Shanghai.⁠[3][2][7][8][9][10]

Between 1909 and 1912 he was involved in the political activities that led to the founding of the Republic of China.⁠[3]

He joined the Revolutionary Alliance led by Sun Yat-sen.⁠[4]

In 1911 he took part in Shanghai in the Republican revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty, and in 1913, again in Shanghai, in the unsuccessful revolt against Yuan ShikaiYuan ShikaiYuan Shikai (1859–1916) was a Chinese army leader and reformist minister of the late Qing dynasty and the first president of the Republic of China, from 1912 to 1916. The modern army he trained at Xiaozhan, Tianjin, grew into the Beiyang Army; in 1915–1916 he proclaimed a monarchy with himself as emperor, cancelled it in March 1916 and died on June 6 of that year.Open the full entry. The South China Morning Post article states that he was not just a scholar but also a revolutionary who embraced boldness and took part in the 1911 revolution.⁠[2][5][9]

Grace Yen Shen’s article in the Chinese Annals of History of Science and Technology dates his fight against Yuan Shikai’s seizure of power to 1915.⁠[4]

Thereafter he returned home and in 1913 opened a school for girls, serving as its headmaster.⁠[2][1][3][10]

Articles in the magazine Mathematical Culture and in China Science Daily give the school’s name as the Mingde girls’ vocational continuation school, and a Southeast University Archives page as the Mingde girls’ vocational school; English-language sources call it the Ming De School, the Mingde Vocational School or the Mingde Women’s Vocational Continuing School. An article by Shan Jia in the Southeast University alumni magazine Dongnan Daxue Dongli Dianqi Ren (2016, no. 8) states that the school’s name, Ming De, was taken from the classical line saying that the way of great learning lies in making bright virtue manifest (da xue zhi dao, zai ming ming de).⁠[1][11][12][3][4][13][14]

The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography calls it the first school for girls in the region, China Daily the first school for girls in Taicang, and the National Academy of Sciences memoir one of the first schools in China to admit girls.⁠[2][10][3]

His wife, Funhua FanFunhua FanFunhua Fan (died 1962) was a teacher in China and the mother of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu. She visited families to persuade them to send their daughters to the Ming De School founded by her husband, Zhong-Yi Wu.Open the full entry, visited families to persuade them to let their daughters attend. The entry in Women in World History states that she visited local families to persuade parents both to send their daughters to the school and to end the binding of girls’ feet. Chien-Shiung Wu’s granddaughter, Jada YuanJada YuanJada Yuan is a journalist who was a contributing editor at New York magazine, served in 2018 as the first “52 Places Traveler” of The New York Times and was afterward a reporter at The Washington Post until February 2026; she is a granddaughter of the physicists Chien-Shiung Wu and Luke Chia-Liu Yuan.Open the full entry, writes in The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry that he was adamantly against the foot-binding of girls. Shan Jia’s article states that his wife worked alongside him and helped him run the school’s affairs, and that to encourage local people to send their children to it the school provided tuition, fees and books free of charge and also taught practical subjects such as sewing, embroidery and gardening.⁠[2][3][7][15][14]

China Daily’s article states that he aimed to break the old notion that it was a woman’s virtue to have no talents. The National Park Service’s profile states that he believed girls should receive an education; the Museum of Chinese in America states that he founded the school to provide girls with an education; and Jada Yuan writes that he founded it mainly so that his daughter could get an education. The Mathematical Culture article, which gives his dates as 1888–1959, states that he firmly believed in the equality of men and women, not only giving his daughter a resounding masculine name but also having her educated on exactly the same footing as the boys, and that he opposed the preference for sons. The entry in Women in World History states that, enlightened about gender issues by his reading of Western books, he established a girls’ school and became one of the foremost feminists in China; it quotes him as declaring, “I want every girl to have a school to go to,” and “I want everyone who has suffered to have a place to go to air his [or her] sufferings,” and describes him as a principal committed to preparing both young men and women for life in a modernized China. The China Science Daily article of 2022 states that he held progressive views and advocated equality between men and women, devoted his life to public causes and the good of his home town, and through the Mingde school gave many girls, Chien-Shiung Wu among them, the chance to study. Shan Jia’s article states that he set out to rid his home district of its isolation and ignorance through knowledge and education.⁠[10][13][16][15][1][7][5][14]

In August 1936 his daughter, Chien-Shiung Wu, sailed for the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry for graduate study; he and his wife saw her off on the bank of the Huangpu River in Shanghai. The entry in Women in World History states that her parents supported her wish to go to the United States.⁠[2][1][7]

Her tuition and living expenses were supported by his younger brother, Wu ZhuozhiWu ZhuozhiWu Zhuozhi (1897–1967) was a Chinese mechanical engineer and bus-company operator who studied and worked in France and in 1931 founded Jiangnan Qiche Gongsi, a motor bus company in Nanjing that later developed into the city’s public transport enterprise. He was a younger brother of Zhong-Yi Wu and gave financial support to his niece, the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, when she went to study in the United States in 1936.Open the full entry, a businessman who ran his own company. Wu Zhuozhi had studied in France and in 1931 founded Jiangnan Qiche Gongsi, a motor bus company in Nanjing. An article on the website of the Chien-Shiung Wu College of Southeast University states that she left with the support and financial help of her father and of her uncle Wu Zhuozhi. An article by Zhang Chengning on the website of Nanjing University’s archives sets out the contents of the visa file she completed at the U.S. consulate general in Shanghai in 1936: the entry on financial guarantee states that her father would finance her in full and describes him, in the article’s translation, as manager of the traffic department of a Wuxi–Shanghai motor transport company in Shanghai, and the consul’s note records that she submitted a letter from her father promising full support and stating that the purpose of her journey was study; the article does not mention an uncle. The entry in Women in World History states that the trip was financed by an uncle who had made a fortune establishing China’s first long-distance bus company.⁠[1][2][3][17][18][19][7]

After this parting she never saw her parents again. The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography states that she never saw her parents or her brothers again before they died in the 1950s and 1960s, and the entry in Women in World History states that she never saw her family again.⁠[2][1][7]

When communications with China were restored after the Second World War, Chien-Shiung Wu received a letter from her family and planned a visit, which was put on hold when the civil war began. The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography states that after the war she learned that her family had survived the Japanese invasion.⁠[13][2]

At that point he advised his daughter and his son-in-law, Luke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu Yuan (1912–2003) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist and the husband of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu; he worked mainly at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was a senior physicist. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica in 1959 and chaired the steering committee of Taiwan’s Synchrotron Radiation Research Center from 1983 to 2002.Open the full entry, to wait; the National Park Service’s profile states that he later said she should not return to Communist China.⁠[1][13]

The 2022 China Science Daily article states that as early as 1957 the Chinese government asked him to write to his daughter, Chien-Shiung Wu, inviting her to return to China, but that the political campaigns that followed made a return much harder.⁠[5]

He died in 1959.⁠[1]

Funhua Fan died in 1962. A column by Chen Siyi on the China Times news site states that Chien-Shiung Wu’s older brother and her parents died one after another between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and that because the U.S. government at the time strictly limited its citizens’ travel to communist countries she could not return to China for the funerals of her relatives.⁠[1][20]

Chien-Shiung Wu was not able to return to China until 1973, by which time her parents’ graves had been destroyed. The 2022 China Science Daily article states that by her first return in 1973 her parents, brothers and other close relatives had all died.⁠[13][1][5]

In 1988 Chien-Shiung Wu returned to Liuhe to preside over the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of her father’s birth.⁠[1]

She and Luke Chia-Liu Yuan gave nearly US$1 million of their personal savings to set up a scholarship foundation named after her father, the annual interest of which rewards outstanding teachers and students of the Mingde school. An article on the website of the China Zhi Gong Party states instead that in 1988, attending the commemoration of her father’s centenary, she gave 1 million U.S. dollars from the prize money she had received over the years to set up a scholarship foundation named after him, to buy books and instruments and reward outstanding teachers and students of the Mingde school. The article on the website of the Chien-Shiung Wu College states that in 1988 she set up the foundation in New York with her life savings, to reward the school’s outstanding teachers and students and help it buy instruments, equipment, books and materials. The Southeast University Archives page states that the foundation paid for a laboratory building, equipment, teacher training, foreign teachers and the education of students at the Mingde school.⁠[1][10][21][18][12]

Xinhua’s dispatch and the Mathematical Culture article give the foundation’s name as the New York Wu Zhongyi Scholarship Foundation, while a China News Service dispatch calls it the Taicang Wu Zhongyi Scholarship Foundation. The Chien-Shiung Wu College article gives the name in a slightly different form, Niuyue Wu Zhongyi Jiangxue Jijinhui. Xinhua’s dispatch places the founding of the foundation after the establishment of the Chien-Shiung Wu Laboratory at Southeast University in 1992. The Southeast University Archives page of 2013 gives a third form, Niuyue Wu Zhongyi Jiaoyu Jijinhui (New York Wu Zhongyi education foundation).⁠[22][1][23][18][12]

The couple later donated buildings and computers worth several million yuan to the Mingde school. The China News Service dispatch of 2022 states that she also built a Chien-Shiung Wu laboratory and gave the more than 5 million yuan she had saved over her lifetime to her old school.⁠[1][10][23]

His eldest child was a son, Wu Jianying; his daughter, Chien-Shiung Wu, was the second child, followed by a son, Wu Jianhao. The Mathematical Culture article also records a youngest son, Wu Jianjie, who died young. The National Academy of Sciences memoir gives Chien-Shiung Wu an older and a younger brother, the National Park Service’s profile states that she had two brothers and was the middle child, and the entry in Women in World History likewise speaks of his daughter and two sons.⁠[1][3][13][7]

The children’s names all have jian as their middle character, and their final characters follow in order the four characters of the phrase yingxiong haojie, meaning heroes and outstanding figures. The 2014 China Science Daily article states that Chien-Shiung Wu’s childhood name was Weiwei and that, as the second child, she received the strongly masculine name Jianxiong; her father hoped that she would be the equal of any man and build her strength into heroism.⁠[1][11]

Funhua Fan was a teacher. The National Academy of Sciences memoir states that he and Funhua Fan provided a warm, happy and nurturing home where education and learning were of utmost importance. The Museum of Chinese in America describes both parents as forward-thinking for their time, especially in gender equality and education, and their encouragement of their daughter’s curiosity and academic tenacity as a rare privilege. The Encyclopedia of World Biography states that after he opened a school for girls in Liuhe, Funhua Fan became a tutor, and that the couple became known as strong advocates for education. Shan Jia’s article states that he and his wife loved each other and shared the same ideals, and that he renamed his wife Fuhua, taking the name from Sun Yat-sen’s words calling for driving out the Tartar barbarians and restoring China (huifu Zhonghua).⁠[8][3][16][24][14]

In 1942 Chien-Shiung Wu married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan; because of the fighting in the Pacific, neither family could attend the wedding. Their son, Vincent YuanVincent YuanVincent Yuan (born 1947) is a physicist whose research has been carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the son of Chien-Shiung Wu and Luke Chia-Liu Yuan; he took part in the TRIPLE Collaboration’s research on parity violation in neutron resonances and was first author of an experiment that measured the temperature of a shock wave by neutron resonance spectroscopy.Open the full entry, was born in 1947.⁠[13][3]

Wu Jianying died of illness in 1958.⁠[1]

In 1965 Wu Zhuozhi and Wu Jianhao traveled to Hong Kong to meet Chien-Shiung Wu and her husband. China Science Daily’s 2022 article states that the meeting was arranged by the authorities concerned and took place in secret.⁠[5][1]

The National Park Service’s profile states that Chien-Shiung Wu’s uncle and brother were “killed in the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” and the Mathematical Culture article that the uncle and the younger brother whom she had met in Hong Kong were persecuted to death, one after the other, during the Cultural Revolution. An article credited to Jinling Dang’an and carried by the Jiangsu channel of ifeng.com states that Wu Zhuozhi died of illness in Nanjing in 1967. The entry in Women in World History states that when she returned in 1973 her parents were dead and her brothers had been killed during the Cultural Revolution; the Museum of Chinese in America states that by then her parents had died, as had her brother and uncle.⁠[13][1][17][7][16]

He gave his daughter a masculine-sounding name and had her schooled in the same way as her brothers.⁠[1][11]

Chien-Shiung Wu attended her father’s school up to the fourth grade and in 1923 left home for the women’s normal school in Suzhou. The Southeast University Archives page calls the Mingde school her first school. The entry in Women in World History states that during her seven years at school in Suzhou she led the local chapter of China’s underground student movement and represented the students at meetings and strikes, and that her father’s revolutionary record and her own excellent grades protected her from expulsion.⁠[2][3][12][7]

He brought home science and mathematics books and news from the outside world and encouraged his daughter to study on her own. The South China Morning Post article states that he began reading her articles from scientific journals before she could read and held up the Ming dynasty explorer and diplomat Zheng He, whose seven voyages set sail from their home town of Liuhe, as a life example for her. The entry in Women in World History states that he held China’s culture and traditions in high regard, believed that music, the arts and literature enriched his children’s lives and prepared them for the future, filled the family’s home with scholarly books and encouraged questioning and the exploration of new ideas in his daughter and his two sons.⁠[3][9][7]

He is said to have built the first radio sets in the town, which first stirred his daughter’s fascination with modern learning and technology, and he set her the task of building a working radio out of a pile of loose parts.⁠[2][4]

The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography states that he instilled in his daughter a pride in Chinese culture, a love of science and a belief in herself, and that he urged her to ignore the obstacles and keep walking forward. The entry in Women in World History states that father and daughter grew especially close; when, having graduated at the top of her class in 1930, she was admitted that summer to National Central University and wanted to study physics but doubted her grounding in mathematics and science, he answered that there was ample time to prepare and bought her three advanced textbooks in mathematics, chemistry and physics, which she studied until term began. The National Women’s History Museum’s biography states that he was very close to his daughter and encouraged her to pursue her education as far as she could, at a time when higher education for women was rarely encouraged in China. The Encyclopedia of World Biography states that he and his wife encouraged their daughter to give her very best to excelling in her studies.⁠[2][7][8][24]

After his daughter graduated from the normal school and became a primary-school teacher, he encouraged her to go on to university. She later recalled that without his encouragement she might have been teaching in a primary school somewhere in China, and that he taught her to put the greater self before the lesser self.⁠[11]

Chien-Shiung Wu said repeatedly that her father and her teacher Hu Shi were the two people who influenced her most. The article on the website of the Chien-Shiung Wu College of Southeast University states that in a letter to Hu Shi she wrote that, apart from her father, Hu Shi had influenced her life more than anyone, and records her saying that her father was an educator ahead of his time. The China Daily article states that her father exerted the most profound influence on her life.⁠[5][18][10]

The National Academy of Sciences memoir judges that his impact on his daughter’s intellectual development was profound. Grace Yen Shen’s article states that he gave his daughter the belief that men and women were equal in their potential and that years later Chien-Shiung Wu still credited her career as an experimental physicist at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, on the Manhattan ProjectManhattan ProjectThe Manhattan Project was the United States program that developed the atomic bomb during the Second World War, managed from 1942 by the Manhattan Engineer District of the Army Corps of Engineers with British and Canadian participation. It built plants and laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, among other sites, carried out the first nuclear test in 1945, and produced the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, later that year; after the war its functions passed to the civilian Atomic Energy Commission.Open the full entry and at 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 to her father’s influence and encouragement; the article judges that this influence “pushed her towards science rather than simply allowing it.” The 2022 China Science Daily article judges that her father gave her an open and enterprising character and the ideal of serving society, while Hu Shi added a worldwide outlook and scholarly ambition; it also holds that the region south of the Yangtze, a center of culture that came early under European and American influence, shaped the open and enterprising character of her father’s generation and her own. The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography calls him an enlightened father.⁠[3][4][5][2]

A page published by the Southeast University Archives in 2013 records that Taicang Mingde School, which grew out of the school he founded, comprised the Mingde kindergarten, primary school, junior middle school and senior middle school. The page records that on November 2, 2013, with the support of the New York Wu Zhongyi education foundation, more than 60 staff of the Mingde schools in Taicang, led by their principal, Quan Liufang, and other school leaders, visited the Chien-Shiung Wu Memorial Hall at Southeast University, where they were received by Xiao Taitao, deputy director of the university archives, who outlined how the hall came to be built, its design, construction and opening, and Chien-Shiung Wu’s scientific contributions and her place in the history of science as a Chinese woman of worldwide influence.⁠[12]

China Daily’s 2022 article gives the school’s present name as Mingde Senior Middle School.⁠[10]

Chien-Shiung Wu returned to China nine times in all and visited the Mingde school on five of those trips. The China News Service dispatch states instead that from 1973 on she returned to China five times.⁠[12][23]

She died in 1997, and in accordance with her will her ashes were buried in the grounds of the Mingde school, at a memorial site designed by Tsung-Dao LeeTsung-Dao LeeTsung-Dao Lee (1926–2024) was a Shanghai-born American physicist who taught for decades at Columbia University. In 1956 he and Chen Ning Yang proposed that parity might not be conserved in weak interactions, for which they shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics; from the 1970s he helped advance high-energy physics and the training of physicists in China.Open the full entry; the ashes of Luke Chia-Liu Yuan were placed there several years later. The article on the website of the China Zhi Gong Party states that her ashes, brought back by Luke Chia-Liu Yuan, were buried on the grounds of the Mingde school that her father had founded in 1913, beneath the crape myrtle that he had planted and under which she had read in the mornings and played as a child; it adds that the five green characters of the garden’s name were written by Chen Ning YangChen Ning YangChen Ning Yang (1922–2025) was a theoretical physicist born in Hefei, Anhui, China, who shared the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics with Tsung-Dao Lee for their investigation of the parity laws. In 1954 he and Robert L. Mills formulated non-Abelian gauge theory (Yang–Mills theory), and he worked in turn at the Institute for Advanced Study, Stony Brook University and Tsinghua University.Open the full entry and that Tsung-Dao Lee wrote the epitaph in his own hand. The article on the website of the Chien-Shiung Wu College states that the memorial garden was designed by Southeast University’s department of architecture, with the design reviewed by I. M. Pei, that the epitaph was written by Tsung-Dao Lee and that the name of the garden was inscribed by Chen Ning Yang, whereas the China Daily article states that the epitaph was written by her biographer Chiang Tsai-chien.⁠[2][3][5][1][21][18][10]

On May 31, 2012, Taicang celebrated the centenary of Chien-Shiung Wu’s birth, and the 100th anniversary of the Mingde primary school was marked during the commemorations.⁠[25][22]