Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang was a Chinese writer, translator, and inventor who helped introduce Chinese literature and thought to English-speaking readers in the twentieth century. Born in 1895 in Banzai in Fujian province, he was the son of a Presbyterian minister and studied at St John's University in Shanghai before earning a master's degree at Harvard and a doctorate in linguistics at Leipzig.

Returning to China in 1923 he taught English at Peking University and edited several literary magazines, contributing to the New Culture movement. He developed a romanisation system for Mandarin known as Gwoyeu Romatzyh in collaboration with Y.R. Chao and was a founding figure of the modern Chinese essay, which he called xiaopin wen.

From 1936 he lived in the United States, where his English-language books made him one of the best-known Chinese authors in the West. My Country and My People in 1935 and The Importance of Living in 1937 stayed on American bestseller lists for more than a year, and his historical novel Moment in Peking, published in 1939, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He devoted years and much of his fortune to designing a Chinese-language typewriter, the Mingkwai, which he patented in 1946. He served briefly as a UNESCO official in Paris and the founding chancellor of Nanyang University in Singapore in 1954, and spent his last years in Hong Kong, where he died in 1976. His former home in Taipei is now a museum.

The name Lin Yutang places the family name first in the Chinese order, with Yutang meaning jade hall. He carried it as a masculine personal name traditional in Han Chinese families.