Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c15.s2.t6.2

v2.c15.s2.t6.2

He was born on December 17, 1891 in Shanghai. His father was a minor official of the Qing dynasty who died when he was only four years old. He was raised by his mother at his ancestral home in Jixi in Anhui province. A devout Buddhist, she exposed him to prevalent ideas of popular Buddhism as well as arranged for his formal training in Confucian Four Books and Five Classics to become a scholar-bureaucrat at the village school. At the age of 13, Hu Shi was sent to Shanghai to study in modern schools. After completing his high school, he could not study further due to financial constraints. He spent two years, from 1908 to 1910, working as Chinese and English tutor to support his family. In 1910, he successfully cleared the examination for the Boxer Indemnity Fund Scholarship to study in the USA. Starting his undergraduate studies in agriculture at Cornell University in 1910, he later shifted to Columbia to pursue higher studies in