Huang Zunxian

Also known as Zi Gongdu · Bie Hao Ren Jing Lu Zhu Ren · Jiaying Zhouren

Huang Zunxian, courtesy name Gongdu, who called himself the Master of the Hut among Men, came from Jiaying in Guangdong. He passed the provincial examination in 1876 and the next year went to Japan as counsellor under He Ruzhang, later spending years on his forty-chapter Treatise on Japan (Riben guozhi), a study of Japanese history and the Meiji reforms, and writing poems on Japanese customs. Posted in 1882 as consul-general in San Francisco just as the Chinese Exclusion Act took effect, he worked to protect Chinese labourers. In 1890 he went to London as counsellor with Xue Fucheng and the next year became consul-general in Singapore. After the war with Japan he helped Liang Qichao found the Current Affairs journal in Shanghai and, as a circuit intendant in Hunan, assisted Governor Chen Baozhen's reforms. Sent home after the coup of 1898, he died in 1905. An early poem urged writing as one speaks, and Liang Qichao cited his collected poems as models for a revolution in poetry.