Gu (surname) - Notable People

Notable People

Prominent bearer of this surname include:

• Wellington Koo, the diplomat who represented China in the League of Nations.
• Gu Jiegang, the modern Chinese historian who advocated a modern view of China as a diverse culture, rather than the traditional homogeneous culture.
• Gu Changsheng 顾长声 (1919- ), Chinese scholar of the history of Christianity in China. Gu was born in on July 19, 1919 in Wuxi, Jiangsu province and grew up in a Chinese Christian family. His parents worked for American missionaries of the Adventist Church. He was educated in mission schools in mainland China and Hong Kong. During World War Two, he served as an interpreter for the Nationalist Army. He attended Peking University in the 1950s. However, he suffered during the Cultural Revolution after which he devoted his expertise to the history of Christianity in China. He was a professor of China's Eastern Normal University in Shanghai. His most influential work is "Missionaries and Modern China" which went through three editions in Chinese. He was a visiting scholar in America in the mid-1980s and he came to the United States again in 1989 upon the invitation by U.S. Congress to attend the 1989 National Prayer Breakfast. Soon after he arrived in America, he got married (his 2nd marriage) with an American citizen. His memoir entitled "Awaken: Memoirs of a Chinese Historian" was published in English by AuthorHouse in 2009 when he was 90 years old. Ever since the late 1980s, Gu has lived in Massachusetts.