Life and Scholarly Career
Yú Píngbó's ancestry can be traced to Déqīng, Zhèjiāng. His pet name as a child was Sēngbǎo (僧寶). He was a descendant of Yú Yuè, a renowned scholar during the late Qīng period, and as such Yú Píngbó was trained in the Chinese classics from an early age. In 1915, he qualified by examination for a preparatory course at Peking University, where he became one of Hú Shì's most prominent students. In 1917, he married Xŭ Băoxùn (許寶馴), a gifted female scholar from Hángzhōu, and then commenced composing melodies for Kūnqŭ operas. Meanwhile, he temporarily immersed himself in the New Culture Movement, and in 1918 his first New Culture period poem Spring Waters (春水 Chūnshuĭ) was published alongside Lŭ Xùn's Diary of a Madman in La Jeunesse, becoming one of the pioneering compositions to be written in contemporary Chinese vernacular. That same year, he established with classmates Fù Sīnián, Luó Jiālún and others the New Wave Society. Other intellectual friends or wirters included Zhu Ziqing, Feng Youlan, and Ye Shengtao. He then went on to publish such compositions as the poem Winter's Night (冬夜 Dōngyè). Yú Píngbó graduated from Peking University in December, 1919. After graduation, Yu took a brief trip to Europe, and in 1922 spent an equally brief period in the United States, but found neither place attractive.
In 1923, Yú Píngbó published Debating Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢辨 Hónglóumèng Biàn), giving evidence for his claim that only the first eighty chapters of the original Dream of the Red Chamber had been authored by Cáo Xŭeqín, the later forty chapters being penned by Gāo È. He thereby came to be known, along with Hú Shì, for establishing a new field in redological studies. These studies were not only important in developing an understanding of the text and its complexities, but in advancing the New Culture Movement's nationalistic project of using scientific methodology to replace old Chinese culture with a westernized version.
In 1925 he took up post as a lecturer at Yenching University. In 1928 he went to Tsinghua University. In 1935, he founded the Tsinghua Valley Music Society (清華谷音社 Qinghuá Gŭyīnshè) at Qinghuayuan (清華園, "Tsinghua Gardens") to popularise his Kūnqŭ compositions. In 1946, he transferred to Peking University for the post of professor. In 1935, he entered the Classical Literature Research Unit (古典文學研究室 Gŭdiăn Wénxué Yánjiūshì) at the Literary Research Institute (文學研究所 Wénxué Yánjiūsuŏ) of the Chinese Academy of Science, there revising his old publication Discussing Dream of the Red Chamber and redistributing it under the title Researching Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢研究 Hónglóumèng Yánjiū), in 1954, Máo Zédōng personally launched a nation-wide campaign criticising this work along with Hú Shì's Reactionary Thought (反動思想 Făndòng Sīxiăng), a major incident of the time. During the Cultural Revolution, Yú Píngbó was persecuted further, going to one the so-called 'cadre schools' in Xī, Hénán for manual labour. On 15 October 1990, at ninety years of age, he died at the Běijīng Sānlĭ Hénán Shāgōu Yùsuŏ (北京三里河南沙溝寓所).
Read more about this topic: Yu Pingbo
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