Background
He was born near Belleville, Ontario, Canada, the third son and youngest of six children of John Ferguson, a Methodist minister of Scottish ancestry, and Catherine Matilda (Pomeroy) Ferguson.
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educator Missionary Chinese art specialist
He was born near Belleville, Ontario, Canada, the third son and youngest of six children of John Ferguson, a Methodist minister of Scottish ancestry, and Catherine Matilda (Pomeroy) Ferguson.
He studied for a time at Albert College in Belleville and then moved to Boston, Massachussets, where he served as associate pastor of the People's Church (1885 - 87) and attended Boston University.
After receiving the A. B. degree in 1886 and studying in the theological school, he was ordained in the Methodist ministry.
In 1888 he opened the new Nanking University as its first president, with a class of fifteen students who met in the living room of his home.
Ferguson spent his first months in China at Chinkiang, making an intensive study of the language; with a background of training in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, he learned rapidly.
During the next decade he designed a college curriculum, translated chemistry and mathematics texts into Chinese, and drew up plans and supervised the construction of buildings for the new institution, which soon became a notable center of Western education.
Unlike many of his missionary contemporaries, he was also convinced that China had much to teach him and sought out the usually inaccessible scholar-officials who best embodied the virtues of Chinese culture. His command of the language, admiration for China, and respect for Chinese etiquette won him many friends. Tall and blue-eyed, with long, fair hair, flowing mustaches and bushy eyebrows, he was accepted in the courts and homes of the local mandarins and even of the viceroy.
Officials sought his advice on matters concerning the West. In return he was allowed to see the bronzes, porcelains, and paintings hidden in the great compounds, and his passion for Chinese art began to stir. One of the officials who came to admire Ferguson was Sheng Hsuan-huai, an entrepreneur and banker of doubtful reputation but tremendous power, who wished to found a technical institute in Shanghai.
At his invitation Ferguson in 1897 left Nanking and the mission field to establish and become president of Nanyang College (later Chiaotung University). For the next several years Ferguson's career was linked with Sheng's multiple ventures.
In 1899 Sheng helped him acquire a small Shanghai Chinese-language paper, Sin Wan Pao, which under a competent Chinese staff grew to be the largest daily in Shanghai and provided a comfortable income for Ferguson and his growing family.
In 1902 Ferguson was appointed secretary of the new Ministry of Commerce; from 1903 to 1905 he served as chief secretary of the Imperial Chinese Railway Administration, which Sheng had run since 1896; and in 1911 he was made foreign secretary to the Ministry of Posts and Communications, of which Sheng was head.
In this close formal relationship with the imperial regime, rare though not unknown for a foreigner, Ferguson was also often asked to carry out foreign missions for the Manchu government. During these years Ferguson's capacity for rigorous self-discipline allowed him to continue other activities as well. An early riser, he read his New Testament, in Greek, before breakfast and dispatched a voluminous personal correspondence before turning to other matters.
These included completing work for a Ph. D. degree awarded by Boston University in 1902 for a thesis on the Chinese examination system; editing the Journal of the North China branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1902 - 11), to which he also contributed many articles; and serving as vice-president of the Red Cross Society of China (which Sheng founded in 1909).
As chairman of the relief commission during the famine of 1910-11 Ferguson raised nearly a million dollars to help provide food for the starving. He was thus becoming that most admired of traditional Chinese figures, the scholar-official, prominent in public affairs, philanthropic, and steeped in a knowledge of Chinese culture. Although he never wore Chinese dress, for his seventieth birthday an artist drew a portrait of him wearing the robes of a scholar, for his Chinese friends thought of him in this role.
But traditional China was dying. Just after Ferguson moved to Peking in 1911, the October revolution ended two thousand years of imperial rule and ushered in an era of political chaos. Sheng fled to Japan, his power gone, and in 1914 Ferguson brought his family back to Newton, Massachussets, intending to retire.
He returned to Peking in 1915, however, at the request of the new government and remained there until World War II. Installed in a great compound built for a grand councillor of the Ch'ing Dynasty, he continued to serve as government adviser and to oversee his thriving Shanghai newspaper, which he owned until 1929.
From 1914 on, he published several articles warning against Japanese designs on China. A champion of China's independence and a critic of Western exploitation, he nevertheless did not espouse the growing revolutionary movement.
He also continued to study and write about Chinese culture. Ferguson's deepest love, however, was reserved for Chinese art. Throughout the years he had been acquiring a good selection of Chou bronzes, Han candlesticks, jade pens, rubbings, and fine paintings.
In 1914 he mounted a special exhibition of his paintings for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and produced a pamphlet on bronzes for the Smithsonian Institution. Thereafter he served as art buyer and consultant for the Metropolitan, the Freer Gallery, and other museums.
He also published many articles and several books on art, including two monumental catalogues (in Chinese) on paintings and bronzes.
The most charming of his books is the Noted Porcelains of Successive Dynasties (1931), an annotated reproduction of an important Ming collection.
Ferguson printed it himself, as a labor of love, in collaboration with the superintendent of the famous Ching Te-kien pottery works. To reproduce the color paintings, the two men had paper handmade by a T'ang Dynasty formula and brought printing presses from Germany; they even cast their own type. After the beginning of the war with Japan, Ferguson remained in his house with one daughter, working on a catalogue of rubbings.
He was briefly interned in the British embassy, and was repatriated to the United States on the liner Gripsholm in December 1943.
He was then seventy-seven. Less than two years later he died of arteriosclerotic heart disease in a sanatorium at Clifton Springs, New York, and was buried in the Newton (Massachussets) Cemetery. His wife and three of their nine children had died before him.
Missionaries in China were then developing Christian colleges to supplement lower schools established earlier, and Bishop Charles H. Fowler persuaded the gifted and energetic Ferguson to start a college in Nanking for the Methodist mission. In 1888 he opened the new Nanking University as its first president, with a class of fifteen students who met in the living room of his home. Ferguson had succeeded in being both Western scholar and Chinese mandarin, a mediator between two cultures rather than an outstanding figure in any one field. He felt that China had given him a life full of adventure and romance, and he reciprocated by leaving his collection of art to Nanking University.
( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
( This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)
Missionaries in China were then developing Christian colleges to supplement lower schools established earlier, and Bishop Charles H. Fowler [q. v. ] persuaded the gifted and energetic Ferguson to start a college in Nanking for the Methodist mission.
Quotations:
Herbert A. Giles, however, was not charmed. Giles, whose reputation as a sinologist was then at its height, published a devastating review, entitled "Another Mistranslator, " which included a long list of errors in one of Ferguson's studies and concluded that "Dr. Ferguson should either give up translating Chinese poetry or take a few lessons in the book-language. Ferguson replied in kind:
"Dr. Giles has been engaged for so many years in the translation of an immense number of Chinese phrases and occasionally Chinese paragraphs, that he might have been expected to look generously upon the faults of others, when so many of his own have been pointed out to him. .. . The fellow feeling of fallibility might have expected to produce in an experienced translator some hesitation in calling attention to the faults of others, as long as he could spend his time profitably in revising his own work and correcting his mistakes. "
He was a member the Red Cross Society of China. He was a member of the Chinese delegation to the Washington Conference of 1921.
He served on the editorial committee of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, in whose journals he published extensively.
His outgoing and friendly character made Ferguson popular.
On August 4, 1887, before sailing for China, he married Mary Elizabeth Wilson of Rochester, New York, a minister's daughter. They had nine children: Luther Mitchel, Helen Matilda, Alice Mary, Florence Wilson, Charles John, Mary Esther, Robert Mason, Duncan Pomeroy, and Peter Blair.
mother Catherine Matilda (Pomeroy) Ferguson
son Luther Mitchel Ferguson daughter Helen Matilda Ferguson daughter Alice Mary Ferguson daughter Florence Wilson Ferguson son Charles John Ferguson daughter Mary Esther Ferguson son Robert Mason Ferguson son Duncan Pomeroy Ferguson son Peter Blair
