Background
He was born in Shangshan, Kwangtung, China in 1887.
He was born in Shangshan, Kwangtung, China in 1887.
Mr. Wang had very little schooling when young and his vast knowledge of subjects ranging from mathematics and chemistry to law and political science and including the acquaintance of several languages, was largely the result of his own efforts. Prior to the 1911 Revolution he taught in the National Institute of China at Woosung where he counted among his students some of the intellectual leaders of China such as Dr. Hu Shih and Yang Chien.
On the establishment of the Provisional Government at Nanking in 1912, Yun-wu Wang joined the Ministry of Education and at the same time was secretary to Dr. Sun Yat-sen. When the government was moved to Peking he was made director of the department of higher education in the Ministry of Education and at one time acted as vice-Minister. During this period he was also professor at Chung Kuo University and editor of the Peking Republican Daily News. Later he acted as chief of the translation department and concurrently chief of the technical department of the National Oil Administration.
Mr. Wang was appointed special Commissioner for the suppression of opium in Kiangsu, Kiangsi and Anhwei in 1916. Since 1917 he lived the life of a scholar, doing research in his favorite studies. He written and translated a great number of books. In 1920 he was appointed editor - in - chief of the Commercial Press, but resigned from this post on account of ill health in the summer of 1929. During his editorship, many popularly adopted textbooks in Chinese schools and colleges were published, a number of rare Chinese classics were reproduced and "The Complete Library," constituting many thousands of volumes of standard works in all branches of knowledge, was issued, thus making rare classics available to even a modest purse, while "The Complete Library," sufficient in itself to constitute a nucleus for a small-sized public library, created thousands of village and town libraries.
In spite of his manifold duties, he found time to work out a system of Chinese lexicography - the four-corner numeral system - after years of research and experimentation. The simplicity and practicality of this system have commended it to more than a million users in China and abroad in two years. Soon after his resignation from the editorship of the Commercial Press, he served as director of the law department of the National Research Institute of Social Sciences, Academia Sinica.
While he was making a detailed study of crime in China, based upon a survey of the prisons of eight provinces, he was recalled by the board of directors of the Commercial Press to serve as managing director and general manager, which vacancy was created by the death of Y. C. Bau. Yun-wu Wang also served as director of the Oriental Library, chairman of the committee on the standardization of scientific terms in the Ministry of Education, member of the committee on industrial legislation in the Ministry of Industry, Labor and Commerce, member of the Rural Rehabitation Committee, Executive Yuan. During his round-the-world tour in 1931, he studied scientific management most thoroughly. He was recognised as the first man who introduced scientific management into Chinese industry and it was mainly due to this, that the Commercial Press, Ltd., after its destruction by the Japanese at the beginning of 1932, had more than recovered within a brief period of two to three years.