On the evening of February 17, the award ceremony of Person of the Year of Touching China 2020 was televised. Florence Chia-ying Yeh from Nankai University was on the list.

For students all over the world, you unearth the secrets of poetry and in the eyes of the people you have become a legend. Traveling for thousands of miles, you have great affection for your motherland. As a master of classic Chinese poetry, you demonstrate a thorough knowledge of both Chinese and Western culture. You are a daughter of poetry, but are also known as a real scholar of Chinese culture.

Gaining strength from poetry in adversity

Yeh has a rough life. She was born in a traditional scholarly family in Beijing in 1924. When she was in junior high school, the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression broke out. As Beijing fell in the war, she lost contact with her father who was involved in the war of resistance. When she was in high school, her mother died on the train back to Beijing following surgery.

From 1941 to 1945, she studied at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fu Jen Catholic University. Trained by poetry master Gu Sui, she specialized in classical literature. This academic experience inspired her to devote her life to that field.

After getting married in 1948, she moved to Taiwan with her husband where they lived in white terror. Just four months after giving birth to her first daughter, her husband was suspected of being "communist" and imprisoned. The next year, when she was teaching in a middle school, she was taken to prison along with her less than one-year-old daughter as well as the school's principal and several colleagues. In 1976, her daughter and son-in-law were killed in a car accident.

Although having experienced the unbearable sufferings, Yeh has always been enthusiastically fond of classical poems. It is the power of classical Chinese poems that has helped her through all the difficulties.

Donating 35.68 million yuan to Nankai University

In 2018, Yeh donated 18.57 million yuan to Nankai University to set up the Jialing fund to support studies of traditional Chinese culture.

She made another donation of 17.11 million yuan to Nankai the same year.

Many people have an interest in her huge donations, but what Yeh cares about is only learning. The donations showed her efforts and great sincerity in the study of poetry, the deep love of her life. 

Jialing School built at Nankai for Yeh

Yeh has been teaching for more than 70 years, nearly 40 of which she spent at Nankai University. In her honor, the university built the Jialing School, a courtyard covering an area of about 550 square meters. It has become an even warmer place than home for Yeh. She wrote a poem to express her gratitude for the university's building the school.

Life-long devotion to classic Chinese poetry

After the 1960s, Yeh served as a visiting professor at Harvard University and Michigan State University, and became a tenured professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, spreading Chinese traditional culture abroad.

In 1978, learning that universities in the Chinese mainland lacked teachers, she immediately wrote an application letter to the State Education Commission of China, saying that she hoped to return to teach but asking for no payment.

Since 1979, Yeh has returned to China from Canada every year during the holidays, giving lectures at dozens of universities.

In 2014, Yeh decided to settle in Nankai, and her 19 works about poems, written with painstaking effort, have become classics for inheriting traditional Chinese culture.

Inheriting classic Chinese poetry is what the 99-year-old scholar has done throughout her life. For her life-long creation, study, and teaching of ancient poetry, she has won respect from younger generations.