Penn State in China collections fill gaps for Chinese University
Left: Luo Shiming, president of South China Agricultural University
from
1995–2006, honorary D.Sci from
College of
Agricultural Sciences,
Penn State, 2007;
Center: Lee Stout;
Right (with camera): Pan Hao,
research associate to Luo Shiming
Researchers from the South China Agricultural University (SCAU) recently visited Penn State’s Special Collections Library to examine and copy materials from collections that are helping them to reconstruct their institution’s past. Former President Luo Shiming and his research associate Pan Hao spent several days looking over archives, manuscript collections, serials, and books relating to Lingnan University and its College of Agriculture, a predecessor to the modern SCAU, located in Guangzhou, China.
The collections include the George W. Groff Papers, the Penn State in China Archives, the W. Leon Funkhouser Papers, and other materials. They all stem from the connection of Penn State Distinguished Alumnus George W. Groff with Lingnan University from 1908 to 1941. Groff, a horticulture graduate in 1907, began teaching agricultural courses at Canton Christian College in 1908, during the final years of Imperial China’s Qing Dynasty.
Groff’s work led to the creation of a college of agriculture at the school after it was renamed Lingnan University. He served as dean from 1921 to 1935, when he stepped aside to resume teaching and research on Chinese plant species and taxonomy. He was particularly interested in fruits and published the first scientific papers on the Chinese fruits the Lichi and the Longan. Groff left China in 1941 because of ill health, but returned in 1946-47 to serve in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as an agricultural expert. He was named a Distinguished Alumnus in 1953 and died in 1954.
Groff’s papers include extensive correspondence and research files, a large book collection on Chinese botany, and his copies of college bulletins and science journals published by Lingnan. The “Penn State in China” archives includes records of the American Trustees of Lingnan University as well as materials which document the support of Penn State faculty, staff, and students for Groff and his work through chapel donations. This effort was overseen by the Penn State in China Committee, which also assisted student exchanges between Penn State and Lingnan in the 1920s and ‘30s. The Funkhouser papers include correspondence and a large number of photographs taken by Penn State alum Leon Funkhouser, who taught agriculture at Lingnan from 1919 to 1922.
Penn State’s connection with Lingnan was interrupted by World War II and the Communist Revolution. The school was forced to move its campus several times to avoid the fighting but was eventually merged into Sun Yatsen University (also known as Zhung Shan University) in 1952. With higher education reforms in China, a specialized agricultural college was then created incorporating Lingnan’s agricultural college, Sun Yatsen University’s agricultural department, and several laboratories overseen by Guangdong Province. This institution is today’s South China Agricultural University.
A Penn State delegation under President John W. Oswald visited China in 1974. They toured the Sun Yatsen University campus, which is the campus of the old Lingnan University, and visited the “Penn State Lodge”—the building financed by Penn State donations which had served as a campus home for the Groffs. They also re-established contacts with SCAU that have continued to grow.
As a part of those collaborative efforts, Prof. Luo visited Penn State spring 2007, with several colleagues. He was awarded an honorary doctorate at the College of Agricultural Sciences commencement, and the team spent a good deal of time meeting with their Penn State colleagues and touring college facilities. However, they also spent a short time in The Special Collections Library looking at the archival materials. They realized then that we had many items that their own archives lacked because of the ravages of war and the Cultural Revolution. They copied a number of photos then, but promised to return for a more in-depth visit.
I later saw that they had used those photos in a poster marking the centennial of Penn State’s collaboration with SCAU. The poster was especially prepared and displayed for the visit of President Spanier to the SCAU campus on May 29, 2007. It was a unique feeling to be able to see that one of the images on the poster was a photo and Prof. Luo and me in Special Collections examining the archival materials!
On this visit, Prof. Luo and his colleague Pan Hao worked for several days reviewing collections and copying over 100 photographs and more than 500 pages of documents. They came with very specific research questions and Prof. Luo reported that they were able to answer almost all of them. In emails, he noted “our search for the history of Agricultural College of Lingnan University was very successful….we got almost exactly what we try to have to explain the key development stages in our history.”
As an archivist, it was always my passion to help preserve the historical record for the future for those who wanted and needed to understand the past. It has been particularly gratifying to realize that we have been able to help another university reconstruct its own past through documents that have been preserved at Penn State for nearly sixty years.
By coincidence, my wife and I will be taking an archival journey to China this fall where, with other colleagues, we will visit with Chinese archivists in Beijing and Shanghai. We have planned to take a side trip to Hong Kong, and now we also plan to visit Prof. Luo and South China Agricultural University. A visit to their archives will be a highlight of our trip and bring us full circle.