Wu Dingliang (; January 1893 – 24 March 1969), also known as Woo Ting-Liang, was a pioneering Chinese

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

and

educator A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching. ''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. whe ...

. He is considered the founder of Chinese physical anthropology.

Biography

Wu was educated in Britain during the 1920s and came back to China after he obtained a doctor's degree in anthropology. He continued his work in

Academia Sinica Academia Sinica (AS, la, 1=Academia Sinica, 3=Chinese Academy; ), headquartered in Nangang, Taipei, is the national academy of Taiwan. Founded in Nanking, the academy supports research activities in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from ...

as the director and researcher of the Group of Anthropology in the Institute of History and Language. His research concentrated on somatometry, description of biological variation of ethnic minorities in China. He collected morphological measurements and described physical characteristics of living people in different parts of China. He also prepared the foundation of Institute of Physical Anthropology. He published more than 10 papers on physical anthropology, for example, in 1942, he published "the Physical Characteristics of Miao in South China" in "Journal of Anthropology" edited by Britain Royal Society. Moreover, Wu Dingliang set up and edited "Renleixue Jikan"(Communication on Anthropology). In 1941, Wu published the paper "

Somatometry Anthropometry () refers to the measurement of the human individual. An early tool of physical anthropology, it has been used for identification, for the purposes of understanding human physical variation, in paleoanthropology and in various at ...

of Chinese in the Plain of North China" (including 190 indexes of somatometry) in Vol.2 of "Communication on Anthropology". In Sept.of 1947, the Department of Anthropology and the Institute of Anthropology were set up at Zhejiang University, Wu Dingliang assumed the dean of the department and the chief of the institute. Wu Dingliang educated many students that became prominent scholars of physical anthropology. Among them are Zhang Yinyun and Han Kangxin. In the period from 1946 to 1948, he also worked as part-time professor in the department of anthropology at Jinan University in Shanghai. In 1948,Wu Dingliang was elected as academician of Academia Sinica. During the 1950s, Wu and Liu Xian invited Dong Tichen and Zhao Yiqing to Fudan University. They created the first teaching and research unit of physical anthropology in China. Wu was prosecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and he committed suicide in 1969.

References

T. L. Woo and G. M. Morant, 1932, A Preliminary Classification of Asiatic Races Based on Cranial Measurements onograph Academia Sinica Monograph of the National Research Institute of Social Sciences, No.7 Communication on Anthropology https://web.archive.org/web/20100507105727/http://comonca.org.cn/

Biography

References

See also