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Têng Ssu-yü first studied history at Yenching University, in Peiping, where he spent nearly a decade first as student, then as instructor. There he came under the teaching and influence of American trained historians such as William Hung and Gu Jiegang and met American graduate students in Chinese history, John King Fairbank and Knight Biggerstaff. At Yenching he edited the university's Historical Annual and was an instructor in history from 1935 to 1937. As the Sino-Japanese War erupted in 1937, Teng joined the staff of the Library of Congress in Washington as Assistant Compiler in the Orientalia Collection. At the invitation of his classmate, Fang Chao-ying, who was collaborating with Arthur W. Hummel, Sr. on the monumental Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943), Têng turned his attention to biography and eventually contributed thirty-three articles, most of them dealing with the Taiping Rebellion of the mid-19th century. In 1938, he entered the Harvard University Graduate School and received his Ph.D. in history in 1942. During these years, John Fairbank attracted him from a traditional sinological focus to studies of modern Chinese history and diplomacy. He and Fairbank teamed on a series of articles in the "Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies" which exploited the newly published archives to explain the structure of the Qing dynasty's initial interaction with the west.