page_title: John Calvin Ferguson
section_title: Career in China
hierarchical_section_title: John Calvin Ferguson / Career in China
caption_attribution_description: 中文: 蔡乃煌（中）与美国人福开森（右）合影
context_page_description: John Calvin Ferguson was an American scholar of Chinese art, collector and procurer for American art museums, and a Chinese governmental adviser.
  Ferguson was the son of John Ferguson and Catherine Matilda Pomeroy. His father was a Methodist minister and his mother a schoolteacher. Ferguson attended Albert College in Ontario, Canada and then Boston University, where he graduated in 1886. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church and, in 1887, married Mary Elizabeth Wilson.
  Their son Douglas Ferguson was a sculptor and political activist. A daughter, Mary, served in the administration of the Peking Union Medical College in the 1930s.
context_section_description: Ferguson and his new wife were posted to a Methodist mission in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, where he took up the serious study of the Chinese language, starting with classical texts, which he then translated into colloquial language to improve his speaking ability. A series of riots in 1891, the low mission salary, and raising five children put extreme stress on his wife.
  In 1889, Ferguson used the living room of his house in Nanjing for classes; these grew into Huiwen Shuyuan, which in turn evolved into the University of Nanking. In 1897 he was offered a position by Sheng Xuanhuai, a pioneering industrialist and well-connected entrepreneur whom he had met by chance a few years earlier when they were both on a Yangtze river boat. Sheng was impressed by Ferguson's learned Chinese and courtly manner and invited him to found a second western-style school, the Nanyang Public School, Shanghai, a predecessor of the Jiaotong (Transportation) University, which later split into three independent institutions: National Chiao Tung University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Xi'an Jiaotong University. In 1897, to facilitate faculty and students getting to and from the school, he built a road in the Shanghai French Concession with his own salary, which was later named Route Ferguson (now Wukang Road).
  As Sheng became more influential among government modernizing officials, he arranged posts for Ferguson in the Ministry of Commerce, the Imperial Chinese Railway Administration, and the Ministry of Posts and Communications. With Sheng's backing, Ferguson bought the Sin Wan Bao, which became Shanghai's most successful daily newspaper. The newspaper provided Ferguson with a steady income until he sold it several decades later.
  In 1902 he returned to  Boston University to study for a Ph.D., for which his dissertation was The Confucian Renaissance in the Sung Dynasty. Named honorary secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society (North China branch), he edited their scholarly journal. When Ferguson resigned as president of the Nanyang school, with Sheng Xuanhuai's continuing sponsorship, he became foreign secretary to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce in 1903, and then was official or informal advisor to government bureaus and the chief secretary of the Imperial Chinese Railway Administration until 1907. Taking advantage of his knowledge and connections he began to acquire Chinese art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, Ferguson was a member of the committee to catalog the imperial palace collections of art.
  In 1914, Ferguson returned to the United States to live in Newton, Massachusetts, but in 1915 accepted a position as adviser to Xu Shichang, who soon became President, which required Ferguson to travel back and forth to China. His lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1918 were published as Outlines of Chinese Art. In 1919, his position as adviser led him to establish a permanent home in Beijing. In 1921, he was adviser for the Chinese delegation to the Washington Conference.
  His outgoing and friendly character made Ferguson popular, and he served on the editorial committee of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, in whose journals he published extensively. Herbert A. Giles, however, was not charmed. Giles, whose reputation as a sinologist was then at its height, published a devastating review, entitled "Another Mistranslator," which included a long list of errors in one of Ferguson's studies and concluded that "Dr. Ferguson should either give up translating Chinese poetry or take a few lessons in the book-language. Ferguson replied in kind:
  Dr. Giles has been engaged for so many years in the translation of an immense number of Chinese phrases and occasionally Chinese paragraphs, that he might have been expected to look generously upon the faults of others, when so many of his own have been pointed out to him.... The fellow feeling of fallibility might have expected to produce in an experienced translator some hesitation in calling attention to
caption: Cai Naihuang and John Calvin Ferguson
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