于右任   Yu, Yo-Ren   1879~1964

Born in Sanyuan county, Shaanxi province, China, in 1879, Yo-Ren Yu changed his given name from Bo-Xun to Yo-Ren, indicating that he no longer wore his hair down and folded his clothes to the left. This was a manifesto for renouncing citizenship of the Qing Dynasty. Yu was enlightened at the age of six and read fragments of Tian-Xiang Wen’s and Fang-De Xie’s poetry anthologies, after which his patriotic sentiment was inflamed. He passed the imperial examination at the provincial level at the age of 25. In the same year, the government branded him a revolutionary due to the satirical content of Poetry Drafts from the Hall of Tears and Mockery. Yu then fled to Shanghai in the next year. In 1906, Yu fled to Japan where he had the chance to meet and talk with Yat-Sen Sun. Thereafter he joined the Tongmenghui (i.e. the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance) and engaged in the revolution. He established newspapers and founded schools, and also served as the commander-in-chief of the forces responsible for revolutionary activities in Shaanxi province. He was one of the founding fathers of the Republic of China on account of his great merits, and spent a lifetime attending to national affairs. Yu held a number of public offices, such as the Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communication of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, the commander-in-chief of the forces in Shaanxi province, a member of the Central Executive Committee of Chinese Nationalist Party, a member of the Nationalist Government Committee, the first President of the first Control Yuan, and a representative in the first National Assembly. As a calligraphist, Yu’s contribution to the development of cursive script was much greater than his contribution to politics. In 1931, he founded the Standard Cursive Script Society, after which he devoted himself to grasping the quintessence of cursive script. Yu developed his unique and boundless style of calligraphy on the basis of his profound knowledge of tablet inscriptions of the Northern Wei Dynasty and cursive script. Yu was known for his high proficiency in, and systematic compilation of, standard cursive script, as a result of which he established several principles such as legibility, writability, precision, and aesthetic beauty. He was called the contemporary master of cursive script on account of his intellectual efforts in collating the ways to present ideas in a piece of calligraphy and compiling the Thousand Character Classic in Cursive Script . He also authored many books, including Poetry Collection by Yo-Ren Yu, Essay Collection by Yo-Ren Yu, Calligraphy by Yo-Ren Yu, and Standard Cursive Script.