Xu Fancheng

Who was Xu Fancheng?

Xu Fancheng, also known as Hu Hsu in India, was a Chinese scholar and translator. He translated 50 of the Upanishads into classical Chinese. He also translated Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra, Kalidasa's lyric poem Meghaduuta, and several of Sri Aurobindo's works into Chinese. He was familiar with Greek, Latin, English, French, as well as Sanskrit and German. A 16-volume of his complete works was published in 2006.

He was born into a wealthy family in Changsha, Hunan, and was a friend and student of Lu Xun in his early life. From 1927 to 1929, he studied History at Zhongshan University and then Western Literature in Fudan University. He studied Fine Art and Philosophy at the University of Königsberg, Germany from 1929 to 1932. From 1945 to 1978, he studied and taught in India, thus escaping the Cultural Revolution. He lived in Pondicherry from 1951 to 1978 in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. After returning to China, he worked as a researcher in the Research Institute of World Religions of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.