Courtenay Hughes Fenn

Who was Courtenay Hughes Fenn?

Courtenay Hughes Fenn, or C. H. Fenn, was an American Presbyterian missionary to China, and compiler of The Five Thousand Dictionary, a widely used basic Chinese-English dictionary that has gone through numerous reprints. Fenn's Chinese name was 芳泰瑞.

Fenn was born in 1866 at Clyde, New York, U.S.A., the son of Samuel P. Fenn and Martha Wilson, and was ordained in 1890. He married Alice Holstein May on 8 June 1892 in Washington DC, and had two sons, Henry Courtenay Fenn, well-known American China scholar and architect of Yale University's Chinese language program, more commonly known as H. C. Fenn, and William Purviance Fenn.

In China, Fenn was active in the Presbyterian Overseas Mission Board. He provided a photographic album as firsthand evidence of the Boxer Rebellion and Siege of Peking, 1900, now archived in the Yale Divinity Library, along with his typescript diary. Fenn had perhaps a rather dark view of his Chinese contemporaries, as can be adduced from several remarks attributed to him in New Forces in Old China by Arthur Judson Brown:

Isaac Taylor Headland of Peking University, in his book The Chinese Boy and Girl, recounts that his own interest in Chinese children's rhymes began with a summer-time conversation with Mrs. Fenn on the veranda of the Fenns' house in the hills, fifteen miles west of Peking, in which he heard a nurse teach the following rhyme to her child Henry Fenn: