Mei & Plaks Obituary of Yu-kung Kao

Yu-kung KaoAndrew Plaks and Tsu-lin Mei 梅祖麟 have written an obituary for renowned Chinese poetry scholar and Princeton emeritus professor Yu-kung Kao 高友工, who has died at age 87. They write:

The invaluable contributions of Kao to the academic training of a generation of scholars of Chinese literature in the United States and abroad is matched only by the profound and lasting impact he had, on a personal level, on so many lives. In some ways, he was an enigmatic individual — quiet and reserved, a very private person whose inner thoughts remained a mystery even to his closest friends, reluctant to display his vast erudition and penetrating insight. Yet in his own way, with his inscrutable smile and self-deprecating manner, he was always reaching out to touch the minds and hearts of all the students and colleagues who read his seminal writings with utter absorption, or sat around his seminar table, intent on absorbing even a small measure of the spiritual and intellectual depths of the Chinese “lyric vision.”

For more details of his life, click on the image for the obituary in full.