Zhou Youguang and his family have been the beneficiaries and victims of China's extraordinary history over the past 150 years.
In the 19th century, the Zhous were an important family in Changzhou , Jiangsu province. The Taiping army ransacked the town and destroyed the family home: in despair, his great-grandfather took his own life by throwing himself into a river.
Then, in 1937, the Japanese army occupied Suzhou and the family lost everything again. The third time was the Cultural Revolution, when Zhou was sent to a labour camp in Ningxia for 28 months; when he returned, he found his Beijing home empty of everything; not even a piece of paper remained.
But he bears no grudges. 'That is fine - no assets and no burden. I feel very relaxed.'
Born in Changzhou on January 13, 1906, Zhou enrolled in St John's University in 1923, one of only 500 university students in China at that time; he majored in economics, with a supplementary in linguistics.
In 1933, he married Zhang Yunhe , one of four daughters of a distinguished Anhui family and a graduate of the history department of Guanghua university in Shanghai. One of her sisters married Shen Congwen , one of the most famous writers of the pre-communist period; Shen never used the simplified characters or pinyin Zhou invented.
In 1937, the family fled to Chongqing , along with the national government. Zhou hid in caves to escape the Japanese bombing and came out to see corpses all around him.
