Happy 2025 to all of our readers! The end of this month will mark the start of Chinese New Year festivities, ushering in the Year of the Snake. I therefore want to take the opportunity to highlight some of the notable Chinese scientists in the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, as well as examples of US-Chinese scientific collaboration. While the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not formalize diplomatic relations until 1979, China was not nearly as closed-off before then as many people might think. Scientific communication was happening between our two countries starting from at least 1966 with the founding of The Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (CSCPRC), and later the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China (CSCC). That said, most exchanges did not happen until after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. Topics of these exchanges ranged from wheat cultivation to paleoanthropology (and of course, physics).
Some housekeeping before we begin: these photos were taken during a time when romanization standards for Chinese names were in flux. While today most names from the PRC are romanized using the modern Pinyin system and follow Chinese naming order, that is, family name - given name (e.g. Xi Jinping), during the 20th century it was common to follow the Western naming order of first name - last name (e.g. Jinping Xi). Furthermore, the Pinyin romanization system was only developed and widely adopted in the latter half of the century, before which there was the Wade-Giles system of romanization (e.g. Hsi Chinp’ing), still in use in Taiwan today. In other cases, Chinese disyllabic given names were sometimes hyphenated (e.g. Xi Jin-ping) or separated (e.g. Xi Jin Ping). All this to say that you will find many of these different naming conventions reflected in our collections, and when describing a given picture I have chosen to use whatever was used in the original photo description. In cases where I mention a Chinese name that is not in the photo, I use the modern Pinyin with Chinese naming order.
Not sure how to pronounce some of these names? I’ve got you covered! This handy website offers spoken pronunciations of every Pinyin syllable in the Chinese language (luckily there’s only about 200, unlike English which has well over 10,000 possible syllables). If the name is written in the Wade-Giles system, you can convert it to Pinyin using this chart.
A visit to the Institute of Modern Physics in Lanzhou, China. L-R: C.C. Yang, Bernard Harvey, David Allan Bromley, Pierre Perrolle, and Tom Tombrello. This was part of an extended visit of a group of American Nuclear Physicists to institutions throughout China in 1979. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Bromley Collection. Bromley David Allan D23
Just five months after formally establishing diplomatic relations, the United States sent a delegation of ten nuclear physicists on a three-week tour of China under the auspices of the CSCPRC from May 21 to June 9 of 1979 in order to gain a greater understanding of the state of China’s nuclear research, as well as deliver lectures at Chinese universities and build relationships with the Chinese scientific establishment. The report of the delegation offers a detailed overview of the scientists’ activities, not only from their observations of Chinese scientific facilities, but also the tourist attractions they went to and some of their overall personal impressions.
This photo was taken at the second city the delegation visited: Lanzhou, a city in western China near Xi’an. Here we see them being welcomed at the Institute of Modern Physics by Director of the Institute and Vice Director of the Lanzhou Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Yang Chengzhong (or Ch’eng-chung, judging by the “C.C.” in the photo description) on the left. While the man on the right side is unidentified in this photo, it is highly likely that it is Xie Bowang, Secretary of the Committee of the Communist Party of the Institute. According to the delegation’s report, he along with Yang Chengzhong were present at the official welcome.
Of course, when I first saw this picture, my first thought was not of physics but of food (a common occurrence if we’re being honest). Lanzhou is famous throughout China for its beef noodle soup–nearly everywhere in any big Chinese city you will now find restaurants claiming to specialise in Lanzhou beef noodles. Unfortunately for the delegation, there is no direct evidence in their itinerary that they got to try this delicacy during the short time that they were there.
In spring of 1975, the Department of Physics [at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] was honored to host a delegation of ten solid state physicists from the People's Republic of China. As part of a five-week tour of eleven U.S. universities and institutions sponsored by the committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, the Chinese physicists spent two days in the Department of Physics and the Materials Research Laboratory exchanging ideas and information on current developments in solid state physics. Specifically, their interests were crystal growth and structure, semiconductors, solids under high pressures and high temperatures, and magnetic materials and their applications. Deputy leader of the delegation was the well-known Kun Huang, co-author with Max Born of the Dynamical Theory of Crystal Lattices (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1954). Left to right, Row 1: Chang-shou Kao, Anne Fitzgerald, Chia-hsi Lu, Ch'i Chiang, Chin-feng Wang, Chin-liang Yu; Row 2: Dennis Williams, Chung-hsing Pao, Chin-shun Huang, Shou Wu Wang, David Pines, Kun Huang, Tsung Chang; Row 3: Paul Beck, Pao-kuang Kuo, Yin-fu Feng, Chih-Tang Sah; Row 4: Clarence Stafford, Charles Slichter, John D. Dow, Robert W. Keyes, Ralph O. Simmons, Hans Frauenfelder, David Lazarus, James H. Smith. Credit: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign E22
I love that previous generations of librarians and archivists already did the work of thoroughly describing this photograph for me! Rather than rehashing what my predecessors already said, I’m going to give you some historical gossip (my favorite kind of gossip): two people in this photo eventually got married as a direct result of their work in US-China scientific exchanges. A year after this photograph was taken, Anne Fitzgerald (first row, second from left) and Charles Slichter (last row, second from left) were part of a delegation of solid-state physicists to China, the counterpart to this visit of Chinese solid-state physicists to the US. The two then worked together to co-edit a 208-page report for the CSCPRC describing their experiences titled Solid State Physics in the People’s Republic of China: A Trip Report of the American Solid State Physics Delegation. Their time together must have left quite the impression, because four years later in 1979 they began courting, and by 1980 they were married. As Slichter describes in his 2005 oral history interview:
“…for a while I thought my first wife and I might get remarried to each other. And then, she met someone else and decided to get married to him. And so then I started thinking about who do I know? And, I remembered Anne Fitzgerald, who I had met a few years earlier on that trip to China. And so, in 1979 when my first wife told me she was going to get married to this other guy, why I started looking around and started seeing Anne, again, and we decided to get married. We got married in 1980.”
Although unrelated to Slichter and Fitzgerald’s love story, as a former language professional I would be remiss if I did not mention that Pao-kuang Kuo (third row, second from left, directly in front of Slichter) served as the interpreter for the 1979 tour of American nuclear physicists to China seen in the previous photo. At that time he was an Assistant Professor of Physics at Wayne State University, so he not only had the linguistic and cultural skills but also the subject matter expertise that would be needed for such a role. Knowing firsthand how incredibly exhausting that kind of interpreting work can be (there’s a reason professional conference interpreters work with partners and switch every 20 minutes), I think we all owe him a debt of gratitude for his intense mental labor in furthering scientific collaboration.
A University of Illinois delegation in the People’s Republic of China. The group visited the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Fudan University. This was supposedly the first formal exchange between the Academy and a foreign university; a formal agreement was signed April 5, 1984. L-R: Chih-Tang Sah, unidentified, Edwin Goldwasser, Jiri Jonas, unidentified, Stanley O. Ikenberry, unidentified, Shau-Jin Chang, unidentified, Ralph Simmons, unidentified, Mrs. Edwin L. Goldwasser (Eliza), and James P. Wolfe. Credit: Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Sah Chih-Tang D1
Although delegations of Chinese and American scientists had been traveling back and forth between the two countries for a few years, it was not until at least 1984 that formal exchange agreements were signed between American and Chinese universities. Here we see the result of one of those first agreements, with a delegation from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, including the University’s President Stanley O. Ikenberry, arriving in China. While not pictured here, it is highly likely that the delegation went on to meet the first female president of a major Chinese university, physicist and President of Fudan University Xie Xide, who also founded the Center for American Studies there and was a pioneer in advancing international scientific cooperation in China. As President of Fudan and signer of the agreement along with Ikenberry, she would have played an active role in making this collaboration happen.
It should be noted that the original description of this photo is somewhat misleading. There were actually two agreements signed by the University of Illinois: one with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and a separate one with Fudan University in Shanghai. Thanks to the help of the friendly archivists at the University of Illinois Archives I was able to obtain scanned copies of the agreements and discovered that the one with CAS was signed April 4, 1984, while the one with Fudan University was signed April 10.
The agreement with CAS is a broad memorandum of understanding which does not list specific obligations for either party, but rather serves as an agreement that the two institutions will work towards further cooperation in the fields of “physical and chemical sciences, life sciences, computer science, engineering, research and development management, management sciences, science and technology policy, and other such subfields and disciplines of science and engineering, or related activities, as are mutually agreed.” Cooperation under the memorandum included such things as the exchange of scholars and students, exchange of information, equipment, and samples, joint research and project planning, and “other forms of cooperation as are mutually agreed.”
The Fudan agreement, on the other hand, is a much more specific document relating only to the exchange of students between the two institutions, noting that each university will send up to three students to the other per year, and that each host university will provide accommodations, stipends, health care, etc. to each student.
While this was likely the first agreement (or rather, pair of agreements), such cooperative agreements quickly proliferated. By 1987, we can see over a hundred such partnerships between American and Chinese institutions listed in the CSCPRC’s “Guide to Academic Life and Work in the PRC.”
L-R: unidentified man and Chen-Ning Yang standing outdoors at the Old Beijing Observatory. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection. Yang Chen Ning C18
Here we have one of our many photos of renowned theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Chen-Ning Yang, along with a friendly-looking man I unfortunately failed to identify (if you know who he is, send us a holler at [email protected]!). While Yang spent most of his professional career in the United States, this photo was likely taken around 1971 shortly after he started revisiting China almost yearly. He would eventually relocate there after his retirement from Stony Brook University in 1999 to become a professor at the Center of Advanced Study at Tsinghua University.
Behind them at the Beijing Ancient Observatory we see an armillary sphere, a device historically used to model the visible cosmos. The observatory was built during the Ming dynasty in 1442 and was in continuous use until 1927. During the Kangxi (1662-1772) and Qianlong (1736-1796) periods of the Qing dynasty, several new devices brought by European Jesuits were added to the observatory, making it an early example of East-West scientific exchange and collaboration.
Chinese Physicists at the Conference of Elementary Particles, Cambridge [England], 1946. Appearing in photograph [L-R] are: Wu Da-You, Qian San-Qiang, He Ze-Hui, Zhou Pei-Yuan, Peng Huang-Wu, Hu Ning, Mei Zhang-Yao, and Hu Ji-Min. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Conference on Elementary Particles E1
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that the students and young professionals in this photo represent a major part of what would become the Chinese scientific establishment of the 20th century. To begin with, He Ze-Hui (third from left) was not just the only woman present in this group but also the only one among them to present at the conference, sharing her four-page paper “Elastic collisions between positrons and electrons and annihilation of positrons” under the name Ho Zah-wei (Pinyin was not yet in widespread use). She would later go on to be a leading figure in the development of China’s nuclear capabilities and lead the Neutron Physics Research Office, a Chinese parallel to the Atomic Energy Institute.
It was not just He Ze-Hui who would go on to do great things among those in this picture, however. Many of them are mentioned in the report of the 1979 delegation discussed in the first photo, where we discover where their careers took them over 30 years later. Hu Ji-Min would go on to become the first Chairman of the Department of Technical Physics at Peking University in 1958; Hu Ning would go on to become the Director of the Institute of High Energy Physics and Deputy Director at the Institute of Theoretical Physics; Zhou Pei-Yuan went on to become the President of Peking University; and Qian San-Qiang went on to become the Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, President of Zhejiang University, and was known widely as the “Father of the Chinese Atomic Bomb.”
In another case of scientific romance, this picture was taken the same year that He Ze-Hui and Qian San-Qiang were married in Paris. They eventually had three children, so one might say they formed the ultimate nuclear family.
Portrait of Ming-Chen Wang, First female Chinese physicist working in statistical mechanics. Credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Wang Ming-Chen A1
For our last photo, we have not only the first female Chinese physicist to work in statistical mechanics but also the first female professor at the prestigious Tsinghua University, Ming-Chen Wang. Scientific excellence seems to have run in her family; many of her siblings became accomplished scientists, and she is a cousin of the aforementioned He Ze-Hui. This particular photo was taken circa 1926 in Shanghai, possibly before she entered Jinling Women’s College in Nanjing that fall as an undergraduate student.
According to her autobiography (in Chinese), she received her Master’s degree in physics from Yanjing University in Beijing in 1932, after which she returned to Jinling Women’s College to teach until she had to flee to Wuhan in 1937 on the eve of the Japanese invasion of Nanjing. The following year Wang managed to travel to the United States to study for her PhD in physics at University of Michigan, where she published several papers with Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck, graduating in 1942. During WWII she worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. After the war she returned to China to teach at Yunnan University, but ended up coming back to America to teach at University of Notre Dame due to the Chinese Civil War. She eventually returned to China for the final time in 1955 and settled as the first female professor at Tsinghua University. Like many intellectuals at the time, she was sadly imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution from 1968 to 1973, after which she continued to teach at Tsinghua for another three years before her retirement in 1976.
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