Master Kung: The Story of Confucius

by Carl Crow

All the world has heard of the great Chinese sage Confucius, but few know of Master Kung though the two characters are embodied in the same person. Master Kung is the sincere, lovable, entirely human scholar and gentleman who was born in the sixth century before Christ, led a blameless life, suffered more disillusionment and disappointments than usually fall to the lot of men, and died feeling that his life had been a failure.

Confucius was the creation of generations of later scholars who deified the man, interpreted his acts and sayings by methods which would justify this deification and so created an intellectual Frankenstein monster, a fleshless creature conceived and born between the covers of a textbook.

from the introduction

347 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1938

About the author

Carl Crow was a Missouri-born newspaperman, businessman, and author who managed several newspapers and then opened the first Western advertising agency in Shanghai, China. He ran the agency for 19 years, creating calendar advertisements and the so-called sexy China Girl poster. He was also founding editor of the Shanghai Evening Post.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Crow wrote 13 books; and his most popular book, 400 Million Customers (1937)won one of the early National Book Awards: the Most Original Book of 1937.

Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and made the city his home for a quarter of a century, working there as a journalist, newspaper proprietor, and groundbreaking ad-man. He also did stints as a hostage negotiator, emergency police sergeant, gentleman farmer, go-between for the American government, and propagandist. As his career progressed, so did the fortunes of Shanghai. The city transformed itself from a dull colonial backwater when Crow arrived, to the thriving and ruthless cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1930s.

Among Crow’s exploits were attending the negotiations in Peking which led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, getting a scoop on the Japanese interference in China during the First World War, negotiating the release of a group of western hostages from a mountain bandit lair, and being one of the first westerners to journey up the Burma Road during the Second World War. He met and interviewed most of the major figures of the time, including Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the Soong sisters, and Mao Zedong’s second-in-command Zhou En-lai. During the Second World War he worked for American intelligence alongside Owen Lattimore, co-ordinating US policies to support China against Japan.

Reviews

[Theresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

A biography of Confucius written in the 1930s by a white, middle-aged businessman and ad-excec from Missouri. That's not just a description of what this sounds like, it's what it actually-factually is.

I think the author meant well, but this was just.... unintentionally hilarious. When I found this, I had absolutely no idea what it was about other than just "Confucius" (thanks, title) so maybe it was funnier to me than it would (should?) have been if was expecting/hoping for something different.

[Pagehead · Rating 1 out of 5]

Worthless and old fashioned. One of the books that did not go with it's time