Sun Peiliang (1910.12.8-1987.11.4) Born in Beijing, ancestral home in Gutan Village, Wuqiang County, Hebei.

Due to poverty, Sun Peiliang was often out of school in his childhood. In 1925, he was admitted to the publicly-funded Peiping Municipal Normal School. After graduation, he made a living by submitting articles to the “Beichen Xueyuan”.

In 1933, he was admitted to the China Dictionary Compilation Office, but due to insufficient academic qualifications, he worked for half pay for four years.

In 1937, he was introduced to teach in the Art Education Department of the private North China University, but soon left Peiping due to the “July 7 Incident”. After traveling through Shandong, Nanjing, and other places to Wuhan, he joined the Kuomintang 78th Army Officer Training Corps. Less than a month later, the training corps was disbanded. Later, he accidentally met his old teacher Zhang Xuemen and went to Guilin together to prepare for the Guangxi Provincial Kindergarten Normal School, but failed.

In August 1938, he went to Guangdong to teach with Zhou Dafu, a former colleague at the China Dictionary Compilation Office.

In March 1939, he arrived in Chongqing and entered the National Institute for Compilation and Translation. He was later fired due to a disagreement with the director Liang Shiqiu.

In September 1944, he taught Chinese at the Chongqing Municipal Normal School and was dismissed for participating in student protests.

At the end of 1945, he was invited by Wei Jiangong to Taiwan to serve as a member of the Taiwan National Language Committee. In the autumn of that year, he and Wang Shi’an took over the Tainan College of Engineering together, and was later transferred to the Taiwan Provincial Institute for Compilation and Translation. In 1947, the Institute for Compilation and Translation was closed due to the political stance of the director Xu Shoushang. Sun Peiliang lost his job and later returned to the mainland.

At the end of 1947, he taught Western History at Lanzhou University.

In the spring of 1949, he taught at the National Women’s Normal College. In 1951, the school merged with the Sichuan Provincial College of Education to form the Southwest Normal College, and he served as the director of the Department of History and Geography.

Sun Peiliang later became a famous domestic expert on Iranian history.

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Sun Peiliang