Eugene Wen-chin Wu

Eugene Wen-chin Wu (吳文津 Wu Wenjun; Eugene Wu; 1922, Sichuan China – August 1, 2022, Menlo Park, California) was a China-born American China scholar, bibliographer, and librarian best known for being head of the Harvard-Yenching Library from 1965 to 1997. Wu was an English major at National Central University in wartime China, served as an interpreter between Chinese and American soldiers, and was sent to the United States to help train pilots for the Chinese air force. After earning a degree in Library Science from University of Washington, Seattle he developed the Chinese collection at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He worked toward a PhD there, but became head of the Harvard-Yenching Library, where he stayed until retirement in 1997. Wu was a key figure in organizing American Chinese and East Asian libraries.

In 1965 he succeeded Alfred Kaiming Ch'iu at the Harvard-Yenching Library, becoming only its second director.

Wu's father was an official in the Sichuan provincial police and became county magistrate of Xinjin county, near Chengdu, where Wu was born, his family's fifth child. He studied English at Central University in Chongqing, as the city was subjected to constant bombing during Second Sino-Japanese War. He volunteered to join the army, and became a translator in the Foreign Affairs Bureau. In 1945 the United States Army asked China to send 100 translators to help train American pilots. Wu became the team leader of these 50 translators. After the end of the war in 1945, he enrolled in the History department of University of Washington. When the university decided to catalogue the one or two thousand Chinese language volumes in their library, Wu became a student assistant. This task started him on his library career. He then went to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, where in 1956, he became deputy director of the Chinese Library. He and Mary Clabaugh Wright worked for several years to assemble documents and publications on the history of the Chinese Communist Party, which became known as the Chen Cheng Collection.