Jin Kemu

Jin Kemu (1912–2000), courtesy name Zhimo and pen name Xinzhu, was a Chinese Sanskrit scholar, translator and essayist. His ancestral home was Shouxian, Anhui, and he was born in Jiangxi. Largely self-taught, he mastered Sanskrit, Pali, Hindi and several other languages. In 1941 he went to India to study, and from 1948 he taught in the Department of Oriental Languages at Peking University, where he was known, together with Ji Xianlin and others, as one of the "Four Elders of Yanyuan". His works include A History of Sanskrit Literature and Collected Essays on Indian Culture, and his translations include the Mahabharata and The Cloud Messenger. Five of his works are held here, covering Oriental culture, old learning and new knowledge, popular astronomy and the study of the eight-legged essay; they span the humanities and popular science and fall under examination, classics, popular science and social sciences. His writing combines a scholar's textual care with an essayist's clarity, making complex subjects accessible to general readers.