The Former Residence of Wang Guowei
Wang Guowei (1877-1927), also known as Jing'an and Baiyu, styled Guantang and Shuiguan, and was a a Ci poet and a scholar. He was born in Haining, Zhejiang.

At the age of 16, he entered Hangzhou Zhongwen College. He was known as one of the four talents from Haining. A year later he passed the imperial examination at the county level. In 1898, he went to Shanghai where he became a clerk and proofreader of Current Affairs and was influenced by the New Learning and the Western Learning. In 1901, with the financial support of Lou Zhenyu, he went to study in Tokyo Physics School in Japan. In the summer of the next year, he returned to China because of illness. Then he taught himself Western philosophy, including works by Kant and Schopenhuaer, and taught as instructor in Tongzhou Normal College and Suzhou Normal College. In 1906, he went to Beijing, devoting himself to the studies on Ci of the Song Dynasty and the Verse Popular in the Yuan Dynasty. Since 1907, he held many scholastic posts. When the 1911 Revolution began, he went to Japan with Lou Zhenyu to stay away from the revolution, devoted to the studies of inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty (16th-11th Century BC), inscriptions on the bronze objects and inscriptions on bamboo slips of the Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD). In 1916, he returned to China and became editor of the journal Academic Library. In 1922, he was engaged as correspondent supervisor. In 1925, he became professor of the College of Literature in Qinghua University. In 1927, he committed suicide by throwing himself into the Kunmin Lake in the Summer Palace of Beijing.

He was an outstanding scholar in the history of modern China, making great contributions to the studies of history. In literary studies, he was one of the scholars in Chinese history who took in Western philosophy and aesthetics and applied the Western research methods earlier than most of other scholars. He broke new grounds in the studies of Chinese literature. His important works include Schopenhuaer's Theories on Philosophy and Education, On Ci Poetry, Critical Annotations on A Dream of Red Mansions and many others, amounting to 62 kinds of works.