Chinese studies and European research
Born in Liaocheng, Shandong, Fu graduated in Chinese literature from Peking University in 1919. He pursued research at University College London in 1920–1923 and at Berlin University in 1923–1926. His institutional curriculum vitae records research study, rather than a doctorate, for these appointments.
Fu’s career combined scholarship with administration. He directed the Institute of History and Philology from 1928, also headed Academia Sinica’s Institute of Social Sciences in 1933–1934, and served as the academy’s secretary-general in 1940–1941.
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Evidence beyond inherited books
His 1928 founding manifesto proposed widening both evidence and research techniques. Local gazetteers, diaries, commercial accounts, archives and excavated remains all belonged within historical inquiry. Dialect surveys, phonetics and comparison across languages would similarly enlarge linguistic research.
Fu acknowledged earlier evidential scholars such as Gu Yanwu and Yan Ruoqu, while challenging inherited questions that new evidence could overturn. He envisaged libraries, collecting teams and a shared research environment enabling specialists to correct one another. The manifesto’s polemical judgments about older scholarship express his contemporary program.
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Research institutions through displacement
The institute moved from Guangzhou to Beiping, Shanghai and Nanjing. Wartime evacuation carried its staff and collections through Changsha and Kunming to Lizhuang in Sichuan, before a postwar return to Nanjing. Preserving, studying and publishing excavated objects and documents required institutional continuity.
Fu was acting president of Peking University in 1945–1946 and became an Academia Sinica academician in 1948. He assumed the presidency of National Taiwan University in January 1949 while retaining the institute directorship. He died in Taipei on 20 December 1950.