So from 1955, I abandoned economics and started studying writing systems.' Everybody urged me to change professions, so I did. 'But they said, it's a new job, everybody is an amateur.

'I said I was an amateur, a layman, I couldn't do the job,' he says, laughing. Originally, he intended to teach economics in Shanghai, but he was called to head a committee to reform the Chinese language. Zhou decided to return to China after the 1949 revolution to build the country. As a young man, he moved to the United States and worked as a Wall Street banker - during which time he even befriended Albert Einstein, although Zhou says their conversations are now lost in the mists of time. John's in Shanghai, studying economics with a minor in linguistics. Zhou was educated at China's first Western-style university, St. He laughs cheerfully as he reminisces, despite his complaints that 'after 100, the memory starts to fail a bit.' He's frail but chipper, as he receives guests in his book-lined study. That someone from that era is alive - and blogging as the ' Centenarian Scholar' - seems unbelievable.īut despite his age, Zhou still lives in a modest third-floor walk-up.

When Zhou was born in 1906, Chinese men still wore their hair in a long pigtail, the Qing dynasty still ruled China, and Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House. Zhou (shown here in New York in 1947) worked on Wall Street as a banker but returned to China in 1949 after the Communist Revolution.

Chinese air force linguist locations