A fact from Tsien Tsuen-hsuin appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 5 May 2015 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, who recently died at age 105, risked his life to ship rare books from China to the United States, out of the reach of the Japanese Army?
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I have no problem with the date of 1 December, 1909, but just for the record, James Cheng's article, who was a student of Tsien's and presumably checked by Tsien, gives the date of 11 January 1910! [1]ch (talk) 19:19, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In that case, I think we should use Cheng's date. The birth dates of early 20th-century Chinese people are always a headache to reconcile (there was an edit war on Run Run Shaw), but LCCN and most sources on WorldCat use 1910 as his birth year, so presumably Cheng's date is more widely accepted. -Zanhe (talk) 19:26, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I believe the discrepancy is not from any direct numerical error of the authors, it's because the 12/1 date is his lunar calendar birthdate: 腊月初一 of 1909 corresponds to 11 January 1910. White Whirlwind 咨 20:19, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, that makes sense. I was mislead by the Chinanews article into believing his Chinese-calendar birthdate was 10-11. It appears that the 10-11 date is actually a misprint of 01-11. -Zanhe (talk) 22:34, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Gerhardvalentin: I also read the NYT obituary and originally used Dec. 1 in the article. But as White whirlwind convincingly argued above, Dec. 1 1909 is most likely the Chinese calendar date, which corresponds to 11 January 1910 of Gregorian calendar, which is the date used by James Cheng, a scholar who was a student of Tsien's. This is a common problem with Western media reporting of Chinese birthdates. -Zanhe (talk) 18:58, 22 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For any interested editors, here is the response I received from the NY Times editor regarding this issue:
Margalit Fox explains: because of the differences between the Chinese (lunar) calendar and ours, some sources give Tsien's birth date as January 1910, others as December 1909. When I was reporting the piece, I asked Wen Huang, the University of Chicago publicist, about the discrepancy, which I'd noticed in the clips. He had noted it, too, and had conferred with Tsien's family when he was writing the university's obit. They all determined that since Tsien, a naturalized U.S. citizen, chose to use the date December 1, 1909, in his passport, then that was the date to go with. Indeed, the university used this date in its own obit of Tsien, and Mr. Huang confirmed that it was completely safe for us to do likewise.
This strikes me as very strange reasoning: their use of "December" to refer to the 12th lunar month is very misleading in this context, and I would never have chosen to do so. I think our use of "11 January 1910" is much more accurate and preferable. White Whirlwind 咨 16:47, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
