People visit the ongoing show, The Calligraphic Art of Yan Fu, at the Palace Museum in Beijing. The exhibition features Yan's lesser-known attributes of contemporary Chinese history. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

Yan Fu is remembered as a pioneering scholar and translator, who introduced Western ideas to China. A new exhibition focuses on his lesser-known attributes. Wang Kaihao reports.

It's no exaggeration to say his biography is a reflection of China's painstaking struggle to modernize in an age of turmoil.

Yan Fu (1854-1921), a native of eastern Fujian province, is remembered by many Chinese as a pioneering scholar and translator who advocated for social reforms and introduced Western ideas to China in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

But a new exhibition in the Palace Museum in Beijing, also known as the Forbidden City, showcases more facets of this key figure in recent Chinese history.