Wenbin Zhou
Premium memorialLovingly known as “Zhou Lao”
21 August 1932 — 4 April 2021 · aged 88
Tsinghua hydraulics professor who taught rivers to behave and students to think
Beijing, China Born in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province Resting at Fushouyuan Cemetery, BeijingAbout Wenbin
Zhou Wenbin left this world on the morning of Qingming, the day Chinese families sweep their ancestors' tombs, and his family took it as a sign that he had simply gone to join the conversation. Born in Suzhou in 1932, into a household of silk merchants who expected him to inherit the shop, he preferred canals to ledgers and spent his boyhood floating paper boats down the Pingjiang River and timing how fast they arrived.
In 1950 he entered Tsinghua University to study hydraulic engineering, and he never really left. Over forty-three years in the Department of Hydraulic Engineering he taught open-channel flow, built scale models of Yellow River floodplains in the laboratory's long concrete basin, and advised engineers on irrigation and reservoir projects across northern China. The Cultural Revolution sent him to a May Seventh Cadre School in Jiangxi for three years to farm and dig ditches; he never spoke bitterly of it, remarking only that the ditches there were very well designed. Back at Tsinghua he supervised more than a hundred graduate students, many now senior engineers, and answered every letter with a fountain pen.
At home in a Tsinghua faculty apartment he drank Longjing tea from a chipped enamel mug, practised tai chi on the lawn at six every morning, and on winter afternoons taught his grandson xiangqi, losing on purpose, badly. He and his wife, Liu Shuqin, a paediatrician at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, were married for fifty-eight years. He died quietly on 4 April 2021, aged eighty-eight. He is survived by Shuqin, his daughter Zhou Lan, his son Zhou Yang and two grandchildren, and by a laboratory basin that still holds, in faded pencil, the date of every experiment he ran.
“A river is never wrong. Only our model of it is.”
- Place of birth
- Suzhou, Jiangsu Province
- Resting place
- Fushouyuan Cemetery, Beijing
- Passed away
- 4 April 2021, Beijing
Farewell Ceremony
Wednesday, 7 April 2021 at 10:00 UTC
Add to calendarLife journey
B.Eng. in Hydraulic Engineering
Tsinghua University1950 – 1954 · Beijing
Top of his class in fluid mechanics and in patience.
Lecturer to Professor, Department of Hydraulic Engineering
Tsinghua University1954 – 1997 · Beijing
Forty-three years of teaching open-channel flow and building river models.
Married Liu Shuqin
1963 · Beijing
A marriage of fifty-eight years.
May Seventh Cadre School
1969 – 1972 · Jiangxi Province
Farmed and dug ditches, and kept his lecture notes in his head.
Consultant, Yellow River floodplain model studies
Yellow River Conservancy Commission1978 – 1995 · Zhengzhou
Advised on river training and reservoir operation.
Outstanding Teacher Award
Tsinghua University1991 · Beijing
For forty years of devoted teaching and mentoring.
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Family & connections
Wenbin is survived by
- Liu Shuqin· Spouse
- Zhou Lan· Daughter
- Zhou Yang· Son
- 2 grandchildren· Grandchildren
Tributes & memories
5 people have shared a memory of Wenbin.
Knew Wenbin? Share a memory with the family and everyone who loved them.
Sign in to write a tribute- ZJ
Niece in Suzhou
Uncle visited every spring and walked the canals with us, always counting the bridges. He told me once that his paper boats on the Pingjiang River never sank. This Qingming we will float a paper boat for him there.
- DH
Student, class of 1986, now at the University of Illinois
He wrote my recommendation letter by hand in 1987 and added one line at the bottom: 'He asks good questions.' It was the nicest compliment of my life. I carried that sentence across the Pacific, and have tried to deserve it for thirty-four years.
- CX
Colleague in the Department of Hydraulic Engineering
He kept a flask of Longjing in the lab for anyone who stayed past midnight. During model runs he would stand by the basin for hours, silent, hands behind his back, like a man listening to music. We learned to be quiet when he was.
- WJ
Former PhD student, now a chief engineer
Professor Zhou made me redo my river model four times. After the fifth he poured me tea and said, 'Now it is yours.' Thirty years later I tell my own students the same thing and watch them hate me and thank me, in that order.
- ZL
Neighbour in the Tsinghua faculty compound
Every morning at six I saw him doing tai chi on the lawn, slow as a river in August. Children from the compound joined him at the back. He taught half of them xiangqi and let all of them win.
