Gu Hongming was born in Penang, British Malaya (present day Malaysia), the second son of a Chinese rubber plantation superintendent, whose ancestral hometown was Tong'an, Fujian province, China,[1] and his Portuguese wife.

Leo Tolstoy, whom he had befriended, and Gu were both opposed to the Hundred Days' Reform, which was led by prominent reformist intellectuals of the time, including Kang Youwei.

He served in the Imperial Foreign Ministry from 1908 to 1910, then as the president of the Nanyang Public School, the forerunner of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

An advocate of monarchy and Confucian values, preserving his queue even after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, Gu became a kind of cultural curiosity late in his life.

He was fluent in English, Chinese, Hokkien, German, Russian and French, and understood Italian, Ancient Greek, Latin, Japanese and Malay.