He was awarded a monthly stipend of two taels of silver, but was forced to transfer to a Resident Guest School because the local Shandong students taunted him for his southern accent and resented the advantage of his head start in Confucian learning.

[6] After graduating in 1916, Hung's knowledge of English and German gave him the choice of several jobs in government agencies dealing with foreigners, but a wealthy American wrote from St. Louis offering to pay for his study in the United States.

The Fuzhou Methodist Bishop James Bashford recommended Hung enroll at the Ohio Wesleyan University, where he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1917.

[7] In 1919, Hung, through their common work with the Chinese Students' Association and the Intercollegiate YMCA, met Rhoda Kong, who had left China at an early age and grown up in Hawaii.

[8] From 1921 to 1922, Hung served as Chinese Secretary for the Board of Foreign Missions of Methodist Episcopal Church giving more than one hundred lectures throughout the United States.

Hung joined Yenching in 1922 as a part-time lecturer in history, also serving as the Chinese pastor in a Methodist mission for students from Fujian in Peking.

He announced his ambition to raise Yenching's academic quality and to "make it the peer of Peita" (Peking University).

[11] In the end, Harvard agreed to make Yenching their partner, but not before Hung helped to overcome a possible stumbling block.

In 1925, a Yenching student named Wang came to Hung's campus residence late at night to report a matter of patriotic concern.

[12] Knowing Warner was a key negotiator for Harvard and that he was in secret talks with Peking University, Hung instructed Wang to act as if nothing had happened, but also arranged with a colleague in the Ministry of Education to instruct every local official along the route that Warner was to be warmly welcomed, but never left alone at any historic site.

[13] By 1927 Hung felt he could confidently claim that Yenching no longer had to "share the disgrace of inferior Chinese courses, a charge so frequently made against missionary education institutions.

He suspected that even President Stuart felt his discipline alienated strong nationalist or communist students, perhaps egged on by the older teachers of Chinese.

[15] In 1928, as part of the new Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University invited Hung to Cambridge, where he offered the course "The Far East Since 1793".

An even more ambitious project was the preface to the concordance for the Spring and Autumn Annals, a work which Confucius had been credited with editing centuries after its composition.

Hung finished work on the volume while Japanese war planes dropped their bombs only a few hundred yards from the Yenching campus.

[19] After the Japanese Army captured Peking in July 1937, Hung continued his sinological research under increasingly difficult circumstances.

Hung and his colleagues secretly worked at the Sino-French University (中法大學, l'Université Franco-Chinoise) to publish several further volumes in the index series.

[9] When war with the United States was declared in December 1941, the Japanese army arrested twelve Yenching University professors, including Hung.

That summer, he decided to move back to the Harvard–Yenching Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts and, with the outbreak of the Korean War, Hung completely abandoned the idea of returning to China.

Hung and his wife bought a house close by the university, and rented out rooms and collected minimal social benefits.