Shiu-Ying Hu

Shiu-Ying Hu, BBS (22 February 1910 – 22 May 2012) was a Chinese botanist. She was an expert in the plant genera of Ilex (Aquifoliaceae), Hemerocallis (Amaryllidaceae), and Panax (Araliaceae). She studied the families Orchidaceae, Compositae, and Malvaceae, and Chinese medicinal herbs and food plants. She was given the nickname "Holly Hu" by her colleagues for her extensive work with holly plants.

Hu was born in 1910 to a farm family in a Chinese village near the city of Xuzhou in Jiangsu province. She received her B.Sc. in Biology from Ginling Women’s College (now part of Nanjing Normal University) and M.Sc. in Biology from Lingnan University (now part of Sun Yat-sen University). In 1946 Hu traveled to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in Botany at Radcliffe College. Her supervisor was Elmer Drew Merrill. In 1949 she became the first Chinese woman to receive a doctoral degree in Botany from Harvard University.

After earning her Ph.D., Hu worked as a research botanist at the Arnold Arboretum. In 1968 she took the post of Senior Lecturer in the Department of Biology at CUHK, which Hu held until her retirement in 1975. She continued to carry out research during her retirement both at the CUHK Herbarium and the Harvard University Herbaria. Over the course of her career she produced over 160 academic treatises, collected over 30,000 specimens, and published the 800-page encyclopedia Food Plants of China.

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