Leong Pei Wan (born Leong Long Kwong, 1907–2010), a native of Yongchun, Fujian, was an educator, poet, calligrapher and public figure who lived to 103. Educated in his youth at Waseda University in Japan, he founded and served as principal of Liming Senior Middle School in Quanzhou in 1930, and later led overseas Chinese schools in Indonesia and Malaysia and the National Coastal Frontier School. From 1966 he was assigned by Liao Chengzhi to handle returned-overseas-Chinese work in Macao, where he settled long-term, chairing the Macao Returned Overseas Chinese Association and leading cultural bodies such as the Macao Chinese Language Society and the Macao Cultural Research Association; in later life he revived Liming University as its board chairman and principal. A member of the 6th, 7th and 8th National CPPCC, he received the inaugural Macao SAR Silver Lotus Medal in 2002 and the Grand Lotus Medal of Honour in 2007.
From the front of a Quanzhou classroom, to the Chinese schools of Southeast Asia, to a Macao office resettling returning émigrés — across a full century Leong Pei Wan made three things into one: teaching, poetry and calligraphy, all in service of safeguarding the roots of Chinese culture.
Leong Pei Wan (born Leong Long Kwong, 1907–2010), a native of Yongchun, Fujian, was an educator, poet, calligrapher and public figure who lived to 103. His life spanned the late Qing, the Republic, the war of resistance, the overseas-Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, and Macao before and after the Handover — one of the few figures whose weight can be summed up as a "centenarian cultural elder."