One of the few doctors bridging successfully the wide gap between Western and Eastern medicine throughout his long life of 94 years, Qiu Fazu was the first Asian to receive the highest German honour, the Federal Cross of Merit, in 1985. He is remembered in China and Germany as much for his personal courage as his medical achievements. And he is one of few people to have endured and resisted two terror regimes: Nazi Germany and the Cultural Revolution in China.

Qiu Fazu was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, in December 1914. He decided to study medicine because his mother had died after maltreatment of appendicitis. After his finals at the German School of Medicine in Shanghai, he went to Munich with the help of a Humboldt scholarship, graduating from the medical faculty and receiving a German MD in 1939. Despite the German racism of the time, Chinese people were not badly treated, Qiu said when later remembering his time in Germany.

During the second world war, he worked as a surgeon in a Munich hospital trying to rescue many victims of the bombing raids. He was later sent to a hospital in Bad Tölz, a spa town 50 km south of Munich, where, in 1945, he encountered 40 prisoners from Dachau concentration camp. They were members of a huge group of prisoners forced by the SS to leave the camp and go south as US troops advanced.

About 60 years later, Qiu remembered clearly that he was getting ready to operate when a nurse shouted that there were many prisoners from a concentration camp lying outside. He ran out of his room with his operation cap on, as he had already learnt what happened in the camp. More than 40 ragged prisoners were squatting down on the ground in the corner of a street. Sick and weak, they could not move any further. The SS troops standing there shouted at them and ordered them to stand up.

“I was shocked that they were not able to move any further,” Qiu recalled. He summoned up his courage and told the troops, “These prisoners have typhoid fever. Let me take them away.” The prisoners were released, and the doctors led them to the basement, saving their lives with careful nursing.

One of the German nurse students supporting him was Loni, who became his wife soon after the war was over. In 1946 she accompanied her husband, who was homesick for China, first to Shanghai and later to Wuhan. The couple remained devoted to each other and had three children.

Back in China, Qiu introduced modern surgical techniques, and with his experience from Germany helped in setting up medical schools. Promoting the development of abdominal and general surgery, he is considered a surgical pioneer and the main founder of organ transplantation surgery in China. In the 1970s he began the earliest research programme on liver transplantation—from experimental study to clinical treatment—founding the first institute of organ transplantation in China.

He is also well known for his achievements as a teacher. He wrote Surgery, a nationwide standard textbook for Chinese medical students. In 1948 he founded and was the chief editor of the first popular science journal, Popular Medicine.

In 1978 he became deputy president of Wuhan Medical Institute and director of the Organ Transplantation Research Institute. In 1981 he was appointed president of Wuhan Medical Institute. He never lost contact with his second home country and helped hundreds of German medical students to visit and benefit from the experience of training in Wuhan’s hospitals. His support of the exchange between Tongji and Heidelberg University earned him an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1982.

However, life in China was very difficult at times, especially in the 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution tried to eradicate privileges and class differences. Qiu had to clean toilets—“and this was the only time they were really clean,” he used to joke. The family had to grow its own food, and he was sent into faraway rural areas to provide medical care for peasants.

When life and the political climate improved again, the couple continued their modest life, with Qiu still practising and teaching when needed.

He leaves his wife, Loni, and three children.