Cheng Hong (front R), wife of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, visits Addis Ababa University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, May 5, 2014. (Photo/Xinhua)

Devoted scholar

After four years as an "iron girl", Cheng returned to the city. She went to Peking University for English studies, where she met her husband.

Shortly after their marriage, Cheng took a teaching post at CUEB. She has taught in the foreign languages department for more than 30 years. She was responsible for a research project on "natural literature and eco-criticism".

The professor developed her interest in American and British literature on nature and ecology when she was a visiting scholar at Brown University in the United States, an experience she wrote about in her book Tranquility Is Beyond Price, published in 2009.

"The inner landscape of an individual is nourished by natural scenery," she wrote in the preface.

Cheng is the first person to have translated four masterpieces of Western nature writing to China, including Wake-Robin, The Singing Wilderness, The Outermost House and Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.

"Judging from the editors' viewpoint, professor Cheng is the kind of writer that editors would call 'the best'," says Li Xuejun, veteran editor with SDX Joint Publishing, who has been cooperating with Cheng since 1999.