John K. Fairbank
| John K. Fairbank | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Born |
John King Fairbank May 24, 1907 Huron, South Dakota, U.S. |
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| Died | September 14, 1991 (aged 84) Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
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| Education |
Phillips Exeter Academy University of Wisconsin–Madison Harvard College (1929) Oxford University |
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| Spouse(s) | Wilma Denion Cannon | ||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 費正清 | ||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Fèi Zhèngqīng |
John King Fairbank (May 24, 1907 – September 14, 1991), was a prominent American academic and historian of China.
Fairbank was born in Huron, South Dakota in 1907. He was educated at Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard College, and Oxford University (Balliol). As an undergraduate, Charles Kingsley Webster, the distinguished British diplomatic historian then teaching at Harvard, advised him to choose a relatively undeveloped field of study, and suggested that since the Qing dynasty imperial archives were then being opened, China's foreign relations would be a prudent choice (Fairbank later confessed that he then knew nothing about the state of China itself). In 1929, when he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.
At Oxford, Fairbank began his study of the Chinese language and sought the counsel of H.B. Morse, retired from the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. On Webster's advice, he had read Morse's three-volume study of Qing dynasty foreign relations on the ship coming to England. Morse became his mentor. The ambitious young scholar decided to go to Beijing to do research in 1932.
In Beijing, he studied at Tsinghua University under the direction of the prominent historian Tsiang Tingfu who introduced him to the study of newly available diplomatic sources and the perspectives of Chinese scholarship which balanced the British approaches he saw at Oxford. Wilma Denio Cannon, a daughter of Walter Bradford Cannon, came to China to marry Fairbank and began a career of her own in Chinese art history. He and Wilma came to know to a number of Chinese intellectuals, and became especially warm friends with Liang Sicheng, the son of the distinguished Chinese reformer Liang Qichao, and his wife, Whei-yin, whom they called Phyllis.
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