Léopold de Saussure
| Léopold de Saussure | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
May 30, 1866 Geneva, Switzerland |
| Died | July 30, 1925 (aged 59) Geneva, Switzerland |
| Citizenship | French (naturalized) |
| Nationality | French |
| Fields | Chinese astronomy |
Léopold de Saussure (30 May 1866 – 30 July 1925) was a Swiss-born French sinologist, pioneering scholar of ancient Chinese astronomy, and officer in the French navy. After a naval career which took him to Indochina, China, and Japan, he left the service and devoted the rest of his life to scholarship. He was most famous for his studies of ancient Chinese astronomy.
He was the younger brother of Ferdinand de Saussure, the pioneering linguist and semiotician, and René de Saussure, a Swiss Esperantist and mathematician.
Léopold de Saussure was born in Switzerland, just outside Geneva, in the hamlet, Creux de Genthod. His family were Protestants with roots in Lorraine, France who had come to Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1588. His father, Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, was a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist and a constant traveler and explorer who wrote treatises on the insects of Africa and had an encyclopedic range of interests.
From his early teens de Saussure set out to make a career in the navy, an undertaking which one historian called "a somewhat problematic undertaking in Switzerland." Saussure, with his father's permission, became a French citizen in order to enter the École Navale, and in 1885 went to sea as a cadet. In 1887, he successfully demanded admission to the Ecole des Langues orientales vivantes in Paris.
He spent the years 1889-1891 in Indochina, then a French colony, as well as in Japan, but mainly in China, where he served on the gunboat Aspie, which cruised the Yangtze River. de Saussure gathered not only linguistic experience, particularly in Vietnamese, but a stock of anecdotes and ideas on Asian history and writings, most of which he later abandoned, however. He took part in the French campaign in Dahomey before family concerns obliged him to resign his commission.
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