William Rockhill, The Man Who Shaped China Policy a Century Ago.

• Author: Bridges, Peter

American Diplomacy

November 1, 2021

www.americandiplomacy.org

Title: William Rockhill, The Man Who Shaped China Policy a Century Ago

Author: Peter Bridges

Text:

Linguist, author, explorer, and diplomat, William Woodville Rockhill is best known as the author of the Open Door policy toward China put forth by the United States in 1899. In between his first diplomatic assignment in China and his later role as the top U.S. diplomat there, he trekked for months across North Asia, and recorded meticulous observations of climate, geography, and local people in a book published in 1894 by the Smithsonian Institution.

In his two decades of service to the United States, Rockhill served both in Washington and as the American envoy to several major countries. He was, however, not just a diplomat. He lived a life uniquely diverse for an American of his or any day. When a boy, he moved with his widowed mother to France. In his teens he entered St. Cyr, the French military academy, where he found time to study Tibetan, the first American to do so. After St. Cyr he became an officer of the French Foreign Legion, and served in Algeria, where the French administration was taking stern measures to control the native Muslim majority.

In 1876, in his early twenties, Rockhill left the Legion, returned to America, and married his childhood sweetheart, Caroline Tyson, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and former assistant postmaster general. The couple bought a ranch in New Mexico, but soon sold it and moved five thousand miles east to Montreux, Switzerland, where Rockhill's mother lived. Throughout these moves, his interest in Asia continued and, it seems, increased. Enjoying a private income, he studied Tibetan, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Salar (a minor Turkic language of Xinjiang), and co-authored a biography of the Buddha. Assignment Peking

Decades would pass before the creation of a career American Foreign Service, but Rockhill was perhaps uniquely qualified for a diplomatic job, especially one in Asia. Although he had not yet traveled in Asia, he had studied the region and several of its languages, he was an experienced traveler, and he had connections in Washington. He applied for a diplomatic post, and in 1883 was assigned as a junior officer to the American Legation in Peking.

After several years at the legation, Rockhill asked his chief, Minister Charles Denby, for an eight-month leave of absence without pay, in order to travel through western...