Cambridge, Oxford and the Middle Kingdom
by Alexander McKinnon, Cambridge historian
In the beginning there were the two universities and little was known of the busy activities unfolding in the East. Oxford was founded in the confused days of the overlapping Song, Liao and Jin dynasties. Cambridge takes its date of foundation from just three years after the extended touring of a Mr Genghis Khan (or Tai Zu in Chinese) had established the Yuan dynasty. Both universities had their first colleges by the time Marco Polo had completed his travels in Cathay and one could imagine that the merits of the Genoan’s bestesller informed refectory gossip amongst Oxbridge’s scholar-monks at the time.
This was perhaps the first indirect contact between the Ancient Universities and the Middle Kingdom, starting a relationship that has often reflected the tumultuous nature of Sino-British (and European) relations, but which has also only deepened over the centuries.
The relationship has been fuelled by a succession of adventurous graduates heading east and by a flow of Chinese students to the dreaming spires and hallowed cloisters of Oxford and Cambridge. This never more so than over the last twenty years and today Oxford and Cambridge are leading European centres of Chinese studies and Sinology and many of the world’s leading China scholars, including Jonathan Spence, first practised their tones as a begowned Cantabridgean or Oxonion. Since the start of China’s reform and opening, Oxford and Cambridge have both received senior Chinese scholars, sent abroad by their government to first study and then return to assist with China’s development.
The first British ambassador to China may have been Dublin educated but since then relations between Britain and China have been dominated by Oxford and Cambridge men and women. The nineteenth century in particular saw a dramatic, though indirect, increase in Sino-Oxbridge contact, with the strong-willed foreign policy of the British Empire bringing more of her diplomats, merchants and soldiers into contact with China, though not always acting in historically the best light.
British and Commonwealth scholars also began to find ways of working in the land they had studied. Amongst them Sir Reginald Johnston, a Magdalen man, was the only foreigner ever to be allowed into the inner sanctum of the Qing court as tutor to the last emperor, Xuangtong, later to be known as Pu Yi.
Indeed over the twentieth century as scholars began to play a more significant role than soldiers in the West’s relations with China, Oxbridge graduates continued to make their mark. Noted sinologist Sir Cecil Clementi was another Magdalen man, who acted as governor of Hong Kong whilst Johnston himself would go on to be governor of Weihaiwei (modern Weihai in Shandong). In an increasing spirit of imperial retrenchment, Johnston would hand back Weihaiwei to Chinese administration on ‘Rendition Day’, 1 October 1930 and it thus became possibly the first territory to be lost by the British since the American War of Independence.
China also provided the other book-end to Britain’s imperial disengagement when in 1997 a Cambridge man, the Prince of Wales, and an Oxford man, Chris Patten, returned Hong Kong to the PRC.
Little remains of records relating to a Peking or a China Oxbridge Society, though over the last four or five years several valiant attempts have been made at creating a more orderly and regular forum for graduates and students to congregate in China. However, natural diffidence and a belief in the values of the spirited amateur, that have for centuries marked the Oxbridge graduate from his peers, have also hitherto prevented the great universities from mimicking the success of the alumni of American tertiary institutions with their much-loved professionalisation of social discourse.
Technology has finally removed many excuses for lassitude on this front, and with an increasing number of recent graduates seeking to pursue professional careers on the Mainland and both universities now running courses in association with Chinese universities, it was deemed suitable to once again attempt to regularly facilitate the gathering of Chinese and foreign Oxbridge graduates in China.
