BIOGRAPHIES

CASE 4:  China and International Law in the 19th Century

  Lord Elgin

Born James Bruce, Lord Elgin (1811–63) was the Eighth Earl of Elgin and Twelfth Earl of Kincardine, the son of the famous Elgin, Thomas Bruce (1766–1841) who had removed the Greek Marbles, allegedly with the permission of the Turkish authorities, and shipped them to England during the early nineteenth century. James Bruce himself had served as the colonial Governor General of Jamaica (1842–46) and that of Canada (1846–54) before arriving in East Asia to become the Queen’s High Commissioner and Plenipotentiary of China and Japan in 1856.
 

Thomas Wade

Thomas Wade was a key player in the drafting of the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, as well as the Treaty of Yantai with Li Hongzhang in 1876. After retiring from foreign service, he was invited to fill the first endowed chair of Chinese at Cambridge University and is now remembered as the sinologist who designed and promoted the Wade-Giles’s romanization system, which now has been replaced by the pinyin system.