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Holcombe graduated from Union College, where he was selected to Phi Beta Kappa. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister, he performed missionary work in China. In 1884, S. Wells Williams, the distinguished missionary who had become secretary to the American legation in Beijing, asked Holcombe to be his replacement. As a diplomat, he filled various posts in US diplomatic service in China, helping in the negotiations of two treaties between the United States and China. He was the author of The Real Chinaman (1895) and The Real Chinese Question (1900), which attempted to expose myths concerning China, Chinese culture, and the issue of Chinese immigration to the United States. In September, 1906, he published "The Missionary Enterprise," in The Atlantic Monthy, a defense from the accusations following the Boxer Uprising.
NOTES1.^ "Missionaries of Southwestern Iowa"
2.^ Missionary Enterprise in China by Chester Holcombe; September 1906, 'ATLANTIC MAGAZINE'
Chester Holcombe Jr. was born on 16 October 1844 at Winfield, Herkimer Co., NY.1 He was the son of Chester Holcombe and Lucy Tompkins. Chester Holcombe Jr. married Olive Kate Sage. Chester Holcombe Jr. died on 25 April 1912 at Rochester, Monroe Co., NY, at age 67.1
Chester, missionary and diplomat to China, was born in Winfield, New York, the son of the Reverend Chester Holcombe, a Presbyterian minister, and Lucy Thompkins. Holcombe's mother, who had intended to be a missionary herself prior to Chester's birth, passed on that intention to her son. Following graduation from Union College in 1861, Holcombe entered the teaching profession. He taught for a number of years at both the high school level and the normal school level in Troy, New York; Hartford and Norwich, Connecticut; and Brooklyn, New York. During the 1860s he also began to study theology and in 1867 was licensed by the Presbytery of Lyons, New York, to begin preaching. In 1868, the same year he was ordained, he began work in Georgia as a missionary for the American Sunday School Union. This first experience as a missionary turned out to be of short duration, for in 1869 Holcombe, accompanied by his wife, Olive Kate Sage, and his brother Gilbert Holcombe, departed for China as a missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
Holcombe's arrival in Peking (Beijing) in the spring of 1869 came on the heels of the 1868 Burlingame Treaty between China and the United States, a treaty that led to even greater U.S.
commercial and missionary activity in China. Holcombe quickly understood that effectiveness as a missionary was tied to language skills, and he threw himself into the study of Chinese. While helping to run a missionary school for boys in Peking, Holcombe developed sufficent language abilities to begin producing works in Chinese, including an account of the life of Christ published in 1875. Yet, like other missionaries serving in East Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century--such as Samuel Wells Williams and Edward Thomas Williams in China and Horace N. Allen in Korea--Holcombe found himself being drawn into the world of diplomacy. As early as 1871 he had begun serving as an interpreter for the American legation in Peking. Five years later, when Samuel Wells Williams, who had been something of a mentor to Holcombe, stepped down as secretary of the U.S. legation, Holcombe tendered his resignation with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and took over as Williams's replacement. He held the position of secretary of the legation for the next nine years.
Holcombe exercised considerable influence at the legation, perhaps partly because of his own language skills but also because of the frequent turnover in personnel. From 1867 to 1882 there were eleven different U.S. ministers or charges d'affaires in China, and Holcombe himself served as charge d'affaires on three separate occasions. Working under Ministers George F. Seward (1876-1880), James B. Angell (1880-1881), and John Russell Young (1882-1885), Holcombe had the opportunity to participate in events that helped to shape the course of late nineteenth-century American-East Asian relations.
The 1868 Burlingame Treaty, among other things, had legalized Chinese immigration to the United States. As the influx of Chinese immigrants began to swell in the 1870s, an American backlash, especially within the western states and territories, began to arise. By 1880 the U.S. government was under considerable pressure to limit Chinese immigration to the United States. That same year a three-member commission led by Angell entered into talks with Chinese representatives to adjust the terms of the Burlingame Treaty. Holcombe assisted in producing a compromise draft that became the basis for the 1880 Sino-American Treaty. While this treaty did not completely prohibit Chinese immigration to the United States, it did give the American government the exclusive right to limit the immigration of Chinese laborers and thus set the stage for the harsher and more controversial exclusion acts that were soon to follow. Holcombe, like Angell, was a moderate on the immigration issue and in the 1890s became an outspoken critic of efforts to prohibit all Chinese immigration to the United States.
As the controversy over immigration began to strain Sino-American relations, another important issue demanded Holcombe's attention--the opening of Korea. The United States had first attempted to sign a commercial treaty with Korea in 1871, but that expedition had ended in complete failure and considerable loss of life for the Koreans. By 1880 the United States was ready to try again and dispatched Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt to East Asia. Upon receiving the news that China might be willing to offer its good offices on behalf of the Korean government, Shufeldt traveled to Tientsin and entered into negotiations with the powerful Chinese official, Li Hung-chang. Holcombe not only served as a translator for these talks but also played a key role in resolving the most difficult aspect of the treaty--Korea's sovereignty. Li, who hoped to use the treaty as a way of blocking growing Japanese influence in the peninsula, insisted that the treaty include a clause stating that Korea was a dependent state of the Chinese empire. Shufeldt, on the other hand, refused to consider the inclusion of such a clause. The diplomatic deadlock was finally broken when both parties agreed that a separate letter declaring Korea's dependence on China would be written by the king of Korea and sent to the president of the United States. Negotiations were then quickly completed in the spring of 1882, and the treaty was officially signed in Korea on 22 May of that year. Although Holcombe served as Shufeldt's chief assistant during these talks and thus deserves much of the credit for their success, the issue of Korean independence continued to haunt Sino-American relations for the next two decades.
With the 1884 election of Grover Cleveland to the presidency of the United States, the Democratic party took control of the Department of State for the first time in twenty-four years.
Democrat Charles Denby replaced Republican Young as minister to China, and Holcombe stepped down as secretary of the legation.
Holcombe himself had hoped one day to become the U.S. minister to China and, in fact, was selected for the position in 1889, only to have his nomination rejected because of his missionary background by the Chinese government at the suggestion of Li.
Holcombe spent the remainder of his years as an occasional adviser on Chinese affairs, as a dealer in Chinese curios, and as a lecturer on Chinese society and culture. In the mid-1890s he attempted to negotiate a large international loan on behalf of the Chinese government, but his plans fell through. He wrote a number of popular, if relatively unimportant, books on China, including The Practical Effect of Confucianism upon the Chinese Nation (1882), The Real Chinaman (1895), and The Real Chinese Question (1899), later revised as China's Past and Future (1904). Holcombe's first wife died during their years in China; in 1906 he married Alice Reeves. By the time of his own death, the missionary turned diplomat that Holcombe typified was increasingly being replaced by trained specialists within the American Foreign Service. Holcombe, who had no children, died in Rochester, New York.