John King Fairbank (24 May 1907 - 14 September 1991) (Chinese: 费正清; pinyin: Fèi Zhèngqīng), was a prominent American academic and historian of China.
Fairbank was born in Huron, South Dakota on 24 May 1907. He was educated at Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard College, and Oxford University (Balliol). In 1929, when he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes ...
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John King Fairbank (24 May 1907 - 14 September 1991) (Chinese: 费正清; pinyin: Fèi Zhèngqīng), was a prominent American academic and historian of China.
Fairbank was born in Huron, South Dakota on 24 May 1907. He was educated at Sioux Falls High School, Phillips Exeter Academy, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Harvard College, and Oxford University (Balliol). In 1929, when he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in order to study British imperial history. At Oxford, Fairbank learned that the Qing imperial archives were being opened, and he decided to go to Beijing to do research for his doctoral degree in 1932. In Beijing, he studied at Tsinghua University under the direction of the prominent Chinese historian Tsiang Tingfu. Wilma Cannon came to China to marry Fairbank and began a career of her own in Chinese art history. In 1936, Oxford awarded him a D.Phil. for his thesis on the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs.
He returned to Harvard in...
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