At Harvard, Fairbank had learned that secret diplomatic papers of the Chinese government had just been published in Peiping (as Beijing was then called). Research on China's relations with the European powers could now contribute to the current historiographical task: uncovering the background of the Great War. Fairbank recalled later that "China appealed to me at age twenty-two as something interesting that no one else seemed to be doing." He began China research at Balliol and the Public Records Office. But for language training there was no substitute for Peiping, where he transferred in 1932.

Five years in China showed him that behind every specialized historical topic lay a broader challenge: understanding the immense differences between Chinese civilization and our own. That broader challenge would dominate his life.

Fairbank's Ph.D. research convinced him that the frontier society of China's "treaty ports" grew as much from Chinese thought and institutions, as from Western commerce and diplomacy. Such was the theme of Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast, the monograph that emerged from his Oxford D.Phil. thesis. The same reasoning convinced him that China's modern revolution was as deeply conditioned by her own history as by Western contact: obvious enough today, but not to the Western sinology of the 1930s.

In 1936 Fairbank returned from China with his wife, Wilma D. Cannon (Radcliffe, 1931), whom he had married in Peiping and who lent her artist's sensibility to their joint exploration of Chinese life. Harvard appointed him instructor in History, and he set about building a modern China program. For his graduate students, there was "Ch'ing Documents:" both historical seminar and cultural immersion. For undergraduates, Fairbank and Edwin O. Reischauer offered "The History of East Asian Civilization," quickly dubbed "Rice Paddies," which became the Harvard students' port of entry into China and Japan.

During World War Two, US government service in China quickened Fairbank's sense of mission. In Chungking, he was struck by the declining morale of the Nationalist government, and horrified by the grim lives of his old Peiping friends in their West China refuge. There began two lifelong commitments: to supporting liberal Chinese academics, morally and materially; and to warning Americans about China's catastrophe. He gradually realized that if the United States remained tied to the inept and corrupt Nationalist regime, Sino-American common ground would shrink to nothing.

Back at Harvard after the war as Professor of History, Fairbank spoke beyond Harvard Yard to the American public. China's revolution, he insisted, was home-grown, "not only genuinely Communist but genuinely Chinese," and that in any event there was nothing the US could do to stop it. Understanding Chinese history was the key to dealing with China as it really is, not as we might wish it to be.

He reserved his finest efforts, however, for training China specialists at Harvard and building the China field nationwide. Training scholars in a new field (which he once likened to making machine tools, but which he actually practiced as a form of gardening) required persistent cultivation of talent and liberal application of foundation funds. As a scholarly entrepreneur, Fairbank was both warm hearted and hard headed: he was extraordinarily kind to students and colleagues; yet maintained a relentless grip on the main task: building the field of China studies. Harvard's East Asian Research Center, founded by him in 1955 and named for him when he retired, set the standard for modern China scholarship. For colleagues worldwide, the center was a forum of understanding; for students, it was a beacon of professionalism.

Students were insulated from scholarly burnout by the dead-pan Fairbankian wit. They learned, for example, that Emperor Tao-kuang, who reigned from 1821-1850, "came to the throne at age thirty-eight, and everything we know about his private life (which is next to nothing) suggests he was devoted, in the fashion of his time, to his empress, and on family matters (allowing for cultural differences) would have been at one with Queen Victoria." Congressional witch-hunters of the 1950s challenged even the Fairbank wit, but came out the losers: "There is no denying I was in China before the Communist victory," he wrote colleagues at the time, "but I do not go as far as some in causally connecting the two phenomena."

His students were his most cherished scholarly achievement. They felt that he had summoned them to a pioneering quest: a quest in which each believed that his mentor considered him an indispensable companion. It was a companionship of freedom: the wide range of his students' interests and methods demonstrates his wry skepticism about our ability to achieve final truth, and his liberal belief that building a field of scholarship meant finding out what able people wanted to do, then helping them do it.

Fairbank seemed always in search of a simpler, purer summation of China's unique experience. His last book, written in frail health, was a superb synthesis of recent scholarship, fused onto his own vision of China's past. This work he delivered to the Harvard Press on the morning of September 12, 1991, and that afternoon he was felled by his final heart attack. He died two days later, aged 84.

Respectfully submitted,
Albert M. Craig
Akira Iriye
Roderick L. MacFarquhar
Ernest R. May
Benjamin I. Schwartz
Philip A. Kuhn

(originally published in the Harvard University Gazette, January 8, 1993)

One of five children of Walter and Cornelia James Cannon, she was born Wilma Denio Cannon and raised in the family home at what is now the site of the Harvard-Yenching Library on Divinity Avenue in Cambridge. In 1931, Wilma Cannon graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College in Art History, a department which allowed its students the then unique opportunity of attending coed classes at the Fogg Museum. This experience is one for which Wilma Fairbank is now very glad. "I always just assumed that I was just as good as [men] were, and that's the way it works, usually. If you assume that they're going to treat you right then they do treat you right." Her thesis, entitled Nature in Painting: Recorded, Remembered, Inherited and Ignored, reflects her early interest in painting, one which she has retained all her life.

In 1932, Wilma Cannon left on a solo journey to Beijing, to join and marry John Fairbank, a young Rhodes Scholar whom she had met in Cambridge. The trip took a full month. "In those days," she says, "it was quite a thing. It took three days and nights to go across the country by train, and then you took a ship to Japan and another to China."

Once Wilma arrived, she and John married and settled in Beijing. Their wedding ceremony was not fancy or formal. "We simply had a person from the embassy who had to be present, a very nice person who was a missionary and friend and just one or two more," Wilma Fairbank says. "We stood up in our beautiful Peking house and went through the necessary motions and we had tea and that was that."

When she first arrived in China, Wilma did not speak the language, but she began studying it almost immediately. Along with this work, she delved into the study of Chinese art and began to paint scenes of China as she saw it. While she was living in Beijing, she had a show at the Institute of Fine Arts. She sold several of her paintings to buyers from all over the world, but now regrets having done so. In particular, she wishes she had the three paintings of Taishan which she completed on that mountain during her honeymoon.

The Fairbanks were to remain in China for four years, living in Beijing but traveling a great deal. "We were very fortunate in those days because [with permission] we could go more or less wherever we wanted." John's thesis research took them to the Treaty Ports from north to south along the east coast and Wilma's art interests led them to colossal Buddhist statuaries carved in rock cliffs at Yungang and Longmen. Wilma, inspired by her interest in Han dynasty rubbings, made a trip to the remote site in Shandong of the Wu Family Offering Shrines and came away with new insights. Upon returning to Cambridge in 1936, Wilma wrote several articles based on her Shandong research. These aroused the interest of archaeologists and switched her art concerns to that field. Her Han studies and additional articles on Shang bronze design were published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute in Adventures in Retrieval.

Wilma Fairbank also lived the life of a Harvard faculty wife. For over 30 years, she and her husband hosted parties every Thursday afternoon for Harvard students and scholars, visitors from elsewhere, friends and relatives. "All we could offer weekly was a warm welcome, a chance to talk with us and with each other, plus tea, cucumber sandwiches and brownies. Luckily this unchanging menu amused guests returning after twenty years and made them feel at home."

In the autumn of 1941 when John was called to government service, the Fairbanks moved to Washington, DC. In January 1942 Wilma became the first employee of the State Department's newly established program of Cultural Relations with China. It was her first experience as a government official and she found both life in Washington and her job extremely interesting. John was sent to China shortly after the war began but Wilma worked in Washington until May 1945. She was then sent by the State Department to serve as Chief Cultural Officer of the American Embassy for two years, first in Chongqing and later in Nanjing. "Returning to China after ten years not as a student but as an official functioning in the community was fascinating. I dealt with Chinese people constantly and used the language all the time. I traveled quite a bit. Though I had Chinese teachers and Chinese friends, the experience of representing my country in working with and for the Chinese people was new to me."

Upon returning to the United States after their second stint in China, The Fairbanks adopted two baby daughters. Wilma feels that because she and her husband we in their 40s by this time, she had a chance to accomplish many of her own goals. When asked if she felt luckier than some of her peers who had less time to develop their careers, she says, "I don't compare myself to somebody else." Their daughter Holly is a dancer and has recently studied and taught dance in China. Her sister Laura is a nurse supervisor at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. "We thought it was very amusing," says their mother, "that our daughters were both in fields we knew nothing about at all."

Wilma Fairbank continues to research and write. She is currently involved in completing a biography of the architects Liang Sicheng and Lin Weiyin. Lin and Liang, son of the famous early twentieth-century Chinese writer and thinker Liang Qichao, met the young Fairbanks in Beijing during the 1930s and remained close friends through the years. Wilma's biography has been accepted by the University of Pennsylvania Press and is in the final stages of production. In 1984, MIT Press published Liang Sicheng's A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, for which Wilma served as Editor. An edition of 5,000 copies was bought widely not only in the United States but also in Canada, Europe and Asia, selling out by 1990. Wilma is hoping that the forthcoming book will lead to a new edition of Liang's Pictorial History.

(article based on an interview with Wilma Fairbank, originally published in the Fairbank Center Newsletter, Winter 1994)