China had gotten into Rockhill’s blood
The fame of William Woodville Rockhill faded after he died in 1914, but there is now renewed interest in the US explorer, diplomat and Sinologist on both sides of the Pacific.
Rockhill’s name, once almost forgotten except in connection with the US’ “Open Door Policy” for China, is once more on people’s lips because of his long association with China.
And increased academic studies and the emergence of historical documents from the early 1950s have gradually pieced together a more complete picture of the American who closely tied his life to China.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1854, his family relocated to France when he was 13 years old, and Rockhill began his inextricable fascination with the Tibetan areas after he read an account of the snow-covered Tibetan Plateau written by the French missionary Abbé Huc. It was to be a lasting fascination, and he would become one of the most astute and experienced diplomats and Sinologists in China at that time.
“One felt that China had gotten into his blood; that if he let his mustache grow and pull it down at the corners in a long thin twist, and wore Chinese clothes, he could have passed for a serene expounder, whether of the precepts of Lao-tze or Confucius, I don’t know,” Alice Roosevelt, daughter of former US President Theodore Roosevelt, wrote in her diary after Rockhill accompanied her as an interpreter during her visit to the Summer Palace in September 1905, where she was honorably received by the Guangxu Emperor (1871-1908) and the Empress Dowager Ci Xi (1835-1908).
His years in China brought his knowledge of China and his study of the Tibetan language and Tibetan Buddhism to a new high. And the publication of his book, The life of the Buddha, and Early History of His Order in 1885, as well as the many books related to Tibetan Buddhism he bought for the Berlin Library, attracted more Westerners to study Tibetan Buddhism.
Rockhill’s keen interest in the Tibetan region and Tibetan Buddhism was not limited to the discovering in the accounts of others. He started his first, long-desired, journey to Tibet in 1888, from Beijing, en route to Lanzhou and Xining, but he was stopped at Yushu, in neighboring Qinghai province because he didn’t have a legal identity certificate. His second journey, commenced three years later in 1891, had to be aborted for the same reason. But although he failed to reach Lhasa, the center of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, Rockhill did gain a better and deeper knowledge of Tibetan history, geography, custom and ethnic anthropology.
The numerous travel accounts and theses on Tibet he wrote after he returned to the United States, such as Tibet: A Geographical, Ethnographical, and Historical Sketch (1892), and Diary of a Journey Through Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892 (1894), ignited great interest in Tibet.
However, unlike the majority of Westerners who coveted the dismembering of the then feeble Chinese Empire, Rockhill strongly advocated the nation’s entirety be maintained, although his advocacy was partly motivated by a desire for the less-powerful US to share with other Western powers chances and benefits in China.
But as a Tibetologist and Sinologist who harbored deep affection toward Tibet, Rockhill’s conceptual contribution to the US’ Open Door Policy that “the United States is to seek a solution which may bring about permanent safety and peace for China, preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity, protect all rights guaranteed to friendly powers by treaty and international law, and safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese empire”, made him and the US different from the other Western powers that had an unconcealed conspiracy to partition China’s territory at that time.
As an advocate that Tibet is part of China, Rockhill strongly opposed Britain’s invasion of Tibet in 1904. The publication of “The Dalai Lamas of Lhasa and Their Relations with the Manchu Emperors of China” in T’oung Pao, a famous European Sinology magazine in 1910 should serve as early Western testimony to China’s current stance that Tibet is an indispensable part of its territory. In the publication he stated there has been no claim raised by Tibetans for total, or even greater, independence from China, and no wish to deprive themselves of the aid and guidance of China’s central authorities.