Samuel Wells William enjoyed a spectacular career. After training to be a scientist at the Rensselaer Institute, he sailed to Canton in the 1830s to serve as printer for the young Protestant Missions. He mastered Chinese languages, co-edited and contributed to the
Chinese Repository, opposed England and America’s opium trades, and subjected Chinese civilization to rigorous study. Indeed, Williams took the organizational forms from his training in pre-Darwinian science—its taxonomies and classification schemes—and used these to impose system and order over the vast Chinese civilization. His 1848
Middle Kingdom is the first rigorous and comprehensive study of China. Encyclopedic in scope, it became the authoritative text on China in the United States. Williams toured the United Stated to familiarize Americans with a country he loved, and he assisted the United States in its negotiations with China in the 1860s. Departing China in the 1870s, Williams accepted an faculty position in Chinese language and literature at Yale. Alarmed by the upwelling of xenophobic anti-Chinese sentiment, Williams revised and expanded the
Middle Kingdom, hoping real knowledge of China might restore sanity to politics. The new edition, along with his
Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language, may be viewed as the foundation of American Sinology.
