Asia-Pacific in the Making of the Americas: Toward a Global History

A Sinologist

Let us advance forward almost thirty years to 1876 when Williams prepared to leave China and return to the United States for good. Despite the evangelical objectives that had launched his career, Williams spent most of his final two decades in China in the service not of the American Board of Foreign Missions but of Uncle Sam. Williams had become a government employee and sometimes official. 

Shortly after arriving home, Williams received gratifying news from the institution he had longed to attend as a youth. Yale had decided not only to confer upon him the degree of Master of Arts but also to create a faculty position for him: he would be the first to occupy the Chair of Chinese Language and Literature. It was the first of its kind in the United States.[45] Since the college library’s holdings were devoid of Chinese texts, Williams worked with friends in China to effect the transfer of a sizeable library of Chinese books, totaling 1,280 volumes. The Yale Library now had an East Asian Collection.[46] In 1878, Williams delivered his first lecture and remarked later that the “audience was good,” despite a heavy snowstorm and a presentation that he described as less than “exhilarating.”[47]
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[45] In 1879, three years after Yale had established its professorship in Chinese Studies, Harvard followed suit by hiring Ko Kun-hua from China. Professor Ko and Samuel Wells Williams enjoyed a strong, but short, friendship. Professor Ko died the following year. Frederick Wells Williams, 450-453.
[46] See list of Chinese titles. Box 17. Series 2. SWWFP. This was not the first time that Williams had brought about the transfer of Chinese books to American institutions. In 1869, he orchestrated an exchange of texts between the United States Government and the Chinese Government. See Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, “The First Chinese-American Exchange of Publications,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (1965): 19-30.
[47] Letter to Robert Stanton Williams. February 1, 1878. Box 14. Series 2. SWWFP.

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