Derek Bryan
British diplomat and academic
Herman Derek Bryan OBE (16 December 1910 – 17 September 2003) was a consular official, diplomat, sinologist, lecturer, writer, translator and editor.
Education
Derek Bryan was the son of a well-established dentist in Norwich, Herman Bryan, the other children being three sisters. After attending Gresham's School, Holt, from 1924 to 1929, he went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His lifelong diffidence regarding scholarly pursuits was already evident, but he finally settled on modern languages for his degree. At both Gresham's and Cambridge he was acquainted with Donald Maclean; one story he liked to tell was of looking up Maclean at the Foreign Office when later on home leave from China, with Maclean emerging to declare, "We have lost Franco."
Career
After Cambridge, Bryan was again uncertain what to do, but was steered in the direction of taking the examinations for the Open Competition for the Civil Service. As he liked to tell it, he passed just high enough to be offered the last post going, a student-interpretership in the China branch of the Consular Service. Sailing for China in December 1932, a week before turning twenty-two, an active career followed taking in postings in various parts of China, including Macao during part of the Japanese incursion. He acted as private secretary to the British Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr on a second posting in Chongqing in 1941, rising to be Chinese Secretary in the British Embassy in Peking.
He was a fluent linguist and made many friends in progressive Chinese circles. In the summer of 1936, when first posted in Chongqing, he joined a memorable walking expedition in Western Sichuan towards the Tibetan border in the company of Julian Bell, Yeh Chun Chan (Ye Junjian) and the geologist J. B. (Jack) Hanson-Lowe (who made a more extensive exploration of the region the following year).
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This entry incorporates text from “Derek Bryan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.