Valdemar Rudolph von Raasløff
Danish diplomat (1815–1883)
Valdemar Rudolph von Raasløff (6 November 1815 – 14 February 1883) was a Danish politician, military officer, and diplomat.
Biography
Raasløff was born at Altona in the Duchy of Holstein. He spent his school years at Sorø and in 1832 he was admitted to the Royal Military College (Kgl. Militære Højskole), from which he graduated in 1838 as second lieutenant in the artillery.
Instead of serving in Denmark, he applied for service abroad and in 1840–41 he served in the French Army in Algeria. He later summarized his experiences in Algeria in a book, which was translated into several languages. In 1849–50, he served as captain in the Danish army in the First War of Schleswig, however, in 1851, he left the military in order to go to America and become an engineer.
In 1857, he was appointed Denmark's Minister Resident in Washington, DC. On behalf of King Christian IX, he concluded the first commercial treaty between Denmark and the Qing Empire on 13 July 1863, a treaty which was modeled on the Treaties of Tianjin and governed the relationship between the two countries for several decades. Between 1 October 1866 and 19 April 1870, he served as the War Minister of Denmark. He died during 1883 in Paris.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1794516. VIAF identifies the subject as 54959764. The Library of Congress control number is n86142384. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1815, 1883, 1832 and 1838.
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This entry incorporates text from “Valdemar Rudolph von Raasløff” 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.