Charles Boxer; Spy, Historian of Dutch, Portuguese

Charles Boxer, 96, British spy and prolific historian of colonial empires who also was engaged in one of the 1940s’ most public love affairs. Boxer was born on the Isle of Wight into a military family. His boyhood fascination with Japan led him to teach himself Portuguese and Dutch so he could read original accounts of first contacts with the Far East by people writing in those languages. He joined the British army in 1923, rising to the rank of major within a decade. By 1936 he had joined Britain’s secret service in Hong Kong and offered astute assessments of Japan’s military strength at a time when few took the threat seriously. He was wounded in action in 1941 and spent the next four years as a prisoner of the Japanese. While he was still married to Ursula Norah Anstice Tulloch, known throughout Hong Kong as a woman of uncommon beauty, he met and began a romance with Emily Hahn, then China correspondent for the New Yorker. Hahn wrote of their love affair and the child born of that illicit union in her 1944 bestseller, “China to Me.” Newspapers in England and the U.S. breathlessly reported on the couple’s doings, including Boxer’s announcement shortly after his release by the Japanese that he planned to marry and make “an honest woman” of Hahn as soon as he reached the United States. He began his academic career in 1947 when he accepted the position of Camoens Professor of Portuguese Studies at King’s College, London. Boxer, who had no college degree, held that post until 1967 when he received the first of several teaching jobs in the U.S., including appointments at Indiana University, the University of Virginia and Yale. He wrote more than 330 books and articles on the origins and expansion of the Dutch and Portuguese. Among his most important books are “The Christian Century in Japan,” “South China in the Sixteenth Century,” “The Dutch in Brazil” and “Race Relations in the Portuguese Empire.” On April 27 in a nursing home in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England.