Frederick Seguier Drake | |
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Born | Zouping, Shandong, Qing China | 13 April 1892
Died | 21 August 1974 | (aged 82)
Other names | 林仰山 (Lín Yǎngshān) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of London |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Sinology |
Institutions |
Frederick Seguier Drake (Chinese: 林仰山; pinyin: Lín Yǎngshān, 13 April 1892 – 21 August 1974) was a Chinese-born English Baptist missionary, sinologist, and archaeologist. Born in 1892 to a family of British missionaries in Zouping, Shandong, he attended school in Britain before returning to Shandong with the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) in 1914. After a decade of missionary service, he received a Teacher's Diploma and began work as an associate professor of education at Cheeloo University in Jinan. He briefly served as the principal of a high school in Qingzhou before returning to Cheeloo as a church history professor. He conducted archaeological work in the 1930s, discovering the Shang city of Daxinzhuang.
The operations of the Baptist church in Shandong were restricted following Japanese occupation in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Separated from his wife and child, Drake continued his work throughout the occupation and the succeeding Chinese Civil War. Large portions of Cheeloo University were destroyed during the capture of Jinan in September 1948, at which point Drake was the sole remaining BMS member in the city. He assisted in rebuilding following the war, although the BMS's duties were largely restricted to the operations of Cheeloo in the wake of an increasingly self-sufficient regional Baptist church and repression from the incipient Communist government. Drake left Cheeloo in 1951, obtaining a position as Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Hong Kong the following year. His career at the university saw the recruitment of a number of prominent Chinese scholars, excavations of the Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb, and the foundation of what would become the University Museum and Art Gallery. He retired in 1964, dying ten years later.