Background
Brewitt-Taylor was born 11 December 1857, Kingston, Sussex and died 4 March 1938 at the age of eighty, in his house, Cathay, in Earslferry, Fife.
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Charles Brewitt-Taylor
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Married Alice Mary Vale in 1880, who died in 1891. Brewitt-Taylor remarried in 1891 to Ann Michie. Brewitt-Taylor"s father, a coastguard boatman, committed suicide in October 1868.
As an orphan, Charles was eligible for Royal Hospital School in Greenwich, where he pursued naval studies before switching to astronomy.
He applied to the Royal Observatory for a post but was turned down on medical grounds. The school was part of the naval dockyard which had been established to support the Self-Strengthening Movement in its of learning science and technology from the west.
There the young man was befriended by the Vice-Consul Herbert Giles, the eminent sinologist, who encouraged him to learn Chinese. After his house was destroyed by French artillery in the Battle of Fuzhou in 1885, Brewitt-Taylor joined the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and was assigned in 1891 to Tientsin.
Charles was then posted to Peking, where he became Deputy Commissioner, and then as Acting Commissioner to Swatow in 1900.
During the Boxer Uprising the family was trapped in the British Minister"s residence. Their home was burnt down, destroying the completed draft of his translation of the San Kuo. His Chats in Chinese was published in 1901.
The family was then posted to southern Yunnan, near the border with French Indo-China.
Because of his frequent travel, Charles arranged for a junior officer to stay in his house to ensure its safety. The officer developed a romance with Mistress
Brewitt-Taylor, and when he resigned, Ann suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1907 she returned to England into Bethlem mental hospital in London before returning to China seven months later.
In 1908 Robert Hart. head of the Customs Service, chose Brewitt-Taylor, partly because of his Chinese scholarship, as Director of the new college established in Peking to train Chinese for the Customs Service.
As part of this work, Charles prepared a two-volume Textbook of Documentary Chinese, which included study texts and material on the work of the Customs. His final post was in Chungking. He retired in 1920, aged 62.
H. C. H. H.
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The couple had two sons, Raymond, who was killed as a member of the Field Ambulance Service in World War I, and Leonard, who died in 1933 from a cancerous blood condition.
