Edward Thomas Williams was born on October 17, 1854 at Columbus, Ohio. He was the eldest son and the second of eight children of William Williams, a plasterer who also built and sold houses, and Dinah Louisa (Hughes) Williams, both natives of Wales.
Young Williams attended high school in Columbus, graduating as valedictorian in 1872. Although reared as a Baptist, he entered Bethany College in West Virginia, founded by Alexander Campbell of the Disciples of Christ, to prepare for the ministry in that denomination. He graduated in 1875.
In 1875 Williams was ordained and accepted his first pastorate, at the Christian church in Springfield, Ill. In the years that followed he held pastorates in Denver (1877 - 78), Brooklyn, New York (1878 - 81), and Cincinnati, Ohio (1881 - 87).
In 1887 he offered his services to the board of the Foreign Christian Missionary Society and for the next nine years served as a missionary in China. Settling in Nanking in a small Buddhist monastery in October 1887, he began an intensive study of the Chinese language and within six months was able to begin preaching.
During the next few years, however, his studies of astronomy, geology, and especially evolution, as well as of comparative religions, produced a change in his religious views, and in 1896 he left the ministry. That summer he obtained an appointment as translator at the American consulate general in Shanghai. Williams spent the next twenty-five years in the service of the American and the Chinese governments. His sympathy and affection for the Chinese people, his interest in their culture and literature, and his command of the language made him unusually valuable.
In 1897 he was appointed vice-consul general at Shanghai. He left the American consular service temporarily (1898 - 1901) to serve the Chinese government as a translator at the Shanghai Arsenal, working on textbooks for use in the schools.
In 1901 he was appointed Chinese secretary at the American legation at Peking. Among his duties were interpreting at the Manchu court, working on the "Boxer Protocol, " a revision of the commercial treaty between the United States and China, and preparing reports for the State Department on such topics as extraterritoriality and currency. His compilation, Recent Chinese Legislation (1904), included various decrees relative to reform in China. During the year 1908-09 he served as consul general at Tientsin.
In 1909 Williams was transferred to Washington as assistant chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs in the State Department, and for the next two years he was involved, with some reluctance on his part, in the "dollar diplomacy" of Chinese railroad loans.
In 1911 he returned to China for the last time. As first secretary at the American legation in Peking (1911 - 13) he twice served as chargé d'affaires.
Williams became chief of the Far Eastern Division in the State Department in 1914, a post he held for four years. When Japan, in 1915, issued her "Twenty-one Demands" concerning her rights in China, Williams at first denounced them; but later, noting Japan's "special interests" in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, he urged the State Department to consider the demands on a quid pro quo basis by which Japan would agree not to interfere with American commercial interests in China.
Williams also felt that China could absorb Japan's excess population and thus reduce Japanese immigration to the United States and the resulting tensions.
His concept of Japan's "special interests" was later incorporated into the Lansing-Ishii Notes of 1917. During the Paris Peace Conference, Williams was technical adviser on Far Eastern affairs to the American delegation. Despite his personal recommendation to President Wilson, however, the "Big Three" decided that former German rights in Shantung should go to Japan.
Williams then advised the Chinese delegation to refuse to sign the Versailles Treaty, and in the summer of 1919, after his return to Washington, he criticized the Shantung decision before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Williams left the State Department in 1918 to accept an appointment at the University of California at Berkeley as Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature, a chair he held until his retirement in 1927. He had for some years belonged to a number of scholarly associations, both in China and in the United States, and had published The State Religion of China under the Manchus (1913) as well as several articles. Williams interrupted his teaching in 1921 to serve as an expert assistant to the American delegation at the Washington Conference on arms limitation and the Far East.
Williams died of pneumonia at Berkeley General Hospital in his ninetieth year and was buried in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California.
An early advocate of American recognition of the Chinese republican government headed by Yüan Shih-k'ai, Williams represented President Wilson at the formal recognition ceremonies in May 1913. He felt strongly that the stability of China depended on the continuance of the Yüan regime; and, believing Yüan to be capable of crushing a rebellion led by Sun Yat-sen in the summer of 1913, he successfully urged the American government not to intervene.
A scholar by temperament, Williams had, in the judgment of Cordell Hull, "a quiet sense of humor and an extraordinary capacity for making friends. "
Williams was first married on August 12, 1884, to Caroline Dorothy Loos, professor of French and German in the Christian College for Women at Columbia, Missouri, and the daughter of Charles L. Loos, a Disciples of Christ minister and professor of ancient languages at Bethany College. Their two sons were Edward Thrasher and Charles Louis Loos. His wife died in China in 1892, and on January 8, 1894, at Chinkiang, Williams married Rose Sickler, an American teacher at a mission school in China. They had two children, Alice Sickler and Gwladys Louise.
