In 1865, the renowned American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow hosted a special dinner at his house in celebration of receiving a gift from China: an elegant paper fan with his poem “A Psalm of Life” inscribed in Chinese (one of the first English poems translated into Chinese) by a Chinese official named Dong Xun. Among the guests at the dinner was Longfellow’s close friend, Anson Burlingame, who was then the American minister in China and brought the fan to Longfellow. A few years later, Burlingame would serve as China’s Envoy Extraordinary and High Minister Plenipotentiary and lead a Chinese delegation to the West to sign China’s first equal treaty after the Opium Wars. Another friend at the dinner was Senator Charles Sumner, the staunch abolitionist and unwavering defender of Chinese migrants against the surging anti-Chinese violence in the nation. The Longfellow family’s connections with China later would be represented by Longfellow’s oldest son, Charles, who was an avid world traveler and visited Asia several times (including his trips to China in 1873-1874 and again in 1891). His life and his large collection of Chinese artifacts reflected the broad patterns of American interest in China and Asia in the late 19th century. This talk will draw on the Longfellow family papers and tell the stories not just about the prominent American poet and his family and friends but also about American society and about the shared history of the United States and China. With the rising tensions in U.S.-China relations in our current time and with political leaders and public media often focusing on geopolitics and trade war, it is important to understand the deep historical ties between the two nations and the rich personal and cultural interactions that bind them together.

Lisong Liu is professor of history at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and specializes in Chinese migration, Asian American history, and U.S.-China relations. He is also an associate in research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and a member of the International Advisory Committee for the Chinese Heritage Center at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is currently working on a book on the history of Chinese cultural presence and migrant experience in Boston.