Arthur de Carle Sowerby

Arthur de Carle Sowerby (8 July 1885 – 16 August 1954; Chinese: 苏柯仁; pinyin: Sū Ke Ren) was a British naturalist, explorer, writer, and publisher in China.

[2] The Sowerby family was on furlough in England at the time of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion during which many of their friends and colleagues at their Shanxi mission station were massacred.

[3] Sowerby attended Bristol University studying for a BSc in Science but dropped out and returned to China where he was appointed lecturer and curator of the Anglo-Chinese College in Tianjin.

Sowerby was taken on as a naturalist for Robert Sterling Clark's Expedition of 1909 which sought specimens from the Yellow River into Shaanxi and then to Gansu province and made the first map of a little-known area of China.

[4] He made four separate expeditions into Manchuria and parts of Mongolia during the next few years, the last being in 1915 and then wrote his book Fur and Feather in North China.

[5] Sowerby returned to England during the First World War with the intention of joining up, but to his dismay was posted to the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) due to his ability to speak the language.