C. R. Boxer

Sir Charles Ralph Boxer FBA GCIH (8 March 1904 – 27 April 2000) was a British historian of Dutch and Portuguese maritime and colonial history, especially in relation to South Asia and the Far East.

The Japanese crucified hundreds of Christian missionaries and converts and for good measure executed a delegation of anxious envoys sent out from the Portuguese enclave of Macau to make it entirely clear to the European outsiders that they meant what they said.

On visits to the occupied territories he would often have a kendo bout, eat, drink scotch and then pump the various Japanese officers and officials that he was socialising with for information in the true nature of a secret service agent.

Between 1937 and 1941, Boxer, promoted from captain to major, became one of the key members of the Far East Combined Bureau, a British intelligence organisation that extended from Shanghai to Singapore.

During this period, the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London also appointed him as its first Professor of the History of the Far East, serving in that post for two years from 1951 to 1953.

Boxer's works covered the history of early European intrusions into Japan and China during the sixteenth century, and splendid accounts of the opulence and decline of Goa, seat of Portugal's empire in Asia.

In over 350 publications, all of the highest order of scholarship, Boxer wrote on sixteenth-century naval warfare in the Persian Gulf, the tribulations of the maritime trading route between Europe and Asia, a sparkling overview of Brazil during the eighteenth century in the age of gold strikes and frontier expansion, magnificent syntheses of both Dutch and Portuguese colonial history, as well as many pioneering comparative studies of local municipal institutions in Asia, Africa, and South America, race relations, and social mores.

Famously in the 1960s at the height of Portugal's colonial wars in Africa, he took on the "Luso-tropicalist" propaganda of the Salazar dictatorship by unravelling its roots in Gilberto Freyre's assertion of Portuguese colonial non-racialism and was thoroughly vilified for it by the regime and its apologists.″[2] He was married to Ursula Norah Anstice Tulloch, a woman commonly called the most beautiful in Hong Kong, when he met and had an affair with Emily Hahn, the New Yorker's China correspondent, who herself was involved with one of China's leading intellectuals, Zau Sinmay.