Herman Derek Bryan OBE (16 December 1910 – 17 September 2003) was a consular official, diplomat, sinologist, lecturer, writer, translator and editor.
In the summer of 1936, when first posted in Chongqing, he joined a memorable walking expedition in Western Sichuan towards the Tibetan border in the company of Julian Bell, Yeh Chun Chan (Ye Junjian) and the geologist J.
On finally moving back to Norwich, he was able to find expression for this again, together with an engagement with the St. Julian's Church, which was only a short distance from the Bryans' home on Southgate Lane.
As Chinese Secretary, he helped to resolve the Yangtse Incident of April 1949, when the British warship HMS Amethyst was caught off-guard on Yangtze River behind the rapidly advancing lines of the People's Liberation Army.
While his assistant, Edward Youde, later to serve as Governor of Hong Kong, achieved popular recognition for cycling behind those lines to make contact with the Amethyst, it was Bryan who was sent to take a lecture on gun-boat diplomacy from Huang Hua.
While serving as the British Consul in Peking, he called for the admission of the People's Republic to the United Nations a generation before the Americans stopped vetoing it, and in 1951, during the Korean War, he said he approved of Mao's social reforms.
But, chaffing again with scholarship, perhaps more particularly with his chosen topic, the writer Lu Xun, he turned to more active organisational work, for instance, playing a leading role in the Britain-China Friendship Association.
With Joseph Needham, who was by now concentrating on the history Chinese science, he established the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), which for some years provided the only way for the British to visit the People's Republic.
Bryan developed conflicting health problems after a long-haul flight from Hong Kong on returning from being a guest in Peking for the fiftieth anniversary in 1999 of the establishment of the PRC.
Under the guidance of Innes Herdan, the papers of Derek Bryan and Liao Hongying are now in the Special Collections library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (see the Archive Catalogue under PP MS 99).