Francis Woodman Cleaves

Francis Woodman Cleaves (born in Boston in 1911 and died in New Hampshire on December 31, 1995[citation needed]) was a sinologist, linguist, and historian who taught at Harvard University, and was the founder of Sino-Mongolian studies in America.

Cleaves received his undergraduate degree in Classics from Dartmouth College, and then enrolled in the graduate program in Comparative Philology at Harvard, but transferred to the study of Far Eastern Languages under Serge Elisséeff in the mid-1930s, prior to the formal establishment of the department.

After the war ended, he helped to relocate Japanese citizens who had lived in China back to Japan and sorted through the books they left behind to find those suitable for shipping to the Harvard-Yenching Library.

Among his best-known disciples were Joseph Fletcher, the distinguished Mongolist and historian, and Elizabeth Endicott-West, author of basic studies on the Yuan dynasty and History of Mongolia.

A mutual friend recalled that Cleaves was "an old-fashioned gentleman perhaps more at home with his cows, horses, and fellow farmers in New Hampshire than with the academic intrigues of Cambridge," while Hung was a "pragmatic Confucianist."