Samuel Turner Fearon

Samuel Turner Fearon (c. 1819 – 18 January 1854) was the first professor of Chinese at the King's College, London. He was an interpreter in the First Opium War and a colonial servant and senior government official in British Hong Kong.

He was born in Chiswick, London in about 1819. He was baptised in 1820 and first went to China in 1826 with his father, Christopher Fearon. He went to the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca and was fluent in local tongue and became an interpreter in the First Opium War from 1839 to 1842. He was awarded China War Medal. After the war, he went to Hong Kong and became a civil servant in the British colony. He was a clerk and interpreter of the Magistrate Court and also a public notary and coroner. He later became the first Registral General and Collector of Chinese Revenue in 1846.^[1]

He became the first Chinese professor at the King's College, London when the Chinese program was institutionalised at the invitation of George Thomas Staunton in 1847, despite he was not a Sinologist. He did not give lectures and translate any classics or other works of Chinese language. At the end, the Chinese education at the King's College failed.^[2][3]

He died in St. Pancras, London on 18 January 1854. He was son of Christopher and Elizabeth Fearon. He married Caroline Libery in 1846 and had children Charles and Kate.^[1]

References

1. "Fearon, Samuel Turner". King's College London.
2. Kwan, Uganda Sze Pui, ‘Translation and the British Colonial Mission: The Career of Samuel Turner Fearon and the Establishment of Chinese Studies in King's College London’, collected in Wong, Lawrence Wang Chi; Fuehrer, Bernhard; (2016). Sinologists as Translators in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chinese University of Hong Kong.
3. Kwan, Uganda Sze Pui, Translation and Resolving Conflict: The First Opium War Interpreter of the British Empire, Samuel T. Fearon (1819-1854) "Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica" (PDF).Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, (2012) Vol. 76, pp. 41-80

Government offices
New title	Registrar General and Collector of Chinese Revenue 1846	Succeeded by Andrew Lysaght Inglis