Tianjin History Tianjin People
Written by Drew Pearson
In October of 1891 Herbert Clark Hoover entered Stanford. During his senior year at Stanford, Herbert Hoover met his future wife, Lou Henry. She was also a geology student whose love of fishing and the outdoors paralleled that of Herbert Hoover's enthusiasm for these outdoor activities.
May of 1895 Hoover graduated with a degree in geology. May of 1897 he arrived in Australia. 1898, Miss Lou Henry, who was Stanford’s first-ever female geology graduate, graduates.
Herbert had gone to work in Australia as an administrative engineer and had been promoted to a junior partnership in a British firm. He was successful. Charles Moreing thought Herbert Hoover could help with the firm's fortunes in China, and so he offered Herbert a chance to go to China with a better salary. The aggregate salaries would be about $20,000 per annum and expenses.
This in turn caused Herbert to consider his personal life. 1898 on packing up at the Sons of Gwalia and traveling to Perth in preparation for his journey to China via London and the US, Hoover cables Lou with four words: “Will you marry me?” She replies with one: “Yes.” The uncertain and turbulent life of an engineer offered no obstacles to Lou Henry.
Hoover arrives in London for a briefing on the China job, then proceeds to New York and across the continent to Monterey, Lou's hometown, in California. There they were wed in the bride’s family parlor on February 10th. Less than a fortnight later, outfitted with dozens of books on China, they embarked from San Francisco for Beijing and then Tianjin (Tientsin). Hoover had circumnavigated the globe, a transit he would make—by sea and by land—four more times in the next decade.
In Tianjin, his non-Chinese staff of perhaps a dozen was greatly overshadowed in number by his Chinese staff, composed chiefly of semi-technical assistants, draftsmen, surveyors' assistants, interpreters, etc. A few of the Chinese helpers had had foreign training; there was one from Yale, for example, and another from Rose Polytechnic. The latter so devoted to American baseball that he was greatly disappointed when he found that Hoover was not a baseball player. But he thought better of him when he learned that Hoover had at least managed his college team. The staff had its headquarters in Tianjin (Tientsin), where were also the principal laboratories for the mineralogists, assayers, and chemists. Some of the men gave their time to the technical work, and others were engaged in collecting and correlating everything that had been published in the foreign languages about the geology and mines' of China. Chinese scholars hunted down and translated into English all that had been printed in Chinese literature.
Hoover and most of his immediate experienced assistants were chiefly occupied with the exploring expeditions into the interior and the examination of the old mines and new prospects. Especially did some immediate attention have to be given to the mines already being actually worked, for the Minister let it be known that he expected Hoover to pay the way of the Department as soon as possible from the increased proceeds of the mines which were to arise from the magic touch of the foreign experts.
In Tientsin, he rented a commodious house on the outskirts of the foreign settlement that removed him from the local populace, save for his fifteen Chinese servants. The house was a large, four-square, wide-veranda affair. The servants, carefully distinguished as "No. 1 Boy," "No. 2 Boy" and so on down the line, waited, according to their own immemorial traditions, on the Mr and Mrs Hoover. These servants had curious ways, and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or of chicken as "one piecee looster."
As most of Mr. Hoover's journeys into the interior were under circumstances where reasonable comfort or privacy was impossible for any woman, Mrs. Hoover determined to fill her time learning to speak Chinese. For this, she engaged a Chinese teacher and never failed in her daily stint whenever she was at home. With a natural gift for languages she made great progress in the most difficult tongue in the world.
Mr. Hoover never absorbed more than a hundred words. But all their life afterwards she kept that hundred words in use between them by speaking Chinese to Mr. Hoover on sotto voce occasions.
In the winter and spring of 1900 the Hoovers began to hear of the new secret society directed against foreigners. It was named the I Ho Tuan—the mailed fist. The foreigners called it "The Boxers." Their avowed purpose was to expel all foreigners from China, to root out every foreign thing—houses, railways, telegraphs, mines—and they included all Christian Chinese and all Chinese who had been associated with foreign things. They believed they had supernatural protection from foreign bullets and other great powers.
Read more at Tianjin Past and Present
