People · British diplomat, first foreign inspector of Shanghai customs, sinologist
Thomas Francis Wade
威妥玛Wēituǒmǎ · 1818–1895
British diplomat, first foreign inspector of the Shanghai customs in 1854, later minister to China and first Cambridge professor of Chinese.
Thomas Francis Wade (威妥玛, Wēituǒmǎ) was a British diplomat and Chinese scholar whose Shanghai role came in 1853-1855. He served as vice-consul in 1853 and, in 1854, became the first foreign inspector of the Shanghai customs.
The gazetteer places that appointment in the year Britain, France and the United States obtained control of the Shanghai customs. Wade held the post only briefly and resigned in 1855.
His wider career ran from the Opium War, in which he served as an army officer in 1841, through interpreting work in Hong Kong, to the Treaties of Tianjin and Beijing in 1858 and 1860. He became British minister to China in 1871, and the Yantai Convention was signed in 1876 after the Margary case. After leaving his post in 1883 he became Cambridge’s first professor of Chinese in 1888 and gave the university his collection of Chinese and Manchu books. The Wade romanisation of Chinese is named after him.