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CHARLES BOXER, 96, AMOROUS SPY, DIES By Douglas Martin
His achievements ranged from writing 330 books and articles about the origins and growth of the Dutch and Portuguese empires to holding professional chairs at five universities on both sides of the Atlantic to collecting a celebrated library of rare books. But it was Mr. Boxer's breathtakingly public romance with Emily Hahn, the author of 52 books and a longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine, that account for most of this fame. He was married to Ursula Norah Anstice Tulloch, a woman commonly called the most beautiful in Hong Kong, when he met and had an affair with Miss Hahn, the New Yorker's China correspondent, who herself was involved with one of China's leading intellectuals, Sinmay Zau. Miss Hahn made the new romance - not to mention her avid opium addiction - a topic of discussion in her 1944 best seller, "China to Me." She told how she fell for Mr. Boxer immediately, even though she was friendly with his wife. She wrote that he suggested having a child and offered to be legally responsible for the baby. A few weeks before the Japanese bombed Peal Harbor and the United States entered World War II, a daughter named Carola was born to the couple. After the Japanese took over Hong Kong, a British colony, Miss Hahn convinced the authorities that she was Eurasian and stayed on to carry food parcels to starving prisoners of war. Fearing for her daughter's safety, though, she led in 1943. In March 1945, unconfirmed reports carried in American newspapers said the Japanese had executed Mr. Boxer. Miss Hahn said she refused to believe the rumor. In truth, another British officer had been executed, and Mr. Boxer was sentenced to a long term of hard labor as a result of being implicated in a secret radio-listening operation. Upon his release at the end of the war, Mr. Boxer, by then divorced, told United Press that he intended to marry Miss Hahn as soon as possible. "I am going to make an honest woman of Mickey," he said, using her nickname. "It's high time, don't you think?" Each step of his journey home was reported in the newspapers, from a flight delay in San Francisco, to Carola's excitement at spotting her father, to the couple's marriage by a justice of the peace in New Haven, Connecticut, after a judge granted a waiver of the standard five-day waiting period. Miss Hahn died in 1997. Charles Ralph Boxer was born on the Isle of Wight into a long line of admirals and generals, as well as affluent stockmen, who raised sheep in Tasmania and Australia. After being rejected by the Royal Navy because of poor eyesight, he joined the army in 1923 and rose to the rank of major by the late 1930s. From 1930 to 1933 he served as a language officer in Japan and became fluent in Japanese, Dutch, French, German and Portuguese. In 1936 he joined the British intelligence service and was assigned to Hong Kong. A 1993 article in the Canadian Journal of History cited his perspicacity in estimating the strong military threat posed by Japan at a time when many British analysts played down its capabilities. He was severely wounded in December 1941 and after a long convalescence was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp for the duration of the war. His rare book collection, which centered on the Dutch and Portuguese empires, was sufficiently celebrated in East Asia to be seized by the Japanese for the Imperial Library in Tokyo. He was able to recover most of it after the war. In 1947, just as Mr. Boxer was realizing that he had little chance of advancement in the military, he was offered the position of Camoens Professor of Portuguese Studies at King's College, London. Back to C.R. Boxer |