Derk Bodde (1909–2004)

Professor Derk Bodde passed away peacefully in his sleep on November 3,2003, in his home in Germantown, Pennsylvania.He was 94 years old.Active intellectually and socially until the very end, his death represents a great loss to the academic community and particularly to the field of Chinese studies.Many colleagues and students benefited from his broad learning, his wise counsel, and his friendly demeanor.He had kept up a meaningful relationship with all of them long after his retirement in 1975.From his early years, Professor Bodde was committed to scholarly learning and writing, passions that remained with him to the end.From the age of fourteen, he contributed beautifully-written field reports, diaries, and essays in his school journal, the St. Nicholas Magazine, texts that are still well worth reading today.His travel diaries of visits to the Borubudur Buddhist temple, to the Bromo volcanoes on the Island of Java, and of several trips inside China (published 1923-1927), demonstrate his pristine literary qualities-terseness, conciseness, attention to concrete detail, logical strength, mastery of literary composition.These writing qualities reached their maturity in his later sinological studies.It comes as no surprise that he majored in literature at Harvard University and that his first major research project as an undergraduate student dealt with a problem of literary criticism, namely, "Shakspere and The Ireland Forgeries" (1930), a published Honors Thesis which was reprinted several times.As a boy, from 1919 to 1922, Professor Bodde had the good fortune of spending three years in China, when his father was invited to teach physics at Nanyang College near Shanghai (now called Jiaotong daxue or College of Communications).While he was studying at Harvard, the founding of the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 1928 may have awakened reminiscences of his childhood experiences in China.Professor Bodde was among the first few students who registered in the new and wellfunded Chinese program.A year later, he obtained a two-year fellowship to study in China, renewable for four years, and which he managed to extend to six years (1931)(1932)(1933)(1934)(1935)(1936)(1937).Professor Bodde's last fellowship years in Peking were very eventful and productive.In 1935 he married Galia Speshneff, who had immigrated to China from Russia after the Russian Revolution.

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