Francis Woodman Cleaves

Who was Francis Woodman Cleaves?

Francis Woodman Cleaves was a sinologist, writer and historian who taught at Harvard University, where he was key in establishing Mongolian studies in America. He is well known for his work in translating The Secret History of the Mongols.

In 1935, on a fellowship from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Cleaves went first to Paris, where he studied with Paul Pelliot, then to Peiping, as Beijing was then called, where he studied with the Mongolist Antoine Mostaert S.J. Always an avid book collector, he also roamed the stalls and shops in Liulichang, the street for books and antiques. There he accumulated an extensive collection not only in Chinese and Mongol, his own interests, but also in Manchu, which he did not plan to himself use. The books in Manchu were particularly rare, and form the core of Harvard's Manchu collection.

In 1941 Cleaves returned to the United States, but lost his books and the manuscript of his doctoral thesis. He taught Chinese in the Department of Far Eastern Languages at Harvard, and worked on the Chinese dictionary project of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. He joined the United States Navy and served in the Pacific. After the war ended, he helped to relocate Japanese citizens who had lived in China back to Japan, and sorted through the books they left behind to find those suitable for shipping to the Harvard-Yenching Library.