WHEN SIR WILLIAM Hayter was commissioned by the UK government in 1960 to produce a report on the state of ‘Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies’ education in the UK higher education system, few can have anticipated the consequences of his report. At the time, courses designed to nurture the next generation of East Asian specialists were extremely limited in scope, with those interested largely restricted to programmes in which the inevitable focus, given the exigencies of the time, lay in providing a sound linguistic and philological perspective.

Hayter's main recommendations included securing a better balance in the programmes available ‘between linguistic and nonlinguistic studies and between classical and modern studies’, to be secured through implementation of a 10-year programme of development, centred on the establishment of new centres for the study of East and Southeast Asian languages and societies beyond the golden triangle centres. Within months of publication of this report, plans were in place to ensure that the series of new centres for area studies Hayter envisaged for the north of England were duly inaugurated – and, when the special funding for this purpose was released in 1962, the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and Hull all moved quickly to bring these ideas to fruition; the centres for Chinese studies at Leeds, for Japanese studies at Sheffield and for South-East Asian studies at Hull were duly established.

Effective leadership for these new centres was crucial – and, to this end, Leeds moved quickly to secure the appointment of Owen Lattimore as its inaugural professor of Chinese Studies. Lattimore was a British-educated American, who had served during WW2 as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's appointed personal political adviser to Chiang Kai-Shek and later as Director of Pacific Operations in the Office of War Information in San Francisco. Fluent in Chinese, Russian, Mongolian and French, Lattimore was lured from his post as Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University in the US and by 1963 he had succeeded in establishing the Department of Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. He brought with him not only years of experience working in China-related posts but also some trenchant opinions as to how best to implement a teaching and research programme in area studies.