IN 2010, SOON after his appointment as Japanese Ambassador to the UK, Hayashi Keiichi laid a wreath at a grave in a churchyard in north London. Those locals who observed him arriving in the ambassadorial car must have wondered what on earth he was doing there. And there would have been very, very few Japanese who would have understood his action. He was paying his respects at the grave of Sir Harry Parkes, honouring, he said, his role in promoting industrial development in Japan. Although Parkes spent longer in China, and is now much better known there than in Japan, it is safe to say that no Chinese Ambassador will ever do the same thing.

But for all the understandably negative feelings about Parkes in China today, nobody can deny the central role he played in the relations between East Asia and Britain (and indeed the West as a whole) from the 1840s until the 1880s, as he rose from a humble assistant, all the way up to Minister – the equivalent of today's Ambassador – to Japan, China and Korea. He started early: at the age of fourteen, he was present at the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), which officially ended the First Opium War. At twenty-eight, a dispute he had with a few Chinese officials triggered the Second Opium War, leading to the collapse of a British government and the deaths of something in the order of 30,000 Chinese.

In Japan, he played a key role in the revolution which saw the end of the feudal regime of the Shoguns and the beginning of a modern nation, ruled by a constitutional monarch. Although he was not seen as such a friend of Japan by the end of his eighteenyear stint there, he would always be remembered and appreciated for his crucial support of the Emperor's regime in 1868 when they really needed it.

Feelings about Parkes were mixed everywhere, but everyone saw him as a ‘big beast’ – indomitable, fearless and incorruptible, entirely different from later diplomats who had to be the smoother, blander, less abrasive types we associate with the profession today.