Michael Loewe

Michael Loewe was born in Oxford, England, to a distinguished Anglo-Jewish family. His parents where Ethel Victoria and Herbert Loewe, a professor of Semitic languages at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. His great-grandfather Louis Loewe was a professor of Oriental studies and theology who later emigrated to Britain and became the confidant and personal secretary of philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore. His older brother Raphael Loewe also became a noted academic. Loewe was educated at The Perse School in Cambridge, then entered Oxford University. Following the outbreak of war with Japan in December 1941, Loewe was assigned to learn Japanese at the secret Bedford Japanese School. His first course began in February 1942 and lasted for five months. Towards the end of the course, he received some training in cryptography. After completing the course, Loewe was posted to the top-secret code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park, where he worked in the Naval Section until the end of the war. He studied Mandarin Chinese in his spare time. During a six-month stay in Beijing in 1947, Loewe became interested in traditional and historical Chinese topics, which he began studying at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) at the University of London after returning to the UK. He received a First Class Honours degree in Chinese in 1951. In 1956 he left government service to become a Lecturer in the History of the Far East at the University of London. In 1963, SOAS awarded him a PhD, and he subsequently joined the faculty at Cambridge, where he taught Chines studies until retiring in 1990 to focus solely on his research and scholarship. He has written dozens of books, articles, and other publications in the fields of Classical Chinese as well as the history of ancient and early Imperial China. He was married to Carmen Blacker, a scholar in the Japanese language.