Degree Recipient

Life Experience

William Alexander Parsons Martin was named after his father, Reverend William M. Martin. Martin Jr. was educated in Livonia, Indiana. He was the younger brother of Samuel Newell Depew Martin. William and Samuel and one sister were missionaries in China and Africa. William, Samuel, and one brother became ministers, and five of their seven sisters married Presbyterian ministers. William Martin entered IU at age sixteen and graduated with his bachelor’s degree at age nineteen. He studied theology for three years at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in New Albany.

Immediately following his father’s death in 1850, Martin traveled to China as a missionary at age twenty-three. In 1857, he entered a thirty-year service to the Chinese government. In 1858, he assisted as an interpreter for U.S. Minister W. B. Head in negotiating the Treaty of Tientsin, which opened China to international trade and missionary activity. In 1859, Martin accompanied U.S. Minister John E. Ward to Peking and to Japan. Four years later, he made Peking his permanent residence. In 1867, he became a professor of international law at the Imperial College in Peking. Two years later, he became the president of the Imperial College (a position which he held for the next thirty-nine years) and received his Doctor of Divinity degree from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. A year later, he received his Doctor of Laws degree from New York University. He wrote and edited many books, including Natural Theology and Evidences of Christianity, which was reprinted in numerous editions in China and Japan.

During the anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion in 1900, Chinese soldiers destroyed the Imperial College’s library. Martin, in his seventies, acted as gatekeeper during the long siege. When the rebellion ended, Chinese anti-foreign sentiment caused him and all foreign faculty to be banished from the country. He was forced to return to America. When the rebellion ended, he returned to China in 1902 and resumed his work.

In 1914, Martin wrote to the IU Alumni Association that “It almost makes me in love with old age, to be honored as I was on the 10th instant, my eighty-seventh anniversary. May God reward my friends and not regard me as a cumberer of the ground.” He was the only surviving member of his graduating class. He died two years later in China and was buried in the British Cemetery in Peking (now Beijing).  At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Red Guards went on a rampage of destruction at the British Cemetery. They dug up bones and smashed grave markers. The cemetery no longer exists, and the fate of Martin’s bones remains a mystery.

Marriage and Family

In 1849, Martin married Jane Vansant of Philadelphia. She died in 1893.

Interesting Anecdote

Martin was the first foreigner during his time to travel from Peking (now Beijing) to Shanghai by land.

References

1. Wylie
2. Findagrave.com
3. Wikipedia
4. www.christiantoday.co.kr
5. Harding (1904)
6. Johnson, Rossiter, and John Howard Brown (1904) The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans (Boston: The Biographical Society)
7. Clark, Minnie B. (1927) “The Old Log College at Livonia,” Indiana Magazine of History March (Vol. 23 No. 1) pp. 73-81