About 1869 a nephew of President Van Buren, John Sheffield Van Buren, went out to Yokohama as an assistant in the consular office of his uncle. He was soon in Hongkong as agent of the Pacific Mail, Occidental and Oriental, and Toyo Kisen Kaisha trans-Pacific steamship companies, and was in touch with the Chinese of that great crown colony for thirty-three years. He had an intimate knowledge of China, and trained many of its commercial men who have risen high in the commercial and diplomatic affairs of the new republic. In Hongkong he was looked upon as one of the ablest minds that linked the West and the East. He was devoted to Southern China, developed its trade, dry docks and shipping, and formulated China’s first trans-Pacific steamship line, the Chinese Merchants’ Steamship Company of 1903. The famous Chinese guilds of Kwangtung province looked upon him as a sage, and sought his aerie retreat over Robinson Road on the cliff for many a conference under the swaying punkahs. He was a very tall thin man, with a long countenance, great eyes, and a slow, full, round voice. It was impossible to irritate him to heated expression. Like the mills of the gods, he ground slow but exceedingly fine. He used to bemoan the fact that Americans who managed Oriental companies generally do so from America, before being first experienced in the Orient, and he was a strong advocate of the British system of moving partners who would serve their seven-years term in the Orient, seven at home and then back to the Orient again. He was decidedly in an inferior field in commerce. If American diplomacy had been steadier in the East, freed from the spoils system, his mentality and training were perfectly fitted for a great American minister at Peking, or a great consul-general at Canton. He was a deep student of the Filipino, as well as the Chinese, but was altogether in favor of the latter. He was more pessimistic perhaps than was justified regarding what America will be able to do with the Filipino and the Philippines. A thorough student of the Far East, and the representatives of all nations who gathered there, smiling like Buddha in his vast but reserved knowledge, nothing irritated him so much in his official duties as listening to the conversation of the official American globe-trotter, who dropped into Hongkong for a week, and then drove contrary opinions down the throats of such sinologues as he was, and wrote books, most of the prophecies of which remain as a joke when compared with events. There was one American senator and another American official who wrote books of Far East prophecies whose “cocksureness”, like that of the Kanaka surf-rider, used to strike to the core of the resentment of this usually placid Solon of the East, who died in the terrific heat of the Red Sea in 1910, worn out with his long life near the equator, and never having written the books that were within him, and which he really owed the world. His sister married an Austrian nobleman.