Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement/Baber, Edward Colborne
BABER, EDWARD COLBORNE (1843–1890), Chinese scholar and traveller, the son of Edward Baber and a great-nephew of Henry Hervey Baber [q. v.], was born at Dulwich on 30 April 1843. He was educated under his father at Rossall junior school and (1853-62) at Christ's Hospital, whence he obtained a scholarship at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He graduated B.A. from Magdalene in 1867. In July 1866 he obtained in open competition a student interpretership for China or Siam, and proceeded at once to Peking, where his merit was soon recognised by the British minister, Sir Thomas Wade. After working ten hours a day for six months at the language he mastered three thousand characters, and finished the colloquial course in the most rapid time on record. He passed quickly through the various grades of the service, was first-class assistant in 1872, when he filled for a short time the post of vice-consul at Tamsuy in Formosa, and in 1879 was raised to the post of Chinese secretary of legation at Peking. In the meantime he had made three very interesting journeys in the interior of China. The first of these was made in 1876, when Baber accompanied Thomas Grosvenor across Yun-nan to Bhamò, on the Burmese frontier, to investigate the murder of Augustus Raymond Margary [q. v.], of which expedition he drew up a map and a narrative, forming the substance of the official blue-book issued in 1877. The second was an adventurous tour through the Sze-Chuen highlands in 1877, during which he visited and studied the language, spoken and written, of the remarkable indigenous tribe of Lolos, completing much that was attempted by Baron von Richthofen in 1872. A detailed account of this journey, enriched by a great amount of miscellaneous information as to Chinese customs and habits of thought, was printed in 1886 under the title ‘Travels and Researches in Western China’ (with three maps), as part i. of the first volume of the Royal Geographical Society's ‘Supplementary Papers.’ In 1878 he journeyed from Chungching northward by a new line of mountain country, occupied by the Sifan tribes, to the now well-known town of Tachienlu on the great Lhassa road, and wrote a valuable monograph on the ‘Chinese Tea-trade with Thibet’ (‘Suppl. Papers,’ 1886, pt. iv.) On 28 May 1883 he received one of the Royal Geographical Society's medals, with a highly complimentary address from the president, Lord Aberdare. In 1885 and 1886 he was consul-general in Korea, and soon afterwards received the appointment of political resident at Bhamò on the Upper Irawadi, where he died unmarried on 16 June 1890, at the age of forty-seven. In addition to the works mentioned, Baber, while in England during 1883, skilfully condensed a narrative of his friend Captain William John Gill's ‘Journey through China and Eastern Tibet to Burmah,’ which was issued in November 1883 as ‘The River of Golden Sand.’ A portrait of Baber is given in the ‘Geographical Introduction’ to this work.
[Proceedings of Royal Geographical Society, 1883, 1886, and 1890; Yule's Introduction to Gill's River of Golden Sand, 1883 ; Athenæum, 1890, i. 831 ; Times, 23 June 1867.]