Stuart of Yenching

High in the ranks of U.S. educators is a man who has not lived in the U.S. for 40 years. Since 1919, thin, balding John Leighton Stuart, 69, has been President of China's No. 1 Christian university, American-endowed Yenching. The past three and a half of these years have been spent in Jap captivity. In Chungking last week Dr. Stuart, perhaps the most respected American in China, told his story.

When the Japs overran Peiping in 1937, Yenching, just five miles away, became an oasis of free learning: the Japs then were too sensitive to U.S. opinion to move in. But they ordered President Stuart to hoist the puppet-regime flag and to give personal "thanks" to the Jap militia for the invasion. Dr. Stuart refused, and got away with it. For three years before Pearl Harbor he was used to transmit peace feelers between the Chinese and the Japs. At 8:20 a.m., Dec. 8, 1941, Dr. Stuart's freedom ended.

"Cocktail Hour" & Anagrams. Dr. Stuart was cooped up for 39 months with two others, in three dimly lit rooms in the back of a British mercantile establishment in Peiping. His fellow prisoners: Dr. Henry S. Houghton, 66, director of Peiping Union Medical College, and Trevor Bowen, 59, its comptroller.

Bowen breakfasted at 7, Houghton and Stuart at 9. Stuart spent the forenoon writing on his pet subject: New Testament criticism. At lunch all three took turns reading aloud the German war communiques from the English edition of Osaka Mainichi. High point of the day was "cocktail hour," when the three met to re-chew the morsels of news they had read at lunch. Every night Houghton and Stuart played anagrams--altogether 1,500 games. (Dr. Houghton wrote a book on anagrams which should be the definitive work.)

In May 1943, the trio was broken up for five days. The Japs locked Comptroller Bowen in a bamboo cage not wide or long enough to lie down in while they questioned, threatened and kicked him (they thought he could tell them where the medical college had hidden its famed archeological relic, the bones of Peiping Man, presumably so they could present them to the Emperor. Bowen did not know).

In July, the Japs issued an imperial edict freeing Dr. Stuart--if he would ask Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to negotiate with the U.S. for Japan. He refused either to leave his two companions or to transmit the terms. Less than a month later all three were free.

As soon as able Educator Stuart can move Yenching back to Peiping (it has been limping along in exile at Chengtu), he plans to retire, end his days in China.

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