DURING THE COURSE of a 1984 survey of Guangzhou's surviving historic and cultural relics, local historians stumbled upon an unusual find - 237 American, European and Indian graves scattered across Changzhou, a Pearl River island just upstream of Guangzhou's Huangpu port. 'Nobody knew these graves existed,' says Jiang Tiejun, director of the Guangdong Revolutionary History Museum.
The tombs, dating as far back as 1751, were in a poor state of disrepair. Nature had reclaimed most, smothering them in a dense thicket of briars, bamboo and other vegetation. Many headstones had toppled over or been smashed. Some had been carted off by nearby villagers for use either as building materials or - taking advantage of their rough granite surfaces - washboards. For decades, villagers literally rubbed away the inscriptions with their dirty laundry.
The historians were, however, in for an even bigger surprise. For they were in the presence of a VIP ghost. After taking rubbings of the faded gravestones and sending them for translation to professors at Guangzhou Foreign Languages College, the historians were informed one of them belonged to - according to its inscription - Alexander Hill Everett, First Resident Minister of the United States of America to China.
The historians, it appeared, had stumbled upon the grave of the first US ambassador to China. Also mentioned on Everett's gravestone were his date of birth on March 19, 1790, in Boston, Massachusetts; his graduation from the University at Cambridge (US) or Harvard; and his date of death on June 28, 1847, 'under the hospitable roof of the Reverend Dr Parker at Canton', as Guangzhou was then more commonly known.
In fact, Everett was America's second ambassador to China. But the first, another Boston native by the name of Caleb Cushing, travelled no further than Macau, where he arrived in February 1844 and left just six months later.
'The tombstone inscription for Alexander Hill Everett is ? basically correct,' notes Evan Duncan, of the US State Department's Office of the Historian. 'Everett was still the first resident chief of a US diplomatic mission to China.'