Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: Gilbert L. Mattos, whose Chinese name was Ma Jidao 馬幾道, died on December 12, 2002, at the age of 63, of complications from diabetes.With his passing, the scholarly world lost one of the foremost linguists and epigraphers specializing in early China.Mattos was born on June 24, 1939, in Mill Valley, California, to William and Tessie Mattos.His family was of Portuguese descent (the name Mattos is essentially the equivalent of the English Matthews).Although he had no special exposure to Chinese culture as a child, he became fascinated with it at an early age and resolved even as a teenager to learn the language.After graduating from San Rafael High School in 1959, he spent a year and a half studying Chinese in Taiwan, then returned to the United States and graduated from San Francisco State University in 1964.Aided by a fellowship, he pursued his Ph.D. in Chinese linguistics under Li Fang-kuei and Paul L-M. Serruys at the University of Washington, where he was one of an outstanding group of students that included W. South Coblin, Ken-ichi Takashima, and Ting Pang-hsin.He earned his doctorate in 1973 with a dissertation on the Stone Drums of Qin (which are drum-shaped stones with poetic inscriptions in archaic Chinese).With his degree in hand, Mattos opted to work for the Central Intelligence Agency instead of seeking a regular academic post.This was the moment when the groundwork was being laid for Richard Nixon's historic visit to China; with an extreme shortage of agents competent in Chinese, the CIA was naturally interested in the services of anyone who could read and translate Chinese documents.After his death, I found among his papers some correspondence-evidently unclassified-from representatives of the American government who were on the ground in China paving the way for the famous summit.Even among his associates in intelligence and diplomatic circles, Mattos must have had a singular reputation as a lover of Chinese antiquities: one of the letters discusses rubbings of bronzes that the other agent had discovered in a used-book shop.As this anecdote reveals, Mattos was a scholar at heart, and a career as an intelligence analyst lost its appeal before long.Because he enjoyed living in East Asia-he was an inveterate bibliophile, and this was a time when rare Chinese books were still on the market at affordable prices-he
Source: Early China
Author: Paul R. Goldin
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2486197496