George Kung-Chao Yeh

George Kung-Chao Yeh was a scholar of English literature before he entered diplomacy. He studied at Amherst and Cambridge, taught at Tsinghua and Peking University, and helped edit the literary journal Crescent Moon. During the war against Japan, he directed Nationalist information work in British Malaya and then London, where his work combined political advocacy with lectures on Chinese culture. ¹

After the Nationalist government moved to Taiwan, Yeh became foreign minister in 1950. He helped negotiate the 1954 mutual defense treaty with U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, which committed the United States to assist in the defense of Taiwan and the Pescadores. Appointed ambassador to Washington in 1958, he was recalled in 1961 amid the dispute over Mongolia’s admission to the United Nations. He subsequently became a minister without portfolio and returned to painting and calligraphy. ¹