Former US envoy was longtime resident of city

John Leighton Stuart was awarded an honorary citizenship by the Hangzhou congress in 1946 when he returned to the city for a visit. He had just been appointed US ambassador to China, a position that would put him on a path he himself could not control.

Ambassador Stuart was not airdropped from the US. He was literally a native kid, having been born in Hangzhou in 1876 and spent 14 years of his life there. It was reported he could speak the local dialect before he could speak English and his Chinese had some Hangzhou flavor. He always considered himself more Chinese than American.

Most Chinese learned of his name, the Sinicized Situ Leideng, from a Mao Zedong article from 1949 where he was viewed as "a loyal agent of U.S. cultural aggression in China". That was the year he left China for good. He died in the US in 1962.