In 1872, University of California Regent Edward Tompkins left a tract of land in Oakland to the University with the provision it be used to support a professorship. According to an online exhibit maintained by Doe Library, Tompkins was a man in the pragmatic mold of the UC's founders. He believed, with evident foresight, East Asia would become an important trading partner with California. And so his land would come to support Berkeley's first endowed chair, the Agassiz Professorship of Oriental Languages and Literature.
Eventually.
In 1896, the Tompkins tract had reached a worth of about $50,000, enough for UC President Martin Kellogg to summon British scholar John Fryer from Shanghai to become the first holder of the Agassiz chair. A missionary in China for more than 30 years prior, Fryer did not fit the image of the stereotypical Western cultural imperialist. He mastered Mandarin early on and became an eager student of Chinese literature. He helped found the Shanghai Gezhi High School in 1874, a famed technical school that was one of the first to introduce Western scientific ideas to China and still operates today.
John Fryer
Courtesy of University Archives, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Though instruction in East Asian languages and literatures had started more than 20 years before, the Department of East Asian Languages was only officially founded along with the arrival of Fryer in 1896. Fryer became not just an advocate for East Asian studies but Asian students, as well. He pushed for the admission of Chinese and Japanese students to the school, bought land to provide them housing, and guided early Asian American students through a university where many still considered them unwelcome.
In his will, Fryer left his personal library of over 2,000 volumes to Berkeley. The collection would become the seed out of which the East Asian Library would grow. Fryer's collection will soon be housed in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library, currently under construction on the hillside east of Memorial Glade. The library's 800,000 volumes make it one of the three largest collections of its kind outside of Asia. The new building will finally bring all the East Asian Library's holdings under one roof, after spending years scattered throughout buildings on and off campus. The library will be the first free-standing building dedicated to an East Asian collection in the United States.
– Marcus Wohlsen