[1/28/2025] 不亦樂乎: Foggy Bottom, Beijing, the Ways Between—and Now I’m Back?

What strange paths make a life? Peter Rupert Lighte graduated from GW’s School of Public and International Affairs in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War protests. He went on to earn a PhD in Chinese history at Princeton in 1981. Doctorate in hand, his first port of call was academia and, then, perchance, banking. After postings in Beijing, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo, he became the founding chairman of JP Morgan Chase Bank in China. Peter has authored several books on his adventures, including Straight Through The Labyrinth: Becoming a Gay Father in China (2022) and Host of Memories: Tales of Inevitable Happenstance (2015). Join us to learn of Peter’s views on the wisdom of taking risks, considering the lessons of the past which inform our futures, the roads we know and those we dare to take.

Panel One

Peter Rupert Lighte (BA ’69), graduated from GW’s School of Public and International Affairs (now the Elliott School of International Affairs). A sinologist by training, in the early 1970s, Peter studied Chinese culture at Princeton University and subsequently taught Chinese history and philosophy to college students. In the early 1980s, he entered the world of international finance. He continued to live abroad for almost three decades, dividing his time between London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Beijing. In Beijing, he served as the founding chairman of JP Morgan Chase Bank in China. Currently, he serves on the boards of Half the Sky Foundation and the Council on International Educational Exchange and is active in Princeton alumni affairs. He’s on the boards of Prudential Financial, the Council for International Educational Exchange, and OneSky UK. He is the author of Straight Through The Labyrinth: Becoming A Gay Father in China, Host of Memories: Tales of Inevitable Happenstance, and Pieces of China. A calligrapher, mosaicist, and needlepointer, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his husband Julian Grant, a distinguished Anglo-American composer, and Fuqi, their pooch from Beijing. Their daughters, both Barnard women, are now well out in the world.

 Moderater

Professor Eric Schluessel is a social historian of China and Central Asia, and his work focuses on Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Land of Strangers, his first monograph, uses local archival and manuscript sources in Chinese and Chaghatay Turkic to explore the ramifications of a project undertaken in the last decades of the Qing empire to transform Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians. It won the 2021 John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association.

Professor Schluessel is currently pursuing two research projects: Saints and Sojourners explores the economic history of the Uyghur region from the 1750s through the 1950s as seen from below, through the records of merchants, farmers, and managers of pious endowments. It ties changes at the village level to shifts in the global economy in places as far away as Manchester and Tianjin. Exiled Gods delves into Han Chinese settler culture and religion to illuminate the history of a diasporic community of demobilized soldiers and their descendants that spanned the Qing empire.

Thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.

Professor Schluessel previously taught at the University of Montana in Missoula and spent the 2018–2019 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Schluessel has also completed a translation and critical edition of the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī, which is an important Chaghatay-language chronicle of nineteenth-century Xinjiang.