They then planned a very unusual honeymoon. He met his future wife, Eleanor, in the same year, and married her in 1926. Once he saw the edge of steppe from Hohhot, he had to go farther. In 1925, he found his way to Guihua (modern Hohhot) at the end of the railhead in Inner Mongolia, where he saw camels and caravans bringing bales of wool from Central Eurasia. Finding the business itself and the expatriate foreign community tiresome, he devoted himself to the intensive study of Chinese and to traveling. The 1920s in China were a time of chaos, when warlords struggled to dominate the country. In 1919, he returned to China to work in his father’s import-export business in Tianjin. 1 His family sent Owen to Europe at the age of twelve to get an education, and he studied classical languages in Switzerland and England, but Oxford University rejected his application for a scholarship, so he never got a college degree. His father was a high school teacher who became a businessman in China.
Lattimore was born in 1900 in Washington, DC.
