William Su Ting: China’s forgotten palynologist

Palynology is a relatively young science in China. It is accepted conventionally that the earliest papers are those by Jen Hsü, regarded as ‘the pioneer of palynology in China’, from 1950 onwards. This is clearly not so–geographer Su Ting (1913–2000) published an earlier paper on Chinese pollen grains in 1949, having included pollen-analytical research in a largely geomorphological doctoral thesis in 1937–the first PhD by a Chinese citizen at the University of Glasgow. Caught-up in the civil war between Communist and Nationalist forces, Ting had left China for the then British colony of Hong Kong in 1949 and arrived in Los Angeles in 1957 where he termed himself William Su Ting. In Los Angeles he conducted palynological and other research, initially with Daniel Axelrod, eventually retiring as Professor of Geography from California State University in 1979. Ting maintained a long correspondence with Gunnar Erdtman which informs this account along with additional archival and family material. Although Ting was the first Chinese palynologist to work in mainland China, an added element is represented by the Japanese workers Misaburo Shimakura and Genkei Masamune, who performed pollen-analytical investigations in Mainland China and Taiwan respectively in the early 1940s, when this territory was under Japanese control. Ting’s unpublished research on sites in Orkney and the Isle of Bute mark him as one of the UK’s pioneer workers in palynology. His North American publications reflect a willingness to grapple with issues as diverse as Quaternary and pre-Quaternary palaeoecology, pollen morphology, microscopy and statistics.