Ferdinand von Richthofen

In 1879 he got married to Irmgard von Richthofen.

He was an uncle of Manfred von Richthofen, famously known as the ‘Red Baron’, an ace German fighter pilot.

On October 6, 1905, he succumbed to a sudden stroke in Berlin at the age of 72.

He was born on May 5, 1833, in Carlsruhe, Prussian Silesia, in to Karl Richthofen and Ferdinande Richthofen.

He attended the Catholic Gymnasium in Breslau (at present Wroclaw) to complete his secondary education. Thereafter he enrolled at the ‘University of Breslau’ in 1850 to study geology.

After a couple of years he joined the ‘University of Berlin’’ from where he completed his graduation in 1856.

Around 1857 he joined a team of distinguished geologists and embarked on a geological tour of the Vorarlberg Alps and the Alps of Tyrol. He was designated the duty to compile the combined report while carrying on the survey. His independent publication on Alpine geology ‘Geognostische Beschreibung der Umgegend von Predazzo…’ (1860) received accolades from all over. He efficiently detailed about the Triassic succession in the South Tirol as also the circumstances that led to its formation. Contrary to the earlier catastrophic perception, Richthofen held slow crustal movements as the reason for alterations in the form of terrain and the tectonic disturbances.

He furthered his studies to the trachytic mountain ranges of the Carpathians in Transylvania with the support of the ‘Austrian Imperial Geological Institute’.

He joined the Prussian government mission, the ‘Eulenburg Expedition’ in 1860 as a geologist and till 1862 travelled Southeast Asia and the Far East including Japan, Ceylon, Celebes, Taiwan, the Philippines, Java, Burma and Siam. However nothing of significance came out of the expedition, and most of his records and collections were lost.

In June 1862, he went to California, United States and till 1868 worked there as a geologist and reported on mineral wealth and gold strikes to German newspapers. He identified a clear-cut series of igneous rocks, from propylite to trachyte in the ‘Sierra Nevada’ and the ‘Rocky Mountains’. Some such geological expeditions of Richthofen led to the discovery of goldfields.

Although he strived to explore China earlier, the ongoing ‘Taiping rebellion’ (1850-64), the civil war in China posed a problem making the country inaccessible. It was only in September 1868, four years post the civil war that he could succeed in his mission of visiting the country.

The China trip was initially financed by the ‘Bank of California’ and afterwards by the ‘Chamber of Commerce of Shanghai’ and in return he had to send reports in English regarding the economic resources of the regions he explored.

Till 1872 he explored eleven out of eighteen Chinese provinces and compiled a series of reports of such expeditions, which were published as ‘Letters on China’ (Shanghai, 1870–72). These reports were the first to suggest the significance of the Shantung coalfield and also attached prominence on the commercial potentiality of Tsingtao, a port that was later occupied by the Germans.

His major contributions included stratigraphy of the Alpine, the geography and geology of China, standardising the procedures of chorology and chorography, and establishing the science of geomorphology.