Charles Ralph Boxer, 1904-2000, was born on the Isle of Wight, England. Boxer studied at the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst and then served in the British Army for twenty-four years (1923-1947). At the beginning of his military career, peacetime allowed him to study maritime history and collect rare books. He went on to serve for an extended amount of time in Japan as a language officer, then transitioned to intelligence work in Hong Kong. During World War II, he was captured and sent to a Japanese internment camp. He left the army after the war, at which time he resumed the reading and historical research that he had begun as a young man. Though he never earned a history degree, he was offered a professorship at King's College in London in 1947. He served as the Camões Chair of Portuguese and as a professor of the history of the Far East. After retiring from King's College, Boxer served as a visiting professor at Indiana University and as a consultant to the Lilly Library from 1969-1972. He also held a position at Yale University. Over the course of his career as a historian, Boxer produced over 350 publications and received numerous honorary doctorates. He died in 2000 at the age of 96.

Charles R. Boxer: An Uncommon Life: Soldier, Historian, Teacher, Collector, Traveller, a biography by historian Dauril Alden, 1926-, was published in Lisbon by Fundação Oriente in 2001. Alden was born on 12 January 1926 in San Francisco, California. He completed his BA, MA, and PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1950s and subsequently taught history at the University of Seattle.