China and the West had developed into two distinctively different civilizations, independent of each other before any recorded contact between the two occurred. It was only with the advent of European exploration, and because of the excursions of people like Marco Polo (1254–1324) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), that contact was established, bringing China and the West together through the eventual promotion of cultural interactions. As a result, China and the West engaged with one another in a two-way model of co-education. The Opium War of 1840 marked the start of China’s Modern Age. Following its outbreak, China began to learn from the West at a grand scale, from the daily habits and styles, to the structures of political institutions, while the West practically lost interest in learning from Chinese civilization. This period of the waning of exchange came to resemble a one-way Model of cultural interaction. This chapter examines the characteristics of literary interactions between China and the West during this waning phase, looking specifically at the cases of Xu Zhimo (1897–1931), a Chinese poet who stayed from September of 1920 to August of 1922 in Cambridge, and William Empson (1906–1984), a Cambridge poet who taught from 1937 to 1939, and again from 1947 to 1952 at Beijing University (the university was relocated to Yunnan during the years of 1938 to 1946 because of the Sino-Japanese war). The chapter further explores their roles and experience as student (Xu) and teacher (Empson) in their new contexts, arguing that each figure was exemplary of the role the country and culture of which they were an emissary played in the one-way model of interaction then emerging at a societal scale.