Auguste t'Kint

Auguste Pierre Joseph t'Kint de Roodenbeke (1816 – 1878) was a Belgian diplomat who initiated his country's treaty relations with several countries in Central America and East Asia.

It has not yet been fully established when and where Auguste t’Kint was born. According to one source, he was born in Brussels on 12 December 1816 to a family which claimed descent from the t'Kint de Roodenbekes, one of the Seven Noble Houses of Brussels. However, another source mentions that Auguste t’Kint was born in Antwerp on 22 November 1816, as son of Pierre-Joseph t’Kint, a broker at the stock exchange of Antwerp, and Anne Waumans. From 1832 to 1840, Auguste t’Kint worked for several trading companies in Antwerp and Brussels.

His civil service career began in 1840 in the commercial section of the ministry of the interior. In 1841 he was assigned to the project to establish a Belgian colony at Santo Tomás de Castilla in Guatemala. He was responsible for liaising between the Compagnie belge de Colonisation and the Guatemalan government. When the project was abandoned in 1855, he was appointed consul general to Guatemala and Belgian plenipotentiary to all the republics of Central America, with a brief to tie up loose ends left by the failure of Belgian colonisation in Santo Tomás, to put the relationships between the two governments on a sounder footing, and to extend Belgian diplomatic relations to other Central American countries. In December 1868 he was appointed Leopold II of Belgium's extraordinary envoy and minister plenipotentiary to both China and Japan.

He returned to Europe in ill health in 1872 and retired in 1875. He died 20 March 1878 as a commander in the Order of Leopold.