Sir John Rutherford Alcock, KCB (25 May 1809 – 2 November 1897) was the first British diplomatic representative to live in Japan. In 1844, he was appointed consul at Fuzhou in China, where, after a short official stay at Amoy, he performed the functions, as he expressed it, "of everything from a lord chancellor to a sheriff's officer." Fuchow was one of the ports opened to trade by the Treaty of Nanking.

Alcock, along with his wife, Henrietta, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law, moved to Shanghai in the fall of 1846, where they were part of a burgeoning community of expats, merchants and missionaries from England, France, and North America. Alcock made it a special part of his duties to superintend the established Chinese government and lay out the British settlement, which had developed into such an important feature of British commercial life in China. In 1853 Alcock's wife, Henrietta died (March), and the Taiping rebellion reached Shanghai. The city was besieged and attacked until February 1855 when the rebels were starved and burned out of the city. Alcock remained in Shanghai until April of that year to restore peace and order, and then moved on to the Consulate in Canton, the original seat of much unrest in the 1840s. He was stationed in Canton for 1 year and then took a furlough to return home to England in October 1856, just before tensions once again ignited in Canton.