In 1950, Hawkes was joined in Beijing by his fiancée, Jean, and the two were married in April 1950 after a long negotiation with the local police station. Within several months Hawkes' wife became pregnant and China entered the Korean War, and the couple was strongly advised to leave China. They departed China in 1951 and returned to Oxford, where Hawkes continued his graduate study in Chinese under the American sinologist Homer H. Dubs, Oxford's new chair of Chinese. He received a D.Phil. in 1955 with a dissertation entitled "The Problem of Date and Authorship of "Ch'u Tz'u"", a study of the 3rd century BC anthology "Verses of Chu" ("Chu ci" 楚辭). Hawkes' work attracted the attention of the prominent translator Arthur Waley, whom Hawkes came to consider his mentor.