Cecil Lowis was born in Bengal, India in 1866 the son of Susan Mary (Curry) and Edward Elliott Lowis and educated at Newton College, Devon, at Gttingen Gymnasium, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.  He is connected to the Man family through his marriage to Sarah Josselyn Man. He joined the Indian Civil Service and rose to become Commissioner and Superintendant of Ethnography in Burma; he retired in 1912 . He was lent to the Egyptian government in order to conduct the Census of Egypt in 1907. He also conducted the Census of India and was Superintendent of the Ethnographical Survey, Burma.  He served in Burma as magistrate and traveling judge.  He wrote more than a dozen novels set in Burma, a listing of which can be found by following the link below.

Bibliography of books by C.C. Lowis. Some brief reviews appearing in the Times Literary Supplement have been identified and can be read here (<--- 4 pages PDF). See also the obituary below.

Where did Cecil get his middle name from? Here is the answer: 

Cecil's father was Edmund Elliot Lowis and his mother was Susan Mary Currie (m. 9 July 1863).  Susan Currie was one of the daughters of Sir Frederick Currie. Sir Frederick had three wives and Susan was a daughter from the third wife Katherine Mary Powney Thomson whom he married on 10 February 1841.  Katherine was born on 16 April 1821, and died 30 January 1909 at Holmdene, Yately.  Another daughter of Frederick and Katherine's was Harriet Sophia who in 1865 married Sir John Underwood Bateman-Champain.  Cecil was born a year after this marriage and it is probably safe to assume that his parents named him Champain after his uncle Bateman-Champain.  To read the obituary for Bateman-Champain in the Geographic magazine written by Sir Frederic Goldsmid in PDF click here.  Bateman-Champain appears in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB).

It is also interesting to note that Harry Edward Julius Man, Sarah Josselyn Man's uncle, was one of the supervisors laying the Telegraph line through Persia in the 1860's.  Illness forced him to retire from the project early on.  Harry mentions John Champain (the Bateman was added later) a few times in his letters from Persia.  It is also of interest to note that Cecil's elder brother Harry married on the 31 January 1917 Sybil Woolf whose father Benjamin was the uncle of Leonard Woolf.

Cecil's first book 'A Treasury-Officer's Wooing' was serialized in two parts in Macmillan's Magazine. The first part appeared in November 1898 can be read here.