Author: Robert HartPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674443204
Category : Customs administration
Languages : en
Pages : 1706
Book Description
The I. G. in Peking
Author: Robert HartPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674443204
Category : Customs administration
Languages : en
Pages : 1706
Book Description
The I. G. in Peking
Author: Robert HartPublisher: Belknap Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 872
Book Description
Robert Hart's forty-five-year administration of China's customs service was a unique achievement. In these letters Hart speaks to us directly from a time long past in China, but a time that may seem only yesterday to a Western reader. The result is a primary source for the history of modern China and the era of foreign privilege there. Bearing sole responsibility for the Chinese Maritime Customs as its Inspector General, Hart built up an international staff of thousands, facilitated foreign trade, gave the late-Ch'ing court its principal new revenues, and fostered China's modernity in administration, schools, naval development, postal service, and many other lines. Behind the scenes Hart was also a diplomat who settled the Sino-French war, changed Macao's status, got boundaries delimited with Burma and India, and mitigated the disasters of imperialism. His career at Peking, coinciding with that of the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi, represented the constructive side of the unequal treaty system and Victorian Britain's informal empire in East Asia. The publication of the great I. G.'s weekly or fortnightly letters to his confidant and London commissioner, James Duncan Campbell, gives us an intimate, inside view of Hart's problems and methods. He appraises his employers in China's foreign office, the Tsungli Yamen, and comments pithily on the complex flow of events and personalities. He quotes the Confucian Classic but, even more, the Latin poets. His personal life is revealed--standing long hours at his writing desk, finding solace in the violin, keeping his own counsel, constantly isolated by his responsibilities. Having no confidant in Peking, he explains himself to his loyal agent in London. The Hart-Campbell letters, after five years' editing and annotation and with an informed introduction by Hart's final successor as foreign I. G., L. K. Little, thus take their place as one of the great historical treasures that bring a vanished era back to life.
Britain's Imperial Cornerstone in China
Author: Donna BruneroPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113434094X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199
Book Description
This book provides an overview of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, focussing especially on its later years and in particular on the experiences of the foreign administration.
The International History of East Asia, 1900-1968
Author: Antony BestPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135181667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339
Book Description
This book provides a broad account of the international history of East Asia from 1900 to 1968 - a subject that is essential to any understanding of the modern epoch. Whereas much of the scholarship on this subject has focused purely on the immediate origins and consequences of violent events such as wars and revolutions, this book demonstrates the importance of also considering other forces such as ideology, trade and cultural images that have helped shape East Asian international history. It analyses how the development of the region was influenced by ideological competition and ‘orientalism’, by both multilateral and unilateral efforts to instil order, and by the changing nature of international trade. It considers a number of important topics such as the concept of the ‘open door’; the rise and influence of progressive internationalism in the forum of the League of Nations; the development of anti-colonial nationalism and anti-Western internationalism in the shape of pan-Asianism; and the onset of the Cold War. It also includes detailed case studies of subjects including the administration of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service; the international effort to regulate the trade in opium; and the significance of intra-Asian trade. Overall, this book constitutes an impressive account of the international history of East Asia, and is an important contribution to the interpretive study of this crucial period of history.
Entering China's Service
Author: Katherine F. BrunerPublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684172624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
Robert Hart was one of those empire builders of the Victorian age who had a long and nearly uninterrupted experience in China, from 1854, when as a young Irishman from Belfast he landed in Ningpo, until 1908, when as a man in his seventies he finally retired to England. His years as the Ch'ing government's Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service have been copiously recorded in letters to his London agent, beginning in 1868, published as a 2-volume collection, The IG. in Peking (Harvard, Belknap Press, 1975). In 1970, a second lode of Hart materials came to light, the 77 volumes of his journals, begun on the day of his arrival in China in 1854 and ending at his departure in 1908, with two short but significant gaps in the first decade where he himself destroyed entries of too personal a nature. Entering China's Service presents a complete and annotated transcript of the surviving journals through 1863, alternating with chapters devoted to Hart's North Ireland background, the China he encountered, the Ch'ing officials who trusted him, and the unfolding of his career. His reactions to the Chinese as well as to his fellow Westerners cast an invaluable light on nineteenth-century China.
A Journey to the East
Author: Gui LiPublisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472113545
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Book Description
A record of China's first officially sanctioned eyewitness account of people and places around the world
The Empress and Mrs. Conger
Author: Grant Hayter-MenziesPublisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888083007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363
Book Description
This is the story of two women from worlds that could not seem farther apart--imperial China and the American Midwest--who found common ground before and after one of the greatest clashes between East and West, the fifty-five day siege of the Beijing foreign legations known as the Boxer Uprising. Using diaries, letters and other sources,The Empress and Mrs. Congertraces the parallel lives of Empress Dowager Cixi and American ambassador's wife Sarah Pike Conger, which converged to alter their perspectives of each other and each other's worlds. Grant Hayter-Menziesis the author ofImperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Lingand the biographer of stage and screen stars Charlotte Greenwood and Billie Burke. "Sarah Conger's story is worth telling for many reasons. She occupied a point in time that makes her interesting, but the author demonstrates that she is interesting in her own right-a flawed and fascinating individual whose story we want to read not for what we learn about Chinese history, but for what we learn about a woman profoundly typical of her era and class leading a life of determination in the belief that the right combination of positive attitudes and common sense must win out over adversity." - Timothy Brook, University of British Columbia
Music and the New Global Culture
Author: Harry LiebersohnPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022664930X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Music listeners today can effortlessly flip from K-pop to Ravi Shankar to Amadou & Mariam with a few quick clicks of a mouse. While contemporary globalized musical culture has become ubiquitous and unremarkable, its fascinating origins long predate the internet era. In Music and the New Global Culture, Harry Liebersohn traces the origins of global music to a handful of critical transformations that took place between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Britain, the arts and crafts movement inspired a fascination with non-Western music; Germany fostered a scholarly approach to global musical comparison, creating the field we now call ethnomusicology; and the United States provided the technological foundation for the dissemination of a diverse spectrum of musical cultures by launching the phonograph industry. This is not just a story of Western innovation, however: Liebersohn shows musical responses to globalization in diverse areas that include the major metropolises of India and China and remote settlements in South America and the Arctic. By tracing this long history of world music, Liebersohn shows how global movement has forever changed how we hear music—and indeed, how we feel about the world around us.
Treaty Ports in Modern China
Author: Robert BickersPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317266285
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Book Description
This book presents a wide range of new research on the Chinese treaty ports – the key strategic places on China’s coast where in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries various foreign powers controlled, through "unequal treaties", whole cities or parts of cities, outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese authorities. Topics covered include land and how it was acquired, the flow of people, good and information, specific individuals and families who typify life in the treaty ports, and technical advances, exploration, and innovation in government.
The Origins of the Boxer War
Author: Lanxin XiangPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136865896
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Book Description
This is the first book to provide a panoramic view of the origins of the Boxer War. Comprehensively examining this historical conundrum of the 20th century from a detached perspective, the book is based on ten years of exhaustive research of both unpublished and published materials from all nine countries involved. Analysing the misunderstanding between the Chinese and foreign governments of the day, Lanxin Xiang debunks the traditional view that the anti-foreign Empress Dowager of the Chinese Empire was chiefly responsible for this catastrophic episode which altered the course of 20th century China's relationship with the west.