Volume 23, Number 16 · October 14, 1976
The Customs of the Country
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868-1907
edited by John King Fairbank, by Katherine Frost Bruner, by Elizabeth MacLeod Matheson, with an introduction by L.K. Little
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2 vols, 1625 pp., $50.00
In a recent review of Dr. Lo Hui-min's excellent edition of The Correspondence of G.E. Morrison,[*] I wrote about the aggressive philosophy which Morrison, as Peking correspondent of the London Times, brought to China in the 1890s and preached with relish throughout the next twenty years. Now Dr. Lo's edition of Morrison's letters has been succeeded by a no less scholarly edition of the correspondence of a very different character who also spent most of his life in Peking: Sir Robert Hart. Indeed, in a sense, the two works are complementary, for Morrison took off where Hart began to decline. The brief period of overlap, when they were both together in Peking, was the dramatic period of the Hundred Days' Reform, the Boxer Rising, and its sequel: the period in which the policy of Hart seemed to have foundered and the policy of Morrison would take root.
Review, 4300 words
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