ROBERT HART IN CHINAS HISTORY HART MEETS THE PROPER TIME a traffic of goods and ideas,strategies and policies,flowed in both almost three years to mourn the death of a parent,was still an active directions.China had been invaded before and China's response to force.No one has made a count,but the ancestral temples in China the foreign aggression of Hart's day was well rooted in China's long of Chinese lineages that reverenced their ancestors probably out- history. numbered the Christian churches in Western countries.Hart's Chris- Just as Hart had his counterparts elsewhere in Queen Victoria's tian faith that found expression so often in his journal had its empire,so he had his predecessors in earlier periods of China's for- counterpart among his Chinese employers,though their faith did not eign relations.The famous exemplars are,of course,Yeh-lu Ch'u-ts'ai impel them to assume anything like the Western "white man's (1190-1244),the Sinicized Khitan Mongol who advised Genghis burden.” (Chinggis)Khan and later helped administer North China;Marco What did Hart's "modernizing"activities consist of?Did he con- Polo,the Venetian who served the Chinese Emperor Kublai(Qubilai) tribute principally by building a revenue arm of the failing dynasty? Khan from 1275 to 1292;and the Jesuit fathers Adam Schall(1591- Or by advising it on its problems of foreign relations?Did he put the 1666)and Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688)who served as Chinese capstone on the treaty system that ushered China into the modern officials in the Board of Astronomy at Peking under the late Ming world?Or did he prolong the life of a moribund regime that held and early Ch'ing dynasties.There are a host of other non-Chinese China back?Such questions can best be raised here and answered at who served as officials in China under various dynasties.Their num- least tentatively in subsequent chapters. ber is already legion,but it will increase as the dynastic histories are more intensively studied.The lore concerning them is immense,a major study in itself.So Robert Hart,the British insider at the Court HART MEETS THE PROPER TIME of Peking,was only the latest in an ancient lineage-whether he knew There is a type of Chinese poem entitled "Meeting the proper it or not.? time."Specifically this refers to the scholar who has the good fortune In a similar fashion the opprobrious "unequal treaty system"that to be needed and employed by the emperor as an official,thus having the British in particular felt they had invented had its Near Eastern his talent recognized and recorded in history.The term is found most predecessors,and in the Far East was only the latest in a long series often in the poems of disappointed scholars,who lament that they did of arrangements set up to mediate contact between China and the out- not meet the proper time to figure in great events.3 The obvious and side world.The predecessor of the unequal treaties as a means of quite valid assumption is that greatness usually comes to those people managing Sino-foreign relations had been the Ming-Ch'ing tribute of talent,like F.D.R.and Churchill,whose availability happens to system that underlay the Canton trade until 1842 and in fact contin- coincide with an urgent historical need for leadership. ued to coexist with the treaties-though with increasing pallor- Plainly,young Robert Hart met the proper time.How he suc- down to 1894 (or 1908 if we count a tribute mission to Peking from ceeded H.N.Lay as Inspector General of the Chinese Imperial Mar- Nepal that year). itime Customs Service in November 1863 has been told in our first The above suggests that China's "modernization"(a catch-all term volume,Entering Chinas Service.It has presented the portions of Hart's even less precise than "imperialism")was a process influenced from journals that survived from his first decade in China after his arrival within China even more than from without.This is,of course,what in 1854.In that earlier volume our narrative chapters followed Hart's we should expect.The activities of China's modernization,after all, personal growth during his twenties as he moved into the new bicul- had to occur mainly within China and to be carried on mainly by Chi- tural environment of the treaty ports,and studied the Chinese lan- nese persons.When we call Hart a "modernizer"we are classifying guage and social customs.In particular he learned the ways of the him essentially as a reformer who was trying to play a role that many Ch'ing dynasty's Chinese and Manchu officials with whom the Brit- Chinese and others were also attempting. ish consuls and interpreters had to deal.It was during this decade Behind this reforming role lay countless examples of Confucian that Hart acquired the proficiency in Chinese that enabled him to reformism at work in China's long history.Christian righteousness become an interpreter-that special officer who mediated between was no more compelling than the moral dictates of Confucianism.Fil- the two sides,speaking to the hapless Ch'ing officials with the author- ial piety,which obliged even the highest official to leave office for itative voice of his British superiors and yet representing the Chinese 5