Breaking with the Past

Breaking with the Past PDF Author: Hans Van de Ven
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231137389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
From 1854 to 1952, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service delivered one-third to one-half of all revenue available to China’s central authorities. Much more than a tax collector, the institution managed China’s harbors and surveyed the Chinese coast. It oversaw a college training Chinese diplomats; translated legal, philosophical, economic, and scientific documents; organized contributions to international exhibitions; and pioneered China’s modern postal system. After the 1911 Revolution, the agency began managing China’s international loans and domestic bond issues, and in the 1930s, it created a coast guard to combat smuggling. The Customs Service was central to China’s post-Taiping entrance into the world of modern nation-states and twentieth-century trade and finance, and this is the first comprehensive history of the Customs Service’s activities and truly cosmopolitan nature. At times, the Service kept China together when little else did.

Breaking with the Past

Breaking with the Past PDF Author: Hans Van de Ven
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231137389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
From 1854 to 1952, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service delivered one-third to one-half of all revenue available to China’s central authorities. Much more than a tax collector, the institution managed China’s harbors and surveyed the Chinese coast. It oversaw a college training Chinese diplomats; translated legal, philosophical, economic, and scientific documents; organized contributions to international exhibitions; and pioneered China’s modern postal system. After the 1911 Revolution, the agency began managing China’s international loans and domestic bond issues, and in the 1930s, it created a coast guard to combat smuggling. The Customs Service was central to China’s post-Taiping entrance into the world of modern nation-states and twentieth-century trade and finance, and this is the first comprehensive history of the Customs Service’s activities and truly cosmopolitan nature. At times, the Service kept China together when little else did.

Britain's Imperial Cornerstone in China

Britain's Imperial Cornerstone in China PDF Author: Donna Brunero
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113434094X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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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.

Government, Imperialism and Nationalism in China

Government, Imperialism and Nationalism in China PDF Author: Chihyun Chang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135122334
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, which was led by British staff, is often seen as one of the key agents of Western imperialism in China, the customs revenue being one of the major sources of Chinese government income but a source much of which was pledged to Western banks as the collateral for, and interests payments on, massive loans. This book, however, based on extensive original research, considers the lower level staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and shows how the Chinese government, struggling to master Western expertise in many areas, pursued a deliberate policy of encouraging lower level staff to learn from their Western superiors with a view to eventually supplanting them, a policy which was successfully carried out. The book thereby demonstrates that Chinese engagement with Western imperialists was in fact an essential part of Chinese national state-building, and that what looked like a key branch of Chinese government delegated to foreigners was in fact very much under Chinese government control.

An Irishman in China

An Irishman in China PDF Author: Zhao Changtian
Publisher: Shanghai Press
ISBN: 9781602202382
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
It was a long journey—in more ways than mere geography—from a childhood in Northern Ireland to becoming the most influential foreigner in 19th-century China. This historical novel follows the life of Robert Hart, whose career in China spanned more than half a century during the turbulent last decades of the Qing dynasty. As the Qing government's Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Hart was involved in many major events of late Imperial China. While negotiating his way through civil dissent and foreign conflicts, he played an instrumental role in the country's modernization. A rare foreigner who learned the language and developed a deep interest in and sensitivity to the culture, Hart had a passion for his adopted country but continually struggled in his dual role as British subject and employee of the Chinese government. Hart's personal life was not without its own challenges as he grappled with his relationship with his Chinese lover and the children he had with her, as well as his British wife and their family together. Long periods of conflict, loneliness and doubt lurked behind the professional triumphs for which he became world-renowned. Based on exhaustive historical research, the story is enlivened by dialogue and plot elements suggested by the author's deep knowledge of Hart and the country and times in which he lived. The reader will be rewarded with insight into this pivotal period in Chinese history through the lens of the life of one fascinating individual.

Imperial Maritime Customs

Imperial Maritime Customs PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description


H. B. Morse, Customs Commissioner and Historian of China

H. B. Morse, Customs Commissioner and Historian of China PDF Author: John King Fairbank
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813171043
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Hosea Ballou Morse (1855-1934) sailed to China in 1874, and for the next thirty-five years he labored loyally in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, becoming one of its most able commissioners and acquiring a deep knowledge of China's economy and foreign relations. After his retirement in 1909, Morse devoted himself to scholarship. He pioneered in the Western study of China's foreign relations, weaving from the tangled threads of the Ch'ing dynasty's foreign affairs several seminal interpretive histories, most notably his three-volume magnum opus, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (1910-18). At the time of his death, Morse was considered the major historian of modern China in the English-speaking world, and his works played a profound role in shaping the contours of Western scholarship on China. Begun as a labor of love by his protégé, John King Fairbank, this lively biography based primarily on Morse's vast collection of personal papers sheds light on many crucial events in modern Chinese history, as well as on the multifaceted Western role in late imperial China, and provides new insights into the beginnings of modern China studies in this country. Half-finished when Fairbank died, the project was completed by his colleagues, Martha Henderson Coolidge and Richard J. Smith.

The I. G. in Peking

The I. G. in Peking PDF Author: Robert Hart
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 872

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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.

The Custom Of The Sea

The Custom Of The Sea PDF Author: Neil Hanson
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446421961
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
On 5 July 1884, the yacht Mignonette set sail from Southampton bound for Sydney. Halfway through their projected one hundred and twenty day voyage, Captain Tom Dudley and his crew of three men were beset by a monstrous storm off the coast of Africa. After four days of battling towering waves and hurricane gales, their yacht was finally crushed by a ferocious forty foot wave. The survivors were cast adrift a thousand miles from the nearest landfall in an open thirteen foot dinghy without provisions, water or shelter from the scorching sun. When, after twenty four days, they were finally rescued by a passing yacht, the Moctezuma, only three men were left and they were in an appalling condition. The ordeal that they endured and the trial which followed their eventual return to England held the whole nation - from the lowliest ship's deckhand to Queen Victoria herself - spellbound during the following winter. This is the true story of the voyage and the subsequent court case which outlawed for ever a practice followed since men first put to the ocean in boats: the custom of the sea.

Pleasure Boats

Pleasure Boats PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Boats and boating
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Book Description


The Chinese Maritime Customs

The Chinese Maritime Customs PDF Author: B. Foster Hall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description