In 1911 the Qing dynasty, the last dynasty of imperial China which had ruled for 266 years, fell in a nationalist uprising, bringing an end to thousands of years of Chinese Emperors and opening the playing field for one of the 20th century’s most controversial figures - Mao Zedong. But before the dynasty’s ultimate demise, Sir Robert Hart, a man from County Armagh helped move China and its international relations into the modern world, closing the chapter of rigid anti-foreign influence and opening China’s doors to the west.
Hart was born in 1835 in a small house in Portadown and by the age of 18, he was nominated by Queen’s College for the consular service in China, a job which entailed him spending three months as a student interpreter in Hong Kong and overseeing minor disputes between the British and Portuguese stationed in China before the Ningpo massacre, in which as a resident he heard of the killing of Portuguese pirates at the hands of Cantonese rebels. Conflict between the Chinese and foreign imperialism underpinned much of his career, and at one point he had to take two years leave in Britain after sustaining injuries during an anti-British riot in 1859. But throughout these affairs, one of his main positions was as the inspector-general of China’s Imperial Maritime Custom Service, and it was his advice which led to the improvement of China’s port and navigation facilities and the purchase of many new fleets.
But the most captivating aspect of his long career in China was the trust he built up with senior imperial figures, most notably Dowager Empress Cixi, the second last Empress of China who reigned until just 3 years before the end of the Qing Dynasty. She trusted him right from the beginning of her time in power to be in charge of Chinese customs. He held this position for the entirety of her political career, and his great success meant that towards the end of both their working lives, Chinese customs accounted for around 1/3 of China’s national revenue.
He even played a significant role in aiding China’s budding diplomatic service, a sector which had been shunned by previous rulers, but was embraced by the Dowager Empress. Hart was even given the opportunity to appoint Peking’s first ambassador to London and he undoubtedly contributed an extraordinary amount to China’s international relations, with perhaps his most important achievements being his position in finalising a treaty with Portugal which gave them rights to Macau and his role in the peace negotiations between the Qing government and Japan.
In the Queen’s university Belfast Special Collections is Hart’s own photographic collection, an invaluable selection of images taken between 1860 and 1910 which create an accurate representation of life in Qing China. The Hart Photographic Collection has been described as the “most delightful” of the materials relating to Hart, and work is has been underway at Queen’s to catalogue and digitise it. It holds a great wealth of information about how China transformed its international relations and ultimately developed its diplomacy along western lines whilst still maintaining a distinctly Chinese character. Furthermore, Hart’s own personal letters of correspondence provide us with a complete understanding of his own complex views on the country he spent so much of his life in and how he moulded sino-western relations. Due to the work carried out by Queen’s university in digitising his photographs and letters, Hart’s innovative career is still available for members of the public to access, and it offers a portal into the lives of the Chinese people just a couple of decades before not only the fall of imperial China, but the rise of Mao Zedong, one of history’s most infamous dictators.
His work and influence penetrates into the 21st century, and despite the turbulence of the years following the fall of the Qing dynasty in China, modern historians can still appreciate how he catalysed the transition from an outdated and corrupt system to a more streamlined and internationally tolerant country. He had multiple children to a Chinese concubine, and in his later life to his Irish wife, in a sense representing his life being sandwiched between the west and China. Despite being criticised by both the British and the Chinese, Hart’s unique approach to diplomacy and his own personal identity is undeniable. He was said to have identified as Irish despite coming from a plantation settling family and sympathised with the growing anti-foreigner movement represented by the Boxer Rebellions in China. He sent shockwaves through the British imperialist nature of many of his colleagues by arguing his opinion that the Chinese people who took part in the Boxer rebellion, in which his own house was burned down and his own obituary incorrectly published in a national newspaper, were acting due to a series of foreign abuses. At the very end of his career and life, he made clear his belief that the success of younger Chinese generations in overcoming foreign imperialism was an inevitability, and sure enough after the communist victory in 1949 after the Chinese civil war, foreign domination, whether from Europe or Japan was brought to an end.
