Robert Hart is a key figure in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese history, best known for building and expanding the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs (CIMC) during his nearly fifty years as Inspector General (1863-1910). Beyond overseeing tax collection on behalf of the Qing government, he played a crucial role in Sino-Western affairs, serving as a mediator in negotiations between the Qing court and foreign diplomats. His ‘cultural sensitivity’ to Chinese methods and practices, combined with his genuine interest in restructuring the Qing state along Western lines made him a uniquely hybrid figure — both a servant of the Qing dynasty and an agent of Western influence.[1] These facts are more or less known to anyone familiar with the role of Hart in China. His public prominence and impact were being celebrated in London in July 1908 when this photograph was taken at the annual dinner of the lobby group, the China Association.
China Association dinner to Sir Robert Hart, London, 1908 Source: G. W. Swire Collection, Sw-S01 © John Swire & Sons, Ltd
In August 2025, I had the honour of having my book on Hart published by Palgrave Macmillan. Given the opportunity this blog provides to reflect on my work, I would like to use it to stress a few aspects of Hart’s career that, I believe, remain inadequately addressed by scholars — themes that my book explores through six case studies of Sino-foreign disputes involving Hart and the CIMC.
First, serving as a go-between between the Qing and Western powers certainly benefited both Hart and the CIMC, making them an indispensable yet autonomous link between ‘overstretched empires and weak Chinese governments’.[2] Hart himself frequently emphasised the value of his unique intermediary perspective to his nominal masters: ‘When riding a horse, you cannot sit still if you turn east or west; I just mediate between the two sides’.[3] To foreign diplomats and colleagues of his, he often boasted of knowing best how to make the Qing swallow yet another hard pill forced upon them by the unequal treaties—be it the opening of a new port, the easing of tariff restrictions, or the concession of territory.
But not everyone accepted his self-image. His position came at a price: to many foreigners, Hart appeared too ‘sinicised,’ too conciliatory toward Chinese interests, while, ironically, many Qing officials saw him as a foreigner wielding excessive influence and authority within their own state. These conflicting perceptions have been explored by some scholars. Catherine Ladds, for instance, has shown how Western suspicions extended to Hart’s foreign subordinates in the CIMC, who were sometimes portrayed as ‘deracinated turncoats’ who had abandoned their national loyalties to serve a foreign, less civilized power.[4] Chi-Hui Tsai, on the other hand, has highlighted the hesitancy of Qing reformers to trust Hart, often keeping him at arm’s length—or, at worst, openly opposing him.[5]
Yet Hart belonged wholly to neither camp, finding common cause only in fragments with each. When scholars, myself included, write that Hart worked for the Qing government, it is important to clarify that he worked for the Qing government in Beijing. That was where his employers in the Zongli Yamen were based—and where his loyalties ultimately lay. A closer look at the often tense relationship between the central Qing authorities in Beijing and the provincial administrations during the dynasty’s final decades reveals a more nuanced picture of Hart’s role and objectives within the Qing state.[6] Hart actively promoted the centralisation of Qing governance: he sought to build national institutions under the control of his superiors in Beijing, extending across the vast empire much like the CIMC he led or the postal service he helped establish. Moreover, he advocated for the creation of a central navy and the reform of land taxation—initiatives that effectively bypassed the authority of provincial governors in matters of fiscal administration. His aim was simple: greater centralisation in Beijing meant greater influence over Qing policy.
Unsurprisingly, Hart’s principal antagonists within the Qing government were provincial governors. Hans van de Ven notes Li Hongzhang’s thinly veiled resentment toward the court’s reliance on Hart during the Sino-French War.[7] Hart’s plan to establish a central navy was sabotaged by Shen Baozhen, as Hart himself recorded in his diary, while his proposed land tax reform was ultimately blocked by Zhang Zhidong.[8] All three were powerful provincial officials. Ironically, their views on the adoption of Western institutions and methods often aligned more closely with Hart’s than with those in Beijing. At the same time, this very overlap explains their hostility: they saw him as encroaching on their administrative domain and undermining their own authority within the empire.
It should also be noted that the Qing court, for its part, actively fuelled this antagonism. During the Sino-French War and the subsequent British occupation of Burma, the court maintained two parallel channels of communication with the foreign powers: one managed by Hart, and another handled by Qing diplomats abroad who were closely aligned with the reform-minded provincial governors.[9] As Hart once put it himself to his agent London, James Duncan Campbell: ‘we are all in the water together […] ; we are not a crew, on board a ship, and under one commander!’.[10]
At the same time, Hart’s national loyalties were equally complicated and cannot be neatly confined within the label of ‘an agent of British imperialism’ as some historians have claimed.[11] Despite his obvious connections with the British empire—and the fact that, as the dominant imperial power in China, Britain was the foreign authority he dealt with most frequently—Hart’s outlook and methods often diverged from those of British officials. I have emphasised on this in several chapters in my book: the first chapter, for example, shows that he repeatedly sought to keep both the CIMC and his position as Inspector General beyond the jurisdiction of British courts in China. In a later chapter, I examine a particularly heated confrontation between Hart and the British Minister to China, Sir Thomas Wade, during which Wade swore ‘by the living God’ that he would ‘smash’ the CIMC if Hart failed to comply with British policy on a disputed issue.[12] In 1885, Hart, albeit with a heavy heart, declined the offer to become the British minister to China.
Richard O’Leary has highlighted Hart’s Irish roots as a key to understanding his critical attitude toward British authority, and this explanation certainly holds weight.[13] Indeed, I would argue that the national policy in China most representative of Hart’s own outlook was that of another man of Irish descent, the U.S. Minister to China, Anson Burlingame. Hart himself recognised this affinity, remarking in his diary that he and Burlingame were both Irishmen who, as he put it, ‘got on—he for the U.S. and I for China!’.[14]
The American approach to China resonated with Hart—partly because the United States, unable at the time to pursue a more aggressive imperial policy, adopted a comparatively cooperative stance, and partly because Hart himself was influenced by contemporary American thinkers. His first Chinese translation of an international law text was by the American jurist Henry Wheaton, and he often supported China’s first ambassador abroad, Guo Songtao, by drawing on American legal cases and writings. Moreover, his previously mentioned proposal for land tax reform drew directly on the ideas of the American political economist Henry George.[15] In his diaries, Hart described US diplomacy as ‘the diplomacy of common sense,’ and he observed that ‘the U.S. [was] more interested in the future of China, and […] more connected with China than [could] be any other country’.[16]
Perhaps further study of Hart’s intellectual engagement with American thinkers could shed more light on this dimension. For now, suffice it to say that both his national loyalties and his allegiance to his nominal masters in the Qing government demand a more nuanced approach in order to decode Hart’s idiosyncratic approach to Sino-Western relations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I hope that my work moves the discussion in that direction.
Yorgos Moraitis is a historian specialising in modern Chinese history and Sino-Greek relations. Currently a Chinese History lecturer at the Department of Political Science, University of Crete, and an Associate Researcher at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies in Rethymno, he is also a Postdoctoral Researcher with the IDIS China Program at Panteion University, focusing on the history of Sino-Greek maritime trade. Dr Moraitis received his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast, where his research explored China’s early engagement with Western international law. His monograph Robert Hart and Sino-Foreign Disputes in Qing China, 1863–1908: Negotiating Sovereignty was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.
[1] Richard S. Horowitz, ‘Politics, Power and the Chinese Maritime Customs: The Qing Restoration and the Ascent of Robert Hart’, Modern Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press 40, no. 3 (2006), 577.
[2] Hans J. Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (Columbia University Press, 2014), 4.
[3] Xu Conghua 徐从花 and Sheng Zhuohe 盛卓禾, ‘Shi Xi Hede de “Qima” Lilun – Yi Gengzi Peikuan Tanpan Weili 试析赫德的“骑马”理论-以庚子赔款谈判为例 (An Analysis of Hart’s “Horseback Riding” Theory – A Case Study of the Boxer Indemnity Negotiations’, in Hede Yu Jiu Zhongguo Haiguan Lunwen Xuan 赫德与旧中国海关论文选 (Selected Essays on Hart and the Old Chinese Customs), Zhongguo Haiguan Lishi Xueshu Yanjiu Congshu 中国海关历史学术研究丛书 (China Customs History Academic Research Series) (Zhongguo Haiguan Chubanshe 中国海关出版社 (China Customs Publishing House), 2004).
[4] Catherine Ladds, Empire Careers: Working for the Chinese Customs Service, 1854-1949. (Manchester University Press, 2016), 27.
[5] Chih-Hui Tsai, ‘Robert Hart’s Relationship with the Late Qing Bureaucracy’ (Ph.D., Queen’s University Belfast, 2016).
[6] Mu Zhang, ‘Imperialism and the Evolution of Central-Provincial Relations in Late Qing China: Zhang Zhidong in Jiangsu and Hubei’ (The University of Queensland, 2020).
[7] Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China, 116.
[8] For Shen Baozhen’s reaction to Hart’s naval ambitions, see chapter 5 in my book Yorgos Moraitis, ‘Territorialising the Qing State: Hart’s Role in the 1874 Taiwan Crisis’, in Robert Hart and Sino-Foreign Disputes in Qing China, 1863-1908: Negotiating Sovereignty, ed. Yorgos Moraitis (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025). For the internal debate surrounding Hart’s proposed land tax reforms, see vols. 66 and 67 of his diaries.
[9] I talk about this in chapter 5 of the book. Moraitis, ‘The Informal Connection: Hart and the Annexation of Burma (1885–1886)’, in Robert Hart and Sino-Foreign Disputes in Qing China, 1863-1908.
[10] Robert Hart to James Campbell, 5 December 1884, no.507 in Sir Robert Hart, The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868-1907, ed. John K. Fairbank, Katherine Frost Bruner, and Elizabeth MacLeod Matheson. Vol. I. Two vols. (Harvard University Press, 1975), 579.
[11] Chen Shiqi陳詩啓. 2002. Zhongguo Jindai Haiguan Shi 中國近代海關史 (History of China’s modern Maritime Customs Service. Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe人民出版社.
[12] Hart to Campbell 8 Feb. 1877, no. 169, Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, vol. One, p.237.
[13] Richard O’Leary, ‘Robert Hart in China: The Significance of His Irish Roots’, Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (2006): 583–604.
[14] 3 October 1868, in Hart, ‘Diary Vol.11’, QUB Special Collections, MS 15/1/11.
[15] Stanley Fowler Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs (Published for the Queen’s University [by] W. Mullan, 1950), 795.
[16] 3 October 1868, in Hart, ‘Diary Vol.11’, QUB Special Collections, MS 15/1/11.
