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Sir Robert Hart (1835-1911), Inspector General of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs from 1863 to 1908, was a key figure in China’s nineteenth-century history and its relations with the West. He rose to the top of the Maritime Customs Service, the remarkable body that kept tax … This is a personal favourite of mine, although there is plenty of competition. Robert Hart and China's Statistical Revolution - Volume 40 Issue 3 - ANDREA EBERHARD-BRÉARD. Sir Robert Hart, 1st Baronet, Anglo-Chinese statesman employed by the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12) to direct the Chinese customs bureau and thus satisfy Western demands for an equitable Chinese tariff.

Edward Drew, Sir Robert Hart and his Life Work in China (Worcester, Mass: Clark University, 1913 )[ r e p r i n t e df r o m The Journal of Race Development 4 : 1 ( 1913 ): 1 – 33 ], here p.

A British consular official in China (1854–59), Hart became customs inspector at Guangzhou

Robert Hart was born in Portadown in 1835.

As the Ch'ing government's Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Robert Hart was the most influential Westerner in China for half a century.

As Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Robert Hart (1835–1911), born in County Armagh in Ireland, was a chief fiscal administrator of the Chinese Empire. Sir Robert Hart’s Chinese band, directed by M. Encarnacao, Hart collection, (c) Queen’s University Belfast. Robert Hart grew up in Portadown, but his real life started when he shipped out to China. These journal entries continue the sequence begun in Entering China's Service and cover the years when Hart was setting up Customs procedures, establishing a modus operandi with the Ch'ing bureaucracy, and inspecting the treaty ports. Buy An Irishman in China: Robert Hart, Inspector General of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs by Zhao Changtian (ISBN: 9781602202382) from Amazon's Book Store. In 1890 Robert Hart was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. An ancestor called Van Hardt had fought with William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Hart had sent copies of the statistical publications of the Maritime Customs Service regularly to the Society, but he himself was no statistician. Hart was a British citizen, yet he was employed by the Chinese government and was responsible for hundreds of Western (mostly British) and thousands of Chinese employees. Hart’s father Henry managed a distillery.