Seventy-three years ago a little Irish boy lay in his aunt's lap looking out on a strange and mysterious world that his solemn eyes had explored for scarcely ten short days, while she, to whom the commonplaces of everyday surroundings had lost their first absorbing interest, was busily engaged in braiding a watch-chain from her splendid, Titian-red hair. These chains were the fashion of the hour, and the old family doctor, friend as well as physician, paused after a visit to the boy's mother, to

Robert Hart began his romantic life in simple circumstances. He was born on the 20th day of February, 1835, in a little white house with green shutters on Dungannon Street, in the small Irish town of Portadown, County Armagh, and was the eldest of twelve children. His mother, a daughter of Mr. John Edgar, of Ballybreagh, must have been a delightful woman, all tenderness and charity, judging from the way her children's affections became entwined around her. His father, Henry Hart, was a man of fo

The journey out to Chinn in 1854 was not the simple matter that it is now. No Suez Canal existed then, and the Candia that took Robert Hart from Southampton left him at Alexandria. Thence he had to travel up the Mahmudi Canal to the Nile, push on towards Cairo, and finally spend eighteen cramped and weary hours in an omnibus crossing the desert to Suez, where he got one steamer as far as Galle, and another—the Pottinger from Bombay—which called there took him on to his destination. He remained t

When Robert Hart joined the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, the service was already four years old. 1854—the very year he passed through Shanghai on his way to Ningpo—saw its beginning as an international institution. A Chinese Superintendent had hitherto collected duties for his Government, but, owing to the capture of Shanghai by the rebels, affairs became so disorganized that he appealed to the three Consuls of Great Britain, France and the United States for help, and they responded by eac

The first order transmitted by Prince Kung to the new Inspector-General—or the I.G., as he was always familiarly called—was that he should live at Shanghai. This gave him the opportunity of meeting and working with the famous "Chinese Gordon," to whom the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion was so largely due. For the history of that rebellion—how one soldier of fortune after the other attempted to suppress it; how the picturesque American Burgevine, on changing masters and seeking to better hi

When his share in the arrangements for the disbandment of "The Ever-Victorious Army" was completed, the I.G. received a second order directing him to live at Peking. In those days Peking was the very last corner of the world. Eighty miles inland, not even the sound of a friendly ship's whistle could help an exiled imagination cross the gulf to far-away countries, while railways were, of course, still undreamed of. The only two means of reaching the capital were by springless cart over the grey a

Three important things occurred in Robert Hart's life between the years 1870 and 1879. In 1873 his only son was born; 1875 was marked by the beginning of the famous Margary affair, and in 1878 he went as President of the Chinese Commission to the Paris Exhibition. À propos of the birth of his son, there was a very strange—almost what a Highlander would call an "uncanny"—sequence of dates in the I.G.'s own life. The year that he himself was born, the 20th of February—his birthday—fell on the 23rd

Curiously enough, almost as soon as Robert Hart was back in Peking (1880) the opium question was brought to his attention again. This time it was by a Chinese official—one Yuan Pao Hêng, an uncle of the famous Yuan Shih Kai, whose influence is paramount in the Flowery Land to-day, and who more than any other single man was probably responsible for the Imperial Edict (1906) which ordered the opium traffic to be abolished within ten years. The uncle was as bitter an enemy of the drug as his nephew

Robert Hart therefore went quietly on with his work in the Customs (1885), setting personal ambitions calmly aside, and finding—let us hope—his reward in the satisfaction which the Chinese and the service generally expressed at his sacrifice of the British Government's tempting offer. The very year after it was made, an important piece of business, safely, even brilliantly concluded, added greatly to his reputation. This was the settlement of questions relating to the simultaneous collection of

Some three weeks before the beginning of the Siege proper Peking was in a state of great unrest—how great no one, not even the I.G., could accurately judge. But as each day brought new alarms and constant reports of Boxer misdoings all over the city were confirmed by terrified eye-witnesses, it was thought wise to make some practical preparations for defence. The Legations were luckily provided with guards, whose officers, acting in concert, agreed to hold a square that included the whole quarte