Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai – Sir Robert Hart, Maritime Customs, and the Beginning of Korea’s “Chinese Decade”, 1880-1888 – 26/6/12

RAS LECTURE

Tuesday 26th June 2012 at 7.00pm

The Tavern, Radisson Blu Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road, Shanghai

兴国宾馆上海市兴国路78号

PROFESSOR WAYNE PATTERSON

ON

Sir Robert Hart, Maritime Customs, and the Beginning of Korea’s “Chinese Decade”, 1880-1888.

When discussing Korea’s “Chinese Decade”, roughly defined as the dozen or so years prior to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, most of the attention is focused on the heavy-handed activities of Yuan Shikai in Seoul. Less well known is that part of this Chinese effort to bind Korea more closely to China involved the absorption of Korea’s newly-formed Maritime Customs Service and the key roles played by Sir Robert Hart, Li Hongzhang, Henry F. Merrill, and Paul Georg von Mollendorff. Using the recently-discovered correspondence of the first commissioner of customs in Pusan, this talk will discuss some heretofore unknown aspects of this attempted takeover by China, and is based on the author’s recently-published book, In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876-1888 (Berkeley: University of California Institute of East Asian Studies Korea Monograph Series 35, 2012).

Wayne Patterson received his undergraduate degree in history from Swarthmore College and his graduate degrees in both history and international relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, the University of Hawaii-Manoa, the University of South Carolina, the University of Maryland, the University of Kansas, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of California-Berkeley, and abroad at Yonsei University, Ewha University, Korea University, and the University of the Philippines-Diliman. He is currently professor of modern East Asian history at St. Norbert College in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Entrance: RMB 30.00 (RAS members) and RMB 80.00 (non-members). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Lecture. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.  Members will have priority booking until 24 June 2012. 

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