78
HENRY JAMES LETHBRIDGE
many Chinese in Weihaiwei, where he was held in great esteem, who will lament the passing of a kindly and sympathetic administrator and a warm-hearted friend,68
Lockhart's training in the Chinese classics, the staple educational fare for all Europeans in the nineteenth century who wished to master Chinese, drew him towards traditional and conservative forces in Chinese society. In Lockhart's time cadets studied, for example, the various publications of James Legge and were expected to understand, and to be able to translate from, Mencius and the Tso Chuan. Lockhart, like R.F. Johnston, did not reject in its entirety the old China that was being transformed slowly in his day. Thus, unlike some European missionaries and merchants, who looked forward eagerly to the breaking-up of China because they expected change would favour their respective interests, Lockhart did not want the China he knew and valued to be changed radically. He believed in a renovated China - a return of the Chinese to their antique virtues and a refurbishing of their institutions. He was not in sympathy with views held by members of the China Association,69 a London repository for Old China Hands such as T.H. Whitehead, and the clubmen of Shanghai and the Treaty Ports. On the other hand, as most of us are, he was a man of his time - a colonial official from a particular stratum of British society, who believed in his mission to govern, but to govern well, those territories of the Middle Kingdom taken over by the British in the nineteenth century.
A vigorous man, physically and mentally, Lockhart was attracted by the challenges presented by the administration of newly acquired colonial territories. He enjoyed the power and position conferred by his official status. As Commissioner of Weihaiwei, Lockhart the Scot, was, it is not too absurd to argue, in the role of a Scottish chieftain, the overlord of a rude and hardy peasantry, related to his following through a web of personal relationships. He was a salaried official, but the term 'colonial official' tends to mask the fact that he succeeded in his various tasks not so much because of his rank but because of the enormous sympathy he had for Chinese, because he was a scholar who could establish easy social relationships with members of a very different race. And, to shift the analogy from Scotland, Lockhart's views on governing the Chinese were close to those held by the Confucian Mandarin to establish appropriate
78
HENRY JAMES LETHBRIDGE
many Chinese in Weihaiwei, where he was held in great esteem, who will lament the passing of a kindly and sympathetic administ- rator and a warm-hearted friend,'68
Lockhart's training in the Chinese classics, the staple educational fare for all Europeans in the nineteenth century who wished to master Chinese, drew him towards traditional and conservative forces in Chinest society. In Lockhart's time cadets studied, for example, the various publications of James Legge and were expected to understand, and to be able to translate from, Mencius and the Tso Chuan. Lockhart, like R.F. Johnston, did not reject in its entirety the old China that was being transformed slowly in his day. Thus, unlike some European missionaries and merchants, who looked forward eagerly to the breaking-up of China because they expected change would favour their respective interests, Lockhart did not want the China he knew and valued to be changed radically. He believed in a renovated China - a return of the Chinese to their antique virtues and a refurbishing of their institutions. He was not in sympathy with views held by members of the China Association,6" a London repository for Old China Hands such as T.H. Whitehead, and the clubmen of Shanghai and the Treaty Ports. On the other hand, as most of us are, he was a man of his time - a colonial official from a particular stratum of British society, who believed in his mission to govern, but to govern well, those territories of the Middle Kingdom taken over by the British in the nineteenth cen tury.
A vigorous man, physically and mentally, Lockhart was attracted by the challenges presented by the administration of newly acquired colonial territories. He enjoyed the power and position conferred by his official status. As Commissioner of Weihaiwei, Lockhart the Scot, was, it is not too absurd to argue, in the role of a Scottish chieftain, the overlord of a rude and hardy peasantry, related to his following through a web of personal relationships. He was a salaried official, but the term 'colonial official' tends to mask the fact that he succeeded in his various tasks not so much because of his rank but because of the enormous sympathy he had for Chinese, because he was a scholar who could establish easy social relationships with members of a very different race. And, to shift the analogy from Scotland, Lockhart's views on governing the Chinese were close to those held by the Confucian Mandarin to establish appropriate
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