H.B. Morse

Hosea Ballou Morse (18 July 1855 – 13 February 1934) was a Canadian-born American customs official and historian of China. He served in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Custom Service from 1874 to 1908, but is best known for his scholarly publications after his retirement, most prominently The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, a three volume chronicle of the relations of the Qing dynasty with Western countries, and The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635–1834.

Morse descended from New England stock although for five generations his family lived in Nova Scotia, where he was born. The family returned to Medford, Massachusetts when Morse was young. He attended Boston Latin School and graduated from Harvard College in 1874, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He married Annie Josephine Welsford in London on February 8, 1881. The couple had no children of their own. After Morse's retirement, they lived in Surrey, England, and during World War I he became a British citizen. He was granted an honorary LL.D. from Western Reserve University in 1913 and an Honorary LL.D. from Harvard in his Fiftieth Reunion year, 1924. He died in on February 13, 1934 in Surrey, England.

In his senior year of college, Morse and three of his Harvard classmates were recruited to join the Imperial Maritime Custom Service under Sir Robert Hart, who had headed the Service since 1860. Morse was at first stationed in Shanghai, where he studied the northern dialect, Mandarin, for an hour each day before breakfast, and then served in Peking. His spoken Chinese became good enough for interpreting day-to-day business, but he could not read well enough to handle a wide variety of texts. He was posted to Tientsin in 1877, doing extra duty for the North China Famine of that winter and the following summer. When posted to the London office of the Customs Service, he met Annie Josephine Welsford – "Nan" – who had been born in Brooklyn to British parents. They were married in 1881. While in London, Morse also joined the Royal Asiatic Society and met a number of the leading Orientalists of the time. On the couple's subsequent posting to Tientsin, Nan took an almost instant dislike to China and the Chinese, though it is not clear how this affected her husband's attitudes. Morse was involved under Li Hongzhang's direction, in the diplomacy surrounding the Sino-French War of 1885 for which he received the Order of the Double Dragon, third division, second class.

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