The surviving private papers of Robert Hart, Inspector General of the Imperial Maritime Customs, 1863-1911, were deposited at Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1971. They have been studied in part by a few scholars, including the present writer. Most of Hart's papers, private and official, were destroyed in the Boxer Revolution, when his house and office were burned, but his private diary, in 77 volumes, was saved from the general destruction by a 4th Assistant (B) of the Customs who carried it from the house in a black tin chest. Apart from the diary, the papers consist of loose materials, some 120 packages of private letters and miscellaneous printed Customs reports for the period 1900 through 1908.

I appreciate being here in this role, remembering those, including my teachers, who have stood here before me, and remembering the role of the AAS in providing the commonality from which all Asianists benefit, the freemasonry of shared learning. Most of us prefer to work individually as scholars, but none of us really works or writes alone. We are sustained by our links, in print and in person, with generations of fellow scholars. That vital nexus is greatly enhanced through our common enterprise in the Association, and we owe it and its dedicated staff a profound debt. This is our fortieth annual meeting, and we have much to celebrate: our sound organizational and financial position and—the object of all our collective efforts—a vigorous community of scholars of Asia.

In China during the Ch'ing period, as before, many Confucian values were so family-centered as to tolerate degrees of nepotism not acceptable in some other societies. Ideally, of course, Confucian values admitted of no conflict between loyalty to the Emperor and loyalty to close relatives and friends. Nevertheless, conflicts between public and private interests were recognized at least as early as the Meng-tzu and were typified in such expressions as “robbing the public to help the private” (chiakung chi-ssu) and “putting the family first and the nation last” (hsien chia-tsu erh hou kuo-chia). But whatever may have been the nepotistic intent of officials, there was during the Ch'ing period, at least before the Taiping rebellion, a great centralization of imperial authority.

How do we think about migration? This question was the topic of the first installment of the 2019 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, given by the exiled Russian journalist Masha Gessen, at Harvard University. Gessen, who had reported on immigrants, began with a story of a Montenegro man whose family fled to the United States when he was five. Then they told a second story, then a third, followed by fifty-four more stories of individuals’ sorrows, despair, and dreams. Gessen's intent was to bring to life individual migrants, underscoring their diverse experiences. Individuality and complexity matter, because too often, people on the move are reduced to numbers in the news and in the eyes of governments.