CHINA THROUGH WESTERN EYES

Manuscript Records of Traders, Travellers, Missionaries and Diplomats, 1792-1842

Part 7: The Diaries of G E Morrison (1862-1920), Peking correspondent of The Times from 1897, and political adviser to the President of China, 1912-1920, from the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

G.E. Morrison

Morrison trained as a doctor, but, seeking a more varied life, became a correspondent of The Times, and was in China during and after the Boxer Rebellion. From 1912 to 1920 he served as political adviser to Yuan Shih-K’ai, President of the new Chinese Republic, and his successors. During Morrison’s lifetime, the exact bounds of Britain’s influence in China were uncertain, and other countries, notably Russia, Germany and Japan sought to expand. His diaries cover Western and Japanese expansion, the collapse of the old imperial order, and the birth and disintegration of the new republic. In this seventh part of China Through Western Eyes, Adam Matthew Publications is proud to present his diaries in full. These diaries, held at the Mitchell Library, New South Wales, run from 1878 to 1920. The chronological sequence is complete from 1899 onwards.

Biography

The outline of Morrison’s life can easily be assembled from his diaries and from the detailed Reminiscences he dictated later in his life to his wife. George Ernest Morrison was born in February 1862 in Geelong, Australia, where his father had recently founded what was to become Geelong College. Morrison was educated there and at Melbourne University, reading medicine. The diaries of his youth attest to the importance of sport in the education of Victorian boys; there are details of school sport and also of Australian cricketers, and of the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. Morrison’s imagination was seized by the encounter of the journalist Stanley with the explorer and doctor Livingstone in 1871. To a young boy living on the edges of continent with a mysterious interior, the lure was irresistible. He dedicated one of his journal books to Livingstone, (‘wholly without permission’), and his canoe was called ‘Stanley.’ Morrison’s own life can be seen as a combination of doctor, journalist and explorer. He wanted to explore and to make known areas of which Europeans were ignorant. This is true both of Australia in his youth and of China as an adult, with the emphasis increasingly shifting onto politics and business. Whilst at University he travelled extensively on foot across Australia and noted in his Reminiscences that one ‘walk proved how great had been the progress of colonisation in the interior during the years that had elapsed since the Burke and Wilkes party.’ This expedition, following a route from Normanton to Melbourne, twenty-one years earlier, had only one survivor.

Having failed his second professional examination Morrison signed on as an able seaman. While leading an expedition in New Guinea he was wounded by a native spear. Fragments of this were removed from his thigh in Edinburgh by John Chiene, professor of surgery at Edinburgh University, where Morrison had resumed his studies in 1884. He graduated MB and ChM in 1887, proceeding to MD in 1895. (His thesis was titled, ‘Hereditary Transmission of various Malformations and Abnormalities.’) After trying unsuccessfully in Newfoundland, Philadelphia, New York and Jamaica to find employment, he worked as a doctor in a Rio Tinto mine in Spain during 1888-89.  

Morrison returned to Australia in 1890, after an absence of nearly six years. From 1891– 1893 he was resident surgeon at Ballarat hospital. He then moved to Hong Kong, and the following year travelled by horse and foot from Shanghai to Rangoon. These travels led to his only book, An Australian in China: being the narrative of a quiet journey across China to British Burma, published in London, 1895. As Morrison wrote in his Reminiscences:

I was offered £ 1000 a year to stay in Victoria as a doctor, but found that I could go home to England as a surgeon [and] arrive there with £30 and the MS. account of my journey across China. There was never any doubt as to the decision. The craze of travel had bitten me. I had never seriously contemplated the discomforts of medical practice. I decided to go home.

This book was very well received; its title may echo John L Dow, An Australian in America, published in Melbourne in 1884. Morrison determined on being a journalist, and after various rejections elsewhere, a meeting with CF Moberly Bell, editor of The Times, led to his appointment as a secret correspondent in Siam (now Thailand), an area that Morrison reckoned was insufficiently known. Two years later he was appointed resident correspondent in Peking. He travelled widely over the next fifteen years, visiting every province of China. He did not reach Tibet. His journeys include Manchuria/Siberia (1897: Statensk to Vladivostok), and Beijing to the French border at Tonquin (1907). His final long journey in 1910 was a six month trip, from Honan (central China) to Russian Turkestan, and then onto Europe.

Morrison spent substantial amounts of time travelling outside China, visiting Australia and travelling regularly to Europe, either via Aden and Suez, or by going via North America. In London in 1899, Morrison recorded (Nov 17) that ‘there was great anxiety regarding the capture of Winston Churchill.’ Morrison himself was soon to become the object of news rather than a reporter of news. He was in Peking during the Boxer rebellion, and, following reports of his death during the siege of the legations, The Times published his obituary on 17 July 1900.  The obituary commented on his integrity as a journalist and his importance as an accurate conduit of intelligence concerning British interests, an intriguing insight into the obituarist’s perception of the role of the journalist.  Morrison in fact had been wounded. His account of the siege of the legations is detailed, and could be compared in attitude and style with other contemporary documents of Britons under siege, both in China and in South Africa.  

The next major crisis (at least from the European perspective) in East Asia was the Russo-Japanese war. Morrison supported the Japanese, partly because Russia was still occupying Manchuria, in defiance of recent treaties, and was present at the triumphal entry into Port Arthur in 1905. He represented The Times at the Portsmouth peace conference the same year.

In 1912 Morison left The Times and became political adviser to Yuan Shih-K’ai, second president of the new Chinese Republic that had been declared at Nanking on Jan 1 1912. The reason for this move seems in part to be financial. His salary as a journalist was not high. Morrison’s diaries normally contain an annual financial reckoning. In 1899 he valued his 2500 books at £ 250, or a fifth of his worth. His library he eventually sold in 1917 for £ 35 000, and particularly as his health deteriorated, he worried about financial provision for his young family.

The Chinese Republic had been declared at Nanking on Jan 1 1912. The first president, Dr Sun Yat Sen, resigned on Feb 13 1912, the day after the last Ching emperor, P’u-I (1906-1967) had announced his abdication. The potential of the new president, and his willing to adopt Western methods of organisation, had been noted by Western observers before the Boxer rebellion. He sought to reform the bureaucracy and the educational system, and to strengthen the economy. He sent elite students to study abroad. His policies have been compared to those of Bismarck, but their effect was short-lived, since he had not taken into account their political impact or the expansionist policies of Japan. He aimed, with the support of the Dowager Empress, to restore a Confucian style emperor, and to this end accepted the throne in December 1915. But his generals did not support him, so he stood down in March 1916, and died three months later, his authority in tatters. Central authority disintegrated with him, and his legacy to China was not reform but, until 1949, generals as war-lords.

He married his secretary, Jennie Wark in 1912. They had three sons. Morrison died, while on leave in England, in Sidmouth on 30 May 1920. He had been unwell for the previous year, and had had operations in London. Ten days before his death he wrote, ‘My own hope now is to get back to China. I do not wish to die, but if I have to die let it be in Peking among the Chinese who have treated me with such consideration for so many years!’ One of the last of his visitors was Sir Ernest Satow. The Times published Morrison’s updated obituary on 31 May.

The diaries

As hinted above, the arrangement of Morrison’s diaries is somewhat complex. The early run of diaries up to 1899 is not complete, though his Reminiscence provides full coverage. From 1899 to 1801 the diaries exist in multiple version, some being retrospective rewrites of contemporary impressions. The work done by JB Capper on Morrison’s papers in the 1920s needs to be taken into account. Capper, in a manuscript note added to the collection, notes that the publishers Messrs Constable had accepted the first two volumes of Morrison’s diaries for publication, but that the trustees had declined to proceed because they considered that insufficient time had elapsed since the events described. A secondary consideration was the unflattering description of some people. This last fact may explain why some pages are missing, from the original diaries, from Morrison’s retrospective interpretations, and from the Capper papers. The diaries of Morrison post 1900 that survive are of two sorts. First there is a large diary with one page or more given to each day. These diaries are, usually, ‘Lett’s Indian and Colonial Rough Diary.’ These are used extensively, and blank days can normally be attributed to illness or to travel. The structure of the meetings described would indicate that Morrison summarised after the meeting rather than noting during the meeting. These diaries also served as a basis for his despatches to London. Second there are some much smaller pocket diaries, used for more personal notes, such as health details, and as a schedule of engagements. In both diaries the ink for some entries is weak.

It should also be noted that the Morrison diaries have been recatalogued since the original filming. Old cataloguing targets, where found, have been left in place, to aid cross referencing with earlier secondary material. This applies mostly to the material from reel 114 onwards.

Importance

Morrison’s career illustrates the dramatic improvement in international communications and the development of foreign influence over China. They mention his links with both native and western officials. Figures mentioned include Chinese political figures, and Western and Japanese businessmen and diplomats, and their households. Morrison provides an informed perspective on the collapse of integrated national authority.

Historiographically, Morrison is unusual in that he was tied to China neither by consular and diplomatic duties, nor by the requirements of commercial involvement or business. Morrison’s diaries contain much material on the limits of British power and the relation between formal and informal empires. Comparisons can be made with South Africa, the ‘Raj’ in India, or Australia. Within China there is the example of debates about treaty ports, and the extension of Japanese influence. The diaries can be combined usefully with other parts of the China Through Western Eyes project, and with the East Asian sections of the Church Missionary Society Archive. One name that occurs often in the diaries is that of Sir Ernest Satow; he was one of Morrison’s last visitors in Sidmouth. Morrison mentions missionaries periodically (though he shows no missionary zeal himself).  There is some material on how Britain perceived colour and race in the management of its possessions, a point made more poignant by the fact that while Britain’s Australian possessions achieved a measure of self government (as well as female suffrage: see International Women’s Suffrage), similar requests from India were denied. There is also information on how the Chinese government responded to the expansion of the Japanese sphere of interest, such as the Twenty-One Demands of January 1915. Finally, the business and financial aspects can be explored further in Business and Financial Papers, Series 1. This includes The Anglo-Japanese Gazette (1902-9) and The Eastern World. A Weekly Journal for Law, Commerce, Politics, Literature and Useful Information (1899-1908).

Morrison’s wider importance in presenting China to the world, beyond the abortive attempt to publish his edited diaries in the 1920s, is illustrated by the fact that in 1932 Chinese residents in Australia founded an annual series of lectures on China in his honour. (These are reviewed in the Journal of East Asian History.) His library was acquired by Baron H Iwasaki, founder of the Oriental Library in Tokyo, in 1917.

Morrison’s wife died in 1923. His eldest son, Ian Morrison, also became a correspondent of The Times; he was killed in the Korean War. His daughter-in-law was the photographer Hedda Morrison (1908-1991), famous for her depictions of life in China in the 1930s. Some 6000 of her photos are currently being digitised by Harvard-Yenching Library.

Select bibliography

The correspondence of GE Morrison. Vol.1 1895-1912 ed H.M. Lo Cambridge, 1976

The correspondence of GE Morrison. Vol.2 1912-1920, ed H.M. Lo
Cambridge, 1978

(Chinese edition, Shanghai, 1986)

Morrison, George, An Australian in China : being the narrative of a quiet journey across China to British Burma London : H. Cox, 1895

(reprinted in facsimile, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972, and Oxford/Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1985.)

Catalogue of the Asiatic library of Dr. G. E. Morrison, now a part of the Oriental Library, Tokyo, Japan, ed. Toyo Bunko Part. 1. English books. Part 2. Books in other languages than English. Tokyo : Oriental Library, 1924

Pearl, Cyril, Morrison of Peking, Sydney 1967

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