ROBERT HART (1835-1911) was one of those proconsuls of the Victorian age who built the empire-except that he did it in China, where he built an arm of government, the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service. That a young Irishman from Belfast should become a chief fiscal administrator of the Chinese Empire fascinated the foreign community in China and has intrigued historians ever since. Thus far, Hart's career as a modernizer has become visible chiefly through the 1,437 letters he wrote to his London agent, James Duncan Campbell. The two volymes of The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart, Chinese Maritine Customs, 1868-1907 (edited by John King Fairbank, Katherine Frost Bruner, and Elizabeth MacLeod Matheson, with an introduction by L. K. Little, Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1975) illuminate the center of Western influence in the last years of the Ch'ing dynasty (1644-1912) of the Manchus in China. This present volume, based on Hart's early journals, stems from the stage prior to the letters. But first the letters' provenance must be explained.