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In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876-1888. By Wayne Patterson. Berkeley: Center for Korean Studies, 2012. 193 pp. (ISBN: 978-1-55729-100-4)
A great regret of mine is having only recently found the time to read this wonderful book. Wayne Patterson's study of William Nelson Lovatt (1838-1904), first Commissioner of Customs at Pusan (1883-1886), tells a good, gripping story and complements a few other, similar works we have. It is a well-wrought biography of an insider to the Korean Customs Service. Patterson's background and knowledge are exactly what are needed to bring us the full significance of the tale. Patterson had one of those rare moments, envied by all historians, when someone he happened to meet asked him if he would be interested in a cache of personal letters and documents by "a man who had worked in East Asia in the late nineteenth century." The resultant book is history at its most authentic, and I can report that the book is refreshingly devoid of mindless distractions about whatever fashionable theory currently clamours for attention.
Lovatt served the Korean throne at a critical juncture when Chinese policy was moving away from the benevolence of the sadae arrangement and towards outright intervention, even reaching towards annexation. First in the employ of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service and then the first Commissioner of Customs at Pusan, Lovatt was often separated from his wife and family. He wrote copiously to his loved ones about his professional career in the service of the Korean king and about his personal life. Close to my own interests, Lovatt's letters offer an excellent view from the ground and from outside Seoul of how the Customs Service operated in the febrile atmosphere created by Li Hung-chang, Sir Robert Hart, Paul Georg von Möllendorff, and Henry F. Merrill. But, there is much more to be enjoyed in the extensive texture of life Patterson weaves for us as Lovatt and his family lived as the first western family in the predominately Japanese city of 1880's Pusan. One can hear the sea in the distance and smell the salt air. The book is divided into four parts that provide background on the establishment of the Customs Service,...