WATCHING, AS INTERNAL disruption threatened to tear the country apart in 1917, Guy Hillier confided in Addis his sense of exasperation, but concluded, ‘we can only cling to our belief in the indestructibility of China and of those national qualities which we must hope will bring the country through in the end’. Encapsulating not only his own feelings but also those of his family since his grandparents, Walter and Betty Medhurst, first arrived in Malacca one hundred years before, his comment explains why we need to explore this sort of family story and to examine the impulses that stimulated that belief. Over three generations, members of the family lived and worked in East and Southeast Asia, their public lives intersecting with many of the major events which shaped Sino-British relations, whilst their private lives helped establish and sustain the British presence. To understand the nature of that presence, we need to understand the processes that underpinned it.

This study has argued that family played a major role in that process. Operating as a social unit or mechanism, it generated a collective mind that enabled and informed empire careers and developed networks and practices that consolidated Britain's presence and gave an identity to this part of the British World. By focussing on family, we have also been able to see how that presence was shaped by, and dependent upon, collaborative relationships with Chinese officials and how, by mediating between the Western and Chinese communities, officials like the Medhursts and Hilliers facilitated those relationships. Whilst family was a key mechanism for shaping empire, at the same time, familial relations were themselves being constantly re-shaped. The relationship between family and empire was, thus, mutually constitutive.

Although the British presence has long since ended, these events remain relevant today for at least three reasons. First, both in Britain, where little is known of this history, and in China, where it is remembered as the ‘century of national humiliation’, there is a need to sweep away the myths and understand how this presence was effected over such a lengthy period in order to evaluate its impact on both cultures, then and now.