the diplomacy surrounding the Sino-French War of 1885 for which he received the Order of the Double Dragon, third division, second class. In the following years Morse helped to audit and supervise the China Merchants' Steam Navigation Company, a joint venture between Chinese officials and merchants. He worked with Sheng Xuanhuai, but ran into trouble negotiating the political currents. Upon his resignation from the company in 1877, he was reassigned to Shanghai, where he supervised the Statistical Department. In the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, he found himself one of some two hundred and fifty members, most of whom worked for the Customs Service, and soon became one of the most productive. He and Nan were sent to Pakhoi (Mandarin: Beihai), on the north coast of the Gulf of Tonkin, in 1889, and then on a two-year leave in the United States. Their next posting was to Tamsui in Taiwan, where he was an important witness to the Japanese invasion of Taiwan in 1895. He then served in Pakhoi once more, Youzhou, Hunan, and Hankow. Poor health forced him to take leave from 1900–1903, but he returned to the Customs Service to head the Statistical Service from 1904 to 1908. He retired from the Customs Service in 1908. Second career: Morse the scholar and his role in the study of China Upon his retirement in 1908, rather than return to New England, which his wife disliked almost as much as China, the couple took up residence in Surrey, England. In 1909 he turned down feelers from the American government to become Ambassador to China. During the First World War, he became a British citizen (as he had been born in a British colony). He traveled frequently to the United States, and kept up relations with his Harvard classmates, including Charles Franklin Thwing, president of Western Reserve University. A long-time smoker, he died of pneumonia in February, 1934. Morse published his first large work in 1908, the year of his retirement, The Trade and Administration of the Chinese Empire. The first volume of The International Relations of the Chinese Empire came out in 1910 (the third and last volume in 1918). Articles in magazines and journals included "A Short Lived Republic," which recounted his resistance to the 1895 takeover of Taiwan by Japan and the attempt to establish an independent nation. His novel, In the Days of the