Papers of F. Alan Robinson

One file relates to Robinson's work in the Salt Revenue Department and includes papers given at a Salt Affairs Conference in January-February 1929. The rest of the papers concern the history of the Reorganisation Loan of 1913, the complications caused by the nationalisation of banks in Russia after the 1917 Russian Revolution leading to the exchange of new bonds for the original ones, the collapse of the Russo-Asiatic Bank in 1926 which caused this exchange to cease and the resumption of the exchange in 1929 to 1930. The papers includes correspondence and telegrams, notes of meetings, a register of bonds and claimants, and other related papers.

F. Alan Robinson went to China in 1909 to work for the British Supreme Court. In 1919 he joined the Salt Revenue Department. It had been a proviso of the Reorganisation Loan of 1913, a £25,000,000 loan raised by Britain, the USA, France, Russia and Japan to enable China to carry out a modernisation programme, that a number of foreigners should join the Salt Revenue Department to ensure that the Department operated efficiently and effectively. In 1929 Robinson was sent to Paris to oversee the exchange of new green bonds for the yellow ones, originally issued by the Russo-Asiatic Bank which had gone into liquidation.

Open

Donated by F.A. Robinson's son in 1979.

This description constitutes the only finding aid at present.