ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG
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however, he was attempting to start a company with the professed intention of working his new-found country, we thought it our duty to let Hong Kong know both sides of the story of his adventures. Even supposing the adventurer's conduct to have been straight, we can scarcely conceive how any speculators in Hong Kong could be induced to embark in such an enterprise. Meantime for a
Hong Kong Company to think of opening up trade with such an inaccessible country as the Sedangs is the most Quixotic project that has ever been mooted in Hong Kong."37
The next day the vitriolic but loyal Fraser-Smith dashed into print to defend the departed King in a long diatribe against the Mail. The article, as a good specimen of Hong Kong journalism at the time, should be quoted from in extenso:
The article in last night's China Mail regarding M. de Mayréna the King of the Sedangs, is like the former attacks made by this religious journal on that gentleman, a tissue of barefaced falsehoods, published out of sheer malice. “Another King" has not gone into exile, as the gutter scribe of the China Mail gleefully records. M. de Mayréna has gone to Paris to assert his rights, and where he will have some chance of obtaining fair play and justice. With his influential connections in the French capital, there seems no reason to doubt that his position and claims will be fully vindicated. And when he does return to this colony, which will probably be in about four months' time, the cowardly libeller of the China Mail will summarily be called to account. We should do it with a strong horsewhip; M. de Mayréna will take criminal proceedings for defamatory libel. As we have already indicated, our contemporary's latest attack on the King of the Sedangs—prudently made after that gentleman had left the colony—bristles with inaccuracies and ignorance. The writer is as weak in his geography as he is reckless in his alleged facts. He does not even know where the Sedangs country is. The "one reader" of the China Mail is assured that if the cruiser Filipinas had been purchased by the King "it could never have even reached the country unless it was transported overland." The Mekong, by far the largest and most important river in Indo-China, runs right through the Sedangs country, dividing it from Siam, and is navigable beyond Stung Treg, the chief town in Sedangs. It is further untrue, as affirmed by the China Mail, that M. de Mayréna attempted "to start a company in this co-