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Highbury and in a position to encourage Fryer to enter into missionary service. Alford later became "Lord Bishop of the see of Victoria, and Warden (for the Church Missionary Society) of St. Paul's College in 1867". What seems certain is that Alford was instrumental in obtaining the appointment for Fryer at St. Paul's College, under the sponsorship of the Church Missionary Society, thus launching his career in China.
In the letter describing his "First Impressions" Fryer appears to have quickly adjusted to the culture shock of Hong Kong and its people. Through the course of the letter Fryer takes the reader, in this case the family and friends to whom he has written, on a walking tour first of the island and then of the College. After a brief description of the island's geology, flora, and fauna, Fryer offers his impressions of both colonizers and colonized. He is pithy at times and harsh at other times, yet perhaps not off the mark. The letter concludes with a walking tour of the building that housed St. Paul's College with comments on the ambience of the building, each of the rooms, the students, the methods of instruction, and the Chinese house staff.
In the letter we see Fryer coming to terms with the European community and with the Chinese, among whom he was to work and live for the next 35 years. We see a determination which includes both a mastery of the situation and an accommodation to the requirements of the missionary community and the various social hierarchies in which he chose to live and work. This assimilation was to serve Fryer well during his career in Hong Kong (1861-63), in Peking (1863-65) at the T'ung-wen Kuan, and in Shanghai (1865-96) primarily at the arsenal at Kiangnan, where he accomplished his major work as translator of books on Western science and technology.
The manuscript for "First Impressions ..." is to be found in the Fryer Papers in The Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. The papers contain both the holograph and a typewritten transcript made by Fryer many years later. Along with the holograph is a single sheet of paper with pen and ink drawings, tinted with watercolor, made of the floor plan of St. Paul's College, with the ground floor and the second floor on opposite sides of the sheet. Unfortunately, the ink and color of the sketches has run through the thin paper making them unsuitable for reproduction. An attempt has been made to reproduce the spirit of the sketches in the illustrations.