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during his first journey into the interior from Hankow to begin his career with one of the new local armies of the Chinese Imperial forces. Potted biographies of Mesny have been little more than loosely connected accounts of the major incidents in his life and have presented a one-dimensional figure. Had he not been made a general in the Chinese Imperial Army with which he served for a mere six years, the other forty-five years of his life would probably have merited 300 words towards the foot of the obituaries page in a local paper. Also, without the four volumes of his Miscellany, which tend to be our sole source-material, virtually all record of his service with the Chinese army would have been lost.
For at least part of his life Mesny lived at one end of an extreme, as a westerner who dressed as a Chinese, lived in a Chinese home and absorbed Chinese ways semi-consciously. The other end of the extreme were the westerners who lived out their working lives in treaty ports moving from office to club to home, and making sure that they never had any contacts with the natives nor learnt a single word of their language. He seems to have been an engaging character, though pretentious and extravagant, whose fascinating life, although insignificant in the run of Chinese history, was no more exciting or unique than many other westerners who led equally exciting lives on the China coast during the same era, the difference being that remarkably few wrote about them and those who did were usually fairly staid travellers describing their journeys across the Chinese empire. Mesny went several stages further, writing notes and autobiographical essays. Many were self-serving memoirs, which he published in Shanghai in his own periodical, the four volumes of Mesny's Chinese Miscellanies [described in detail in Appendix A] consisting not only of events within China, especially ones he considered important insofar as they affected his personal life and activities but also, more importantly, colourful observations during the second half of the 19th century in China reflecting the atmosphere, the social and military structures of the lower echelons of Chinese officialdom, foreign fortune seekers during the earlier days of the Treaty Ports and also, to a certain extent, the social life of the middle strata of foreigners on the China coast. Although he did not fully appreciate it, his notes on the Chinese military forces at that time and in particular the day-to-day details of military operations within a Chinese provincial army are unique. Although certain colour emerges from the foreign news telegrams of the day reproduced in his later volumes, it is singularly disappointing that he wrote so little on the momentous changes occurring in China at the turn of the century.