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on the depth and interest of their writings. Some, like Archibald Colquhoun1 went into great detail describing the wealth of minerals, the scope for modernisation in communications and the economy, all subjects which Mesny too, at the same period if not earlier, had written about at length. Others like Mrs Scidmore2 list 'intrepid travellers to Szechuan3 and the far west,' with names like Richtofen, Pumpelly, Von Kreitner, Hosie, Baber, Blaikiston, Little, Gill, Hart, Parker, and Pratt, Mrs Little and Mrs Bishop, and Dr Morrison, but not one of these authors referred to Mesny whose travels and experiences outweigh most if not all of them. Was it because he was considered to have gone native or been more Chinese than ‘one of us"? We shall never know but each time yet another book was published it must have been galling for Mesny to find only very rarely he had earned a mention. After his trip with Gill to Tibet and India in 1877 he was scarcely referred to in books on China; this together with his constant and repeated reference to his contacts with and closeness to Chinese friends and acquaintances, mostly in high places, suggests that he was ostracised or perhaps no more than ignored by the western social community in Chinese ports and in Shanghai in particular.
During his later years when fortune seemed to elude him, when there was no caste lower than the impoverished European or American, a number of themes and points of view in Mesny's writings place him fairly firmly into a class and category of his time. A plague of self-importance swept late-Victorian Britain and spread through its colonies and dependencies. Mesny suffered a massive dose and never, as far as his Miscellany record, appears to have had his balloon pricked. He must have been seen by foreigners in Shanghai and, in particular by his fellow 'Old China Hands', during the latter years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this as a vulgar, low-born upstart, too fond of his own ideas, a self-centred braggart and an opinionated man, but let it be stressed that he would not be alone in this category in Shanghai or for that matter in all the other major western communities in the Orient. His own notes reflect the disdain with which he was regarded by people like Sir Thomas Wade and Sir Robert Hart. His name dropping in many of his writings, mostly in his personal relationships with Chinese viceroys, provincial governors and commanders in chief, suggests that he probably also dropped names to the same extent in everyday conversation. However, he knew the importance of patronage, especially in China, as one can see from his obituary of Tso, and his description of the momentary meeting with a Manchu hereditary prince.