50
His experience when assaulted by Chinese soldiers in Wu-chang during his holiday outing.
10 Mesny's Chinese Miscellany: Volume 2: 10 September 1896: page 449
In 1992 Miss Lucie Mesny in Jersey explained that as a child she had never encountered any elderly lady, a member of family, called Lydia, who had been only two years younger than William Mesny and therefore would have been only in her mid-sixties when Miss Lucie was a child, if of course Lydia had still been alive
12 Mesny was referring to what had been a very recent incident when the Germans had sent a few hundred soldiers to I-chou in Shantung province 'to bring the local populace to their senses.'
13
Presumably the good Doctor Dudgeon was John Dudgeon, who lived in Tientsin towards the end of the nineteenth century, the author of Chinese Arts of Healing, a series in the Chinese Recorder in 1869/70; The Great Medical College at Peking (in the Chinese Recorder February 1870); The Disgusting Nature of Chinese Medicines (also in the Chinese Recorder in March 1870); The Worship of the Moon (Chinese Recorder in Mar/Apr 1882), "The Beverages of the Chinese: and finally Kung-fu or Taoist Medical Gymnastics (Tientsin: 1895).
14
It is strange that Mesny should have been unaware of the legend of the powerful and ubiquitous Northern Emperor, 玄天上帝 a deity whose aides are a turtle and snake, frequently portrayed wrapped around each other at the feet of the image of the deity in Taoist and folk religion temples, and referred to as Generals.
15 Yun-yü, the Clouds and Rain, is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse
16
This was recorded in his Miscellanies in 1896 as Tsung-ping: translated as 'Regional Commander', rank 2a in the Chinese military forces of the Green Standards [lu-ying], subordinate to the Provincial Military Commander and Province Governors. [Hucker C.O., A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China: Stanford University Press: 1985]
11 Colquhoun A R: China in Transformation: Harper and Bros: New York and London. 1898 (and other books)
Scidmore E R. China - The Long-lived Empire: MacMillan & Co. London: 1900
Appendix A
Mesny's Chinese Miscellany
Each weekly issue of the Miscellany, edited and printed in Shanghai during 1896, 1899 and 1905, with a run of one thousand copies, began with Notes on China and Chinese Subjects later renamed Anglo-Chinese Notes, an arbitrary, catholic and unstructured collection of items ranging from natural subjects such as the names in English and Chinese of trees, plants etc with a short description presumably culled from a major tome on the subject, to historical and mythological items, geographical descriptions mostly in western China, and a long section