59
prevail elsewhere, and some of the descriptions held good for the whole of China. But,' continued Mesny, 'China is a large Empire, and General Tcheng was too young when he left China for Europe to have seen much of his own country. He was no doubt much better acquainted with Parisian manners and customs than with many manners and customs which prevail in many parts of the Chinese Empire. Nevertheless, his book deserves to be read more than once, even by me, who have seen so much more of China and the Chinese than General Tcheng has so far. Had I the literary qualifications of the writer of Les Chinois, Peints par Eux-memes, I could write at least a dozen such books on China and the Chinese without exhausting the stock of information I have acquired during my forty-four years' residence in the country. I have been treated in some parts of China much the same as General Tcheng was treated in Paris,'
The Miscellany probably just about paid its way though from the occasional note of sadness though not despair which appears from time to time, Mesny must have continued more for the desire to make a living and perhaps also to keep his name before the public eye rather than to earn a fortune. It was by no means smooth going and at times he must have upset individuals and even groups such as the announcement he made in July 1899 that his Miscellany was being boycotted by the press, bankers, insurance and shipping agencies and by shopkeepers. He bemoaned the fact [Volume II, Issue 28: Sep 1896] that the loss on the first year's publication was over $2,000.
Several times in the course of his Miscellanies Mesny repeats a disclosure of a titbit of news or political scandal to prove that he was first and that the North China Daily News and the Shanghai Mercury had simply copied his original scoop without attribution.
A number of magazines were being published around this time on the China Coast such as The East of Asia Magazine, printed and published by the North China Herald Office in Shanghai, a quarterly illustrated consisting of essays on topical subjects such as Chinese customs and superstitions, gems of Chinese poetry, bits of Fukien travel, Ningpo under the T'ai-ping's, etc mostly written by reasonably well known people. It only ran for a couple of years. Another was Social Shanghai, a monthly glossy journal relating western social happenings mostly in Shanghai but in a few instances referring to the outports. It consisted of the usual society articles, including births, deaths and marriages, the races, and lengthy pieces about the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. This ran