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# Appendix E
Potted Biographies
of
Chinese and Europeans
and
a list of Terms
which appear in the Mesny Saga
Baber, E Colbourne [1843-1890]:
HBM's Consul-General at Seoul, formerly HBM's Political Agent, Resident at Chungking. Mesny wrote that he had met Baber every day during his stay in Chungking in 1880 having first met him in the spring of 1877.
Chang Chih-tung:
ZIF
An Imperial official, born in 1837 died in 1909.
He was a reformer with close contact with foreigners, who remained a staunch Confucianist and a supporter of the Manchu dynasty. He was appointed governor of several Chinese provinces and was unusual in that he died poor, having lived an honest and comparatively frugal life. His reputation has remained as one who took the lead in the modernisation of Chinese economic life. Gretchen Mae Fitkin in her book The Great River, [North China Daily News, Shanghai 1922,] wrote that [the city of] Wu-chang under the idealistic rule of Viceroy Chang, branched out commercially and grew and prospered. He was a man of strange personality, an impractical dreamer, possessed of the spirit of the reformer and promotor (sic), but without either the stability to stick to one thing or the foresight to fit his plan with conditions. When he decided to start the iron and steel mills at Hanyang in [1890] he sent orders back to England for blast furnaces. The manufacturers wrote back for a sample of the ore. They manufactured two types of plant, each suitable to a distinct type of ore. But as Chang Chih-tung had not yet found the ore he could not send a sample. He insisted, however, on having the plant, and one was finally sent out. But it was not of the type suitable for the ore later discovered! One can see these furnaces today (1922) at the Hanyang Iron Works. According to OM Green [The Foreigner in China]