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post on the Yangzi,' a place where John Mesny, William's brother, had also been employed in the Imperial Customs, 'If you belonged to the Duff faction you couldn't speak to a clerk of Bean's if you passed him on the Bund; if you belonged to the Bean faction (and Bean was the drinking, swearing, concubine-keeping Scotsman) you were taboo in three houses where there were wives, and therefore decent entertainment.' But if you frequented Starkey, the hospitable, or Emery with his lawful Chinese wife, you were ostracised by the wealthy faction."
Transit passes
You will recall that Mason, according to the Inspector General of Customs, had a grip on the subject of Transit Passes. E. H. Parker, who retired in 1895 to become the Professor of Chinese in Manchester, had been Consul in Zhenjiang in about 1877/78 and he explained that "from the first day of his arrival piles of mysterious documents came pouring into the office which demanded immediate attention.42 These were 'Bonds to be signed by British merchants, guaranteeing that the goods brought down under transit-pass were their own property, and undertaking to export them at once. The chief staples were 'donkey-skins, lily-flowers and melon-seeds'. The question he asked his predecessor during the hand-over was 'What do we do with donkey-skins in England?' The reply was that it was no business of the Consul : the British merchant swears they're his, and that's all the Consul has to do with it. After the departure of his predecessor Parker asked one of the British merchants the same question. He replied that he had not the remotest idea what was done with the donkey-skins, but that they were certainly his, 'in a way,' the question of joint interest being a 'custom of the trade'. The export of donkey-skins at the time was enormous, certainly several hundred tons a week. The Daotai was a fine, tall, gentlemanly old man, who had been a Peking Foreign Office clerk. He knew nothing of anything, and only wanted peace and quietness. He, like Parker, thought that donkeys never died, neither had ever seen a dead donkey anytime during their lives, and was quite unable to explain the mystery. He added, however, that he understood from the merchants that the well-to-do classes in England took donkey-skins and tea as a tonic. Parker told him that he did not believe a single donkey-skin ended up in England to which the Daotai added that he had a shrewd idea that melon-seeds and lily-flowers don't go there either'.