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regular references to his deep knowledge of things Chinese and in particular, their formal rituals. As with many foreign writers on China and the Chinese, Mesny frequently implied exclusive access to hidden corners. This was indisputable because, whilst most foreigners who pride themselves on having Chinese friends and have visited them at home, even perhaps having stayed with them, few have the opportunity afforded to Mesny when he served with the Chinese military forces and lived as one with them on the staff. However, in retrospect we can see that Mesny knew little of the private life, thoughts and policies of the native Chinese higher classes, or more importantly, of the ruling Manchus, simply through his lack of access. The great majority of foreigners in China were dependent upon what they could glean from their native interpreters whose depth of understanding was limited by their lack of knowledge, especially about state policies. Such people as Mesny, foreigners who spoke and read Chinese and had Chinese contacts, were one up on the foreigners who heavily depended upon their Chinese employees, but for Mesny to maintain his credibility with possible foreign investors he had to clutch at any crumb from the tables of the great and worthy, hence his repeated name dropping. It is also well nigh impossible to judge simply from his own account of events the extent to which Mesny understood the power politics of senior Chinese Imperial military officers or the nuances of the accusations aimed at a number of the generals. If he did, then his poignant description of the removal and demotion of his own Commander-in-chief from his command in Kueichou is very sympathetic.
Shanghai, where Mesny spent many of his later years, was one of the first Treaty Ports, opened in 1842, and by the turn of the century the largest foreign settlement in the East with a western population of many thousands. Mesny spent all but five of his last thirty-three years in the city.
A Briton, Oliver Ready3, writing in 1904 of the time when Mesny first reached China said, 'Forty odd years ago, at the close of the second great war [i.e. 1860, the year in which Mesny reached the China coast], China was a veritable Eldorado for Europeans, where all turned to gold beneath the slightest touch of alien hands. Fortunes were made with startling rapidity, and money came in so freely that the standard of living amongst foreign merchants and their employees reached such preposterous heights of luxuriousness, that even when the inevitable reaction set in, want, and even ruin, supervened where plenty should have been found. Forty years ago the foreign trade was practically monopolised by Englishmen, who only had to place their goods on the market of
8
regular references to his deep knowledge of things Chinese and in particular, their formal rituals. As with many foreign writers on China and the Chinese, Mesny frequently implied exclusive access to hidden corners. This was indisputable because, whilst most foreigners who pride themselves on having Chinese friends and have visited them at home, even perhaps having stayed with them, few have the opportunity afforded to Mesny when he served with the Chinese military forces and lived as one with them on the staff. However, in retrospect we can see that Mesny knew little of the private life, thoughts and policies of the native Chinese higher classes, or more importantly, of the ruling Manchus, simply through his lack of access. The great majority of foreigners in China were dependent upon what they could glean from their native interpreters whose depth of understanding was limited by their lack of knowledge, especially about state policies. Such people as Mesny, foreigners who spoke and read Chinese and had Chinese contacts, were one up on the foreigners who heavily depended upon their Chinese employees, but for Mesny to maintain his credibility with possible foreign investors he had to clutch at any crumb from the tables of the great and worthy, hence his repeated name dropping. It is also well nigh impossible to judge simply from his own account of events the extent to which Mesny understood the power politics of senior Chinese Imperial military officers or the nuances of the accusations aimed at a number of the generals. If he did, then his poignant description of the removal and demotion of his own Commander-in-chief from his command in Kueichou is very sympathetic.
Shanghai, where Mesny spent many of his later years, was one of the first Treaty Ports, opened in 1842, and by the turn of the century the largest foreign settlement in the East with a western population of many thousands, Mesny spent all but five of his last thirty-three years in the city.
A Briton, Oliver Ready3, writing in 1904 of the time when Mesny first reached China said, 'Forty odd years ago, at the close of the second great war [i.e. 1860, the year in which Mesny reached the China coast], China was a veritable Eldorado for Europeans, where all turned to gold beneath the slightest touch of alien hands, Fortunes were made with startling rapidity, and money came in so freely that the standard of living amongst foreign merchants and their employees reached such preposterous heights of luxuriousness, that even when the inevitable reaction set in, want, and even ruin, supervened where plenty should have been found. Forty years ago the foreign trade was practically monopolised by Englishmen, who only had to place their goods on the market of
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