14
mostly written by himself, which sadly adds little to our overall knowledge.
One of the problems is dating, not only of his personal life though the general outline is well defined, but also the dates prior to publication when he wrote up the notes and the final narratives. There would appear to be times when flashes of inspired hindsight have been included into episodes of his biography or into his essays on China's recent past, her problems and how they should be solved.
Mesny's writings have brought to life again a number of now long forgotten aspects of life in China in the nineteenth century. It was not a China of pagodas, silk, tea and pigtails but one of hostility, dirt, bug-ridden towns and villages, a mass of poverty-stricken peasants and the ever-present threat of early death from disease. We tend to forget or overlook the acceptance as a norm in those days of the complications and tedium caused by time, distance, and poor communications when it took days and even weeks of tiring travel on foot or on the backs of animals to reach the capital of a neighbouring province. Nowadays we also tend to imagine that during Imperial days the peasant population of China was fairly sedentary with little knowledge of much beyond the neighbouring village or the annual district fair. Mesny describes at one point how memories of distant parts of China were brought home to their villages by the many individuals who served with armies suppressing revolts in distant provinces such as Mongolia, Yunnan and Dzungaria [now part of Sinkiang province]; and, for example, how far and wide the Cantonese, as traders, had spread their presence. Mesny also vividly brings alive on a number of occasions the atmosphere in which foreigners, often alone or in very small parties, were out on a limb in far-flung parts of China with ever-increasing xenophobia, and with anti-foreign violence threatening their very lives.
The Miscellanies contained remarkably few illustrations. All were photographs of people apart from several poorly reproduced photographs in 1905 of astronomical instruments in the Peking Observatory before they were borne off to Germany by the German contingent during the Boxer rebellion in 1900, and one litho in Volume 4 of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, merely recording who it represented. The picture of Chu Yuan-chang in all his ugliness was also reproduced later in 1910 in a small book also printed in Shanghai written by William Kahler, 'Chinese Hotchpotch', accompanying one of the articles reprinted from
14
mostly written by himself, which sadly adds little to our overall knowledge.
One of the problems is dating, not only of his personal life though the general outline is well defined, but also the dates prior to publication when he wrote up the notes and the final narratives. There would appear to be times when flashes of inspired hindsight have been included into episodes of his biography or into his essays on China's recent past, her problems and how they should be solved.
Mesny's writings have brought to life again a number of now long forgotten aspects of life in China in the nineteenth century. It was not a China of pagodas, silk, tea and pigtails but one of hostility, dirt, bug- ridden towns and villages, a mass of poverty-stricken peasants and the ever-present threat of early death from disease. We tend to forget or overlook the acceptance as a norm in those days of the complications and tedium caused by time, distance, and poor communications when it took days and even weeks of tiring travel on foot or on the backs of animals to reach the capital of a neighbouring province. Nowadays we also tend to imagine that during Imperial days the peasant population of China was fairly sedentary with little knowledge of much beyond the neighbouring village or the annual district fair. Mesny describes at one point how memories of distant parts of China were brought home to their villages by the many individuals who served with armies suppressing revolts in distant provinces such as Mongolia, Yunnan and Dzungaria [now part of Sinkiang province]; and, for example, how far and wide the Cantonese, as traders, had spread their presence. Mesny also vividly brings alive on a number of occasions the atmosphere in which foreigners, often alone or in very small parties, were out on a limb in far flung parts of China with ever increasing xenophobia, and with anti-foreign violence threatening their very lives.
The Miscellanies contained remarkably few illustrations. All were photographs of people apart from several poorly reproduced photographs in 1905 of astronomical instruments in the Peking Observatory before they were borne off to Germany by the German contingent during the Boxer rebellion in 1900, and one litho in Volume 4 of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, merely recording who it represented. The picture of Chu Yuan-chang in all his ugliness was also reproduced later in 1910 in a small book also printed in Shanghai written by William Kahler, 'Chinese Hotchpotch', accompanying one of the articles reprinted from
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