Mesny's Personal Life
PART TWO
Considering how detailed and verbose Mesny could be in his writings it is surprising how little we know about his personal life during the later years. A certain amount about his well-being and illnesses, his religion and his relationships with the female sex during his first fifteen to twenty years in China can be extracted from his autobiographical snippets but on the whole they add little but colour to the overall picture. He did however reveal relatively more to us about his financial situation but only because it had deteriorated and was obviously causing him great anxiety.
Mesny must have lived from hand to mouth for most of his later years. He had always had an eye for the big break and though at times he seemed to make himself a small fortune, though we never hear the details, he soon enough appears to have reverted to scraping by. He loved the adventure of travel and for some years managed to earn sufficient or at least obtain adequate sponsorship to visit all eighteen provinces of China. However, the day came when he could just dream. In 1896, at age of 54, he wrote that being strong and active though getting old, he would like to make an expedition to Lhasa [he called it Lassa]. He bemoaned the fact that he had not the necessary funds - but, he wrote, if he had had sufficient he would liked to have journeyed to Mukden [Shenyang] and Kirin, then via the Amur region, return via Urga [Ulan Bataar] or the K'un-lun and the Seven Lakes including Ch'ing-hai [Kokonor], Tengri Nor to Lhasa and Darjeeling [in India]. He felt capable of accomplishing the feat penetrating right through unknown Thibet [sic] to India and added the hopeful 'Wait and see.' He never made it.
He was forever trying to persuade Chinese officials to allow him to help them and China with his grandiose ideas. Presumably he was planning and hoping to earn commission from any scheme which took off though he repeated several times in his writings references to such schemes in which he was prepared to act on behalf of China for the good of the Chinese people without benefit to himself. But for one reason or another, and we rarely learn why, these failed to come to anything. In 1878 he had been asked by a French bank to contact a very senior Chinese official, Marquis Tso, to arrange a loan to build railways, etc. in China's Northwest. Mesny would have to pay his own travelling expenses crossing China by land but would receive a handsome commission if
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Mesny's Personal Life
PART TWO
Considering how detailed and verbose Mesny could be in his writings it is surprising how little we know about his personal life during the later years. A certain amount about his well-being and illnesses, his religion and his relationships with the female sex during his first fifteen to twenty years in China can be extracted from his autobiographical snippets but on the whole they add little but colour to the overall picture. He did however reveal relatively more to us about his financial situation but only because it had deteriorated and was obviously causing him great anxiety.
Mesny must have lived from hand to mouth for most of his later years. He had always had an eye for the big break and though at times he seemed to make himself a small fortune, though we never hear the details, he soon enough appears to have reverted to scraping by. He loved the adventure of travel and for some years managed to earn sufficient or at least obtain adequate sponsorship to visit all eighteen provinces of China. However, the day came when he could just dream. In 1896, at age of 54, he wrote that being strong and active though getting old, he would like to make an expedition to Lhasa [he called it Lassa]. He bemoaned the fact that he had not the necessary funds - but, he wrote, if he had had sufficient he would liked to have journeyed to Mukden [Shenyang] and Kirin, then via the Amur region, return via Urga [Ulan Bataar] or the K'un-lun and the Seven Lakes including Ch'ing-hai [Kokonor], Tengri Nor to Lhasa and Darjeeling [in India]. He felt capable of accomplishing the feat penetrating right through unknown Thibet [sic] to India and added the hopeful 'Wait and see.' He never made it.
He was forever trying to persuade Chinese officials to allow him to help them and China with his grandiose ideas. Presumably he was planning and hoping to earn commission from any scheme which took off though he repeated several times in his writings references to such schemes in which he was prepared to act on behalf of China for the good of the Chinese people without benefit to himself. But for one reason or another, and we rarely learn why, these failed to come to anything. In 1878 he had been asked by a French bank to contact a very senior Chinese official, Marquis Tso, to arrange a loan to build railways, etc. in China's Northwest. Mesny would have to pay his own travelling expenses crossing China by land but would receive a handsome commission if
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