[ { "id": 204301, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1961", "page_number": 69, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch ORASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n65\n\nBlume, Carl Ludwig, 1796-1862.\n\nFlora Javae . . . cum tabulis lapidi aerique incisis. Bruxellis, J. Frank, 1828.\n\nCAMOES, LUIZ DE, 1524-1580.\n\nThe Lusiad, or, the discovery of India. An epic poem translated from the original Portuguese by William Julius Mickle. Oxford, printed by Jackson and Lister, 1776.\n\nCOOK, JAMES, 1728-1779,\n\nA voyage towards the South Pole, and round the world. Performed in His Majesty's ships the Resolution and Adventure, in the years 1772, 1773, 1774 and 1775. . . . In which is included, Captain Furneaux's narrative of his proceedings in the Adventure during the separation of the ships. 2v. London, printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777.\n\nJULIEN, STANISLAS, 1799-1873.\n\nZTUNK Lao Tseu Tao te king, Le livre de la vie siècle avant l'ère chrétienne par le philosophe Lao-Tseu, traduit en français, et publié avec le texte chinois et un commentaire perpétuel. Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1842.\n\nJULIEN, STANISLAS, 1799-1873.\n\nLe livre des récompenses et des peines, en chinois et en français, accompagné de quatre cents légendes, anecdotes et histoires, qui font connaître les doctrines, les croyances et les moeurs de la secte des Tao-ssé. Traduit du chinois. Paris, printed for the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland. 1835.\n\nKIRCHER, ATHANASIUS, 1601-1680.\n\nChina monumentis quà sacris quà profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata Amstelodami, Joannem Janssonium à Waesberge & Elizeum Weyerstraet, 1667,\n\nKLAPROTH, HEINRICH JULIUS VON, 1783-1835.\n\nAsia polyglotta. Paris, gedruckt bei J. M. Eberhart, 1823.\n\nMARTINI, MARTIN, 1614-1661.\n\nNovus atlas sinensis a Martino Martinio. Soc. iesu descriptius et serenmo Archiduci Leopoldo Guilielmo Austriaco dedicatus. Bruxellis, 1655.\n\nMILL, JAMES, 1773-1836,\n\nElements of political economy. London, printed for Baldwin, Cradock and Joy. 1821.\n\nMILNE, WILLIAM, 1785-1822.\n\nA retrospect of the first ten years of the Protestant Mission to China, (now, in connection with the Malay, denominated,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204320, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1961", "page_number": 88, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\n84\n\nVol 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\nsaw a dazzling light penetrating into his palace making the walls transparent. He dispatched his son, Prince Mo Chieh (E), with a group of mariners to go around in the sea to investigate.”\n\n26\n\nThis Mo Chich, probably a re-incarnation of Bimbisara, who was a king of Magadha () converted by Sakyamuni and who died and was re-incarnated as a son of Vaisravana, has been changed into Ao Ping in the above quotation from the Fêng-shên Yen-i, and has lost his original Buddhist flavour. Comparing this short paragraph from the Tung-yu-chi with the composition and description of the corresponding paragraphs in the Fêng-shên, we can see the artistic superiority of the latter.\n\nThe combat between No-cha and Ao Ping, the third son of the dragon-king, has a tragic end. No-cha put his foot on Ao Ping's neck and struck the latter's forehead with his bracelet, thus killing him. No-cha pulled out the sinews of the little dragon and went back, saying he would make a good belt of it for his father to fasten his cuirass on. The dragon-king, hearing of the death of his son, went to see Li Ching, and put the latter in a very embarrassing position. Li Ching, being ignorant of his son's prodigious feats, denied his guilt. But No-cha came out and apologized for what he had done, and told the dragon-king that his son's sinews were intact. The dragon-king was exasperated and told Li Ching that he would lodge a complaint at the court of the Jade Emperor against father and son. The story continues:\n\nAfter No-cha had calmed his parents he went to the Chin-kuang Cave and told his master, the Taoist Immortal T’ai-I, of his adventure. The master ordered him to unfasten his coat, drew spells on his bosom, and told him what to do the next morning. \"After that,\" the master said, \"you may go back to Ch'en-t'ang Pass. If anything unusual happens, you must tell your parents that I shall be responsible for your misdeeds.” The next morning No-cha reached the Pao-tê Gate (F),27 the gate of heaven. After a while he saw the dragon-king approaching wearing his celestial robes, but because of the magic spells on No-cha's bosom, the dragon-king could not see him. No-cha was so angry that he strode forward from behind and dealt the dragon-king with his bracelet such a heavy blow that immediately he fell to the ground. (Ch.12)\n\n•\n\n26 No. 9, Fu-shuo Jên-hsien Ching (MA), The Tripitaka in Chinese,\n\n27 Ch. 39, Hsi-yo-chi of the \"Four Travels\", the Pao-tê Kuan (OH) is the Gate in heaven where Li Ching dwells.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205846, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1969", "page_number": 152, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "146\n\nRONALD C. Y. NG\n\nthe immediate vicinity of the well recognized market towns. The other important factor is probably related to the state of law and order in some of the outlying areas during this period of China's internal upheaval. The complacent mandarin in San On Un would most likely have left Lantau and its adjacent islands to the unlawful elements and concentrated instead on the places with overland contact. In view of the notorious history of piracy on these islands, which were ideally situated in relation to the trade routes focusing on and weaving between the flourishing ports of Portuguese Macau, British Victoria and Chinese Canton, the officials in Nam-tau-shing, the administrative seat of San On district, would have been unable to render the priest much protection had he ventured to these parts. Volonteri, however, was not wanting in courage and in spirit of adventure, but the pirates of the Pearl River estuary were very different men from those he encountered in Swabue, on whom he had written, 'the pirates seem to fear the humble priest and not the priest the pirates; they make some rare appearances but the presence of the padre impels them to retreat at once'. How far this can account for the comparatively poor outline and incorrect location of the off-shore islands as well as for the lack of information on the settlements there must await fresh materials on Volonteri's work in San On, but the villagers on Lantau vouchsafed to me that in the time of their forefathers, piracy, preying on ships and peasants alike, was a greater hazard to the population than the vagrant weather conditions.\n\nFinally, the bilingual feature of the map must be noted. It is apparent that the document was intended primarily for English-speaking users. As there are several current systems of transliteration, in the present case the one based on Williams' Dictionary, the inclusion of the original Chinese names adds to the work that rare, but highly desirable, quality of precision and refinement. In a way, the document is simultaneously a map and a gazetteer of the District. The degree of cooperation between Volonteri and Liang was remarkable and out of the hundreds of villages cited bilingually there was not a single occasion where the name in one language did not correspond to the other. This is probably due to Fr. Volonteri's ability to read, perhaps not so much as to write presentably, the Chinese script which enabled him to check every detail. Credit should also go to his colleague for juxtaposing", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206005, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1970", "page_number": 85, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "80\n\nA. D. BLUE\n\ndifficult problems to the governments concerned, and cruel, drastic, but ineffectual attempts were made to halt immigration. The massacres of thousands of Chinese in the Philippines in 1603, 1639, and again after the British occupation of 1763, are the most celebrated of many such occurrences, the last being caused by the Chinese having shown a marked preference for British rather than Spanish rule. In Indonesia the worst massacre took place at Batavia in 1740. Similar pogroms, but on a much smaller scale, continued in the Philippines down to 1820, and post-war Indonesia has shown a disquieting tendency to put the clock back two centuries in their treatment of their Chinese. But although victims of periodic bouts of xenophobia from the local peoples, in most countries of South-east Asia and at most times the Chinese were protected by the colonial governments which recognised the value of Chinese labour for their economies.\n\nBy the early decades of the 19th century the coolie trade between China and South-east Asia had attained substantial proportions -- although still nothing like so great as it was to become later -- and most of the trade was in the hands of Chinese junks of from 300 to 400 tons. Such craft could only sail before the wind and carried crews of up to ninety sailors, enough to man five European ships of the same size. They took anything from twenty to thirty days between south China and the Straits or Bangkok, and the coolies had a very uncomfortable time on the passage. No charts were carried, the only navigational instrument being a very rude compass, and they kept as close to land as possible. In the 1830s up to eighty such junks sailed to Bangkok every year, usually from Swatow, and by the mid 1840s, by which time European steamships were entering the trade, it was estimated that about 15,000 coolies were emigrating to Bangkok every year.\n\nA description of these old trading junks is given in S. Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom (London, W. H. Allen & Co. revised edition, 1883) vol. 1, p. 753. It shows inter alia that the number of passengers carried on these junks to the Nanyang could be very great. ... \"The cabins look more like niches in a sepulchre than the accommodations for a live passenger. The crew lie upon deck most of the time, and are usually interested in the trade of the vessel or an adventure of their own. The great number of passengers which have been stowed in these vessels entailed a frightful loss of life when they were wrecked. In February, 1822, Capt. Pearl, of the English ship Indiana, coming through Gaspar Straits, fell in with the cargo and crew of a wrecked junk, and saved one hundred and ninety-eight persons (out of one thousand six hundred with whom she had left Amoy).\" Ed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206483, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1972", "page_number": 31, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "NINETEENTH CENTURY WATER-COLOURS OF CANTON\n\n25\n\nwhilst our original attackers were in our rear. There was no time to be lost, so we skirted along the base of the White Cloud Mountains, for then we knew we had only one flank to watch. In case of being hard pushed, we could get up and make a stand, and the struggle might be seen from the city walls, and relief be sent to us.\n\nThe fellows came out after us with their flags and their jingalls, running along at our side, and following in our rear, and banging away with really wonderfully bad luck they never could hit any one even by chance. Meanwhile we posted on as fast as we could, firing a shot every now and then, and when they came too near, sometimes making a little charge towards them, when, of course, away they scampered. But time was everything to us, and we could not afford to chase them, for as we passed each village we saw armed men turning out, and flags hoisted on the mandarin poles. One or two of the marine artillerymen got knocked up from fatigue and had to be put on the ponies; at last, after some five miles of this fun, on turning the corner of a hill, the pagodas of Canton rose before our eyes to our immense relief. Our pursuers evidently thought they had gone far enough and hauled off, and we sat down on the grass, and finished our cold chickens and beer, determined not to be done out of our pic-nic. We got in about five o'clock, after ten hours' enjoyment of rather mixed feelings.\n\nPresumably the artist was among the officers who took part in the 'picnic'. Unfortunately Col. Fisher does not name them.\n\nContinuing his account of events in Canton in the spring of 1858, Fisher states that \"in the middle of May some troops moved off for the expedition to the Pei-ho under Sir Michael Seymour; a company of Engineers went on the 11th from Canton; the 59th were taken up from Hong Kong, and on the 16th of June a detachment of Marine Artillery was removed from Canton for the same purpose.\" Again he mentions no names, but this corresponds with the departure of the Adventure from Hong Kong for the Peiho river on 22nd June 1858, and with paintings XX, XXV and XXVI of the present collection. The gunboat in painting number XX was the Slaney, commanded by a Lieutenant Hoskens. For the remainder of 1858, it seems, the artist stayed in or around Canton.\n\nFrom the information deduced from the paintings, the artist was almost certainly the Major Schomberg who arrived in Hong Kong on board the Adelaide on December 1st, 1857.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206963, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1974", "page_number": 34, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG: THE MARQUIS DE MORES AND DAVID DE MAYRENA\n\nHENRY JAMES LETHBRIDGE*\n\nAdventurers at Government House\n\nIn the nineteenth century Hong Kong's Government House quickly established itself as one of the best caravanserais in the whole Far East. There were then few good hotels in Hong Kong so that His Excellency the Governor usually felt under a strong social obligation to accommodate at government expense any distinguished visitor from abroad; less prestigious persons would be invited to a function—dinner, soirée, levée — and journalists, writers, and other small fry granted in most cases only an interview. It is clear from Sir William Des Voeux's memoirs1 that at certain seasons Hong Kong swarmed with globe-trotters, nearly all of whom would wish to pay their respects to Her Britannic Majesty's representative at Government House.\n\nDes Voeux declares2 that two of the most extraordinary visitors he received at Government House were David de Mayréna, 'King of the Sedangs', and the Marquis Antoine de Morès, 'Emperor of the Badlands', both of whom arrived in Hong Kong in November of 1888 and left behind the remarkable legend that they had fought a duel. This essay is an attempt to describe their strange histories and to explore some questions relating to what may be termed 'the sociology of adventure'. Inevitably such an inquiry must invite discussion of why Europeans left their homeland, for they went overseas not only in pursuit of wealth but in search of a destiny, a term that suggests a number of psychological and sociological problems.\n\nOn 14 November 1888 the Danish steamer Frejr, a small vessel of 397 tons, engaged in the coastal trade and commanded by a Captain Lund, anchored in Hong Kong harbour after a three days\n\nMr. Lethbridge who is Reader in Sociology at the University of Hong Kong is well known for his earlier contributions on local society and government which have appeared in this Journal and elsewhere.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206971, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1974", "page_number": 42, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "36 \n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE \n\nto organise the retail meat market in that state. This enterprise also failed, so the disillusioned Marquis, who had lost a large part of his private fortune, returned home to France in 1886. \n\nMorès' father, the Duke of Vallombrosa, advised his despondent son to take a long vacation and suggested a journey to India, a land the Duke had visited in his younger days. In November, 1887, therefore, Morès and his wife embarked at Marseilles for the journey out to Bombay. \n\nFrom Bombay Morès and his wife went by train to Calcutta, where they stayed with the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, and where they met Prince Henry of Orléans. The Marquis and the Prince and a few friends at once organised an expedition into the interior to shoot game. Another expedition, to Nepal, was organised soon after they returned from their first chase, this time with Medora as participant. After five weeks the party returned with the skins of many wild beasts, including that of a tiger which the redoubtable Marquise had herself shot. In the spring of 1888, Morès and his wife returned to Europe. \n\nThe ship that took Morès and his wife back to France was also carrying a number of his old comrades, former Saint-Cyriens, returning from the campaign in Tonkin. Morès had long conversations with these French colonial army officers and learned much about conditions in Indo-China. On the voyage back he thus became deeply interested in the commercial prospects of this new French colonial possession. But to open up and develop the territory necessitated the construction of a railway system: Morès decided to pioneer such an enterprise. As soon as he reached Paris he hurried to see the Minister for Foreign Affairs and presented a plan for building without government aid a railway line from Hanoi to the Chinese border. He was given official permission to prospect the region of Tonkin. On 21 October 1888, as noted, Morès left Marseilles together with William Van Driesche and an engineer, M. Thorel. On 22 November 1888 he landed at Hong Kong en route for Haiphong, and the start of another adventure: the economic exploitation of the Red River basin, a scheme as grandiose as the one he had been engaged on in the Dakotas. \n\nMayréna's Odyssey in Hong Kong \n\nMayréna spent his first days in the Colony studiously cultivating members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He visited the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206973, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1974", "page_number": 44, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "38 \n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE \n\nsize—we hear the gong, and set off along its passages into the dining room. It is a regular hall, 50 or 60 yards long. The far side is broken by a row of French windows opening on to the stone verandah, which looks out over the harbour. A double row of great white punkahs, down the whole length of the place, swing slowly. The bright blazing sunshine outside is tempered by green blinds, let down over the arches of the verandah. Thirty or forty Chinese \"boys\" in complete and flowing white, keep up a perpetual come and go in their attendance on the tables. These suitably imposing surroundings became the setting for Mayréna's Hong Kong adventure.\n\nMayréna, the China Mail animadverted, ‘from an ardent pietist became a man of the world... He became an admirer of the opera and with royal prodigality distributed tickets to his friends'. The 'Queen' with her dames d'honneur were welcomed frequently at the Hotel, the 'Queen' arriving in a chair with four bearers, draped in regal sashes. Hong Kong, of course, was electrified by Mayréna's theatrical coups; but money was not forthcoming from the amused public. J.J. Francis, for example, was almost persuaded to finance a company for the working of the new kingdom but at the last moment backed out; other astute European businessmen refused to invest. But the King continued to make friends, to enchant his visitors, and to hold nightly revels in the public rooms and tap-rooms of the Hotel. After all, Mayréna, a great showman, provided splendid entertainment for a dull little Colony, accustomed to a stale diet of 'At Homes' and stodgy dinner-parties.\n\nUnluckily, Mayréna's waking hours were dogged by one Afong, a Chinese shopkeeper from Haiphong, who had supplied a large number of uniforms for the King's warrior hosts and had come to Hong Kong to present his bill. The jaunty Mayréna at first ‘gave it out that the Chinaman was a member of a syndicate that wished to advance him money; but as this story would hardly hold for long, the Chinaman was finally appeased'. It soon became clear, then, that Mayréna was not a man of substance, that his schemes were insubstantial, and that he was simply an amusing adventurer, good for a convivial debauch but hardly a sound partner in any serious business venture.\n\nIt was, however, the editor of the China Mail, George Murray Bain, who really brought about Mayréna's downfall by a systema-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206986, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1974", "page_number": 57, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG \n\n51 \n\nboarded Huck Finn's raft on the Mississippi went by the names of the Duke of Bilgewater (Bridgewater) and the Dauphin. But a title not only helped to disarm potential sceptics but allowed an adventurer to secure credit, often a necessity for the realisation of his schemes. Mayréna, as we have seen, kept himself afloat for some time by the sale of bogus titles, decorations and honours. A title, as it were, gave the claimant a fake persona, a social mask or facade behind which the predator could lurk. In this century, however, a devaluation of titles has taken place coincident with the rise of meritocracy.\n\nPoor communications helped an adventurer of the impostor or swindler type, for if knowledge of his past leaked out too soon, this would undermine any claim to respectability and diminish confidence in his intentions. News flowed more sluggishly in the nineteenth century, though it was a period of great achievements in the development of a network of world-wide communications. In 1853 the P. and O. had established a regular mail service between Hong Kong and Calcutta, thus establishing fortnightly communications with England; in 1863 the French Messageries Maritimes opened a route to the East; telegraph connection with Manila was achieved in 1880, with Canton in 1882. Nevertheless, mail, newspapers, and reading matter of all kinds took time — usually a month — to reach Hong Kong from Europe, even at the end of the century. There was also no Interpol to flash news by telegraph or wireless about international swindlers, pretenders and other social pests. The Hong Kong public had to wait several weeks before Le Courrier d'Haiphong brought news of the accusations Father Guerlach had levelled against Mayréna. It was not until 24 December 1888, six weeks after his arrival in Hong Kong, that the general public acquired some knowledge of Mayréna's chicanery and general untrustworthiness.\n\nIt was not only the pursuit of adventure, of fame or fortune, that drew adventurers to alien shores. Some left their homelands to escape from the cultural constraints and legal bind of their own societies — an escape, as they saw it, into freedom, innocence and, its corollary, libertinage.57 Laurence Hope, the wife of Lieutenant-General M. H. Nicolson of the Bengal Army, in 1902 wrote:\n\nUpon the City Ramparts, lit up by sunset gleam,\n\nThe Blue eyes that conquer, meet the Darker eyes that dream,58", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207011, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1974", "page_number": 82, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "\"OH FOR THE JOYS OF ENGLAND\"\n\nLT. ORLANDO BRIDGEMAN'S LETTERS FROM CHINA AND HONG KONG, 1842 - 1843\n\nROBIN MCLACHLAN*\n\nLieutenant Orlando Bridgeman was a minor participant in British activities in China in the early 1840's. Mention of this quite unimportant subaltern is not likely to be found in any of the dozens of histories and memoirs narrating the First Anglo-Chinese War and the early years of Hong Kong. However, Orlando Bridgeman has left us his own personal record of his sojourn in the Far East in the form of several entertaining, if somewhat illegible, letters preserved in the archives of the Nottingham County Record Office.1** His correspondence home provides the rare opportunity of seeing what life could be like in the Far East for a very homesick and bored young British officer on his first overseas service. The impression that Bridgeman gives of life in China and Hong Kong is quite different from the more romantic and adventurous picture provided by more experienced and hardier souls. For Bridgeman, his time there was little more than an adventure in misery.\n\nLimited biographical information on Orlando Bridgeman can be gleaned from Hart's Annual Army Lists and Burke's Peerage.2 His full name was Orlando Jack Charles Bridgeman; he was born in 1823, the younger son of Captain Orlando Henry Bridgeman (1794-1827) and his wife, Selina. Both parents were the children of British aristocracy; his father was the third son (of four) of Baron Bradford and his mother was the daughter of the Earl of Kilmorey. The careers of the four sons of Baron Bradford comply with the popular stereotype of careers followed by the sons of eighteenth and nineteenth century British nobility. The eldest son, of course, succeeded to the family title; for the second, third and fourth sons there were careers in the navy, army and church respectively. Following their schooling at Harrow, both Orlando Jack Charles Bridgeman and his brother, Francis Orlando Henry, followed their\n\n* Mr. McLachlan is a member of the Department of Far Eastern History at the Australian National University.\n\n**The notes to this article will be found at the end.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207406, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 174, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "166\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nletter to our commanding officer, Colonel Shackleton, which he at once passed to the Japanese. In the letter we said that the progress to recovery of our wounded and sick patients was being impeded by a diet low in protein, vitamin and total calorie value and also by the difficulty of overcoming chronic sepsis on a deficient diet. We quoted League of Nations standards, well aware of the fact that Japan had left the League after her Manchurian adventure in 1933. We suggested a diet more suited to our habits and needs. Looking at this letter today I believe that we put our requests on a very moderate level.\n\nSome time in 1942, well before August, the Japanese began to pay commissioned officers both staff and patients. Our nurses were not paid nor were any of our working staff. We were paid in “military” yen, which at first I think had the same value as the yen, and Shackleton set up a patients' Comforts Fund and an Extra Diets Fund to which officers made contributions on a scale which at first lacked regularity. On 3 August 1942 Harrison and I wrote again expressing our disquiet about the whole patients and staff situation and advised that all efforts to improve conditions should be financed through a Central Hospital Fund supported by all officers. We identified the needs under four heads; those of patients for special diets during and after dysentery, surgery etc., those of staff upon whom the work fell, the need of every person for improved food value in the rations and variation in the monotony of diet, and lastly the need of our whole community for electric bulbs, sewing cotton, soap etc. We quoted our basic average diet for the months of April, May and June and July 1942 (see Appendix “A”, Table 1). Perhaps a clearer idea of the position is conveyed by the fact that in the week 23 July to 1 August 1942 we had fish twice, meat once and a sweet rice pudding once, the last being the only dish for mid-day dinner, while all other dinners consisted of boiled rice and boiled vegetables only. Breakfast and suppers were rice or bread and sugar, syrup or vegetables, the whole diet being ill calculated to appeal to a sick man. Many so-called well men ate only as a duty to themselves and certainly not as a pleasurable activity.\n\nThe hospital had narrowly escaped a further disaster during hostilities for a large shell, a four-inch I think, had pitched at the junction of the road above the hospital leading to the sisters' mess and the lower wall of the reservoir. Had it exploded the reservoir", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207752, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1976", "page_number": 140, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "NOTES ON FRIENDS AND RELATIVES OF TAIPING LEADERS 125\n\nfor the Rev. John Chalmers of the London Missionary Society, but soon he began to be used extensively in the various activities of the mission, preaching in their Lower Bazaar Chapel, visiting prisoners in the Gaol, serving as an evangelist to the sick in the dispensary recently opened by Dr. Julius Hirschberg on Queen's Road West. Legge characterized him as “a man who has won my affection and esteem as few of his countrymen have done\", and he impressed Dr. Wong Foon, who had recently returned from Medical School at Edinburgh and was associated with Dr. Hirschberg in the dispensary, as “a man of great intelligence and considerable fluency of speech.\"5\n\nIn 1858, with the blessings of the Mission, Hung Jen-kan with a companion made another effort to reach Nanking, but this time travelling up through Canton and Kwangsi. In a letter dated 5 June 1858, the Rev. John Chalmers remarks on his and Jen-kan's hopes:\n\n\"He has had a desire for a long time to reach his friends at Nanking and endeavour to impart to them the superior knowledge he has acquired, and I doubt not the fact that the present government is so hardly pressed from without had induced him to adventure upon the long and dangerous journey across the country from Canton in hopes that the Nanking party may be persuaded to seek an alliance with foreigners before it is too late. Of course his religious zeal is associated with patriotic feelings. We have always thought that if he could get among the Taiping people he might be the means of correcting many of their errors with regard to Christianity and to foreigners, from whom they have received it.\"6\n\nThe London Missionary Society at Hong Kong financed the trip and agreed to grant a monthly allowance of seven dollars to his family for ten months or until Jen-kan himself was able to provide for them.\n\nIn the course of his journey Jen-kan wrote five letters to the society at Hong Kong, but only three were received. One written from Hupei states that:\n\nUnexpectantly on 16th October, I was seized and searched by Imperialist guards. They only found some medical books and money. On the 19th I made my escape to Yaou Chow and on the 14th of November eight officers who wished to leave the Imperial service took me to Lung Ping in the province of Hoo", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208691, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1979", "page_number": 148, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "THE MARYKNOLL MISSION, HONG KONG 1941-46\n\n121\n\nlyze our feelings. We regretted leaving our many friends in Camp, yet were glad to get out to freedom. What would we find in Hong Kong? Would we be allowed to go to the interior of China? Where are we going to stay in Hong Kong? There had been some talk of our staying with the Bishop in his \"Little Seminary\" and again some mention of Bethany at Pokfulam. So there was an element of mystery and of adventure in our trip that day.\n\nAll went well until our truck reached the top of the Wongneichong Gap on the Happy Valley Road. Here there was a barrier and we were stopped by a gendarme, who demanded that we get out of the truck and have our baggage inspected and examined. We were preparing to do this, when Mr. Yamashita, the young Japanese gentleman in charge of Camp affairs, who was sitting with the driver, got down and tried to explain the situation. It seems that the gendarmes had not been informed by the Foreign Office that we were being released, and the officer in charge of this post gave Mr. Yamashita an unmerciful tongue lashing while he, Mr. Yamashita, being a civilian, stood at attention, bowed repeatedly and never answered back a word. At length, when the officer ran out of breath, we were allowed to proceed, without having our baggage examined.\n\nWe then went into the city, stopping finally at the Queen's Road entrance to the former Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building, one of Hong Kong's newest and most imposing structures, and now occupied by the Japanese Foreign Office. Once inside, we saw Sister Paul and Sister Famula who had already very kindly arranged for our temporary passes. The Sisters were most helpful to us during our first free days in Hong Kong as we felt just like innocents abroad.\n\nAfter securing our passes and arranging for our baggage, Sister Paul told us that our new home is to be Bethany with the French Fathers, but that before going there we were to have tiffin at the Holy Spirit School. We walked up Queen's Road and then up onto Caine Road, feeling rather strange and out of place, but we reached our destination without any misadventure. At the Holy Spirit School we sat down to a real dining room table, with real dishes and knives and forks and most important of all, with some real food, for which we have to thank the Sisters and Mrs. Leong, the wife of our genial friend, the manager and owner of the Metropole", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208947, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1980", "page_number": 109, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "SILK & SILVER: MACAU, MANILA TRADE\n\n77\n\nIn 1629 the Viceroy Conde de Linhares ordered that both the Macau-Nagasaki and Macau-Manila voyages should henceforth be made under the supervision and control of the Crown and the profits from them used for the upkeep of the royal dockyard at Goa and the maintenance of the Portuguese fleet in Asian waters, but it was not until 1635 that an administrator for the voyages was sent from Goa to Macau to enforce the new system.32 In the same year the Viceroy finally agreed to allow one pinnace to make the Macau-Manila voyage each year, laden with munitions for the Manila garrison and enough silk for local consumption in the Philippines without any surplus for export to Mexico, where it would compete with silks from Seville.\n\nBy the end of the 16th century Macau's trade was already being threatened from several quarters. On the one hand, the development of the Manila-Japan trade, the increasing power and cohesion of the Japanese state under the Tokugawa and the encouragement of a Japanese merchant navy by Tokugawa Ieyasu — the famous Red Seal ships33 — and, above all, the growing hostility of the shoguns towards Christianity and the missionary activities of Portuguese Jesuits and Spanish friars undermined Macau's trade with Japan. On the other hand, competition from the Dutch, whose control of the Straits of Malacca made trade and communications between Macau and Goa difficult and dangerous and whose establishment in Taiwan after 1624 extended this danger into the China Seas, had a deleterious effect on Macau's trade with Indonesia. The extortions of the Chinese merchants, who also of course carried on direct trade in competition with the Portuguese, licitly or illicitly, both with Japan and Manila, weakened Macau's position still further. Between 1613 and 1640, an average of 60 to 80 Chinese junks visited Japan yearly, though from 1634 they were, like the Portuguese, confined to Nagasaki. These difficulties culminated in the summary expulsion of the Portuguese from Japan in 1639 by the Shogun Iemitsu and in the fall of Malacca to the Dutch in 1641. The embassy sent from Macau in 1640 in a last attempt to get Iemitsu to revoke his edict of expulsion met a terrible fate. 61 of the 74 members of the delegation were beheaded by 61 executioners sent specially from Yedo to Nagasaki for the purpose. A contemporary Portuguese account of how the citizens of Macau reacted to the news of the calamity sums up well the peculiar quality of the whole Portuguese adventure in the East, its mixture of missionary zeal and ...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209316, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 219, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n205\n\nfarmers could ever raise enough cash for those expenses requiring substantial cash payments, e.g. to build or repair extensively a house or buy a new plough. I was told that careful management could make a plough last almost indefinitely: a completely new plough was needed only if the old one shattered into fragments. The wooden parts could be replaced by the farmer cutting and preparing wood himself, the coulter had to be regularly replaced by a coulter bought new but could be fitted on by the farmer. The blacksmith in Tai Po would accept the old coulter in part payment for the new one; he would then melt it down to recast it. Small expenses (e.g. extra rice, sugar, oil, other comestibles) could be met by the sale of firewood etc. Sugar was very cheap: sale of 1 picul of firewood would enable enough sugar and oil to be bought to last a thrifty family several weeks. As for houses, these were repaired as soon as the slightest signs of wear, cracks, leakage or ants appeared, and would thus survive almost for ever, barring typhoon or fire damage. If a home did get so damaged a poor family could only repair it by mortgaging its fields at a high price (say, at the rate of 1 or 5 picul per harvest per tau). If good years supervened in which there were good harvests and opportunities for wage labour such a family could recover and pay off the mortgage, but if bad years came the mortgage might be foreclosed and “that family would starve and might well die\". Substantial wealth in ready cash \"usually came from outside\" from remittances from seamen etc. as in Wai H.L.'s father's and uncle's case, or the Ng family in West Lane etc. One member of Chan family (Name given me by Wai H.L. but I forgot it) in Tai Wai “about 30 or 40 years older than Wai Siu-ling” (i.e. born about 1855-1865) became very rich as a seaman at the turn of the century or thereabouts or a little earlier. He became the \"leader” of an American ship. Villager wanting to go to sea would have to receive his recommendation, and would have to pay to get it. He also smuggled opium to Chinese communities in the U.S.A., making great profits which he used to buy up houses and fields in Tai Wai. He shamed the other villagers \"by wearing only silk when they could afford only hemp, and eating pork and chicken when they could afford only rice and salt fish” He also married the most beautiful girl in Sha Tin, However, he was caught when his last smuggling adventure \"just before he retired\" (1915?) went wrong and was fined very heavily. He could not pay and had to sell all his belongings at an auction. He was considered a \"bad man\" - not because of his smuggling but because he did not help the village. \"Other men who became rich like this would repair the r'ong (ancestral hall) or do other communal acts, but he not only refused but would not even help his", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210674, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1986", "page_number": 25, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "8\n\nHELEN F. SIU\n\nprolonged discussions, the commune officials decided to process the application with the expectation that Liang would help the commune establish overseas business connections. Impatient with the bureaucratic delays, he took his chances and smuggled himself into Hong Kong in late 1979.\n\nOne of Liang's friends could not tell as successful a story. He took a land route to the coast to meet up with a gang ferrying illegal aliens directly to Hong Kong. Caught before he reached the coast, he was confined in a temporary prison. He and fellow prisoners were made to labour but were each given four ounces of rice a day. Isolated and totally at the mercy of the prison officials, they lived the agony of extreme anxiety for half a month. He was then returned to the commune. Though publicly reprimanded, he was allowed to retain his job in the commune factory. His peers actually sympathised with him. However, the weeks of captivity were so traumatic that he swore he could never try the adventure again.\n\nAdapting to the life of an immigrant\n\nFour months after Liang arrived in Hong Kong, he and I met on the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He had managed to get in touch with two graduate students who had assisted me in fieldwork. We took a walk on the campus grounds after dinner. It was a clear night, and I remember he looked up and said, \"How bright are the stars.\" He was thin and pale, wearing a leather jacket too big for his frame. He looked subdued. I could not believe that he was the young, motivated technician I had met in the commune a year before. I knew he was missing home, because I remembered the starry skies on the nights when we walked home after fieldwork.\n\nTo his surprise, his uncle did not put him up at his home. Instead, Liang had moved to a hostel rented by the restaurant for single male employees. His work hours were harsh from 5 p.m. to early hours of the morning. City noise and congestion made him tense and restless. He was disgusted with his co-workers, who, according to him, gambled all day, swore, and squandered their pay on women, as if there was no future. He could not understand why they wasted the income which, compared to his commune", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210842, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1986", "page_number": 193, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "176\n\nCARL SMITH\n\nDr. Legge never taken him away from the herd of buffaloes he was tending at Malacca.\n\nSTUDENTS CATCH GOLD FEVER\n\nGold fever hit the Canton delta in the 1850s. It had an unsettling effect on students. Books were much less attractive than nuggets of gold in California or Australia.\n\nThe reports of the schools reflect the pull of the gold-fields on the pupils.\n\nShortly before the first class of the Presbyterian Boarding School at Canton was to be graduated in 1852, the whole class was swept by the gold fever. Their principal, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Happer, explains the reasons. \"The villages from which the older pupils have come are those from which a great number had gone to California. Their brothers, uncles and cousins had gone, some had sent home some gold dust and statements about the ease with which gold could be obtained. This caused a feverish excitement among these boys.\"\n\nThe school had a hold on them from which it was not easy to get free. When they were enrolled their parents signed a bond that the boys would remain in the school for the full course, usually six to eight years. In return they received free board, clothing and education. If they left before this period, the cost of their board figured at $20 a month had to be refunded or the bond was forfeited.\n\nWhile others of their own age were off to adventure and fortune, they had to sit in the classroom deprived of their freedom. They became restless, unruly and hard to manage, not the docile, diligent, obedient students the missionary teachers had become used to.\n\nIt took a great amount of diplomatic skill and patience for Dr. Happer to prevent a full-scale walkout. He believed that most of the unrest was caused by one student, whom he had to dismiss. Afterwards Dr. Happer reflects: “I am now inclined to think that wanting employment he took the course he did with a wish to be", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211863, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 278, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "253\n\ndescribed by other missionaries. It included a ship's captain who was irreligious, malicious, and perhaps incompetent; a sailing ship that suffered doldrums, storms, groundings, and tensions between officers and crew; a trip that subjected the passengers to tedium; a call at a tropical port that exposed the missionary to the wider colonial world; and, at the end of the voyage, the excitement of the unknown in China.\n\nFryer wrote a \"Diary of Voyage to China\" in the form of a letter to be circulated among his parents and friends in England. The “diary” is no doubt an abstract of a journal he kept, edited for home consumption, and titled to coincide with his 22nd birthday on August 6th. Although Fryer mentions keeping a journal or a diary in several of his later letters, no such journal has surfaced.\n\nThe Diary is the earliest example of Fryer's writing to come to my attention. It is well thought out, expresses Fryer's deepest convictions, conveys a sense of confidence in himself and his mission, and describes the excitement and adventure experienced by a young man about to make his mark on the world.\n\nThe Diary starts with expressions of faith and anticipation about the future. In it one obtains a feeling for Fryer's upright character and resoluteness, characteristics that were to serve him well in his life's work as a translator, introducer of Western science and technology, advocate of the superiority of the West, and educator. During the trip he familiarizes himself with nautical terms and the names of items on the ship; he studies the Chinese language; he observes and notes the changes of climate and visible stars, discusses local flora and fauna, describes people he met and records strange fruits and vegetables. In the **diary** he comments on customs of the sea and on peculiarities of both colonized and colonizer in Batavia. Above all, he describes the terrors of a journey fraught with danger and uncertainty.\n\nThe text of the holograph Diary required editing only in details. Minor changes were made to bring dates, prices, capitalization, emphasis, and spelling into conformity with modern usage and to improve readability. Fryer's use of the apostrophe and various punctuation marks was often capricious. Usually, Fryer wrote just one run-on paragraph for each day's Diary entry. These have been separated into smaller units for ease of reading. Where a single day's entry is broken in the original into more", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211864, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 279, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "254\n\nthan one paragraph, the original paragraph break is marked by a caret. The stylistic “&” and “&c” have been changed to \"and\" and \"etc.\" and certain numbers and fractions spelled out.\n\nJohn Fryer left China in 1896 to become the first Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He held that post until 1914, at age 75, when he became Professor Emeritus. During his Berkeley years he worked to establish courses in the Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, and Malay languages, and to present Chinese and East Asian cultures to a wide audience. He was quite vocal in advocating the training of Chinese students at American universities at a time when it was not popular to do so. He forcefully supported the training of Americans in East Asian languages and cultures for eventual consular, commercial, and missionary work. He foresaw the need to integrate the study of language, literature, and culture, with emphasis on economics and political science, in a multi-cultural context. He was an early, perhaps the first, academic advocate of what we now call Pacific Rim studies.\n\nUpon his death in 1928 he left his personal library, his letterbooks, and his manuscripts to the University of California. The letterbooks and manuscripts are available in the archives of The Bancroft Library. His letters and manuscripts are currently being assembled and edited for publication.\n\nIn addition to the \"Diary of Voyage to China” the John Fryer papers in The Bancroft Library contain manuscripts titled “First Impressions of Hong Kong and the Chinese People” (August 1861), “Account of Three Days Excursion on the Mainland of China” (January 1862), and \"A Fortnight's Adventure in China and Mongolia\" (May 1865). These essays are of sufficient historical interest to warrant separate publication and will be presented in future issues of this Journal,\n\nNOTES\n\n'A biography, primarily dealing with Fryer's translation efforts, is available in Adrian A. Bennett's John Fryer: The Introduction of Western Science and Technology into Nineteenth-century China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), published as Harvard East Asian Monograph 24.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212083, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 25, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "\"Every Chinese peasant is three thousand years of China in miniature. He may not peruse the books of history, but he has heard the story-teller night after night relate in detail, and with delightful embellishments, stories of the history of China from the time of the early rulers to the present day. He and his wife and children have attended the theatricals where the stories of romance, of adventure, of loyalty, and of virtue have been realistically visualised in the open-air theatre that adorns the square of every self-respecting market town. Their culture thought-patterns are not chosen from present day movie stars but from great men of old. The common people have absorbed, not read, from the master spirits of forty centuries.\"\n\n\"Most Chinese peasants are anything but stupid. Their knowledge of their own folklore and folk history is extensive, although it is far from being historically accurate. Usually the history the country person knows has been learned at the opera, and he is frequently unable to say whether a certain character is a real person who lived at a definite time, or merely the creation of a dramatist. This confusion is the more frequent because so many of the characters of Chinese drama are patterned after actual people of history.\"\n\nI do not wish to suggest for a moment that time has ever stood still. Rather, I am using the impressions gained by Joliffe, Winfield and others to emphasise the immense weight and influence of Chinese traditional education and upbringing upon the people until recent times. With reference to Hong Kong, I would say that their powerful, lingering vestiges here lasted until perhaps two decades ago: until the rapid modernisation and the improvements to the educational and socio-economic structure which began in the 1970s soon shifted the whole basis of society onto a more material level, and together with other changes greatly reduced the influence of the past upon behaviour and outlook.\n\nMy own realisation of the continuing strength of traditional values and practice and their lingering influence upon the people was obtained before these changes had taken hold, and was mainly acquired at first hand in the course of observing and experiencing the responses of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212710, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 19, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "4\n\noff with a whole pound, 'the foundation of his fortune' which induced him to go to sea as a sailor. He then sailed away, at the age of 12, and in the course of the next six years visited various parts of the world including Australia, Africa and the Americas before finally settling in China in 1860 during the last days of the Arrow War [better known perhaps as the Second Opium War].\n\nMesny arrived in China at the start of the era known to the Chinese as the 'post-unequal treaties', an extraordinary period of readjustment in Chinese thinking. He arrived in a China whose rulers were an alien dynasty, the non-Chinese Manchus from Manchuria whose dynasty, the Ch'ing, ruled China between 1644-1911. Mesny's era covered the gradual collapse of the dynasty and its fall, followed by the first years of the Republic.\n\nWilliam Mesny spent a total of 59 years in China during which time he first, for some thirteen years, led a life of high adventure and, later, one which he lived to the full but at the same time one which appears to have fluctuated between the verge of success and pathetic failure. As it stands the later years of Mesny's life, following his short military career, fall into four periods; first, trekking across China, second, his life in Shanghai whilst still hoping to make his fortune; third, his time there when that hope had all but disappeared and finally, his last days, apparently alone in Hankow. The story contains elements which can only be guessed by reading between the lines in his Miscellanies, sadly without the help of other written or oral records.\n\nI have attempted to provide a chronology of Mesny's life from the multitude of snippets and asides he provided in his Miscellanies. This will be found at Appendix B. The great majority of the research in the UK has been carried out by Dr R G Tiedemann of SOAS in the University of London to whom I am also greatly indebted for both his advice and comments, as I am too to Miss Lucie Mesny of St Lawrence in Jersey, for her memories and photographs. However, any errors are mine alone.\n\nApart from the autobiographical portions of the Miscellany we have to rely upon the tiny smattering of family memory still available, two obituaries from Shanghai English language newspapers and what little has been written about Mesny by others who knew him in China. It is unfortunate that other living descendants of William Mesny have fought", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212722, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 31, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Mesny's Personal Life\n\nPART TWO\n\nConsidering 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.\n\nMesny 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.\n\nHe 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", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212742, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 51, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "36 \n\nsomething more than ordinary adventure.' \n\nAgain, after a theatrical performance by a Chinese actor and actress in a provincial town in Kueichou province, Mesny wrote that local people, believing him [he was then 36] to be very old as he had a beard, knew that foreign women must be inferior; \"They must be, “they added\", as foreign men pass by but never foreign women, and foreign men marry Chinese wives.' Mesny added that he had one 'with very small feet and wears elegantly embroidered red satin shoes!' This must have been in 1878. \n\nWriting a paragraph under the heading of 'Slave Girls', Mesny noted that it was a common thing for well-to-do people to present a couple of slave girls to a daughter as part of their marriage dowry. It was also customary with respectable people to release slave girls when marriageable. Mesny added that he had bought three different girls, two in Szechuan, for a few taels each [less than 15 dollars Mexican]. One he released in Tientsin, another died in Hong Kong; the other he gave in marriage to a faithful servant of his. \n\nIn his Miscellanies he described a number of Chinese women, young and beautiful, who [or so he claimed] desired to marry him. Some he encouraged but in each instance the story peters out, others disappear out of his stories without explanation or further mention. He also had a 'romantic and intimate interlude' with a young Chinese widow, who did not appear to be short of money, and who accompanied Mesny down river to Hankow where they remained in a house near the Yamen where Mesny frequently visited her. He noted at one point that 'there was nothing like gushing love between us, but I could not fail to admire such an admirably sensible woman. What she thought was admiring in me I know not, but I know she said from the first that she required my protection. The only time that I ever noticed anything like affectionate love on her part for me was on my first visit to her after my misadventure at the Lung-wang Miao\". Then she wept. She took my head very gently between her fine hands and repeatedly kissed the fresh scars of my recent wounds... we were both silent.' Despite this, he shortly afterwards described in the Miscellany that he, Mesny, 'had been busy at work and with his friend Pickerell, and paid frequent visits to my charmer near the Tao-t'ai's Yamen. She complained of the scarcity and brevity of my visits and showed unmistakable signs of being in a condition likely to increase the already great population of the vast empire of China.'", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212749, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 58, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "43\n\nespecially in water, He wrote that the Chinese generally assert that snakes and tortoises cohabit; he continued with a story with details at variance with his original version, “and I have seen paintings of turtles and tortoises,1 and metal castings also, with a snake wound about, the emblem of strength and longevity; and on inquiry, I have always been told the same story that it was the only way of multiplying both species. In the Miscellany he also wrote that he had seen a bronze image of a turtle and snake connected together in one of the taoist temples at Chi-nan Fu in Shantung.\n\nVery occasionally his stories verged on the salubrious but were never risqué. Describing his voyage up the Yangtze and passing Wu Shan he described an incident from Chinese mythology which led to a Chinese euphemism. The legend was about the 'pious and eccentric lady Yao-chi who lived before the Christian era immortalised by the ancient poet Sung Yü in an ode. She had entertained a princely guest in the Yang Tai Tower of Voluptuousness, and gratified him with the delights of Yün-yü, 'the Clouds and Rain,' hence the saying Yün-meng T'ai, 'Cloudy Dream of the Voluptuous Tower' which had become a synonym for excessive love and passionate desire for sexual intercourse. The name Yao-chi has in the same manner become the common appellation of renowned courtesans.\n\nSumming Up\n\nMesny's life in China falls neatly in two parts, the first thirteen years of excitement and adventure, followed by forty-five years living to a great extent on his 'bubble reputations', a spent force, living from day to day always in the hope of something turning up. It rarely does and on his own admission he fluctuated from comparative wealth to living hand to mouth.\n\nThere is however little doubt that at one period in his life at least, Mesny was trusted by his immediate Chinese superiors, as far that is as any Chinese official would have faith and confidence in a non-Chinese. These were the Chinese generals in the Imperial Army of Szechuan under whom Mesny served in Kueichou. Mesny seems to have spent the rest of his life trying, not all that successfully, to ensure that his ambitions were beneficial and to the best advantage of all, including himself. He made a great point about his ideas for the modernisation of China, each of them in turn rejected but then later put into practice without", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212757, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 66, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "51\n\non the Chinese military, its organisation, terminology and weapons almost certainly from his own experience. The second section is a two-page on-going essay on the need for China to modernise, for the construction of railways, the establishment of a foreign-style economy, etc. and finally, an on-going school boyish adventure describing his life on the Yangtze, commanding Chinese troops or as a prisoner of the Taipings. The whole was sub-titled A Text Book of Notes on China and the Chinese.\n\nMesny appears to have written and published this weekly magazine single-handed both from his memory, and notes written years beforehand stored against the day, together with material culled from other people's works. It ran for twenty-six weekly issues at a time, which were later bound into a total of four volumes. The individual issues were sold by subscription.\n\nVolume I: This ran from 26 September 1895 to 19 March 1896. His address, at this stage, was given as Club Chambers, 2 The Bund, Shanghai, with the printing of his Miscellanies at the China Gazette with offices at the same address.\n\nVolume II continued on from 26 March 1896 and ceased on 17 September 1896 when financial problems brought publication to an end.\n\nAfter a gap of some two and a half years Issue I of Volume III was published on Saturday 25 March 1899 with a firm promise of one year of publication. It ended, however, on Saturday 7 October of the same year with issue 26, and a regret that the Editor cannot commence Volume IV yet. The quality of the paper of Volume III was very poor indeed and has faded to a dull brown. The office had moved to Szechuan Road in Shanghai. Volume III was more literate than the previous two, suggesting perhaps that Mesny had employed a sub-editor. The format too had changed with Volume III. It was more professional and included some Peking court news, two pages of Commercial Notes and extracts from Reuter's telegrams. In a notice in issue 3 of Volume III Mesny explains that the Miscellany is 'a novel journalistic enterprise... which fills a gap. Its peculiar and unique features appeal to the intelligence of all discerning foreign residents in China as well as the intelligent readers of all nationalities in all parts of the World.' In August of 1899, some eight weeks before apologising to subscribers that he could not commence Volume IV yet, he doubled his subscription price. He was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212906, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1992", "page_number": 215, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "200\n\nessential. So my mother had come to the comparative safety of Hong Kong for the birth.\n\nI cannot recall the event though by curious coincidence my first memories are of the Matilda. I was four at the time and had developed roaring appendicitis. It had to come out.\n\nNow a journey up the Peak by the Peak Tram was no great novelty but to go up by a Peak Car was a great adventure. We went to the hospital and there I went through the traumatic experience of being gassed by ether poured on a mask held down against my protesting hands. No doubt a more modern anesthetic would have been less painful but it would have also been less memorable.\n\nThe events surrounding this experience allow me to take you to Cheung Chau for it was to Cheung Chau that I was taken for convalescence.\n\nCheung Chau and Summer Holidays\n\nCheung Chau, throughout the thirties, was a rest resort for missionaries from South China. In these days of universal air conditioning it is difficult to appreciate the trials of the summer in Hong Kong, let alone the hotter and more humid conditions in South China. The typical tour for a missionary was five years followed by a furlough in England during which the missionary toured the country speaking about his experiences. During the hot summers missionaries' families would descend on the resorts of Hong Kong. Two were particularly popular — Cheung Chau and Sunset Peak on Lantau\n\nOn Lantau a number of bungalows had been built and are still there. We slept in our bungalows but had our meals in the common dining room which was also used for meetings and services. As children we spent the whole time out of doors and swimming in pools in the streams. My most vivid memory of Lantau was being there in a typhoon. We must have had some warning of the approach of the typhoon as the shutters were closed, so that the lamps had to be lit there was no electricity of course. We did not have long to wait before the storm hit. The noise was terrific and the wind blew quantities of water under the door into the bungalow It seemed to go on for a long time. The next day the shutters were opened, the lamps put out and we emerged into a battered", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213391, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1994", "page_number": 213, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "201\n\nForsyth, Sidney A, An American Missionary Community in China 1895-1905, Cambridge (Mass), Harvard University Press, 1971\n\nFortune, Robert, Five Year's Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China, London John Murray, 1844 (Shanghai Reprint University Press)\n\nTwo Visits to the Tea Countries of China and the British Tea Plantations in the Himalaya, London John Murray, 1853\n\nFox, Helen, ed and trans, Abbe David's Diary, Cambridge (Mass) Harvard University Press, 1949\n\nFranck, Harry Alverson, Wandering in Northern China. New York and London The Century Company, 1923\n\n— Roving Through Southern China, New York and London The Century Company, 1925\n\nFranek, Rachel (Harta), I Married a Vagabond the Story of Family of the Wandering Vagabond, New York Appleton-Century 1939.\n\nFritz, Chester, China Journey, Seattle Washington University Press, 1981\n\nGallagher, Louis J ST, trans, The Journals of Matthew Ricci 1583-1610, New York Random House, 1953\n\nGamewell, M N, The Gateway to China Pictures of Shanghai New York Fleming H Revell Company, 1916 (Taipei: Reprint Cheng-wen Publishing)\n\nGarman, Schuyler New Fight on Hua and Gabet. Their Expulsion From Lhasa in 1846. Pacific Eastern Quarterly | 148-63 (1942)\n\nGardner, James. In and Out of Chungking Changteh - Wenchow - Chanchow. Missionary Life, Experience and Adventure During the First of Three Periods of Residence in China, Sydney 1947\n\nGaron, Shirley S. The Chamber of Commerce and the YMCA in Mark Elvin and G William Skinner, eds. The Chinese City Between Two Worlds, Stanford Stanford University Press. 1974 213-238\n\nGaunt Mary Elizabeth Bakewell (b. 1872). A Woman in China, London, Lane, 1914\n\nGeil, William Edgar. A Yankee on the Yangtze, New York Eaton and Mains, 1904 (Copy at Yale published by Methuen in London 1926)\n\nGeneral Description of Shanghae and Its Environs Shanghai The Mission Press, 1850\n\nGoes, Bento de, The Travels of Benedict Goez, a Portuguese Jesuit from Lahore in the Mogul's Empire to China, in 1602. in Pinkerton, John, ed, A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels London 1808-14:577-587)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213392, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1994", "page_number": 214, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "Gordon-Cumming, Constance Frederica, Wanderings in China, Edinburgh Blackwood, 1888\n\nGraham, Gerald S. The China Station Wan and Diplomacy 1830-1860, London Oxford University Press, 1978\n\nGraham, Dorothy, Through The Moon Door the Experiences of an American Resident In Peking, New York JH Sears, 1926 (Bj19j/A2/926g)\n\nGray, John Henry, Walks in the City of Canton, Hong Kong De Souza, 1875\n\nGray, Mrs John Henry, Fourteen Months in Canton, London Macmillan, 1880\n\nGreen, Owen Mortimer, The Foreigner in China, London Hutchison, 1942\n\nGreenberg, Michael, British Trade and the Opening of China 1800-42, Cambridge the University Press, 1951\n\nGriffith, Robert, China fu - China fydd, etc, London Gwasq Livingston, 1935\n\nGue, Caroline, China 13 (An Account of Travel to Treat Trachoma), London Faber and Faber, 1964\n\nGumpach, Johannes von, The Burlingame Mission, a Political Disclosure on the Position and Influence in China of Robert Hart As Confidential Advisor of the Tsungli Yamen, the Dispersion of the Lay-Osborn Flotilla, the Policy of the United States in China, Shanghai, London and New York, 1872\n\nGutzlaff, Charles (Gutzlaff, Karl Frederick), Journal of Three Voyages Along the Coast of China in 1831, 1832, and 1833, London Frederick Westley and A H Davies, 1834\n\nChina Opened, or a Display of the Topography, History, Customs, Manners, Arts, Manufactures, Commerce, Literature, Religion, Jurisprudence, etc of the Chinese Empire. London Smith Elder and Co. 1838\n\nHall, Josef Washington, In the Land of the Laughing Buddha, New York Putnam, 1924.\n\nHao, Yen-p'ing, The Comprador in Nineteenth Century China Bridge Between East and West, Cambridge (Mass) Harvard University Press, 1970\n\nChanging Chinese View of Western Relations 1840-95, Cambridge History of China, vol 11, 142-201\n\nHarkness Ruth, The Baby Giant Panda, New York Garrick and Evans, 1938 (Yale copy entitled The Lady and the Panda, an Adventure)\n\nHarris, George L, The Mission of Matteo Ricci, SJ a Case Study of an Effort at Guided Cultural Change in China From Sixteenth Century, Monumenta Serica XXV 1-168 (1966)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213393, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1994", "page_number": 215, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "Hatt. Virgie Chittenden, Western China, a Journey to Mount Omei, Boston Ticknor and Co, 1888\n\nHedin, Sven Anders, The Silk Road, English translation, New York Dutton, 1938\n\n— My Life As An Explorer, London Cassell, 1926\n\nHillard, Mrs Barnet(Low), My Mother's Journal Hope 1829-1834, Boston Ginn & Libs. 1900\n\nManila, Macao and Cape of Good\n\nHolden, Reuben Andrus, Yale in China, the Mainland, 1901-1957, New Haven The Yale in China Association, 1964\n\nHolm, Puts, My Nestorian Adventure in China, a Popular Account of the Holm-Nestorian Expedition to Sian-fu and as Result, New York and Chicago. Revell, 1923\n\nHomer, Jay, Dawn Watch in China, Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1941\n\nHopkirk, Peter, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia, London John Murray, 1980 (Hong Kong Reprint Oxford University Press)\n\nHosie, A. Three Years in Western China, London Philip, 1897 (Taipei Reprint Cheng-wen Publishing)\n\n—, On the Trail of the Opium Poppy, London, 1934\n\n1\n\nHoy Ching-ming, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China. 1840-1937 Cambridge (Mass). Harvard University Press, 1965\n\nHsu, Immanuel C.Y., The Rise of Modern China, New York: Oxford University Press. 1970\n\nHuang, Ray, The Lung-ch'ing and Wan-li Reigns 1567-1620, Cambridge History of China, vol 7, 511-84\n\nHue, Ivan, Recollections of a Journey Through Tartary During The Years 1844 1845 and 1846, a condensed translation by Mrs Percy Simmett, London Longman, 1852\n\n- A Journey Through the Chinese Empire, New York, 1855\n\n1\n\nHughes, Mrs Thomas Francis, Among the Sons of Han Notes of Six Years Residence in Various Parts of China and Formosa, London. Innes & Brothers 1887\n\nHume Lotta Carswell, Drama at the Doctor's Gate the Study of Dr. Edward Hume of Yale-in-China, New Haven Yale Association, 1961\n\nHummel, Arthur W, ed., Eminent Chinese of the Ching Period. Washington DC Government Printing Office, 1944 (Taipei Reprint. Cheng-wen Publishing)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216124, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 423, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "357\n\nMORE ON LOUIS DE SAN\n\nPAUL BOLDING\n\nYoung and keen for adventure, Louis de San was 29 in 1939 when he found himself in Chungking as a Belgian diplomat at the court of the nationalist Chinese government as the Japanese seized more and more of the country.\n\nThrough a family connection I met Louis de San in Syria in 1988 where he had retired and where he later died. I have recently acquired a fascinating letter he wrote to a friend from Chungking and some family photographs. In addition, his own recollection of how he set an Asian gliding altitude and duration record in Chungking in 1940 has been published.\n\nThe letter describes how he arrived in Hong Kong en route for his new post. 'I knew absolutely nothing about China. It took me three days to find out what was happening, buy supplies (bed linen, underwear, radio, wines and spirits etc) daily lunches and dinners, packing and repacking my stuff, making a thousand demarches, in short an absolute killer of a regime.'\n\nHe took the 900-tonne steamer Canton for Haiphong, a three-day journey. Hanoi he found ‘a small French provincial town replanted in Asia; the Japanese will find it easy to swallow it when it takes their fancy.' He caught a train to Kunming and waited there for a plane to Chungking. After five days, French fliers got him a place on a flight on a Douglas.\n\n'A lunar landscape with nowhere to land in case of accident; these poor planes are flying 10 or 12 hours a day!' he wrote of the trip.\n\nHe was immediately put to work by colleagues and the next day was at the French embassy when air raid sirens sounded.\n\n'In a few seconds, everyone was underground in the shelters with admirable discipline; then the wait with a note of anxiety and mystery... one did not know if one would still be alive minutes later... that lasted half an hour.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216338, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2003", "page_number": 97, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "46\n\nown people, and as Denham's editor wrote, its officers expected to exercise the same 'absolute, unquestioned, and unlimited authority over the persons of those who traded to their shores', or came there on any other business: with implicit obedience 'not to what the laws had provided, but to what they [the Chinese officers] thought fit to order'.68 The ever watchful Gutzlaff had noted that 'the poor are generally the sufferers (in the judicial system), whilst the rich expiate their crimes by means of money'. 'The purest virtue is boasted of on paper, whilst cruelty and oppression mark every public act'.70\n\n69\n\nFundamental aspects of the China Trade\n\nA Mutual Ignorance\n\nWhilst those Westerners engaged in the old China Trade became accustomed to the very different world around them, and sent back all manner of items illustrative of certain aspects of its culture (albeit those perceived by Chinese to meet demand) the greater part of those engaged were \"on the outside looking in.\" Little real knowledge of the country could be acquired by the great majority of those coming to China, because of its government's firm determination to confine the foreign maritime trade to one outlet at Canton, and to hedge in its personnel with all manner of restrictions. In this aim, the authorities were at one with the Japanese Shogun, who confined the Dutch to the one small demi-island of Deshima at Nagasaki for over 250 years of limited trading.71\n\nThe restrictions were greatly lamented by some. Major George Henry Mason, author of one of the most valuable early works in English on China and the Chinese, who stayed in Macau and Canton in 1789-90, had complained of 'the very circumscribed limits which are marked out for foreigners at Canton.' It was, he wrote, 'to be exceedingly regretted, that either habitual caution, ungenerous suspicion, or experienced necessary circumspection, should influence the Chinese, even at a distance of fourteen hundred miles from the capital of their empire, to restrain the observing traveller within his narrow compass'. And after describing the tumultuous outcome of an unsuccessful attempt by a party of British officers to gain the city walls of Canton, he had remarked, 'This adventure is related as a convincing proof of the difficulty, if not of the danger, attending inquisitive strangers in China.'72", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216481, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2003", "page_number": 240, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "190\n\nof his first command and the position of trust in which his employers had placed him. The Euphrates and Tigris Shipping Company had come into possession of the Shushan after it was no longer required for the Nile expedition and decided to use it to extend their operations into South West Iran up the Karun River beyond Ahwaz. They were already running a regular passenger and freight service up to Ahwaz but were unable to proceed further because of a series of rapids that had effectively closed the river to conventional steam traffic.\n\nPlant picked up his new command at Basra and was introduced to his engineer officer, a young Englishman called Stanley Webber with whom he would be sharing his Persian adventure. Together, they and a temporary crew from Basra, made their way down the Shatt al Arab to Mohammerah, a town at the mouth of the Karun River and from there, up river to Ahwaz. His next task was to take the Shushan up and over the rapids at Ahwaz, where the water rushed down a seemingly impenetrable rocky slope although, it was said, there were a few fast water channels through which the craft might proceed with safety provided it had sufficient paddle power. To be on the safe side he obtained some long safety lines and hired a crowd of pullers and heavers to man them should the craft not be able to manage the rapid under its own steam.\n\nRiver pilotage\n\nThus, all was made ready for the assault on the feared Ahwaz rapids. The great day came and so did the crowds to see the fun - but his hard work and planning paid off. With a full head of steam and Plant on the wheel the Shushan climbed the first rapid and then went full ahead upstream for the next gap between two great rocks where the river 'poured through like a sluice.' She just made it and then moved up to through the next rapid that was just a little easier and finally entered the calmer waters above the town. Here, the crew was discharged and sent back to their home port while Plant made preparations for taking the Shushan on its first trip to Shuster some 50 miles up river.\n\nFirst, he had to find and train a permanent crew, including someone with knowledge of the river and a Tindal (bo'sun) to take charge of the deck hands. He also needed an interpreter, through whom he could give instructions to the crew, most of whom spoke no English. He would\n\nPage 240\n\nPage 241", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]