[
    {
        "id": 214307,
        "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-1998",
        "page_number": 165,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "129\n\na few wavered in the face of student rioting they all stood firm and Sowerby's tense moment passed.\n\nIn 1935 he was elected president of the North China Branch of the RAS until illness forced him to resign in late 1940. He was also elected honorary director of the Shanghai Museum, one of the major activities of the RAS, an office he held until 1946. The RAS had a new building in the early 1930s and the China Society of Science and Art of which he was president was incorporated into the RAS with all its funds and interests passing to the RAS.\n\nLife in Shanghai was quite busy what with his business company directorships and his membership of several councils including the Foreign Residents' Association and the British Residents' Association of Shanghai.\n\nHe and Clarice lived in comfort in Shanghai with their collection of Chinese pottery and porcelain and all their books on China until her death in May 1944. These were all donated to the Heude Museum in Shanghai before he left China in 1946 and placed into a large room named \"The Sowerby Hall.\" During the first part of the Japanese occupation he and Clarice were granted exemption from internment and were allowed to remain at home categorised as sick and elderly. However, after Clarice's death he was taken into an internment camp where he became so ill that he spent the last eight months of the war in hospital. He was fortunate in that his belongings were safely stored with friends.\n\nHe remained on in Shanghai for a further year, enjoying his garden and studying animals, insects and flowers. Then, in the autumn of 1946 he brought Alice Cowens, the nurse who had cared for his brother in France, out to Shanghai where they were married and left for England. They stayed in London for some months, through the bad winter of 1946-7 and after a short trip around parts of England they decided to retire to Washington DC, partly because so much of the material he had collected during his expeditions in China was kept there but mainly because he thought that it would be better for his health.\n\nThen a problem arose. Though his wife as a British citizen could stay, he had been born in China and the quota for that category to settle in the States was\n\nPage 165\n\nPage 166",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214310,
        "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-1998",
        "page_number": 168,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "132\n\nArthur Sowerby was recorded in the Directory & Chronicle of China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, etc. for the years 1932 and 1938 as manager of China Industries Ltd, with an office in Museum Road, Shanghai and in 1938, as a director of the Post-Mercury Company Inc., USA in Avenue Edward VII, also in Shanghai. The latter was involved in printing and advertising.\n\nArthur was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Fellow of the Zoological Society, a member of the RAS North China Branch and also President [1928] of the China Society of Science and Arts [in Shanghai], as well as being Honorary Director of the Shanghai [RAS] Museum.\n\niii\n\nHe married three times, the first time in about 1910, at the age of twenty-five, to Mary Anne Mesny, the daughter of John Mesny of the Chinese Customs Service. She would have been just about the same age as Arthur though more than likely his elder by a few years. She seems to have disappeared from the scene almost immediately, perhaps dying comparatively young but not before she bore him a son. She does not appear in any notes after their marriage even when his parents and sisters were evacuated from Taiyuan to the safety of Tientsin during riots. This suggests that she was no longer present after about 1911 or 1912. As Mary Anne's father, John Mesny, was married to a Chinese lady whom he married in Hankow in 1866, Mary Anne was half-Chinese. This was a time when mixed marriages and even more so, marriage to someone with native blood, was frowned upon by the more bigoted expatriates.\n\nHis second wife, to whom he was married at the age of forty-two in 1927, was Clarice Moise, the American with whom he founded the China Journal. Clarice died in 1944 during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.\n\nHis third wife was Alice Cowens, an old friend and the lady who had nursed Arthur's brother when he had been gassed during the First World War. She was invited to join Arthur in Shanghai in the Autumn of 1946 at a time when he was too ill to travel back to England alone and promptly flew out, first to Hong Kong and then, five days later, she arrived in Shanghai and married him.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    }
]