[ { "id": 204613, "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-1963", "page_number": 94, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "BRITISH LEGATION AT PEKING\n\n81\n\nthe death of Sir Robert Hart during the siege, and on July 21st it carried a long letter from the President of Queen's College, Belfast, which served as a somewhat premature obituary notice for Hart, who, in fact, lived until 1911.**\n\nThe relieving troops finally entered the British Legation on August 14th, when a Company of mounted Sikhs rode in at about 3 p.m. accompanying General Gaselee and his staff. So ended the siege which had lasted from June 20th until August 14th, a total of 55 days. Fortunately no overwhelming damage had been done to the British Legation, though many of the roofs were badly smashed about and bullets and shells had gone through most of the buildings. One last ironic touch; immediately after the raising of the siege the commissariat functioned so inefficiently that the besieged had to forage for themselves and for some days got less to eat than during the fighting. Meanwhile those who had 'enjoyed' the hospitality of the British Legation during the siege departed and the work of clearing up and repairing the damage began.\n\nThe actual damage suffered by the British Legation buildings was slight in comparison with the damage done to the other foreign Legations. The outer walls were badly damaged and had to be rebuilt, but one small section on the north-east corner facing the Imperial Canal was sufficiently unharmed to be left intact, and on its surface someone painted in black nine-inch letters the words \"LEST WE FORGET”. Most of the buildings in the compound were soon repaired and the Legation again looked substantially the same as before the siege. However, as part of the settlement after the Boxer troubles and the siege of the Legation Quarter Britain acquired considerable ground on the northern and western sides of the old Legation. This consisted of land formerly occupied by the Mongol market, by the Imperial Carriage Park and by the Hanlin Academy, which was burnt out during the fighting. This newly acquired land was later used for\n\n28 Born in 1835 Hart came out to China in the Consular Service in 1854 and spent his first three months as an interpreter at Hong Kong. After various consular appointments he was permitted by the British Government to resign from the consular service in 1859 and to join the newly formed Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs service as Deputy-Commissioner of Customs at Canton. In 1863, at the age of twenty-eight, he was appointed Inspector-General of the Maritime Customs, a post which he held until his resignation in 1908.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209960, "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-1983", "page_number": 219, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "197\n\nFrom 1860 there is, firstly, a collection of China Medals and related items and eight drawings by a Royal Marines Light Infantry officer who served in the Second China War. There is also a vase and a gilded, seated, Buddha which were taken from the Summer Palace in that year.\n\nThe Marines were involved in the fighting occasioned by the Boxer uprising in 1900, and the Museum holds a number of relics of this involvement. A Boxer flag is, for instance, on display. This was captured by Sgt. Preston, Royal Marines Light Infantry, on the walls of Peking on July 14, 1900, an act for which he was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal. The notes explain that Preston kept the Boxers at bay while an American Marine seized the flag.\n\nA Victoria Cross was won at about the same date which is commemorated by the display of a large pike. This was captured by the RMLI detachment during the siege of the Legations. Captain L.S.T. Holliday led a sortie during which he had half a lung shot away. He later became Adjutant General of the Royal Marines and when he died in 1966 at the age of 95 he was the oldest holder of the VC. A squat, gape-mouthed, mortar about two feet high is also on show. This was seized at the capture of the Taku forts in 1900. A large brass shell case used by the Quick Firing guns at the Taku Forts is mounted in the museum as a gong. The case has the name Berndorfer stamped upon it, an Austrian firm.\n\nNext came a quick visit to the National Army Museum, in Chelsea, London. Among the items which I spotted there were the following, and I am sure there must be others which I missed.\n\nThere is a large, full-length, portrait of Sir Hugh Gough, by an unknown artist. He is shown with what looks to be an Indian servant buckling on his sword and is impressively bemedalled. A tall, slim, figure, with a white moustache, the General was in his fifties or sixties when the picture was painted. A silver model pagoda commemorating the Treaty of Nanking, August 1860, is on loan from the present Viscount Gough. It was made by Richard Hennell and is hallmarked London 1860-61.\n\nA long rampart gingall, manufactured at South Tientsin Arsenal in 1895 slants diagonally across a case which also features", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211631, "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": 46, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "21\n\nto be regarded as such by mankind and to be revered only as the representation of that power. However, over the centuries, he has developed into a god in his own right, depicted as a gilded image of an emperor sitting on a throne, and is accepted by the masses as the ruler of the Heavenly bureaucracy.\n\nIn T'aishan in Shantung province it was claimed that the Jade Emperor in mortal life had been merely a learned doctor of medicine who had lived during the 12th century AD at the Sung court in Kaifeng. He attended the emperor Hui Tsung during a serious illness and saved his life with a miraculous cure. He was known as Chang Yu-huang, but, on his death, he, like many a hermit, was deified by imperial decree.\n\nBritish representatives met the imperial representative, Li Hung-chang in 1876 in the temple (Yuh Huang T'ing) dedicated to the Jade Emperor to the west of Yent'ai (Cheefoo) in Shantung province to arrange the Chefoo Convention. Another incident involving the British in North China and connected with the Jade Emperor concerned Sir Meyrick Hewlett of the China Consular Service at the turn of the century during the clearing up after the siege of the British Embassy during the Boxer Rebellion. He found in the house of Sir Ernest Satow, HM Ambassador in Peking, a tablet with a background of sky-blue, framed in rich gold and inscribed with the four characters in gold — 'Huang T'ien Shang Ti'. Prince Ch'ing identified it as an item from the Temple of Heaven which had been missing for more than a year. When Sir Ernest asked how to restore it to its rightful place, the Prince begged the Ambassador not to send it round to his palace as should it be placed in the entrance he could neither leave nor enter his home without kowtowing twenty-seven times before it. Another more enlightened official helped out by bearing it off at dead of night in a Peking cart to the vaults of a European bank where it awaited a favourable day for restoring it to the Temple of Heaven. Some thirty-five years later, Sir Meyrick, paying his farewell visit to Peking, visited the Temple of Heaven and asked the attendants whether he could see the tablet, kept with the other tablets sacred to the emperors of the Ch'ing dynasty in a small temple opposite the Altar of Heaven. They replied that this was quite impossible, since even in post-imperial Kuomintang days no-one was allowed to see it. Sir Meyrick related the story of its recovery, upon which the attendants agreed to show him the tablet together with the tablets to the 28 Major Constellations, to Thunder and Lightning, and to the other forces of nature, but said that the tablets to the emperors were all lost after their", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212717, "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": 26, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "The Boxer Rebellion in north China in 1900, which involved the massacre of some western missionaries and a siege of the Legation area in Peking, did not reach as far south as Shanghai, though in his curriculum vitae Mesny mentions 'Volunteered for service at Peking 1900'. Unfortunately, we do not know whether his service was accepted or what he did during that period.\n\nThe Chinese Imperial government survived these rebellions but slowly became even weaker as the years went by. Western nations also took full advantage of Chinese imperial weakness until in 1911 the Revolution overthrew the imperial government and established a very weak republic which, after some further thirty or so years of both inner turmoil and invasion by the Japanese, ended with the Communist victory. Mesny lived through the first eight years of the Republic, and though they were stirring times, he must have had many nostalgic memories of his prowess and success in the Chinese imperial army, particularly in the latter days of the suppression of the Miao rebels, and the time when he was a prisoner of the Taipings, features which make his eye-witness accounts of value today.\n\nMesny lived in a China which followed a predominantly masculine routine. The majority of foreigners were either isolated loners or members of small groups in remote parts of China, or they lived in treaty ports, enclaves in which the relative comfort of 'home', friends, and social occasions made life bearable, even though foreign women tended to live circumscribed and artificial lives. However, his accounts lack such intimate detail of his and his family's lives. Despite the autobiographical notes in the Miscellany, not only in segments but selective in the extreme, Mesny remains somewhat of an elusive person, and, as none of his letters appear to have survived, much of his personal life would seem to be largely irrecoverable. His enigmatic snippets about his Chinese family are such that they do little more than fuel guesswork. We still lack an account of Mesny's private life in his later years, one in which we might hear the voices of his wives and children as clearly as those of the senior officers we have been provided in the Miscellanies, of the senior Chinese officers during the Kueichou campaign.\n\nMuch of the raw material provided by Mesny contains stark, bald statements which leave loose ends and strands which we cannot gather together without straying into the realms of guesswork. Regrettably, there would appear to be little chance of ever satisfying our curiosity from...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215597, "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-2001", "page_number": 374, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "324\n\nJapanese were able to demand the formal opening of Chongqing to steamers, and a clause to this effect was embodied in the Treaty of Shiminoseki. By this treaty, under the favoured nation clause, the Chongqing and the Upper Yangzi became open to the world and Little immediately applied to the then British Minister, Sir Claude Macdonald [of the later Boxer Siege fame], who encouraged Little to proceed and promised energetic support. Little ordered a twin-screw steamer to be built in Shanghai, fifty-five feet long and ten feet beam. It steamed at nine knots, and though he would have preferred a larger and more powerful vessel he had to cut his coat according to his cloth. This was the Leechuen.\n\nHe left Yichang on 15th February 1898 for the 500-mile voyage through the Gorges, ascending some 500 feet during the journey to Chongqing. The story, told by Archibald Little in his Through the Yangtse Gorges,2 describes the most frightening moment when at dusk in the Scissors Gorge, making about six knots they bumped over a sharp rock that cut through the inch planking, broke two hardwood frames and sent water spouting up over the saloon floor. Fortunately they soon spotted a steep patch of sand on to which they ran the boat. Then, overnight, they stuffed cotton, white lead and tallow into the cracks; nailed blankets down with planks all over and by dawn had stopped the leak sufficiently to be able to get under way again. The rock had only newly fallen from the cliff above and had been unknown to the pilot. They reached Chongqing eleven days up from Yichang and the only photograph I have seen of the Leechuen during her epic journey is a very fuzzy snap of high cliffs with the Leechuen amidstream, a not so large speck, her billowing smoke being almost twice her size.3\n\nTwo British gunboats, H.M.S. Woodcock and H.M.S. Woodlark, made the same journey fifteen months later in May 1899, and then, in June, the first merchant steamer, Pioneer, followed them up to Chongqing.\n\nWe now turn to William Mesny. In 1878 and 1879 he travelled across south-west and central China calling on the most powerful and influential officials and gentry, advising them to adopt modern means for developing the riches of the country and bettering their conditions.* Mesny was a Jerseyman who spent most of his life, from first setting foot in China in 1861 until his death in Hankou in 1919 endeavouring to make his fortune. He was never backward in relating how he had the ears of many of the most influential Chinese of the day and although", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216369, "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": 128, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "77\n\n1863. However, $30 was still a lot of money at that time. If Hart had completely ceased his sexual relationship with Ayaou and never resumed it after 1863, it would not seem to be necessary for him to continue to pay Ayaou a monthly sum of $30 until 1866. Some may argue that Hart paid Ayaou the money not just to keep her, but also to contribute to the upbringing of their children; however, the words Hart uses in his statement do not give us any indication of this. He states that \"she continued to be kept i.e. paid ($30 a month) by me till I went home on leave in 1866 (Declaration 1)\"; it appears to refer to female companionship.\n\nIt may also be argued that in his diary entries between 1864 and 1866, there is no mention of his having resumed his sexual relationship with Ayaou, and if he had, he would have recorded it as he did in the missing volumes of his earlier diaries. Hart did tidy up his diaries after he was asked by reporter Hosea B. Morse for permission to see them in connection with a proposed biography in 1902, and he also left two substantial gaps in the earlier diaries. However, this fact does not necessarily mean that Hart \"was forced to destroy\" some of his earlier diaries, as has been suggested (Bruner, Fairbank, Smith 1986: 150-1). Hart actually left half of Volume 2 with empty pages and almost the same again with Volume 3; these form the two gaps in his diaries. This allows for the possibility that Hart simply did not write anything between 29 July 1855 and 20 March 1858, nor between 6 December 1858 and 9 May 1863. Hart himself states on the flyleaf of Volume 4 “Journals from 6 Dec. 1858 @ [to] May 1863 lost, probably in the Boxer siege 1900\", and this may be deliberately misleading on his part when one considers the empty pages. It is more likely that during his intimate involvement with Chinese women, more particularly with Ayaou, he simply stopped writing in his diary. This gives us an indication that Hart avoided mention of his intimate relationship in any depth in his diaries.\n\nHart's abstinence from womanising and his political ambition\n\nIt should be noted that Hart decided to cease his sexual relationship with Ayaou around early summer 1863—the exact time, if it is not simply a coincidence, when he knew almost for certain that he would be appointed as L.G. Hart was formally appointed as L.G. of the CIMC", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]