[ { "id": 206215, "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-1971", "page_number": 32, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "26\n\nSTEPHEN UHALLEY, JR.\n\nabout in the preceding three days, beginning with a request apparently from the Ch'ing tao-t'ai of Ningpo for British and French naval support for his impending attack on the city. Consul Harvey noted that this was \"an extraordinary coincidence,\" and one that \"was far too good an opportunity to be thrown aside and lost.\" The attack was to consist primarily of the vessels of a famous pirate of the region by the name of Apak who had gone over to the Manchus. Some effort was made to conceal the joint nature of the attack at the outset, for Captain Dew wrote for the record that he told his Ch'ing collaborators that since the rebels had refused his demands he had no objection to their fleet passing up river, \"but that they were not to open fire till well clear of our men of war.\"28 The fiction of this position was made clear by subsequent events, and by other evidence. The ultimatum of May 8, stated that had the demands been agreed to, the English and French should have felt bound in honour to prevent an attack on the Taipings from the settlement side by approaching Ch'ing forces \"which in countless numbers and heavily armed ships advance to attack you.\" The ultimatum proclaimed neutrality unless fire came from the battery or walls opposite the settlement on the advancing Ch'ing forces \"(thereby endangering the lives of our men and people in the foreign settlement).\"29\n\nIt is of interest to note how this exchange of correspondence was characterized by Consul Harvey and Captain Dew. Harvey said that \"... the whole tenour of their letters was as bad and sarcastic as it was defiant,” and he assured his respondent “that nothing could have been more friendly, reasonable, and patient than the tone of our letters, as well as of all our demands on the Taipings.\"30 Dew was a bit more candid, for as he reported later: \"I now commenced a lengthy correspondence with the Taiping chiefs, which was met on their side by the most subtle reasoning and arguments soon convincing me that but one argument, viz: that of cannon balls would avail with them....\" The two men substantiated their interpretation of events and attitude in the correspondence with two memoranda written by an interpreter. The first, based upon \"information supplied by certain respectable natives,\" claimed that General Fan had been sent from Nanking “to turn the foreigners out of Ningpo.\"32 The second memorandum purported to be extracts of a speech made by General Huang\n\n31", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212711, "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": 20, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "shy of sharing their knowledge with us, possibly, and perhaps understandably, wishing to retain family privacy.\n\nComparatively few of his autobiographical ‘facts' have been verified though he does assure us at the beginning of at least one of his autobiographical essays that it contains 'facts not fiction'. The autobiographical paragraphs and snippets scattered throughout his Miscellanies appear to have been honest and candid in so far as his revealed details. There is no reason to doubt anything he has written, anything dishonest, though with his statement that he is a 'self-proclaimed publicist,' one cannot help coming to the conclusion that there are times when he doth protest too much and that some of the details are slightly more supportive of his claims than one would have thought strictly true or indeed necessary. One is often left with more than a slight suspicion that Mesny had a touch of Walter Mitty about him, and in a number of his exploits one suspects he has embellished an already good story. The chapters of this biography on The Early Years, The Pacification of the Miao, and the Later Years, are to all intents and purposes autobiographical, and much of the substance of these chapters may seem to be grandiloquently worded, pompous and stilted. This is because I have transcribed most of the anecdotes written by Mesny in the first person singular into the 'third person' otherwise leaving the narrative as a whole as it was in the Miscellanies to provide the reader with a distinct and palpable feel for his personality.\n\nAt least three potted biographies of Mesny have been written, beginning with an entry in Balleine's Biographical Dictionary.2 Later, a piece in The Pilot's first volume (July 1946) which described The (Jersey) Trinity Boy who became a Chinese General, under the general heading of ‘Adventurous Jerseymen.' This was repeated in The Pilot of July 1980. Douglas Ford of the Jersey Museum added a little to Balleine and The Pilot in his 'From Jersey to the Celestial Empire' [undated], and when the Jersey Post Office produced its stamp series in May 1992 commemorating the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Mesny's birth they issued a short piece which added yet more about him. These were all laudatory describing Mesny's adventures and successes without portraying the unromantic and often wretched side to his life. These hyperbolised descriptions occasionally lead to erroneous claims such as the assertion that Mesny always wore Chinese clothes. In practice he wore foreign clothes most of the time and only donned Chinese robes for some fifteen years, when he had his photograph taken with his son and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214242, "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": 100, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "63\n\nthe golden bowl being his unique characteristic.\n\nMahesvara, Mahadevi or Siva, known in Chinese as Mo-hsi-shou-lo T'ien 摩醯首羅天\n\nMahesvara is one of the numerous titles borne by one of the best known of the Indian deities, Siva. He has come to be regarded as the Supreme Being though he more generally represents the more malignant forces and destruction, all part of the cycle of creation and destruction. He is married to either Uma Mahesvara [also known as Parvati], by whom he had a son named Skanda [see 21 below], or to Kali, who is also Durga. The latter is known as Hariti [and in Chinese Kuei-tzu Mu: see 6 below] whose image is also one of the twenty-eight Devi. Hariti has one face, six arms and a necklace of skulls\".\n\nImages of Siva stand in both the Ta Pei Ssu and the Pi-yun Ssu. In the Ta Pei Ssu he is portrayed as a typical northern Chinese deity dressed in multi-coloured robes and a tall Buddhist crown, but with six arms and an ageless Chinese face of indeterminate sex. He looks like and could easily be confused with other multi-arm Buddhist deities as he has no unique characteristic. In the Pi-yun Ssu he is naked apart from a skirt in colourfully decorated cloth down to his knees. He has four arms and a smaller head on top of his normal head. He has red spiky hair on both heads and fangs rising out of the lower jaw of his normal head.\n\nSoothill described Siva as having eight arms, three eyes and riding a large white bull, holding a handful of snakes and a small drum, and can be represented as the phallic symbol.\n\n4] Maritci [Maritchi or Marici] known in Chinese as Chun-t'i P'u-sa\n\nThe Tantric [Lamaist] bodhisattva, Chun-t'i, is the Buddhist form of the Hindu personification of light and an offspring of Brahma, Cundi or Candi. She is often confused with the Tantric many-armed Kuan Yin and the Taoist stellar deity, Tou-mu Hsing-chün. Two separate deities also are referred to by Chinese devotees as Chun-t'i; these are as", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 } ]