[
    {
        "id": 214306,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 164,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "128\n\ngland to write the rest of his magnum opus, the five-volume work The Naturalist in Manchuria, and, as we shall see, kept in touch with the nursing sister who had looked after his brother in the military hospital in France.\n\nIn 1921 he returned to China by way of the United States and visited the National Museum in Washington where so many of the specimens he had collected were exhibited. Once back in China he could not wait to get on with his next expedition, to southeast China. From Peking he travelled first to Shanghai and then on to Foochow in the spring of 1922 where he met Harry Caldwell, the American missionary famous for his book on the 'blue tiger of Fukien province' but, as luck would have it, the blue tiger eluded him. From Fukien, Sowerby decided to move on to southwest China, to Yunnan province in particular, a place he had long wished and planned to visit. It was not to be as Clark telegraphed an order that he should not risk his life as the bandit situation in Yunnan was extremely bad. And as Clark was funding Sowerby, he obeyed and to his everlasting regret never made it to the southwest. China was unstable for several decades following the Revolution of 1911, during which time banditry was endemic. A generic term for some of the bandits was Red Beards, hung hu-tzu, and Sowerby's own red beard, which he had during his expeditions, was quite an asset and rarely was he trifled with.\n\nBy the early part of the 1920s, Arthur found that his chronic arthritis was preventing him from making any more major expeditions and, therefore, when he met and married Clarice Moise in 1922, during her stay in Shanghai on her world tour, they settled in Shanghai where they decided to found the China Journal.\n\nWhat Sowerby later described as the most tense moment in his life happened immediately after the 30 May incident in 1925 when the Shanghai police had to resort to the use of firearms to prevent the over-running of a police station and to quell a student riot during which some students were killed. This led to a major strike against all foreigners and the city came to a standstill. The expatriate Volunteer Corps was called out and organised into specialist units. Sowerby was placed in charge of the 'Sniper' unit with the sole role of covering the Chinese policemen to ensure that they carried out orders. The 'Sniper' unit had orders to pick off any policeman who failed to obey orders and, though",
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    {
        "id": 214308,
        "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": 166,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "130\n\nalready full. So off they went again across the Pacific by sea to Manila, Hong Kong and Shanghai before setting out for Cape Town where they remained for five months. They finally returned to Washington having stayed in Buenos Aires for a month en route. Back in Washington they found that he was still unable to obtain a residence permit. However, someone pointed out the small print that as a dependent of his wife they would be allowed to stay and there they remained for the next six years until Sowerby died on the 16th of August 1954 at the age of sixty-nine. His last years were confined to his sickroom from which he continued his researches and writing.\n\nFor some twenty-five years of his life he lived in Shanghai, through its heyday, and for fourteen years he produced and published a creditable monthly periodical, the China Journal, aimed at ‘educating' Westerners in China to appreciate many of the aspects of Chinese civilisation and life under headings - Science, Art, Literature and Travel. It was to \"encourage an active enthusiasm for the powerful and often enigmatic Chinese self-contained culture,\" though the Journal not only pursued interests concerned with culture and the Chinese social environment it also pursued the major leisure activities available in China - hunting, shooting and fishing - all subjects close to Sowerby's heart. His primary interest centred on the collection of scientific and geological specimens for museums in Britain and the United States, as well as retaining some specimens for a unique museum in Shanghai.\n\nThe bimonthly Journal was originally titled The China Journal of Science and Arts, and edited by Arthur de C. Sowerby [Science] and John C. Ferguson, PhD [Literature and Arts]. Clarice Moise BA began as the Assistant-Editor and Manager but later simply became the Manager. We know nothing of Ferguson whose name continued on the editorial staff until the late 1930s. The first issue, No. 1 of Volume 1 was issued in January 1923 with a primitive sketch on the cover designed by A de C. S showing a mounted T'ang horseman, a dragon and bats. At first, the journal was based at 103 Ben Building at 23 Avenue Eduard VII in the French Concession though later, by 1928, its offices had moved to 8 Museum Street in Shanghai. The cover was changed in 1926, again designed by ‘A de C S', to a cross-legged Buddhist deity with his palms held together in front of his chest in prayer, with a flaming nimbus behind him and sitting on a pedestal.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
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    {
        "id": 214309,
        "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": 167,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "131\n\nNot only did he write many of the Journal's editorials but also in each edition a number of miscellaneous articles on subjects ranging from hunting in Manchuria and boating as a holiday to the Hall of Antiquities in the Hude Museum in Shanghai - a pet project of his, as well as Scientific Notes and Reviews. His editorials ranged from Shanghai's Position in the World to China's New Industrialisation. A typical editorial described the colossal task facing the leaders of China's Republic and, as the years passed, so his editorials became more and more anti-Japanese. In the great age of European self-confidence these editorials reflected the general mood of expatriates not only in the Treaty Ports but also within the hinterland of China. None of this necessarily precluded a measure of genuine interest in Chinese culture though he, himself, appears not to have been a convinced ‘Orientalist.' He covered a vast range of subjects under broad-brush headings Engineering, Industrial and Commercial Notes; Scientific Notes and Reviews; Educational Notes and Intelligence and Travel and Exploration Notes.\n\nA number of articles written by people whose names have come down to us as authors of well-known books such as Florence Ayscough, L.C. Arlington, Juliet Bredon and James Hutson appeared in the Journal over the years. It would be impossible to list here many of the articles and papers printed issue by issue ranging as they did from tea to river craft, secret societies to criticisms on the Shanghai local artists exhibitions as well as descriptions of expeditions into the interior With Kua-tzu and Camera in the Yangtze Gorges by H. Foote-Carey and in 1923 - Investigation of the Thermal Dissociation of Hydrated Alumo-silicates, Prehnite, Zoisite and Epidote by E. Norin of the Nystrøm Institute, Taiyuan Fu, Shansi.\n\nIn early 1938 Arthur and his wife, Clarice, sold their interest in the China Journal to a new company called \"The China Journal Publishing Company Limited\" based at 117 Hong Kong Road, Shanghai, accepting part of the purchase price in shares of the new company. There were now three directors, H.J. Timperley, A. de C. Sowerby and H.J. Freyn. The manager at that point was a Mr. W.V.D. White with Clarice Moise no longer referred to on the staff of the Journal. Then, on 7 December 1941, after Pearl Harbour, men of the Japanese navy broke into the offices and destroyed everything, including the files, mailing lists, back numbers, and that was the end of the China Journal.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
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    {
        "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",
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        "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",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214314,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 172,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "136\n\nI am grateful to the Reverend Carl Smith for the following information:\n\nAn announcement from a China mail of 1925. Married, at Shanghai, yesterday, Miss Clarice Sara Moise, to Mr. Arthur de Carle Sowerby, publisher of the China Journal of Arts and Science. Will of wife, Clarice Clara Sowerby, probated in Hong Kong in 1948, written in Shanghai 1933, in favour of her husband Arthur de Carle Sowerby of Shanghai, and son, Arthur Mesny de Carle Sowerby. Sister, Nina Ethel Moise. Will of Sowerby himself: Arthur etc., probated in Hong Kong, 1955, Arthur de Carle Sowerby, scientist, at present residing at Fairfax Hotel (?), 2100 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington DC. Wife, Alice Muriel Sowerby. If predeceased, sister-in-law, Nina Ethel Moise, 6485 San Marco Circle, Hollywood, to receive half; and son, Arthur Mesny de Carle Sowerby, to get the other half. Will written 7th November, 1949. A death record of Arthur de Carle Sowerby, 16th August 1954.\n\nCarl Smith also commented that it was known that Sowerby had children (sic) by a Chinese woman. It would appear that most expatriates in Shanghai were unaware of Sowerby's first marriage in Tientsin to William Mesny's niece, Mary Anne, and that the reference to the 'children by a Chinese woman,' remembering that Mary Anne's mother had been Chinese, suggests that Sowerby's first marriage had been quietly 'forgotten.'\n\ni The bandits were referred to as the Ko-lao Hui, the Elder Brother Society, an old powerful secret society, membership to which was strictly forbidden by the Ch'ing government and punishable by death. Their gangs robbed and killed far and wide as well as causing trouble with their inter-gang feuding.\n\nii The British Residents' Association was formed in 1931 to enable long-term residents to have a say in the running of the Concession. At about the same time, in order to support the authorities in the Concession following the recent troubles and crises, a body known as the Shanghai Fascisti was organised, and led for a while by Sowerby. The Fascists at this time were regarded by many as an honourable force against encroaching communism.\n\niii John Mesny died in 1884 in Hankow leaving a widow and eight children, all under the age of sixteen.\n\niv Davidson-Houston, JV: Armed Pilgrimage : Robert Hale Ltd : London: 1949\n\nv Journal of Oriental Studies Vol. II. No. 1. January 1955 [University of Hong Kong]",
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