[
    {
        "id": 212747,
        "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": 56,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "41\n\nHis leaders in his Miscellanies and his letters to the local papers are little different from present day British local paper indignation. A typical Mesny throw-away remark was the comment that ‘As China licks the hand that slaps her most, even a mailed one, so she has decided to give Prince Henry of Prussia’ a befitting reception at Nanking, of all places.\n\nHe frequently made the point that his knowledge of Chinese customs outweighed that of virtually all other foreigners, and that he, understanding Chinese ways, was in the position to inform foreigners how they should react to Chinese behaviour with due decorum. He explained manners and Chinese courtesy at great lengths, including the various bows and genuflections to be afforded to whom and when. It must have irritated many a foreigner to be reminded so often that he, Mesny, ‘knows better’ what is ‘the done thing.’\n\nOne of the hundreds of short essays in the Miscellany in which he informs his readership of such Chinese mores and customs is simply entitled ‘Etiquette’. He begins by explaining that the Chinese people beat the world for official etiquette, social politeness, ceremonies, manners and customs. He added that ‘I have never yet found or met a foreigner who has been so careful as myself to observe all the Chinese manners and customs of society, whether official or private and without sacrificing any important privilege of my British birthright. Without performing the degrading ceremony of kotowing to anybody, I have nevertheless observed all the other rites and ceremonies. Some foreigners, like Sir Halliday Macartney, have performed the kotow to their superiors, Li Hung-chang, for instance, but I have rigidly declined to do so, although many Chinese officials of the highest rank have kotowed to me; on such occasions I have bent my knees and picked them up.’\n\nMesny continued in this vein for several more paragraphs instructing his readers on polite behaviour. He then described the matter of ‘equipage’ which he suggested was ‘a serious one, especially at Peking.’ ‘I was advised by a friend,’ he continued, ‘not to travel in a cart or carriage drawn by a horse or pony. A mule is the proper animal. A cart with four openings on each side, three at the back, and one at the front is called a Shih Erh Kai, or twelve openings, and is only used by dudes, saunterers or other persons noted for their irregularities in the matter of genteel propriety. I was quite surprised to find the veteran Doctor Dudgeon riding in a cart drawn by a pony. I called his attention to this",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212756,
        "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": 65,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "50\n\nHis experience when assaulted by Chinese soldiers in Wu-chang during his holiday outing.\n\n10 Mesny's Chinese Miscellany: Volume 2: 10 September 1896: page 449\n\nIn 1992 Miss Lucie Mesny in Jersey explained that as a child she had never encountered any elderly lady, a member of family, called Lydia, who had been only two years younger than William Mesny and therefore would have been only in her mid-sixties when Miss Lucie was a child, if of course Lydia had still been alive\n\n12 Mesny was referring to what had been a very recent incident when the Germans had sent a few hundred soldiers to I-chou in Shantung province 'to bring the local populace to their senses.'\n\n13\n\nPresumably the good Doctor Dudgeon was John Dudgeon, who lived in Tientsin towards the end of the nineteenth century, the author of Chinese Arts of Healing, a series in the Chinese Recorder in 1869/70; The Great Medical College at Peking (in the Chinese Recorder February 1870); The Disgusting Nature of Chinese Medicines (also in the Chinese Recorder in March 1870); The Worship of the Moon (Chinese Recorder in Mar/Apr 1882), \"The Beverages of the Chinese: and finally Kung-fu or Taoist Medical Gymnastics (Tientsin: 1895).\n\n14\n\nIt is strange that Mesny should have been unaware of the legend of the powerful and ubiquitous Northern Emperor, 玄天上帝 a deity whose aides are a turtle and snake, frequently portrayed wrapped around each other at the feet of the image of the deity in Taoist and folk religion temples, and referred to as Generals.\n\n15 Yun-yü, the Clouds and Rain, is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse\n\n16\n\nThis was recorded in his Miscellanies in 1896 as Tsung-ping: translated as 'Regional Commander', rank 2a in the Chinese military forces of the Green Standards [lu-ying], subordinate to the Provincial Military Commander and Province Governors. [Hucker C.O., A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China: Stanford University Press: 1985]\n\n11 Colquhoun A R: China in Transformation: Harper and Bros: New York and London. 1898 (and other books)\n\nScidmore E R. China - The Long-lived Empire: MacMillan & Co. London: 1900\n\nAppendix A\n\nMesny's Chinese Miscellany\n\nEach weekly issue of the Miscellany, edited and printed in Shanghai during 1896, 1899 and 1905, with a run of one thousand copies, began with Notes on China and Chinese Subjects later renamed Anglo-Chinese Notes, an arbitrary, catholic and unstructured collection of items ranging from natural subjects such as the names in English and Chinese of trees, plants etc with a short description presumably culled from a major tome on the subject, to historical and mythological items, geographical descriptions mostly in western China, and a long section",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214315,
        "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": 173,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "137\n\nXU, THE DAOIST PERFECTED LORD XU ZHENJUN 許真君\n\nTHE PROTECTIVE DEITY OF JIANGXI PROVINCE\n\nKEITH STEVENS AND JENNIFER WELCH\n\nChinese Daoist and folk religion cults can in general terms be classified as nation-wide, provincial or local cults, the latter often limited to as few as one or two villages. Most studies of such cults made during the past half century have concentrated, for very good reasons, on Fujian and Guangdong communities in Hong Kong and Macao, Taiwan and South-east Asia as well as in Fujian and Guangdong provinces, and only a handful have described in any detail those cults limited to the more remote or less accessible provinces of Mainland China. The following short study is, in truth, no more than a tolerably full outline of a provincial cult which has spread to a limited extent into the neighbouring provinces of China. It is basically a medical cult, the deity revered for his skills in healing the sick; however, in a number of places there is also the added concept of the sick being healed by the deity using his power to cast out demons of sickness. Our particular cult is centred on the not so easily accessible southern province of Jiangxi.\n\nXu Sun, [known also as Xu Zhenren] is one of the numerous legendary Perfected Lords, the 'Immortals' or 'saints' of Daoism. He is the patron deity not only of the Xu clan but also of Jiangxi province. For at least two hundred years his cult has been very popular in the Jiangxi provincial capital, Nanchang [formerly Yu-chang] as well as throughout the whole province of Jiangxi and the immediately adjoining provinces where he is regarded as one of the most potent agents to cure sickness by ridding communities of the baleful spirits and demons who caused the sickness. He, in particular, was believed to be especially efficacious with diseases of the eye. According to Dudgeon, Xu was a doctor in Jiangxi province who, with six brothers, saved the province from devastating floods.\n\nA threesome, of Xu Zhenren and two other Immortals, Sun Zhenren and Wu Zhenren, are venerated as healers of the sick in many temples within communities from Jiangxi and Fujian, and in Fujian communities outside China.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    }
]