[
    {
        "id": 214958,
        "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-2000",
        "page_number": 54,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "been claimed that during this journey Macartney tried to obtain information about tea growing in China but was unsuccessful. This is incorrect. In fact, he was allowed to collect shoots of tea plant. These were later carefully transported to Bengal with samples of soil where they flourished and very likely gave rise to present Indian tea. This was perhaps the only success of Macartney's Embassy.\n\n14\n\nWe know of Macartney's open instructions on his mission, which included negotiating opening ports for trade and establishing full diplomatic relations with China. There is also a strong conjecture that Macartney was authorised to offer the Chinese active British efforts to stop opium trade, if negotiations achieved their principal aims. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to obtain confirmation of this very important directive. Although Macartney's Embassy was unsuccessful, the Ambassador wrote a rosy account of the mission suggesting that it was not a total failure but had achieved a great deal of goodwill between the two nations. Not so, writes Dr. James Dinwiddie, member of the Embassy, whose official duties as astronomer and scientist were to demonstrate the scientific instruments brought as presents. If we are to believe this meticulous observer with scientific training, it became apparent early during their sojourn in Beijing, and later in Chengde, that the Chinese including the Emperor were not impressed either by the members of the mission or the elaborate scientific instruments offered as presents. \"These things are good enough to amuse children,' the Emperor was supposed to have said after briefly examining them. Their reception, wrote Dr. Dinwiddie, was at best perfunctorily polite, at worst impatient and abrupt. From the day they stepped onto Chinese territory, a feeling of fear and mistrust seemed to pervade the motions of Chinese officials who appeared to check every move of the members of the Embassy; soldiers constantly guarded the Embassy. They were warned, early during their stay in Beijing, that their visit would be terminated shortly, and it seemed clear to the good doctor that the mission was doomed from the start. Even if Dinwiddie was unduly sensitive to the attitude of their hosts, it seems clear that the Embassy had achieved little towards establishing friendly relations, or an atmosphere of mutual trust, between China and Britain. Macartney's mission has been aptly summed up by Peter Auber1 as 'Received with the utmost politeness, treated with the utmost hospitality, watched with the utmost vigilance, and dismissed with the utmost civility.' Subsequent embassies were not so well treated.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214965,
        "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-2000",
        "page_number": 61,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "PROUDFOOT, W.J.: Notes from Biographical Memoir of James Dinwiddie, LL.D, embracing his account of travels in China as a member of Macartney's Embassy, Edward Howell, Liverpool, 1886.\n\nWALEY, A.: The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes, Allen and Unwin, London, 1958.\n\nWONG, J.Y.: Deadly Dreams: Opium and the Arrow War (1856-1860) in China, Cambridge University Press, 1998.\n\nWOODWARD, N.H.: Teas of the World, Collier Macmillan, London, 1980.\n\nThis paper was presented at the \"International Conference on Lin Zexu, the Opium War and Hong Kong,” held at the Hong Kong Museum of History in December 1998.\n\nAmong his many other accomplishments, Dr. S. M. Bard, OBE, ED, is also a historian.\n\nHis published works include the following: In Search of the Past: A Guide to the Antiquities of Hong Kong (Urban Council Hong Kong 1988); Traders of Hong Kong: Some Foreign Merchant Houses, 1841-1899 (Urban Council Hong Kong 1993); and Garrison Memorials in Hong Kong: Some Graves and Monuments at Happy Valley (Antiquities and Monuments Office, Hong Kong: Occasional Paper No. 4, 1997).\n\nSome scholars prefer to divide the Wars into the Opium War, 1839-1842, and the Arrow War, 1856-1860.\n\n* A Dutchman, Dr Cornelius Decker, advocated 40-50 cups a day.\n\nPortuguese Princess Catherine is credited with introducing tea to Britain when she married King Charles II.\n\nA story is told of German Radio, during the 2nd World War, which announced that due to shortage of tea in Britain, the British were ready to sue for peace, not having access to their 5-o'clock tea. It only served to amuse the British, for the Germans got the time wrong!",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215642,
        "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": 419,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "371\n\ndescriptions of it paint a vivid picture in inland China, of towns, villages, farming and husbandry at the end of the eighteenth century and put life to the many pictures and engravings of that period.\n\nIt was on this inland journey that Macartney was able to collect his tea plants. He says in his own words:\n\nI must not omit that the Viceroy (they had been joined by the Viceroy from Canton) observing our curiosity about everything relative to natural history, allowed us to collect seeds and fossils as we came along, and to take up several tea plants in a growing state with large balls of earth adhering to them, which tea plants I flatter myself I shall be able to transmit to Bengal, where I have no doubt that by the spirit of patriotism of its Government an effective cultivation of this valuable shrub will be undertaken and pursued with success.\n\nNo doubt the hard balls of earth were wrapped in the same casings of matting in which plants arrive from China to this day.\n\nSo far as opium is concerned, rather oddly, I cannot find that it came up in conversation at all although by then the illicit trade was well established and its use had been banned by Imperial edict some sixty years before.\n\nDr. Dinwiddie, who had accompanied the Embassy to Peking, took the plants to India on Jackall, together with tallow and varnish plants as well as some silkworm eggs, all of which were delivered to Dr. Roxburgh, superintendent of the East India Company's botanical gardens in Calcutta. Some years later indigenous tea plants were discovered growing in Assam and it is tea from these which seems more like the tea that we are now accustomed to drink. Whether there was any hybridisation between the two species I cannot say. Certainly Chinese tea retains its distinctive characteristics.\n\nThe journal of the Embassy's adventures in China is a fascinating and extraordinarily detailed account and description of a way of life and scenery which has largely disappeared. Present day Chengde is a shadow of the Jehol described by Macartney with pagodas, temples",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]