[ { "id": 207798, "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-1976", "page_number": 186, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA \n\n171 \n\nwhich was brought out in sections and assembled in Shanghai. The Chinese, however, refused to allow the Kuling above Ichang, and after a year of wrangling, Little sold her to the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, reputedly at twice she had cost him, and she was put on the Hankow--Ichang service. \n\nLittle was not disheartened, however, and set himself up in business in Chungking, among other activities specialising in insuring cargoes on the Upper Yangtze. At last in 1898, three years after the Treaty of Shimonoseki, he had the satisfaction of taking his wooden twin-screw launch Leechuan through the gorges to Chungking, acting as his own captain and chief engineer. The Leechuan was too small to carry any cargo, and needed trackers to pull her up the rapids; but this success enabled Little to enlist support from friends and form the Upper Yangtze Steam Navigation Company. The new company built a much larger steamer in Britain, the Pioneer, at Dennys of Dumbarton. This was a paddle steamer 180 feet long, sixty feet across the paddle boxes, drawing six feet when carrying a full cargo of 150 tons deadweight, and several hundred deck passengers. \n\nThe Pioneer made her first voyage between Ichang and Chungking in 1900, a few months after two British river gunboats, Woodcock and Woodlark had also made the passage; but these only drew two to two and a half feet of water. These gunboats, later, sometimes went a further 130 miles above Chungking to Suifu, at the junction of the Yangtze and Min Rivers. A similar type of French river gunboat also made the passage between Ichang and Chungking in 1901, the Orly, under the pilotage of Captain Plant who had commanded the Pioneer on her successful voyage. In later years these, and similar gunboats, made regular patrols along the open stretch of the Upper Yangtze above the rapids and gorges, between Wanhsien and Suifu. \n\nIn December 1900 the first of many serious casualties occurred on the Upper Yangtze, when the German steamer Suichsiang was wrecked at the Tungling Rapid thirty-six miles above Ichang on her maiden voyage. This and the Boxer and other political troubles delayed further attempts to establish a regular steamer service on the Upper Yangtze for many years. When this eventually came about in 1908 it was through the initiative of Captain Plant of Pioneer fame. The Pioneer was requisitioned by the Royal Navy during the Boxer troubles, and used to evacuate British subjects down the Yangtze, and rechristened H.M.S. Kinsha. Afterwards", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215595, "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": 372, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "322\n\nracing through the Gorges make this section difficult and dangerous both at low and high water. Chongqing, the chief commercial port of western China and an important distribution centre, was opened to foreign trade by an Additional Article [1890] to the Chefoo Agreement of 1876. This stretch also includes the River down to Chongqing from its junction with the Min River at Yibin [Suifu].\n\nThe fourth and final stretch, the Upper Yangzi of 1,600 miles, is torrential almost from its source in Eastern Tibet far to the west, down to Yibin. It has several major tributaries.\n\nWe, however, are interested in the Gorges. They have long been regarded by Chinese junkmen and especially foreigners who had travelled through them as passengers on river junks, as one of the most difficult stretches of river navigation on earth, with a current in places running at 13 knots.\n\nOur story concerns two British expatriates in China who, as far as we know, never met as they were of different social circles. One is Archibald Little, a British Shanghai merchant, married to a British lady and William Mesny, a struggling entrepreneur also in Shanghai but married to a Chinese. Paul King wrote that 'One of the foreign tea-tasters who each year visited Kiukiang [Jiujiang] was Archibald Little, who was never very successful in business but found himself in Yichang in the uphill work of establishing as a fact that the rapids in the upper reaches of the Yangtze could be negotiated by steam craft. In my [King] time the Navy was represented in Yichang by H.M.S. Kinsha - the famous pioneer merchant steamer on the Upper Yangtze owned and operated by the late Archibald Little.'\n\nThe first steamer to ascend the upper waters of the Great River, the Yangzi, through the Gorges above Yichang and as far as Chongqing during the low water season in the month of March 1898 was the 9-ton steam launch, Leechuen [Li Chuan], the property of Mr. Archibald Little who travelled aboard the steamer with his wife.\n\nArchibald John Little was born in London in 1838, and arrived in China in 1859 where he remained, apart from short visits back to Britain, until 1907 when he returned there and died the following year. He was a merchant, traveller and writer and is as well known to some as the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216490, "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": 249, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "L\n\nFORMEZ. UNDER THE LEZ UZ\n\npum quillin\n\n*I NJ\n\n19 JOINT » THE\n\n1G TING AND\n\nBENGTSB\n\n3. This is a photo of the Pioneer that he commanded in 1900 for Archibald Little and made the first successful commercial passage of a steam vessel from Ichang to Chungking. It is shown as HMS Kinsha after it was commandeered by the British Government following the Boxer rising. As can be seen the photo has been coloured.\n\n199", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]