[
    {
        "id": 211675,
        "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-1989",
        "page_number": 90,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "65\n\nthe better equipped but uninspired troops of the War Lords, had rapidly moved north and reached the Yangtze river at Kiu Kiang. Trouble immediately broke out in the Concession. Violent many-hued anti-foreign posters were pasted onto walls both inside and outside the foreign area. A variety of slogans appeared on these posters such as \"Beat down the British Imperialists”, or “Kill the running dogs of the new War Lords”. Others showed pictures of poor Chinese peasants and students being slaughtered by the aforesaid imperialists, and yet other pictures were too obscene to describe. Every artifice was bent to the inflammation of the feelings of a normally gentle and law-abiding population.\n\nThe threat to the security of the small foreign population was so manifest that armed piquets were put ashore from the British destroyer anchored off the Bund. Guards were mounted on the Concession gates, and rudimentary precautions were taken for the safety of the civilians. Soon the Revolutionary Army reached Hankow, the large treaty port further up the Yangtze, and there the situation repeated itself in an even more acute form.\n\nThe tension was relieved once or twice by incidents which were not without humour. One day a respected member of the British community was going along the Bund to call on his Consul, when he saw, standing outside the gate of the Consulate, two Chinese soldiers, one of whom carried a large kerosene tin full of paste and the other a bundle of pink and green posters. The soldiers with deliberation commenced to cover the Consul's gateposts with a colour-scheme, which on inspection invited the public to \"beat down\" all sorts of fairly innocent parties. This was too much for that particular \"Imperialist”, who seized the can of paste and poured it over the head of one of the soldiers. That put him temporarily hors-de-combat, but the other soldier grasping the paste-brush daubed the \"Imperialist's\" face with a particularly adhesive mixture. The situation had in it all the beginnings of a riot. Chinese coolies and others passing-by ran up, when fortunately the hasty, if innocent, cause of the commotion remembered that he carried a whistle for just such an occasion. He looked towards the destroyer, anchored some two hundred yards away, and blew three shrill blasts. There was no obvious reaction on board the warship, but the street cleared like magic. The member of the community, no longer looking so respectable, thus had an additional subject to discuss when he went in to see his Consul.\n\nPage 90\n\nPage 91",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212745,
        "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": 54,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "39\n\nShe was his maternal cousin, and his parents were keen that he should return from China to marry her. He said that he had made many lame excuses—which his parents had interpreted to be that his business was going so well that he dare not leave it [his usual ebullient tendency to exaggerate doubtless led them to assume he was making a fortune, and his brother, John, was therefore persuaded by their parents to travel out to China to let Mesny return home to marry]. However, Mesny's business was not sufficiently adequate for him to consider marrying anyone, not even the girl in Hankow, despite the Hankow girl having money of her own, and in addition, Mesny did not feel ready to marry and did not do so. He tells us that the Hankow girl went down to Shanghai, where she married a young man ‘whose name was still [in 1899] a household word, though husband and wife had long since been absent from the scene of their former experience in matrimony and other matters.'\n\nDespite the view he held about marrying a girl from his own country, he married Chinese women, one immediately after the other. The local girl back in the Channel Islands, his cousin, Lydia, whom his parents wished him to marry, appears to have dropped out of the picture in the late 1860s or early 1870s, when he married his first Chinese woman, probably by Chinese rites first, followed by a western marriage at the Hankow Consulate some years later. He was still sending verses to Lydia in 1868 and, incidentally, writing a letter a month to his old father in Jersey.\n\nWe have little idea what happened to either his first or second wife. We know that the second was legally separated from him and had taken half his worldly wealth with her. Why did he move back to Hankow for his last years? He left Shanghai in 1914... the unanswered question is whether his wife's obtaining a legal separation led to his move from Shanghai to Hankow? Another oddity involved his only son, who moved from Hankow to Shanghai to work, in his early thirties, at about the same time as his father moved back to Hankow from Shanghai. Mesny's son-in-law was a British businessman who, at some stage, lived and worked in Ningpo, not too far from Shanghai, and yet Mesny moved in the other direction to Hankow, where he had acquired a menial job with a long-standing British firm until he died.\n\nWe do not know anything about his relationships with his son and daughter, particularly in later years. At the time of his death, his only son would have been 34 and probably married. His daughter, Marie,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216049,
        "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-2002",
        "page_number": 348,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "282\n\nin 1896 took herself off up the Yangzi and later wrote about her six-month journey, including her stopover in Zhenjiang. She travelled on the steamer Poyang and...'after passing Silver Island [Jiao Shan], a wooded rock on which there is a fine temple, we reached Chinkiang, the first of the treaty ports on the Yangtze, and well situated at the junction of the Grand Canal with the river. On my two visits I thought it an attractive place. It has a fine bund and prosperous-looking foreign houses, with a British Consulate on a hill above; trees abound. The concession roads are broad and well kept. A row of fine hulks connected by bridges with the shore offers great facilities for the landing of goods and passengers. Sikh police are much in evidence, the hum of business greets one's ears, traffic throngs the bund, the Grand Canal is choked with junks, ...and judging from appearances only, one might think Zhenjiang a busier port than Hankow, the great centre for commerce in Central China'. Mrs Bird then goes on to describe the passing trade including...'our German rivals have done a very neat thing' in starting an albumen factory, in which the albumen, dextrously separated from the yolks of ducks' eggs, is made into slabs, which are sent to Germany for use in photography, the production of leather, and the printing of cotton, etc.'. She also commented on 'the beautiful Golden Island [Jin Shan], separated as recently as 1842 by the channel south of the island where there is now an expanse of wooded and cultivated land sprinkled with villages'.\n\nThe hulks were replaced many years ago, and yet again, since 1980, their wooden piers have been rebuilt into a row of some half dozen concrete piers. Sir Robert Hart, the Inspector-General of Chinese Maritime Customs for forty-five years, referred several times to the hulks at Chinkiang, usually because the hulk owner, Bean in one instance, was involved in a law case with the local Customs Commissioner.\n\nIsabella Bird learned of a number of charities and organisations for the welfare of the poor from the British Consul, W R Carles, and from Rev. W W Lawton who had made careful investigations for the Christian Literary Association of Zhenjiang. She noted that there were an orphan asylum and a benevolent institute for girls in Zhenjiang as well as a benevolent institute with eighty boys. For adults there was a Bureau for Advancing Funds, of inestimable advantage to the struggling farmer or merchant. There were also two free dispensaries, with nine",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]