[
    {
        "id": 214840,
        "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-1999",
        "page_number": 255,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "222 \n\nA Bold Approach to War \n\nI have referred to the indomitable spirit that animated the British troops and sailors of the War. This was something one cannot fail to notice in the various accounts of the War. As in the First Burma War, there was a boldness that must have taken the Chinese aback whenever it was demonstrated. Being practically universal, one minor example may serve to illustrate the rest. It comes from J.D. Vaughan, later a magistrate in the Straits Settlements, who had served as a midshipman on the Honourable East India Company's steam frigate Tenasserim in 1842, and is recounted here largely in his own words.46 \n\nA few days after the capture of the Yangtse city of Chin-kiang-foo, his captain took two of the ship's boats with twenty or thirty men each, with a brass three-pounder at the bow, and went to a town on a canal flowing into the great river. The writer was in one of these boats. The ship's Chinese carpenter, a Southern Chinese picked up at Singapore, could write but could not speak the Mandarin language of the area. Armed with a slate, and a truly astonishing degree of sang-froid, he made the captain's wishes to purchase provisions known to a large throng of citizens and soldiers who had assembled on the banks. Negotiating with a mandarin, they got all that they wanted, and during their brief stay were treated with the greatest civility and kindness. “A table and chairs were brought, and the elders of the city had a most interesting conversation with us through the invaluable carpenter. It was a curious sight to see the skipper sitting as cool as a cucumber smoking his cigar surrounded by our foes.\" \n\n“Few men,” Vaughan says, “would have ventured so fearlessly into the very clutches of an armed foe within a few miles of a captured city with war raging all around; and strange to say we came away un-harmed and not an angry face was to be seen amongst the crowds of men who flocked out of the gate of the town to see us.” \n\nMany other instances can be found in the books on the War, and indeed it was the norm. This verve derived from military and naval discipline and tradition, and from the leadership shown by, and expected of, British officers of the day. Only when that leadership failed, as in the contemporary disasters at Kabul in the First Afghan War, when a British army was annihilated through hesitation and mismanagement, \n\nPage 255\n\nPage 256",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214847,
        "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-1999",
        "page_number": 262,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "229\n\nHong Kong, 1842-1843,\" in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch, Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 14 (1974), pp.78 and 82.\n\n37\n\nHolt, p.142.\n\n38 Milne, p. 125.\n\n41\n\n43\n\nOuchterlony, p.225.\n\nAccording to Bingham (Vol.I, pp. 184-9), the provincial authorities issued a notification on 27 June 1840 with a carefully spelled out scale of rewards and inducements. A later proclamation by the three imperial commissioners, with greatly increased rewards, is translated in his Vol. II, at pp.404-7. Deceits and kidnapping were apparently the norm in oriental wars. In describing and condemning them, the writers were but echoing the similar complaints made by their brother officers during the First Burmese War in 1824-26, when such actions were also encountered there. See Bruce, op.cit pp.54.\n\nBingham, Vol.I, pp.286-291, adding an account of Captain P. Anstruther's imprisonment with the survivors at Ningpo (pp.292-7).\n\nBingham, Vol.II, pp. 181-3: \"When Ning-po was subsequently captured, it appeared that poor Mr. Stead had been conveyed there alive, when the brutal Chinese general had him secured to a stake, and then practised his bowmen by firing at him as a target; his body being subjected to the same brutality after life was extinct\". Davis, likely to be more authoritative, has a different but equally horrendous version. Upon Yukien's direction, \"the prisoner was tied to a stake in the middle of the public place [at Ningpo], deliberately flayed alive, and then cut in pieces\": China, During the War and Since the Peace (London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 2 vols., 1852), Vol I, p.170.\n\n4 Beeching, pp.121-2 and 136-7.\n\n44\n\nBingham, Vol.I, pp.212-217.\n\n45\n\nBingham, Vol.I, pp. 194-5.\n\nJ.D. Vaughan, The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements (Oxford in Asia Paperbacks, 1970, reprint of the original edition by the Mission Press, Singapore, 1879), pp.90-1 and see also p.36.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]