[ { "id": 213323, "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-1994", "page_number": 145, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "126\n\nsite of the battery of old guns covering the harbour, was a small renovated folk religion temple. Finally one elderly man explained that a newly rebuilt temple stood some two miles up the coast overlooking the sea. It had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s. When eventually we found it we were lucky enough to be guided by another elderly man who we had encountered on the approach track. Before we had time to discuss anything whatsoever he asked who we were and on hearing that we were English he immediately volunteered the fact that the English had been to that spot before, to that very temple, which they had attacked. He added that the English 'general' had been killed during the battle and had been buried on the hillside and he pointed out roughly where the grave had been. He explained that it had been plainly visible until 1949 when the Communists had taken over and had had the hillside planted with young trees which had obliterated the grave.\n\nExtremely interesting though this piece of folk memory was, it did not tie in with the sketch map provided by an officer, Lieutenant Ouchterlony of the Madras Engineers, who was present in Chapu during the landings and the subsequent battle. The Left Column and the Right Column both had landed in the bay at the point where the present rebuilt temple stands, and therefore our informant was right to claim that the English had been there. However, whoever had been buried on the hillside at that spot was certainly not Colonel Tomlinson who fell at the joss house marked on Ouchterlony's map much nearer to Chapu. The site of the Joss house marked on the map, where Tomlinson fell, is within a very short distance from the harbour where the battery of old guns now stands and where the local inhabitants were quite certain that no temple had been there within living memory.\n\nThe fallibility of folk memory is well known and it is not too difficult to understand how over the century and a half since the battle took place the scene of the attack on the temple had been transferred to the other temple where a grave, presumably of a foreigner, was accepted as that of the British senior officer who fell that day.\n\nPlates and photographs accompanying this article will be published in a future edition of the Journal - Editor]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214288, "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": 146, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "109\n\nships of the line. The largest ships employed were the equivalent of battleships. They were mounted with up to 74 guns generally of a size of 32 pounders (the calibre of guns was usually quoted as the weight of the round shot, the cannon ball, which they fired), but up to 64 pounders. Field pieces were of smaller size so that they could be moved about the countryside. The forces in the first China war had six and nine pounders as well as 12 pounder howitzers. The main projectile was round shot. The guns would fire round shot to demolish the walls of forts etc. and they could do this very effectively, especially with the larger sizes of shot. Round shot would also plough through troops.\n\nThe other projectiles that the cannon used were shells and grape or canister. The common shell was filled with explosive which exploded when the fuse burnt down. The early fuses were not very reliable and it was not until the 1850s that accurate and reliable fuses had been developed. However, even in the first war, there are reports of shells being effective against the Chinese forts. In the second war, the Chinese were surprised by the effectiveness of the improved fuses, when their troops were shelled behind Canton. Caseshot, grapeshot or canister was also used, which was a tin of the size of the bore filled with bullets which burst open as it left the muzzle allowing the bullets to spread out in an arc. The number of bullets used varied, but the following were the normal loads:\n\n9 pounder gun\n\n41 5-oz. bullets\n\n6 pounder gun\n\n41 1-oz. bullets\n\n100 2-oz. Bullets\n\n24 pounder howitzer\n\nA variation of caseshot was the spherical caseshot which was fitted with a fuse so that the casing did not burst until it was well on its way to the target, thus increasing the effective range. Grapeshot could be used to clear men from the decks of ships as well as any massing on shore. Lieutenant Ouchterlony describes the effect that it could have in a confined space: \"The effect was terrific, for the street was perfectly straight, and the enemy's rear, not aware of the miserable fate which was being dealt out to their comrades in the front, continued to mass forward, so as to force fresh victims upon the mound of dead and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214296, "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": 154, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "117\n\nleading their men to an attack.\n\n5 Mackenzie, op. cit., p. 138.\n\n6 Lord Jocelyn. Six Months with the Chinese Expedition. London, 1841, p. 41.\n\n7\n\nAlthough the benefits of rifling to give more consistent trajectories were known, no one had yet been able to come up with a practical means of taking advantage of it in a cannon.\n\n8 Lieutenant John Ouchterlony, The Chinese War: An Account of all the Operations of the British Forces from the Commencement to the Treaty of Nanking, London 1844, p. 98 notes that at Tycocktow the Gunboat Nemesis \"threw shells into the upper fort.\"\n\nD. Bonner-Smith & E.W.R.Lumby. The Second China War 1856-1860. London, 1965, p.53 records that Rear Admiral Seymour reports that \"The Barracuta at the same time also shelled the troops in the hills at the back of the city, from a position at the head of Sulphur Creek.\"\n\n19 D. Bonner-Smith, op. cit., p. 173 records that Commander Forsyth of the Hornet reports \"..commenced firing grape and shrapnel, with ricochet shot,into the whole mass of junks, which must have done dreadful execution, as they were crowded with men to excess.\"\n\nOuchterlony, op. cit., p. 239.\n\n12 Mackenzie, op. cit., p. 23 reports \"a Congreve rocket, which was fired at the Admiral's junk, went through the deck into the magazine, upon which she immediately blew up.\"\n\n13 Loch, op. cit., p. 40.\n\n14 Mackenzie, op. cit., p. 149 notes \"In artillery they are very backward, their guns being of enormous weight in proportion to their calibre; some of the pieces of ordinance which we captured weighing seven ton, although only 42 pdrs; yet notwithstanding the immense thickness of metal in many cases the guns burst.\"\n\n15 Mackenzie, op. cit., p. 157 notes \"in the great arsenal at Amoy, a large two-decked junk was found nearly ready for sea with guns, as well as something bearing a resemblance to gun-carriages.\"", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214832, "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": 247, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "214\n\nForce conceded that there were reasons for beginning hostilities against China, whilst others were openly critical of a war opened on behalf of opium traders, badly treated or not.\n\nAn anonymous military writer in Colburn's United Service Magazine observed bitterly at the time that \"the poor Chinese - with their painted paste-board boats - must submit to be poisoned, or must be massacred by the thousand, for supporting their own laws in their own land.\" Another military officer, Lieutenant John Ouchterlony of the Madras Engineers in his history of the War, conceded: \"That the quarrel was an unhappy one and for many reasons to be deeply deplored, does not admit of a doubt.\"\n\nAt the same time, Ouchterlony introduced a wider consideration for his readers. However plausible the view taken in England by those opposed to a war which, as they thought, was being undertaken to enforce the opium traffic, it was, he said, “on our part just and unavoidable\" due to the \"vindictiveness and insufferable arrogance of the Chinese government\" during the past half-century. \"The opium question,\" to his mind, was to be \"regarded merely as a spark blown into a mine, and no more to be considered the primary cause of the war than the match which ignites the train...\" This was a view shared by another young officer, Lieut. Wyndham Charles Baker of the Madras Engineers, as we see from one of his published home letters.\n\nNot all their brother officers were convinced. The naval surgeon Edward Cree, was more concerned with the results of the War. Noting in his journal for Monday 29th [August] 1842 that \"the articles of the treaty [were] signed this day,\" he commented:\n\n“So ends the Chinese War. About the justice and policy of it I leave to more competent judges, but one thing I dislike in connection with it is the opium question. It has cost the lives of many thousands of human beings, and great destruction of property and misery and sorrow to many.\n\nWaging War in European Style\n\n11\n\nIn official circles in Britain, China's Court and Government were blamed for bringing on the War. Perhaps because of this, the British", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214838, "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": 253, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "220\n\n[Chusan]: \"We have allowed people to take away their property and then follow after it,\" he complained. \"So here we are, having captured a large and wealthy town in a deserted place, and unable to get for our money even a little tea, sugar or common oil of the coarsest quality; and we cannot get a labourer to work for us out of the thousands that were here a month ago. I presume such a thing was never before heard of in the annals of war.\"34\n\nKidnapping and the Maltreatment of Prisoners\n\nOne feature of War as waged by the Chinese was deprecated in the strongest terms. This was what they saw as the despicable and underhand practice of kidnapping and killing unwary soldiers and camp followers. Lieutenant Oughterlony styles it “a system of warfare, if the term may be so applied, so repugnant to the feelings of civilized nations.”35 It was especially so for those whose friends were its objects.\n\nWriting to his sister, Lieutenant Orlando Bridgeman of the 98th Regiment, recounted a near successful attempt near camp in Chusan upon two brother officers who had unthinkingly gone too far into the country. What \"pity\" he felt for the Chinese on account of their heavy losses in battle was now lost, he said, \"since they proved so dreadfully treacherous\" with their kidnapping on Chusan.36 It was the same at Ningpo. As many as 40 men were abducted in the later stages of its occupation, by means of offering them the potent native liquor and women.37\n\nNeither were civilians to be spared. W. C. Milne, the missionary referred to above, was afterwards told that he himself had been the subject of such a plan in the spring of 1842, and in recounting this added that, “If I mistake not, it was (and I may add is now) the only effective plan the Chinese adopted for annoying their foreign aggressors.\"38 Ouchterlony, too, styled it \"an effectual method of annoyance.\"\n\n1139\n\nIndeed, kidnapping had been official policy since the early period of the War, encouraged by a widely distributed placard and a published scale of monetary rewards, beginning with the Plenipotentiary himself, Captain Elliot.40\n\nThe harsh and inhumane treatment, and worse, inflicted by", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214843, "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": 258, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "225\n\nNOTES\n\nNot all the materials for this study are available in Sydney libraries, and I have been obliged to take extracts from secondary sources where it has not been possible to consult the originals.\n\n2 William C. Milne, Life in China (London, Routledge, Warnes & Routledge, New Edition, 1859), p. 1.\n\n3 Davis had been a long-serving member of the Honourable East India Committee's Select Committee at Canton, and was a skilled linguist and translator.\n\n5 Sir John himself provided a light-hearted anecdote in the Introduction to a revised and augmented edition of another of his books, The Poetry of the Chinese, published in 1870. This tells its own story. \"When this Treatise was first printed (now more than forty years ago), with types brought from China, in the quarto Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, the foreign [i.e. Chinese written] character was so little known in England, that Lord Palmerston, with his usual pleasantry, said he took it 'at first sight for a work on Entomology'.\" (Sir John Francis Davis, The Poetry of the Chinese (Paragon Book Reprint Corp. New York, 1969 of the original, London 1870, p.v)\n\nConcerning the Chinese statecraft reformer Wei Yuan, Jane Kate Leonard comments, \"Never for a moment did he conceive of the West as a new and unique center of culture and civilization in any sense comparable with China\": in Wei Yuan and China's Rediscovery of the Maritime World (Harvard University Press, 1984), pp.3-4.\n\n6 George Henry Mason, The Costume of the Chinese (London, William Miller, 1804), preface.\n\n7 \"An Observer\" in Vol II of this publication, p.111.\n\n8 Lieutenant John Ouchterlony, The Chinese War: An Account of All the Operations of the British Forces from the Commencement to the Treaty of Nanking (London, Saunders and Otley, 1844), p.37.\n\n9 Ouchterlony, pp.37-8.\n\n10 Wyndham Baker wrote home: \"I have read every work I can get hold of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214850, "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": 265, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "232\n\nRoutledge, New Edition, 1859)\n\nGeorge Henry Mason, The Costume of the Chinese (London, William Miller, 1804)\n\nLieutenant John Ouchterlony, The Chinese War: An Account of All the Operations of the British Forces from the Commencement to the Treaty of Nanking (London, Saunders and Otley, 1844)\n\n\"An Artillery Officer in China, 1840-1842,\" Blackwood's, 1964.\n\nThe Cree Journals, The Voyages of Edward H. Cree, Surgeon R. N., as Related in his Private Journals, 1837-1856 Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Levien. (Exeter, Webb & Bower, 1981)\n\nJack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (Hutchinson of London, 1975)\n\nCaptain Sir Edward Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, performed in Her Majesty's Ship Sulphur, During the Years 1836-1842. Including details of the Naval Operations in China, From Dec. 1840, to Nov. 1841 (London 1843, Dawsons of Pall Mall reprint, 1970)\n\nStanley Lane-Poole, Sir Harry Parkes in China (London, Methuen & Co., 1901)\n\nEdgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China (London, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1964)\n\nSir Henry Keppel, A Sailor's Life under Four Sovereigns (London, 3 vols., 1899)\n\n1881)\n\nLaurence Shadwell, Life and Campaigns of Lord Clyde (London, 1881)\n\n\"Oh for the Joys of England! Lt Rolando Bridgman's Letters From China and Hong Kong, 1842-1843\", in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch, Royal Asiatic Society Vol.14 (1974)\n\nSir John Francis Davis, Chinese Miscellanies: A Collection of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216348, "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": 107, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "56\n\n80 Macartney's Journal, January 1794. See (editor) Cranmer-Byng, J.L.(1962). An Embassy to China, Being the Journal kept by Lord Macartney during his Embassy to the Emperor Ch'ien-lung 1793-1794. London, Longmans, p.215.\n\n#1\n\nOuchterlony, Lieutenant John (1844). The Chinese War: An Account of All the Operations of the British Forces from the Commencement to the Treaty of Nanking (London, Saunders and Otley, p.37. Wyndham Baker of the Madras Engineers wrote home: \"I have read every work I can get hold of concerning the Opium Question and have come to the conclusion that we have no right to date the present eruption to that cause, as we have been insulted, our Trade interfered with, and British subjects have been maltreated long before Opium was mentioned and we have only been too tardy in seeking redress\". Letter of August 21st 1840 from Chusan, from (1964) An Artillery Officer in China, 1840-1842, Blackwood's, p. 80.\n\n$2 Levien, Michael Levien. (Edited and with an Introduction by). The Cree Journals, The Voyages of Edward H. Cree, Surgeon R.N., as Related in his Private Journals, 1837-1856. Exeter, Webb & Bower, 1981, p.117.\n\n* This section should be read in conjunction with my article (1999-2000). \"That Singular and Hitherto Almost Unknown Country': Opinions on China, the Chinese, and the ‘Opium War' among British Naval and Military Officers who Served During Hostilities There, in JHKBRAS Vol.39, pp.211-233.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]