[
    {
        "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": 214842,
        "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": 257,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "224\n\nseemingly well prepared for paying imperial honours. Surgeon Cree relates in his diary that upon the signature of the Treaty of 1842 on board the British flagship on 29 August, a plain yellow flag was hoisted at the main and saluted with twenty-one guns. On September 14 following he noted that \"all ships of the Expedition hoisted the yellow flag at the main - the royal standard of China - and at noon fired a royal salute of twenty-one guns.\"\n\n50\n\nThere was a distinct awareness of the fineness of the country itself. Of Central China, Sir John Davis declared that “it yields to none in the whole world, and is equalled by very few.\"5 Lieutenant Wyndham Baker of the Madras Artillery also waxed lyrical on the subject.52 Even Sir Henry Pottinger, the Plenipotentiary responsible for forcing the Treaty of Nanking upon the Chinese, had called China \"this superb country,” in his despatch to the British Foreign Secretary announcing the event. Several decades earlier, Sir Henry Ellis, member of the Amherst Embassy in 1816, had written that \"it was impossible to travel through the Emperor of China's dominions without feeling that he has the finest country within an imperial ring-fence in the world.\"54\n\n53\n\nNone of the books and letters consulted contains the derogatory or offensive terms for Chinese in use later in the century. British sailors jocularly used the term “Fokies\" for their opponents,55 and referred to the mandarins as “mad-marines,\"56 but the Chinese themselves are not here dismissed as “Chinks,” “Chows,\" \"Heathen Chinee” or “Mongolians\" (as they so often were at a later time, in those English-speaking countries to which they had gone in search of gold or employment) but invariably as \"the Chinese\" or \"Chinamen.\" Indeed, many of the authors pay tribute to the honesty and good manners of the ordinary people.\n\nIn short, our naval, military and civilian writers of the period were still generally respectful of China, its Court and its inhabitants.57\n\nThese facts are worth keeping in mind when considering the Opium War. We should be careful to view the conflict in the context of its own time, and not of that later period when Western attitudes towards China had changed for the worse.",
        "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": 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
    }
]