[ { "id": 209483, "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-1982", "page_number": 140, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "TWO CHINESE DOMESTIC MURDERS\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE*\n\nBoswell. \"You 'Johnson called the East-Indians barbarians. will except the Chinese, Sir?\" Johnson. \"No, Sir\". Boswell, \"Have they not arts?\" Johnson. \"They have pottery\". Boswell. \"What do you say to the written characters of their language?\". Johnson. \"Sir, they have not an alphabet, They have not been able to form what all other nations have formed\".\n\nBoswell's Life of Johnson\n\n1\n\nGeorge Orwell wrote a celebrated short essay on murder in which he argued that the great classic English murders were mostly domestic and concerned ordinary people. He went on to argue that the violence of external events, such as World War II, had made conventional murder seem unimportant.2 Orwell's essay was published in 1946. A latter-day criminologist is likely to argue that the abolition of the death penalty in 1965 has 'demeaned' murder as a fine art. Before 1965, a murder trial was often an awesome contest - the issue was a matter of life and death. Today a convicted murderer in Britain, or Hong Kong, is likely to experience, on the average, between 7 to 10 years of incarceration. The two cases discussed below, in which both principals were Chinese, raise a number of interesting legal and sociological questions, together with problems of cultural 'confusion'. In each case, the judge and jury had great difficulties in interpreting Chinese behaviour and in understanding the motivation for the crime.\n\nLock Ah Tam: the man who ran ‘amok'?\n\nLock Ah Tam was born in 1872 in Canton, the capital city of Kwangtung province. Kwangtung was then one of the major areas for Chinese emigration and a territory from which over half of China's seamen hailed. As a young man, he went to sea as a ship's steward. In 1895 he settled in Liverpool and stayed there for the rest of his life, marrying a Welsh girl. Before 1914,\n\n*Prof. Lethbridge is Professor of Sociology, University of Hong Kong.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209485, "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-1982", "page_number": 142, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "120 \n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE \n\nunusual for a Chinese in those days. \n\nOn December 1, 1925 Lock gave a dinner party to celebrate his son's coming of age. This young man, Lock Ling Tam, had just returned after nine years of education in China. The evening was convivial and speeches were made in the only son's honour by both father and mother. Before his guests departed, Lock said to one of them: 'Ring me up tomorrow morning, and let me know how your daughter is' (Lock was always concerned about his friends.) In the early hours of December 2, 1925, a call came through to the Liverpool Telephone Exchange with the message, in broken English, 'I have shot my wife and child'. The mysterious caller was immediately put through to the Police and a constable recorded the words: 'Tam shot kill wife and child'. The caller further stated that he was Lock Ah Tam and that his home was at 122 Price Street, Birkenhead. \n\nThe chain of events, as reconstructed by the police and affirmed by the prosecution, was never seriously questioned by the defence. Soon after all the guests had gone, Lock Ling Tam heard his father abusing his mother and stamping his feet. The young Lock intervened and told his father to leave her alone. The father then left the room and asked the maid, a Eurasian girl, to fetch his boots. The maid caught a glimpse in a mirror of Lock loading a revolver. Next, Lock loaded his shotgun and immediately went to the kitchen where he killed his wife and youngest daughter. After that he seized his revolver and shot his eldest daughter who was cowering behind a door with the maid (the latter was not fired at). The son, terrified by the first explosion had fled the house. While he was seeking help from neighbours, Lock, as related above, phoned the police and admitted responsibility for the murders. Such were the stark facts; how to interpret them? \n\nbut \n\nAs soon as Lock's story became known in the Chinese community, his friends opened a defence fund and subscriptions flowed in from all over Britain and from other parts. Altogether, more than a thousand pounds were raised (a large sum in those days). His solicitor instructed the famous Sir Edward Marshall Hall K.C. to defend him. Marshall Hall was then probably the best-known English advocate. A flamboyant, histrionic, and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209492, "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-1982", "page_number": 149, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "127\n\n20\n\nPart of this, at a later date, was due to the influence of the popular novelist Sax Rohmer who invented the sinister but suave Dr. Fu Manchu, perennially at war with the tight-lipped, establishment Nayland Smith (Ian Fleming's Dr. No revives this stale mythology).2 The British public came to believe, as a result of press reports, that the insidious Doctor had become incarnate in the person of 'Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurateur and 'dope-king', whose premises were located in Gerrard Street, London, opposite the Forty Three Club, Mrs. Kate Meyrick's notorious night-club.27 Chang was a member, and supplied the club's rich clientele with narcotics, especially cocaine, until April 1924, when he was sentenced to fourteen months imprisonment, followed by deportation.28 Although the great majority of Britain's Chinese population were hard-working, intent on bettering their lot by economic enterprise, a constant process of stereotyping caricatured Chinese as inscrutable and complex, unknowable and different, sly and dangerous, separated by a vast cultural chasm from Englishmen. This, I believe, is suggested by Marshall Hall's comments in the Lock Ah Tam case and, as we shall see, by Sir Travers Humphreys' animadversions on Miao Chung-yi, whose case will now be examined.\n\nDr. Miao Chun-yi: a murder for profit?\n\nMiss Siu Wai-sheung married Miao Chung-yi, a doctor of law or jurisprudence, in New York on May 12, 1928.20 Born in 1899, she was the eldest daughter of Siu Ying-chau, a rich Macau merchant with business interests also in Hong Kong. Her mother was Siu's primary wife (tsai), but there were other children born to Siu's concubines (tsip). As a girl she was clever and able, and when her mother died in 1910 she helped run her father's household. She was educated at St. Stephen's Girls' College, Hong Kong, which she left in 1917 to further her education at Emerson College, Boston, U.S.A., and graduated in 1922. Then she returned home. In 1924 her father died. She was named sole executrice in his will; he left over a million dollars — an unusual event in those days when unmarried Chinese women had few, if any, testamentary rights. Moreover, she inherited much of his wealth, although she had a younger brother, and several half-brothers and half-sisters. Soon after", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209499, "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-1982", "page_number": 156, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "134\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nby Mrs. Miao. Miao was not in employment, having just finished his studies in America, though he did state he had been offered a legal post in China and was to take it up when he returned from his lengthy honeymoon. Little is known about his father's finances. Presumably he was an official, but had he lost his post when the Nationalists seized power in 1927, or was he dead by then? It was not only a murder for profit, but a premeditated one, planned before he left America. Miao wanted not only his wife's inheritance but her jewellery and other possessions.\n\nIt has been argued that the real motive for the crime was Mrs. Miao's infertility. She had been told at Albany, so it is alleged, that she would be unable to bear children, and the knowledge depressed her husband. An article in The Sunday Express of March 24, 1929, quotes Miao as saying his wife died willingly to allow him to remarry and have heirs. This story sounds implausible. Divorce was not impossible in China in 1928; in any case, it would have been legitimate for Miao to have taken a secondary wife (tsip), as his wife's father, the Macau merchant, had done on several occasions. Adoption was, and is, a common practice in China and often utilised when a married man has no male heir. Even if Miao had been barred by his devotion to Christianity, a monogamous religion, from either divorcing his wife or taking a concubine, religious scrupulousness does not seem to provide a realistic motive for his crime. One surmises that if the statement were in fact made by Miao, it was an afterthought, a justification for a cruel murder and theft. One would agree with Travers Humphreys that Miao was an ‘odd fellow'; but to the non-murderous most murderers must appear odd, simply because they have indulged in, rather than daydreamed about, murder they have crossed the line that separates the good and the not-so-good from the truly bad.\n\nNarrowing the gap\n\nLock Ah Tam and Dr. Miao Chung-yi exemplify, broadly speaking, the two strands of Chinese migration into Britain: uneducated or lower-class Chinese and educated or upper-class Chinese. In 1901, according to MacNair, there were only 387 Chinese reported as resident in England and Wales; 1,319 in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209500, "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-1982", "page_number": 157, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "135\n\n1911.40 After the First World War, the number had risen to over 2,000. (These figures do not include several thousand seamen, mostly firemen, stokers and stewards, without permanent domicile). At the beginning of the century, it is claimed, Chinese tended to ‘avoid Scotland and Wales', but were strongly attracted to London, especially Limehouse. With such small numbers present in Britain, it seems certain British judges and lawyers rarely came in contact with Chinese, only very occasionally perhaps in certain Liverpool or London courts; but never, one surmises, in normal social intercourse. In the 1920s, then, the Chinese in Britain were still a mysterious, but minute, social entity, habitually caricatured in the press and by novelists as 'vellee' strange people who spoke a particularly difficult and dissonant language and wrote, as Dr. Johnson noted, a script that was perversely pictorial to alphabet-lovers. Even professors of Chinese, sinologues and sinologists, were regarded at that time with as much wry amusement as were Assyriologists or Egyptologists, seekers after equally rarefied knowledge of no great practical importance.\n\n47\n\nThe first mass movement of Chinese to the outside world occurred in the nineteenth century. It was mostly 'coolie emigration', to use Campbell's descriptive term, the drift of mainly uneducated and relatively unskilled, though hard-working, Chinese to places where opportunities appeared to be brighter than in the homeland (a territory then much wracked by rebellion, foreign wars, famine and other afflictions). Lock Ah Tam, as mentioned above, is representative of the first wave, an emigrant who did well in his adopted country. As China was forced reluctantly into the modern world and into normal diplomatic relations with foreign powers, a different type of Chinese was becoming known abroad — the educated Chinese, a member of the 'Mandarin class', as Europeans were wont to describe him. In 1876 Kuo Sung-tao was appointed as the first Chinese minister in England.18 A Legation was then established in London, in 1877, with a normal complement of officials and secretaries. Chinese diplomatic staff became a common sight in Whitehall although, until the 1911 Revolution, most wore traditional Chinese attire and sported the queue. (After 1911, they took to frock-coat and top-hat and adopted European hair-styles).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 } ]