[ { "id": 207533, "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-1975", "page_number": 301, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n293 \n\nThe former had been purchased in 1859 at a Government Land Sale by an Austrian, Gustav Overbeck (later Baron von Overbeck), a partner in the firm of Dent and Co. In the following year, Lot 607 was granted by Government to the Berlin Women's Society as a site for their foundling hospital. The trustees were Overbeck and the Rev. Johann Ludwig Ladendorff. \n\nNew trustees were named in 1869, and of these, three were German merchants; Berthold Friedrich Johann Schwarzkopf, founder of the firm of Blackhead and Co., Friedrich August Julius Menke, of William Pustau and Co., and Gustav Overbeck. The other trustee was Ladendorff's successor as Superintendent of the Foundling Hospital, Rev. Ernest Klitzke. \n\nIn 1892, Lot 624 was purchased by the Government. The remaining lot was registered in the name of the Director in Hong Kong of the Berlin Ladies Mission for China, incorporated by Ordinance No. 12 of 1889. At the time of the First World War, the property was administered as alien property. Finally, in 1925, it was surrendered to Government. \n\nAs residents of an English colony with a predominant Chinese population, those for whom English or Chinese is not a first language tend to organize groups where they can use their mother tongue. A German Club was organized in Hong Kong in 1859, and by 1867 a recognized German church congregation was meeting regularly. \n\nGerman church services had been held previous to 1867, however. A report of the Berlin Society concerning its activities in 1858 mentions the baptism of a certain Lydia (Wei-mong) “at a German service at Victoria”. The Day Book of the Rev. Rudolph Lechler, of the Basel Missionary Society, notes on May 19, 1861, attendance at a German service on Morrison Hill, where the premises of the Berlin Society were located before they occupied \"Bethesda\" in July, 1861. Another Basel Society missionary, the Rev. Philip Winnes, in 1858 reported, \"I preached to the German sailors, for there are always ships arriving from Hamburg and Bremen. Also this year a poor German established a German Inn for sailors, where always a few people are staying until they can find employment. In this inn, I preached until the sailors had had enough, and that they had quite soon.” (Heidenbote, March, 1858, p. 15).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212308, "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-1990", "page_number": 250, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "227\n\n19th century. In 1891 the Hong Kong Telegraph spoke of the firm in less than complimentary terms;\n\nthe everlasting Bugbears of Eastern commerce, the nigger-drivers, the sweaters, the Jews worse than Jews,\n\n-\n\nfor no Jew was ever so full of hatred and persecution and intolerance of all others...\n\nYet Swire's was sometimes also accused of having more liberal racial views, and comments were rife when B&S invited Chinese brokers to a dinner. A recorded comment was:\n\n+++\n\nthe Swire lot blustering away among the Chinamen (hobnobbing) with every unwashed devil in the place\n\nJohn Swire died in 1898, wealthy and prestigious.\n\nDuring World War I Governor Sir Henry May accused Swire's of reluctance to help the war effort for failing to provide volunteers for the defence of the Colony. Today, with people in their employ like Lady Lydia Dunn, Howard Young and others, Swire's can certainly no longer be accused of lacking in community spirit.\n\nFrom 1878, Jardine's acted as agents for the China Sugar Refining Company at East Point. But after going East, Swire soon started to diversify. John Samuel's first marriage was to the owner of a sugar refinery, and not only did he consider he knew something about the business but a study conducted in Hong Kong satisfied him there was potential for two refineries. Consequently, Taikoo Sugar Refining Company was first registered in 1881, although it did not commence production until 1884, at Quarry Bay, in a refinery based on a design of a factory in Scotland.\n\nBy the early 1900s Taikoo was the largest sugar refinery east of Suez, with a turnover of approximately 2,000 tons a week. At one stage it was said to be the largest in the world under one roof. The company was the first in Hong Kong to provide living accommodation on site for its staff. A new factory was completed in 1925. This had to be refitted after World War II, but in the early 1950s there were about 650 workers and it was still the largest sugar refiner in the Far East.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212744, "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": 53, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "38\n\nHe covered several of his printed pages with descriptions of various groups of attractive 'fairies' who treated him as a great Lord and fussed him with food and attention. He explained that he had wondered who they were and had come to the conclusion that they were well-to-do daughters of officials captured by the Taipings and were part of the Taiping chieftain's retinue.\n\nHe implied at one point that the 'unknown charmer' who had been closely chaperoned by her sister, yet met him daily during his captivity in Nanking to learn English, was one of the daughters of the Taiping ruler Hung Hsiu-ch'üan\". She passed him a note as he was leaving with the Royal Navy rescue party, which, though lengthy and in semi-verse, left no doubt that the maiden, whoever she might have been, was expressing her desire for Mesny to return to marry her. No clue was given why Mesny should believe her to be a daughter of Hung Hsiu-ch'üan, and yet again we are left in the dark with his 'fair admirer' unidentified.\n\nAlthough there was no mention of marriage in this instance, his army commander in Kueichou province in 1870, returning home at the end of the first campaign, had offered to take Mesny back to Hunan with him where he could live en famille. Mesny then went on to say that he told the General that he had been away from his home and family in Jersey for some sixteen years and preferred to return there to get married in his own country rather than in China.\n\nThe priests or monks of the Ch'ien-lin Shan monastery more than once asked him to become a member of their order with a view to becoming eligible as a ruler over the four hundred monks in that monastery. He declined as he said that he had always had an inclination to marry some European lady of education, or to otherwise secure the life companionship of a distinguished European lady writer with whom he might associate as pupil or assistant in her literary career [this was written after he had been married to several Chinese women].\n\nOnly twice in his writings does he ever refer to European women as either attractive or otherwise, and interested in him. One was a young English lady of 'prepossessing appearance and fascinating manners,' who surprised everyone in Hankow by declaring that Mesny, who was unprepared to avail himself at the time as he had set his affections on another lady, 'Lydia,' (a girl at home in Jersey) reciprocated her love in a marvellous manner though they had not met since he was 11 and ...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "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": 212756, "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": 65, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "50\n\nHis experience when assaulted by Chinese soldiers in Wu-chang during his holiday outing.\n\n10 Mesny's Chinese Miscellany: Volume 2: 10 September 1896: page 449\n\nIn 1992 Miss Lucie Mesny in Jersey explained that as a child she had never encountered any elderly lady, a member of family, called Lydia, who had been only two years younger than William Mesny and therefore would have been only in her mid-sixties when Miss Lucie was a child, if of course Lydia had still been alive\n\n12 Mesny was referring to what had been a very recent incident when the Germans had sent a few hundred soldiers to I-chou in Shantung province 'to bring the local populace to their senses.'\n\n13\n\nPresumably the good Doctor Dudgeon was John Dudgeon, who lived in Tientsin towards the end of the nineteenth century, the author of Chinese Arts of Healing, a series in the Chinese Recorder in 1869/70; The Great Medical College at Peking (in the Chinese Recorder February 1870); The Disgusting Nature of Chinese Medicines (also in the Chinese Recorder in March 1870); The Worship of the Moon (Chinese Recorder in Mar/Apr 1882), \"The Beverages of the Chinese: and finally Kung-fu or Taoist Medical Gymnastics (Tientsin: 1895).\n\n14\n\nIt is strange that Mesny should have been unaware of the legend of the powerful and ubiquitous Northern Emperor, 玄天上帝 a deity whose aides are a turtle and snake, frequently portrayed wrapped around each other at the feet of the image of the deity in Taoist and folk religion temples, and referred to as Generals.\n\n15 Yun-yü, the Clouds and Rain, is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse\n\n16\n\nThis was recorded in his Miscellanies in 1896 as Tsung-ping: translated as 'Regional Commander', rank 2a in the Chinese military forces of the Green Standards [lu-ying], subordinate to the Provincial Military Commander and Province Governors. [Hucker C.O., A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China: Stanford University Press: 1985]\n\n11 Colquhoun A R: China in Transformation: Harper and Bros: New York and London. 1898 (and other books)\n\nScidmore E R. China - The Long-lived Empire: MacMillan & Co. London: 1900\n\nAppendix A\n\nMesny's Chinese Miscellany\n\nEach weekly issue of the Miscellany, edited and printed in Shanghai during 1896, 1899 and 1905, with a run of one thousand copies, began with Notes on China and Chinese Subjects later renamed Anglo-Chinese Notes, an arbitrary, catholic and unstructured collection of items ranging from natural subjects such as the names in English and Chinese of trees, plants etc with a short description presumably culled from a major tome on the subject, to historical and mythological items, geographical descriptions mostly in western China, and a long section", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 } ]