[ { "id": 207370, "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": 138, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "130 \n\nRICHARD J. SMITH \n\nArmy,83 Others, such as Captain Coney, Baron de Meritens, and William Winstanley, headed foreign-training programs established in treaty port areas. Still others, including John Pennell, Halliday Macartney, and William Mesny, served in Chinese armies as individual instructors or officers.85 Forced by circumstance to employ these foreigners, the Chinese became quite adept at handling them—despite China's disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the West. \n\nAs in the past, Ch'ing officials paid their foreign employees well, at the same time subjecting them to close surveillance, and fostering personal relationships with them as a means of control. In addition, however, they also took special pains to define regular channels of communication and command, and specified roles and responsibilities through the use of detailed regulations and written agreements.86 Furthermore, in rewarding loyal foreign service, the Chinese authorities went beyond simply arranging for edicts of praise and encouragement, the dispensing of ranks and titles, and the bestowal of traditional marks of imperial favor such as peacock feathers, silk, animal skins, and silver. They also began notifying foreign governments of the accomplishments of their respective nationals, and distributing foreign-style (as opposed to Chinese-style) medals—a rather significant departure from traditional practice. The throne even went so far as to acknowledge in 1864 that since Westerners especially esteemed foreign-style medals, these awards were the most generally appropriate expression of imperial gratitude.87 \n\nTo be sure, Peking continued to reward evidence of cultural submission, casting it in traditional terms of imperial condescension. The cases of Pennell and Mesny provide striking examples of this tendency.88 Moreover, throughout the nineteenth century, even as the Chinese world order crumbled about them, Ch'ing policymakers continued to use expressions such as \"turning toward Chinese civilization,\" \"cherishing and soothing men from afar,” and “using [the doctrines of] China to transform the barbarian.\" Policymakers also persisted in referring to both ancient and more modern precedent in order to justify (or argue against) the employment of barbarians in Chinese military affairs. Allusions to the use of foreign \"allies\" as the Hsiung-nu and Uighurs, as well as references to such diverse individuals as Yu Yü, Chin Mi-ti, Ch'i-pi Ho-li, and Gordon, continue to crop up in Ch'ing documents of the 1890's", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207378, "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": 146, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "138\n\nRICHARD J. SMITH\n\n86 See Smith, \"Foreign-Training;\" also Yang-wu yün-tung [The “foreign matters\" movement] (Shanghai, 1961), 3: 463, 469, 492, 599, 613, etc.\n\n87 IWSM, TC 22: 12-13b; 23: 42-43.\n\n88 See the IWSM references cited in note 85. Pennell became fully sinicized, shaving his head, changing to Chinese clothing, learning Chinese, marrying a Chinese, and finally petitioning to be registered as a native of Ho-fei, Anhwei. Mesny, too, was attracted by Chinese civilization, thus reinforcing the persistent notion of barbarian \"transformation\". See especially the memorial by Wu Tang and Ch'ung-shih in 1870 requesting that Mesny be advanced to the rank of lieutenant-colonel (ts'an-chiang) and awarded the peacock feather for his efforts against the Miao. This memorial was in many respects a replica of Hsueh Huan's request for similar awards to be granted to Ward in 1862.\n\n89 Examples in IWSM and WCSL abound. See also Fairbank, \"The Early Treaty System,\" esp. 264-265; John Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 50. Traditional attitudes were, of course, reinforced by the examination system. One of the topics for the metropolitan examinations in 1880 was the following quotation: \"By indulgent treatment of men from a distance they are brought to resort to him from all quarters. And by kindly cherishing the princes of the states, the whole empire is brought to revere him.\" Cited in the North-China Herald, May 18, 1880.\n\n90 See, for example, WCSL 101: 9; 129: 17.\n\n91 See especially K. C. Liu, \"The Confucian as Patriot and Pragmatist: Li Hung-chang's Formative Years, 1823-1866,\" HJAS, 30 (1970); David Pong, \"Confucian Patriotism and the Destruction of the Woosung Railway, 1877,\" Modern Asian Studies, 7.4 (1973).\n\n**\n\n92 For a discussion of the concept of r'i-chih, see Immanuel Hsü, China's Entrance into the Family of Nations (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).\n\n93 See Ella Lonn's Foreigners in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1940) and Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy (Baton Rouge, 1951).\n\n94 See, for example, Ernst Presseisen, Before Aggression: Europeans Prepare the Japanese Army (Tucson, 1965); Noboru Umetani, \"Foreign Nationals Employed in Japan during the Years of Modernization,\" East Asian Cultural Studies, 10.1 (March, 1971).\n\n95 What differed was China's international situation. China had to endure far more political, economic and military pressure from the European powers than either the United States or Japan in the nineteenth century.\n\n96 The great majority of Japanese military employees in the latter half of the nineteenth century neither became Japanese subjects nor accepted Japanese culture. See, for example, Presseisen, 112.\n\n97 See the discussion in Smith, \"Foreign-Training.\"", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212707, "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": 16, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "A JERSEY ADVENTURER IN CHINA GUN RUNNER, CUSTOMS OFFICER, AND BUSINESS ENTREPRENEUR \n\nAND GENERAL IN THE CHINESE IMPERIAL ARMY \n\n1842-1919* \n\nKEITH STEVENS \n\nPART ONE \n\nThis is the story of General William Mesny, Knight Ying of the Order of the Pa-t'u-lu, a man who lived an exciting life from the day he left home on the island of Jersey at the time of the Crimean War to sail the oceans until finally he settled in a turbulent China having served with two of the provincial armies of the Chinese Imperial forces as a mercenary or, in modern parlance, a foreign adviser. He became a general in the Imperial army before he was 30, suggesting that his services were greatly valued by the Chinese though at the price of being viewed by the western community in central China, and Shanghai in particular, as too pro-Chinese and probably very eccentric having ‘gone native'. The remaining 47 years of his life were spent, first travelling around China, after which he tried to make a fortune in Shanghai but, sadly, having failed, eked out his latter years in virtual obscurity. He put a brave face on his troubles during the last 25 or so years with the occasional glimpse of disappointment and despair showing through in his writings. Considering his lack of formal education his publications deserve respect even if he displayed the undoubted large chip on his shoulder due to 'them', both Chinese and westerners, not affording him the respect and esteem he felt his due, in view of what he considered to be his radical ideas for modernising China. We only know details of Mesny's life, especially his time with the Chinese army, from his own writing, and his serialised autobiographical essays in the journals he published in Shanghai, Mesny's Chinese Miscellany. \n\nThese journals contained not only short autobiographical essays but also a wealth of interesting but unconnected snippets about Chinese customs, Chinese military organisations, mineralogy, Chinese food, commercial notes, etc, though concealed within these essays are a number \n\n* This article is somewhat long for the Journal, but in view of the level of scholarship it has been left at more or less its original length & [Editor]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212708, "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": 17, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "2\n\nof bonnes bouches relating to him and his family. The information, its presentation and language tell us more about William Mesny than about Chinese life. A considerable part of his writings consisted of piecemeal notes or essays written to emphasize, probably unconsciously, both his prominent standing with important Chinese and his foresight as a man of ideas. He played up so many of the episodes in which he was involved that it is difficult not to minimise and even to discount what in practice must have been his quite significant achievements. Three major subjects regularly featured in Mesny's Miscellanies, his economic and political foresight which was inevitably spurned by westerners and Chinese alike; his activities as part of the Chinese imperial military forces in Kueichou quelling a rebellious minority ethnic group; and his wives and women in general.\n\nIn one of his forthright, self-congratulatory moments he wrote, \"The Editor of Mesny's Chinese Miscellany feels that he has a sort of an inspired mission in China to set forth, preach and proclaim the inspiring and magic-working words of Reform and Progress to the inquiring multitudes amongst China's 400 million black-haired people.'\n\nWilliam Mesny (pronounced “May-knee' in Jersey), was brought up in the bilingual Channel Island community speaking English and French. He left home when he was nearly twelve to travel far afield but without ever losing pride in being a Jerseyman and British.\n\nMesny was born at La Croiserie Vingtaine in the parish of Trinity in Jersey on 9 October 1842, the eldest son of William Mesny of Alderney and Marie Rachel née Nicolle, second daughter of Philip Nicolle of du Nord, Jersey. Mesny's father was described in one place as a cobbler, a local preacher preaching several times a year in French and English Wesleyan chapels, and a member of the Royal militia (probably the Jersey Militia). Mesny writing elsewhere in his Miscellany described his parents as poor; his mother was 'bed-ridden' and his father, though a Wesleyan local preacher, was forced to work for a living in attendance on divers engaged in the harbour works, and often repaired his own shoes to save the expense of having them repaired at a shoemaker's. Mesny's father and his grandfather, Guillaume Mesny, were both said to be of St Martin, Jersey, whilst Mesny himself claimed that his roots lay in the ancient family of Megny d'Auregny [i.e. Auregny Alderney]. It has also been recorded that Mesny's father and grandfather had both been born and brought up in Alderney with the father moving to Jersey at some stage. Guillaume's brothers included the great grandfather of Miss Lucie", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212709, "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": 18, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "3\n\nMesny, currently of St Lawrence in Jersey.\n\nMesny was sent to a dame school at the age of five run by a widow named Todd with two grown-up daughters to help her. After a visit by a school master Mesny was sent to his school but complained that as the school master did not appear to understand how to manage him, he often played truant, went bird nesting and fishing, and rode his grandmother's mare, Old Violet, without saddle or bridle. The schoolmaster complained to Mesny's father about his behaviour and having been chastised in a very painful manner he decided to leave school and go to work. In his 'Recollections', part of his obituary, he was said to have been educated at the National School, St Anne's in Alderney, which presumably is where he was taught by the schoolmaster who did not understand him.\n\nAt the age of eight he obtained a job in a brickfield making dabs and helping to make bricks, at four pence a day. The brickfield soon closed and when another opened up some distance away he got a job there at six pence a day. But again this did not last long and he was out of work. He then got himself a job as a stone cutter at eight pence a day, a job he liked. The stone cutters had a smithy for repairing and sharpening their tools and he soon learnt how to sharpen and temper the tools in a fairly satisfactory manner. At this point the Government decided to build forts along the coast of Jersey and Mesny obtained work there at much better pay. He was soon taken along as an assistant by the architect who gave him a shilling a day to carry the plans and instruments for him. Mesny soon learnt how to draw simple plans and use the theodolite, and after the first year proved so useful that his pay was increased to one and sixpence a day. This was a great help to his parents, especially when Mesny obtained extra work with the contractor of the works as an assistant in the blasting department. Here he learnt how to make cartridges for mining and blasting under water, and also how to blow the bugle to warn of blasting. When the work was completed in 1854 he was discharged with excellent testimonials and was filling in time. One day wandering near the quay he heard that the cutter Napier was leaving for Cherbourg and was one hand short. His offer of service was taken up and he jumped aboard in the clothes he stood up in and shouted to a friend to tell his parents that he might be back in a week or ten days. The Crimean War was then in full swing and the naval port of Cherbourg was full of soldiers and sailors going to the Crimea. When he returned to Jersey he was paid", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212710, "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": 19, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "4\n\noff with a whole pound, 'the foundation of his fortune' which induced him to go to sea as a sailor. He then sailed away, at the age of 12, and in the course of the next six years visited various parts of the world including Australia, Africa and the Americas before finally settling in China in 1860 during the last days of the Arrow War [better known perhaps as the Second Opium War].\n\nMesny arrived in China at the start of the era known to the Chinese as the 'post-unequal treaties', an extraordinary period of readjustment in Chinese thinking. He arrived in a China whose rulers were an alien dynasty, the non-Chinese Manchus from Manchuria whose dynasty, the Ch'ing, ruled China between 1644-1911. Mesny's era covered the gradual collapse of the dynasty and its fall, followed by the first years of the Republic.\n\nWilliam Mesny spent a total of 59 years in China during which time he first, for some thirteen years, led a life of high adventure and, later, one which he lived to the full but at the same time one which appears to have fluctuated between the verge of success and pathetic failure. As it stands the later years of Mesny's life, following his short military career, fall into four periods; first, trekking across China, second, his life in Shanghai whilst still hoping to make his fortune; third, his time there when that hope had all but disappeared and finally, his last days, apparently alone in Hankow. The story contains elements which can only be guessed by reading between the lines in his Miscellanies, sadly without the help of other written or oral records.\n\nI have attempted to provide a chronology of Mesny's life from the multitude of snippets and asides he provided in his Miscellanies. This will be found at Appendix B. The great majority of the research in the UK has been carried out by Dr R G Tiedemann of SOAS in the University of London to whom I am also greatly indebted for both his advice and comments, as I am too to Miss Lucie Mesny of St Lawrence in Jersey, for her memories and photographs. However, any errors are mine alone.\n\nApart from the autobiographical portions of the Miscellany we have to rely upon the tiny smattering of family memory still available, two obituaries from Shanghai English language newspapers and what little has been written about Mesny by others who knew him in China. It is unfortunate that other living descendants of William Mesny have fought", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212711, "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": 20, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "shy of sharing their knowledge with us, possibly, and perhaps understandably, wishing to retain family privacy.\n\nComparatively few of his autobiographical ‘facts' have been verified though he does assure us at the beginning of at least one of his autobiographical essays that it contains 'facts not fiction'. The autobiographical paragraphs and snippets scattered throughout his Miscellanies appear to have been honest and candid in so far as his revealed details. There is no reason to doubt anything he has written, anything dishonest, though with his statement that he is a 'self-proclaimed publicist,' one cannot help coming to the conclusion that there are times when he doth protest too much and that some of the details are slightly more supportive of his claims than one would have thought strictly true or indeed necessary. One is often left with more than a slight suspicion that Mesny had a touch of Walter Mitty about him, and in a number of his exploits one suspects he has embellished an already good story. The chapters of this biography on The Early Years, The Pacification of the Miao, and the Later Years, are to all intents and purposes autobiographical, and much of the substance of these chapters may seem to be grandiloquently worded, pompous and stilted. This is because I have transcribed most of the anecdotes written by Mesny in the first person singular into the 'third person' otherwise leaving the narrative as a whole as it was in the Miscellanies to provide the reader with a distinct and palpable feel for his personality.\n\nAt least three potted biographies of Mesny have been written, beginning with an entry in Balleine's Biographical Dictionary.2 Later, a piece in The Pilot's first volume (July 1946) which described The (Jersey) Trinity Boy who became a Chinese General, under the general heading of ‘Adventurous Jerseymen.' This was repeated in The Pilot of July 1980. Douglas Ford of the Jersey Museum added a little to Balleine and The Pilot in his 'From Jersey to the Celestial Empire' [undated], and when the Jersey Post Office produced its stamp series in May 1992 commemorating the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Mesny's birth they issued a short piece which added yet more about him. These were all laudatory describing Mesny's adventures and successes without portraying the unromantic and often wretched side to his life. These hyperbolised descriptions occasionally lead to erroneous claims such as the assertion that Mesny always wore Chinese clothes. In practice he wore foreign clothes most of the time and only donned Chinese robes for some fifteen years, when he had his photograph taken with his son and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212712, "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": 21, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "6\n\nduring his first journey into the interior from Hankow to begin his career with one of the new local armies of the Chinese Imperial forces. Potted biographies of Mesny have been little more than loosely connected accounts of the major incidents in his life and have presented a one-dimensional figure. Had he not been made a general in the Chinese Imperial Army with which he served for a mere six years, the other forty-five years of his life would probably have merited 300 words towards the foot of the obituaries page in a local paper. Also, without the four volumes of his Miscellany, which tend to be our sole source-material, virtually all record of his service with the Chinese army would have been lost.\n\nFor at least part of his life Mesny lived at one end of an extreme, as a westerner who dressed as a Chinese, lived in a Chinese home and absorbed Chinese ways semi-consciously. The other end of the extreme were the westerners who lived out their working lives in treaty ports moving from office to club to home, and making sure that they never had any contacts with the natives nor learnt a single word of their language. He seems to have been an engaging character, though pretentious and extravagant, whose fascinating life, although insignificant in the run of Chinese history, was no more exciting or unique than many other westerners who led equally exciting lives on the China coast during the same era, the difference being that remarkably few wrote about them and those who did were usually fairly staid travellers describing their journeys across the Chinese empire. Mesny went several stages further, writing notes and autobiographical essays. Many were self-serving memoirs, which he published in Shanghai in his own periodical, the four volumes of Mesny's Chinese Miscellanies [described in detail in Appendix A] consisting not only of events within China, especially ones he considered important insofar as they affected his personal life and activities but also, more importantly, colourful observations during the second half of the 19th century in China reflecting the atmosphere, the social and military structures of the lower echelons of Chinese officialdom, foreign fortune seekers during the earlier days of the Treaty Ports and also, to a certain extent, the social life of the middle strata of foreigners on the China coast. Although he did not fully appreciate it, his notes on the Chinese military forces at that time and in particular the day-to-day details of military operations within a Chinese provincial army are unique. Although certain colour emerges from the foreign news telegrams of the day reproduced in his later volumes, it is singularly disappointing that he wrote so little on the momentous changes occurring in China at the turn of the century.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212713, "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": 22, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Until the middle of the 19th century China assumed and acted on the principle that the world owed allegiance to the supreme ruler, the Emperor of China, a view considered by the British in particular as ludicrous, and despite costly emissaries to try to persuade them otherwise, the Chinese were only forced to accept change by military force—leading to what it was hoped by foreigners would be an era of equality such as existed between other nations. Mesny experienced but probably failed to appreciate the depth of change within China in which he was involved; Chinese military commanders in the field without the presence of their foreign overlords, the Manchus, being one. But much more important were the changes in style of xenophobia, a newly acquired awareness of the power of western nations by the Chinese and most of all the deep resentment of the imposition of foreign equality. It is this more than anything else which makes Mesny's story so fascinating and refreshing.\n\nHe also lived in China during the era when the attitudes of Christian missionaries were changing, from those who felt such a strong cultural superiority and behaved arrogantly, with an attitude of self-righteousness and a complete lack of sensitivity towards Chinese feelings, which caused the vast majority of Chinese to become even more xenophobic than they had been before westerners forced through 'unequal' treaties; to those with more sympathetic views. By the end of the century many missionaries were comparatively understanding and tolerant of Chinese customs and culture, and though their mercantile compatriots were still of the old views, a number of missionaries were working with Chinese and helping to bring about the modern transformation of China. Although Mesny was one of the few foreigners whose sympathies lay with the Chinese, with his feet in both camps he found good and bad on both sides. One of Mesny's more revealing snippets is the irritated and grieving rather than angry digression; an item in the Miscellany on an uncommon Chinese saying \"Tsai ssu szu wei\" meaning \"Try, try and try again\". He wrote 'It (the phrase) is probably worth using by foreigners as a very expressive and convenient tenor when trying to persuade natives [Chinese] that it is impossible to comply with the requests and importunities to \"do something for them\". I have reflected on the matter,' he continued, 'and though I have repeatedly tried still I have not succeeded.' Many foreigners, even to this day, will sigh in agreement.\n\nMesny would, in later life, doubtless have seen himself as a ‘China Expert' and would also have wished others to regard him so. He cultivated this impression in print from the first issue of his Miscellany with his", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212714, "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": 23, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "8\n\nregular references to his deep knowledge of things Chinese and in particular, their formal rituals. As with many foreign writers on China and the Chinese, Mesny frequently implied exclusive access to hidden corners. This was indisputable because, whilst most foreigners who pride themselves on having Chinese friends and have visited them at home, even perhaps having stayed with them, few have the opportunity afforded to Mesny when he served with the Chinese military forces and lived as one with them on the staff. However, in retrospect we can see that Mesny knew little of the private life, thoughts and policies of the native Chinese higher classes, or more importantly, of the ruling Manchus, simply through his lack of access. The great majority of foreigners in China were dependent upon what they could glean from their native interpreters whose depth of understanding was limited by their lack of knowledge, especially about state policies. Such people as Mesny, foreigners who spoke and read Chinese and had Chinese contacts, were one up on the foreigners who heavily depended upon their Chinese employees, but for Mesny to maintain his credibility with possible foreign investors he had to clutch at any crumb from the tables of the great and worthy, hence his repeated name dropping. It is also well nigh impossible to judge simply from his own account of events the extent to which Mesny understood the power politics of senior Chinese Imperial military officers or the nuances of the accusations aimed at a number of the generals. If he did, then his poignant description of the removal and demotion of his own Commander-in-chief from his command in Kueichou is very sympathetic.\n\nShanghai, where Mesny spent many of his later years, was one of the first Treaty Ports, opened in 1842, and by the turn of the century the largest foreign settlement in the East with a western population of many thousands. Mesny spent all but five of his last thirty-three years in the city.\n\nA Briton, Oliver Ready3, writing in 1904 of the time when Mesny first reached China said, 'Forty odd years ago, at the close of the second great war [i.e. 1860, the year in which Mesny reached the China coast], China was a veritable Eldorado for Europeans, where all turned to gold beneath the slightest touch of alien hands. Fortunes were made with startling rapidity, and money came in so freely that the standard of living amongst foreign merchants and their employees reached such preposterous heights of luxuriousness, that even when the inevitable reaction set in, want, and even ruin, supervened where plenty should have been found. Forty years ago the foreign trade was practically monopolised by Englishmen, who only had to place their goods on the market of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212715, "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": 24, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "9\n\nany newly-opened port for them to be snatched up and at almost any price by Chinese merchants..... until the Chinese purchaser came to close quarters with the English importer, eliminating middlemen at small ports and to transferring operations chiefly to the great emporiums of Hong Kong and Shanghai.'\n\nHankow was the other city in which, on and off, Mesny spent a dozen or so years and where eventually he died, a city on the north bank of the Yangtze, part of the three-city metropolis now known as Wuhan. It was the major commercial port in central China during the second half of the 19th century, containing British, German, Russian, Japanese and French settlements, known as Concessions. Hankow was opened as a treaty port in 1861, a year before Mesny arrived there and became famous abroad as the start of the annual tea-clipper race back to England.\n\nThe province of Kueichou in south-west China, where Mesny also spent a number of years was one of the most backward areas of China. It had been under Chinese rule since the Han at about the time of Christ, but only became a separate province during the Ming, in AD 1413. Waves of Chinese immigration, mainly from neighbouring Szechuan and Hunan provinces, forced the non-Chinese minority tribesmen out of the fertile valleys leading eventually to discontent and finally rebellion. Mesny's story is illuminating in a number of respects. There were always foreigners who took up minor posts with the Chinese bureaucracy, particularly during the modernisation campaigns which took place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Old photographs exist showing foreigners in, for example, a Chinese arsenal beside foreign machinery or weapons, both as advisers and trainers, but few ever wrote of their experiences. The most interesting part of Mesny's life, however, standing out as a unique experience, was the short period of some five to six years when he served with two provincial forces of the Chinese Imperial Army on active service helping suppress a rising of the Miao, a subjugated minority race in a remote part of southern China. [See Appendix C for a summary of the first campaign against the Miao in which Mesny took part]. Probably the most interesting part of these narratives is the reasonably detailed description of Chinese soldiering during this relatively minor campaign. It is full of anecdotal descriptions of campaigning in central south China against a redoubtable foe, the Miao people, though regrettably Mesny fails to go into detail about such interesting subjects as how he was paid, how patronage worked up to him personally, etc. He does, however, cover a number of themes in his Notes on the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212716, "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": 25, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Chinese Military Services which have not before been recorded in English. One aspect of Mesny's writings which will bring wry smiles to a number of western faces was his occasional essay into the ever-popular art of China-watching. In 1896 his conjecture that Earl Li Hung-chang was a likely candidate to be the first ruler of a China ruled by Chinese is now, with the benefit of hindsight, amusing to say the least. Even more so was Mesny's next thought. Li perhaps might even marry the Empress Dowager and thus amalgamate his influence with that of the reigning line. He added that the Empress Dowager was however too old to bear children and would therefore only be a witness to her own departing glory by seeing her husband, [and Li would then have been 74] begetting an heir to the throne through a younger woman.\n\nBetween 1850 and 1873 peasant discontent, both Chinese [Han] and non-Chinese, led to a wave of rebellions, some of exceptional size. These included the Taipins, the Nien and the Moslem revolts, but not Ya'qub Beg's Sinkaing rebellion which ended in 1877. Mesny first became involved in the Taiping rebellion [1850-1864] towards its latter days, a time when the imperialists were gaining the upper hand and had confronted the Taiping leadership in its capital, Nanking where he was held captive for some months. Later, whilst he was working with the Chinese Maritime Customs in Hankow, he became involved with the Nien-fei [the Nien rebels] bandits who ravaged north of the Yangtze between 1851 and 1868.\n\nThe Nien, a decentralised association of peasants, were basically bandits without any ideology as such, whereas the Taiping rebels were a pseudo-Christian movement led against the imperial rulers in Peking by Hung Hsiu-ch'uan who had adopted some elements of Christian beliefs into his ideology. The Taiping rebels, whose capital city was Nanking, enjoyed some sympathy from westerners but eventually the rebellion was defeated but not until many millions had died. When the final defeat came it was due mainly to the Chinese imperialists under Tseng Kuo-fan, Li Hung-chang and Tso Tsung-t'ang, aided to some extent by several foreign-trained Chinese forces which included the much-vaunted western-trained force, first under an American Frederick Ward and finally under a British colonel in the Royal Engineers, Charles Gordon, together with direct British and French military intervention in Shanghai and Ningpo areas. The rebels, with whom Mesny and many Christian missionaries at first sympathised, introduced many reforms such as monogamy, and the banning of opium, tobacco and alcohol, and foot-binding.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212717, "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": 26, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "The Boxer Rebellion in north China in 1900, which involved the massacre of some western missionaries and a siege of the Legation area in Peking, did not reach as far south as Shanghai, though in his curriculum vitae Mesny mentions 'Volunteered for service at Peking 1900'. Unfortunately, we do not know whether his service was accepted or what he did during that period.\n\nThe Chinese Imperial government survived these rebellions but slowly became even weaker as the years went by. Western nations also took full advantage of Chinese imperial weakness until in 1911 the Revolution overthrew the imperial government and established a very weak republic which, after some further thirty or so years of both inner turmoil and invasion by the Japanese, ended with the Communist victory. Mesny lived through the first eight years of the Republic, and though they were stirring times, he must have had many nostalgic memories of his prowess and success in the Chinese imperial army, particularly in the latter days of the suppression of the Miao rebels, and the time when he was a prisoner of the Taipings, features which make his eye-witness accounts of value today.\n\nMesny lived in a China which followed a predominantly masculine routine. The majority of foreigners were either isolated loners or members of small groups in remote parts of China, or they lived in treaty ports, enclaves in which the relative comfort of 'home', friends, and social occasions made life bearable, even though foreign women tended to live circumscribed and artificial lives. However, his accounts lack such intimate detail of his and his family's lives. Despite the autobiographical notes in the Miscellany, not only in segments but selective in the extreme, Mesny remains somewhat of an elusive person, and, as none of his letters appear to have survived, much of his personal life would seem to be largely irrecoverable. His enigmatic snippets about his Chinese family are such that they do little more than fuel guesswork. We still lack an account of Mesny's private life in his later years, one in which we might hear the voices of his wives and children as clearly as those of the senior officers we have been provided in the Miscellanies, of the senior Chinese officers during the Kueichou campaign.\n\nMuch of the raw material provided by Mesny contains stark, bald statements which leave loose ends and strands which we cannot gather together without straying into the realms of guesswork. Regrettably, there would appear to be little chance of ever satisfying our curiosity from...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212718, "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": 27, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "12\n\nother sources about whatever ensued and this reflects the virtual sole source of the material available, William Mesny himself. Several other foreigners with somewhat comparable careers to Mesny who eventually wrote their autobiographies, and therefore might be regarded as collateral, include Prosper Giquel whom Mesny refers to and who was in Hankow and established a Franco-Chinese force there in 1866, but who does not mention Mesny,\n\nOne of our problems in trying to bring Mesny, the man, into focus lies with the limited amount of material he published. It would seem from his writings that he recorded much more, a great deal of it lost during his travels which, had it been preserved, would have made all the difference to our overall picture. He appears not to have been particularly interested in dating episodes within his narratives and was only very rarely specific; and even during his detailed story of the first Kueichou campaign he ignored the temporal progression of the story, jumping from incident to anecdote and back again with scant regard for sequence. He was also cavalier in naming names. Without introduction, he includes a new name without any explanation or identification. In many instances, the individual could be identified from snippets thrown in at a much later stage, but several have remained unidentifiable. The narrative provided in his Miscellanies was published in weekly episodes years after the events, possibly from a diary, though it would appear to a certain extent to have been written up at the time. Many of the weeks' texts were divided into two separate sections, consciously or perhaps even unconsciously, one being the progression of the campaign and the other anecdotes about local fruits, silver mining, or the prescribing of drugs for the various illnesses prevalent at the time, etc. It might have been that he was stretched for material to fill the columns, and this perhaps is borne out by the number of times he repeats himself, offering greater and often unnecessary detail. Mesny also appears to have assumed that his readers, not only in Shanghai but 'world-wide', knew the general background to the Chinese political, economic, and social scene, and therefore a number of his allusions can now no longer be understood. Also, his views of the Chinese military, which we can assume should be relatively accurate at the lower echelons, would appear to be less accurate and lacking confirmatory detail, due to Mesny not being anything like as important as he would have had us believe.\n\nOne incident during the campaign in Kueichou exemplifies the confusion Mesny's account, and sometimes even his assumptions,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212719, "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": 28, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "13 \n\nimposes upon readers. He had joined the large skirmishing force led by General Liu Ho-ling, commander of the Ko-i Force of the Szechuan Army Corps and Mesny's immediate chief, to harry the Miao tribesmen. Mesny remarks that upon retiring the General and Mesny came under fire from a Miao ambush with hundreds of bullets whizzing close to them. Mesny quickly dismounted and soon cleared the wood [in which the ambushers were hidden] and the enemy fled leaving their dead and wounded. Some ten lines further on, after an anecdote about a splendid prize that he had captured, an eight foot long Miao rifle, he explained that the Miao-tzu had lost more men in and near that wood than they had all day as Mesny had laid an 'ambuscade' for them with two companies of General Liu's guards. If one bears with Mesny's usual hyperbolic claim that he had laid the successful ambush, one is left wondering what he was doing, alongside the General, when they fell into the ambush, which Mesny would appear from an earlier paragraph to have foiled alone with great success.\n\nAt another point in the narrative, when General Liu goes off leading a local attack, he leaves Mesny behind because 'the Commander-in-chief needed Mesny's advice more than he, General Liu, did.' Liu was defeated, 'badly' says Mesny, and one can sense the schadenfreude. Mesny added that one of the battalion commanders had commented that General Liu would appreciate Mesny's abilities better in future! It is not hard to imagine General Liu becoming more and more irritated by this young foreign whippersnapper who always knew best. General Liu has only to leave Mesny behind and, as luck would have it, be defeated.\n\nHis lengthy and often involved autobiographical essay in his Miscellanies only cover the period from 1861, when he was 19, to 1870 and the end of the first campaign in Kueichou to suppress the Miao tribesmen's rebellion, when he was still only 28. From 1870 on we are dependent upon the copious and varied snippets in his Miscellanies, both long and short, until the final publication of the Miscellanies in 1905 when he was 64. Dr Tiedemann of SOAS, University of London, has discovered that Mesny wrote at least a dozen letters from Kueichou from May 1872 to February 1874 published in the Shanghai newspaper, Shanghai Budget and perhaps even more in the Celestial Empire, the paper which took over the Shanghai Budget in 1874. No copies of these papers appear to be available though we can surmise that they probably covered Mesny's activities during that period. From 1905 until his death fourteen years later, in 1919, we have to rely on his obituary, admittedly", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212720, "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": 29, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "14\n\nmostly written by himself, which sadly adds little to our overall knowledge.\n\nOne of the problems is dating, not only of his personal life though the general outline is well defined, but also the dates prior to publication when he wrote up the notes and the final narratives. There would appear to be times when flashes of inspired hindsight have been included into episodes of his biography or into his essays on China's recent past, her problems and how they should be solved.\n\nMesny's writings have brought to life again a number of now long forgotten aspects of life in China in the nineteenth century. It was not a China of pagodas, silk, tea and pigtails but one of hostility, dirt, bug-ridden towns and villages, a mass of poverty-stricken peasants and the ever-present threat of early death from disease. We tend to forget or overlook the acceptance as a norm in those days of the complications and tedium caused by time, distance, and poor communications when it took days and even weeks of tiring travel on foot or on the backs of animals to reach the capital of a neighbouring province. Nowadays we also tend to imagine that during Imperial days the peasant population of China was fairly sedentary with little knowledge of much beyond the neighbouring village or the annual district fair. Mesny describes at one point how memories of distant parts of China were brought home to their villages by the many individuals who served with armies suppressing revolts in distant provinces such as Mongolia, Yunnan and Dzungaria [now part of Sinkiang province]; and, for example, how far and wide the Cantonese, as traders, had spread their presence. Mesny also vividly brings alive on a number of occasions the atmosphere in which foreigners, often alone or in very small parties, were out on a limb in far-flung parts of China with ever-increasing xenophobia, and with anti-foreign violence threatening their very lives.\n\nThe Miscellanies contained remarkably few illustrations. All were photographs of people apart from several poorly reproduced photographs in 1905 of astronomical instruments in the Peking Observatory before they were borne off to Germany by the German contingent during the Boxer rebellion in 1900, and one litho in Volume 4 of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, merely recording who it represented. The picture of Chu Yuan-chang in all his ugliness was also reproduced later in 1910 in a small book also printed in Shanghai written by William Kahler, 'Chinese Hotchpotch', accompanying one of the articles reprinted from", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212721, "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": 30, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "'Union'. There was no indication that either Mesny or Kahler realized the implication behind the extraordinary ugliness of the emperor nor that the print had anti-Manchu secret society connotations.\n\nThe only time Mesny refers to photography was when Pickerell, his friend in Hankow in about 1864/5 who knew something of the rudiments of the art, 'then very imperfectly understood,' added Mesny, had produced some very good negatives and positives on glass of his Chinese employers. This spread Pickerell's fame and brought him lots of business. The colodion gave out and none was to be obtained at any price. Mesny tells us in his Miscellany that he knew how to make it and produced some which served the purpose until a supply could be obtained from Hong Kong. This yet again highlights the enigma of how did Mesny keep abreast with European and American business and scientific advances whilst in remote parts of China, and how did he, at the age of 22 or 23, in the heart of China, having left Jersey some ten years earlier, know anything about photography and in particular the constituents of colodion and how to make it?\n\nThe illustrations provided by the Jersey Post Office on the commemorative stamps are interesting illustrations of how the present day artist imagined Mesny and his surroundings. They should therefore be regarded as fanciful representations rather than accurate depictions. Mesny, for example, at no time appears to have worn the square badge of the civil official as portrayed in the illustration with Governor Chang. Again, he was never a 'Mandarin first class', he was a 'military official second class.' Finally, at no stage did he ever refer to himself at 'the River Gate.' Every walled town down the Yangtze would have had one but Mesny, himself, never mentioned the term and again, to our knowledge, was not on the Yangtze in 1874.\n\nNOTES\n\nThe Manchu dynasty was actually descended from the Jürchen, the so-called Golden Horde. The Manchus in China were neither Mongol nor even, strictly speaking, autochthonous Manchus but Jürchen conquerors from Manchuria\n\n1 Balleine G R: A Biographical Dictionary of Jersey Staples Press: London\n\nReady O: Life and Sport in China London. 1904\n\nPage 30\n\nPage 31", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212722, "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": 31, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Mesny's Personal Life\n\nPART TWO\n\nConsidering how detailed and verbose Mesny could be in his writings it is surprising how little we know about his personal life during the later years. A certain amount about his well-being and illnesses, his religion and his relationships with the female sex during his first fifteen to twenty years in China can be extracted from his autobiographical snippets but on the whole they add little but colour to the overall picture. He did however reveal relatively more to us about his financial situation but only because it had deteriorated and was obviously causing him great anxiety.\n\nMesny must have lived from hand to mouth for most of his later years. He had always had an eye for the big break and though at times he seemed to make himself a small fortune, though we never hear the details, he soon enough appears to have reverted to scraping by. He loved the adventure of travel and for some years managed to earn sufficient or at least obtain adequate sponsorship to visit all eighteen provinces of China. However, the day came when he could just dream. In 1896, at age of 54, he wrote that being strong and active though getting old, he would like to make an expedition to Lhasa [he called it Lassa]. He bemoaned the fact that he had not the necessary funds - but, he wrote, if he had had sufficient he would liked to have journeyed to Mukden [Shenyang] and Kirin, then via the Amur region, return via Urga [Ulan Bataar] or the K'un-lun and the Seven Lakes including Ch'ing-hai [Kokonor], Tengri Nor to Lhasa and Darjeeling [in India]. He felt capable of accomplishing the feat penetrating right through unknown Thibet [sic] to India and added the hopeful 'Wait and see.' He never made it.\n\nHe was forever trying to persuade Chinese officials to allow him to help them and China with his grandiose ideas. Presumably he was planning and hoping to earn commission from any scheme which took off though he repeated several times in his writings references to such schemes in which he was prepared to act on behalf of China for the good of the Chinese people without benefit to himself. But for one reason or another, and we rarely learn why, these failed to come to anything. In 1878 he had been asked by a French bank to contact a very senior Chinese official, Marquis Tso, to arrange a loan to build railways, etc. in China's Northwest. Mesny would have to pay his own travelling expenses crossing China by land but would receive a handsome commission if", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212723, "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": 32, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "17\n\nsuccessful. He made the lengthy journey but would appear never to have achieved arranging the loan.\n\nIn 1879 Liu K'un-yi, Governor General of the Two Kuangs, was disposed to retain Mesny on his staff at Canton to take charge of the Foreign Affairs Department, and superintend the creation of a local naval force and the fortification of the coast of Kuangtung province. Mesny related a lengthy story about the local gentry in Canton requesting him to visit Peking to persuade a 'well-known prince' with a bribe of Taels 100,000 in order to gain permission to re-open the Wei-sing Lottery Offices in Kuangtung province. After being put under considerable financial and other inducements Mesny decided that he did not want to have anything to do with the lottery business and at his next interview with the Viceroy he was told that there were no funds available to build ships and forts and therefore there was no further need for his services. Mesny added that he understood the money derived from the lottery would have been entrusted to him to build ships of war and fortifications. He concluded [and this was written in 1895] that after that episode his friends deserted him and he never had an offer of really substantial employment after that day. He later added, 'I have been reduced to the lowest ebb of poverty. I have lost all my property, and been left unemployed ever since, so that I am sometimes driven to think that honesty may not be the best policy in China.' He also claimed that after Mason's trial in 1891 when his name had been linked with a major anti-imperial secret society he had never again been offered employment by [the Chinese] government.\n\nOn 7 September 1891, according to Mesny, a typhoon struck Shanghai and did much damage. He referred to the disaster when describing his precarious financial state, explaining that it had destroyed the Olympia Skating Rink in Lloyd Road, his property, thus ruining him financially.\n\nDuring the publication of his Miscellanies, in addition to his many references to his weak financial position, signs of financial circumspection are obvious: for example, Volumes 1 and 2 were produced on very cheap paper, and in No 20 of Volume 2 in 1896 he announced that the printer had not delivered the edition on time to the Editor through lack of funds to pay for printing... ‘difficulties,' he added, ‘had now been overcome.'\n\nHe recorded a loss of over $2,000 on first year's publication but", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212724, "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": 33, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "18\n\nexpressed the hope that as the work became better known the number of subscribers would increase, and in May 1899 he announced that his circulation was increasing and was a great success. He claimed a noticeable increase in the number of advertisers especially from America and planned to increase advertising space. Three months later however, in July 1899, he noted that certain advertisers had deserted him, and specifically referred to 'banks, steamer and insurance agencies.'\n\nVolume III was completed in October 1899, since which time, Mesny wrote in April 1905, he had been busily engaged in keeping soul and body together by means of commissions earned as a life and fire insurance agent. During the five years 1900 - 1905 he had canvassed a great many Chinese and foreigners with a view to insuring 'their precious lives or their valuable property,' and had succeeded in persuading a few, of the many people he had canvassed, that insurance was a wise investment; he continued, ‘A respectable insurance agent is in reality one of the greatest latter day benefactors of mankind. Instead of being considered a pestilent fellow and a nuisance to be shunned at all times, he ought to be eagerly patronised and praised.' Also in 1899 he had problems over money having stood surety for a Chinese arrested for publishing a so-called illegal book.\n\nIn 1904 Mesny, whilst complaining about 'Chinese shareholders being defrauded by their incapable and avaricious squeezing directors,' mentioned that 'it happened [undated] that I had Taels 400,000 in hand to invest on reasonable terms as to risk and interest.' The rest of the statement was not material. The question these remarks raise is when did he have a sum as large as four hundred thousand taels available?, and whether the large sum was his or he was handling it on behalf of someone else? We shall never know.\n\nIn February 1905 Mesny offered subscribers the opportunity to invest in the stock of Mesny's Miscellany. He was also advertising insurance suggesting that people call or write to him, with no charge for consultation.\n\nTowards the end of issue 20 (of 26), in May 1905 a short but heavily printed notice read, 'Subscribers and Advertisers are hereby respectfully informed that the Editor [Mesny] of Miscellany is wading up to his knees in financial difficulties, a fact which may delay the completion of Volume", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212725, "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": 34, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "19\n\nIV. Unhappy are they who die with their shoes on. Wm. Mesny.\"\n\nVirtually the last item in the final volume of the Miscellany was an acknowledgement of the receipt of No 4 Volume 1 of the Shanghai monthly magazine The Far East. Mesny heartily commended the work to Sinologues, wished Editor Fink every success and then added ‘and wish we could follow his good example in the matter of illustrating Mesny's Miscellany.' This again highlighted the shoe string on which the Miscellany had been published.\n\nMesny wrote in 1895 on his use of pawnbrokers. It was an aside that having lost the ticket for some gold ornaments pawned by him in Shanghai he had obtained surrender of the articles by giving a description of them and an acknowledgement, backed by two local shopkeepers, as security for his assertion. This was his only reference to his use of pawning to raise ready cash.\n\nHaving been deprived of half of his property when he was legally separated from his wife in his late sixties he appears to have drifted into a menial job, probably paying a nominal salary, which kept him going until he died. There has been no indication that he was supported by either his son or daughter, nor for that matter whether they kept in touch with him.\n\nApart from two specific instances of inventions, one which he failed to patent, but described in his Miscellanies, he implied that he had been the inventor of a number of items as well as having a fertile imagination for schemes to aid both China and his pocket. There is no doubt whatsoever about his ability to improvise and modify equipment when required but nothing specific appears to have been created and marketed by him and been a resounding success. If it had been so we would have been told about it and not just once. The invention he failed to patent and which he claimed was taken up by an American firm was a cartridge extractor for horse pistols. He explained that he had had enormous difficulties with the pair he had used in action as the spent cartridges remained within the chamber and had had to be pushed out with, amongst other things, a chopstick. The other invention which he patented in both England and France in 1878 and manufactured one gross of was a ship's life jacket-cum-pillow. We hear no more about it.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212726, "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": 35, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "20\n\nIllnesses\n\nMesny seems to have got through life with remarkably few illnesses and, apart from one major well-nigh fatal illness during the forced march from Soochow with the Taipings and the occasional bouts of malaria, had he suffered anything more serious than a high temperature, he did not mention it. During his undiagnosed well-nigh fatal illness he had to fend for himself and lived off boiled rice-water. He could not face food, ran a very high temperature and at one point he was laid out, unconscious, presumably to die. He was placed on a bed of reeds on a veranda with a cannon barrel as a pillow and covered with an old vermin-ridden sheepskin jacket, flung over him by one of the assistant cooks. He had lain there delirious for about a week before he recovered, with little recollection of anything apart from a Cantonese doctor making him swallow a large pill as a cure for fever. He later described the illness as the one 'when his hair fell out.'\n\nHe suffered from prickly heat all the time he was in hot countries, and from eczema and boils during the time he was based in Canton [1884-1887]. He was also bitten by a snake, slept amongst swarms of vicious mosquitoes and doubtless drank filthy water on occasions, though this is never recorded by him in so many words.\n\nHe obtained for himself various patent medicines, especially during his time in Kueichou province, such as Collis Browne's chlorodyne, Lepeltier's sulphate of quinine, Holloway's Pills and ointment, and described how his reputation as a doctor grew during the campaign when he successfully dosed many a sick Chinese soldier from his medicine cabinet, saving the lives of a great number of them.\n\nHe claims at a later date to be a most abstemious man if not an absolute teetotaller, and practically a vegetarian; eggs, butter and milk being the only animal food he allowed himself. Mesny repeated on several occasions that he rigidly abstained from animal food, especially whilst living in the interior of China, out of respect for the authority of the officials and as an example of obedience to well-intentioned laws. At one point, Mesny lived for three years in a Buddhist monastery in Kuei-yang Fu in Kueichou province, Western China, [though not as a religious] and at another stage in his life was vegetarian for three months at a stretch.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212727, "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": 36, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "21\n\nIn 1896 when describing various secret societies Mesny, as an aside wrote 'I'm of the ritualist sect, Tsai-li Chiao [sic] #, a secret political society3, the members of which bind themselves to abstain from eating flesh of oxen, goats and sheep; from drinking wine and all other intoxicating liquors; from smoking opium, tobacco and all other such ingredients in any form. The ritualists usually wear a white girdle, but abstain from wearing anything red or green. This society is now [1896] very strongly rooted in Northern China. It has a temple or hall in Shanghai, with a priest or master, who initiates members after several severe trials and approbation in secret. Candidates for membership in this society have to undergo very severe trials for steadfastness and fidelity before they are considered fit for initiation.\" He refers to members of the society as 'they' without once referring to his own membership again nor does he ever refer to the society or his membership elsewhere.\n\nConsidering the distances he covered in central China and the era he lived in it would seem amazing that he did not die young, as did his brother in Hankow at the age of 39. He lived to the ripe old age of 77, was described in his last year as walking briskly, with clear eyes, fair complexion and tinted like a winter apple, and although we do not know what he died of, 1919 was in the middle of the great world influenza epidemic.\n\nReligion\n\nIt has to be borne in mind that he was living and writing during a period of incipient reform, with Chinese imperial die-hards fighting back against increasing foreign influence which they saw mostly manifest in missionary activity. Chinese officials and for that matter Chinese peasants too were unable to differentiate between Christian sects. Mesny's only criticisms of Christians were for Roman Catholic priests who had, he claimed, set their converts against non-Catholics of all kinds, revealed by their use of abusive terms for non-Catholic Christians. As this was a common complaint, and one which was reciprocated equally strongly by Catholics, Mesny would appear simply to be voicing popular British and American expatriate views of the day.\n\nMesny came from a Wesleyan Methodist background and both he and his brother in Hankow had some links with the Wesleyan Methodist missionaries in Hankow, especially with David Hill, Mesny was also a Free Mason of long standing.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212728, "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": 37, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "22\n\nAlthough from several of his comments in his Miscellany Mesny would appear to have remained a God-fearing Christian, at one point, he confessed that he had grown up with a strong inclination to sinfulness and, he continued, in 1865 he had added to his gallantries the vicious habits of gambling and drinking having just lost his 'fair charmer,' a Chinese widow. However, 'having lost my fear of God and drifted from the narrow path that leadeth unto salvation,' fortunately, he wrote, the Revs. Josiah Cox and Griffith John, Dr John Falconer and Wm Grant Gordon never forsook him. They gave him good advice and showed good examples which he followed. His fall from grace appears to have been of short duration and was never again referred to.\n\nHe made the point several times that he was a Christian believer and, for example, he began a lengthy paragraph with the sentences, 'From my earliest departure from home in 1854 unto the present day [1896] the Holy Bible has been my constant companion, and the Lord God Almighty has been my refuge and strong tower, and I have had much reason to praise the Lord, for his mercy endureth forever. The VIII Psalm, and more especially the 4th and 5th verses of that Psalm, also the 1st and 2nd verses of the IX Psalm, have been very appropriate to my personal experience at various times and at various places.' He continued in this vein for the rest of the paragraph, ending with ‘Of late years I have often had reason to apply the prayer of David to my humble self as it is given in Psalm LXXXVI.’\n\nIn a card sent by him in his last year he referred to himself not only as a friend of China but also a 'Student of Primitive Christianity and Christian Science.'\n\nMesny recounted at some length, as was his wont, the cleansing of the soul of a very wild Liverpudlian who roamed the Yangtze in his lorcha and took great pleasure in killing any Chinese with his great sword in revenge for the great harm they had caused him. The Liverpudlian called on Mesny some time in the early 1860s and finding him kneeling in his daily devotions joined him, and begged Mesny first to say a prayer for him. He then asked to be purified and absolved. Mesny did as he requested and the Liverpudlian 'went away very much changed. He came boldly as a lion and departed timid as a sheep.' Mesny heard later that the Liverpudlian had disappeared from the river [the Yangtze] and was never heard of again.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212729, "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": 38, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "23\n\nMesny shared with other Europeans the assumptions of Christian moral superiority. He did, however, have a genuine respect for Chinese culture that was absent in so many foreigners in China. He also approved of Christian missionaries and their work and anticipated that China would be converted to Christianity within the next century, i.e., by the year 2000, and noted at one point during a discourse on meeting Chinese during his travels that he occasionally took the opportunity afforded him by his contact with groups of them to discuss the importance of Christianity.\n\nSeveral times Mesny raged against the iniquity of the Western nations in their support of the Chinese Imperial Government in its struggle against the rebellion of the Taipings. The latter was led by Hung Hsiu-ch’üan, a failed examination scholar and a professed Christian. Hung, a Hakka, was influenced by Protestant faith and adopted a number of its elements into his cult. After a series of visions, he declared himself to be the son of God and a younger brother of Jesus. The Taipings, a major threat to the last Imperial dynasty of China, were puritanical, having outlawed gambling, opium, tobacco, and alcohol. Their rebellion thrived on the tensions stemming from the economic and political issues of the day, though by the end, it had destroyed very many millions of lives and lasted some thirteen years with much of southern China under their control, and with its centre and capital at Nanking on the Yangtze. Defeated by the Imperialists aided by Western mercenaries, Hung committed suicide in 1864, and the Taipings were eliminated. Mesny, who had been well treated by the Taipings during his captivity in Nanking, explained that Hung had eventually been viewed as blasphemous by Western missionaries for believing the Lord's Prayer, calling God their Heavenly Father, and Jesus [the author, he noted, of that very prayer] their Heavenly Senior Brother. It was logical to Hung, said Mesny, to take it that step further, if God is the Father and Jesus is the Son, and God is also our Father, then Jesus must be our Brother too. Hung simply saw himself as a modern-day Saint leading his followers in the way of Jesus. The Chinese slant included concubinage for the leaders together with a number of misinterpretations of Christian beliefs and rituals which, when identified, became anathema to the missionaries both Protestant and Roman Catholic.\n\nHis Other Publications and Letters to the Press\n\nApart from the major work, his Chinese Miscellanies, Mesny appears to have written one book, Tungking, printed by Noronha in Hong Kong.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212730, "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": 39, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "24\n\nin 1884. He also claimed to have produced several minor booklets, one on Yunnan and another on Tonkin, and one article in the Royal Asian Society North China Branch Journal in 1891 on 'Yunnan: Its Treasures and Trade Routes'. He planned to incorporate the two booklets into what he saw as his magnum opus 'The Greater China' which unfortunately never saw the light of day.\n\nHe wrote a very long letter on the Yellow River and its appearances, published in 1887 in Indian Engineering, describing the different places where he had sailed on or had crossed it.\n\nMesny and Chiang Chao-ling, under noms-de-plume, produced in Shanghai in February 1898 'A New Collection of Tracts for the Times', with Mesny editing and Chiang writing the introduction. It was reviewed in the North China Daily News of 23 July 1898. Mesny and Chiang had planned some ten years earlier to publish a monthly magazine in 1887 which would seem never to have taken off.\n\nMesny wrote a lengthy account of his journey from Canton through Kuangsi in 1879 for the London Daily News, but 'this very influential and highly respectable journal did not consider my poor contribution sufficiently interesting to insert it in its widely read columns.'\n\nIn passing when describing a 'celebrated heroine of romance' a novelette based on facts, Mesny added, \"I wrote it all out in one of my stories 'Chinese Nights' years ago, considerably different from Mayer's [version]...,\" but Mesny leaves us no wiser about 'the stories I wrote.'\n\nIn 1904 he published Mesny's Chinese and English Almanac though no copies appear to be available nowadays.\n\n*\n\nIn 1905 he advertised two forthcoming publications, 'Mesny's Commercial Guide' and 'Mesny's Business Directory', presumably both one-off books.\n\nMesny's Ranks and Honours\n\nAlthough Mesny was awarded several decorations by the Chinese one, the Baturu, a Manchu military award for distinguished services rendered on the field of battle, was the award of which he was most intensely proud and which, he explained, had entitled the recipient to travelling", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212731, "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": 40, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "25\n\nallowances of food, accommodation and bearers, twenty horses and eighty men to be supplied by the county magistrate through whose territory the recipient travelled. He described the order of the Pa-Tu-La (to give it its Chinese title) as 'similar to the Legion of Honour or the Victoria Cross, awarded on the strength of a recommendation of the highest provincial official for distinguished services.' He also claimed that although he had been recommended for it several times between 1868 to 1873 he had only received it in 1873 together with the rank of Brigadier-General.\n\nAccording to Mayers in his book 'The Chinese Government':\n\nPa-l'u-lu The Batʼuru distinction. The Military distinction called in Chinese Pa-t'u-lu (a representation of the Manchu word bat'uru, signifying ‘brave') is an institution dating from the early years of the present dynasty, and is conferred solely for active service in the field. It constitutes an order of merit partaking of some of the characteristics of the French Legion d'honneur, but its special feature of difference from European order consists of the fact that it has no outward mark of decoration to be worn by its possessor, in the place of which there can only be reckoned the distinguishing word (or title) which is assigned to each recipient on the bestowal of the order. These specific titles may be either Manchu, Mongolian or Chinese, the Manchu being considered the most honourable. Under this system an officer upon whom the distinction is conferred, might receive the designation Ti Yung Pa-t'u-lu, or 'Bat'uru with the title Magnanimous Brave', and so forth. The title carries with it the right to wear the peacock feather, although it seldom happens at the present day that the peacock feather, lavishly awarded as this decoration has been of late years, is not obtained previously to the bestowal of the batʼuru; and the allowances of the bearer, when employed on active service, are considerably enhanced in virtue of his possession of the title. The Bat'uru has been conferred upon at least one European, Mr W Mesny, a native of Jersey, for services rendered in the province of Kueichou.\n\nMesny commented in his Miscellany in 1896 that on several occasions during the early years of the Kueichou campaign he had been recommended to the Emperor for the bestowal of military rank and his", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212732, "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": 41, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "26\n\nname had eventually appeared in the Peking Gazette. In 1871, he added, he was recommended for special honours on account of distinguished services on the field of battle and received the order of merit called Yung Hao with the title of Ying Yung Pa-t'u-lu [i.e. ‘Brigadier-General, the title of Knight Ying of the Order of Pa-t'u-lu, Mesny\"]. Mesny was awarded the Ying-yung for having penetrated a Miao stronghold with a few Chinese riflemen and turned the tide of battle from defeat into victory. In April 1896 Mesny wrote: 'Having lived in Hankow for some years and acquired some notoriety amongst the Chinese there, if not actual fame, the characters Wen-kao 'Eminent', were chosen and given me as a Hao or familiar by my friends.' His Chinese name is Mai Wen-kao or using a transliteration 'Mai-shih-ni [i.e. mai-knee) and his rank, Tsung-ping **General**]. In another autobiographical 'obituary' printed after his death in the Celestial Empire, a Shanghai paper, he described himself as 'I, Wen-kao William Mesny, F.R.G.S., Brevet Lieutenant-General of the Chinese Army; Knight, Ying Yung of the Order of the Pa-t'u-lu..................\n\nMesny noted on one occasion long after he had completed his military service that he had come across a battalion of Kueichou field troops with the men wearing the cuirass-shaped uniform or Pa-t'u-lu vesture, invented by Mesny in 1868 for the An-ting and Ko-i Rifle Brigades. [\"The ancient Manchu Knights of the order of the Pa-t'u-lu wore such vests as uniform when not wearing the metal cuirass, hence its significant name Pa-t'u-lu.']\n\n[NOTE: Liu Ming-ch'uan, Governor of Taiwan 1884-1891, referred to in the text as having met Mesny, initially was a freebooter who, during the Taiping Rebellion supported Li Hung-chang and the Imperial forces, and opposed the Taipings. He was at that stage a fairly lowly officer and is recorded as having received 'the honorary title of military merit, baturu': Later, when more senior he was awarded the much greater award of the Yellow Riding Jacket.]\n\nMesny was awarded the 'flowery plume' [hua-ling ##4] in 1869 together with the brevet rank of colonel after battles with the Miao tribesmen. He was also presented with the Pao-hsing in 1869. He refers to the Pao-hsing #, the Precious Planet [or decoration of the Star of China] implying that it was the same decoration as the Double Dragon Jewelled Star which he also later referred to. It was, he said, instituted after the Taiping Rebellion as a form of reward for foreigners who", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212733, "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": 42, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "27\n\nrendered eminent service to the Imperial cause. The Double Dragon Jewelled Star (Shuang-lung Pao-hsing) was, he repeated, conferred on him in Kueichou during his first campaign in that province (1867-1869). He described it in his second note as consisting of a pure heavy gold [2oz or more] medal rather than a star, about one and a half inches in diameter, with a hole in the centre about half an inch in diameter, filled by a light sapphire globe revolving on a gold pin inserted through it. On one side were two dragons in high relief, on the other, four characters, also in high relief, viz. Ta-Ch'ing Feng-tseng meaning 'a title of honour bestowed by the Ch'ing dynasty'. The jewelled globe in the centre was intended to represent the light blue button and rank of colonel which Mesny then held. Had the medal been conferred by the Emperor, Mesny added, he would have worn it in Europe in 1878 but as it was the gift of a provincial viceroy he did not. Mesny also wrote that he preferred his ordinary Chinese rank and decorations, the Flowery Plume or single-eyed Peacock's Feather and, later, the ordinary order of Pa-t'u-lu with special designation of Ying yung, the Penetrating Knight, awarded to him by the Emperor.\n\nMayers, again, in The Chinese Government wrote about this minor award;\n\n'Isolated distinctions have indeed been conferred in China on foreigners of various nationalities, principally for services rendered in the command of drilled troops during the Taiping rebellion, and subsequently in the collection of the Customs revenue, which are known, with reference to the European term 'star', by the designation pao-hsing; but as these are bestowed, for the most part, by provincial authorities, and without the sanction of any established rule or recognised statutes, such as are required to constitute what is commonly known as an 'Order', the badges thus conferred can scarcely be regarded as having any real value as authentic marks of distinction.'\n\nMesny was recommended for 4th Degree civil rank in 1866 which, if it had been awarded, would have entitled him to wear a mandarin square 'wild goose' breast badge. He recorded that the fourth degree civil rank had the right to wear and were distinguished by a dark blue button on their official cap. The embroidered robe, mang pao, had but eight dragons with five claws on each foot. The dress badge worn by civil officers and all ladies of their class and degree bore the semblance of a swan", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212734, "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": 43, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "28\n\n[yun-yen].\n\nIn October 1874, at the age of 32, Mesny returned to Hankow from Kueichou with the rank of Major-General and, he claimed, an excellent letter of recommendation from the Governor of Kueichou, addressed to Prince Kung and the Ministers of the Tsung-li Yamen in Peking. In 1886 he was promoted to the brevet rank of Lieutenant-General.\n\nIn his autobiographical ‘obituary' in the North China Herald, Mesny wrote \"The confirmation of my rank as a Major-General in the Chinese Army with the decoration of the Kualing [hua-ling] Plume, the order of the Pa-t'u-lu and promotion to be Brevet Lieutenant-General, with ancestors ennobled for three generations, was published in the Peking gazette, and the documents handed to me by the British Legation officials at Peking, and by the British Consul at Canton\": His decoration, the San-tai Erh-pin Kao-feng, an honorary title and patent of retrospective rank conferred upon meritorious officials, their wives and their immediate ancestors for three generations, was recommended to the Throne by the Governor of Kueichou, Ts’en Yü-ying, in 1879. [Grandfather Guillaume Mesny, who had died many, many years earlier and who was now presumably in the Afterworld, must have been most surprised, to say the least!]\n\nMesny also handed out awards and decorations: During his first campaign in Kueichou, Mesny had a supply of Meritorious Warrants (kung-p'ai [which confers the right of the recipient to wear a button on his hat, normally the fifth or sixth degree with blue feathers]). His supply was already sealed with the commander-in-chief's seal, and Mesny bestowed them on meritorious men after each battle, adding the name of the recipient, the date, etc., and Mesny's own seal. He also had hundreds of the Military Silver Medal [Chung-kung Yin-pai] made during the war in Kueichou from 1867-1874, at his own expense, and bestowed them as rewards to deserving soldiers. It consisted of a thin piece of silver about three and a half inches at its longest diameter, with a slit in it for a ribbon, and the character Shang \"Bestowed\" in repoussé work stamped upon it.\n\nHis ranks and grades during his service with the Chinese Imperial forces are a more complex subject and one that is far from clear from Mesny's own writings. He portrayed himself as having 'senior' mandarin rank, and this has been reflected in one of the postage stamps produced by the Jersey Post Office in 1992, on which he is depicted as a 'Mandarin'.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212735, "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": 44, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "29\n\n1st Class in a sedan carried by four bearers.' This was probably no more than hyperbole. He stated in his Miscellanies that he had once possessed a very fine sedan-chair presented to him in Szechuan, with a magnetic compass let into the hand rest or bar which is placed across the chair in front of the rider to rest his hands on.\n\nImperial officials, and their principal wives, wore large embroidered square badges tacked across their surcoat's chest and back, which in addition to their hat buttons, denoted their rank. These were worn by all nine grades of civil officials and, according to Garret, by military officers of the Manchu army stationed in provincial garrisons and in Manchu quarters in large cities. This might explain why Mesny failed to mention squares, apart from five paragraphs describing them and their use, and a remark in passing that a Major-General, 2nd Class of the 2nd Degree would have a 'lion' breast badge. When he visited Amoy in 1879 he was reported in the local foreign press having worn western clothes but with the red button of mandarin rank on top of his foreign cap. As he never spelled out that he ever wore the badge and button commensurate with his military rank we shall probably never know whether he ever did wear such a badge.\n\nHe possessed a Chinese passport consisting of a large single sheet of printed white paper, usually endorsed with certain conditions but in Mesny's case it entitled him to protection in all provinces and beyond the Great Wall, unlimited as to a period of time. He was, he added, never asked for it. It called on all county officials to afford the traveller due protection, safe guidance and reasonable information. He also had at various times official Circular Dispatches [ch'uan-p'ai]. These, he explained, were issued to officials travelling on government service entitling them to named supplies of food, fodder, carts, chairs, pack mules, saddle horses, coolies and accommodation in official inns along the whole line of march.\n\nHe had an official seal when he was the General Superintendent of Foreign Ordnance for the whole of Kueichou province, an appointment he obtained during the Winter of 1875 and held until March of 1877. He explained that he observed all the due formalities of putting away his seal during the New Year annual rites and ceremonies. The seal, he claimed, bore his rank as Lieutenant-General, and Knight Ying of the Order of Pa-t'u-lu. We have no idea of the rank and grade of the Superintendent and as he does not refer to himself as Lieutenant-General", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212736, "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": 45, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "30\n\nin 1886, a year after he had ended his service 'being retained by Viceroy Chang Chih-tung in Canton.' It would appear that he mistakenly claimed the seal bore the more senior rank.\n\nMesny - Neither Chinese nor Western: But Perhaps Both\n\nMesny lived within the two cultures to the extent that we are left in no doubt that he was able to see both the good and the bad in both. He criticised national traits of Chinese and westerners on numerous occasions, though despite the almost universal criticisms by western travellers in China of the dirt, personal filthiness, disregard for decency, boorishness and inquisitiveness, to say nothing of the incessant and noisy talk, Mesny never comments. Foreign travellers almost without exception comment on one or more of the following Chinese characteristics, their remarkable mechanical aptitude, with a delicacy of touch; a patience probably unrivalled in the world; adding however that their inability to draw the necessary inferences, and improving and inventing as they proceeded always surprises. The Chinese, they continue, are an intensely practical people who dislike doing anything for which there is no necessity; and finally, despite there being hardly a product which Chinese would not use, and with a hatred of waste that makes them utilise everything, westerners are always amazed that they should be so averse to milk and milk products. Mesny hardly touches any of these matters, possibly as they had either not crossed his mind or more likely because he saw no reason to add to the chorus.\n\nHe was not impervious to Chinese arrogance and occasionally added a barbed aside such as his reference to a non-Chinese tribe in southern China when he added, ... [the Chinese] are ever ready to apply the very opprobrious term of barbarian to every other people, but not their darling selves...' A more telling paragraph amidst the hundreds of snippets or topics, and pen pictures of things Chinese which were the primary fillers of his weekly Miscellanies, one written in February 1905, after forty-five years in China, and therefore presumably a distillation of his views, was a description of:\n\n'Chinamen [sic]. hua-jen #A, a Brilliant man, a Glorious or Elegant Person, a Chinaman.\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212737, "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": 46, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "31\n\nA native of China generally, whose chief characteristics are: sobriety, frugality, and industriousness; having a burning desire for male offspring, an insatiable appetite for public notoriety, and a terrible affinity for lucre; a being who is perfectly willing at all times, and in all places, to worship the God of Wealth, Ts'ai Shen, or any other particular god or deity, as well as all the known and “unknown\" gods and his own ancestors, as far back as he, or somebody else, may be able to have traced them, but more especially any of them who may have acquired wealth or fame in any age.\n\nPatronage and Name Dropping, and Incidental Anecdotes\n\nHe appears never to have missed an opportunity throughout his long life in China to pay his respects by calling on the local county, provincial and even national mandarins. A number of these officials were referred to thereafter on more than one occasion as 'friends' or 'officials with whom [Mesny] had conferred.' The one he most prided himself on was his 'intimacy' with the Chinese senior statesman, Li Hung-chang, by whom he would appear to have been tolerated, but only just, though with the normal Chinese courtesies.\n\nMesny knew the importance of patronage and name-dropping, especially in China: this we can see from the two and a quarter pages he devoted in one of his Miscellanies to the momentary meeting with a Manchu hereditary prince; his obituary of Tso, etc. He was as obsessed with his affiliation and rapport with the Chinese as he was about females, and at every possible opportunity he managed to name-drop and rub home his kindred feeling for the Chinese together with descriptions of their reciprocation in kind. Mesny refers with pride on a number of occasions to Chinese 'sworn brothers.' He disclosed these individually either without ever referring to them again or in some instances he simply mentioned their names in passing during descriptions of his journeys. One such blood brother was Chang Kuang-chun (or -chin) who in about 1874 was an Expectant ta-t'ai of Szechuan, and a Metropolitan literary graduate [Chin-shih] of the Tao Kuang reign. Another was Chang Ping-tang, the Military Secretary to the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force. Elsewhere in the Miscellany he claimed to have two Chinese sworn brothers, one a literary and the other a military undergraduate whom he had met whilst travelling in a provincial town in Kueichou. He met", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212738, "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": 47, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "32\n\nthem during his journey across the province in 1879 and accepted their offer of sworn brotherhood. He later explained that he had done so to prove to them that Englishmen believed in cultivating and cementing friendship with all civilised beings of whatever creed or nationality. He also mentioned several times his 'never-to-be forgotten friend and brother, Yü Te-k'ai, an officer in Kueichou of the fifth degree of civil rank, the confidential correspondent to the C-in-C beside being commandant of the battalion of guards.' It would have been interesting to have learned the views of these sworn brothers about Mesny.\n\nAlthough Mesny described quite a substantial number of contacts with Chinese officialdom and his views on the very senior officials, he frequently simply referred to the names and titles of senior Chinese officials with or for whom he had worked or by whom he had been interviewed in such a manner as to imply a personal relationship which, in the majority of instances, raises suspicions that he was trying more to bolster his own ego in his passing years and convince himself as well as his readership. However, he also had many an axe to grind and debts of personal slights to repay and these he undertook with great relish in his Miscellany. He sat, in his fifties, in Shanghai, after a life of action, musing over Chinese officialdom's ingratitude, lack of foresight, ineptitude etc. taking pleasure from the opportunity afforded him to write about those who had earned his displeasure.\n\nMesny had particular respect for one very senior Chinese official, Tso Tsung-t'ang, whom he first met when Mesny called to pay his respects during the winter of 1867 in Hankow. After discovering Mesny had been a captive of the Taipings at the age of 25 and spoke French and English, he offered Mesny an appointment as French and English Secretary on his staff, with a recommendation to the Emperor for the civil rank of Fourth Degree. He also offered to take Mesny on his impending campaign to the North-west of China where Tso had just been appointed Governor-General of Shensi and Kansu provinces and C-in-C of the Imperial Forces. The offer was scuppered by the refusal by the local British Consul, Medhurst, to provide a British passport as Mesny's parents had written objecting to his involvement in recent escapades, and capture by both the Taipings and Imperial forces whilst running the blockade. Mesny was next involved or very nearly involved with Tso in 1879 when Mesny trekked from Canton to Tso's headquarters in Hami in the extreme North-west to offer him a French loan. However, Tso had been recalled to Peking just", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212739, "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": 48, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "33\n\nbefore Mesny reached Hami,\n\nDuring the Franco-China War of 1883 when Tso was Governor-General of the southern provinces of Fukien and Chekiang, which included Formosa [Taiwan] where the French did much of their fighting, Mesny was invited by Tso's private secretary in Foochou to come to that city to see Tso with a view to undertaking some of the 'progressive' works he, Mesny, had recommended years beforehand, including telegraphs, railways and mining. Mesny was involved at the time transacting some business in Shanghai for Viceroy Chang Chih-tung and replied that he would call at Foochou on his return from Canton. Viceroy Tso, however, died before Mesny arrived in Foochou.\n\nMesny appears to have revelled in including short tabloid-style titbits usually revealing some appalling or unspeakable act by a Chinese official. One such was the tale of the Manchu bannerman who became such an intolerable nuisance as a Chinese government spy at the British Legation in Peking, where he had been employed as a teacher for many years, that he was expelled from his job. Mesny added that as a reward for the efficient secret services he had rendered his government he was given the rank of Expectant prefect of Kueichou, in about 1874, where he did much mischief and was then transferred to Kuangtung where he remained as an ‘incorrigible anti-foreign mischief maker under the protection of the notorious anti-foreign Tatar, General Chang-shun.'\n\nMesny went into a little detail on the subject he called \"Traitors in Camp' [Nei-ying or li-ying]. These he noted were greatly depended upon in all official (and most other) undertakings. He supposed that there was not a Yamen or office in which there was not some individual paid by a rival to disclose the affairs of that place. Writing in 1905 he accused some of the anti-Christian Chinese of sowing discord amongst Christian missionaries. The latter he claimed 'are so bigoted yet simple that they are very easily imposed upon by designing mischief makers who wish to embroil the missionaries and bring them into evil repute'.\n\nAlthough the majority of titbits on Chinese culture, the social scene and personalities, consisted of one or two paragraphs, Mesny occasionally", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212740, "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": 49, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "34\n\nhad a head of steam and wrote several pages of detailed description on one particular theme, usually with an educational value aimed at foreigners in China. One in particular was his portrayal of a Chinese banquet, consisting not only of various menus, but seating plans, courtesies and the role of the servants.\n\nHis Promotion of Western Education\n\nSince 1868, Mesny claimed, he had had an inclination to do something towards dispelling some of the gross darkness that prevailed amongst the Chinese. In 1870 he established a small day school for boys and girls in a temple called the Yu-huang Kung [The Temple of the Jade Emperor], which served as a club house for the people of the Hu-kuang provinces who resided in Kuei-yang. He imported some school books which he considered suitable and paid a Chinese teacher to teach the children during the four years of his residence in Kuei-yang.\n\nMesny in later years had interviews with senior Chinese mandarins with a view to promoting western sciences and other subjects of study for examinations in China. He also claimed that he had persuaded a Chinese Viceroy to submit a memorial on educational reform to the throne and that this was the start of such reform. The reforms were abolished by the Empress Dowager in 1898.\n\nMesny and Women\n\nDespite the genuinely colourful life he led in China, his experiences living with the Taiping rebels, his service with the Szechuan Force în Kueichou and his treks across much of the country; when we come to his descriptions of his love life with Chinese ladies, although they may have been real and authentic, for the most part they read like episodes out of a modern pulp novelette. This may be due to a possible inability to describe them without a modicum of exaggeration or 'editing' or, though unlikely, they may have been figments of his imagination. There is little doubt that he was red-blooded and normal, and as a single man in foreign parts with few if any women of his own race or culture it was the understood thing for expatriate westerners to have a local female partner. He frequently wrote of pretty women at the roadside during his journeys across China who attracted him or, more to the point, were attracted by him. However, the exact measure of his intimacy with any but his wives is destined to remain tantalizingly obscure.\n\nCorrected minor OCR errors, reformatted text into paragraphs, and corrected \"în\" to \"in\" for consistency and correctness.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212741, "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": 50, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Bearing in mind that much of what he claimed was written from either notes or memory between the ages of 53 to 63, the almost obsessive way he describes the semi-nudity of the girls from the minority Miao suggests that he must have been sex-starved, a red-blooded young man, and a lone Westerner amongst an army of Chinese. Mesny described various tribes and sub-groups of non-Chinese and their customs in some detail in his articles in the Miscellanies, though he did seem to be more interested in their love life and marriage customs than, for example, births and deaths.\n\nHis description of the 'fair maidens' en route during his treks in central China eyeing him and he ogling them are frequent, with no lack of comment on their bare bosoms in particular and occasionally their genitalia. These were, as one would expect in Kueichou province at that time, not Han Chinese but tribeswomen from the Chuang, Lolo, Miao, and other tribes. He also allowed himself the pleasure of preening before them and, in one instance, washed the upper part of his body, combed his beard, and brushed his hair in full view of the local ladies who, he believed, 'expressed great admiration' for him. He was 36 at the time and ostensibly unmarried, though we suspect that he had already taken a Chinese lady to wife by Chinese rites.\n\nMesny, on the subject of marriage, made much of the fact that he very nearly became the son of a Cantonese millionaire named Huang, conditional on Mesny changing his name to Huang. This apparently took place in Hong Kong shortly after he had arrived in the Far East, in 1861, when he was still under the age of twenty and a turn-key at a Hong Kong gaol. It is hard to believe that a wealthy Chinese would be so desperate to acquire a foreign son-in-law, though we know no more than Mesny has seen fit to tell us. In the event, the marriage did not take place, and though he does no more than hint at it by stating that something unforeseen had turned up, it would seem more than likely that his dismissal from the Hong Kong Prison Service had something to do with it. He was then nearly ensnared by a Chinese friend who wished him to marry his sister. Mesny, however, claimed to have declined to be a party to any scheme depriving another man of his prospective wife, as she had been betrothed to a young man in accordance with the custom of the country. Mesny added that he did not wish to break the law, even if it meant hurting the feelings of the Chinese friend who, in Mesny's words, was 'no ordinary personage, in the common sense of the word, and the [proposed] voyage up the Yangtze with him gave promise of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212742, "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": 51, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "36 \n\nsomething more than ordinary adventure.' \n\nAgain, after a theatrical performance by a Chinese actor and actress in a provincial town in Kueichou province, Mesny wrote that local people, believing him [he was then 36] to be very old as he had a beard, knew that foreign women must be inferior; \"They must be, “they added\", as foreign men pass by but never foreign women, and foreign men marry Chinese wives.' Mesny added that he had one 'with very small feet and wears elegantly embroidered red satin shoes!' This must have been in 1878. \n\nWriting a paragraph under the heading of 'Slave Girls', Mesny noted that it was a common thing for well-to-do people to present a couple of slave girls to a daughter as part of their marriage dowry. It was also customary with respectable people to release slave girls when marriageable. Mesny added that he had bought three different girls, two in Szechuan, for a few taels each [less than 15 dollars Mexican]. One he released in Tientsin, another died in Hong Kong; the other he gave in marriage to a faithful servant of his. \n\nIn his Miscellanies he described a number of Chinese women, young and beautiful, who [or so he claimed] desired to marry him. Some he encouraged but in each instance the story peters out, others disappear out of his stories without explanation or further mention. He also had a 'romantic and intimate interlude' with a young Chinese widow, who did not appear to be short of money, and who accompanied Mesny down river to Hankow where they remained in a house near the Yamen where Mesny frequently visited her. He noted at one point that 'there was nothing like gushing love between us, but I could not fail to admire such an admirably sensible woman. What she thought was admiring in me I know not, but I know she said from the first that she required my protection. The only time that I ever noticed anything like affectionate love on her part for me was on my first visit to her after my misadventure at the Lung-wang Miao\". Then she wept. She took my head very gently between her fine hands and repeatedly kissed the fresh scars of my recent wounds... we were both silent.' Despite this, he shortly afterwards described in the Miscellany that he, Mesny, 'had been busy at work and with his friend Pickerell, and paid frequent visits to my charmer near the Tao-t'ai's Yamen. She complained of the scarcity and brevity of my visits and showed unmistakable signs of being in a condition likely to increase the already great population of the vast empire of China.'", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212743, "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": 52, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "37\n\nWhilst he was absent from Hankow for two weeks in 1865, starting his new job [cotton broking], she left for Hunan and 'virtuous widowhood.' [Despite her apparently being with child by Mesny?]\n\nUnder another heading, on male offspring, Mesny related an incident which occurred when he would have been about forty. He was riding by a tent of a member of a Mongolian-Turki nobleman in Turkestan and it was an act of benevolence, says Mesny, to perform the agreeable function of adding a male child to the nobleman's family. The nobleman, a weak-looking old man with a strong Turkish woman of about forty years of age, had borne a daughter and been barren ever since. The husband, Mesny concluded, introduced us and left us together.\n\nImmediately after his capture by the Taipings in 1862 he was confronted by a Taiping chief, an Admiral, who, according to Mesny, welcomed him once he had realized that Mesny too was a Christian and immediately promised to make Mesny a Vice-Admiral in the Taiping navy commanding one of their vessels and give him the hand of one of his daughters in marriage. An old lady with great pull amongst the Taiping leadership who had befriended Mesny after he had repaired her musical box and her pistols, did not approve of Mesny marrying the Admiral's daughter as the girl had already been betrothed to two different men, both of whom had been killed in battle, a sign that she was unlucky and consequently should remain single. Mesny added, 'I had nothing to say in the matter, being as submissive in matrimonial matter as a lamb that is being led to slaughter.'\n\nIn 1896 he described another of his many adventures with the Taiping rebels in the mid-1860s when, as a captive, many of the Taiping ladies had been perfectly charming and very persuasive, offering him a wife or two from the large number of Taiping ladies in the Taiping king's palace and elsewhere. He added that he had told them that he had no intention of staying with the Taipings for a life time, and hoped to go back to his native land to get married there to a wife whose interests and sympathies would be nearer to his than those of any Chinese lady could ever be. He wrote this in 1896 and one can sense the regret in his tone that he ever did marry a Chinese woman as, at that stage in his life he was married for at least the second time, had two Eurasian children, and was kept at arms length by fellow expatriates in Shanghai where he lived at the time.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "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": 212746, "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": 55, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "40\n\nin\n\nwould have been 20 when her father left Shanghai. She presumably remained there until she married in 1917. We know that Marie, in her middle age in Jersey, never referred ever to her time in China nor to her mother. If the subject ever arose, even with close relatives in Jersey, she promptly changed the subject. The only time she ever let slip anything about life in China was when the Chinese silken slippers were produced and she told her second cousin once removed that when her father, William Mesny, returned from a distant and lengthy trek, he found that his Chinese wife had bound her (Marie's) feet in accordance with custom. He ordered them to be unbound at once and never to be bound again. Incidentally, he wrote in his Miscellany in 1896, when Marie would have been two, that “... women must cease to cramp their feet: crippled women cannot produce healthy and hardy children.”\n\nIn 1905, writing about Eurasians, when his son would be 20 and his daughter about 10, he wrote 'the only prospects of a future easy life for the Eurasians in Shanghai are to be trained for service in foreign houses; the boys as clerks and such like, the girls as mistresses at least, though of late a good many of them have been induced to demand marriage and have succeeded in obtaining it.' There was little future in China for people of mixed blood, especially in the twenties and thirties of this century, and none outside it. Mesny's daughter's extreme sensitivity about her mixed blood simply reflects the era in which she lived.\n\nMesny's Knowledge of Things Chinese\n\nThere is no doubt that Mesny's knowledge of Chinese life, customs, history, geography, etc. was extremely wide, bolstered, understandably, by works written by other foreigners, such as the Chinese Reader's Manual by W F Mayers, which is quoted from extensively. He went to some pains to explain that he saw as one of his responsibilities the importance of him educating both Chinese and foreigners in each other's cultures.\n\nMesny was not backward in expressing his views and opinions on all matters to do with China, be they economic, political, religious, social, or personal, occasionally echoing those of the few like-minded foreigners who professed that westerners, and in the case of Mesny, the British in particular, were well-intentioned in what they were doing in China but mistaken in their political and religious views, policies, and convictions.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212747, "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": 56, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "41\n\nHis leaders in his Miscellanies and his letters to the local papers are little different from present day British local paper indignation. A typical Mesny throw-away remark was the comment that ‘As China licks the hand that slaps her most, even a mailed one, so she has decided to give Prince Henry of Prussia’ a befitting reception at Nanking, of all places.\n\nHe frequently made the point that his knowledge of Chinese customs outweighed that of virtually all other foreigners, and that he, understanding Chinese ways, was in the position to inform foreigners how they should react to Chinese behaviour with due decorum. He explained manners and Chinese courtesy at great lengths, including the various bows and genuflections to be afforded to whom and when. It must have irritated many a foreigner to be reminded so often that he, Mesny, ‘knows better’ what is ‘the done thing.’\n\nOne of the hundreds of short essays in the Miscellany in which he informs his readership of such Chinese mores and customs is simply entitled ‘Etiquette’. He begins by explaining that the Chinese people beat the world for official etiquette, social politeness, ceremonies, manners and customs. He added that ‘I have never yet found or met a foreigner who has been so careful as myself to observe all the Chinese manners and customs of society, whether official or private and without sacrificing any important privilege of my British birthright. Without performing the degrading ceremony of kotowing to anybody, I have nevertheless observed all the other rites and ceremonies. Some foreigners, like Sir Halliday Macartney, have performed the kotow to their superiors, Li Hung-chang, for instance, but I have rigidly declined to do so, although many Chinese officials of the highest rank have kotowed to me; on such occasions I have bent my knees and picked them up.’\n\nMesny continued in this vein for several more paragraphs instructing his readers on polite behaviour. He then described the matter of ‘equipage’ which he suggested was ‘a serious one, especially at Peking.’ ‘I was advised by a friend,’ he continued, ‘not to travel in a cart or carriage drawn by a horse or pony. A mule is the proper animal. A cart with four openings on each side, three at the back, and one at the front is called a Shih Erh Kai, or twelve openings, and is only used by dudes, saunterers or other persons noted for their irregularities in the matter of genteel propriety. I was quite surprised to find the veteran Doctor Dudgeon riding in a cart drawn by a pony. I called his attention to this", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212748, "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": 57, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "42\n\nbreach of good manners, but the veteran told me that the pony was a very nice one, presented to him by the late Marquis Tseng, and then added the doctor, you see I have the regular Peking wheels, not those flash Shansi wheels, and my man does not wear an official hat. This last item is another fault rather than a virtue, which shows that thirty-two years' constant residence has not sufficed to enable the good doctor to learn all the niceties of Chinese etiquette.'\n\nAmongst the scores of interesting items about his various achievements minor themes emerge such as his ability to play Chinese chess. This he used to while away the long hours during the lengthy trip up the Yangtze in early 1868 when he played with Fan Ho-ting. On a somewhat contradictory note he later claimed that General T’ang Chiung had taught him how to play wei-ch'i [Chinese chess] in his camp at Chung-an Chiang in Kueichou in 1868/9. Though Mesny said that he could beat several good players in camp he never seen anyone beat T'ang who was famous for his ability at the game.\n\nThere were however occasional instances of inexplicable ignorance, more often than not surprising in view of the depth and width of his knowledge but never the less excusable as they were nearly always on specialised subjects, such as the story he related about the turtle and snake. Mesny, both in a letter to a Shanghai newspaper in March 1883 and in his Chinese Miscellany some twenty years later, referred to seeing a snake and turtle together crossing the Chung-an river below Kueichou. During his lengthy description of his first Kueichou campaign he states that he was at an elevated position on the bank of the river at the foot of the bluff where the Commander-in-Chief had his headquarters, when he saw a turtle swimming with its head out of the water about thirty yards off. His shot, he saw in the clear water, had beheaded the turtle which sank fast and half cut through the neck of the snake which floated to the surface dead. He then went on to describe how the snake had been connected,\" mating to conceive the most venomous of reptiles called the pang pang-she or cudgel snake or the ch'ing-chu piao, a small dark-coloured springing or darting or leaping toad-like reptile. People told him that when a turtle and snake were so coupled they were referred to as kuei-she er chiang-chun, that is 'a turtle and snake both military commanders', which meant that they were to be feared or dreaded. That particular shot of Mesny's was reported far and wide in quick time. This, mused Mesny in another section of his Miscellany, proved to Mesny what the Chinese have often asserted, that is, the snake and turtle love one another\n\ni", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212749, "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": 58, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "43\n\nespecially in water, He wrote that the Chinese generally assert that snakes and tortoises cohabit; he continued with a story with details at variance with his original version, “and I have seen paintings of turtles and tortoises,1 and metal castings also, with a snake wound about, the emblem of strength and longevity; and on inquiry, I have always been told the same story that it was the only way of multiplying both species. In the Miscellany he also wrote that he had seen a bronze image of a turtle and snake connected together in one of the taoist temples at Chi-nan Fu in Shantung.\n\nVery occasionally his stories verged on the salubrious but were never risqué. Describing his voyage up the Yangtze and passing Wu Shan he described an incident from Chinese mythology which led to a Chinese euphemism. The legend was about the 'pious and eccentric lady Yao-chi who lived before the Christian era immortalised by the ancient poet Sung Yü in an ode. She had entertained a princely guest in the Yang Tai Tower of Voluptuousness, and gratified him with the delights of Yün-yü, 'the Clouds and Rain,' hence the saying Yün-meng T'ai, 'Cloudy Dream of the Voluptuous Tower' which had become a synonym for excessive love and passionate desire for sexual intercourse. The name Yao-chi has in the same manner become the common appellation of renowned courtesans.\n\nSumming Up\n\nMesny's life in China falls neatly in two parts, the first thirteen years of excitement and adventure, followed by forty-five years living to a great extent on his 'bubble reputations', a spent force, living from day to day always in the hope of something turning up. It rarely does and on his own admission he fluctuated from comparative wealth to living hand to mouth.\n\nThere is however little doubt that at one period in his life at least, Mesny was trusted by his immediate Chinese superiors, as far that is as any Chinese official would have faith and confidence in a non-Chinese. These were the Chinese generals in the Imperial Army of Szechuan under whom Mesny served in Kueichou. Mesny seems to have spent the rest of his life trying, not all that successfully, to ensure that his ambitions were beneficial and to the best advantage of all, including himself. He made a great point about his ideas for the modernisation of China, each of them in turn rejected but then later put into practice without", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212750, "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": 59, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "44\n\nacknowledging the initial concept having been his, or so he claimed.\n\n+\n\nHe has been described as 'an adventurer and an explorer, a plant collector and a Chinese general. He was certainly an adventurer though nowadays he would be referred to as a soldier of fortune, an adviser, an opportunist, and even a mercenary.\n\nThe question remains, how successful was he? Money certainly came his way at times though judging from his Will, he was not a particularly successful businessman. He certainly collected plants and sent them back to the British Consul in Canton and has one specimen, Jasminum Mesnyii, named after him. He bore the brevet rank of Lieutenant General in the Chinese Imperial army but to what extent this was a genuine rank rather than an honour and a courtesy rank, though fully earned during his military service, is hard to judge. Again, though accurately described as an explorer, he was in fact much more of a traveller in parts of China already settled by Chinese and visited earlier by other foreigners. The trek he made, as recorded by Captain Gill, from Ch’eng-tu in Szechuan province to Burma through what was then called lower Tibet has a different slant to what would have been Mesny's account. In Gill's Mesny is scarcely mentioned and he would appear to have been taken along by Gill as his interpreter. It would have been interesting to have read what Mesny would have, and indeed may have written about his journey of very nearly four months with Gill.\n\nHe saw himself as what nowadays would be called a go-between, a consultant, and in those days regarded, perhaps, as a fixer. Mesny had a few major bees in his bonnet the most barefaced of which was the value he put on the advice he constantly proffered to every senior Chinese official whose ear he could reach on how to modernise China. He had, for example, prepared a list of some nineteen items, suggestions presented to the Viceroy Chang Chih-tung, and although Mesny assures us that Chang accepted the list there is no evidence that he did anything about it or if he did, that he even mentioned Mesny in any memorials to the throne. Mesny wrote indignantly at one point in his Miscellany about his list of suggestions to Chang having been ignored, or put into practice piecemeal and inexpertly, penny pinching and ineffectually without any reference whatsoever to Mesny.\n\nIn 1906 at the very end of his fourth and final volume of his Miscellany he prided himself on his advice with the words 'All those great industrial", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212751, "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": 60, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "45 \n\nworks recommended by Pioneer [i.e. Mesny] through Governor Chang Chih-tung of Shansi, are now, or soon will be, in full operation in various parts of China, though with no other advantage to the conceiver of those useful nineteen undertakings than that of having done just so much good, gratis, for the benefit of China and her millions of industrious people, to whom we wish long continued peace, happiness and prosperity.\" However, whenever China attempted anything which would lead to modernisation, Mesny leapt into print to congratulate whoever was putting the modernisation in train stressing that it was in line with his suggestions of so many years ago. \n\nIn his early days he displayed extraordinary qualities - audacity, determination, adventurousness and a depth of interest in everything he came across; later, however, when in his declining years he had reverted into a petty entrepreneur, he displayed his achievements on his sleeve and at times waved them above his head just in case they might be overlooked. His rank as a brevet Lieutenant General1 in the Chinese Imperial army with the award of the Pa-r'u-lu and the peacock's feather is stressed right to the end of his life. He is an FRGS and a FR Hist S; and in the very last years of his life he even records in his curriculum vitae as one of his qualifications his membership of the Royal Asiatic Society, North China Branch, into which he was elected as late as 1914 when he was 72. This despite having written for the Journal back in 1891 and his son having been elected in 1911. An outstanding question regrettably remains unanswered. Well we might ask why Mesny was promoted brevet Lieutenant General in 1886, so many years after he had completed his active military service in 1874? Balleine may have the answer. He wrote that Mesny volunteered for active service in 1883: whereupon he was sent to Yunnan, and in 1884 to Foochou. In 1885 he was in charge of two arsenals in Canton and the following year was promoted i.e. whilst still working at the arsenals. \n\nMesny explained that officers as junior as Lieutenant Colonel, when in command of troops, were referred to by the honorific title of General. Mesny began his service in 1868 as a company commander rising to brevet Colonel in 1869 and technically in command of troops, though as he himself does not make this point, we can assume that he was never referred to as 'general'. In 1873 he was promoted to Major-General during the latter days of the second Kueichou campaign when, though he again does not say so, he would have been referred to as 'general'. \n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212752, "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": 61, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "46\n\nHis essays on his soldiering days consist of strings of facts and incidents, strong on action but showing little attempt at analysis or motives. He often managed to mingle action scenes with romanticised ones. According to his writings he, at 26, displayed strategic and tactical wisdom which his seniors, experienced Chinese generals greeted with acclaim, or so Mesny would have us believe.\n\nHe lived in exciting times and enjoyed experiences worthy of being recorded for posterity. A case in point is his description of the incidents when twice in a twelve month period he had to call on British gun boats to deliver him from the hands of Chinese captors. The first was the deliverance from the 'Imps' [the Chinese Imperial forces] at the forts below Nanking and the second from the Taiping rebels at Nanking itself. His description of his experiences living with the Taiping rebels, of life in a treaty port and his explanations of, for example, the process of the literary and military degree examinations in China and the organisation of the Tsung-li Yamen [The Chinese Bureau of Foreign Affairs] are fascinating even if some of the material has been copied from other works, and some of the autobiographical episodes seem at times to be exaggerated or 'edited'. An article in The Pilot [July 1946] claimed that Mesny had served under General Gordon during the Taiping rebellion as a lieutenant and, when Gordon returned to England in 1865, Mesny remained on in the Chinese army. This would seem to have been misunderstood folk memory as it is certain that, if such had been the case, Mesny would have described it during his autobiographical essays in the Miscellanies. His love life with Chinese ladies also at times reads like a Mills and Boon novel, but however much we may smile at his amorous memoirs, the military side of his autobiographical essays ring true throughout.\n\nMesny wrote about himself as if he needed the constant repetition to reassure him of his place in society and perhaps history, and was frustrated by the lack of influence he considered his due. In March 1905 Mesny wrote that scarcely a day passed but that he was asked to adjudge of important matters between Chinese and Chinese. He added that he did not always comply though his Chinese rank was sufficient as an excuse to act as a judge. He certainly saw himself as a bridge between Chinese and foreigners, and appeared to have many nodding acquaintances in both societies.\n\nA number of foreign authors describing China as they saw it around the turn of the last century each in turn complimented other writers", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212753, "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": 62, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "47\n\n18\n\non the depth and interest of their writings. Some, like Archibald Colquhoun1 went into great detail describing the wealth of minerals, the scope for modernisation in communications and the economy, all subjects which Mesny too, at the same period if not earlier, had written about at length. Others like Mrs Scidmore2 list 'intrepid travellers to Szechuan3 and the far west,' with names like Richtofen, Pumpelly, Von Kreitner, Hosie, Baber, Blaikiston, Little, Gill, Hart, Parker, and Pratt, Mrs Little and Mrs Bishop, and Dr Morrison, but not one of these authors referred to Mesny whose travels and experiences outweigh most if not all of them. Was it because he was considered to have gone native or been more Chinese than ‘one of us\"? We shall never know but each time yet another book was published it must have been galling for Mesny to find only very rarely he had earned a mention. After his trip with Gill to Tibet and India in 1877 he was scarcely referred to in books on China; this together with his constant and repeated reference to his contacts with and closeness to Chinese friends and acquaintances, mostly in high places, suggests that he was ostracised or perhaps no more than ignored by the western social community in Chinese ports and in Shanghai in particular.\n\nDuring his later years when fortune seemed to elude him, when there was no caste lower than the impoverished European or American, a number of themes and points of view in Mesny's writings place him fairly firmly into a class and category of his time. A plague of self-importance swept late-Victorian Britain and spread through its colonies and dependencies. Mesny suffered a massive dose and never, as far as his Miscellany record, appears to have had his balloon pricked. He must have been seen by foreigners in Shanghai and, in particular by his fellow 'Old China Hands', during the latter years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this as a vulgar, low-born upstart, too fond of his own ideas, a self-centred braggart and an opinionated man, but let it be stressed that he would not be alone in this category in Shanghai or for that matter in all the other major western communities in the Orient. His own notes reflect the disdain with which he was regarded by people like Sir Thomas Wade and Sir Robert Hart. His name dropping in many of his writings, mostly in his personal relationships with Chinese viceroys, provincial governors and commanders in chief, suggests that he probably also dropped names to the same extent in everyday conversation. However, he knew the importance of patronage, especially in China, as one can see from his obituary of Tso, and his description of the momentary meeting with a Manchu hereditary prince.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212754, "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": 63, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "48\n\nIn the end he must have been disappointed at his inability to make and keep a fortune and to have public recognition. He must have felt rejected by the world to which he would have liked to have belonged, an outcast having married a Chinese during an era when it was considered beneath one's dignity to do so, and then having to live with the 'stigma' for the rest of his life of having 'gone native'.\n\nAs with most westerners in China, ending up frustrated at being unable to bridge the gap between themselves and the Chinese, Mesny appears to have resigned himself in his later years to being a westerner who, though still claiming to understand and being able to communicate with them, was one of 'us' and not of 'them', despite the opinion of other Shanghai westerners to the contrary.\n\nLet it not be forgotten that he had fought his way up from poverty and a lack of education to being the writer, editor, and publisher of a magazine which appears to have held its own for several years in a community which would have been comparatively discriminating. Despite being self-educated, he appears to have entertained high hopes of achieving popular esteem through his 'academic' and other achievements. He attempted to write for the edification of others and produced his Miscellany which, though only marginally out of the ordinary, does have some value for its detail of the late Taiping era; the organisation of the Chinese Imperial Army of the day, in particular the provincial forces under Chinese rather than Manchu generals; his contacts with Chinese officialdom and his knowledge of obscure facts about China. Many of the latter, however, were culled from other western sources, and he appears not to have translated much, if anything, from Chinese material.\n\nMesny must have been a difficult man to live with. He was self-made, with a great pride in his achievements offset by his egotism, self-absorption, and his apparent need to denigrate others. He was dependent on his wits, and perhaps his charm, to improvise an alternative existence.\n\nHis obituary appeared in two separate Shanghai English language papers some ten days after his death. Both cover three columns, most of which are taken up with an autobiographical account of his life written shortly before his death. They provide additional biographical detail but fail to answer the many questions which naturally spring to mind.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212755, "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": 64, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "49\n\nDespite the feeling we have acquired simply from his own writings that he had many acquaintances and few friends, that he was neither a European nor a Chinese and was held at arms length by both, that he was God's gift to the girls, that he offered guidance and good advice with great foresight to the Chinese, and was either ignored or his ideas purloined by others, the obituaries, possibly following a policy of avoiding speaking ill of the dead, described him as ‘a great traveller, a great scholar, a soldier, an author and publisher. A cheery man who most people knew, who at 77 walked briskly to and from his office, beloved by many, although not rich in the world's goods he was always ready to help others, and was of a very cheerful disposition. He endured many shrewd blows of fortune but always came up smiling.'\n\nHe must have been regarded both in Shanghai and in Hankow as an eccentric and colourful old man. Everyone would know of him but to what extent he was accepted socially we shall probably never know unless, that is, someone's private correspondence in which he is mentioned comes to light.\n\nNOTES\n\nMason was a young British official in the Chinese Customs on the Yangtze who organised the shipment of arms to and became involved with Nien rebels. Mesny, who knew nothing of Mason's schemes and plot, found himself officially ostracised after being accused by Li Hung-chang of being a rebel leader.\n\nIt is strange that there appears to be no reference to the typhoon in the available Shanghai papers of the day. Also, in view of his complaints about people's refusal to face up to disaster by taking out insurance, why did he not have the Rink insured? Probably, considering his circumstances, he was unable to afford the premium.\n\nThe Tsar-li Hui has been variously described as a minor religious cult, in Shantung province in particular, or as survivors of the White Lotus Society, an anti-dynastic body since its foundation in the fourteenth century through to its final defeat in Shansi in 1815. A number of members then joined the Nien revolt, and here we have a link perhaps between Li Hung-chang's accusation that Mesny was a leader of a Nien rebels during the Mason case.\n\n$\n\nMesny's Chinese Miscellany: Volume 2 item 1431 page 362\n\nBat'uru: 'A kind of Manchu Distinguished Service Order [DSO]' Johnston RF Lion and Dragon in Northern China. Murray: London 1910\n\nWilliam Mesny always referred to himself as 'Knight Ying of the Pa-t'u-lu' BA\n\nThis decoration was intended to correspond to European Orders [sic].\n\nGarrett, Valery M Mandarin Squares. Oxford University Press. Hong Kong. 1990", "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 }, { "id": 212757, "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": 66, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "51\n\non the Chinese military, its organisation, terminology and weapons almost certainly from his own experience. The second section is a two-page on-going essay on the need for China to modernise, for the construction of railways, the establishment of a foreign-style economy, etc. and finally, an on-going school boyish adventure describing his life on the Yangtze, commanding Chinese troops or as a prisoner of the Taipings. The whole was sub-titled A Text Book of Notes on China and the Chinese.\n\nMesny appears to have written and published this weekly magazine single-handed both from his memory, and notes written years beforehand stored against the day, together with material culled from other people's works. It ran for twenty-six weekly issues at a time, which were later bound into a total of four volumes. The individual issues were sold by subscription.\n\nVolume I: This ran from 26 September 1895 to 19 March 1896. His address, at this stage, was given as Club Chambers, 2 The Bund, Shanghai, with the printing of his Miscellanies at the China Gazette with offices at the same address.\n\nVolume II continued on from 26 March 1896 and ceased on 17 September 1896 when financial problems brought publication to an end.\n\nAfter a gap of some two and a half years Issue I of Volume III was published on Saturday 25 March 1899 with a firm promise of one year of publication. It ended, however, on Saturday 7 October of the same year with issue 26, and a regret that the Editor cannot commence Volume IV yet. The quality of the paper of Volume III was very poor indeed and has faded to a dull brown. The office had moved to Szechuan Road in Shanghai. Volume III was more literate than the previous two, suggesting perhaps that Mesny had employed a sub-editor. The format too had changed with Volume III. It was more professional and included some Peking court news, two pages of Commercial Notes and extracts from Reuter's telegrams. In a notice in issue 3 of Volume III Mesny explains that the Miscellany is 'a novel journalistic enterprise... which fills a gap. Its peculiar and unique features appeal to the intelligence of all discerning foreign residents in China as well as the intelligent readers of all nationalities in all parts of the World.' In August of 1899, some eight weeks before apologising to subscribers that he could not commence Volume IV yet, he doubled his subscription price. He was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212758, "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": 67, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "52\n\nbecoming increasingly financially desperate.\n\nHis fourth volume on better paper, weekly fascicules published on Sunday instead of Saturday as in previous volumes, begins with a photo of himself in Chinese robes with his mandarin's cap beside him in the manner of Chinese officials in the standard photographs of themselves. He apologised for the delay between Volumes III and IV, from 1899 to 1905, some five years, because he had been overwhelmed with misfortune and had lost all his savings at a stroke.' In the final fascicule in June 1905 he advised readers that he was unable to afford to continue the Miscellany but would be publishing Mesny's Commercial Guide from that date. In June 1905 after the completion of Volume IV he expresses gratitude to his subscribers but was, he regretted, unable to undertake the publication of a fifth volume as yet due to insufficient support.\n\nDuring almost the entire six months of the production of the weekly parts of Volume IV Telegrams of the Week reflected the mounting excitement of the Russo-Japanese War and contained hundreds of items detailing the departure, the 'secret' journey and arrival of the Russian Baltic fleet in the Far East ending with its catastrophic defeat by the Japanese navy in the Tsushima Straits at the end of May in 1905. The unfolding picture of the Russian navy's progress, route and activities from their almost inexplicable attack on British fishing vessels in the North Sea [believing them to be Japanese torpedo boats] to the devastating destruction off Japan makes compulsive reading, and though of secondary interest as far as Mesny was concerned, the series continued to highlight the fear entertained by the Chinese of Russia swallowing up further large parts of northern Chinese territory.\n\nTwo questions stand out: did he ever get round to a fifth volume? and what happened to all the unused notes he must have had stored away?\n\nFrom an advert in the second to last issue of the Miscellany Volume IV, it is possible that Mesny, giving up the idea of the Miscellany, perhaps only temporarily, requires a 'Job Printing Plant' suitable for printing a small daily newspaper and a small illustrated magazine (nfd). It may be a coincidence but most likely there is a connexion. An advert in the very next Miscellany, the final issue, offers Mesny's Commercial Guide to be published immediately after the completion of Volume IV of the Miscellany.\n\nFrom Mesny's own hand we learn that he frequently advised senior", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212759, "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": 68, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "53\n\nChinese government officials to modernise and import technology with Mesny's assistance. These overtures seemed always to run into trouble over the officials' inability to appreciate the future Mesny was holding out to them, though on more than one occasion such plans were later put in hand and came to fruition after many years, with the assistance of others, leaving Mesny to comment that it had been his idea in the first place and had they only had the vision it would all have been achieved ten or twenty years earlier.\n\nHis leading articles frequently offered future economic and social concepts, ideas and plans he proclaimed as original, which quite often were no more than logical progressions of current trends. Frustration showed at every turn, mainly due in his view to lost entrepreneurial opportunities. His regular theme was the inability of the Chinese to get their act together to build major railway trunk routes necessary to modernise their country. He claimed that the British had been slow in developing the Canton/Hong Kong Railway and that even the Portuguese were going ahead in the matter of railway building, constructing as they intended a line from Macau to Canton. He also vehemently blamed the British for not pushing ahead with a line from Burma via Chiang-hung to Ssu-mao Ting in Yunnan. At one point he stated that Sir Thomas Wade, the British Minister in Peking had told Mesny that he had been asked by an English gentleman to offer Mesny £2,000,000 at any interest above 5% for the construction of anything which Mesny might deem advantageous to China and her people. [He does not explain why it never came to anything].\n\nIn an editorial in May 1899 Mesny explained that he felt that he had *a sort of an inspired mission in China to set forth, preach and proclaim the inspiring and magic words of Reform and Progress to the inquiring multitude amongst China's 400 millions of black-haired people.' The notes and anecdotes in the Miscellanies however, clearly betray the personality and empiricism of the writer, though his colourful use of words and phrases, apart from a rather tedious repetitive use of 'money makes the mare move,' provide a picturesque and interesting read. There is a marked lack of careful proof reading, careless use of capitals and punctuation, and not infrequently intuitive spellings. One of his nicer words was the description of something standing 'slanting-dicularly.'\n\nMesny printed an intriguing and unusual Notice at the beginning of an edition of his Miscellany [Volume III, no. 18: 22 July 1899], a", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212760, "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": 69, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "54\n\ncontinuation of Chapter VII of his long-running serial on The Life and Adventures of a British Pioneer in China describing his journey from Hankow to Kueichou in 1868. The Notice explained that 'the original notes taken by me [Mesny] on the journey were sent by special request to Mr. William Tarrant, Editor and Proprietor of The Friend of China, a newspaper published at Shanghai in those days. Before having published my notes, however, Tarrant died and his printing establishment was taken over by Messrs. Little Brothers, I believe, and my notes thus fell into their hands, and no doubt sharpened the appetite of Mr and Mrs Archibald Little for travelling in Szechuan. At any rate I never saw or heard anything more of those notes although I occasionally saw in the columns of the North China Daily News, notes of a Journey to Szechuan which were so very much like mine that I wrote to Mr F. H. Balfour about them, believing they formed part of the notes I had sent to Tarrant. In the winter of 1880-1881 I happened to be again at Chungking and there told the late Consul-General E. Colbourne Baber about the lost notes. Baber thereupon persuaded me to rewrite them from memory without further delay and I did so, hence the present chapters with their many imperfections.' The accusation that the Littles had been involved in 'pirating' his travels would have been serious and may have prompted a response. However, none appears to have been made. The explanation that he had had to rewrite the travels from memory explains why there were so many gaps and duplications. It was however strange that he delayed so long the publication of such a serious allegation against the Littles.\n\nIt is clearer in Volume IV, even more than in previous ones, that Mesny likes to portray himself as more Chinese than Western. He has long commented on individual friendships with numerous Chinese whilst rarely mentioning Europeans and Americans. When he does, they are usually sinologists of one form or another, mainly missionaries like Moule, Griffith, etc. The first article, if it may be called such, was a two-page biography of Tso Tsung-t’ang, a former Governor General or Viceroy of the Min-Che provinces. When Tso was posted to the Shen-Kan provinces in 1865 Mesny called on him in Hankow to pay his respects, and after the Viceroy had learnt that Mesny had been a prisoner of the Taipings, he immediately appointed Mesny as his French and English secretary. In the early 1880s, he invited Mesny to visit him in Foochow where he was again the Viceroy of the Min-che provinces, with a view to Mesny undertaking some progressive works including telegraphs, railways, and mining. The Viceroy died before Mesny was able to call", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212761, "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": 70, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "55\n\non him. Mesny had taken every opportunity to praise Tso and, in good Chinese fashion, looked upon him as his 'protector' or 'patron'.\n\nIn a comparatively brief single-page highlights-only curriculum vitae printed in the Miscellany in 1905, Mesny would appear to have been careful in his choice of words. He used the phrase 'Volunteered for service' not only when he went to Kueichou in 1868, about which he later wrote at length, but also in connexion with 'Manchuria' and 'Peking', the former during the Sino-Japanese War and the latter at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, neither of which has been mentioned elsewhere in the Miscellany. This suggests that he was not taken up on his offers of service, especially as his name does not appear in any of the standard writings on the Boxer era in north China and he does not describe or offer any anecdotes on the subject in his Miscellany.\n\nHis Miscellanies contain a large number of items culled from other works such as Mayer's Chinese Reader's Manual written in Peking in 1874 where Mayers was a Chinese Secretary to HM Legation, and published in Shanghai the same year by the American Presbyterian Mission Press. At one point Mesny claimed that W F Mayers was a friend of his; but reading between the lines one is tempted to see Mesny meeting Mayers over dinner at the Legation in Peking where polite conversation would lead to a discussion on the failure of the Chinese to help build a railway, with Mesny offering advice and suggestions and Mayers, again politely, concurring. This would appear to have been seen by Mesny as Mayers accepting Mesny's ideas and entrusting him with various tasks. Mayers in all probability forgot all about the conversation, but not so Mesny who repeated himself several times in his Miscellanies, explaining how he had offered advice and had been waiting for a follow up from Mayers which never arrived. It is a matter for speculation how often this type of conversation took place, with other parties forgetting, either with or without intent, their talks with Mesny.\n\nMesny periodically advanced oracular statements which in later years would be referred to as 'China-watching'. In 1899 he made several predictions about the 'inadequacies' of the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty and forecast that the end was 'very' nigh with a new reformed China ahead. He also predicted that the Russians for all their implied power would be unable to retain Manchuria against the Japanese who also, Mesny thought, might join up with China making a powerful empire under the Mikado as ruler of the Greater China and Japan. These predictions", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212762, "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": 71, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "56\n\ntogether with his regular recommendations to the Chinese government, such as the one for the Chinese capital under a new regime to be moved from Peking but not to Nanking which would, he suggested, be the natural Chinese choice, but to Si-an, nearer central China and better able to be defended from invaders, were interspersed amongst other more mundane factual paragraphs.\n\nVery occasionally his stories verged on the salubrious, but were never risqué. He described Patriarch Lu Tsu, one of the Eight Immortals, as the author of an extraordinary work on the art of massage. By a certain process of massage, if systematically continued for some time, it was possible, so wrote Mesny, to deprive young men and women of their desire for sexual intercourse. They were practically rendered impotent and maintained so, without injury to their health or intellect. This was practised in Szechuan and Hupei provinces, especially in the large monasteries and nunneries of the Taoist and Buddhist priesthood, wherein celibacy was strictly enforced and easily maintained.\n\nMesny was not above writing very puerile articles. One such in 1896 was a parody on the subject of the Shanghai Mixed Court in the British Concession, referred to by him as the 'tribunal of injustice', which is now practically impossible to understand without knowledge of the personalities of the day, whom Mesny disguised behind pseudonyms. It filled some five columns on four pages and may have amused some readers and rid Mesny of some of his spleen, but a century later it reads so poorly that it is embarrassing. Something at the Mixed Court had so upset Mesny that he must have rushed into print, writing in the vein of many similar letters to the press in England at that time signed by 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' etc.\n\nThe contents of the Miscellany included serialised weekly parts running for a couple of months or so on substantial subjects such as:\n\n[1] The Taiping Rebellion or the Life and Adventures of a British Pioneer in China. This provided many pages of detailed and often petty experiences, such as his voyage up the Yangtze in 1868, where he repeats minor incidents often ad nauseam. Better descriptions of, for example, voyages up the Yangtze have been written by other westerners, such as Little, with excellent photographs, something Mesny appears not to have", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212763, "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": 72, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "57\n\ntaken advantage of, possibly due to the cost of reproduction in his Miscellany though more likely because he did not possess a camera during his travels.\n\n[2] Campaigning in Western China. Regrettably, despite a note in the Miscellany to the effect that he would be writing more, possibly the most interesting part, the second Kueichou campaign, he only completed the first campaign.\n\n[3] Mesny's Itinerary - from Canton to Kashgaria which was later renamed Mesny's Journeys through China (from Canton to Turkestan). This was never completed. Mesny wrote in the Miscellany that he had written an account of his journey from Canton through Kuangsi in 1879 for the London Daily News. \"This very influential and highly respectable journal did not consider my poor contribution sufficiently interesting to insert it in its widely read columns, so the useful information then written by me practically remained unpublished owing to my lack of funds until 1896 when I wrote up some of it in Mesny's Chinese Miscellany.\"\n\n[4] Varieties of Food in China [in which Mesny covers plain and exotic food and menus, eating etiquette, banquets and the production of foodstuffs such as tou-fu]\n\n[5] Progress in China [editorial essays explaining how China kept missing opportunities, and how it would have been different and better if his advice had been taken]\n\n[6] How I made my Fortune by an Old China Hand ['who is even now neither too old to row nor too heavy to ride']\n\n[7] Notes on Tibet; Mongolia; Kueichou and the Miao-tzu [and in several other places he again described Miao customs and tribal differences]; Yunnan and its Trade Routes; and Kuangsi and the West River", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212764, "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": 73, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "58\n\n[8] Notes on Official Rank and Degrees [in China]\n\n[9] Notes on Ranks and Duties of Customs Officials [A subject on which Mesny would be an authority in his own right]\n\n[10] Notes on Manners and Customs of the Chinese\n\n[11] Notes on the Cycles of Cathay for nearly 5,000 years\n\n[12] Notes on the Chinese Army and Navy\n\n[13] Law of the Ch'ing dynasty\n\nMany of the items on Chinese lore printed in 1905 were individually dated 1895 and had obviously been prepared at the time Mesny was producing Volumes 1 and 2.\n\nDuring the publication of the four volumes he described a large number of items such as the towns and cities of various provinces, one by one, with their longitude and latitude, ancient name, distance from Peking in 'li', their allotment of literary and military undergraduates every three years, and their produce. These must have been culled from a Chinese official source either direct or, perhaps, second hand, just as he must have culled a fair number of small items from other publications. He explains that he kept notes during his travels against the day when he would write it all up but regrettably he lost a number of his notes first in Tai-yuan in 1881 and again in Chungking in 1885. There is always the question of how reliable his memories of 30 - 40 years earlier were, and how much they were coloured by later events and changes in his own thinking.\n\nHe wrote several book crits under Editorial Notes in the final volume, books which obviously had attracted him personally such as the one in February 1905 on the book Les Chinois, Peints par Eux-memes by the Chinese General, Tcheng Ki-tong.' He explains that Tcheng was the Attache of the Chinese Legation in Paris and a first rate French scholar. However, Mesny doubted whether the General had the ability to write such a book unassisted by a Frenchman of considerable literary attainments. The book was in its tenth edition; it was,' wrote Mesny, 'well written, and gave a very good account of China or the Chinese as they were in Fukien, although many of the manners and customs", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212765, "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": 74, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "59\n\nprevail elsewhere, and some of the descriptions held good for the whole of China. But,' continued Mesny, 'China is a large Empire, and General Tcheng was too young when he left China for Europe to have seen much of his own country. He was no doubt much better acquainted with Parisian manners and customs than with many manners and customs which prevail in many parts of the Chinese Empire. Nevertheless, his book deserves to be read more than once, even by me, who have seen so much more of China and the Chinese than General Tcheng has so far. Had I the literary qualifications of the writer of Les Chinois, Peints par Eux-memes, I could write at least a dozen such books on China and the Chinese without exhausting the stock of information I have acquired during my forty-four years' residence in the country. I have been treated in some parts of China much the same as General Tcheng was treated in Paris,'\n\nThe Miscellany probably just about paid its way though from the occasional note of sadness though not despair which appears from time to time, Mesny must have continued more for the desire to make a living and perhaps also to keep his name before the public eye rather than to earn a fortune. It was by no means smooth going and at times he must have upset individuals and even groups such as the announcement he made in July 1899 that his Miscellany was being boycotted by the press, bankers, insurance and shipping agencies and by shopkeepers. He bemoaned the fact [Volume II, Issue 28: Sep 1896] that the loss on the first year's publication was over $2,000.\n\nSeveral times in the course of his Miscellanies Mesny repeats a disclosure of a titbit of news or political scandal to prove that he was first and that the North China Daily News and the Shanghai Mercury had simply copied his original scoop without attribution.\n\nA number of magazines were being published around this time on the China Coast such as The East of Asia Magazine, printed and published by the North China Herald Office in Shanghai, a quarterly illustrated consisting of essays on topical subjects such as Chinese customs and superstitions, gems of Chinese poetry, bits of Fukien travel, Ningpo under the T'ai-ping's, etc mostly written by reasonably well known people. It only ran for a couple of years. Another was Social Shanghai, a monthly glossy journal relating western social happenings mostly in Shanghai but in a few instances referring to the outports. It consisted of the usual society articles, including births, deaths and marriages, the races, and lengthy pieces about the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. This ran", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212766, "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": 75, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "60\n\nfor many years. Neither refer to Wm Mesny, though Sam Couling in 1917 in his Encyclopaedia Sinica does run to a short paragraph describing in very round terms, the then still living Mesny.\n\nNOTE\n\nTcheng Ki-tong. I have been unable to find the date of publication of his first edition of Les Chinois, Peints par Eux-meme; however, in the preface to the English seventh edition of Bits of China by Tcheng, published in English in London in 1890, Tcheng writes 'The friendly welcome accorded by the English Public to my Chinese Painted by Themselves has encouraged me to publish this translation of my last work, (from the French Les Plaisirs en Chine).' Mesny publishing this book crit as late as 1905 suggests an ulterior motive, perhaps no more than an instinctive urge to highlight yet again his tireless and tenacious claim to recognition as the foreign authority on things Chinese.\n\nAppendix B\n\nChronology\n\nas claimed by\n\nWilliam Mesny\n\n[Extracted from details within the Miscellanies]\n\n9 October 1842\n1847\n\nMesny born in Jersey\n\n?\n\n1850\n\n1850-1854\n\n1854\n\n1860 December\n\n1861 February\n\n1861\n\n1861-1862\n\n1862 February\nMarch\nApril 1862\nMay 1862\n\nDame School\n\nNational School St Anne's, Alderney\nLeft school\n\nWorked at brick making, stone cutting with a smithy and on Channel Island fortifications. He also worked in blasting and as an architect's assistant.\n\nLeft home, went to sea and sailed to Africa, Australia and the Americas\n\nArrived on the China coast and disembarked at Shanghai\nLeft Shanghai for Hong Kong\n\nRomantic interlude with Huang family in Hong Kong where he bore the name of Huang Chin-fu\n\n3rd Turnkey Hong Kong Gaol\n\nReturned to Shanghai aboard the SS Aden\n\nTravelled up the Yangtze and arrived at Hankow\nMaster of the Hat Liang-wang on the Yangtze based in Shanghai, running the Taiping blockade:\n\nWounded and captured by Imperial Chinese gunboats at Kuan Yin Shan on the Yangtze\n\nRescued by the gunboat HMS Banterer and secured the release of\n\nPage 75\n\nPage 76", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212767, "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": 76, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "61\n\nNovember 1862\n\n1863 March\n\n1863 May 1864 April\n\n1864\n\n1864-1865\n\n1867 Winter\n\n1867\n\nhis junk and three others\n\nCaptured at Fu-shan-chan by Taiping rebels. Mesny held first in Soochow and Chang-shu, then at Pao-ying the Taiping camp, and finally in Nanking\n\nRescued by Adkins, the British Consul at Chin-kiang aboard HMS Slaney and taken back to Chin-kiang\n\nJoined Chinese Imperial Customs Service, Hankow\n\nResigned from Customs Service after fourteen months Involved in cotton broking\n\nEstablished the Hankow Horse Bazaar, a private hotel in Hankow, and set up Hupei Iron and Brassworks, Han-yang Romantic interlude with a Chinese widow in Hankow Mesny called on Tso Tsung-tang during the latter's visit to Hankow and was appointed his French and English Secretary, and was further offered the opportunity to accompany Tso on his campaign to the Northwest. Mesny also claimed that he had made recommendations to Marquis Tso Tsung-tang for a number of undertakings to help modernise China\n\nSold the Huper Iron and Brassworks to officials of the Viceroy of Szechuan province\n\nMesny's trek to war\n\n1868 June\n\nLate July or early August Late August\n\nSeptember\n\nLeft Hankow, after five year's residence, for Szechuan to become a drill instructor with the Szechuan Force\n\nArrived Chungking\n\nDeparted Chungking for Kueichou to join the Szechuan Force suppressing the Miao rebellion: he accepted employment as a military instructor (wu-chiao hsi)\n\nArrived Niu-ch'ang, the headquarters of the Szechuan Force in Kueichou\n\nSeptember 1868-May 1874 Involved in the military campaigns to suppress the Miao\n\nThe Advance: Late Summer 1868-March 1869\n\n1869\n\nPromoted Colonel, awarded the Star of China and the Flowery Plume The Retreat: Summer 1869-Summer 1870 1870/1871\n\n1871\n\n1872\n\nHelped form a joint stock company in Kuei-yang to \"recover mercury\"\n\nThe Withdrawal: mid-August 1870-Lunar New Year 1871\n\nca 1873\n\n1873\n\n1874 Spring\n\nEstablished a small day school for poor boys and girls in the Jade Emperor temple in Kuei-yang, importing suitable books and paying a Chinese teacher, a struggling student painter, Chin Yü-t'ang Siege of Hsin-ch'eng in upper Kueichou (Mesny involved in preparations for the siege during 1871)\n\nWent to Szechuan with General Chou Ta-wu\n\nPromoted Major-General and awarded the Ying-yung Pa-t'u-lu Left Kueichou for Szechuan: Margary expected to meet Mesny in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212768, "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": 77, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "62 \n\n1874 April \n\nJuly October \n\n1874 \n\n1874 December Late 1874 \n\n1875 Summer? 1875 Winter \n\n1877 February \n\nKueichou, but Mesny had already departed \n\nTo Ch'engtu (six month stay] \n\nVisited the temple dedicated to Tu Fu the poet in Ch’engtu Returned by very large houseboat via Sui-fu, Chungking and I-ch'ang to Hankow. Mesny entertained at the palace of General Viscount Pao Chao in K'uei-chou en route on the Yangtze. In Hankow he met Rev. David Hill \n\nPublished 'Tungking' [date in the book itself: Mesny however, claimed later that it was published in 1875] \n\nOfficially married Nien Suey-tsen in Hankow \n\nTravelled overland from Chin-kiang, through Shantung [Chi-nan], en route for Peking. Spent winter in Chi-nan at invitation of Ting Pao-chen, the Governor of Shantung, to whom he claimed he had been an adviser \n\nPeking \n\nReturned to Kueichou via Shanghai [November]. Hankow and Human [1876] Re-appointed Superintendent of the Kueichou Armouries, an appointment he held until March 1877 \n\nMesny entertained two British Protestant missionaries in Kuei-yang \n\nOverland Trek to Western China, through Burma to India and by sea to England \n\n28 May \n\nJune 1878 8 January \n\nNovember \n\n26 December 28 December \n\n1879 February \n\n9 March 4 June \n\nDeparted Kuei-yang for Szechuan [his third visit to the province (en route for England, via Tibet, Burma and India, with Captain Gill)] Arrived Ch'engtu \n\nArrived in England from Calcutta \n\nVisited Channel Islands \n\nReceived telegram from Chinese Minister in London desiring Mesny to accompany the returning Chinese Minister at Berlin to China: departed! Marseilles for Hong Kong aboard the Irrawaddy Arrived Hong Kong from England \n\nDeparted Hong Kong for Canton \n\nVisited Amoy \n\nDeparted Canton for Kueichou, via Kuei-lin (Kuangsi] Arrived Kuei-lin \n\n25 July \n\nArrived Tu-yun Fu \n\n4 August [1880/1881] \n\n1880 February \n\n15 March \n\nAugust \n\n1881 January \n\nFebruary \n\nArrived Kuei-yang \n\nPossibly visited Hanoi? \n\nGovernor of Kueichou province recommended Mesny to the Throne for the bestowal of posthumous honours for three generations [San-tai Erh-p'in Kao-feng] \n\nSet out for Lan-chou via Chungking [where he had remained six months] \n\nMesny spent the night at Ch'ien-hsi Chou, some 90 kms NNW of Kuei-yang, where he was attacked by an armed mob Departed Chungking [after 'delay due to unexpected contretemps\" which Mesny did not clarify] \n\nArrived Lanchou \n\nDeparted Lanchou, crossed Gobi to Ham taking six to seven weeks", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212769, "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": 78, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "63\n\n1881\n\nApril\n\nJune\n\n1882 February March Spring\n\n1882 November 1882/1883\n\n1883 May\n\n1833 Autumn\n\n1883\n\nca 1883/1884\n\nEarly 1884\n\n1884 July\n\nArrived Hami\n\nPassed through Shensi and Kansu to Turkestan he tried to push on through Central Asia to India but was stopped; again, tried to push on to the Russian frontiers via Ili and Tarbagatai but was stopped, visited Hami [HQ Chinese Army]. Residence in Hami where he said he remained until the Treaty of Livadia [2-10-79] was signed and where he learned a number of Turkish words. [Mesny claimed that in 1882 returning from Kashgaria he stayed in Tso Tsung-t’ang's camp. [Tso was recalled from Hami to Peking in late 1880] Departed Hami and retraced his steps leisurely across the Gobi desert to Kansu, on to northern Tibet (visited old fashioned gold diggings) and back to Kan-chou to refit before continuing into Tibet a second time in another direction. He then, travelled through the Kokonor region ending up at Lanchou, February 1881, via Hsi-ning.\n\nDeparted from Northwest China for Peking, via Si-an, Ho-nan Fu, Tai-yuan Fu and Pao-ting Fu.\n\nWhilst in Si-an Mesny visited the Nestorian Cross, later, on his first evening in Taiyuan he lost 640 pages of notes, the journal of his Journey to Hami from Canton\n\nArrived Peking\n\nVisited Tientsin to await the first steamers of the season carrying mails Returned to Tai-yuan in Shansi and Pao-ting Fu, and again visited Si-an.\n\nVisited the famous Shao-lin monastery in the Sung-shan [Mountains] near Ho-nan Fu and invited to settle down for a couple of years with the monks.\n\nDeparted Shansi for Canton; however,\n\nVisited Yunnan province at the invitation of T'ang Chung to assist in the development of natural resources of the province The French authorities in Tongkin insisted that Mesny leave the province Passed through Ch'engtu and Yunnan Fu heading for Canton via Po-se, Nanning Kuangsi [Kuei-hsien, where he spent three to four months whilst the Franco-Chinese war raged in Tongkin), Kueichou and the West River. He travelled much of the way by large house boat. He took careful notes which he offered to the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce but failed to receive any encouragement\n\nArrived Canton, then visited Hong Kong, Macau, Swatow, Amoy and Foochou [Viceroy Chang Chih-tung retained Mesny at Canton for one year and ten months (nfd) He lived in an hotel unable to get an appointment from Chang he eventually withdrew. Mesny met Kung Chao-yuan, the Commissary General at Shanghai for Formosa, at the Kiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai\n\nVisited tomb of Su Hsiao-hsiao near Hangchou. (a celebrated courtesan of the 11th century AD)\n\nDeparted Canton via Hong Kong for Foochou and Shanghai [elsewhere he noted that he had been recommended for the post of Foreign Superintendent of the Arsenal at Foochou during his visit there in 1883)\n\nIn Wu-chang and Han-yang", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212770, "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": 79, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "64\n\nSeptember 1885 March\n\nJune\n\nca 1885\n\n1886 January\n\nca 1886\n\nca 1886\n\n1887\n\n1889/1890\n\n1889 23 January\n\n1890\n\nLived in the Chang-fa Chen, an hotel in Shanghai\n\nHis first child, Pin Mesny, also known as Hu-sheng, born in Shanghai Departed Shanghai aboard the Yangtze for Canton and appointed for service in both Arsenals [claimed that during the years 1884/1887 whilst living in Canton, he suffered from boils, eczema and prickly heat]\n\nMany of Mesny's notes lost in Chungking during the destruction of the CIM missionary premises. Mesny had left them for safe keeping with the Rev G Nicoll\n\nOffice Bearer of the Keystone Royal Arch Chapter of Masons in Shanghai\n\nPromoted to the brevet rank of Lieutenant-General [ennobled for three generations: previously claimed to have been bestowed in 1879] In charge of the China Branch of the New York Life Office, in Shanghai\n\nRepresentative of the Lartigue Railway Construction Company in Shanghai\n\nIntention to publish a monthly magazine in Shanghai to be called Yüleh Pao together with Chiang Chao-ling (friend and sworn brother). to be the organ of the Reform Party\n\nMade two journeys through Anhui and northern Kiangsu in connection with famine relief\n\nJourney through Anhui, around Lake Chao from Wu-hu to Lu-chou Fu, returning 5 February 1889\n\nVisited Wu-chang to warn Chang Chih-tung that he was erecting the Iron and Steel Works in Wu-chang in an unsuitable place\n\n1891 7 September Typhoon destroyed the Olympia Skating Rink, his property in Lloyd\n\n1892 January\n\n1894\n\nMay\n\n1895 September\n\n1896 Mar/Sep 1898\n\nMay/June\n\nDecember 1899 Mar/Oct\n\nRoad, Shanghai, ruining him financially.\n\nMesny involved in the Mason case\n\nInvited to organise a naval brigade for service on the Hsiang and Han rivers\n\nStormy interview with Li Hung-chang in Tientsin Visited Peking and had breakfast with Manchu Prince Su Claims to have volunteered for service in Manchuria [Sino-Japanese War]\n\nEn route to Manchura: Visited Liu K'un-1, Generalissimo of Chinese Forces [afloat and ashore] at his headquarters at Shan-hai-kuan Mesny refused permission to visit camps of Wu Ta-cheng and Wei Kuang-tao at or near to T'ien-chuang-tai Liu advised Mesny to return to Tientsin.\n\nHis second and only other child, his daughter, Marie Wan-er, born in Shanghai\n\nBegan the publication of his Chinese Miscellany Volume 1 in Shanghai\n\nPublication of Volume 2 of his Chinese Miscellany\n\nLegally married to Lady Han, mother of Hu-sheng [or Pin] and Marie Wan-er\n\nTrip by chartered boat to Hangchou\n\nVisited Nanking\n\nPublication of Volume 3 of his Chinese Miscellany", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212771, "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": 80, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "65\n\n1900 ca 1900\n\n1901 December\n\n1904\n\n1905 Jan/Jun\n\n1907\n\nca 1910/1911\n\n1914 November\n\nca 1914/1915\n\n1914-1919\n\n11 Dec 1919\n\nClaims to have volunteered for service in Peking [Boxer troubles]\n\nMesny visited Nan-chang in Kiangsi where he met Hsiung Shih-fu, a young reformer\n\nInterviewed Viceroy Liu K'un-yı în Nanking.\n\nPublished Mesny's Chinese and English Almannac\n\nPublication of his final volume of his Chinese Miscellany\n\nMost Excellent High Priest in the Keystone Royal Arch Chapter, in Shanghai\n\nHis wife, Han, obtained a legal separation in Shanghai\n\nMesny moved to Hankow\n\nClaims to have passed a medical and then offered his services to the Crown [World War 1]\n\nEmployed by Messrs. Reiss and Co. in Hankow\n\nDied in rue de Paris in Hankow\n\nAppendix C\n\nThe Chinese Imperial Forces\n\nMesny's Involvment in the Suppression of the Miao Revolt\n\nThe First Campaign by Imperial Troops\n\nin Kueichou Province\n\n1868-1871\n\nand\n\nOrder of Battle of the Szechuan Force\n\nChinese Imperial Forces, with the aid of a number of foreigners and foreign arms, had by 1864 succeeded in suppressing the Taiping rebellion against the dynasty. They then turned to liquidating the other rebellions seething in various parts of China which included the Nien movement in northern China, the Moslem minority revolt in Yunnan province, another major Moslem uprising in the North-west, and finally the Miao aboriginal tribes which had revolted in Kueichou province.\n\nThe Miao, or Miao-tzu as Mesny refers to them, rose against the Ch'ing dynasty Manchu rulers of China in 1854 after discontent reached boiling point due not only to Chinese settlers colonising the best lands in the low lying areas of the province of Kueichou, but also to the exploitation of the Miao by Chinese officials and merchants. According to Mesny the passionate and untamed Miao gradually took back almost the whole province apart from the capital, Kuei-yang Fu, and the city", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212772, "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": 81, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "66\n\nof An-shun Fu until, by 1867, the Imperial troops, who had first fought to suppress the major threat from the Taipings, were able to raise sufficient forces to recover the 'lost' lands. The two Kueichou campaigns dragged on for five or more years with, so some claimed, possibly only one tenth of the Miao population surviving. Mesny only describes the first campaign.\n\nThe story of the first campaign which took place in the northern part of the remote and mountainous province of Kueichou during the four years from 1868 as described by Mesny consists of episodes, incidents and background in a day by day or month by month description of one or two of the major skirmishes and assaults, victories and defeats of the one particular Chinese Imperial force, raised and funded by the province of Szechuan. Two other forces were involved, the armies of Hunan province and the internal force of Kueichou province whose army was combined with a force from Yunnan province [northern Kueichou being flanked by the provinces of Szechuan, Hunan and Yunnan]. Mesny's descriptions of the problems of military re-supply, funding, rewarding merit, the punishment of criminals both military and civilian, the treatment of prisoners and medical problems, as well as his descriptions of camp life and inter-officer relations, make the narrative a most interesting story.\n\nThe campaign has been hardly mentioned in histories of China and was probably of little interest in Peking at the time. However, here we had three Chinese Imperial forces operating far from supply bases, some with little incentive to do much more than draw their pay and keep their heads down, and a foreigner with a glorified opinion of his own importance, based in the heart of the Szechuan Force alongside the general in charge of the Central Army and not too far from the Commander-in-Chief [C-in-C]. Mesny's role, so he told us, was to advise his C-in-C and his general on modern foreign arms and their maintenance. We should however bear in mind that Mesny was but 26 at the start of the campaign, and had had no official military training other than having been a seaman and having learned something about the handling of artillery from British ex-servicemen whilst he had been a Customs Officer with the Chinese Imperial Customs on the Yangtze. Amongst his numerous claims to military fame one of the lesser ones was his successful organisation and training of a company of artificers for use at headquarters during the first Kueichou campaign.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212773, "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": 82, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "67\n\nMesny, writing in the first person some thirty years later, was not in any way slow in claiming that he played key roles in the campaign and frequently related how his improvements on the battle plans conceived by the Szechuan Force's senior officers were immediately adopted and were always successful. On the occasion when a general went ahead with his plan without Mesny, which ended in defeat and failure, Mesny made no bones about it; the failure was due to the lack of foresight of the general concerned for not first consulting Mesny!\n\nAlso of significance is the infrequent mention by Mesny of the Manchu Tartars. Considering that China was at this stage still under the rule of the Manchu dynasty, with the main forces of the Imperial Army in Manchu hands, and whose armies consisted to a considerable extent of Manchu bannermen, there is no indication from Mesny of Manchus being involved in the campaigns to suppress the Miao, and his only reference to the Manchus was the sighting of Manchu women in a town on his journey along the Yangtze. Manchu emperors had permitted only Manchus real power and had not allowed Chinese to hold independent commands until Tseng Kuo-fan was given a military command during the Taiping rebellion, in 1852. His army, called the Army of Hunan, won many of its battles leading to other Chinese armies being raised, one of which was the Army of Szechuan into which Mesny was recruited. How much Mesny understood the behind-the-scenes politics in play directing the control of the force in which he served is difficult to assess as, for example, he does not refer to the Manchus at any point. He would have us believe that he was frequently the confidante of Chinese senior military officers; logic, however, suggests that he, a foreigner in his twenties who had had no previous military experience, would be unlikely to be told anything of the more complex struggles and challenges for control and power within his or other Chinese forces.\n\nMesny's position within the Chinese Imperial military, as he described it, was complex. On joining the Szechuan Army Corps at Kuei-yang at the age of 26 in 1868, he was given a commission and brevet rank of Ch'ien-tsung +, which he equated on one page of his Miscellany to a First Class Warrant Officer or Sergeant Major, and on another page with a Company Commander or Captain.\n\nIn early 1870 he was awarded the rank and honour of ts'an-chiang hsien. The 'hsien', according to Hucker in his Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China, is a troublesome term. It is often", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212774, "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": 83, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "68\n\nrendered as brevet rank, which Mesny did. 'Ts'an-chiang is an assistant regional commander [tsung-ping kuan], rank 3a in the Chinese forces called the Green Banner. However, according to Brunnert and Hagelstrom, [Present Day Political Organisation of China [1911], translated from the Russian], it equated to Lieutenant Colonel. Mesny lists it as 'Colonel, the lowest grade of general.\n\nBy the latter days of the second Kueichou campaign he appears to have been promoted to the rank of Major-General, and some twelve years later was awarded the rank of Brevet Lieutenant-General, bearing the title for the remainder of his life. As he is portrayed in foreign-style uniform in a photograph in the Miscellany and yet occasionally refers to himself wearing Chinese attire with his Chinese buttons of rank, it is far from clear whether these were genuine ranks or honorary ones awarded to an attached civilian. It is noteworthy that he never refers to himself wearing a mandarin square [the chest badge], though he does mention his cap button. His uniform as an instructor in the army of Tso Tsung-tang consisted of a cap of the French kepi pattern, ornamented with the Chinese coat of arms [two dragons struggling for a burning globe], with a coat and trousers of dark blue navy cloth, ‘nicely braided front, back and sleeves.\n\nMesny explained that between 1868-1871 for two or more years he was in one corps of fifteen2 battalions styled the Ko-i Ch'üan-chün [brigade], part of the Shu-chün, the Szechuan Army Corps; and another for four years with a corps styled Wu-tzu Ch'üan-chün741, also in Kueichou, i.e. from 1871-1874. The latter corps was also in the original Hsiang-chün, [the Hunan Army]. Regrettably this confuses his story rather than clarifying it, as we do not know when he served with the Hsiang-chün unless he means the Wu-tzu corps which in another part of his Miscellany he noted to have been part of the Hunan Force.\n\nAs far as can be ascertained from the jigsaw pieces he has supplied us with, Mesny, when he was with the Szechuan Army Corps in the first campaign in Kueichou province from 1868-1871, and again during the second campaign from 1871-1876 with the Wu-tzu Hunan Army Corps, almost certainly served with one of the new provincial armies which he refers to in his Miscellany as Disciplined Army Battalions.3 At no point does he actually say so in so many words, but bearing in mind the grades he gave for the ranks and styles of the senior officers in his Force and as he was particularly scathing about the proficiency of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212775, "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": 84, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "69\n\nGreen Standard forces and not so about the Lien-chün, we can assume that he was a member of, or attached to one of the Lien-chün.\n\nMesny wrote relatively short explanatory notes in the first volume of his Miscellanies on the three armies, the Army of the Huai River, the Army of the Hsiang River and the Army of Ch'u, about which he felt he had unique knowledge having served with the Chinese military.\n\n'The Huai Army, an important Field Force raised in the area drained by the River Huai, did such good service to the Imperial cause under the C-in-C Li Hung-chang, who had been wise enough to advocate and introduce the use of foreign weapons. The Ever-victorious Army, styled Chang-sheng Chün, first organised and disciplined in a foreign manner by General Ward and subsequently rendered so famous under the command of General Gordon, was the principal corps of this army, and consisted of 5,000 men all told. The Ming-tzu Ying, another corps of the same army, raised by General and later Governor Liu Ming-ch'uan, and disciplined by General Pinel and Colonel Lucas, though senior to the Ever-victorious was, however, secondary in importance at the time' [but still existed when Mesny was writing this in 1895].\n\nAt no time did Mesny allude to a general staff in the sense we understand it today. This raises the question what did the Force have by way of what we now call an operations staff or department? Nor did Mesny refer to staff officers responsible for the organisation of manpower or materials; and although he mentioned procurement officers and a staff of officers surrounding the General commanding to carry out his bidding, 'operations' as such, the most crucial aspect of an army's functioning was kept strictly in the hands of the Szechuan force C-in-C. It would appear that military operations in their wider sense were directed by civil mandarins who were more interested in cost cutting than in the direction of the campaign, whereas the military officers, who grade for grade were very much the juniors to the civil mandarins, were responsible for the day to day running of the various forces.\n\nForward planning was always limited by financial constraints. Arms and ammunition, rations and reinforcements had to be reviewed and planned well in advance, but with the attitude of the Viceroy in Ch'eng-tu [according to Mesny] and the restraints imposed by him little could ever be expected to be achieved.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212776, "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": 85, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "70\n\nOne of the problems faced by the Szechuan Force commander was the distance between his headquarters and the Viceroy's Yamen in the Szechuanese capital at Ch'eng-tu and the time it took for orders and reports to be carried between them. The length of time between reporting back to Ch'eng-tu and receiving instructions either encouraged the Force commander to take too much upon himself or to sit and wait for further intelligence or instructions. When the Hunanese Force was defeated on its way to take part in a joint operation with the Szechuan force, communications were such that the first the Szechuanese general knew that the plan had gone wrong was from stragglers from the defeated Hunanese Force and from captured Miao. Considering the terrain the commanders had no real choice as communications relied upon runners who had to cross enemy country where the Miao who knew the country well were in full control.\n\nWhilst Mesny did not provide any evidence of the consultative procedure, if indeed there was one, between the Viceroy of Szechuan and the Szechuan Force commander, we do know from Mesny that the military commander in Ch’eng-tu, the Tartar General Chung-shih, was visited by the Szechuan Force commander when the Szechuan Force commander returned to the provincial capital to pay his respects to the visiting Li Hung-chang.\n\nAn Outline Description of The First Campaign against the Miao: 1868-1871\n\nThe first campaign by the Chinese Imperial Forces in Kueichou to suppress the rebellious Miao tribesmen, as seen through Mesny's eyes, began with a thrust by the major element of the Szechuan Force into the heartland of Miao territory during the late summer of 1868. The Kueichou provincial Force and the Hunan Force, two other separate armies under their own commanders, paid and supported by their own provinces, flanked the Szechuan Force though, as we hear little about them and their activities from Mesny, we are led to believe that they were relatively inactive. The interesting point about the forces used to suppress this local rebellion of Miao tribesmen [which was minor on the scale of events], was that each of the Chinese Imperial forces was controlled unilaterally and led by Chinese officers from the contiguous provinces of Kueichou, Hunan and Szechuan without any senior general empowered to command all three forces. Until relatively recently senior military commanders in the Chinese Imperial Army had in the main been Manchus and not native Chinese.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212777, "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": 86, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "71\n\nThe Szechuan Force, of five corps with a total of thirty-three battalions* [i.e. 18-20,000 men] to start with, had two brigades up to full strength, the An-ting Brigade and the Ko-i Brigade [the latter with fifteen and a half battalions]. Mesny was located with the headquarters of the Ko-i Brigade during most of the campaign as a foreign adviser to the C-in-C of the Force on the use and maintenance of foreign arms. His descriptions of skirmishes between the Imperial troops and the Miao tribesmen reflect this limitation, being restricted to what he saw for himself and information he was able to gather within both the C-in-C's and the Ko-i Brigade Headquarters.\n\nThe first location of the headquarters of the Ko-i Brigade referred to by Mesny was Niu-ch'ang, though it moved forward shortly afterwards towards the old city of Huang-p'ing Chou. The vanguard advanced to Ma-ping-bah, occupying a Miao camp where the Szechuan Force planned to spend the winter of 1868/9. Shortly after this, Mesny moved to Huang-p'ing Chou, and described a skirmish at Ta-ngai, followed the next day by a full-scale battle at Huang-p'ing itself.\n\nJust before Chinese New Year in 1869, the Ko-i Brigade despatched a reconnaissance party in the direction of the Miao headquarters at Hsin-chou [Huang-p'ing New Town] some ten miles further into tribal Kueichou beyond the old city of Huang-p'ing. They discovered that the Miao had left only a small body of men in the town, having withdrawn their headquarters to Wu-ku Lung. The day after the New Year, a large body of Miao rebels descended from the hills and fired on the Imperial camp at Huang-p'ing but were driven off by the Ko-i Guards Regiment.\n\nRegionalism and factionalism were two powerful factors influencing the inter-personal relationships between members of the various Forces involved in the Kueichou campaign. In order to achieve anything, one had to rely on personal connections. Mesny, who did not hide his partisan views, repeats again and again how unfairly his Commander-in-Chief, T'ang Chiung, had been treated both in rewards for good service and in support, both financial and matériel [both of which were withheld]. Jealousy between the commanders of the various forces caused not only disharmony but, if Mesny is to be believed and there is no reason to doubt him, the failure of the whole of the first campaign. One of China's cultural characteristics was reflected in a number of instances referred to in Mesny's narrative. Personal relationships and connections, 'squeeze', and deep concern for one's self to the detriment of others were the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212778, "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": 87, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "72\n\nbasic elements of the social network and were such obvious facts of life that Chinese took them for granted and did not think of them as in any way unusual.\n\nThe Army of the Hsiang was an important Field Force raised in Hunan, especially in the area of the Hsiang River, a sort of counter-balance to the Huai River Army, raised about the same time for the suppression of the Taiping rebellion in the valley of the Yangtze and elsewhere. The Marquis Tseng Kuo-fan was the C-in-C of the Hsiang-chün consisting of Hunan troops which had at first been designated as the Ch'u-chün or Army of Ch'u, a name derived from the ancient state of Ch'u, which comprised the provinces of Hunan and Hupei, as well as other provinces including the whole or part of Anhui and Honan. The Ch'u-chün was commanded by Tso Tsung-t'ang. The Hsiang Army was divided into several army corps or divisions, each numbering from ten to twenty, or even thirty battalions each of five hundred men. Each corps had a distinct designation or appellation, derived from the locality where it was actually organised or from the name or part of the name of the commander of the particular corps. One corps however, the principal one, was styled the Hsiang-ying from its having been organised in the prefecture of Changsha Fu on the banks of the Hsiang River. When more corps were required, however, the name Hsiang-chün was brought into use as with the Huai-chün, to represent all the corps of each army.”\n\nAlthough Mesny obliquely mentioned a higher command, the Ministry of War in Peking, regrettably he did not offer any information which would explain the subordination and chain of command other than telling us that the commander of the Szechuan Force, General T'ang, took his orders from the Viceroy of Szechuan and obtained supplies and funding, when they were forthcoming, from the Szechuanese provincial authorities in Ch'eng-tu.\n\nThe plan now was for the main body of the Ko-i Brigade to advance and occupy the city of Chung-an [Szu] on the Chung-an River by way of Ta-ngai and Chung-pai (later renamed Chung-sheng), whilst another element of the brigade would advance and occupy Huang-p'ing Hsin-chou [New Town].\n\nThe advance began on 18 March 1869. Several days later Chung-an had been occupied and fortified, as had Huang-p'ing New Town. Chung-an was overlooked by hills and mountains occupied by", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212779, "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": 88, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "73\n\nmany Miao, a number of whom wished to live in peace and had offered allegiance to the Imperial Force. Meanwhile the Miao rebels who were constructing stockades on the mountain sides above Chung-an prior to attempting to destroy the Imperial Force, were able to observe the C-in-C's headquarters together with Imperial reinforcements and supplies arrive from Ma-ping-bah.\n\nThe Szechuan Force's next objective was the city of Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien some 20 miles away, on the far side of the river. Despite having been in rebel hands for the previous eighteen years it was captured without too much difficulty though the Imperial Force had had a tough time for a day or so repelling Miao counter-attacks.\n\nThe C-in-C of the Szechuan Force sent a proposal to the C-in-C of the Hunan Force suggesting that the Szechuanese should advance on one side of the river Chung-an with the Hunan Force advancing up the other and, as the Hunanese had gunboats, they could also advance up the river itself.\n\nMeanwhile, and here Mesny's chronology is questionable, in early May 1869 the Ko-i Brigade advanced on Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien and prepared to storm the thirteen Miao stockades on the Tieh-chang Po heights above the town. Eventually after a fierce struggle and capture of the stockades, the Ko-i Brigade awaited the approach of the Hunan Force which should have been taking the next mountain range at the same time. Mid-afternoon on the day of the assault on the stockades, as the Hunanese had not appeared, the Ko-i Brigade withdrew to their camp in Chung-an, only to learn that the Hunan Force after initial successes had been badly defeated at Wu-ku Lung.\n\nThe Szechuan Force then remained comparatively inactive in Chung-an for the next seventeen months, until November 1870.\n\nMeanwhile, during the summer of 1869, Miao rebel forces had defeated the Kueichou provincial Force at Tu-yün Fu which left the Szechuan Force undefeated but out on a limb with both flanks exposed by the defeat of the Hunan Force on one side and the defeat of the Kueichou Force on the other. The emergence of a new Miao rebel chieftain threatened the Szechuan Force whilst at the same time the lines of communication between the Szechuan Force and the provincial capital at Kuei-yang and the rear base at Tsun-i were in danger of being cut.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212780, "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": 89, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "74\n\nRepeated references by Mesny to the refusal by the Szechuan provincial Viceroy to send funds, supplies, reinforcements and rations to his provincial Force in Kueichou were followed by harrowing descriptions of the great hardships caused to the Szechuanese troops, with rations virtually non-existent and rampant disease carrying off many men.\n\nBy mid-winter of 1869/70 the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force decided that he could no longer wait for the Hunan Force to complete its reorganisation, and made up his mind to capture Ka-ba Niu-ch’ang, near to where the Hunan Force had been defeated the previous year. In the event the main body of the Ko-i Brigade were defeated with heavy losses though the rest of the Szechuan Force managed to hold on. The Ko-i Brigade, after a feint attack by a flanking element of the Szechuan Force which drew off the Miao rebels, eventually reached Wu-ku Lung and Ka-ba Niu-ch'ang.\n\nAgain the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force proposed joint action with the Hunan Force, supporting an advance this time towards Tu-yün Fu and Ma-ho Chou with the express aim of relieving pressure on the provincial capital. The Hunan Commander appears not to have agreed and, without co-operation and united action, nothing could be attempted and nothing therefore was done. However, T'ang, the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force again decided to act alone. He seemed to be unaware at the time that a new Kueichou provincial C-in-C, Chou Ta-wu, had been appointed to command all troops within the province operating against the rebels; this included the Szechuan and Hunan Forces. T'ang went ahead, ordering the withdrawal of the main body of the Szechuan Force from its forward positions in Miao territory in mid August, leaving behind at Ch'ang-p'ing Hsien some fourteen battalions of his now increased Force to hold the line until new plans could be made and carried out. In less than three days the main body of the Force had retreated unmolested through Ta-ngai and Niu-ch'ang to Weng-an Hsien where the main body remained whilst the C-in-C and his headquarters withdrew a further 20 miles to Kou-ch'ang (later renamed Lung-ch'ang: about half way between Kuei-yang and Tsun-i).\n\nThe commander of one half of the force of the fourteen battalions left behind at Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien decided off his own bat to evacuate the city, abandoning all camp kit and equipment, and fleeing with his seven battalions to Kuei-yang where he spread a report that the main body", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212781, "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": 90, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "75\n\nof the Szechuan Force under the C-in-C had been badly defeated and had left him in the lurch without support. However, the other half of the fourteen battalions remained in Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien and stood firm, and even recovered much of the abandoned equipment. This was not reported to Kuei-yang and Ch'engtu in Szechuan in time to benefit the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force, the story put about by the commander of the seven battalions who had evacuated Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien being believed and acted upon. The C-in-C, T’ang, was therefore degraded and posted to Szechuan,\n\nThe story, according to Mesny's narrative, ended with the demobilisation of several units of the Szechuan Force, the C-in-C's guards and the Ko-i Brigade in particular, and with Mesny settling into life as an adviser to the new supreme commander of all the Imperial forces in Kueichou, Chou Ta-wu; leaving us in anticipation of the next and successful campaign to suppress the rebel Miao, beginning later the same year, 1871, to be published by Mesny. Regrettably it never seems to have got beyond either Mesny's pencil jottings or good intentions.\n\nThe Organisation of the Szechuan Force\n\nIn his Notes on Chinese Military Services Mesny explained that there were several branches of the Army, the Manchu Banner Corps, the Mongol Banner Corps and the Chinese Banner Corps, each with eight banners. There were also the Chinese militia called Chih-ping; volunteer troops raised during the Taiping Rebellion and on many other occasions of emergency, called Yung-ying or simply Yung i.e. braves [known to Mesny as the Mobile Volunteer Force], and the local train bands\", Tuan-lien [known to Mesny as the Sedentary Volunteer Force]; armed peasants trained in the use of weapons for the defence of their homes in both town and country.\n\nMesny appears to have used notes written during the early 1870s to compile his descriptions of the Chinese Imperial forces and seems not to have taken much advantage of the benefit of hindsight to amend them prior to going to press in 1895. It had proved difficult to differentiate between Mesny's personal knowledge and his accuracy in recording detail, and information he acquired from other non-Chinese sources. Many of his notes on the Manchu Army and the Green Standard Regiments have been taken from Mayers'\n\nPage 90\n\nPage 91", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212782, "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": 91, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "76\n\nThe Chinese Government, Mayers does not refer to the Lien-chûn Ying. Mesny's ambiguous descriptions are confusing though it would seem that there were four separate bodies, the Banner Forces, the ill-trained Green Standard armies under provincial control, the Disciplined Battalions formed from the Green Standards forces, and the local defence train bands.\n\nThe standing army was divided into two great classes, the Banner Forces, [Ch'i-ping], and the Militia Forces (Chih-ping]. The real Chinese National Army also called Ying-ping generally styled by foreigners as the Green Banner Force [Lu-ch'i Ying'] derived its title from the colour of their triangular standard, green satin with a red satin scalloped border and a golden dragon embroidered in the centre. Each province had a separate army corps under a C-in-C styled Ti-tu Chün-men [one such force was the Kueichou Provincial Force operating alongside the Szechuan Force in which Mesny served]. The forces consisted entirely of Chinese and were, in fact, a part of the local militia. Three centuries ago, wrote Mesny, it was the finest military force in the world: as it was in 1895, he added. The force was beneath criticism.\n\nThe Disciplined Army battalions, the Lien-Chün Ying [troops trained by and after foreign advisers], was a new organisation instituted by Ts'en Yü-ying, formerly Governor of Yunnan, Kueichou, Fukien and subsequently Governor-General of the Yun-kuei provinces. It consisted of detachments from the various Territorial Green Regiments formed into battalions and bearing the same territorial name as the regiment from which they had been detached and of which these detachments actually formed or constituted a fighting or field battalion. The Disciplined Battalions were armed with obsolete rifles but far superior to anything opposed to them in Yunnan or Kueichou. These Disciplined Armies, often referred to as the Anhui and Hunan Armies, were originally privately raised and financed by Tseng Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang to combat the Taiping rebel armies and were under the personal command of Han Chinese generals. Later, they employed westerners such as Mesny to assist China's programme of 'self-strengthening', primarily in the sphere of armaments.\n\nAlthough Mesny explained that there was a lack of uniformity in organisation throughout the whole of China he went into some detail, and added that each provincial army corps was considered a regular", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212783, "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": 92, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "77\n\narmy in itself, especially organised to meet the requirements of its own territorial demands or necessities. The various provincial army corps [chün] consisted of two or more territorial divisions called chen besides several [from 3-10] territorial brigades called hsieh. The divisions consisted of several regiments and battalions, both of which were called ying; the regiments were commanded by ts'an-chiang [colonels] or yu-chi [lieutenant-colonels], and battalions by tu-ssu [majors]. Most regiments and battalions were divided into two or more companies, shao; however, a few regiments and battalions were not divided at all, with the officers in each regiment or battalion holding common authority over all portions of the regiment or brigade.\n\nMesny frequently referred to individuals as holding the rank of lieutenant-colonel in one context whilst elsewhere describing them as generals. This was finally clarified in a throwaway line buried in other text when he wrote, 'In China Brigadier-Generals, Colonels and Lieutenant-Colonels in command were all considered to be General officers, that is Chiang-Chün.' General officers, chiang-kuan, in the territorial army were those brigadiers, colonels and lieutenant colonels in command. In field forces the commanders of battalions were also so styled by courtesy irrespective of rank. The same courtesy was extended to the chief of battalion, ying-kuan, in field forces where many of them had only permission to wear a button sometimes of the lowest civil rank and degree.\n\nMesny summarised the order of battle including the Chinese naval forces, with two provinces, Kuangtung and Fukien each having a naval force, and another stationed on the Yangtze. Finally, with the northern steam fleet of iron-clads there was a total of twenty-one army corps, i.e. provincial forces, and four naval corps for the whole Chinese empire. To these had to be added the Tartar Banner forces forming the garrisons of several important towns, Canton, Foochou, Hangchou, Cha-pu, Chinkiang, Nanking, Peking and elsewhere. Also the numerous regular field troops denominated Yung or Lien-chün which had been kept under arms in various parts of the empire since the Taiping Rebellion (which, he added, were a great deal more formidable in numbers as well as effectiveness than the whole of the sedentary garrisons or ordinary chün or army).\n\nIt was not until, literally, the latter days of the first campaign that an overall commander was appointed, with the Szechuan Force commander", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212784, "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": 93, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "78\n\nT'ang, dismissed and the Kueichou Force commander, Chou Ta-wang assuming supreme command of all Forces operating within the province of Kueichou.\n\nImperial Army Organisation as Described by Mesny\n\nA division was usually divided into three or more brigades, though some had five, designated as follows:\n\nCh'ien-lu or ch'ien-chün vanguard or the advance\n\nChung-lu 中路 the central brigade\n\nHou-lu 後路 rearguard or the rear brigade:\n\nTso-lu 左路 the left brigade or the left wing of the division, sometimes known as Tso-i\n\nYu-lu 右路 the right brigade or the right wing of the division, sometimes known as Yu-i\n\nThe lone three brigades in a division, when such a formation existed, were usually designated rear, centre and advance, with the divisional general usually with the centre brigade.\n\nThe order of their arrangement in battalions of field troops [yung-ying 勇營] was\n\nCentre, Left, Right, Van and Rear\n\nthus forming a cross [sic] when in order of battle or encampment. On the march however if the above order could not be maintained the order of movement was as follows:\n\nVan, Left Wing, Centre including staff and impedimenta, Right Wing and Rear Guard\n\nThis order held good for divisions, brigades, battalions and companies.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212785, "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": 94, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "79\n\nIf however moving on a broad front the order was:\n\nVan Left Centre Right Rear\n\n[on different roads]\n\nThe bodyguard in a field force and elsewhere, usually the central company of a battalion, or the central battalion of a brigade of five or more battalions, was styled chin-ping, whilst the escort or individual guardsman was a hu-ping#.\n\nEach battalion, ying, of three companies, had five hundred fighting men and one hundred and fifty supporting coolies. The battalions were commanded by a major, tu-ssu#, with two 2nd major adjutants.\n\nEach company, shao\", of three sections, consisted of approximately one hundred fighting men, supported by a further number of unpaid men awaiting appointment as soldiers, and supporting coolies. Companies were commanded by a captain, ch'ien-tsung†§, with two lieutenants, orderlies and personal coolies. Later, Mesny notes that strengths and personnel of Chinese military companies can be very elastic.\n\nEach section, tui, of three 'tents', was commanded by an ensign or warrant officer, with two further junior warrant officers or sergeants.\n\nEach tent, p'eng, contained sixteen men: these consisted of a corporal, shih-changH, in charge, two lance corporals, ten men, yung or ping, and three coolies, fu#.\n\n10\n\nThe Ko-i Rifle Brigade in Kueichou had a Guards Battalion\"[Ch'in-ping Ying#4] of six companies, each company having at least 150 men, which with staff officers brought the total strength of the battalion up to 1000 men. At the time Mesny joined the Force there were also two rifled twelve-pounder field guns and an extra battalion of light infantry, styled Fu Hu-chünH. The 700 men of this extra battalion were all former rebels [surrendered or captured\"] of various ages, from 20 to 40; many of them decorated with scars and wounds. Three months after Mesny joined in 1868 this particular battalion was formed into an independent corps, as it were, with the glorious style of the Ever Victorious Force, Chang-sheng Chün. When the Force was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212786, "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": 95, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "80 + broken up in 1871 on the change of command, there was scarcely a man left in the Force who did not bear one or more scars about his head or face, and it was customary to designate the men in familiar conversation as 'the decorated ones', tai-hua ti Æ9, on account of their wounds. They all received double pay, and deserved it too. Many soldiers served until they were sixty without getting beyond the step of veteran leader of a squad, not even getting the rank of an NCO. When a private soldier desired to get married he received a sum of money varying from two to four taels, and when he died, a similar sum of money was allowed to his relations to bury him with.\n\nA typical example of one of the number of items on military matters published by Mesny in his Miscellany was the system of recruitment for the Chinese Territorial Army of the Green Standard [Lu-ying]. It was, wrote Mesny, by voluntary enlistment. In every garrison town there were a number of young men styled Yu-ting or novices, on probation as it were, for vacancies in the lowest rank of soldiery. These novices received neither pay nor pension but generally got odd jobs about the garrison for which they were given rations and some pittance as a reward. They did however attend all drills and exhibited their skill in handling weapons in the presence of the drill instructors and drill inspectors and obtained certain marks of approbation if considered deserving of such as an encouragement to perseverance in the prosecution of their exercises. When a vacancy in the lowest rank of the soldiery, second class private soldier, occurred these novices were summoned to pass an examination, and the most expert in his exercises and the manliest in appearance usually got the appointment which was that of a garrison soldier, shou-ping, and entered on the pay and ration roll, and were immediately available for active service in garrison or field force units, and would then receive both pay and rations accordingly.\n\nOther items included descriptions of the secretariat, orderly officers, and quartermasters. In every battalion brigade and division or corps of field troops there were always a few officers known as ch'ai-kuan or orderly officers, most of them men of experience risen from the ranks with ranging from a general down to the lowest, the lieutenant. These form the staff of the commander under whose orders they are.\n\nViceroys and governors of provinces and commanders of divisions of field troops had one or more officers, each and a military secretariat usually of the civil rank of tao-t’ai, styled as Ying-wu Ch'u, established", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212787, "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": 96, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "81\n\nin an office which bore the same name and in which there was a staff of clerks etc. It corresponded to all intents and purposes with the western orderly room in which was transacted nearly all the business concerning the force of which it formed a part. Before the Taiping rebellion military secretaries and clerks were all military officers but after it civil service men got the appointments owing to the fact that so few military men could read or write sufficiently well to carry on the correspondence of the force. All offenders against military laws, whether soldiers or civilians, were first of all examined by the military secretariat or a delegate appointed by him. Some viceroys had several such secretaries, each attached to some department with the chief of them styled Tsung-lu Ying-wu-ch'u, i.e., Chief Director of the Army Secretariat. Soldiers in attendance wore the name of the office on their uniforms. In provincial Governors' staff brigades, Fu-piao Ying, warrant officers and NCOs were employed as couriers and runners.\n\nStandards and standard bearers were frequently referred to in Mesny's accounts: each standard being displayed to make known the location of the unit or official represented. A number of the petty unit and formation supporting officials had the character for 'flag' [ch'i] within their title. Examples of these were the Quartermaster in charge of ammunition depots and reserves in a Field Force who displayed a red flag and was known as The Red Flag [Hung-ch'i] and the QM in charge of provisions was the Blue Flag [Lan-ch'i]. These officers were subordinate to the Quartermaster [Chün-chuang] who was responsible for all stores and clothing, and who in turn was subordinate to the Headquarters' Commissary Officer [Liang-t'ai].\n\nCoolies were paid three taels of pure silver per month of thirty days [or forty days for An-hui troops], private soldiers four taels two mace, decurions four taels five mace, orderly officers eight taels, vice commanders of companies twelve taels and one servant, commanders of companies eighteen taels and two servants, vice-commander of a battalion received thirty-two taels and three servants, the commander of a battalion received one hundred and eight taels and forty coolies, besides extras, brigadiers got two hundred taels for each battalion in their brigade besides their battalion pay and perquisites. Mesny continued: the company commanders in the Force in which he served in Kueichou made about double their pay every month in perquisites of all kinds. The battalion commanders made about seven hundred taels a month, but added Mesny, he had heard that the company and battalion commanders", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212788, "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": 97, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "82\n\nof the Anhui troops made much more. In the Wu-tzu Hunan Army Corps in which Mesny served during the second campaign in Kueichou, twenty battalions were farmed out to their respective chiefs who were each paid monthly two thousand eight hundred and forty taels to find pay and rations for their men. Those chiefs of battalions cleared about one thousand taels a month. The men usually got one tael a month mess money and about thirty catties of rice, for which sixty tael cents was deducted from the men's pay, even when they ate rice that had been obtained by capture from the enemy.\n\nA soldier's uniform consisted of a long shirt worn over his undershirt; a long robe or coat, split before and behind, for riding; a short over coat with a round patch on the breast and shoulders on which was inscribed the name of his division or brigade as well as the name of his regiment and company, also his own name. The riding coat was dark blue with green or red facings, the long coat was grey; he also wore a sash, hat and boots. The price for this outfit was deducted by small instalments from the soldier's regular pay, so that it took one a year or two to get out of debt on the Adjutant's books.\n\nThe Miao Rebels\n\nAccording to Mesny the enemy, during the mid-nineteenth century, consisted of four separate and individual groups.\n\n1. Remnants of the Taiping reformers detached from Shih Ta-kai's Second Army (Hung-ping chün)\n\n2. Two local factions of local rebels\n\nA. Huang-hao The Yellow 'Signals'\n\nB. Pai-hao The White 'Signals'\n\n3. Mohammedan rebels: Hui-fei, called Pai-ch'i- White Flags\n\n4. The Miao-tzu aboriginals Miao-fei (83 different tribes)\n\nThe Szechuan Force had suppressed the first three groups before beginning the campaign to suppress the fourth, the Miao.\n\n83", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212789, "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": 98, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "83\n\nFrom Mesny's various descriptions of the Szechuan Force with which he served the following, extracted from numerous items within his Miscellanies, is a considered view of the Order of Battle of the Force:\n\nSzechuan Army Corps\n\nKueichou\n\n(1868-1872)\n\nCommander-in-chief [tsung-t'ung]: T'ang Chiung\n\nThe Szechuan Army Corps consisted of\n\ntwo self-contained rifle brigades of Chinese forces\n\ni.e. Field Force Units (Lien-chün Ying)\n\nthe An-ting Ch'ũan-chün and the Ko (or Kuo)-i Ch'ũan-chün\n\n安定全軍\n\n果義全軍\n\nunder the direct\n\ncommand of the C-in-C\n\nconsisting of ten battalions\n\nunder command of General Liu\n\nHo-ling consisting of fifteen\n\nbattalions", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212790, "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": 99, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "84\n\nThe Szechuan Force\n\n劉軍\n\nC-in-C: General T’ang Chiung [tsung-t'ung]\n\nHeadquarters\n\n \n An-ting Brigade\n Ko-i Brigade\n An-chi Ying ??\n \n \n [10 battalions]\n [4 battalions]\n [3 battalions]\n \n\nUnder direct command of the C-in-C\n\n \n Comd: Ch'en Shui-ching*\n Comd: Ch'en Shui-ching*\n Ch'en Tzu-ho\n \n \n Centre Battalion\n Left Battalion\n Right Battalion\n \n \n Rear Battalion\n ??? Battalion\n Vanguard Battalion\n \n\nunlocated: General Chou Shou-ching\n\n*Mesny refers to General Ch'en commanding both of these forces individually and as a combined force", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212791, "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": 100, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "The Ko-i Brigade' \n\n義全軍 \n\n[Knoron as Liu's Force] \n\nCommanding General: Liu Ho-ling NBG \n\nSecretariat and Commissary Staffs \n\n85 \n\nment [Hu-chin \n\n*ang-sheng Chin] \n\nStandard \n\nYü Te-k'u \n\n2 Regiment Left Regt \n\nBlue Standard \n\nComd Gen Sich Hung-chang \n\n3 Regiment Right Regt \n\nWhite Standard \n\nComd General Lung \n\n4 Regiment Vanguard Regi \n\nRed Standard \n\nComd xxx \n\n5 Regiment Rear Regt \n\nBlack Standard \n\nComd Gen Chou Wan-shun \n\nlion \n\n \n I Battalion\n Left\n 2 Battalion Supplementary\n \n \n 3 Battalion New\n Bacation Battalion\n \n \n \n Battalion\n t Battalion Forward Battalion\n | Baration Right Baualcon\n \n \n 2 Battalion Supplementary Battalion\n 3 Battalion New Battalion\n 2 Ballation Supplementary\n \n \n Battalion\n 2 Battalion Supplemenary\n Battalion\n \n \n 3 Battalion New Battalion\n 1 Battalion Rear Battalion\n 2 Battalion Suplementary Battalion\n \n \n 3 Battalion New\n \n \n \n\nForeign-armed \n\nUnit \n\nBattalion \n\nunds \n\n· Mesny -ying] \n\nl'u \n\n[Fu-chung Ying] Cond: Colonel Hsiang \n\n(Hain-chung Ying] \n\n[Yang-pao To \n\nComd \n\n洋炮釅 \n\nColonel Hsung \n\ncompanies \n\n1st Battalion - 'original', 2nd Battalion - 'Supplementary', and 3rd Battalion - 'New' \n\n>, usually pronounced \"Guo-i\" means \"Determined and Faithful\" \n\ndowel Hsiang appeared to have commanded both the 2nd Battalion and the Foreign-armed Unit as General Yü Te-k'ai commanded not only his Regiment but also the 1st Battalion \n\nMesny also referred to the following without identifying their subordination: The Chung-tzu Ying & consisting of Sha-jen; four unidentified battalions of auxiliaries - Mino and Chinese rebels, one commanded by Sha-yen Wang; four unidentified battalions commanded by Brevet Maj-Gen Lan, Colonel Wang, Yang Yich-ting and Li Yin-chiu", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212792, "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": 101, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "86\n\nNOTES\n\nIn one of the notes written by Mesny in his Miscellany, [Volume 4 page 34], he listed the various classes and degrees of military rank in what he terms the Chinese Militia Service. A marshal or general was a T'i-tu Chün-men, a lieutenant-general was a Tsung-ping Kuan, a major-general a Fu-chiang; and a colonel a Ts'an-chiang.\n\n2 Mesny gives various totals for the number of battalions serving with the Szechuan Force and in particular with the Ko-i Brigade, with a grand total of thirty-three battalions in the whole Force. These vary from eight to fifteen and a half operating with the Ko-i Brigade. Presumably the explanation lies in the arrival of new battalions to support the Force from time to time, though we are unable to be certain how many battalions were serving at any one particular moment.\n\nMesny states at the beginning of Volume 1 of his Miscellanies that in 1861 General Ward had organised a disciplined force for the Chinese Government, at first locally styled \"Ward's Force\" and later as the 'Ever-victorious Legion'.\n\n4 Mesny later keeps referring to thirty-five battalions.\n\nThe I-ho-t'uan, the \"Patriotic Train Band\", was the official title of the Boxers, of ill-repute.\n\n6 Mesny too had been a member of a train band, the volunteer force in Hankow between 1863-67, under arms several times during the approach of the Nien-fei rebels, when he wore the uniform of the Queen's Western Rifles [sic].\n\n7 Mesny goes into some detail providing recruitment policy, promotion schemes, ranks and titles, training and duties.\n\nUse of the term Disciplined Force was a contemporary fashion. It later became popular to refer to the Lien-chun Ying as Field Forces.\n\n9\n\nMost of the ranks of unit commanders given by Mesny do not tally with those given by Hucker in his Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China.\n\n10 All commanders of divisions and corps had one or more battalions, regiments or brigades, serving a sort of staff brigade and forming the headquarters of that particular army corps. It was popularly designated the Body Guard Battalion or Regiment.\n\nPresumably Han Chinese rebels such as the Huang-hao or the Pai-hao, the remnants of the Taipings or even the Moslem rebels.\n\n12 This is the same title as the Force previously operating under the command of General Gordon during the Taiping Rebellion. Either Mesny has incorrectly recalled the title of the new Force or the new Force continued to bear the former title.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212794, "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": 103, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "88\n\n# Appendix E\n\nPotted Biographies\n\nof\n\nChinese and Europeans\n\nand\n\na list of Terms\n\nwhich appear in the Mesny Saga\n\nBaber, E Colbourne [1843-1890]:\n\nHBM's Consul-General at Seoul, formerly HBM's Political Agent, Resident at Chungking. Mesny wrote that he had met Baber every day during his stay in Chungking in 1880 having first met him in the spring of 1877.\n\nChang Chih-tung:\n\nZIF\n\nAn Imperial official, born in 1837 died in 1909.\n\nHe was a reformer with close contact with foreigners, who remained a staunch Confucianist and a supporter of the Manchu dynasty. He was appointed governor of several Chinese provinces and was unusual in that he died poor, having lived an honest and comparatively frugal life. His reputation has remained as one who took the lead in the modernisation of Chinese economic life. Gretchen Mae Fitkin in her book The Great River, [North China Daily News, Shanghai 1922,] wrote that [the city of] Wu-chang under the idealistic rule of Viceroy Chang, branched out commercially and grew and prospered. He was a man of strange personality, an impractical dreamer, possessed of the spirit of the reformer and promotor (sic), but without either the stability to stick to one thing or the foresight to fit his plan with conditions. When he decided to start the iron and steel mills at Hanyang in [1890] he sent orders back to England for blast furnaces. The manufacturers wrote back for a sample of the ore. They manufactured two types of plant, each suitable to a distinct type of ore. But as Chang Chih-tung had not yet found the ore he could not send a sample. He insisted, however, on having the plant, and one was finally sent out. But it was not of the type suitable for the ore later discovered! One can see these furnaces today (1922) at the Hanyang Iron Works. According to OM Green [The Foreigner in China]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212795, "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": 104, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "89\n\nChang was the first scholar in the land. Sir Everard Fraser, the Consul-General in Hankow for ten years [1901-1911], was an excellent scholar. He once told Green that he had taken a despatch in Chinese to Viceroy Chang, of Wuchang, who had become a friend of his when he was in Hankow, for his opinion on it. The Viceroy read a few lines, and then taking up his brush-pen began to edit. ‘And then,' said Sir Everard, ‘I had the finest lesson in Chinese that I ever got.' Chang was that rara avis, the official who scorned to enrich himself.\n\nChiang Chao-ling #*# @ Chiang Pa-hsia (1846-1891)\n\nA native of Szechuan, Chiang met Mesny when he, Chiang, was travelling to Yunnan to take up an appointment as County Magistrate of Hsi-o Hsien. He and Mesny were thrown out of the province at the behest of the French in Tongkin. They met again in Canton and Shanghai where Chiang's pursuit of reform was not appreciated by other officials. He died in Peking. Mesny and Chiang were to have started a monthly magazine in Shanghai in 1887 to be called the Yueh Pao ♬ which was to have been the organ of the reform party. Chiang was to have been the chief editor and Mesny the registered owner and business manager. Mesny intended to use his nom-de-plume of Meng-hua # but in the event the magazine appears not to have been published.\n\nCooper T.T.\n\nVisited Hankow and asked Mesny to accompany him on a trek to India. Mesny refused as the fees offered were too low. He later expressed regret at having refused as he 'had missed an opportunity to travel.'\n\nDamström\n\nCaptain Damström was referred to by Mesny three times during his times in Hankow in the mid 1860s. Once as a gunnery officer on one of the first steam boats ever owned by the Chinese, at Ningpo, and later as Captain of the S.S. Pao-hua [nfd]. Mesny took him along together with a Captain Dix to offer their services to General Tso of the Imperial Force in the Northwest of China. Tso offered all three of them positions as instructors but we never hear the outcome as far as Damström and Dix were concerned.\n\nThe second occasion was when Damström went off with the other", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212796, "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": 105, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "90\n\nThree Bold Adventurers to fight alongside the Nien rebels. After being captured and carried to Chin-chiang in a cage, he was saved by two British artillery officers serving with the Taiping forces.\n\nThe third time was in Hankow when Mesny took Damström along with him as a heavy-weight. The incident occurred after Mesny 'arrested' the dishonest Chinese merchant who had swindled Dupuis. [These incidents are probably not in temporal order].\n\nDupuis, Jean\n\nA French merchant born ca. 1828, who arrived and lived in Hankow in about 1860. He built up a thriving trade in armaments. Fluent in Chinese, he introduced Mesny to the Szechuanese officials whose invitation to serve with the Szechuan Force changed his life. Mesny remarked that Dupuis was a distinguished explorer and 'conqueror of Tonkin.'\n\nGill, William J: born Bangalore 1843\n\nServed in India after being commissioned into the Royal Engineers. Inherited a fortune and indulged his passion for exploration. One of his travels was through north Szechuan province, where first he travelled alone and then later with Mesny to Burma. He wrote The River of Golden Sand in 1880, and after several other travels, in Tripoli and Afghanistan, he was murdered by Bedouins in 1882.\n\nGiquel, Prosper M. [1835-1886]\n\nA French naval officer who arrived in China during the Second China War. Formerly Commissioner of Imperial Maritime Customs at Ningpo and Hankow. He assisted the Sino-French 'Ever Triumphant Army' that fought alongside Tso Tsung-t'ang's force in Chekiang province to recapture Hangchow and Ningpo, and later commanded the force in operations that led to the recapture of Hangchow, for which he received high rank and honour from the Ch'ing government. His principal achievement was the construction and administration of the Foochow Arsenal in 1866, and dockyard with its fleet of warships. He was the only foreigner besides Gordon to receive the honour of the Yellow Riding Jacket.\n\nPage 105\n\nPage 106", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212797, "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": 106, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "91\n\nHart, Sir Robert [1835-1911]\n\nKnown as the \"I G” [Inspector-General of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs]. His Bureau was the one financial stay and prop, the negotiable asset, the one honestly administered and creditable branch within the Imperial government. He left the British Consular Service in 1861 to join the Customs Service, appointed I G in 1863.\n\nHill, David [1840-1896]\n\nWesleyan missionary stationed in Hankow until 1867. Died of typhus in Hankow. Hill was not only a witness with Griffith John at the re-marriage of William Mesny's brother's widow to E.G. Wilson in October 1884; he was also guardian with William Mesny to John's children.\n\nHung Hsiu-ch'uan ## [1813-1864] a Hakka\n\nLeader of the Taiping Rebellion: believed himself to be entrusted as the brother of Jesus to lead China and destroy the Manchu regime. [There is an inexplicable reference in Mesny's Miscellanies to a daughter 'of Hung?' wishing Mesny to return to Nanking to marry her]\n\nGordon, C G [1833-1885]\n\nAn English officer in the Royal Engineers who commanded the 'Ever-Victorious Army' against the Taiping rebels. He was appreciated by the Ch'ing Imperial government and was the first foreigner to be awarded the prestigious Yellow Riding Jacket. He later helped advise the Chinese during the Ili uprising in the early 1880s. He died in Khartoum during the Mahdi Uprising.\n\nJohn, Griffith [1831-1912]\n\nMissionary, LMS, Hankow 1861-1912. (Hill: q.v.)\n\nPrince Kung: also known as I-hsin [1832-1898]\n\nSixth son of the Tao Kuang emperor and half brother of the Hsien Feng emperor. Probably one of the most important Ch'ing dynasty officials in foreign affairs.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212799, "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": 108, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "93\n\nthe first anti-foot binding societies in China.\n\nLovatt, W N\n\nEx-Royal Artillery serving in Honan Road in Shanghai. He, with Massagorra, taught Mesny the skills of guns and gunnery in 1864. He later became a Commissioner of Customs in Korea.\n\nMason, Charles H. A. W.\n\nA young Imperial Customs Assistant who was the main figure in the 'Mason case'. He joined the Customs in 1887 and after an involved plot was arrested for smuggling arms into China with the intention of providing foreign weapons for the Ko-lao Hui, a secret society whose aim was to overthrow the Imperial government.\n\nMassagorra, W\n\nFormerly Royal Navy and subsequently mate on one of the large lorchas plying the Yangtze: he, with Lovatt, taught Mesny gunnery.\n\nMayers, W F\n\nChinese Secretary at the British Legation in Peking in the mid-1870s. His best known work was the Chinese Reader's Manual. [Mesny culled a large number of items from Mayer's Manual and included them in his Miscellanies]\n\nRichard, Timothy\n\nBaptist missionary in Shantung and Shansi provinces. He met Mesny in Taiyuan Fu where Richard was superintending a branch of the English Baptist Mission. Richard was renowned for his humanitarian work during the great famine in Shansi in 1877-1878.\n\nSu Chin-wang\n\n[Shan-ch'i ## or Shan Ai-t’ang #E#: born ca 1865]\n\nThe Manchu Prince with whom Mesny had breakfast in Peking in 1892 when Su had not yet inherited his title and was then simply the captain of the Emperor's Bodyguard. A black and white photograph", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212800, "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": 109, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "94\n\n[passport) of Prince Su was printed on page 235 of Volume 4 [18 March 1904] of Mesny's Miscellanies.\n\nTseng Kuo-fan [1811-1872]\n\nA Confucian statesman and general who defeated the Taiping rebels in Nanking and put an end to the rebellion. He was first a militia leader, then a Governor-General of the Two Kiang provinces and finally the Imperial Commissioner for the suppression of the Taiping Rebels. Later he became the Imperial Commissioner ordered to suppress the Nien rebellion. He was Viceroy of Chihli in 1869. His Hunan Army provided the Manchu dynasty with a new lease of life.\n\nTso Tsung-t’ang [1812-1885]\n\nAn official who first came to the notice of his emperor when he was an active and successful military officer during the Taiping Rebellion. He was raised to an earldom and up to 1866 earned renown as an administrator in the provinces of Fukien and Chekiang. With his experience during the Taiping Rebellion he was sent to Shensi and Kansu to suppress the Muslim revolt [1862-1873] and, en route, he helped suppress the Nien rebels. He remained Governor General of Shensi and Kansu for many years and later in 1884 he became Governor of Fukien province during the French attack on Foochow and Keelung in Taiwan. He died in Foochow the following year.\n\nWard F T [1831-1862]\n\nAn American mercenary and founder of the 'Ever-Victorious Army', a Sino-foreign military force which aided the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty suppress the Taiping rebellion. He was killed in battle in September 1862 near Ningpo and was at first succeeded by another American, Burgevine, and then by Charles Gordon [q.v.]. Ward married Miss Yang, the daughter of the official banker Yang Ta-Ki, a Tartar. A magnificent mausoleum was erected over his grave in Sungkiang in 1877.\n\nWylie, Alexander [1815-1887]\n\nA missionary and scholar, editor of the Chinese Recorder.\n\nT", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212801, "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": 110, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Terminology\n\n95\n\nButton : The knobs used by the Manchu dynasty to indicate rank, worn on top of caps. They were either transparent or opaque and, depending on rank, red, blue, white or plain gold.\n\nCash: the only coin cast in Imperial China prior to modernisation in the early twentieth century; a crude copper disk each with a square hole in the centre for convenience in carrying a large quantity, hence the expression ‘strings of cash'. Cash, like taels [see below] lacked uniformity in value, and strings, normally a thousand cash, often were composed of 700 pieces or even 1100 according to the regulations prevailing in the locality at the time. Giles claimed that the name was derived from Caixa, the Moorish name for the coin found at Malacca by the Portuguese in AD 1511.\n\nCh'al-kuan : Orderly Officers. These were men of all ranks, risen from the lowest grades, and were the operative staff of any commander.\n\nChai-tzu #7: a common term for a stockade or more commonly in southern Chinese rural areas, the village outer stockade.\n\nChen-t'ai #✩ : General of Division and an Area Commander\n\nChiang-chün #: General, a rank in the Chinese Imperial army used for commanders of reasonably substantial bodies of men be they regular forces or forces recruited for a specific campaign. Mesny explained that any commander lieutenant-colonel and above was referred to as general, and provided a good example with General Hsieh, the adopted son of General Liu, a major commander in the Szechuan force in which Mesny served. Hsieh was only 22 at the time of the campaign, some four years younger than Mesny. He had been the orderly to General Liu and had been adopted by him as his son after Hsieh had carried Liu off the battlefield, saving his life. General Hsieh's command in the Kueichou campaign consisted of the Left-wing Regiment and its second battalion; he could therefore be a regimental commander equating to a full colonel or brigadier at the most in western parlance. Another example is the \"solitary battalion' under command of General Ho Te-wu, the Chung-tzu Ying, with Ying being a 'force of a number of battalions' or ‘a lone battalion'.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212802, "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": 111, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "96\n\nCh'in-ch'ai Ta-ch'en ✯✯E : Imperial High Commissioner, a very senior appointment.\n\nEver Victorious Army ET: A European-officered Chinese force of the Imperial Army raised by the American, Ward, which ultimately, under the command of Colonel Gordon, assisted in putting an end to the Taiping Rebellion.\n\nExpectant... (Ho-ju) ✩A : A prefix indicating that an official was qualified and certified to take up duty in the post named.\n\nFan-t'ai #: A provincial treasurer known to foreigners as the Commissioner of Finance; charged with the fiscal or financial administration of a province.\n\nFormosa: The Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan.\n\nHakkas [Ko-chia] ** : One of the southern Chinese ethnic groups said to have migrated from northern China during the Mongol dynasty, ca the thirteenth century AD.\n\nHan-lin Yuan #: The Chinese National Academy, admission to which was the highest literary honour obtainable by a Chinese scholar.\n\nHo-shang : Buddhist monk or priest.\n\nHongkew : Site of the American Settlement in Shanghai, where Mesny later lived.\n\nHsien : Administrative district.\n\nHuang Ma-kua : The Yellow Riding Jacket. A high award from the emperor to his senior officials.\n\nImperial Maritime Customs: Chinese customs service with a foreign inspectorate largely able to control the collection of duties and taxes without the usual Chinese squeeze [q.v.]. Robert Hart became Inspector General in 1863.\n\nJingal (gingal): The Chinese blunderbuss. It was generally fired from a swivel fixed on a wall or wooden post, but sometimes it was fired with", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212803, "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": 112, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "97\n\nthe barrel resting on a second man's shoulder.\n\nKang sì: a baked mud or brick bed used in northern Chinese homes, warmed in winter by hot air from the kitchen flue passing through it.\n\nKo-ino Hul #₺★ : A powerful secret society; the Elder Brother Society, membership to which was strictly forbidden by the Ch’ing government and punishable by death.\n\nKowtow : 'knock the head': The ceremony of prostration common in China, chiefly performed before the emperor, in religious ceremonies, and by inferiors to superiors as an humble apology.\n\nInternational Settlement together with the French Concession [Shanghai]: Colonial enclaves where privileges but not political control were enjoyed. The Municipal Council of the International Settlement, against which Mesny occasionally railed, eventually regarded itself as independent even of the UK and US Governments. Most foreigners regarded their presence in Shanghai, despite increasing Chinese nationalism, as in the best interests of the Chinese. Foreigners were divided socially and economically into businessmen, officials of all kinds including police officers and customs officials, missionaries and others such as be-shored seamen, refugees, later mainly White Russians and German Jews, and 'stayed-on' westerners who had married Chinese women or had nowhere better to go.\n\nLartigue railway system: Mesny would appear to have been acting as the local agent for the Lartigue Railway Construction Company in China [in 1886] though whether authorised on a retainer or on commission we shall probably never know. The Lartigue system was invented during the 1880s by Charles Lartigue, a French inventor who, having observed how camel loads were balanced on either side of the animal, invented a monorail which after a tentative experiment in France was chosen as the system to be used for the Bally-Bunion to Lisowel Railway in a remote corner of Ireland in 1888.\n\nThere is no indication that the line Mesny proposed between Wu-sung and Shanghai, ever got beyond Mesny's fertile imagination. Wu-sung, the town at the junction of the Yangtze and the river which leads up to Shanghai, was where ships first berthed before sailing up the Wu-sung River to Shanghai,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212804, "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": 113, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "98\n\nLikin ✰✰ : [li-chín] An arbitrary tax, originally of one cash per tael 釐金 on all kinds of produce, known to foreigners as the 'tax of one-thousandth', imposed in 1853 with a view to making up the deficiency in the land tax caused by the Taiping and Nien-fei troubles. Hence its common term, a 'war tax'.\n\nLorcha: A vessel having a hull of Chinese build but rigged with European masts and sails, and usually manned by a European captain and a Chinese crew.\n\nMace: The tenth part of a Chinese tael [q.v.] or ounce.\n\nMiao-tzu #7: shoots or sons of the soil: one of the larger of the southern Chinese aboriginal non-Chinese races subjugated by the Chinese, whose revolt in the 1860s lead to Mesny being employed by the Chinese army. This was not their first revolt; they had rebelled against Imperial rule at the end of the eighteenth century when their widespread revolt in Kueichou and Hunan provinces was put down with great difficulty owing to the mountains and forests covering that part of the world.\n\nMixed Courts: Instituted in 1865 in the Shanghai International Settlements [q.v.] for the hearing of cases between Chinese residents in the Settlements, between Chinese and foreign residents, and where foreigners were the defendants, provided always that they were unrepresented by a Consul on the spot. All suits were tried by a Chinese official having the rank of sub-Prefect, with the assistance, in cases where foreigners were concerned, of an assessor of the same nationality.\n\nMuslim Rebellion: the rebellion in the northern Chinese provinces of Shensi and Kansu between 1862 and 1873.\n\nNanking: the major city on the Yangtze and capital of Ming China. The 'Southern Capital', held by the Taipings from 1850 to 1864.\n\nNestorian Christians: The church which first introduced Christianity into China, at the close of the 6th century AD.\n\nNien-fei : [lit. The Twisting Robbers], The official designation of the large bodies of rebels who ravaged the plains of north China for a number of years. They referred to themselves as Nien-Tzu [The Coilers or Twisters] from their peculiar manner of formation in battle. The Nien", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212805, "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": 114, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "99\n\nrebellion [1851-1868], led by Chang Lo-hsing, was a rising of impoverished peasants against the Manchu dynasty in the area to the north of the Huai River. It was defeated by the local Huai Army under Li Hung-chang into whose army many Nien were enlisted for service in the troubles in the North-west.\n\nNingpo: a treaty port on the coast of the eastern province of Chekiang.\n\nPai-lou: an ornamental archway in memory of a deceased person of exceptional chastity, loyalty or filial piety.\n\nSeals [Mandarin]: Every Chinese official of any standing had a seal of office. [all seals, either government, business house (hong) or personal were usually referred to as 'chops' by foreigners]\n\nSedan chairs: Mesny was first carried by two bearers but was upgraded to three shortly afterwards. The emperor alone was entitled to sixteen bearers, princes of the blood eight, and all other officials down to Prefect four, including District Magistrates if in office. Below this grade two was the rule. All tao-t'ai's rode in green chairs carried by four bearers, accompanied on their official visits by a great number of attendants, some of whom were bodyguards, the others bearers of the insignias of office.\n\n'Self-Strengthening': a Chinese term denoting the policy of selective adoption of western technology and institutions between 1860 and 1895. One of the main proponents was Li Hung-chang about whom Mesny wrote many complimentary and other not so complimentary comments.\n\nSquares: pu-tzu: Square badges denoted the nine grades of official ranks in later dynastic China, worn front and back of the official's surcoat. They were some twelve inches square, embroidered in various designs, portraying, for example, a silver pheasant for a civil official grade 5, and a tiger for a grade 4 military official.\n\nSqueeze: applied both as a verb and substantive to peculation of any kind. Originally it was the commission Chinese servants, fully in accordance with Chinese custom, charged their masters on all articles purchased.\n\nTa Ch'ing**: The Great Pure Dynasty: The name of the last Imperial", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212806, "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": 115, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "100\n\ndynasty in China. It was a non-Chinese dynasty, being Manchu, founded by invaders from Manchuria, with Manchu garrisons stationed at the most important points in the empire. It was established in the capital at Peking in 1644. The military arm of the Manchus was referred to as Tartar, with a Tatar-general commanding Manchu garrisons.\n\nTael: Liang : a Chinese ounce in weight [one third heavier than the avoirdupois weight] derived from the Hindu 'tola'. It was the given weight of silver used in commercial reckonings, and was not a coin. Taels varied in value; there were the long taels of the Imperial maritime Customs and the short taels of Shanghai.\n\n[Mesny notes that the rate of exchange in 1860 was six shillings and eight pence to the silver tael; and in 1868 he noted that 10 taels of silver were worth just over £3.] see also under 'Cash'.\n\nTaiping : the name given to the rebellion which raged over much of central China between 1850 and 1864. Literally \"The Great Peace\" though it is usually translated as the \"Heavenly Peace\". Its founders were influenced by Protestant Christian beliefs as well as misunderstood foreign concepts. The Christian beliefs led many western missionaries to admire the Taipings and created a hope that a Taiping victory would lead to some form of Christianisation of China. However, after the leader, who had declared that he was the son of God and a younger brother of Jesus, led a life of ease in his capital at Nanking, and his armies, though comparatively competent, had been defeated, he committed suicide.\n\nTao-t'ai : a civil official post referred to regularly by Mesny. A tao-t'ai was an Imperial Circuit Intendant, a member of the hierarchy controlling several prefectures, e.g. the Tao-t'ai of Shanghai Hsien.\n\nTartar general : [see under Ta Ch'ing above] Manchu commanders of the Manchu garrisons in key cities in China. Their presence was meant as a check upon the actions of civil authorities.\n\nT'i-t'ai : A high provincial official in charge of the military administration of his province as regards native troops; the Manchu force was under the exclusive command of the Tartar general.\n\nTracking: a common practice whereby scores if not hundreds of coolies were employed to tow junks against the stream up the Yangtze Gorges,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212807, "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": 116, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "101\n\neach harnessed and stripped to the waist, fighting the torrent.\n\nTreaty ports: Ports opened to foreign trade and residence under what the Chinese have always regarded as 'unequal treaties'.\n\nTsung-li Yamen : The Foreign Affairs Bureau of the late Ch'ing dynasty, established after the capture of Peking in 1860 by the Allied forces. It was the channel of communication between foreign Ministers resident in Peking and the throne.\n\nTsung-tu #: the Viceroy or Governor-General of one or more provinces within which he had the general control of all civil and military affairs and was subject only to the throne.\n\nWai-sing Lottery: lit: examination of names, a kind of sweepstake, once a very popular form of gambling amongst the Cantonese, on the result of the public examination for the second degree. The holder of a successful candidate's name being the winner of a greater or lesser sum according to position on the published list.\n\nWei-yuan A: a delegate staff officer, a special delegate or Expectant Appointee on ad hoc duty.\n\nWhite Lily Sect [Pai-lien Chiao] was a more serious rebellion at the end of the eighteenth century. This secret society, originally founded in opposition to Mongol domination several centuries earlier, had been revived in order to get rid of the alien Manchu rule of the Ch'ing dynasty. It broke out in western Hupei in 1796 and for nearly nine years taxed China's resources to the utmost. Although Mesny was not involved his and their paths crossed on occasion.\n\nYamen : The official and private residence of any 'mandarin', officials who held a seal, a government office.\n\nYing #: usually a battalion but not uncommonly, a force of a number of battalions.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212808, "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": 117, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Masny's Chinoso Miscellany \n\n[20L, Mny, 1905 \n\nMESNY'S MISCELLANY \n\n著尼士麥通會英華 \n\n上 \n\nJ: \n\nㄓ \n\nLA \n\n名表 ㄩ院投硗费院浣走到洗水!* *很勉署使没到保讓擔保 \n\n刘丹福游新洗贤将出堤 提士四成四成陕渐成铜 鉄十街压治四四学生各 此三門仔 \n\n尼址都川都长江數雄 州 麻份餐將督將推巡十兵 靈能院院医出单街 \n\n恩您 大賞東 \n\n者济龙格 加發愣 \n\n大江路 育协輪五维网辦小 \n\n辦氘饪廷辦投三舉辦高华 \n\nㆭ传院洋効代六洋會 械時半罪格令二月岐 楼 六 \n\n露八浩英辦阁 問州將车贼法断治副 \n\n街十姦女红元将 \n\n洲让些儿卬帮封又传阀 二 賞月 七發輝火 \n\n巴 \n\n洲印刷 放心黯京将門 \n\n花 \n\n本年六三款並 \n\n製 \n\n以 \n\n解 \n\n菜刀 \n\n精+平六月到上海硯電知 \n\n七八年刀花皮 * 单厅眾應大拾 \n\n滋正險 张剑五 月驛 旋飲日赴問迅 \n\n進 願 \n\n.T \n\n請勇 \n\n武川 \n\n英 \n\n招粉漓 \n\n假在巴 \n\n藉並登 \n\n四拾名 \n\n全車 \n\n邱札選 \n\nH \n\n十行款 \n\n月如此 \n\nሀ¢ተ \n\n國光里 \n\n經絡 \n\n宿 出 \n\n近二悉 \n\n力 \n\n斕 \n\n三浒 \n\nTA \n\n月清 \n\n糖 \n\nR \n\n-+- \n\n課 \n\n嫩 \n\n岚 \n\n光壬寅年九月初九日百吨於 \n\n企邱光復香城山且案保加副行街嗣父克医请苏导城尔 阿川安染快攻克黄平州城啟 \n\n克妞 \n\n四去英 \n\n驚 戴全 數 於命 \n\n旋刀整人 \n\n湖六生 \n\n同规羊於 \n\n采光 \n\nPhoto of Yours Respectfully. \n\nMcany. \n\nN winter uniform. Tung Chih 9th year 2nd moon 5th day, 1870. Hat Decorated \n\nIN \n\nwith the Hua Ling flowery plume \n\nwith clear blue button of the third degree. The brevet rank of Colonel, Tsan Chiang Hsien, and decoration of the flowory plume or peacocks feather, Shang-tai IIua Ling 筓戴花覦 \n\n同 \n\n岸 \n\n信 \n\n欽行即因督同總年叫成行理命 治 道為便准查議治門理正川,知拨二 九將連知此轉此照欽八爷月總黔品札 .銜單冊札合可此年秦十督將軍頂 年英帝途你知就也和十獎入部一治務 \n\n薪紙此該照札 肥一周務山堂車九四按 丹麥札英等行 抄月革衙准 年川察 士右 商因為 二商門 吳崇二即使 初尼札 奉此原麥 札 月祈街 推 士此札 葵五士咨 開 初道辦 亚北花 \n\n尼合仰 []尼所 同五唐 颁 即就該行一次 治区 豬便札道 貴片本 九米$ \n\n五此花 花合所 \n\n韭", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212809, "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": 118, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "316\n\nMESNY'S CHINESE MISCELLANY\n\n1420. HSIANG SHAN HSIEH ш:-\n\nThe Hsiang Shan Brigade, composed of two regiments. Each regiment is commanded by a Tu-stu, Major, who has a Shou-pei, or Second Major, for his Adjutant. At the same time the Major commanding the Left Wing Regiment performs the duties of Brigade-Major and Adjutant to the Brigadier-General. Each regiment is divided into two Shao or companies, called in both cases the Tso Yu Shao, or Left and Right (Wing) companies. Each company is commanded by a Ch'ien-tsung, Captain, who is assisted by a Tou Ssu Pa-tsung, First-Lieutenant, and a Er-ssu Pa-tsung, Second-Lieutenant, thus giving a total of seventeen officers for the whole brigade, besides the usual complement of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\n1421. TA PENG HSIEH :-The Ta Peng Hsich Brigade stationed at Chinese Kowloong, opposite the British Colony of Hong-kong.\n\nThe brigade as usual is commanded by a Brigadier-General, Fu Chiang, or Isich Tai, called Hip Toi in Cantonese.\n\nThe brigade has a Tu-ssu, Major, as Adjutant to the General, but it is composed of two battalions, only each commanded by a Shou-pei or Second-Major. Each battalion is divided into the usual Left and Right (Wing) Companies or Shao, having a Ch'ien-tsung for Captain to each Company, with Tou and a Er-ssu Pa-tsung, First and Second-Lieutenant, besides the usual number of non-commissioned officers and men, thus giving a total of sixteen officers.\n\n1422. CHIEH SHIH CHEN # #- The Chieh Shih Chen division, composed of a staff corps or Chên Piao of three regiments and a territorial regiment called the Ping Hai Ying.\n\nJan. 9th, 1896.\n\nmanded by a Ts'an Chiang, or Colonel. Each regiment has a Shou-pei, or Second-Major as adjutant.\n\nThe Lieutenant-Colonel commanding the central regiment acts as the General's Adjutant. Each regiment is divided into the usual left and right wing companies, and is commanded by a Chien tsung, Captain, assisted by a Tou-ssá Pa-tsung, First-Lieutenant, and a Er-ssu Pa-tsung, Second-Lieutenant, in each case, thus giving a total of twenty-four officers for the staff corps, besides the usual complement of non-commissioned officers and men to each regiment, besides the General.\n\n1423. PING HAI YING\n\nThe division is commanded by a Tsung Ping, or Chen Tai, Lieutenant-General. The central and left wing regiments of the staff corps are each commanded by a Yu-chi, Lieutenant-Colonel; the Right Wing Regiment is commanded by a Tu-ssu, or Major, the Territorial Regiment is commanded by a Ts'an Chiang, Colonel.\n\n-The Ping Hai Regiment. This territorial regiment, as I have said, forms part of the Chieh Shih division, and is commanded by a Ts'an Chiang, Colonel, who has a Shou-pei, or Second-Major, for his Adjutant. The regiment is also divided into two companies, each having a Chien-tsung, Captain, a Tou-ssŭ Pa-tsung, First-Lieutenant, and a Er-ssŭ Pa-tsung, Second-Lieutenant, that gives eight officers, besides non-commissioned officers and men.\n\n1424. NAN AO CHÊN YU YING ★ UЯ6\n\n-The Nan Ao (or Namao as it is pronounced locally) division has but two staff regiments, Tso Yu Liang Ying, and one of them, the left wing regiment, is paid and equipped by the government of Fu-kien province, as the station is partly in Fu-kien territory and partly only in Kuang-tung territory. The Right Wing Regiment, belonging to this province, is commanded by a Yu-chi, Lieutenant-Colonel, who has a Shou-pei, Second-Major, for his Adjutant.\n\nThe regiment is divided into two Shao or companies, each commanded by a Chien-tsung, Captain, assisted by a First and Second-Lieutenant, thus giving nine officers, including the General, besides the usual complement of non-commissioned officers and men. Beside its staff regiments the Nan Ao division has two territorial regiments and one territorial battalion in the Kuang-tung province.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212810, "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": 119, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Jan. 9th, 1896.\n\nMESNY'S CHINESE MISCELLANY.\n\n1425. CHENG HAI YING-This territorial regiment is commanded by a Tsan Chiang, Colonel, who has a Shou-pei, or Second-Major, for his Adjutant. The regiment is divided into two battalions, each of which is commanded by a Shou-pei, Second-Major; each battalion is also divided into two Shao or wing companies. Each company being commanded by a Chien-tsung, Captain, assisted by a First and Second-Lieutenant, thus giving a total of sixteen officers, besides the usual complement of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\n1426. HAI MEN YING-The Hai Men Regiment. This Territorial Regiment also forms part of the Nan Ao Division in this province, and is commanded by a Tsan Chiang, Colonel, who has a Shou-pei, or Second-Major, for his Adjutant. The regiment is divided into the usual two (left and right wing) companies, each of which is commanded by a Chien-tsung, Captain. The left company having a First and Second-Lieutenant, the right company having a First, Second and Third-Lieutenant, which gives a total of nine officers, besides the usual number of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\nThe Ta\n\n1427. TA HAO YING Hao Ying is a Territorial Battalion also forming part of the Nan Ao Division.\n\nIt is commanded by a Shou-pei, or Second-Major, under the orders of the Colonel of the Hai men Regiment.\n\nBesides the Commandant of the Battalion there is a Chien-tsung, Captain, a Tou-ssu Pa-tsung, First-Lieutenant, and a Er-ssu Pa-tsung, Second-Lieutenant, with the usual number of non-commissioned officers and men under them.\n\n1428. YANG CHIANG CHEN The Yang-chiang Division. The division was lately transferred to Pakhoi, or the neighbourhood, with the name of Pei-hai Chên derived from the port of Pakhoi, but I have not yet learnt whether the staff officers and men remain as before whilst at Yang-chiang. The Yang-chiang division was composed of two staff regiments.\n\nThe first called the Tso ying, or left (wing) regiment, was commanded by a Yu-chi, or Lieutenant-Colonel, who was also the General's Adjutant; the Regimental Adjutant as usual being a Shou-pei, Major. The regiment is divided into two or Shao companies; the one being a territorial company its captain is called the Chun Cheng Chien-tsung, and he has the assistance of a Tou-ssu Pa-tsung, First-Lieutenant, and a Er-ssu Pa-tsung, Second-Lieutenant, in the ordinary manner, but the Yu Shao, or right (wing) company has, besides its Chien-tsung, or Captain, no less than four Lieutenants, styled respectively Tou-ssu, Er-ssu, San-ssu and Ssu-ssu Pa-tsung with a corresponding number of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\nThe Right Wing Regiment of the Yang Chiang staff corps is commanded by a Major, who has a Shou-pei, or Second-Major, as his Adjutant. The regiment is also divided into two wing companies or Shao in the usual way, each with a Captain and two Lieutenants to a company, besides the usual number of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\n1429. CHIN CH'I HSIEH Chi Chi Brigade. This is composed of its own two battalions, besides one Territorial Regiment and two Territorial Battalions, all of which also form part of the Yang Chiang Division.\n\nThe head-quarters of the Chi Chi Brigade are quite near Macao. Its two Wing Battalions are each commanded by a Tu-ssu, Major, the left (wing) Commandant being also the General's Adjutant. Each battalion is divided into two Shao or companies, each of which is commanded by a Chien-tsung, Captain, who is assisted by First and Second-Lieutenant, thus giving a total of fifteen officers, including the General, besides the usual complement of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\n1430. WU CH'UAN YING: The Wu Chuan Regiment. This Territorial Regiment is commanded by a Tu-ssu, Major, subject to the orders of the Chi Chi, Brigadier-General,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212811, "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": 120, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "918 \n\nMESNY'S CHINESE MISCELLANY.\n\nand he has a Shou-pei, or Second-Major for his Adjutant.\n\nThe regiment is divided into the usual Left and Right (Wing) Companies, or Shao, each of which is commanded by a Chien-tsung, Captain, who is assisted by a First and Second-Lieutenant, thus giving a total of eight officers to this regiment, besides the usual number of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\n1431. CHIEH-CHOU YING - The Chieh Chou Battalion. This Territorial Battalion is commanded by a Tu-ssu, Major, subject to the orders of the Chih Ch'i, Brigadier-General,\n\nand as such also under the orders of the Yang-chiang, Lieutenant-General. The battalion consists of a single company commanded by a Chien-tsung, Captain, who is assisted by a First, Second and Third-Lieutenant, besides the usual complement of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\n1432. TUNG SHAN YING - The Tung Shan Battalion. This Territorial Battalion is commanded by a Shou-pei, Second-Major, also subject to the orders of the Chih Ch'i, Brigadier-General, and thus also forming part of the Yang-chiang Division.\n\nIn one copy of the Red Book that I have this very battalion is placed as under the orders of the Colonel of the Lei chou, Territorial Regiment, but the Provincial List has it placed as above.\n\nIt has a Chien-tsung, Captain, described as a Shui Shih and a Lieutenant, described as a Shui Shih Pa-tsung, besides one Lieutenant, simply described as Pa-tsung (I suppose the Shui Shih officers are afloat), thus giving a total of four officers, besides non-commissioned officers and men.\n\nJan. 9th, 1896.\n\nSecond-Lieutenant in both companies, thus giving a total of eight officers, besides the usual complement of non-commissioned officers and men. This regiment ought to form part of the Chiung-chou, or Hainan Division.\n\n1433. HAI KOU YING - The Hai-kou Regiment. This Territorial Regiment is stationed at the Treaty Port of Hoihow (Hainan Island), and is commanded by a Ts'an-chiang, Colonel, who has a Shou-pei, Second-Major, for his Adjutant. It also forms part of the Yang chiang Division, and is divided into two Shao or companies, each of which is commanded by a Chien-tsung, Captain, assisted by a First and Second-Lieutenant.\n\n1434. LUNG MÊN HSIEH - The Lung Min Brigade. This is an important brigade. Its head-quarters are near the frontiers of Tung-king, as well as on the coast. At the present moment the French are in possession of some town in the neighbourhood, which the Chinese commissioners claim as Chinese territory. The brigade is composed of two wing regiments, Tso Yu liang Ying. Each regiment is commanded by a Tu-ssu, Major, who has a Shou-pei, or Second-Major for his Adjutant. The commandant of the left (wing) regiment is also Brigade-Major and Adjutant to the Brigadier-General. Each regiment is divided into two left and right (wing) Shao or companies. Each company is commanded by a Chien-tsung, Captain, who is assisted by a First, and Second-Lieutenant, thus giving a total of seventeen officers, including the General, besides the usual complement of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\nA number of war junks and a few steamers are also attached to this brigade, I am told, but I suspect the steamers are not worth much.\n\n1435. HAI AN YING - The Hai-an Regiment. This Territorial Regiment is commanded by a Yu-chi, Lieutenant-Colonel, who has a Shou-pei, Second-Major, for his Adjutant, and the commandant is to a certain extent under the orders of the Lung men Brigadier-General.\n\nThe regiment is divided into the usual left and right wings, Shao or companies, each of which is commanded by a Ch'ien-tsung, Captain, who is assisted by a First and Second-Lieutenant, thus giving a total of eight officers, besides the usual complement of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\n1436. AI CHOU HSIEH - The Ai Chou Brigade. This brigade is composed of\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212812, "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": 121, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Jan. 9th, 1896.\n\nMESNY'S Chinese MISCELLANY.\n\nland and sea forces, and its head-quarters are on the coast of Hai-nan Island. It furnishes a marine battalion to the sea-coast naval force. The marine battalion is called Ai Chou Hsieh Shui Shih Yu Ying, or the Right Wing Marine Battalion of the Ai Chou Brigade. It is commanded by a Shou-pei, Second-Major, who is assisted by a Shui Shih Chien-tsung, Naval Captain, two Shui Shih Pa-tsung, First and Second Naval Lieutenants, besides the usual number of non-commissioned officers and men.\n\nThe remainder of the brigade forms part of the land forces of the Hai-nan division Ch'ing Chou.\n\n1437. KUANG-TUNG SHUI SHIH KE CHUN LUN CH'UAN 廣東水師各軍輪船\n\n:-The Steam Naval Forces of Kuang-tung province, or the Canton Provincial Steam Fleet. In the year 1884 there were altogether fifty-six steam vessels of various sorts and sizes belonging to the provincial authorities of Kuang-tung.\n\nThe best of the steamers, the Fei Chao Hai, Chên-jui and An Lan, are neither new, powerful nor fast, though serviceable craft for sea-going gun-boats. Some of the others are of the alphabetical class, but they have been so badly kept that they are far from reliable as to steam power. Some of the vessels are hardly fit to go to sea; though not old in point of age they are not sound, and never were very swift or powerful, even for their class. The rest are nothing better than pleasure boats or steam launches for riverine purposes.\n\nCANTON GUN-BOAT SQUADRON,\n\n \n Name\n Flug and Rig.\n Guns.\n Tons.\n H.P.\n \n \n Chee-hing\n cruiser\n 7\n 450\n 265\n \n \n An-lan\n gun-boat\n 2\n 80\n 20\n \n \n Chên-jui\n cruiser\n -\n -\n -\n \n \n Chên-to\n gun-boat\n 7\n 450\n 265\n \n \n Chop-chung\n gun-boat\n 5\n 500\n 300\n \n \n Chop-sai\n gun-boat\n 3\n 80\n 17\n \n \n Hai-chong-ching\n gun-boat\n -\n 320\n 200\n \n \n Hai-king-ching\n gun-boat\n 4\n 320\n 200\n \n \n Hoi-tung-hung\n -\n 3\n 350\n -\n \n \n Lien-chi\n gun-boat\n 3\n 200\n -\n \n \n Peng-chao-hai\n cruiser\n 3\n 450\n 310\n \n \n Quang-on\n gun-boat\n 3\n 155\n 100\n \n \n San-hing\n gun-boat\n 3\n 150\n 100\n \n \n Tching-on\n gun-boat\n 3\n 150\n 100\n \n \n Tching-po\n gun-boat\n 3\n 150\n 100\n \n \n Tchun-tung\n gun-boat\n 3\n 170\n 100\n \n\nN.B. Some of these vessels have now been condemned.\n\nBy order of the Viceroy of the Two Kuang Provinces (Chang Chih-tung) seventeen of the most serviceable war steamers have been formed into a fleet, called Shui Shih Chin Kor Naval Corps. Each of these ships is called a Shao or company. Four ships, Shao or companies, form a Ying, battalion, or squadron, and four Ying, or squadrons form the Chun, or Corps (may be fleet.) The odd ship is the Peng Chao Hai, and serves as flag ship for the commandant of the fleet, who is styled Tung-ling, and is also commander of his own flag-ship. His titular rank is Tu-ssü, or Major (just now), was, when appointed, Shou-pei, Second Major only.\n\n1438. CHAO CH'ING SHUI SHIH YING -The Chao-ch'ing Naval or Marine Regiment.\n\nThis regiment, although forming part of the Riverine Naval Force, is actually a part of the Governor-General's Staff Corps, and is usually styled the Tu Piao Shui Shih Ying on that account.\n\nThe Governor-General of the Two Kuang Provinces was formerly stationed at Chao-ch'ing Fu, a prefectural city some hundred miles or so from Canton on the north bank of the West River, hence the reason why five of the six regiments forming his Staff Corps are stationed there to this day.\n\nThe Chao-ch'ing Naval Regiment is commanded by a Tu Chiang, Colonel, whose Adjutant is a Shou-pei, Second-Major. The regiment is divided into two Shao or companies, each of which is commanded by a Chien-tsung, Captain, assisted by two Pa-tsung, Lieutenants, and the usual complement of Wai Wei, Sub-Lieutenants and non-commissioned officers.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212813, "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": 122, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "320\n\nMESNY'S CHINESE MISCELLANY.\n\nThe total strength of the regiment is thus: One Colonel, one Second-Major, two Captains, four Lieutenants, four Sub-Lieutenants, two Sergeants, four Corporals, two Lance Corporals and about 650 to 700 men.\n\nThe strength of this regiment is, however, very much increased by over one hundred and thirty gun-boats and a score or so of old ones. Each new gun-boat is manned by one officer and nine men on a peace footing, to which are added one officer and five men in times of war. The old gun-boats have two officers and over twenty men each, and some of them cruise down in the neighbourhood of the Bogue Forts.\n\nThe new gun-boats thus give a complement of 1,300 officers and men in times of peace and over 2,000 in times of war, to be added to the strength of the above naval regiment, besides a proportionate number of commissioned officers.\n\n1439. PAN FEI-A favourite concubine of Tung Hun Hou, the last but one of the Sovereigns of the Ch'i dynasty, A.D. 499-501.\n\nThe practice of cramping the feet of Chinese girls is ascribed to her by some writers. Mayers says: \"She is celebrated for her beauty and grace, and it is related of her (but on untrustworthy grounds) that the practice of artificially cramping the feet was introduced under her auspices See Yao Niang. Her imperial lover is said to have uttered one day, when gazing at her performances in the dance upon a platform ornamented with golden lilies the amorous expression: 'Every footstep makes a lily grow!' and hence the term Chin Lien metaphorically used for the feet of women is said to have taken its rise. In allusion to the same traditions the expression Lien Kou (lily hooks) is also applied in celebrating this charm of woman-kind.\" The term Chin Lien really means Golden Lotus, not Golden Lilies, frequently translated by foreign writers, and in like manner means the term Lien Kou Lotus Hooks. I have often heard the nicely cramped feet of women described as I tui lien hua, i.e., a brace or pair of lotus flowers.\n\n1440. CHOU TICH CHÈN : The battle name of Chou-han the malicious. The rabid anti-foreign Hu-nan man, who has done so much harm to China and to the Chinese by stirring up animosity against foreigners instead of friendliness, adopted as a battle name the characters Tich-chen, which means True as Iron, or \"True as steel\" Chou Han has now fallen, and is ruined, and he is bound to die a miserable death, like everybody else who gets in the way of Christian progress. The following two characters-Tich-chen —may now be substituted for the two so boastfully selected by himself.\n\nHu-nan is bound to be opened to foreign trade and friendly intercourse with foreign nations. No mortal man even yet kicked against Christianity without hurting himself. Chou Han is as good as dead, or he ought to be dead.\n\n1441. AI YEH -The leaves of Artemisia Moxa, q.v. This is considered a lucky plant. On the fifth day of the fifth moon every family gets a few leaves to hang over the house doors. When dry and rubbed up it answers the purposes of punk or tinder, and may be lighted with flint and steel by striking fire over the punk in the usual manner. It is also burnt to drive away insects, or mosquitoes at least, and is very useful as such.\n\n1442. I-TS'AO-Healing Herbs, Medicinal Herbs, Drugs, Artemisia Moxa, q.v.\n\n1443. AI-HO-Punk made from the dry leaves of the Artemisia Moxa, q.v., and used as a cautery in various cases of disease, and burning the scars seen on the head of all properly initiated Buddhist priests. Each scar represents a vow to abstain from evil and perform good deeds.\n\nA full Index will be issued every Six Months.\n\nJan. 9th, 1896.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212814, "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": 123, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "WÊN-KAO WILLIAM MESNY\n\nWith Complimentary Tablets presented by the late Marquis Tso Tsung-tang.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212816, "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": 125, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Marie Watson, née Wan-er Mesny daughter of William Mesny by Madam Han, with her son and daughter, Reginald and Ivy Watson [undated]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212817, "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": 126, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Jersey Post Office Commemorative Stamps William Mesny 150th Anniversary of his Birth, 1992\n\n―\n\nJERSEY\n\n1860, William Mesny, Shanghai\n\nV. Ambrus\n\n1992\n\n1860, William Mesny, Shanghai\n\nJERSEY\n\n1862.\n\nV. Ambrus\n\n1992\n\n1862, Running the Taiping Blockade\n\n16P\n\nCartor\n\nCarlor", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212818, "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": 127, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "JERSEY\n\n1877, Mesny accompanies Gill, to Burma\n\nV. Ambrus\n\n1992\n\n1877, Mesny accompanies Gill to Burma\n\nJERSEY\n\n1874, General Mesny, River Gate\n\nV. Ambrus\n\n1992\n\nPage 22\n\n1874, General Mesny, River Gate\n\nPage 22\n\nPage 22\n\nCartor\n\n2\n\nCarlor", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214300, "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": 158, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "122\n\nhis birth and childhood, and my favourite stamping ground in China Taiyuan, the capital of Shansi province, to his first wife, the daughter of John Mesny, a junior employee of the Chinese Imperial Customs Service, the life of whose elder brother, William Mesny, was the subject of my earlier research [vide.: my paper in the Journal of the RAS HK Branch: Volume 32, 1992]. Sowerby roamed far and wide throughout northern China before serving for a while in France as an officer with the Chinese Labour Corps [vide: my Note on Chinese Labour Corps Graves in England in the Journal of the RAS HK Branch Volume 29, 1989]. He then visited Fukien province and met Caldwell whose book on the Blue Tigers of that province had intrigued me when I was much younger. Finally, I was drawn to Sowerby's life story because he was not only a dedicated member of the North China Branch of the RAS in Shanghai for whom he wrote prolifically and eventually became its President, an honour he held for some five years, 1935-1940 but also because he produced his fascinating bimonthly journal on both everyday and exotic Chinese subjects. Since his death nearly fifty years ago he has faded into insignificance and is forgotten by all but those who happen to come across his books and journals.\n\nArthur Sowerby was an explorer and author who lived through very exciting times, first as the son of a Christian missionary in the Chinese interior at the time of the decline of the Manchu dynasty, through the Revolution of 1911 and the fall of the Manchu dynasty to the War Lord period during which he roamed some of the more remote areas of northern China. This was followed by the crises and struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists, the incursions and eventual full-scale invasion by the Japanese, his incarceration in an internment camp in Shanghai during the Second World War, ending with learning during his latter years in retirement, first in England and then in the United States, of the Communist victory in 1949 and, just before his death, of the Korean War when China sent its \"Volunteers\" to aid the North Koreans against the South Koreans and their allies which included the Americans and British. During the last thirty-five or so years of his life he suffered great pain wracked as he was by arthritis.\n\nIt was said that he could speak Chinese ‘like a Chinese.' There is no reason to doubt this as he must have learned it at his ayah's knee though he appears never to have made any effort to learn to read and write the language. During his life in China, the next forty or so years,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214310, "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": 168, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "132\n\nArthur Sowerby was recorded in the Directory & Chronicle of China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, etc. for the years 1932 and 1938 as manager of China Industries Ltd, with an office in Museum Road, Shanghai and in 1938, as a director of the Post-Mercury Company Inc., USA in Avenue Edward VII, also in Shanghai. The latter was involved in printing and advertising.\n\nArthur was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Fellow of the Zoological Society, a member of the RAS North China Branch and also President [1928] of the China Society of Science and Arts [in Shanghai], as well as being Honorary Director of the Shanghai [RAS] Museum.\n\niii\n\nHe married three times, the first time in about 1910, at the age of twenty-five, to Mary Anne Mesny, the daughter of John Mesny of the Chinese Customs Service. She would have been just about the same age as Arthur though more than likely his elder by a few years. She seems to have disappeared from the scene almost immediately, perhaps dying comparatively young but not before she bore him a son. She does not appear in any notes after their marriage even when his parents and sisters were evacuated from Taiyuan to the safety of Tientsin during riots. This suggests that she was no longer present after about 1911 or 1912. As Mary Anne's father, John Mesny, was married to a Chinese lady whom he married in Hankow in 1866, Mary Anne was half-Chinese. This was a time when mixed marriages and even more so, marriage to someone with native blood, was frowned upon by the more bigoted expatriates.\n\nHis second wife, to whom he was married at the age of forty-two in 1927, was Clarice Moise, the American with whom he founded the China Journal. Clarice died in 1944 during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.\n\nHis third wife was Alice Cowens, an old friend and the lady who had nursed Arthur's brother when he had been gassed during the First World War. She was invited to join Arthur in Shanghai in the Autumn of 1946 at a time when he was too ill to travel back to England alone and promptly flew out, first to Hong Kong and then, five days later, she arrived in Shanghai and married him.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214314, "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": 172, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "136\n\nI am grateful to the Reverend Carl Smith for the following information:\n\nAn announcement from a China mail of 1925. Married, at Shanghai, yesterday, Miss Clarice Sara Moise, to Mr. Arthur de Carle Sowerby, publisher of the China Journal of Arts and Science. Will of wife, Clarice Clara Sowerby, probated in Hong Kong in 1948, written in Shanghai 1933, in favour of her husband Arthur de Carle Sowerby of Shanghai, and son, Arthur Mesny de Carle Sowerby. Sister, Nina Ethel Moise. Will of Sowerby himself: Arthur etc., probated in Hong Kong, 1955, Arthur de Carle Sowerby, scientist, at present residing at Fairfax Hotel (?), 2100 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington DC. Wife, Alice Muriel Sowerby. If predeceased, sister-in-law, Nina Ethel Moise, 6485 San Marco Circle, Hollywood, to receive half; and son, Arthur Mesny de Carle Sowerby, to get the other half. Will written 7th November, 1949. A death record of Arthur de Carle Sowerby, 16th August 1954.\n\nCarl Smith also commented that it was known that Sowerby had children (sic) by a Chinese woman. It would appear that most expatriates in Shanghai were unaware of Sowerby's first marriage in Tientsin to William Mesny's niece, Mary Anne, and that the reference to the 'children by a Chinese woman,' remembering that Mary Anne's mother had been Chinese, suggests that Sowerby's first marriage had been quietly 'forgotten.'\n\ni The bandits were referred to as the Ko-lao Hui, the Elder Brother Society, an old powerful secret society, membership to which was strictly forbidden by the Ch'ing government and punishable by death. Their gangs robbed and killed far and wide as well as causing trouble with their inter-gang feuding.\n\nii The British Residents' Association was formed in 1931 to enable long-term residents to have a say in the running of the Concession. At about the same time, in order to support the authorities in the Concession following the recent troubles and crises, a body known as the Shanghai Fascisti was organised, and led for a while by Sowerby. The Fascists at this time were regarded by many as an honourable force against encroaching communism.\n\niii John Mesny died in 1884 in Hankow leaving a widow and eight children, all under the age of sixteen.\n\niv Davidson-Houston, JV: Armed Pilgrimage : Robert Hale Ltd : London: 1949\n\nv Journal of Oriental Studies Vol. II. No. 1. January 1955 [University of Hong Kong]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215112, "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-2000", "page_number": 208, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "165\n\nIn 755, during the revolt of An Lushan, Guo helped defend the capital, and in 760 he was despatched to recover territory from Central Asian barbarians and finally, three years after the Turfans [Uighurs] had captured the capital, Guo raised an army and drove them out, more by cunning than military force. The disasters which broke out during the declining years of the Tang Ming Huang emperor were suppressed chiefly by the vigour and determination with which Guo wrested province after province from the hands of the insurgents. He spent a considerable part of his life in warfare and was uniformly successful.\n\nHis images in temples in Northern and Central China usually portrayed him as an old mandarin, with a parted beard, both halves held separately in each of his hands, and with a tiered hat. Occasionally his image depicted him as an old man, sitting, with a long white beard and a white robe, carrying a ruyi sceptre engraved with the four characters for 'Everything shall be as You Desire'. According to one sect, the Jin Dan H., Guo is said to have founded the sect in collaboration with Lü Dongbin, the doctor of renown and one of the Eight Immortals. His image on altars in Sichuan was referred to as Cifu Tianguan14 where he was regarded as a God of Wealth.\n\nNo images of Guo have been noted on temple altars in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau or South-east Asia, though a temple in Haikang in Tainan county bears the hall title of Fenyang Dian and contains on its main altar not an image of him but one of a local provincial cult deity, Guangze Zunwang, the patron of the Guo clan.\n\nBoth Mesny and Timothy RichardR claim that Guo Ziyi was a follower of Nestorian Christianity, Mesny even claiming that Guo's name was carved on the famous Nestorian tablet at Xi'an.\n\nWe move on to images of the two major deified heroes of the era on temple altars who have had their historic figures embellished by tea-house story-tellers down the centuries include:\n\nZhang Xun✯ and Xu Yuan,F are heroes of renown and unique deities whose images have been seen on temple altars in Zhejiang, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South-east Asia [Photographs 6 and 7]. Both are protective deities worshipped particularly by the southern Fukienese, both within Fujian province and in southern Fukienese", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215120, "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-2000", "page_number": 216, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "173\n\ncharacteristics. Plopper in his Chinese Religion seen Through the Proverb : Shanghai : 1935 claimed that Lao Lang was also the patron of prostitutes.\n\nMeng Fu Langjun f. otherwise known as Langjun Ye, NB\n\nwhose\n\n{1\n\n24\n\n0\n\nimage has been noted in Lukang in western Taiwan, is the patron of the southern school of woodwinds.\n\nHe is known by this title which describes his position once he fled to the West from Chang'an ahead of the pursuing rebel forces.\n\nThis lengthy legend basically tells of the emperor's challenge to Zhang Tianshi to use his magic to stop the noise of heavenly music which, unbeknownst to Zhang was being performed by 360 musicians concealed in a cellar. Zhang stopped the music by killing the lot in one swoop with his magic. The emperor, horrified at what he had done, had them all deified as Plague Gods.\n\nZhi Nú is the Weaving Girl in the legend of the Weaving Girl and the Cowherd.\n\nMesny Wm. Mesny's Chinese Miscellany: Shanghai : 1899\n\nRichard T : The Secret Sects of China : The Chinese Inland Mission Handbook : 1896\n\nChaozhou is a city in eastern Guangdong province where their minority language is spoken.\n\nChuanzhou is a city in southern Fujian province and emigrants from both Chuanzhou and Chaozhou have settled in both Taiwan and South-east Asia.\n\n\"The discrepancies in dates is due to the varying versions provided by temple\n\n12\n\nattendants.\n\nA similar claim was made in Central China where the rain and crop deity, Doutian Yuanshuai BÆ, was believed to be an incarnation of Zhang Xun who, it was said, had intervened to assist the imperial forces during the Taiping wars ca. 1855 and had been awarded the title of Zhangwei\n\n13 Goodrich, A. S. : The Peking Temple of the Eastern Peak : Monumenta Serica : Nagoya : 1964", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215235, "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-2001", "page_number": 12, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "CONTENTS\n\nPRESIDENT'S REPORT\n\nFRIENDS OF THE HKBRAS (UK) REPORT\n\nHON. AUDITOR'S REPORT\n\nHON. LIBRARIAN'S REPORT\n\nARTICLES\n\npage\n\nxiv\n\nxxix\n\nxxxii\n\nxlii\n\nNorman Miners - Industrial Development in the Colonial Empire and the Imperial Economic Conference at Ottawa 1932...\n\n1\n\nGöran Aijmer - Earth God Wine and the Meeting of the Fluttering Butterflies: Local Customs of Early Spring in Late Imperial Central China...\n\n25\n\nKeith Stevens - The Popular Religion Gods of the Hainanese ...........\n\n43\n\nValery Garrett - Chinese Baby Carriers: A Hong Kong Tradition Now Gone\n\n95\n\nAnthony Hedley and Alfred Lin - The Lugard Tribute...............\n\n109\n\nCésar Guillén-Nuñez - The Façade of St. Paul's, Macao: A Retable-Façade?\n\nRobert Nield - Bhutan - Why Not?\n\n131\n\n189\n\nKo Tim-keung - A Review of Development of Cemeteries in Hong: 1841-1950........\n\n241\n\nLouis Ha and Dan Waters - Hong Kong's Lighthouses and the Men Who Manned Them\n\n281\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nKeith Stevens - A Tale of Sour Grapes: Messrs. Little and Mesny and the First Steamship Through the Yangzi Gorges\n\n321\n\nix", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215335, "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-2001", "page_number": 112, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "60\n\nundimmed, and taking command of an army, first in face of a threatened invasion by the dreaded Huns of Central Asia, and again later, in AD 48, to pacify the wild aboriginal tribes of Hunan. However, he died during the campaign in Hunan.\n\nReverend Henry15 referred to Fupo Jiangjun, as a Cantonese deity who had temples scattered along the vicinity of the Pearl and West Rivers where he was worshipped by boatmen and travellers. The reason for his popularity apparently was because it was widely believed that Fupo and his army had crossed the range between Hunan and Guangdong, conquering south China, using double-decker troop carrying boats to ferry his troops from the hinterland of Hunan to Guangzhou. The boats had to be portered across the mountains against all odds.\n\n16 Mesny noted that a number of temples in Guangxi honouring Fupo had kept alive the memory of his martial deeds and exploits. A temple on the West River near the great rapids was striking for its perfect preservation. It was kept in repair, wrote Mesny, by boatmen who regarded the deity in some special manner.\n\nIn Taiwan Ma Yuan is the main deity in some half a dozen temples where he is known as Fushun Jiangjun.\n\nc] The Great Emperor, the Plum Blossom Immortal, Mei Xian Dadi ★✩, is a minor Daoist cult Immortal whose image has only been noted on the altars of three temples, all within the Hainanese communities in Kranji, Singapore. His title however appears on the temple deity list together with other deities in five temples in southern Malaysia. Temple keepers agree that the Plum Blossom Immortal was a famous doctor who, according to a god carver, bore the personal name of Zhang Chuang, lived somewhere in China many centuries ago, and is now particularly revered by pregnant women who he protects from malignant forces. He also helps them by ensuring that the babes themselves are small and therefore do not cause any injury to the mother during birth.\n\nImages of the Plum Blossom Immortal have no unique characteristics and vary considerably from temple to temple. Two depict him seated, and at first glance looking somewhat like Guan Gong,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215353, "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-2001", "page_number": 130, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "78\n\nHainan island as well as within Hainanese communities in south-east Asia. Although their legends are unique to Hainanese they are similar in style and format to those told in other ethnic groups.\n\nSadly, most of the rural temples on Hainan island itself have little left of their original images following the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. It is fortunate that we do still have several Hainanese communities in south-east Asia where little has changed over the past century. However, intermarriage between Hainanese devotees and those of other Han ethnic groups has meant that to identify cults as uniquely Hainanese has become that much more difficult.\n\nNOTES\n\n1\n\n2\n\nPopular or folk religion is an amalgam of Buddhist, Daoist and local beliefs ignored by Confucianists, Buddhists and Daoists as well as by the majority of educated Chinese.\n\nHengwa is sometimes referred to as the Puxian sub-group.\n\nHokkien is the Fujian linguistic group word for Fujian people as well as their language. Minnan is the area of southern Fujian province from which many immigrants to Taiwan and South-east Asia originated and is a linguistic sub-group of Hokkien.\n\n4 Buddhist and Daoist images on such altars have not been included in this article, even though a number have been seen on folk religion altars in Hainanese temples, as they are all revered China-wide.\n\n5 Ma Zu is primarily the Fujian community title for Tian Hou.\n\n7\n\nBoth Third and Fourth are deities that have been noted on Hainan island and within Hainanese overseas communities.\n\nAn entirely different deity, the Saintly Matron of Wenzhou, Wenzhou Shengmu would appear not to be connected in any way with Wenzhou Houwang. Nor has she been noted on altars within the overseas southern Chinese communities. She has only been noted by William Mesny who saw an image of her in Zhejiang province in 1896 [doubtless connected with the local coastal city of Wenzhou], and suggested that as her surname appeared to have been Lin she may well be Tian Hou, the patron goddess of seafarers.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215354, "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-2001", "page_number": 131, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "79\n\nگر\n\nA common saying and not specifically linked with this deity.\n\nIt was explained that there are three Laoye [San Laoye] of whom Da Laoye is the senior.\n\n\"Wilmott WE: The Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Cambodia. The Athlone Press: London 1970.\n\n13\n\nThe phrase 'shuiwer' in Cantonese is a slang expression [slow water] for 'business is slow.'\n\nThe important fact was that all 108 had either reached their prescribed time of death and were therefore deified as saints [shen] by the Jade Emperor OR they died their violent death before their due date and were roaming ghosts who had to be pacified and placated. Here we have some devotees regarding them as spirits and asking advice and others who look upon them as dark spirits who require propitiatory offerings and no more.\n\nMa Yuan was the second general to be awarded the title of the Fupo, Wave Conqueror for the pacification of the southern region. The first was Lu Bode who, during the Earlier Han (ca. 120 BC), had subjugated large areas of what today is Guangdong province.\n\nXianfeng is a title which has been noted in connection with three entirely unconnected deities.\n\n* Henry BC: The Cross and the Dragon: Canton: 1883.\n\n10\n\n$7\n\nMeesny, William: Tungking: Noronha: Hong Kong: 1884,\n\nZhonglic was a common posthumous title used during the early Qing.\n\n12\n\natap is the generic name for the wooden-sided huts with the dried-leaf roof so common in Singapore and Malaysian rural areas until the 1970s. Atap consists of the dried leaves of the nipa palm.\n\n19 lit. Office Keepers.\n\n20 This is the only title which has been noted elsewhere though probably not identical with the Hainanese deity. General Gan is one of the Eight Bodyguard Generals, known as The Day Patrolling General", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215355, "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-2001", "page_number": 132, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "80\n\n21 This is present day Maoming in western Guangdong province, not too far from the Liaozhou peninsula leading down to Hainan.\n\n22 A city in south eastern Guangdong province, half way between the Liaozhou peninsula and the Pearl River.\n\n23 Note that there are two different deities, Longwei Shenggong worshipped by the Hainanese and Longwei Shengwang worshipped by the Chaozhou people. The latter is, to all intents and purposes, a local Earth God.\n\n24\n\n25 Laomu, Old Mother [or Elderly Matron], is a title often mentioned in popular stories. In Xue Dingshan's Campaign to the West Laomu was Fan Lihua's teacher who, in eight years, taught her the art of moving mountains and raising armies from a handful of beans.\n\nAn elderly Chaozhou man in a Kowloon temple confided that Lishan [‘Fan Lihua' he called her] is a fictional character to support the story of the two generals Xue, and that much of their legends have little or no historical basis.\n\n26 Xue Dingshan's father, Xue Rengui, also a general, was an early Tang hero who not only also led an expedition to the west, he also served in the Korean campaign of Tang Tai Cong. Xue Dingshan, otherwise known as Xue Gang, is claimed to have saved the life of his emperor and is now a Fukienese cult deity, the face of whose image is characterised by extraordinary and colourful decorations.\n\n27 William Mesny relates that recumbent iron images of oxen were believed to be a protection from floods when these images were placed along the banks of river courses and lakes likely to overflow. He noticed several along the banks of the Grand Canal in 1874 and was told that they had been placed there by Liu Bowen Mesny's Chinese Miscellany: Vol. IV: Shanghai: 11 February 1905.\n\n28 As in Taipan, the Senior Boss.\n\n29 The shrine and its images disappeared, doubtless into a high rise flat, though it could have gone the way of so many minor cults and disappeared due, perhaps, to the aged temple keeper's demise.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215594, "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-2001", "page_number": 371, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "321\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nA TALE OF SOUR GRAPES: MESSRS. LITTLE AND MESNY AND\n\nTHE FIRST STEAMSHIP THROUGH THE YANGZI GORGES\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nIn 1898 Archibald Little was the first man to take a steam-vessel up through the dangerous Yangzi Gorges amidst great acclaim. This was a red-rag to William Mesny who, in 1905 in his Shanghai periodical Mesny's Chinese Miscellany, furiously wrote that had he been listened to in 1875, a steamboat could have completed the journey up the Gorges within a year or so of that date.\n\nThe 3,200-mile long river, referred to by westerners as the Yangzi is known to the Chinese as Changjiang, Long River, or Da Jiang, the Great River. The foreigner name, Yangzi, is a misnomer from the Chinese reference to the first stretch from the Yellow Sea, approximately a day or so sail up from Shanghai to Yangzhou, hence Yang.\n\nThe River can be divided into four sections. The first stretch from the sea to Wuhan [Hankou and Wuchang], some 600 miles upstream, is navigable for blue water vessels during the summer and small draught steamers at all times of the year. It may come as a surprise to read of the emergency run in September of 1931 of the British aircraft carrier, H.M.S. Hermes to Hankou during major floods. The Chairman of the Nationalist Flood Relief Commission, T.V. Soong, requested the British C-in-C for assistance using RAF reconnaissance aircraft from H.M.S. Hermes to assist the Chinese in flood survey patrol work.\n\nThe second stretch upstream from Wuhan to Yichang is always navigable to small draught vessels and is a very boring run passing, as it does, through a flat plain with many dykes.\n\nThe third stretch from Yichang to Chongqing is fast flowing downstream through the narrow and dangerous succession of Gorges, so popular with foreign tourists. The great variations in water level", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215595, "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-2001", "page_number": 372, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "322\n\nracing through the Gorges make this section difficult and dangerous both at low and high water. Chongqing, the chief commercial port of western China and an important distribution centre, was opened to foreign trade by an Additional Article [1890] to the Chefoo Agreement of 1876. This stretch also includes the River down to Chongqing from its junction with the Min River at Yibin [Suifu].\n\nThe fourth and final stretch, the Upper Yangzi of 1,600 miles, is torrential almost from its source in Eastern Tibet far to the west, down to Yibin. It has several major tributaries.\n\nWe, however, are interested in the Gorges. They have long been regarded by Chinese junkmen and especially foreigners who had travelled through them as passengers on river junks, as one of the most difficult stretches of river navigation on earth, with a current in places running at 13 knots.\n\nOur story concerns two British expatriates in China who, as far as we know, never met as they were of different social circles. One is Archibald Little, a British Shanghai merchant, married to a British lady and William Mesny, a struggling entrepreneur also in Shanghai but married to a Chinese. Paul King wrote that 'One of the foreign tea-tasters who each year visited Kiukiang [Jiujiang] was Archibald Little, who was never very successful in business but found himself in Yichang in the uphill work of establishing as a fact that the rapids in the upper reaches of the Yangtze could be negotiated by steam craft. In my [King] time the Navy was represented in Yichang by H.M.S. Kinsha - the famous pioneer merchant steamer on the Upper Yangtze owned and operated by the late Archibald Little.'\n\nThe first steamer to ascend the upper waters of the Great River, the Yangzi, through the Gorges above Yichang and as far as Chongqing during the low water season in the month of March 1898 was the 9-ton steam launch, Leechuen [Li Chuan], the property of Mr. Archibald Little who travelled aboard the steamer with his wife.\n\nArchibald John Little was born in London in 1838, and arrived in China in 1859 where he remained, apart from short visits back to Britain, until 1907 when he returned there and died the following year. He was a merchant, traveller and writer and is as well known to some as the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215597, "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-2001", "page_number": 374, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "324\n\nJapanese were able to demand the formal opening of Chongqing to steamers, and a clause to this effect was embodied in the Treaty of Shiminoseki. By this treaty, under the favoured nation clause, the Chongqing and the Upper Yangzi became open to the world and Little immediately applied to the then British Minister, Sir Claude Macdonald [of the later Boxer Siege fame], who encouraged Little to proceed and promised energetic support. Little ordered a twin-screw steamer to be built in Shanghai, fifty-five feet long and ten feet beam. It steamed at nine knots, and though he would have preferred a larger and more powerful vessel he had to cut his coat according to his cloth. This was the Leechuen.\n\nHe left Yichang on 15th February 1898 for the 500-mile voyage through the Gorges, ascending some 500 feet during the journey to Chongqing. The story, told by Archibald Little in his Through the Yangtse Gorges,2 describes the most frightening moment when at dusk in the Scissors Gorge, making about six knots they bumped over a sharp rock that cut through the inch planking, broke two hardwood frames and sent water spouting up over the saloon floor. Fortunately they soon spotted a steep patch of sand on to which they ran the boat. Then, overnight, they stuffed cotton, white lead and tallow into the cracks; nailed blankets down with planks all over and by dawn had stopped the leak sufficiently to be able to get under way again. The rock had only newly fallen from the cliff above and had been unknown to the pilot. They reached Chongqing eleven days up from Yichang and the only photograph I have seen of the Leechuen during her epic journey is a very fuzzy snap of high cliffs with the Leechuen amidstream, a not so large speck, her billowing smoke being almost twice her size.3\n\nTwo British gunboats, H.M.S. Woodcock and H.M.S. Woodlark, made the same journey fifteen months later in May 1899, and then, in June, the first merchant steamer, Pioneer, followed them up to Chongqing.\n\nWe now turn to William Mesny. In 1878 and 1879 he travelled across south-west and central China calling on the most powerful and influential officials and gentry, advising them to adopt modern means for developing the riches of the country and bettering their conditions.* Mesny was a Jerseyman who spent most of his life, from first setting foot in China in 1861 until his death in Hankou in 1919 endeavouring to make his fortune. He was never backward in relating how he had the ears of many of the most influential Chinese of the day and although", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215598, "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-2001", "page_number": 375, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "بلد\n\n325\n\nthey listened to his plans to modernise China and how he could raise the capital to assist them succeed in doing so, they always went their own ways, often adapting his plans but - as he stressed - without his guiding hand they were never the success they could have been had he been permitted to supervise them.\n\nIn 1905 he described how back in 1879 he had travelled to Sichuan from Guiyang where he had been trying to persuade the Guizhou Provincial Governor, Chen Yuying, to develop the resources of the province by means of a railway from Guiyang to Yongxian in Guangxi province, connecting that city with Canton by a line of steamers on the Yun and West Rivers. He then spent over six months in Chongqing, again offering to supply funds and plans for building suitable steamers to navigate the upper waters of the Yangzi, through the Gorges as far as Chongqing and beyond to Yibin. He added that he was able to speak with authority on the navigation of the upper Yangzi by steamers, \"but no one would listen to me, and even intelligent foreigners, when consulted on the subject, declared I was a visionary and an imaginator of many impractical plans. Some ten days later in a subsequent issue of his Miscellany he wrote 'Whilst here in Shanghai in November 1875, I offered to superintend the construction of a suitable steam-boat for navigation on the upper Yangzi, as far up as Yibin and Chengdu, but the wise Britishers of those days declared that was an impossibility, because British naval officers had studied the subject and declared it to be impossible. I proved to be a good quarter of a century ahead of the progressive age.' Steam-boats now navigate the Upper Yangzi for all that, though they are not as useful as they might have been, had they been devised and constructed under the guidance of a mastermind!\n\n3\n\nPaul King : In the Chinese Customs Service: Heath and Cranton Ltd : London : 1924.\n\nArchibald John Little : Through the Yang-tse Gorges or Trade and Travel in Western China: Sampson Low, Marston & Co.: London : 1898 [Third and Revised Edition].\n\nFacing p. 288 of Little's book, Through the Yang-tse Gorges or Trade and Travel in Western China.\n\nWilliam Mesny: Mesny's Chinese Miscellany : Shanghai : 1st January\n\nPage 375\n\nPage 376", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216051, "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-2002", "page_number": 350, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "284\n\nopposite extremity of the foreign settlement. Some years passed before the site was occupied. On 5th February, 1889, the Consulate building was burnt in a riot together with several neighbouring houses. The final Consulate of a main building and four houses was erected on the same site in 1890. Built predominantly of red brick with white and grey bricks forming the decoration, it had double windows to keep the rooms warm during the bitter winters and a royal reign tablet on the rear wall. This white oval plaque bearing the enjoined letters VR is still in place a century or so later.\n\nAll the British consuls serving in Zhenjiang from its opening in 1860 found time hanging heavily and a number became medically unfit within a short time of taking up their posts. Adkins, the Consul writing to his father in December 1861 wrote in passing that 'the office of Consul at a thriving port is no sinecure I can tell you. He is judge, bishop, police magistrate, coroner etc. etc etc.' As is usual his own countrymen give him the least possible support and abuse him like a pickpocket.' It was also soon realized just how unimportant Zhenjiang had become to foreigners and by 1867 it was decided to post a junior consul to the port under the aegis of the senior consul at Shanghai. However, ten years later the number of British residents had increased sufficiently to warrant a return to the consular post being restored to its former independent status. It was by no means a comfortable place to live though PD Coates wrote that all in all Zhenjiang would have been a pleasant enough post had the [foreign] community been more congenial.24 One incident in the history of the consulate in Zhenjiang related by Coates, tells how in 1879 the Chairman and Treasurer of the Zhenjiang Concession Council, Bean, a British merchant who held several of the nineteen concession leases, physically assaulted H. J. Allen, the British consul, in the Club when the latter as Consul had asked to examine the Council's books before approving its accounts. Duff, another merchant, was the Secretary to the Council. Coates describes the constant and major friction between Bean and Duff, Bean and the Consul, and between other foreign residents of the Concession and this was reiterated by William Mesny as we shall soon see. Oxenham, a subsequent Consul in 1886, described Bean as a coarse, cantankerous, uneducated man of low tastes and malignant disposition who had insulted practically every Consul and Customs commissioner serving at the port.\n\nAdkins described in one of his letters to his father how English", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216059, "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-2002", "page_number": 358, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "292\n\nwas buried there beside his first wife in the Zhenjiang cemetery when he died in Changsha a mere two months later. By the late forties, the cemetery had disappeared beneath industrial buildings.\n\nThere was quite a scandal about the Methodist chapel in about 1907 when, during an evening service, the whole congregation started to wriggle and scratch themselves. Many left hurriedly, and the preacher was almost alone when the service ended. It was then discovered that the Chinese caretaker had turned the place into a paying doss-house for coolies and beggars, and every pew was crawling with bedbugs and lice.\n\nMesny's Involvement with Zhenjiang 1863/5\n\nNow to an entirely different slant on activities within Zhenjiang. William Mesny was a Jerseyman who ran away from home in 1854 at the age of 12 and arrived in China in 1860. His autobiographical writings describe scenes from his diverse and exciting career in China from his earliest days as a lowly gaoler in Hong Kong, through his sailing days as a master on a small Yangzi trader, his time as an Imperial Customs Tide-waiter in Hankou, to the peak of his career serving with the Chinese Sichuan Provincial Green Standard army, ending up as a brevet Lieutenant-General. From there on, he was a self-appointed adviser to senior Chinese officials, travelling far and wide throughout China, and ending his days as an impoverished 'poor white' first in Shanghai and towards the end in Hankou, where he died in 1919. Although he had little to do with Zhenjiang itself during his time on the Yangzi, he was involved with others who had.29\n\nMesny, writing about his time on the Yangzi, first as a youth commanding a lorcha and then as a Customs Officer with the Chinese Imperial Customs, explained that on his first trip up the River, the comparatively short journey on from Zhenjiang to Nanjing took five hours with a call at Shi'er Wei, an important salt town on the northern bank of the river. An hour and a half before reaching Nanjing, ships would pass the Third Fort guarding the narrow defile under Guanyin Shan. It was there that in April 1862, Mesny was wounded and captured by a fleet of Imperial gunboats whose role it was to stop supplies of all kinds reaching the Taiping rebels. Mesny was sailing for Hankou from Shanghai with a full legal cargo, but to the Imperial gunboats, the 'Imps' as they were referred to by westerners, all vessels were fair game. Mesny", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216060, "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-2002", "page_number": 359, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "293\n\nwas a young man of twenty just starting his lifelong career in China. In his Miscellanies he described how on his arrival at Hankou commanding the sailing lorcha, Hailong Wang [the Dragon King], he was paid off by the owners, the Mc Twins, who offered him a job as superintendent builder of a large hong [company office/warehouse] they intended erecting on the Bund. He accepted - as the Hailong Wang was laid up. However, as he actually wished to return to Shanghai to marry a local maiden, Zhu Wenjing, he took leave and in one statement he claimed that he sailed aboard the Huguang, a new beam-engine paddlewheel river steamer on her maiden voyage.\" In another he explained that he had left Hankou at the end of 1862 in charge of a cargo boat which was captured by the Taipings. This occurred when, having called at Zhenjiang on 1st or 3rd of November 1862 [his accounts vary], he was on his way to Shanghai in charge of a cargo boat, and was captured, with his crew, by the Taiping rebels, midstream, at Fu Shan Zhen. Mesny's colourful description of his time with the Taipings began with him being brought in chains before a senior Taiping who ordered him to ketou [kowtow]. Mesny wrote that he refused and that he only bowed to God. ‘So do we', cried the Taiping, and promptly ordered Mesny's release. Mesny continued his tale describing how the Senior Taiping had dined Mesny and offered him his daughter in marriage and the command of a Taiping vessel with the rank of vice-admiral. In another version elsewhere in his Miscellanies Mesny claimed to have been wounded twice during the capture and was at first badly treated by his captors. But once the Taiping discovered that he could play Chinese tunes on his four-octave flutina, their behaviour entirely altered. On a more credible note he was required to write to his employers in Shanghai demanding 100,000 Spanish Carolus dollars ransom.\n\nMesny was puzzled at the time why various senior Taiping officials should have vied to hold him their captive. It later transpired that at first these officials had not appreciated the power and capabilities of the foreign-led Chinese force [meaning the Ever-Victorious Army] sent against them; and when they did the Taiping officials' first act was to obtain and hold foreigners to prevent the violent wrath of the foreign-led force being brought down on them. One of the foreigners Mesny saw momentarily, also in Taiping hands, was Frank Phillip de la Cour, another Jerseyman, who had been taken whilst shipping arms.\n\nHaving managed to send a secret message to Shanghai that he was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216061, "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-2002", "page_number": 360, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "294\n\nalive and a prisoner of the Taiping in Nanjing Mesny was rescued by the Royal Navy in March 1863 after four to five months not too unpleasant captivity after a threat from the captain of the Royal Navy gunboat HMS Slaney to bombard Nanjing. Aboard the gunboat was Adkins, the British Vice-Consul from Zhenjiang, who informed Mesny that he had been given up for dead a long time ago, and that an account of his slaughter and dismemberment had been published in Shanghai papers. Released from Taiping captivity at Nanjing in April Mesny was taken by the British Vice-Consul to his station at Zhenjiang where he was fêted for a day or so before being advised to take the opportunity of a lifetime' as mate aboard a large American owned lorcha, damaged by fire and being towed to Hankou by the Express, a British river steamer.\n\nAdkins lived his lonely and dangerous life in Zhenjiang where his health deteriorated to the extent that he had to take medical leave. He also made occasional trips to the Taiping capital at Nanjing to demand compensation for the plundering of British vessels by the Taipings, which were far from enjoyable, even on occasions, sickening. In a letter to his father dated 20 March 1863 Adkins wrote that I received information that an Englishman was a prisoner in Nankin. My purpose here is to get the unfortunate fellow out of the clutches of the Rebels. I have just sent a dispatch to the head swell [Rebel] here and am awaiting his reply. I shall probably have to go to the city tomorrow'. From the date of Adkin's letter this almost certainly refers to Adkins'trip up Nanjing to effect Mesny's release from Taiping captivity.\n\nto\n\nBefore Mesny decided to return to Hankou, he later explained, he had seriously considered going back to Nanjing where he would have used his unique triangular yellow Taiping flag which would have ensured his welcome, there to wed the 'fair charmer' [the daughter of one of the Taiping leaders] who had written such a beautiful poem expressing hope that he would return to marry her. Mesny was now offered a number of contracts to sail cargoes through the Taiping lines, all of which he rejected on the advice of the British Vice-Consul, Adkins.\n\nMesny frequently wrote of various pretty women at the roadside during his journeys across China who had attracted him or, more to the point, were attracted by him. His descriptions of 'fair maidens' in towns and villages eyeing him and he ogling them crop up regularly with a\n\nPage 360\n\nPage 361", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216062, "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-2002", "page_number": 361, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "295\n\nregular aside about their breasts and occasionally their naked crotch. He also made much of his affairs with Chinese women and at this point, in 1864 had a 'romantic and intimate interlude' with a young Chinese widow. She did not appear to be short of money and, having sought Mesny's company, accompanied him up river from Zhenjiang to Hankou where they remained until she left to join her in-laws in 1865. He had been away for a fortnight to the cotton growing districts and on his return had been handed a very polite letter from the 'fair charmer' thanking him for all his attentions to her and informing him that she was continuing on to her late husband's home in Hunan there to rear her children and end her days in virtuous widowhood. She ended, wishing him joy and happiness, by saying that the Chinese banker would hand Mesny a little keepsake to be retained by him in everlasting remembrance of their unexpected meeting at Zhenjiang, their romantic adventures and intimacy on the voyage up the Great River, and their separation for ever at Hankou.\n\nMesny's visit to Zhenjiang 1874\n\nAfter he had left military service in 1874 Mesny made frequent and repeated egotistical assertions to prominence and repute within Chinese bureaucracy and commercial circles with his endeavours, so he claimed, concentrated on guiding and promoting what he described as the westernisation and modernisation in China. It is far from clear how he made a living after 1874 though later we read in his Miscellanies that he had obtained lucrative business in Guiyang at one stage; that in 1886 he had an insurance agency in Shanghai; and was also the representative for the Lartigue Railway Construction Company. He must have had many other irons in the fire to enable him to travel so widely and so far within China, of which only a few were described in his Miscellanies.\n\nIn late 1874 he travelled down river to Zhenjiang and then overland through Shandong to Beijing, spending the winter in Jinan. From the dates he gives in his autobiographical notes Mesny must have left his bride fairly soon after their marriage as he travelled through Shantung province on his way to Peking from Chen-kiang' [Mesny does not explain why he was there though almost certainly it would have been no more than a port on his journey from Hankou to Shandong]. In Shandong he visited, amongst other places, the home and burial place of Confucius at", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216063, "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-2002", "page_number": 362, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "296\n\nQufu, and Tai Shan, the Holy Mountain, where he saw thousands of poor pilgrims assembling. Mesny claimed that, as an adviser to the Governor of Shandong province, Ding Baozhen, he persuaded the Governor Ding to establish an arsenal near Jinan and build a railway from the Yellow River to the arsenal. Mesny also claimed to have persuaded him to dredge the Yellow River and to fortify Weihai Wei and Jiaozhou [both places later occupied and governed by Britain and Germany respectively as leased territories]. Mesny also claimed to have persuaded Ding to develop the mineral wealth of Shandong 'which he did though in a small way only'.\n\nRiots and mob violence\n\nZhenjiang suffered its share of mob violence and riots during its treaty port era. One of the major problems confronting westerners within China was the ever-present possibility of petty or even major violence against their persons and property. Often the disturbance to the peace, due to whatever cause, would be exacerbated by either western impetuosity and/or the indifference and inactivity of the local intendants [mandarins] and their staffs. There were also the perils of banditry, of pirates, of rebels or simply of thugs.\n\nOne afternoon in 1865 the astounding news was received in Hankou that three foreigners had been most barbarously hacked to pieces in Zhenjiang, and were not expected to live. One was Francis Pickernell, a friend of Mesny, and another was Charles Lewis of Boston, an American, a former ship and messmate of Mesny's, whilst the third was another friend and fellow Jerseyman, Filleule, all of whom died from their horrible wounds. The outrage caused a profound impression upon all foreigners in the river ports and John, Mesny's younger brother, who had not been at Hankou very long, felt very sad at the loss of three such friends. The outrage was said to be due to mistaken identity. A man named Stone, a master of a lorcha on the Yangzi, appears to have offended some Chinese military officials who had insulted his Chinese wife, and they had attempted to avenge themselves in this horrible manner.\n\nOne fine evening in about 1866, during the time the Nianfei [or Nianzi], the so-called Twisting Bandits, were in the neighbourhood of Hankou, Mesny relates the dreadful tale of four westerners who saw a favourable opportunity to join up with one of the roaming gangs of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216064, "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-2002", "page_number": 363, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "297\n\nbandits to seek their fortune. Mesny explained that the opportunity occurred for 'the four bold adventurers' to leave the city together with the bandits together with several old Taiping chiefs, amongst whom was a brother of the Shou Wang, the Taiping leader who formerly had held Ningbo. The four, Jerome, a cripple having had one of his legs damaged during the [Opium] war; Captain O.P. Damström, a Swede; Anthony Fiamin, an Austrian from Fiume; and Beeman, a Britisher from London. Mesny believed that they were the only foreigners who actually served with the Nian rebels. Mesny went to see them off and Jerome embraced him very affectionately after the manner of his country. They had not been gone very long when Mesny received a letter from Damström saying that he had been wounded in a cavalry charge against some 'trainbands' who had attempted to cut them off from the main body. The Four Bold Adventurers had then accompanied the Nianzi in their revolving rambles all over the country lying between the Yangzi and the Yellow River from Hankou to Zhifu and back again until the whole body of the bandits had been beaten and dispersed. At the dispersion Damström had been taken prisoner by the Imperial forces and as such had been brought down to Zhenjiang in a cage, or so Mesny understood, and had it not been for Captains Welsh and Macdonald who had been in charge of the artillery and rocket batteries in one of the Imperial camps Damström would very likely have been done to death like his three companions none of whom, though they had surrendered to the Imperial forces, ever returned to the [treaty] ports. Beeman was said to have been buried alive in Shandong, Jerome and Anthony appeared to have been murdered by their captors in northern Jiangsu [province], having become separated during the last few days march.\n\nWe know remarkably little about Mesny's life during the 1880s. A very serious famine ravaged Anhui province during 1888/9, and Mesny, then aged 46, made two long journeys through Anhui and northern Jiangsu provinces to judge and report on the extent of suffering. During his journeys, Mesny later wrote, he discovered that Earl Zeng [Guochuan], the Viceroy of Nanjing, needed the funds raised earlier by a Shanghai charity, the Renjishan Tang, to appease and pay off the Cantonese bandits, the Shap-ng Tsoi,33 who were very active in the Yangzi valley at the time. Mesny added that he, Mesny, in 1889, had assisted in the pacification of the excited populace at Zhenjiang where he had arrived a few hours after the British Consulate and other buildings", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216065, "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-2002", "page_number": 364, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "298\n\nhad been destroyed and burned down. Thousands of rioters had arrived there in boats and destroyed foreign property. These enigmatic statements suggest that Mesny believed that ‘charity funds for famine relief' were being misused by the Viceroy and others to buy off bandits, even if he does not actually spell it out. There is no indication in his Miscellanies to whom he reported after his fact-finding mission or what he did with his information about the famine, or whether he actually provided physical relief for some of the unfortunate victims.\n\nAs so often happened a very minor incident, in this case concerning a Sikh policeman, grew in a matter of hours into a major riot. It was riots in 1889 referred to by Mesny, when the Sikh, a member of the municipal police force of the Zhenjiang Concession, was alleged to have struck a Chinese. According to Arlington it was started by the Concession Chief of Police, an Indian, accidentally killing a coolie who 'dared' to have his head shaved on the Bund [a terrible thing to shave the head on the Bund!]. The events followed a not unusual pattern with the mob throwing stones and the Europeans managing to escape to a ship on the Great River but not before telegraphing for assistance to Shanghai. The Chinese authorities too had been called upon for help and though both Chinese police and soldiers arrived they simply stood around and did nothing. Both the British and American consulates were destroyed; meanwhile Shanghai replied requesting additional information and advising the westerners in Zhenjiang that a gun boat was being prepared. Order was restored by Chinese troops on the following day. Three days later the British gunboat arrived and was boarded by the Consul who was greeted by a gun-salute. The very first report of the guns sent every Chinese off the Bund and out of the Concession like a cloud of smoke being dispersed by a typhoon. A benefit arising from the riot was the construction of a new consulate office and house with its own garden. A slightly different picture of the cause was given by Consul Parker which he had obtained from hearsay.*4 The Zhenjiang municipal police had arrested a Chinese military officer for 'reckless riding'.\n\nAfter the riots of the 1880s strong, double riot gates of stout iron bars were constructed, each with a span of some twenty feet, so that the whole of the width of the Bund, some forty feet, would be barred when they were closed. The Concession police during the first decade of the 20th century consisted of some sixteen Shandong men from the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216066, "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-2002", "page_number": 365, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "299\n\nrecently disbanded Weihaiwei Regiment of the British Army, trained by British officers.\n\nDuring the Boxer troubles in 1900 a number of missionaries fleeing south from their threatened mission stations, having passed through Anhui, reached safety at Zhenjiang on the south side of the Yangzi.\n\nExtraordinary case of the Englishman who wanted to be King of China\n\nMesny wrote at length some ten years after the event about a case in 1891 into which he had been drawn and which, according to him, caused his name to be dragged through the mud by Li Hongzhang, the most powerful and senior Chinese imperial official in Peking, and to all intents and purposes ended any future credence he might have had as a business adviser to the Chinese. He began by writing that:\n\n*As I was turning over some old notes of mine I found the following [on Mason] almost begging to be printed so as not to be lost.\" He then described his version of his involvement with Mason and the outcome. Mesny claimed that it was believed by many that he [Mesny] had been involved with Mason [Charles Mason was a junior officer in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, stationed in Zhenjiang), as a member, if not the head, of an illegal secret society. This led to him being ostracised by Chinese officials, as well as the desire of the apprehensive and phobic wife of Mesny to separate herself from him and his apparent connection with rebels, even going as far as wishing to divorce him.\n\nThe story as described in Mesny's article is as follows:\n\n'In the early part of 1891 the Municipal Council at Hankou decided to buy a machine gun as a means of protecting the foreign concession and its inhabitants from periodical riots. I therefore wrote to the municipal councillors offering them a machine gun and 30,000 cartridges.\n\nBy some means or other, Mason got this letter and tried to get the gun too. He first wrote me a letter offering me all sorts of good things if I would engage 1000 foreigners, and raise a force wherewith to capture the best ships in the northern squadron also the Wusong, Jiangyin and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216068, "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-2002", "page_number": 367, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "301\n\ngaol on Amoy Road, at the end of the Kueichou Road, and he probably occupied a cell that had previously been prepared to receive me.\n\nMesny was commanded to appear before Her Britannic Majesty's Supreme Court for China and Japan in Shanghai on the 8th day of October 1891 to give material evidence and testify what he knew concerning the charge that Charles Henry Allen Welch Mason of Shanghai on or about the 13th inst. did have in his possession or under his control five pounds or thereabouts of an explosive substance under circumstances that gave reasonable suspicion that he did not have it in his possession for a lawful purpose. He attended as requested with the result that Mason got nine months imprisonment, at Shanghai and to be deported from China for ever thereafter or something like that. Thus it happened, added Mesny, 'that this biter was bitten.'\n\nMesny added that he had suffered ever since from the evil effects of this monstrous attempt to involve him in a treasonable plot. 'I have never been able to obtain employment from the Chinese Government since those days and many of my Chinese friends have cut me dead under the impression that I must have been guilty of some collusion with Mason in some inexplicable manner.\n\nThus in 1892 when I called on Earl Li Hongzhang at Tianjin he accused me of being the head centre of all the Gelao Hui men in China.\n\n'Last winter [noted as 1892 but printed a number years later] I was in Nanjing and in a fair way of getting a good command when Zai Jun, the Daotai of Shanghai, I believe, telegraphed to the Viceroy to beware of me as I was a dangerous character, the friend of Mason, the plotter. My own wife has told me hundreds of times that she is in dread of the awful fate that awaits me on this account and has begged me to grant her a letter of divorce and let her take the children away, she has worried the life out of me during the past few months with this clamour for a divorce and I believe that she is being incited thereto by designing people who take advantage of her weakness of mind to thus annoy me, and when they have got my wife away from me by divorce she ceases to be British [i.e. post-1898], then will they do to her what they do not dare to do now, and probably kill my children.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216069, "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-2002", "page_number": 368, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "302\n\nso that I may die childless, as I am now old and not likely to have any more children. I had never met or seen Mason before he presented himself to me as being the United States Consular Marshal at Hankou, which was a lie, he being actually a Custom House Officer at Zhenjiang.'\n\nLet us try to unravel the sorry story of Mason and Mesny. It is involved and still has aspects which are difficult to fathom. We have a number of versions or parts of it available to us but will confine ourselves to three: Mason's own story, briefly described below, written some 30 odd years later after he had roamed the world as a vagrant worker; the letters from the Inspector General of the Imperial Customs, Sir Robert Hart; and Mesny's bitter accusation. Mason, according to Mesny, practically ruined him and certainly caused Mesny great personal problems as he explained in great detail in his Miscellany. It is difficult to fit these three pieces of jigsaw together as there are few elements in common; however, the basic story is there. Mason bought a large quantity of foreign arms, ammunition, and explosives with which to arm a rising against the Imperial government, and having been arrested in Shanghai, was tried, sentenced, gaoled, and finally deported. Mesny was called as a witness but was accused to his face by the Chinese Premier, Li Hongzhang, of being the chief or very senior in the anti-Imperialist bandit body, the Elder Brother Society. This led to Mesny being ostracised by Chinese officialdom and, as his be-all and end-all as a business go-between was his contacts with Chinese officials, his life quietly slipped downhill thereafter.\n\nAccording to records — ‘Charles Welsh Mason, a young Englishman, had joined the Imperial Maritime Customs in December 1887 and was sent to Zhenjiang, an important post but a minor port on the Yangzi, as 4th assistant B, where he joined the Gelao Hui and became involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the Chinese government. In July of 1891, he took two months' leave and went to Hong Kong, where he purchased a quantity of arms and ammunition for the Society and arranged for it to be shipped to Shanghai and from there on to Zhenjiang. He also recruited men for the Society and bought a quantity of dynamite, which he carried with him to Shanghai, where he requested Commissioner Bredon of the Imperial Maritime Customs to allow it to be shipped on to Zhenjiang so that he, Mason, could uncover more of the Chinese rebels' plans. Bredon refused the \"sting\" and instructed Mason to report to Hart in Beijing. Instead, Mason took a river steamer", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216070, "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-2002", "page_number": 369, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "303\n\nup to Zhenjiang where he was stopped, searched and arrested for carrying arms. He was returned to Shanghai where he was tried and gaoled for nine months. The Chinese were furious having wanted his head'.\n\nMason's own version described his life in some detail and, in particular, his escapade in Zhenjiang and Shanghai in 1891. He began his book with a lengthy piece about him charting his aims and future some year or so after he had arrived and settled in China as a member of the Chinese Imperial Customs. He had decided to make himself king of a great country, first by forming a band of robbers to attract more desperate men and expand the band until he was strong enough to seize a city and plunder its public treasuries and arsenals. From there on he foresaw that things would move rapidly. As he wrote many years later, describing in a summary of his aims and objectives, he had decided to make himself the King of China because, he reasoned, he was in China, was popular with the Chinese, spoke their language and the Imperial Government was weak. He decided to use the Gelao Hui to further his aims. He planned it for some two years, so he wrote, and then in 1891, at the age of 25, he embarked upon his scheme. The plan was to bring a cargo of arms from Hong Kong and distribute them to Sha's [a Gelao Hui chief] five hundred men in Zhenjiang, and they would then rise and attack the authorities.\n\nHaving purchased the rifles, he had them shipped by coastal steamer to Shanghai where, following an informer's tip, Customs men were waiting. Mason, confronted by a Shanghai-based Customs officer, declared that he had been keeping the shipment under observation of his own volition all the way from Hong Kong. He was at first believed or at least given the benefit of the doubt, and was taken off to lunch by the Shanghai Customs Commissioner, Bredon. Mason, hating himself for being a turncoat, fled Shanghai to Zhenjiang where he was promptly arrested, and interrogated at the Customs headquarters in Shanghai by the local Chinese Imperial Daotai. Having confessed all to him but having also refused to name names, even after having been shown photographs of his mangled, tortured and decapitated Chinese friends, he was put before the British Supreme Court in Shanghai where he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year or so in gaol followed by deportation. He never mentions Mesny, nor any aspect of the case as described by Mesny.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216073, "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-2002", "page_number": 372, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "306\n\nThe last mention of Mason in Hart's letters refers to Mason in 1897 having sent Hart his book The Shen's Pigtail or Other Cues of Anglo-China Life. Mason, wrote Hart, had been in low water at home and twice [Hart] had helped him. Mason was, added Hart, a clever fellow who, before the C'Kiang affair broke out, had just got himself on to the ladder of advancement, and in that matter [the Mason affair] he was to Hart's mind, the victim of mixed motives - he was curious, and he wanted to serve Hart, and got into a quicksand.\n\nHart was much kinder to Mason than ever Mesny would be. Mesny, in his Miscellany some ten years later, related in great detail, both from notes and from memory, the extraordinary story related above of being persecuted by Mason.\n\nMesny also wrote in his Miscellany [6 Feb. 1896] that he had gone through the evidence [on the Mason Case] in the British Blue Books and could not see how any mortal could come to any other than one of two conclusions - either Mason had been paid by the Chinese to get up a bogus scare [to create anti-foreign action] or that he was a mere maniac. Nine-tenths of his revelations had been unquestionably pure fabrication. At the bottom of the page, Mesny added, without offering any evidence, \"I am now fully satisfied that Mason was paid by the Chinese.\"\n\nOn an entirely different aspect of life in Shanghai, we read in a postscript from Mesny on the snobbish attitudes of the British in China that adds colour to our story. The British Consul in Shanghai held a party in May of 1899 to celebrate the birthday of Queen Victoria. Mesny wrote in his Miscellany that despite not receiving an invitation, a fact which confirms that he was ostracised by fellow Britons, possibly because of his wife or because he made a point of living among and mixing with Chinese, though it could also have been due to his very pro-Chinese stand, he turned up at the Consulate only to be turned away by the British police at the gate. This short note in the Miscellany describing the slight would appear to have been his method of getting his own back.\n\nAs with most small expatriate bodies, factions existed. Mason described in his 'Chinese Confessions', the problems of a 'British bachelor in the Imperial Customs Service in Zhenjiang, a small Customs", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216074, "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-2002", "page_number": 373, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "307\n\npost on the Yangzi,' a place where John Mesny, William's brother, had also been employed in the Imperial Customs, 'If you belonged to the Duff faction you couldn't speak to a clerk of Bean's if you passed him on the Bund; if you belonged to the Bean faction (and Bean was the drinking, swearing, concubine-keeping Scotsman) you were taboo in three houses where there were wives, and therefore decent entertainment.' But if you frequented Starkey, the hospitable, or Emery with his lawful Chinese wife, you were ostracised by the wealthy faction.\"\n\nTransit passes\n\nYou will recall that Mason, according to the Inspector General of Customs, had a grip on the subject of Transit Passes. E. H. Parker, who retired in 1895 to become the Professor of Chinese in Manchester, had been Consul in Zhenjiang in about 1877/78 and he explained that \"from the first day of his arrival piles of mysterious documents came pouring into the office which demanded immediate attention.42 These were 'Bonds to be signed by British merchants, guaranteeing that the goods brought down under transit-pass were their own property, and undertaking to export them at once. The chief staples were 'donkey-skins, lily-flowers and melon-seeds'. The question he asked his predecessor during the hand-over was 'What do we do with donkey-skins in England?' The reply was that it was no business of the Consul : the British merchant swears they're his, and that's all the Consul has to do with it. After the departure of his predecessor Parker asked one of the British merchants the same question. He replied that he had not the remotest idea what was done with the donkey-skins, but that they were certainly his, 'in a way,' the question of joint interest being a 'custom of the trade'. The export of donkey-skins at the time was enormous, certainly several hundred tons a week. The Daotai was a fine, tall, gentlemanly old man, who had been a Peking Foreign Office clerk. He knew nothing of anything, and only wanted peace and quietness. He, like Parker, thought that donkeys never died, neither had ever seen a dead donkey anytime during their lives, and was quite unable to explain the mystery. He added, however, that he understood from the merchants that the well-to-do classes in England took donkey-skins and tea as a tonic. Parker told him that he did not believe a single donkey-skin ended up in England to which the Daotai added that he had a shrewd idea that melon-seeds and lily-flowers don't go there either'.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216080, "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-2002", "page_number": 379, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "18 Doré: ibid: Vol.X: Second Part: The Chinese Pantheon 95-96\n\n313\n\n19 Stevens, Keith (1999) Images of Sinicised Vedic Deities on Chinese Altars: Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 38:51-106\n\n\"Arlington, LC Through the Dragon's Eyes: 1931: London: Constable and Co Ltd.\n\n21 Rasmussen, A.H. China Trader - My 32 Years in the Orient: 1954: New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.\n\n\"Bird, Isabella (1899) The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, London: John Murray\n\nWingate, A. W. S. (1940) A Cavalier in China London: Grayson and Grayson, Ltd.\n\n**Coates, P. D. (1988) The China Consuls - British Consular Officers, 1843-1943 Oxford: OUP\n\n25 Simon Winchester in his book The River at the Centre of the World London: Viking: 1997, expresses grave doubts. He suggests that the anchor on display is too small for a frigate's anchor and could well be a foreign anchor lost from a smaller vessel at some time down the years.\n\n26 The Times: London: 10 March 1869\n\n\"Griffith John was a pioneering London Mission Society evangelist.\n\nA number of the headstones have been preserved in the Zhenjiang Museum housed in the former British Consulate.\n\n\"Stevens, Keith (1992) A Jersey Adventurer Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 32: 60\n\n*Lorcha - a vessel of about 100 tons burden, having a hull of European build, and generally commanded by a European captain, but rigged with Chinese masts and sails, and manned by Chinese sailors.\n\n\"Mesny, writing in his Miscellanies many years later, frequently confused dates and facts.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216081, "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-2002", "page_number": 380, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "314\n\n32T. Adkins joined the China Consular Service in 1854 and was the first Vice-Consul in Zhenjiang, being posted there in May of 1861, preceded by an assistant, Phillips, in February who had been sent to the ruined city to set up the Consulate in a ruined temple. Within a week of Adkins' arrival, he had moved the Consulate a mile down river to safer accommodation away from the Taiping fighting. He remained there, on an island, living a monotonous life alone as Phillips had been transferred elsewhere. He left Zhenjiang in poor health in February 1865 after serving there for three and a half years to return to the UK.\n\n33 This was the Cantonese title by which the bandits were known. In Mandarin it would be Shiwu Zi† £ 'The Fifteen Sons'.\n\n* Parker E.H. John Chinaman and a few others: John Murray: London: 1902\n\n35 Robert Anderson Mowatt, former consular official: acting Chief Justice and Acting Consul-General Shanghai, April - October 1891.\n\n* The Elder Brother Society (Gē Lǎo Huì): a secret society sworn to overthrow the Imperial government, the foreign Manchu Qing dynasty and replace it with a Chinese emperor.\n\nMesny's son would have been about six at the time of this story, whilst his only other child, his daughter, had not yet been born.\n\n**Mason, C. W. (1924) Chinese Confessions. London: Grant Richards Ltd\n\n\"Fairbank, Bruner and Matheson, ed (1975). The I.G. in Peking: Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press\n\n* Transit Passes are discussed in a separate chapter below.\n\n4\n\nAccording to Mason in his Confession, Croskey had told him that Croskey's father was an English baronet in business in Vancouver and his mother a Spanish Creole of San Diego in California.\n\n42 Parker, E.H. (1903) China Past and Present: Chapman and Hall Ltd: London\n\n\"Cook, Christopher (1982) The Lion and the Dragon - British Voices from the China Coast: London: Elm Tree Books.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]