[ { "id": 204610, "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-1963", "page_number": 91, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "80\n\nJ. L. CRANMER-BYNG\n\nGamewall, an American Methodist, became almost legendary. We get a pen picture of Gamewall in the diary of the Rev. Roland Allen, who was chaplain to the Anglican Bishop in North China at this time. \"Mr. Gamewall was almost voiceless, but still pursued his weary round of the Legation on his bicycle, overseeing the fortifications, and carrying out every suggestion of the military council with untiring zeal.\"25\n\nOutside the Legation Chapel (by now filled to overflowing with missionaries) stood a stone kiosk with a bell inside it, erected to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee. This Bell Tower stood in the middle of the Legation at a point where four ways met. As Allen explained: \"The Tower stood in the midst of tree-shaded ways beautiful from every point of view, sheltered, too, more than most spots from shot and shell. It was only once struck; no one was wounded there. It was well suited to be the centre of the life, as it was by nature the centre of the structure of the Legation.\" People used to collect there in groups to discuss the latest news and rumours. The bell itself was used as an alarm in case of a general attack, when it was rung furiously, and in the case of fire when it was tolled. All round the kiosk were posted up notices for the guidance of the besieged as well as cables, messages, edicts and rumours. Here also was posted up, from time to time, an official census of the inhabitants of the Legation. For instance on August 4th Jessie Ransome entered in her diary the census figures just posted up on the Bell Tower which gave a total of 883 men, women and children. One of the few amusing incidents of the siege was only known to the besieged some time afterwards. On 16th July, 1900 the Belfast newspaper, Northern Whig, had published an account of\n\n25 Rev. Roland Allen, The Siege of the Peking Legations (London, 1901), 161.\n\nA photograph of the six fighting parsons' can be found in Archibald Little, Gleanings from Fifty Years in China (Philadelphia, 1908), 289.\n\n24 When Professor L. Carrington Goodrich passed through Hong Kong in 1962 we spoke about the siege of the Foreign Legations and he told me that he was one of the children of missionary parents who sheltered in the Legation chapel. His father was the Rev. Chauncey Goodrich, remembered today by students of Chinese as the author of A Pocket Dictionary and Pekingese Syllabary, which was first published in 1891 and is still in print, See A. H. Mateer (Mrs.) Siege Days (New York, 1903), 217-18 and photograph opposite page 44. For another photograph see Arther H. Smith, China in Convulsion (New Jersey, 1901) II, 494.\n\n27 Allen, op. cit., 119.\n\nH", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "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": 215596, "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": 373, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "323\n\nhusband of Mrs. Archibald Little who was a traveller and writer in her own right and who in 1895 founded the Heavenly Foot Society for the suppression of the cruel practice of binding and spoiling the natural feet of Chinese girls.\n\nThe story now goes back thirteen years. In 1885 Little planned to set up a company to build a couple of steamers after his own design to sail up to Chongqing to open up the vast and fertile province of Sichuan. This led him first to spend six months in one of the ordinary boats of the river learning all he could about the rapids, swirls, currents, depth and other details of the upper waters of the river.\n\nHe went back to London where he soon formed a company, and an experimental steamer of five hundred tons burden was put on the stocks in Glasgow from designs drawn by Mr. J McGregor, the chairman of the company, conforming to the designs furnished by Archibald Little. The steamer was completed during the summer of 1887, and shipped in sections to Shanghai, where she was put together by one of the local ship-builders and launched towards the end of 1887.\n\nShe was christened the Kuling, and was about five hundred tons burden, one hundred and seventy-five feet long and twenty-eight broad. She was eight feet deep, perfectly flat-bottomed and drew only two feet four inches of water empty, a mere trifle over four feet with a full cargo, and was especially adapted for navigating rocky and dangerous rapids. The boilers and engines were amidships. She was driven by two sets of compound engines, with a stroke of five feet, and worked with a pressure of one hundred and sixty pounds of steam. She had two stern wheels and a balanced rudder astern of the wheels.\n\nThe Kuling reached Yichang at the end of February 1889 and all was ready for the passage through the Gorges, when Mr Gregory, the British consul, backed by the Chinese authorities, refused to allow the steamer to proceed, as no permit had been received from either the Zongli Yamen [Chinese Department of Foreign Affairs], or Sir John Walsham, the British Minister at Peking.\n\nThe rest of the story was so characteristic of Chinese procrastination and delay. To put it simply and bluntly, the British Minister refused to coerce the Chinese in any way, and so the Kuling was eventually sold and the scheme abandoned.\n\nThe matter of the Upper Yangzi navigation remained in abeyance until the Chinese defeat by the Japanese in the war of 1895 when the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]