[ { "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": 216071, "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": 370, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "304\n\nMason's book is fairly thick and contains numerous anecdotes about life on the China coast which in the main have no particular relevance to his later criminal escapade. He explained that he had had no experience of criminal matters and therefore made many mistakes which, with hindsight, he should never have made. He referred also to the American consul in Zhenjiang, General Alexander C. Jones, Mason's oldest and most intimate friend in the port, a southerner who had commanded cavalry on the losing side of the Civil War, and then later, in Hong Kong, Mason assumed the role, in disguise, of an American sailor who had been beached in Hong Kong. He made a great point in his book of how Sir Robert Hart had favoured him as a good employee of the Customs Service, and that looking back he was able to see that Hart had been at pains to try to warn him off doing anything stupid. The tenor of the tale was that Hart and others, including the US consul and the British Consuls in Zhenjiang, had known that Mason was up to something, even, perhaps, what he really had intended to do. Mason ends with no apologies or even any thought of the stupidity of his acts. Out of context, his book would be a \"cracking good yarn\" but taken at face value, it depicts Mason having Walter Mitty fantasies.\n\nHart's letters39 to his London representative reveal that Mason was a 4th Assistant B in Chinchiang [Zhenjiang] in 1887. By mid-1891, in a short sentence within one of his letters, not in any way connected with Mason, Hart refers to the Gelao Hui, whom he did not see as particularly hostile to either foreigners or Christianity but were anti-dynastic and whose activities were incipient rebellion. In the October of the same year, he first mentions the Mason affair and comments on the immense harm it had done to the Service. He attached a draft telegram in which he called Mason ‘a foreign conspirator who had bought arms, seized at Shanghai, with his own money, and whether he himself [Mason] was amateur detective, conspirator, dupe or lunatic remained to be seen, as also whether his disclosures, plot confederates, etc., exist elsewhere than in his own diseased imagination'. There is no indication in any of Hart's published letters that he was aware of Mason's plans, despite, as we learn later, all had already been revealed to the local Customs Commissioner in Zhenjiang.\n\nIn Mason's Confessions, he tells of his attempt to resign from the Customs and of Hart's reply which explained that according to the regulations, this was not possible. He added half-way down his letter to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]