[
    {
        "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",
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        "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",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
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    {
        "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",
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        "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]",
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    {
        "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",
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        "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",
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    {
        "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",
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        "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",
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    },
    {
        "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",
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        "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,",
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    {
        "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",
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    {
        "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",
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        "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",
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    {
        "id": 212746,
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        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
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        "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.",
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    {
        "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",
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        "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",
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        "id": 212756,
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        "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",
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        "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",
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        "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",
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        "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",
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    },
    {
        "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",
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    {
        "id": 212797,
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        "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",
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    {
        "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
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    {
        "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
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    {
        "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
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    {
        "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",
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    {
        "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",
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    {
        "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.",
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    {
        "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",
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        "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",
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    {
        "id": 215355,
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        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "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.",
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    {
        "id": 215594,
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        "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",
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        "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",
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    {
        "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",
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    {
        "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",
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    },
    {
        "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",
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    {
        "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",
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    },
    {
        "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",
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        "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'.",
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