[ { "id": 206965, "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-1974", "page_number": 36, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "30\n\nFL. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nThe arrival of the Marquis de Morès was, on the other hand, barely noticed in the press. The China Mail merely reported in its shipping column: 'Arrived Per Calédonien for Hong Kong from Marseilles. Marquis de Morès. Also Marquis de Morès servant'.* The Marquis had boarded the Calédonien, a Messageries Maritimes vessel, at Marseilles on 20 October and had arrived in Hong Kong on 22 November, eight days after Mayréna had taken a room at the Hong Kong Hotel. The Marquis was accompanied by William Van Driesche,' who in fact was not a servant but the Marquis' private secretary or rather homme de confiance. Because Government House was overflowing with guests, Morès had been forced to seek a lodging in the town and had booked into the Hong Kong Hotel. But Morès was not interviewed by any diligent reporter and we have, therefore, no contemporary description of the Marquis' personality or of his bearing and appearance in Hong Kong.*\n\nBoth Mayréna and Morès visited Government House, though not on the same occasions. Morès was invited to dine with the Des Voeux because they knew the Marquis's father, the Duke of Vallombrosa,* and had visited him in 1866 and 1872 at his villa 'des Tours' in Nice. Morès brought a letter of introduction from his father. Des Voeux states that he knew nothing of his extraordinary past, which is now so notorious that it is unnecessary to refer to it. At the time of his arrival my house was full, and so I was unable to ask him to stay with us, as I should certainly have done otherwise in memory of hospitality received from his family. But he dined with us several times, and we found him to be decidedly clever, and, I am bound to say, as agreeable and amusing as he was good-looking. His experiences, however, had been of such a wild nature that I was not altogether sorry for the accident which caused him to be a guest at an hotel instead of Government House.10\n\nMayréna's audience with Des Voeux took place on 15 November, the day after he landed in Hong Kong. We know that Mayréna had contrived the meeting and that Des Voeux was curious to see this strange visitant from pagan Sedang, a country about which nothing was then known in Hong Kong. This is confirmed by Des Voeux himself who states that Mayréna had", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206967, "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-1974", "page_number": 38, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "32 \n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE \n\nnot on his side. He had come to Hong Kong with an express aim - to obtain cash. His design was to persuade Hong Kong merchants to invest heavily in the exploitation of the territory he claimed to rule as soi-disant King of the Sedangs, a title he had assumed in June 1888 with the passive assent of an innocent montagnard people. There were rich men in Hong Kong - speculators, gamblers, risk-takers - and Mayréna hoped to interest them in the mineral wealth and natural products of his new kingdom. Thus he assumed that meeting Sir William and Lady Des Voeux at Government House would vouch for his respectability and provide an entrée into the social enclosure of the rich European merchant class. \n\nMorès, on the other hand, had no such motivation. He was in Hong Kong with William Van Driesche, and an engineer, a M. Thorel, en route for Tonkin. His visit to Hong Kong was an accident. The Calédonien, the ship he boarded at Marseilles, berthed at Saigon and Hong Kong but not at Haiphong, so Morès was forced to travel on to Hong Kong and transfer to another ship for Haiphong, the entry port for Hanoi and the Red River basin. He was in a hurry and bent on business. Hence he stayed in Hong Kong for only a week, leaving on 29 November by the small German steamer, the Clara. It was during this week that the alleged duel between the two adventurers took place; but to explain why they had both wandered into the East and why they clashed, we must first examine their previous careers. \n\nMarie-Charles David de Mayréna16 \n\nThe future King of the Sedangs was born into a bourgeois milieu at Toulon on 31 January, 1842. His father was a commander in the French navy, who died when Mayréna was a child so that he was reared entirely by a complaisant mother. He failed his examinations for the Ecole navale in 1857 but joined the Sixth Dragoons in 1859, transferring to the Spahis de Cochinchine in 1863. He served in Indo-China until 1868, when he resigned and returned to France. His career so far had been unremarkable. \n\nThe next year he married a colonel's daughter; but little is known about the marriage and it seems likely that they soon separated or divorced. Mayréna was a great womaniser. The Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870 and he was recalled to the colours and procured the rank of captain. In February 1871 he was awarded the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206970, "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-1974", "page_number": 41, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG\n\n35\n\nCollège Stanislas at Cannes. In 1877 he entered the military academy of Saint-Cyr;22 after passing out from Saint-Cyr, he joined the famous Saumur cavalry school. He was to remain a magnificent horseman all his life.\n\nThe turning point in Morès' life came in 1881 when he met Medora von Hoffmann, the daughter of Louis von Hoffmann,23 a New York banker of German extraction, who had a villa, like Morès' father, at Cannes. Morès resigned from the army and in February 1882 married the petite, blonde Medora, who was to bear him three children. In August 1883 they travelled to the New World and Morès soon after started work in his father-in-law's bank.\n\nMorès was an astute banker but when his cousin, Count Fitz-James, returned from a hunting expedition to the Dakotas and regaled him with tales of his adventures, he decided to throw up his banking career and head west to the area of the Dakotas called the Bad Lands. In April 1883 Morès, together with William Van Driesche, set out by Northern Pacific Railway from Chicago for the Little Missouri River. After an inspection of the country he decided it was ideal for cattle ranching. He bought a large tract of land, built his own town--Medora--and a twenty-eight room château24 on a spur overlooking the river and the new town.\n\nThe Marquis, who had begun to fence off his land, soon made enemies among the badmen of the area. Three in particular – Luffsey, O'Donnell and Wannegan--on several occasions attacked the château at night and their gunfire was returned by the intrepid Marquis and Van Driesche. The series of incidents culminated in the ambushing of the trio by the Marquis and two of his cowboys. Luffsey was killed, the other two wounded and taken prisoner. The incident did not end there, for the Marquis was charged with murder, held in custody and nearly lynched by an excited mob.\n\nMorès established his own abattoir, meat-packing and processing plant at Medora and hoped, thereby, to undercut the prices for dressed meat set by the monopolistic 'beef barons' of Chicago--the Armours and Swifts--but he was opposed not only by them but by their business allies, the railroad magnates. By 1885 it was clear that Morès' cattle empire was tottering, that he could not compete with the stockyards of Chicago, and that his scheme to provide cheap meat to Westerners and Easterners alike had totally failed. He returned to New York with his family, but at once attempted", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206971, "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-1974", "page_number": 42, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "36 \n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE \n\nto organise the retail meat market in that state. This enterprise also failed, so the disillusioned Marquis, who had lost a large part of his private fortune, returned home to France in 1886. \n\nMorès' father, the Duke of Vallombrosa, advised his despondent son to take a long vacation and suggested a journey to India, a land the Duke had visited in his younger days. In November, 1887, therefore, Morès and his wife embarked at Marseilles for the journey out to Bombay. \n\nFrom Bombay Morès and his wife went by train to Calcutta, where they stayed with the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, and where they met Prince Henry of Orléans. The Marquis and the Prince and a few friends at once organised an expedition into the interior to shoot game. Another expedition, to Nepal, was organised soon after they returned from their first chase, this time with Medora as participant. After five weeks the party returned with the skins of many wild beasts, including that of a tiger which the redoubtable Marquise had herself shot. In the spring of 1888, Morès and his wife returned to Europe. \n\nThe ship that took Morès and his wife back to France was also carrying a number of his old comrades, former Saint-Cyriens, returning from the campaign in Tonkin. Morès had long conversations with these French colonial army officers and learned much about conditions in Indo-China. On the voyage back he thus became deeply interested in the commercial prospects of this new French colonial possession. But to open up and develop the territory necessitated the construction of a railway system: Morès decided to pioneer such an enterprise. As soon as he reached Paris he hurried to see the Minister for Foreign Affairs and presented a plan for building without government aid a railway line from Hanoi to the Chinese border. He was given official permission to prospect the region of Tonkin. On 21 October 1888, as noted, Morès left Marseilles together with William Van Driesche and an engineer, M. Thorel. On 22 November 1888 he landed at Hong Kong en route for Haiphong, and the start of another adventure: the economic exploitation of the Red River basin, a scheme as grandiose as the one he had been engaged on in the Dakotas. \n\nMayréna's Odyssey in Hong Kong \n\nMayréna spent his first days in the Colony studiously cultivating members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He visited the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206988, "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-1974", "page_number": 59, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG\n\n53\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Sir William Des Voeux, My Colonial Service, 2 vols., London 1903. Sir Frederick Lugard, Governor of Hong Kong 1907-1912, also found that 'entertaining was an essential part of governing. Hong Kong Government House was used as a high-class hotel, restaurant and sports club by many of the hundreds of passengers who left their ships to write their names in the Governor's book...socially more exacting were the many distinguished foreigners and Eastern potentates-Chinese and Japanese princes, Indian Rajahs, the Governor of the neighbouring Portuguese Macao, foreign admirals who had to be visited in their warships and later entertained in turn at Government House; ambassadors en route to or from Tokyo or Peking, and many lesser functionaries.' See Margery Perham, Lugard, vol. 2, London, 1960, p. 289.\n\n2 My Colonial Service, vol. 2, p. 234. Sir William Des Voeux (1834-1909) was Governor of Hong Kong from 1887 to 1891, in which year he retired from the colonial service.\n\n3 14 November, 1888.\n\n4 15 November, 1888.\n\n5 16 November, 1888.\n\n6 22 November, 1888.\n\n7 William Van Driesche was the third generation of his family to serve the Morèses. The children used to call him Mr. Willie.\n\n8 There are several photographs of Morès in Donald Dresden, The Marquis de Morès: Emperor of the Bad Lands, Norman, Oklahoma, 1970, and in Charles Droulers, Le Marquis de Morès 1858-1896, Paris, 1932. Morès was six-feet tall, lithe, ramrod-straight, muscular, with a needle-pointed waxed black moustache. He looked every inch a d'Artagnan.\n\n9 Richard Manca, Duke of Vallombrosa, born 1834, married the daughter of the Duke Des Cars, conqueror of Algeria. He had three children, of whom Morès was the eldest.\n\n10 Op. cit., vol. 2, p. 234.\n\n11 Ibid., p. 235.\n\n12 Ibid., p. 235.\n\n13 The Hong Kong Daily Press, 24 November, 1888. The Governor was accompanied on his trip by his wife, young daughter, and James Russell, the Chief Justice. The Colonial Secretary, Frederick Stewart, administered the government in Des Voeux's absence.\n\n14 The China Mail (1845-1911) was edited by George Murray Bain from 1879 until 1908(?).\n\n15 It is not surprising that Des Voeux took a great interest in his betters since promotion in the colonial service in the nineteenth century depended to a large degree on knowing people in high places.\n\n16 No full-scale study of Mayréna has been published as yet; the best book is probably Jean Marquet, Un Aventurier du XIXe siècle: Marie Jer, roi des Sedangs, 1888-1890. Hanoi, 1927; but Maurice Soulié, Marie Jer, roi des Sédangs, 1888-1890, Paris 1927, is amusing though really une vie romancée. The most penetrating essay on Mayréna is that by Marcel Ner, 'Marie Ier, roi des Sedangs: essai sur la psychologie de l'aventure”, Extrême-Asie, Revue Indochinoise (Hanoi), no. 21, March 1928, pp. 397-407 and no. 22, April 1928, pp. 491-498. There are many references to Mayréna", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 } ]