RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 217 LANGLEY, Edward 1851-1852 Manager of the Oriental Banking Co. LATIMER, Nichol 1865 Born 1830, died 1865. With Archibald Little and John Nutt he was the founder of a firm that operated in Shanghai under the name of Nichol Latimer & Co. in Kiukiang and Chinkiang as Latimer, Little & Co, from January 1, 1864, He was one of the managers of the Shanghai Steam Navigation Co. 1865.130 Member of the NCBRAS 1865.131 Publisher of the North China Herald 1863-1865, in the issue of which of September 30, 1865 his death (on Sept. 28), due to an overdose of morphia, was announced. He was buried at Shantung Road Cemetery. MACDUFF, Hector C.R. 1850-1851, (1854-1855) Mercantile assistant MacVicar & Co.133, later partner in Smith, Kennedy & Co. in which his interest ended June 30, 1855.134 Trustee British Episcopal Church 1854-1855. MAN, James Lawrence 1856-1857 At first lived in Canton.136 135 137 Authorized to sign for George Barnet & Co. March 31, 1865, the date on which that firm moved to Shanghai; partner from August 6, 1855;135 interest ended March 31, 1862.139 140 Trustee British Episcopal Church 1855-1856, 1856-1857 and 1857.141 Portrait. MEDHURST, Dr. Walter Henry 1854-1855 Born 1796, died 1857. Sent out by the London Missionary Society to the Far East, where he lived in Malacca and Batavia before taking up residence in ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g 206 —, Intimate China, the Chinese As I have Seen Them, London Hutchison, 1899 Little, Archibald John, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, or, Trade and Travel in Western China, London Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1888 1 Mount Omer and Beyond, London Heinemann, 1901 Ljungstedt, Andrew, An Historical Sketch of the Portuguese Settlements in China, with Supplementary Chapter - Description of the City of Canton republished from the Chinese Repository, Boston James Munroe and co. 1836 Lo Hui-min, ed, The Correspondence of G E Morrison, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1976 Loch, Granville Gower (1813-1853), The Closing Events of the Campaign in China the Operations in the Yang Tze-Kiang, and the Treaty of Nanking, London J Murray, 1843 Lockwood, Stephen C. Augustine Heard and Company, 1858-1862, Cambridge (Mass) Harvard University Press, 1971 Lonsdale, Anne, Merchant Adventurers in the East, London Longman, 1980 Low, John, Into China, London John Murray, 1986 Lubbock, Alfred Basil, The Opium Clippers, Boston Lauriat Company, 1933 (New York Reprint. AMS) Lutz, Jesse Gregory, China and the Christian Colleges 1850-1950, Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1971 • - Christian Missionaries in China (19/20 Centuries), Boston DC Heath Problems in Asian Civilization series Lyster, Thomas (1840-1865), With Gordon in China, Letters from Thomas Lyster, Lieutenant Royal Engineers, London TF Unwin, 1891 Lyttelton, Edith Sophy (Balfour b1865), Travelling Days, London G Bles, 1933 Macartney, George, First Earl Macartney, Journal of Lord Macartney's Embassy to China, London British Museum, 1897 (Microfilm copy at Hong Kong University Library) Macartney, Lady, An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan, London Ernest Benn. 1931 (Hong Kong Reprint Oxford University Press) Macfarlane, W, Sketches in the Foreign Settlements and Native City of Shanghai, reprinted from The Shanghai Mercury, Shanghai, 1881 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g 322 racing 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]. The 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. We, 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. Our 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.' The 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. Archibald 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 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g 323 husband of Mrs. Archibald Little who was a traveller and writer in her own right and who in 1895 founded the Heavenly Foot Society for the suppression of the cruel practice of binding and spoiling the natural feet of Chinese girls. The story now goes back thirteen years. In 1885 Little planned to set up a company to build a couple of steamers after his own design to sail up to Chongqing to open up the vast and fertile province of Sichuan. This led him first to spend six months in one of the ordinary boats of the river learning all he could about the rapids, swirls, currents, depth and other details of the upper waters of the river. He went back to London where he soon formed a company, and an experimental steamer of five hundred tons burden was put on the stocks in Glasgow from designs drawn by Mr. J McGregor, the chairman of the company, conforming to the designs furnished by Archibald Little. The steamer was completed during the summer of 1887, and shipped in sections to Shanghai, where she was put together by one of the local ship-builders and launched towards the end of 1887. She was christened the Kuling, and was about five hundred tons burden, one hundred and seventy-five feet long and twenty-eight broad. She was eight feet deep, perfectly flat-bottomed and drew only two feet four inches of water empty, a mere trifle over four feet with a full cargo, and was especially adapted for navigating rocky and dangerous rapids. The boilers and engines were amidships. She was driven by two sets of compound engines, with a stroke of five feet, and worked with a pressure of one hundred and sixty pounds of steam. She had two stern wheels and a balanced rudder astern of the wheels. The Kuling reached Yichang at the end of February 1889 and all was ready for the passage through the Gorges, when Mr Gregory, the British consul, backed by the Chinese authorities, refused to allow the steamer to proceed, as no permit had been received from either the Zongli Yamen [Chinese Department of Foreign Affairs], or Sir John Walsham, the British Minister at Peking. The rest of the story was so characteristic of Chinese procrastination and delay. To put it simply and bluntly, the British Minister refused to coerce the Chinese in any way, and so the Kuling was eventually sold and the scheme abandoned. The matter of the Upper Yangzi navigation remained in abeyance until the Chinese defeat by the Japanese in the war of 1895 when the ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g بلد 325 they 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. In 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! 3 Paul King : In the Chinese Customs Service: Heath and Cranton Ltd : London : 1924. Archibald John Little : Through the Yang-tse Gorges or Trade and Travel in Western China: Sampson Low, Marston & Co.: London : 1898 [Third and Revised Edition]. Facing p. 288 of Little's book, Through the Yang-tse Gorges or Trade and Travel in Western China. William Mesny: Mesny's Chinese Miscellany : Shanghai : 1st January Page 375 Page 376 ================================================================================