RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794
130

already full. So off they went again across the Pacific by sea to Manila, Hong Kong and Shanghai before setting out for Cape Town where they remained for five months. They finally returned to Washington having stayed in Buenos Aires for a month en route. Back in Washington they found that he was still unable to obtain a residence permit. However, someone pointed out the small print that as a dependent of his wife they would be allowed to stay and there they remained for the next six years until Sowerby died on the 16th of August 1954 at the age of sixty-nine. His last years were confined to his sickroom from which he continued his researches and writing.

For some twenty-five years of his life he lived in Shanghai, through its heyday, and for fourteen years he produced and published a creditable monthly periodical, the China Journal, aimed at ‘educating' Westerners in China to appreciate many of the aspects of Chinese civilisation and life under headings - Science, Art, Literature and Travel. It was to "encourage an active enthusiasm for the powerful and often enigmatic Chinese self-contained culture," though the Journal not only pursued interests concerned with culture and the Chinese social environment it also pursued the major leisure activities available in China - hunting, shooting and fishing - all subjects close to Sowerby's heart. His primary interest centred on the collection of scientific and geological specimens for museums in Britain and the United States, as well as retaining some specimens for a unique museum in Shanghai.

The bimonthly Journal was originally titled The China Journal of Science and Arts, and edited by Arthur de C. Sowerby [Science] and John C. Ferguson, PhD [Literature and Arts]. Clarice Moise BA began as the Assistant-Editor and Manager but later simply became the Manager. We know nothing of Ferguson whose name continued on the editorial staff until the late 1930s. The first issue, No. 1 of Volume 1 was issued in January 1923 with a primitive sketch on the cover designed by A de C. S showing a mounted T'ang horseman, a dragon and bats. At first, the journal was based at 103 Ben Building at 23 Avenue Eduard VII in the French Concession though later, by 1928, its offices had moved to 8 Museum Street in Shanghai. The cover was changed in 1926, again designed by ‘A de C S', to a cross-legged Buddhist deity with his palms held together in front of his chest in prayer, with a flaming nimbus behind him and sitting on a pedestal.
================================================================================
RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794
132

Arthur Sowerby was recorded in the Directory & Chronicle of China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, etc. for the years 1932 and 1938 as manager of China Industries Ltd, with an office in Museum Road, Shanghai and in 1938, as a director of the Post-Mercury Company Inc., USA in Avenue Edward VII, also in Shanghai. The latter was involved in printing and advertising.

Arthur was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a Fellow of the Zoological Society, a member of the RAS North China Branch and also President [1928] of the China Society of Science and Arts [in Shanghai], as well as being Honorary Director of the Shanghai [RAS] Museum.

iii

He married three times, the first time in about 1910, at the age of twenty-five, to Mary Anne Mesny, the daughter of John Mesny of the Chinese Customs Service. She would have been just about the same age as Arthur though more than likely his elder by a few years. She seems to have disappeared from the scene almost immediately, perhaps dying comparatively young but not before she bore him a son. She does not appear in any notes after their marriage even when his parents and sisters were evacuated from Taiyuan to the safety of Tientsin during riots. This suggests that she was no longer present after about 1911 or 1912. As Mary Anne's father, John Mesny, was married to a Chinese lady whom he married in Hankow in 1866, Mary Anne was half-Chinese. This was a time when mixed marriages and even more so, marriage to someone with native blood, was frowned upon by the more bigoted expatriates.

His second wife, to whom he was married at the age of forty-two in 1927, was Clarice Moise, the American with whom he founded the China Journal. Clarice died in 1944 during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.

His third wife was Alice Cowens, an old friend and the lady who had nursed Arthur's brother when he had been gassed during the First World War. She was invited to join Arthur in Shanghai in the Autumn of 1946 at a time when he was too ill to travel back to England alone and promptly flew out, first to Hong Kong and then, five days later, she arrived in Shanghai and married him.
================================================================================