RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1963 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v BRITISH LEGATION AT PEKING 83 1950 the British government recognized the Chinese Peoples' Republic, and as a result the British representative in Peking was recognized and the remainder of the diplomatic staff came to Peking from the former capital of Nanking. In 1954 the two governments agreed to exchange Chargés d'Affaires. Meanwhile a few changes had taken place which affected the Legation. For instance, in 1945 it was decided not to repaint the words LEST WE FORGET on the outside wall. In 1950 the part of the Legation compound which formerly housed the barracks was requisitioned by the government of the Chinese Peoples' Republic. This was the position when I went to Peking as a tourist in July 1958 and enjoyed the hospitality of friends in the old Legation. It was my first and only visit to Peking and I was impressed by the spaciousness and picturesqueness of the old Legation. The British Embassies at Tokyo and at Bangkok, although impressive in their own ways, could not compare with the old Legation at Peking. Here the grounds were more extensive, and the Chinese buildings and pavilions well preserved and brilliantly painted, so that it was an attractive place in which to stay. Only the water-tower and the dingy brick power-plant spoilt the pleasant effect of trees and lawns and flowering shrubs. The large extent of the grounds deadened the noise of the city outside as well as attracting various wild birds — magpies, hoopoes, woodpeckers, and orioles, crows, cuckoos. While I was enjoying my stay in the Legation and sightseeing every day in the city, the news suddenly broke that American troops had landed in Lebanon and British troops in Jordan. Two days later demonstrators began to assemble outside the gate of the Legation shouting slogans and pasting handwritten posters on the 400-yard stretch of the high walls facing the old Imperial Canal. I had been warned that this demonstration was likely to start in the afternoon but I was so engrossed in sightseeing at the Summer Palace during the morning that I failed to start on the return journey to the Legation early enough. In fact, I travelled back to Peking in a bus with a number of children carrying home-made pennants bearing Chinese characters which meant 'English wolves get out', so that I knew that the demonstration was about to begin. When the bus arrived at the ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1969 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d KING MONGKUT AND THE KINGDOM OF SIAM 99 sources the bestness and most curiosity of the new breach-loading cannon invented by Sir William Armstrong I was eagerly desirous of obtaining one small gun for my own enjoyment or play to see the power and curiosity and usefulness etc. thereof....."6 He was too fond of women but he is said to have treated his wives well and to have loved all his enormous nursery of children. If his harem may be regarded as a mark of eastern backwardness in a changing world his social and economic reforms vastly outweighed this defect. Mongkut was the pioneer in the modernisation of Siam. He had vision for the future of his country. Harry Parkes writing on the negotiations records this impression of the man: "I was fortunate in securing and maintaining the friendship of the First King who listened to several of my propositions even against the will of his Ministers. He is really an enlightened man.... It is scarcely a matter of surprise that he should be capricious and at times not easily guided but he entered into the treaty well aware of its force and meaning and is determined, I believe, as far as in him lies, to execute faithfully all his engagements which are certainly of the most liberal nature." The "force and meaning" of the Treaty was the opening of Siam to western commerce and ideas, social and economic reform and her continued independence. Balanced between competing empires, Siam accepted reform and western influence and by yielding, averted domination. The circumstances of Mongkut's death were typical of the King. He predicted an eclipse of the sun in 1868 and made elaborate arrangements to observe the event. He chose a place far to the south, near the Malay States, and invited Sir Harry Ord, Governor of the Straits Settlements, his officials and their ladies to attend. Invitations had gone to Paris to send French scientists. A palace and residences for the distinguished visitors were built, and quantities of European food and wine were brought to this remote spot. The King with his suite of nobles and their wives sailed south for the occasion. Mongkut's prediction was right, and at the last moment the clouds cleared to reveal the eclipse. The foreign visitors were much impressed and Mongkut Page 105 Page 106 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 46 KEITII STEVENS Mu. The whole is best known as a Taoist Heaven (*). The temple at its peak bears the title of Fan Ch'ih Kung (£) "The Palace of the Essence of Brahma". The slip of paper in Tou Mu's back relates that Huang Wen-yuan, a sincere believer, born on the 27th day, 11th moon of the Year i wei (about December, 1835), residing south of Lu Ling City, Chi An Prefecture, Kiangsi Province, together with the whole of his family, on a lucky day of the 9th moon, of the Year keng wu during the Tung Ch'ih reign (about October, 1870), prayed before Tou Mu stating, "I respectfully implore Most Reverend Tou Mu, a heavenly Goddess of Sacred Virtue, having the immense brilliance of T'ien Hou, generosity, the magic powers of suppressing demons and spirits, and the ability to produce amulets and prescriptions for saving people with serious afflictions, to effectively respond to my earnest prayers and wishes, and wield her supernatural powers to protect all the members of my family and to increase not only the number of children but also all kinds of happiness and prosperity". Of the score or so images, only three deities are categorically identifiable, Kuan Ti, Kuan Yin, and Chao Kung-ming, the deities of loyalty, mercy and wealth respectively. Two of the images seem to be local Earth Gods (+) (Plate 8). They are of a style very commonly seen but with what are probably provincial characteristics. They are seated old men, clutching a fly whisk by the end of its handle allowing the handle itself to rest along the forearm and the whiskers to hang from about the elbow. They have a "shoe" of gold in their left hand, long white beards, white eyebrows and white hair under a green floppy form of skull cap with their hair drawn up into a bun through a hole in the top of it. They are wearing long robes bound by a red belt tied in a bow at the front, and black shoes. A female carved in the same pose, holding a fly whisk in the same manner, and dressed in a floral robe but without the “shoe" of gold, has unbound feet, and hair, without a cap, drawn into two short pigtails. She may perhaps, be the consort of the Earth God. A final image, unidentified, has a spectacular face (Plate 9). He is an unidentified monk, seated cross-legged on a bench and with the ends of his robes hanging beneath him concealing the bench. He holds a fly whisk in his right hand in the same manner as the Earth God and in his left hand he holds a rosary. He has the face of an elderly man but with the characteristics more frequently ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1992 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x 37 Whilst he was absent from Hankow for two weeks in 1865, starting his new job [cotton broking], she left for Hunan and 'virtuous widowhood.' [Despite her apparently being with child by Mesny?] Under another heading, on male offspring, Mesny related an incident which occurred when he would have been about forty. He was riding by a tent of a member of a Mongolian-Turki nobleman in Turkestan and it was an act of benevolence, says Mesny, to perform the agreeable function of adding a male child to the nobleman's family. The nobleman, a weak-looking old man with a strong Turkish woman of about forty years of age, had borne a daughter and been barren ever since. The husband, Mesny concluded, introduced us and left us together. Immediately after his capture by the Taipings in 1862 he was confronted by a Taiping chief, an Admiral, who, according to Mesny, welcomed him once he had realized that Mesny too was a Christian and immediately promised to make Mesny a Vice-Admiral in the Taiping navy commanding one of their vessels and give him the hand of one of his daughters in marriage. An old lady with great pull amongst the Taiping leadership who had befriended Mesny after he had repaired her musical box and her pistols, did not approve of Mesny marrying the Admiral's daughter as the girl had already been betrothed to two different men, both of whom had been killed in battle, a sign that she was unlucky and consequently should remain single. Mesny added, 'I had nothing to say in the matter, being as submissive in matrimonial matter as a lamb that is being led to slaughter.' In 1896 he described another of his many adventures with the Taiping rebels in the mid-1860s when, as a captive, many of the Taiping ladies had been perfectly charming and very persuasive, offering him a wife or two from the large number of Taiping ladies in the Taiping king's palace and elsewhere. He added that he had told them that he had no intention of staying with the Taipings for a life time, and hoped to go back to his native land to get married there to a wife whose interests and sympathies would be nearer to his than those of any Chinese lady could ever be. He wrote this in 1896 and one can sense the regret in his tone that he ever did marry a Chinese woman as, at that stage in his life he was married for at least the second time, had two Eurasian children, and was kept at arms length by fellow expatriates in Shanghai where he lived at the time. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1992 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x 161 I have barely scratched the surface in this overview, but it gives the reader an idea of the vibrant state of the Jewish Community in Shanghai at its peak. Jewish Vestiges in Shanghai in the 1980s There were still some physical remains of the Jewish heritage in Shanghai visible during the 1980s. The Cathay Hotel, also known as Sassoon House, at the junction of the Bund and Nanking Road, built by the Sassoon interests, still exists today (October 1991) as a hotel, but has been renamed the Peace Hotel. Its ballroom, venue of many elegant tea dances in the hotel's heyday, is now a restaurant serving Western food. The Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Hongkew is now the isolation ward of the Shanghai Mental Hospital. A photograph taken in 1984 of the Beth Aharon Synagogue shows the dome of the house of worship intact but the Star of David covered by a coat of paint. The US government was asked to intercede to have this synagogue building preserved, but an article by Sam and Mona Kaplan in the Vancouver Bulletin reports that the building has been razed by a bulldozer.28 The Jewish Cemetery was demolished during the Cultural Revolution, but its chapel, as of September 1983, still stood, but as a tea house. Hardoon's Aili Garden became the Shanghai Agricultural Exhibition Hall. Kadoorie's Marble Hall has been transformed into the Children's Palace. NOTES 2 New York Yeshiva University Press, 1976 On a recent trip to Shanghai in September 1991 Mr Bramsen found that his grandfather's home had been razed only the year before There are still a number of former Jewish residents of Shanghai outside China, including Hong Kong. They are generous in sharing their memories, but they are advancing in years and more than a few of them are getting tired of being asked to recite the same things over and again. A PBS radio programme in Los Angeles featured a number of former residents of Shanghai recalling their life, but these were mostly German Jews who were there from the late 1930s to the early 1950s Carl T. Smith, Chinese Christians Elites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong Hong Kong, Oxford, New York Oxford University Press. 1985 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1995 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g 54 In that case, they are victims rather than the promoters. I read in some articles that a high official of the Ch'ing Dynasty painted a landscape picture for the famous actor Tan Hsin-pei (譚鑫培) and addressed him as Hsiao-xiong (小雄) meaning "Little Brother” another euphemism indicating the recipient as one of his homosexual friends. The result? Tan tore the scroll up as soon as he received it. There were no human rights in the early days. Actors and actresses could be penalized for what they delivered, which was actually part of the text of the play. In one case, it was rumoured and has to be clarified that the same actor - Tan Hsin Pei - was entangled in another debacle in which he was greatly humiliated. He was invited among others into the Palace to play the role of Ch'ing Ying (程嬰) in a play called 《趙氏孤兒》 (To Sacrifice One's Own Son to Save the Son of a Loyal Friend.). When Ch'ing Ying went in to consult his wife for the giving up of their only son, his wife, naturally like all mothers, refused. Then he sang his morbid arias “常言婦人心腸狠,最狠莫如婦人心”- "The most cruel hearts in the world are the hearts of women". One thing he forgot was that he was singing the song in front of the Dowager Queen H. M. Tz'u Hsi. She immediately stopped the play and asked Tan to explain why the hearts of women were the most cruel hearts in the world. Tan replied that he merely followed the text of the play. Of course, she wouldn't listen and gave the poor man forty strokes with the birch to make him know better how and what to sing before the Empress the next time. This shows that there was little human rights in those days. The social position of the theatrical people greatly improved after the 1911 Revolution, but still there was a ground swell of general discrimination of society toward the theatrical people as a whole - a custom which takes long to eradicate. Even in modern times, few parents will allow their daughters to marry an actor or their sons to marry an actress. They consider that this may lower their social standing if they do. The ice is breaking, though. Not long ago a famous Hong Kong medical practitioner who was happily married to another famous doctor's daughter with children suddenly asked to divorce his wife to marry a famous Peking Opera star. This did not materialize and the ================================================================================