RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1988 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q Table 1: Genealogy of the Chan Family Chan Tak Youg (Violet's great grandfather) Chan Jok Jun George, Harry, Henry Chan Jok Chiu (b. 1845) m (1) Au (Violet's grandparents) (2) Leong Yung Kam in Yim (First Paternal Aunt) George Goon Hop (adopted) m (1) Auyoung (2) Liu Gladys Yung Hoy m Lan Kwai Claudia in George Murphy David, Michael Calvin m Barbara Jennifer, Jason, Jeffrey Kwock Wah m Mona Lew Paula, Donna, Marcha, David, Jonathan Lorna (adopted) m Lawrence, Paul, Yolanda, Twila-dawn, Keith, Robin Chan Ping Wing (First Paternal Uncle) m Ching (Concubine: "Small Aunt") Chan Po Ling m (1) Auyoung (2) Kan (Concubine: Kam) Linda, Judy, Lillian, Robert, Chi Fai, Anthony, m Dorothy (5 daughters) Rosita, m Robert Ting (1 child) Chan Ping I (Second Paternal Uncle) m Auyoung Toby in Louise Dung Melody m Johnson Chen, Carol m John Lee, Sonja in Tai Min Wan, Jade m Eddy Lin, Lloyd m Deborah, Lena m Jeffrey Lu Helen m Tong Charles (children) Georgette m Lu Bing Leong (daughter) Moo Yun Ting Cheong (2 sons, 2 daughters) Moo Sau Chan Ping Yip m Jong (Violet's parents) Ruth Violet m John Lew m Me Yuk Helen m (1) Edmund Tin Wai Tong Edmund Yee Sing m (1) Susan Loui Kevin (2) Gertrude Kristiansen Syrilyn, Clayton (2) Tso-yu Fu Lynnette Wen-chu Russell m (1) Lila Kung Dora m Tso-chien Shen Eugene m Nancy Chun Wendell, Celia (2) Susan Carter Russell Gilbert m Christine Liao Warren, Tabitha daughter m Leong Ting Bau (Second Paternal Aunt) Yung Yik m Auyoung (Third Paternal Aunt) Suk Jun, m So (4 sons, 3 daughters) Suk Num, (3 daughters, 1 son), Suk Chiu, (2 sons, 2 daughters) Chan Ping Lim (d. 1903) (Fourth Paternal Uncle) Chan Jok Sau L-6 sons (including Dai Mec, Ngit Chiu and Dai Geng) Chan Jok Sui Ngit Chiu (adopted) d 1924 in Honolulu Chan Jok King Ju Dai, Dai Geng (adopted) 99 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1999 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x 213 Yet however misinformed or ignorant of the real China they might have been, the British officers who went there in the course of the Opium War were not prejudiced against her either. Albeit they usually measured Chinese behaviour against Western concepts of ethics and convention, their writers were still generally respectful of China and its people. Matched by Chinese Ignorance of the West The half truths and misconceptions common to those Britons who bothered to think at all about China and the Chinese were only matched by the equal, if not greater ignorance, exhibited by Chinese about the West, even by the governing classes. Their mind set, even of the most thoughtful among them, was cast in a different mould.5 The Chinese themselves may be held partly to blame for this state of mutual ignorance. Major George Henry Mason, who produced one of the most valuable early works in English on China and the Chinese, based on his personal experience of the situation at Canton in 1789-90, commented that in his day: The very circumscribed limits which are marked out for foreigners at Canton, have rendered the natives of China so completely cut off from human kind that only a very superficial acquaintance has been hitherto obtained with the Religion, the Laws, the Manners or the Arts of a people the most ancient in the discovered world. It was, Mason said, “to be exceedingly regretted, that either habitual caution, ungenerous suspicion, or experienced necessary circumspection, should influence the Chinese, even at a distance of fourteen hundred miles from the capital of their empire, to restrain the observing traveller within his narrow compass. 196 This situation had not changed a whit by 1839. Each party to the War was boxed in by its own limitations. British Officers' Differing Views on the War Like the British public at home, some members of the Expeditionary ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1999 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x 225 NOTES Not all the materials for this study are available in Sydney libraries, and I have been obliged to take extracts from secondary sources where it has not been possible to consult the originals. 2 William C. Milne, Life in China (London, Routledge, Warnes & Routledge, New Edition, 1859), p. 1. 3 Davis had been a long-serving member of the Honourable East India Committee's Select Committee at Canton, and was a skilled linguist and translator. 5 Sir John himself provided a light-hearted anecdote in the Introduction to a revised and augmented edition of another of his books, The Poetry of the Chinese, published in 1870. This tells its own story. "When this Treatise was first printed (now more than forty years ago), with types brought from China, in the quarto Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, the foreign [i.e. Chinese written] character was so little known in England, that Lord Palmerston, with his usual pleasantry, said he took it 'at first sight for a work on Entomology'." (Sir John Francis Davis, The Poetry of the Chinese (Paragon Book Reprint Corp. New York, 1969 of the original, London 1870, p.v) Concerning the Chinese statecraft reformer Wei Yuan, Jane Kate Leonard comments, "Never for a moment did he conceive of the West as a new and unique center of culture and civilization in any sense comparable with China": in Wei Yuan and China's Rediscovery of the Maritime World (Harvard University Press, 1984), pp.3-4. 6 George Henry Mason, The Costume of the Chinese (London, William Miller, 1804), preface. 7 "An Observer" in Vol II of this publication, p.111. 8 Lieutenant John Ouchterlony, The Chinese War: An Account of All the Operations of the British Forces from the Commencement to the Treaty of Nanking (London, Saunders and Otley, 1844), p.37. 9 Ouchterlony, pp.37-8. 10 Wyndham Baker wrote home: "I have read every work I can get hold of ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1999 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x 232 Routledge, New Edition, 1859) George Henry Mason, The Costume of the Chinese (London, William Miller, 1804) Lieutenant John Ouchterlony, The Chinese War: An Account of All the Operations of the British Forces from the Commencement to the Treaty of Nanking (London, Saunders and Otley, 1844) "An Artillery Officer in China, 1840-1842," Blackwood's, 1964. The Cree Journals, The Voyages of Edward H. Cree, Surgeon R. N., as Related in his Private Journals, 1837-1856 Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Levien. (Exeter, Webb & Bower, 1981) Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (Hutchinson of London, 1975) Captain Sir Edward Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, performed in Her Majesty's Ship Sulphur, During the Years 1836-1842. Including details of the Naval Operations in China, From Dec. 1840, to Nov. 1841 (London 1843, Dawsons of Pall Mall reprint, 1970) Stanley Lane-Poole, Sir Harry Parkes in China (London, Methuen & Co., 1901) Edgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China (London, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1964) Sir Henry Keppel, A Sailor's Life under Four Sovereigns (London, 3 vols., 1899) 1881) Laurence Shadwell, Life and Campaigns of Lord Clyde (London, 1881) "Oh for the Joys of England! Lt Rolando Bridgman's Letters From China and Hong Kong, 1842-1843", in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch, Royal Asiatic Society Vol.14 (1974) Sir John Francis Davis, Chinese Miscellanies: A Collection of ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2003 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390 46 own people, and as Denham's editor wrote, its officers expected to exercise the same 'absolute, unquestioned, and unlimited authority over the persons of those who traded to their shores', or came there on any other business: with implicit obedience 'not to what the laws had provided, but to what they [the Chinese officers] thought fit to order'.68 The ever watchful Gutzlaff had noted that 'the poor are generally the sufferers (in the judicial system), whilst the rich expiate their crimes by means of money'. 'The purest virtue is boasted of on paper, whilst cruelty and oppression mark every public act'.70 69 Fundamental aspects of the China Trade A Mutual Ignorance Whilst those Westerners engaged in the old China Trade became accustomed to the very different world around them, and sent back all manner of items illustrative of certain aspects of its culture (albeit those perceived by Chinese to meet demand) the greater part of those engaged were "on the outside looking in." Little real knowledge of the country could be acquired by the great majority of those coming to China, because of its government's firm determination to confine the foreign maritime trade to one outlet at Canton, and to hedge in its personnel with all manner of restrictions. In this aim, the authorities were at one with the Japanese Shogun, who confined the Dutch to the one small demi-island of Deshima at Nagasaki for over 250 years of limited trading.71 The restrictions were greatly lamented by some. Major George Henry Mason, author of one of the most valuable early works in English on China and the Chinese, who stayed in Macau and Canton in 1789-90, had complained of 'the very circumscribed limits which are marked out for foreigners at Canton.' It was, he wrote, 'to be exceedingly regretted, that either habitual caution, ungenerous suspicion, or experienced necessary circumspection, should influence the Chinese, even at a distance of fourteen hundred miles from the capital of their empire, to restrain the observing traveller within his narrow compass'. And after describing the tumultuous outcome of an unsuccessful attempt by a party of British officers to gain the city walls of Canton, he had remarked, 'This adventure is related as a convincing proof of the difficulty, if not of the danger, attending inquisitive strangers in China.'72 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2003 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390 55 70 Gutzlaff, China Opened, op. cit., Vol.II, p.259. "1 For a good description of Deshima, with a drawing, and the restrictions placed on the Dutch merchants who lived there in the late 17th century, see Bodart-Bailey, Beatrice M (1999). Kaempfer's Japan, Tokugawa Culture Observed University of Hawaii Press, Chapter 6. Mason, George Henry (1804). The Costume of the Chinese, London, William Miller, preface. * Milne, William C. (1859). Life in China, London: Routledge, Warnes & Routledge, New Edition, p. 1. *T.T.T (1842). Life in China, The Porcelain Tower or Nine Stories of China. Philadelphia "This topic is well-known, and a source of fun, but its patent inadequacies had serious consequences. Commenting on it in the 1840s, a competent observer wrote, "The whole trade is conducted in this meagre gibberish, which the natives suppose, however, to be as copious and correct English as foreigners themselves speak... Much of the misunderstanding and trouble experienced in daily intercourse with the Chinese is doubtless owing to this imperfect medium .... These petty annoyances have also had more serious results in strengthening the national dislikes, and still further separating those who originally intended, perhaps, only to endure each other as long as they could make gain thereby". Williams, S. Wells (1848). The Middle Kingdom, Boston, 2 vols., Vol. II, pp. 411-2. See also note 55 above. J Concerning the Chinese statecraft reformer Wei Yuan, Jane Kate Leonard (1984) comments, 'Never for a moment did he conceive of the West as a new and unique center of culture and civilization in any sense comparable with China,' in Wei Yuan and China's Rediscovery of the Maritime World. Harvard University Press, pp.3-4. " Gutzlaff, Charles, Journal of Three Voyages, op.cit., p.44. TH Medhurst, W.H.(1838). China, Its State and Prospects, With Special Reference to the Spread of the Gospel. Boston, Crocker and Brewster, p.374. 79 Parkinson, op.cit., p.57. ================================================================================