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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
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2002
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278
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Edith Legge, James Legge: Missionary and Scholar, p. 120.

89. Legge's letter to Arthur Tidman, Secretary of the London Missionary Society, dated October 31, 1861, also printed in the EMMC/MM 26 (1862), pp. 18-19.

90. The first and second volumes comprising Legge's translations and commentaries to the Four Books had been completed in February and November that year,

91. The essay, Che'a Kin Kwáng, must be a pastiche prepared by Helen Edith Legge in preparation for her larger book on her father, James Legge: Missionary and Scholar. It is particularly evident in the last few pages, when letters from Chalmers and others are quoted (without notes or details, typical of her style in the book as well). A comparison of the typescript and the chapter in Helen Edith Legge's book on "Che'a" (notice the same error in transmitting the name of the martyr, pp.102-121) show that she was using the typescript liberally, the last pages of both documents being exactly the same except in one final addition within the book. That addition is a final, short paragraph, hagiographic to the extreme, summarizing how Ch'ea had received the "salvation and strength and the kingdom of our God and the power of His Christ" so that he "loved not his life unto the death". Though its sentiment could be shared by all sympathetic Christians, Helen Legge's writing also had other purposes in mind.

A careful reading of the chapter in her book on Ch'ea reveals numerous factual errors -- wrong timing, mixing up place and person names, confusing original situations -- but also contains some new material from her mother's letters (Hannah Mary) received from her father that provide little cameos of other dimensions of the situation. Unfortunately, she used these sources only selectively, and then apparently destroyed the originals. It is quite significant, therefore, that it is only in the typescript mentioned above and in her chapter in the book that a defence of her father's leaving Poklo in the early morning before the vigilantes attacked the city is presented. (She may, however, be referring to the content of a letter by her father to her mother, or to the later portions of the Reminiscences which I could not check.)

92. See a historical description of the development of this very important institution, one which continued on for forty years as the major bureau for foreign affairs in China, provided by Masataka Banno, China and the West, 1858-1861: The Origins of the Tsungli Yamen (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964).

93. See his Appendix I, “Incidents Mentioned in Text, 1861-1870" in Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity, pp. 275-276. In spite of the title of the table, it seems that the summary is supposed to include all major incidents among the religious affairs documents within the files of the Zongli yámén. Another important gap in the record is the burning of the newly built chapel in Buddha Hill City (Fat-shan, M. Fóshan) in September 1870, a malevolent act perpetrated by crowds who opposed the erection of the building and threatened all those who were there with severe bruisings. Ho Tsun-sheen was one of the Christian officials present at the meeting, escaping through a rear window and finding his way back to Hong Kong independently. The event was so traumatic for him, that within six
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2003
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390
63

A NEW DISCOVERY AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE: THE STATUTORY DECLARATIONS MADE BY SIR ROBERT HART CONCERNING HIS SECRET DOMESTIC LIFE IN 19TH CENTURY CHINA

LAN LI AND DEIRDRE WILDY

[Hon Editor: See also NOTES ON THE ROBERT HART PAPERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG LIBRARY, JHKBRAS, Vol. 29, pp. 367-382]

Introduction

Sir Robert Hart (1835-1911) was one of the extraordinary Westerners who made a substantial contribution to both early China's modernisation and its foreign relations with the West. He was the only Westerner in the latter half of the nineteenth century to occupy an official post in the metropolitan bureaucracy—a position that allowed him daily access to China's highest officials in the Grand Council and Zongli Yamen. He built the first modern institution in China, the Chinese Imperial Maritime Custom (CIMC), and he also played a crucial role in China's imperial politics, significantly influencing its internal reform and diplomatic policy.

During the early period of his life in China (1857-1865) Hart was involved in a sexual relationship with a Chinese girl called Ayaou. The relationship had a significant influence on Hart in that it immersed him deeper in Chinese society. Hart's success in China has been attributed to his good understanding of Chinese tradition. He acquired this capacity in a number of ways, one of which included a long-term intimate relationship with the Chinese girl Ayaou. Hence, Hart's secret domestic life is not simply the personal life of a Western man, who, according to the prevailing custom in the colonial Asia of the 1850s, kept a Chinese girl; it is more significant and, as Bruner, Fairbank, and Smith point out, "does him credit as a human being" and "also shows his capacity for immersion in Chinese society and culture." (1986: 232)

The paper will examine and analyse the recently discovered statutory declarations made by Hart in 1905 and 1911. These documents provide us with new primary and significant material about Hart's relationship with Ayaou and his three children by her. This will address
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