William Mesny

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General William Mesny 1842-1919, was an adventurer, and writer originally from Jersey.

Mesny, left home at the age of twelve to sail the oceans until finally, after visiting India and Australia, he settled in a turbulent China in 1860. He served with two of the provincial armies of the Chinese Imperial forces as a mercenary or, in modern parlance, a foreign adviser.

He spent 59 years in China He became a general in the Imperial army before he was 30, suggesting that his services were greatly valued by the Chinese. He was also made a Knight Ying of the Order of the Pa-tu-lu. At one time he was the senior adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese armed forces.

He visited almost every part of China, including Xinjiang and Tonking (northern Vietnam) and accompanied Captain William Gill on his expedition in 1877 from Chengdu to Burma via Litang, Batang, Dali, along the Tibetan borderlands to Bhamo. He was a plant collector and sent specimens back to the British Consul in Canton, Dr. Henry Fletcher Hance, a famous botanist. One species, Jasminum mesnyi, was named after him.

He wrote an informative history of "Tungking" - now northern Vietnam, which also includes details of his campaigns there.

In his later life he periodically produced a sort of weekly newspaper or journal in Shanghai called Mesny's Chinese Miscellany. Publication of Mesny's Chinese Miscellany began in September, 1895, and continued through 1896, was revived briefly in 1899 and again in 1905. It was comprised of his reminiscences of his life and adventures, snippets of recent news, and thousands of brief articles and notes on a very wide variety of topics relating to China. Mesny also strongly promoted railways and other methods of "modernizing" China.

[edit] References

• Gill, William. 1880. The River of Golden Sand: The Narrative of a Journey through China and Eastern Tibet to Burmah. With Introduction by Henry Yule. 2 vols. London, John Murray.
• Mesny, William. 1884. Tungking. Noronha & Co., Hong Kong.
• Stevens, Keith. 1996. "A Jersey Adventurer in China: Gun Runner, Customs Officer, and Business Entrepreneur and General in the Chinese Imperial Army. 1842-1919." Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Vol. 32 (1992). Published in 1996.

[edit] External links

• http://mesnysociety.com/ (Includes all of Mesny's book, Tungking, a long biographical article, many passages on his adventures from his Miscellany, and other items of interest.)