The European Diary of Hsieh Fucheng Envoy Extraordinary of Imperial
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The European Diary of Hsieh Fucheng ENVOY ExrRAORDINARY OF IMPERIAL CHINA
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Translated by Helen Hsieh Chien Introduced and ~nnotated by Douglas Howland
Palgrave Macmillan
© Helen Hsieh Chien 1993 Introducton and annotations © Douglas Howland 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1993 978-0-312-07946-8
All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America 1993 ISBN 978-1-349-60621-4 ISBN 978-1-137-06023-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-06023-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hsueh, Fu-ch'eng, 1838-1894 The European diary of Hsieh Fucheng : Envoy Extraordinary of Imperial China I translated by Helen Hsieh Chien; introduced and annotated by Douglas Howland.
p. cm.
Includes index. 1. Hsiieh, Fu-ch'eng, dI838-1894-Diaries. 2. Diplomats-China-Diaries. I. Chien, Helen Hsieh. II. Howland, Douglas, 1955- .
ID. Title.
DS764.23.H75A3 1993 951'.033 '092-dc20
93-18496 CIP
Contents Translator's Preface .................................................. vi Introduction - Douglas Howland . ................................ xiii
Part I ...... Sixteenth Year of the Guangxu Emperor (1890) ........... 1 Part II ..... Seventeenth Year of the Guangxu Emperor (1891) ........ 61 Part III ..... Eighteenth Year of the Guangxu Emperor (1892) ......... 97 Part IV..... Nineteenth Year of the Guangxu Emperor (1893) ....... 159 Part V ..... 1\ventieth Year of the Guangxu Emperor (1894) ........ 189
Postscript .......................................................... 199
Translator's Preface
J
first became aware of my famous great-grandfather, Hsieh Fucheng, when I was seven years old, after the funeral of my grandfather in 1934. Several pairs of bright red, wooden placards, which had been brought out from storage to be paraded through the city streets to the burial ground as part of the funeral procession, were left standing behind the benches on the side of the spacious entrance hall of my ancestral home in Wuxi, China. On the surface of each pair, large gilt characters were painted to indicate the title and location of my great-grandfather's official posts. The pair that made the deepest impression in my mind was the last pair by the heavy, black, massive double door. The four characters on the left denoted his title, "Envoy Extraordinary," whereas those on the right displayed the locations he served: England, France, Belgium and Italy. In retrospect, I don't think that my grandfather would have approved of such an ostentatious display of his father's glory at his own home. Otherwise, the placards would not have been in storage for all those years. For my grandfather, by nature, was a true Taoist even though he would never make a public claim of his belief for fear of tarnishing his reputation as a Confucian scholar. The literary achievement of my great-grandfather was virtually unknown to me at that time. I did recall, however, that I had caught a glimp
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