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Meadows on China: A Centennial Review

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

John K. Fairbank
John K. Fairbank
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

In november 1841 a young Englishman named Thomas Taylor Meadows, who had spent some three years studying chemistry and mathematics in Germany, happened to attend Professor Karl Friedrich Neumann's lectures on the Chinese language at the University of Munich. The young man “almost immediately gave up every other study” and prepared for the British service in China. Hardly more than a year later, at the beginning of 1843, Meadows arrived at the new crown colony of Hongkong. When George Tradescant Lay opened the first British consulate at Canton on July 23, Meadows was Senior Assistant and a year later became Interpreter. This made him, in modern parlance, the chief British intelligence officer at the leading treaty port. After a stretch of seven and one-half years at Canton, during which he reported the beginning in Kwangsi of the great domestic uprising later known as the Taiping Rebellion, Meadows became Interpreter at Shanghai (Jan. 1, 1852), and by the time the Taiping horde erupted down the Yangtze from Wuhan to Nanking in early 1853, he was well prepared to study them at first hand.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , May 1955 , pp. 365 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1955

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References

1 Meadows’ miscellaneous references in his essay on civilization begin with Guizot's History of Civilization in Europe and include Compte, Goethe, the Westminster and the North British Review, Helps’ Companions of my Solitude, Creasy's Rise ana Progress of the Constitution, Tennyson (“sheer whoopery”), Richardson on horsemanship, Grimm the philologist, Grote's History of Greece, but principally and at several points J. S. Mill, his Logic and his Political Economy. Crane Brinton's comment, “The very puzzlement so obvious in Mill's work makes him a thoroughly representative Englishman of his time” (English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1949, p. 98) might well be applied to Meadows also—certainly his ideas were more numerous than systematic.

2 Tong, S. Y., “Chinese Influence on the Western Examination System,” HJAS 7.4 (September 1943), 289–290.Google Scholar

3 Hamberg, Theodore, The Visions of Hung-Siu-tshuen and Origin of the Kwangsi Insurrection, Hongkong, 1854.Google Scholar

4 Michie, Alexander, The Englishman in China during the Victorian Era, 2 vols., Edinburgh and London, 1900Google Scholar, 1.161, also 2.224, 2.363.

5 Meadows cites the French original, L'Empire Chinois, Cp. Huc, M., A Journey through the Chinese Empire, 2 vols., New York, 1855Google Scholar, author's preface dated May 24, 1854.

6 Wright, Stanley F., Hart and the Chinese Customs, Belfast: Mullan, 1950, pp. 136–7Google Scholar, 147, 214, 309–10. Meadows had remained strongly pro-Taiping and in the 1860s was denounced for his “blind, dangerous Taiping partisanship”; cp. Montalto de Jesus, C. A., Historic Shanghai, 1909, p. 115.Google Scholar

7 Cordier, Henri, Histoire des relations de la Chine avec les puissances occidentales 1860–1900, 3 vols., Paris 1901–1902, 168 n.Google Scholar