Overview

Charles Halcombe served for much of the 1880s and 1890s with China’s Imperial Maritime Customs Service. His career included sojourns in both Canton and Hong Kong. Halcombe long harboured dreams of becoming a journalist. Unusually he married a Chinese woman, Liang Ah Ghan, the daughter of a Chefoo merchant during his stay. His seven-year career in China, his writing ambitions and his marriage all strongly inform his impressions and the retelling of his experiences. In these excerpts from The Mystic Flowery Land we join Halcombe arriving by sampan at Hong Kong’s old Pedder’s Wharf before accompanying him on an extended literary stroll along Queen’s Road. With him we enter the “rum-mills” and Chinese theatres, meet the Sing-Song girls, indigent Europeans, and inveterate gamblers of the colony. On Hollywood Road Halcombe explores the fascinating Man-Mo Temple. In Canton Halcombe investigates the riverine life of the city – the infamous “flower boats”, the working river and coastal steamers, the numerous temples to the sea Gods. But it is perhaps Halcombe’s description of the terrible bubonic plague that hit Hong Kong in 1894 that stands out to the reader today as both shocking in its tragedy and pertinent to our own times.

Full Product Details

9789887674986

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Charles JH Halcombe was born in 1865, the grandson of a member of parliament for Dover in Kent. He left England for Australia at age 15 and spent some time as a merchant sailor. He was shipwrecked twice – in December 1881 off the French coast, and in January 1883 off Cape Horn – and also lived through a mutiny on one of his ships. He spent some time in South Africa from where he departed for Shanghai in 1887 arriving in May of that year at just 22 years of age. He was to spend the next seven years in China. He appears to have worked for a year for the major British-owned Shanghai English-language newspaper, the North-China Daily News, before joining the Imperial Maritime Customs Service as a Watcher. Halcombe remained with the Imperial Maritime Customs Service for some years, gaining a promotion to Second Class Tidewaiter (a customs officer who boards ships on their arrival to enforce customs regulations). He resigned in 1893 while stationed at Kiungchow (Qiongzhou), on the then-remote Hainan Island. It appears that Halcombe had long harboured thoughts of becoming a published author. given his early stint on the North-China Daily News and that he had also apparently been working on a novel and some poems while a customs officer. Unusually, though not uniquely, Halcombe married a Chinese woman, Liang Ah Ghan, the daughter of a Chefoo (Yantai) merchant.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available