This is part of our series of interviews with some of the speakers at the 2016 Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival.
After a night of heavy drinking at a festival in Guizhou, David Leffman awoke to find his pad filled with notes on the Miao Rebellion.
Quite why he’d written them was unclear. The author’s only recollection was being told by someone that casualties of the 19th century uprising – which he’d never heard of – numbered in the millions.
The research that followed led Leffman to William Mesny, a British mercenary who had fought with the Qing to quell the rebellion. More specifically, it led him to Mesny's Chinese Miscellany – a collection of articles and observations detailing life in China in the latter half of the 1800s. But he was unimpressed.
“It was just someone going into microscopic detail about military terms and things like that,” he explains. “It seemed pointless. I was more interested in what was happening in modern-day China.”
It would be a decade before Leffman revisited Mesny’s accounts. But with many of the intervening years spent exploring Southwest China as a travel writer for the guidebook series Rough Guides, he suddenly found uncanny parallels between the mercenary’s life and his own.
“I re-read some of his work and realized: ‘my God, I’ve travelled to all the places he’d been to,’” he recalls. “I recognized all the individual temples he talks about, the villages he’d stayed in and the battlegrounds he fought at. After that, I just kept coming across Mesny’s name.”
So, after his initial indifference, the British author became fascinated by his countryman’s journey, a process that culminates with release of The Mercenary Mandarin: How a Jersey Adventurer Became a General in Qing Dynasty China. The seemingly tiresome detail of Mesny’s records became Leffman’s most valuable resource.
“The Miscellany is 2,000 pages; it’s a colossal, colossal thing,” he explains. “And it was completely, utterly random. He’d written about everything – marriage customs, rainfall, collecting antiques… there wasn’t anything unifying to it.
“But no other foreigner at the time left as detailed a record as Mesny. Between arriving in 1860 and settling in Shanghai in 1885, there’s an almost unbroken record of his life through his writings and newspaper articles – it was an incredibly well-documented life.”
It was also an incredibly eventful life. Following a short stint as a prison warder in Hong Kong, Mesny began smuggling salt and weaponry up the Yangtze – from Shanghai to Wuhan – during the Taiping Rebellion. He later spent more than five years as a soldier in Guizhou, fighting both the Miao and Muslim insurgents from Yunnan. Other entries in Mensny’s resume include: blacksmith, hotel owner, newspaper reporter, customs official and prisoner of war to the Taiping (who he charmed into keeping him alive).
As Leffman traveled through the region, he was able to discover physical traces of his subject’s life. Remnants of both creation and destruction can still be found in Guizhou: a suspension bridge, which Mesny designed, and a town which still bares the marks of his conquest.
“One of Mesny’s Chinese generals had a pet monkey which got loose and knocked over a lantern, burning the whole town down,” Leffman explains. “When I visited, I met the incumbent ‘oldest man’ in what had once been an impressive family mansion. It was now just a ruin. But while the old man knew that the Sichuan army had once come and burned that house down, he had no idea about the monkey!”
Having followed in Mesny’s footsteps, Leffman has – perhaps inevitably – found further links between himself and his subject. He even describes his approach to the infamously unprofitable world of guidebook writing as “mercenary.”
“One of the things I realized about Mesny was the awkward parallels with my own life,” he reflects. “He spent years roaming around China, gathering this information and publishing it. But he never really achieved anything like what he’d hoped. And sometimes I feel that about my guidebook writing – I gather all this information, put it out and then it’s quickly redundant,” he says with a laugh.
The Mercenary Mandarin: How a Jersey Adventurer Became a General in Qing Dynasty China was published by Blacksmith Books and is available through Amazon or The Bookworm.
WIN!
We have a pair of tickets to give away to David Leffman's Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival event to give away. For your chance to win, simply follow us on WeChat (ID: Thats_Beijing) or scan the QR code below. We'll send out contest details in the coming days.
Sun, Mar 26, 2pm, RMB50. iQiyi, see event listing here. See more interviews with 2016 Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival authors here.
Illustration by Iris Wang
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