William Mesny (1842–1919) was born in Jersey, ran off to sea as a deck hand aged 12, and finally wound up at Shanghai in 1860. China was being dismembered by foreign powers and civil war, and amid the chaos Mesny became variously a prisoner of the Taiping rebels, a smuggler, a customs official and an arms dealer. He eventually enlisted as an instructor in the Sichuan Army where, after five years of fierce campaigning against Miao and Muslim insurgents in remote Guizhou province, he rose to the rank of general.

Mesny witnessed many of the period’s brutal conflicts first-hand, from the Taiping, Miao and Muslim rebellions – civil spats responsible for the deaths of over twenty million people – to territorial wars with France, Russia and Japan which saw China lose valuable tributary states. He spoke fluent Chinese, was twice married to Chinese women, and spent twenty-five years orbiting the country between Beijing and Burma, writing opinionated newspapers articles on everything from mining opportunities to local cuisine, ethnic customs, the appalling state of the roads and inns, and the rigours of dealing with petty officialdom. 

Having served as an advisor to several prominent officials – including the enthusiastic industrialiser, Zhang Zhidong – Mesny eventually settled down at Shanghai with his second wife and published a magazine about his experiences,Mesny’s Chinese Miscellany, whose four collected volumes comprise a fascinating mosaic of late nineteenth-century China. In later years he lost his patronage through entanglement in the Mason Affair, and became caught up in a series of financially ruinous court cases. When he died at Hankou, aged 77, he was working as a desk clerk. 

The Speaker

David Leffman was born and raised in the UK, took a degree in photography, spent twenty years in Australia and relocated back to Britain in 2009. Since 1992 he has worked as a travel writer, authoring and regularly updating guidebooks to Australia, China, Indonesia, Iceland and Hong Kong. In between assignments, he has helped compile a Chinese cookbook and written articles on subjects ranging from crime to horse racing. David spent over fifteen years foot-stepping the nineteenth-century adventurer William Mesny around China, interviewing locals and piecing together his life from contemporary journals, private letters and newspaper articles. His biography of Mesny, The Mercenary Mandarin, is due to be published by Blacksmith Books in 2016. 

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