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Documents in Chinese from the Chinese Secretary's Office, British Legation, Peking, 1861–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

P. D. Coates
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Extract

In 1959 a collection of over twenty thousand Chinese-language documents, previously kept in the rambling Peking compound which had housed the British Legation (latterly, British Embassy) since 1861, was transmitted to the Public Record Office in London. It was given the class title Papers in the Chinese Language and the class number FO 682. The documents, some of which were rumoured to have been lying among the rafters of the Legation chapel, arrived in a state of confusion. Early attempts at listing reflected rather than resolved the confusion, but the documents are in fact far from being the trackless jumble sometimes supposed.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 1983 , pp. 239 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

The author was Acting Chinese Secretary from 1944 to 1946. His thanks are due to Sir L. Lamb for recollections of the CSO, to Dr J. Y. Wong for explanations of some obscure documents and to Mr J. Walford of the Public Record Office for guidance. His thanks are also due in advance to any future users of the material who may be kind enough to forgive errors. References are to Public Record Office classes except where otherwise stated.

1 A Critical Guide to the Kwangtung Provincial Archives Deposited at the Public Record Office of London (Harvard University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

2 Nineteenth Century, December 1920.

3 FO 17/1117: Alabaster to Sanderson, 4 November 1891.

4 FO 369/1099: Jordan's 108 Consular, 12 June 1919.

5 Private information.

6 The sub-number should not be cited when documents are ordered.

7 Part at least of the 1865–78 English register of inward and outward letters was compiled retrospectively (Wade is styled ‘Sir T. Wade’ years before he got his K.C.B) by borrowing from the Chinese registers (some English names are given in their Chinese register forms, for example, ‘Captain Kou-te-sou’ for Captain Coates). There is however no reason to regard the register as unreliable.

8 The earlier entries are of doubtful reliability. They omit some memoranda English versions of which are in FO 233/61, dates are mostly absent, and to the end of 1876 inward and outward entries are each numbered in a single sequence. The omissions and the absence of dates and of annual sequences may imply retrospective compilation after a lapse of time long enough for some documents to be overlooked and dates forgotton.

9 Even at the beginning of 1907 four were so treated (FO 233/130).

10 A 1901 list is in FO 233/127 and a 1934 list in Embassy and Consular Archives: China: Shanghai: Correspondence, etc. (FO 671/560). Other lists are known to exist in FO 228 but have not been pin-pointed.

11 The Chinese register leaves numbered blanks for those entries in the English registers which relate to documents in English only. It also contains entries for 1870–83. Most of the 1870–83 documents are missing, but the extant ones are unbound, in Chinese only and in FO 682, not in FO 233.

12 The revised list will also descríbe more adequately the nearly 500 1834–60 documents outside the scope of Dr Wong's catalogue.