Whose Strange Stories? P'u Sung-ling (1640 - East Asian History

Figure 4
WHOSE STRANGE STORIES'
"Churchill Court, " the Giles' house in Somerset where H. A. Giles grew up (source:
Aegidiana: or gleanings among Gileses at home and abroad by one of them.
With portraits and illustrations, a record of all Giles fa milies in Britain printed
for private circulation in 1910, between pp.106 and 107, courtesy Giles Pickford)
Figure 5
H. A. Giles with his second wile Williamina, their daughter Kathleen, and
Chinese servant in the garden of the British Ningpo Consulate, 1889
IOxford, Samuel Wilberforce. And then in
1855 (when Herbert Giles was ten years old)
came John Giles' sensational trial before Lord
Campbell at the Oxford spring assizes, for
having falsified the marriage registry of
Bampton parish. It appears that Giles pere
was guilty of this charge, having, out of good
nature, tried to "cover the frailty of one of his
servants, whom he married irregularly" (out
of official hours, at the same time falsifying
the date and certain other details of the entry
in the register) "to her lover, a shoemaker's
apprentice." For this crime he was sentenced
to a year's imprisonment in Oxford Castle,
though he was released after only three
months, by royal warrant. After a "lapse of
two or three years," he entered once again
upon an intermittent clerical career, at the
end of which he became rector of Sutton,
Surrey (from 1867 until his death in 1884).
Giles pere was clearly a man of an unusual
character, with controversial views on a
number of issues. "His literary tastes and
some peculiarities of manner and disposition
are said to have injured his popularity, but he
was kind and courteous."
3 Giles lived through almost the entire reign
of Queen Victoria 0837-1901), and the whole
Edwardian reign 0901-10), and died six
weeks before George V. His lifetime saw
enormous changes, both in China and the
West. He was born in the year of the publication
of Engels' Situation oj the working
classes in England, and three years before
the Communist manifesto. He died three
months after the Nuremberg Laws had made
the swastika the official flag of the Third
Reich, and two months after the Italians had
invaded Abyssinia. In the year of Giles' birth,
Hung Hsiu-ch'lian #t* was beginning
the process of preaching and conversion that
would lead to the establishment of the T'aip'ing
Heavenly Kingdom *.IJZ*. In the
year of Giles' death, Mao Tse-tung ::§ *
and the eight or nine thousand survivors of
the Long March finally reached Yen'an. When
Giles arrived in China, the great upheavals of
the T'ai-p'ing Rebellion and the Second Opium
War were over. It was an interlude of moderation
and accomodation in foreign relations,
after the drama of the burning of the Yuan
Ming Yuan III SJI and before the turmoil
of the close of the century. Shortly before his
arrival the T'ung-wen kuan fI"U)(f§ (precur­
sor of today's Foreign Language Institutes)
had been set up, and, unsuccessful lOVER
3