An Aide-de-Camp’s Recollections of Service in China: A Residence in Hong-Kong, and Visits to Other Islands in the Chinese Seas

This two-volume work, published in 1844, is a memoir of time spent in China by Captain Arthur Cunynghame (1812-84), aide-de-camp to Major-General Lord Saltoun, Commander of the East India Company’s troops in China. Cunynghame set off from Plymouth Sound on board HMS Belle-Isle in late 1841 to take up his post, and the first half of Volume 1 consists of a description of the long journey out to China (they touched at Rio de Janeiro before re-crossing the Atlantic to South Africa, and later visited Singapore and Hong Kong). Once in China, Cunynghame travelled widely in the course of his duties, and recorded his experiences in detail, from the wonders of the Yangtse River to the walls of Nankin: as he observes in his dedication, ‘events and anecdotes occurring in a country that is so strange and new to all Europe may be worth recording’.