Abstract
In november 1841 a young Englishman named Thomas Taylor Meadows, who had spent some three years studying chemistry and mathematics in Germany, happened to attend Professor Karl Friedrich Neumann's lectures on the Chinese language at the University of Munich. The young man “almost immediately gave up every other study” and prepared for the British service in China. Hardly more than a year later, at the beginning of 1843, Meadows arrived at the new crown colony of Hongkong. When George Tradescant Lay opened the first British consulate at Canton on July 23, Meadows was Senior Assistant and a year later became Interpreter. This made him, in modern parlance, the chief British intelligence officer at the leading treaty port. After a stretch of seven and one-half years at Canton, during which he reported the beginning in Kwangsi of the great domestic uprising later known as the Taiping Rebellion, Meadows became Interpreter at Shanghai (Jan. 1, 1852), and by the time the Taiping horde erupted down the Yangtze from Wuhan to Nanking in early 1853, he was well prepared to study them at first hand.
