The journey of a lifetime from deckhand to revered China hand

The extraordinary exploits of adventurer William Mesny are recounted in a new biography that fizzes with lively characters and provides a valuable insight into life during the last decades of the Qing Dynasty. Paul Tomic speaks with the author.

One morning in 1998, David Leffman awoke to find himself with a desert-dry throat, a thumping hangover and a notebook littered with jottings about an uprising in the 1860s that resulted in the deaths of 3 million people.

Although the hangover eventually subsided, the scribbled notes Leffman had taken during a three-day "Sisters Meal", courtesy of the Miao ethnic group in the southwestern province of Guizhou, were so intriguing he couldn't get them out of his mind. Despite being well-grounded in Chinese history, the British author was astonished that he had never heard of the uprising, so he decided to learn more about it.

That weekend signaled the start of a 15-year obsession with William Mesny, a British adventurer who arrived in China as a penniless sailor in 1860 and rose to the rank of general in the Imperial Army of the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911), before dying as he had arrived, almost broke, in Shanghai in 1919.

The upshot of that decade and a half of travel and research is Leffman's recently published biography of Mesny, The Mercenary Mandarin: How a British Adventurer Became a General in Qing-Dynasty China, a story packed with stirring tales of derring-do and larger-than-life characters, deftly interwoven with the events that drove the times. Although technically a biography, the author's grasp of history and the pivotal events of the time provide an excellent guide to late 19th century China and the conditions under which people lived.