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Sealing the Mouth of Outrage Notes on the Meaning and Intent of Hart's These from the land of Sinim

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2006

FRANK H. H. KING
FRANK H. H. KING
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
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Abstract

Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while,

Till we can clear these ambiguities,

And know their spring, their head, their true descent…

And let mischance be clove to patience.

–Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Sinim. A name…taken by many scholars as meaning China under the name Ts'in, but modern opinion mostly regards it as referring to Syene…

–Couling, Encyclopaedia Sinica (1917)

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , July 2006 , pp. 725 - 736
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am indebted to a very old friend, the Rt Revd George Hacker, for his initial comments on my attempts to determine the whereabouts of ‘Sinim’ and to his thoughts relative to Christians finding a personal context in a Biblical reading. I am also indebted to the Revd Mark Everitt for the Smith reference and to Darlene Logan for the essential Jewish citations. I have made certain assumptions relative to Sir Robert Hart based on my research prior to writing his biography for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) and on Hart's own collected correspondence in Confidential Correspondence between Robert Hart and James Duncan Campbell, 1874–1907, Chen Xiafei and Han Rongfang, chief eds (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1993). See especially Volume III and the Index in Volume IV.