[
    {
        "id": 209964,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1983",
        "page_number": 223,
        "title": "RAS-1983",
        "content_text": "201\n\nThere were two museums which I intended to visit but as my daughter's birth day approached the time available for such luxuries declined.\n\nI wrote to the Duke of Edinburgh's Royal Regiment museum, at Lichfield, Staffordshire, and received a very helpful reply. The 98th Regiment, later the 2nd North Staffords, served in the First China War and in Hong Kong.\n\nOn display at the museum are a \"soldier's watercolour\" in the uniform of the period c1840-50. \"This also shows a sentry box and the Colours and seems intended to indicate a coastal location. The 'China Dragon' is on the colour and the painting could well relate to the Regiment's subsequent service in Hong Kong (1842-45)\".\n\nThere is an officers' Shako plate (1829-44), an officers' shoulder belt plate, an officers' sword belt clasp (1826-55) and \"two buttons, a shoulder numeral and a few other relics of the period, subsequently dug up in Hong Kong\".\n\nThe other museum which I missed was that of the Royal Berkshire Museum, successors to the 49th Regiment, in Salisbury, Wiltshire.\n\nMy experience in 1983 proved that visitors to England should make a point of calling in at virtually any regimental or army museum that they pass. What may be judged an unimportant relic against the span of centuries of regimental history may be viewed quite differently from a Hong Kong point of view.\n\nNot army, but equally interesting, is the National Railway Museum, in York, which might seem an unlikely place to search for souvenirs of China--but it houses what is probably the biggest one in Britain. There, sparkling and gleaming, is a mighty Chinese National Railways Class KF 4-8-4 locomotive. The 93-foot long behemoth was built in the mid-1930s at the Vulcan Foundry, Newton-le-Willows, to haul 600-ton trains over the mountainous central section of the Canton-Hankow Railway. After 43 years in service the locomotive was presented to the museum by China and it left Shanghai for England in 1981. The sheer size of this monster makes it stand out and it looked to me far and away the biggest in the extensive collection. The engine weighs in at 114.9 tons with a 77-ton tender.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214152,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 10,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "Keith Stevens - Another Dilemma for Today's Youth in China ... \n\n369\n\nKeith Stevens - An Irish Fantasy.. \n\n372\n\nPenny Robbins, Meredith Tong-Draper and Geoffrey Roper - Backstreets of Beijing: Notes on the RAS HK Easter, 1998 Visit to Beijing \n\n375\n\nKeith Stevens and Jennifer Welch - Monument to the Westmoreland Regiment The 55th Regiment of Foot in Dinghai City on Zhoushan Island...................... \n\n383\n\nDan Waters - Tracing Graves in Hong Kong: Research Methodology \n\n395\n\nKeith Stevens - An Unusual and Extraordinary Ancestral Image \n\n399\n\nPhotographs of the Function to Mark the Award of the Bronze Bauhinia Star to Dan Waters contributed by Phillip Bruce............. \n\n403\n\nPaul Bolding - Visit to the Aurel Stein Collection of the British Museum by the Friends of the RAS \n\nBOOK REVIEWS \n\n404\n\nGerald Choa - The Life and Times of Sir Kai Ho Kai, a Prominent Figure in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong....... \n\n407\n\nGillian Bickley - The Golden Needle: The Biography of Frederick Stewart \n\n411\n\nix",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214293,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 151,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "114\n\nMarines and it was not until an action at Amoy on 26th August 1841 that the British Army (Her Majesty's 55th Regiment of Foot) used them in anger.\n\nApart from the musket itself, the soldier was also equipped with a bayonet which extended the musket into a thrusting weapon equivalent to a short pike. It had an overall length of about six feet, and time and again proved itself to be a formidable weapon. This was used both defensively, as in a formed square fending off cavalry, and offensively as in the charge. Its offensive use was considered by some commanders to be more effective than firing the muskets, and it was common to describe the number of troops by the number of bayonets.29 Officers would carry a sword and perhaps one or two single shot pistols. Swords (cutlasses) and pistols were also the weapons of marines when boarding opposing ships, and some may have been carried by those operating on land; however, they were more likely to have been equipped with muskets.\n\nOn the Chinese side, there were a wider variety of arms. Lord Jocelyn describes a display put on by the Manchu Tartars, who were the elite of the troops in China, where the: \"Tartars were dressed in white cotton garb and black cap, and their weapons were swords and matchlocks, or bow and arrows.\"30 Ouchterlony31 illustrates a Chinese swordsman brandishing a sword, but also holding in his left hand a matchlock and with a powder horn slung from his waist. Hence, it can be seen that the projectile arms were matchlocks and bow and arrows. The matchlock musket uses a form of ignition even earlier than a flintlock. It derives its name from the match, which is a hemp cord impregnated with saltpetre and spirits of wine such that it burns steadily without going out. The mechanism is simple in that the match is held in an arm which, on pressing the trigger, descends onto the priming charge and, hence, ignites the main charge. At this time, it was archaic, and it was also a danger to its user, as the burning match could set fire to clothes or, more seriously, to the powder pouch which the user carried round his waist. Also, when wounded, the danger was compounded, and there are reports of troops being burned to death after falling with otherwise non-lethal wounds.32 Perhaps this had helped to preserve the use of the bow, although it continued in use well beyond the adoption of more modern firearms. Photographs33 of the Taku forts taken after their fall in 1860 show crossbows34 amongst the debris. Also Arch-",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214556,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 414,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "383\n\nMONUMENT\n\nTO THE WESTMORELAND REGIMENT THE 55TH REGIMENT OF FOOT\n\nIN\n\nDINGHAI CITY ON ZHOUSHAN ISLAND\n\nKEITH STEVENS AND JENNIFER WELCH\n\nIn October 1998 the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society organised a visit for members to Ningbo [Ningpo] and Zhoushan Island [Chusan Island] off the East coast of China in the archipelago of the same name. The object of the visit to Dinghai, the county capital of the archipelago, was to try and follow the course of the British military campaign there during the First and Second China Wars, the First being the so-called Opium War of 1840-1842 and the Second, the Arrow War of 1856-1860, and see if any monuments to the British victory and subsequent occupation remained. In particular we were looking for the military cemetery and tombstones.\n\nThe Chinese guide who met us in Ningbo and who was to accompany us to Dinghai was most doubtful about our mission. We did not think she was even aware that the British Army had been on Zhoushan 150 years ago. However by the time our ferry docked at Dinghai, maps relating to the campaign, which had been brought along with us, had been studied in detail, together with an account by the Reverend Wright.\n\nIn Dinghai our first call was at the local museum where we collected the Curator. We were most fortunate in that he was interested in the China Wars, and not only knew the accounts - albeit from the Chinese point of view - but was able to lead us to the sites of action, and to the one remaining monument to the British.\n\nDuring the two China Wars Zhoushan had its moments of glory in history after which both conflicts gradually faded from both British national and Chinese local memories. Between the 5th of July 1840 when the city of Dinghai fell before a British attack for the first time, and the 5th of June 1846 when the British restored Zhoushan to the Chinese, the island was ruled twice by the British with its claim to fame as the first Chinese territory ever to be occupied and controlled",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    }
]