[ { "id": 205618, "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-1968", "page_number": 160, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "164\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nhusband's family were Hakkas from near Tam Shui and they had then been in Ngau Tau Kok for three generations.\n\nThese accounts are selected from others known to the writer, and are intended to illustrate a feature of old village life in the Hong Kong region at the end of the last century and, no doubt, for centuries before.\n\nBy way of a postscript it appears that travelling Hakka craftsmen were not only to be found in South China. Agnes Smedley's book The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1956) mentions regular visits from such persons at his home when he was young. He was born in a village near the market town of Ma An Chang in I Lung (四川) district in Szechuan in 1886. The following extracts are of interest:\n\nFrom time to time during the year, itinerant artisans left the big towns and cities and came along the Big Road, wandering from village to village to work for such families as needed their special skills. Carpenters, metalsmiths, mat weavers, cloth weavers and others, all were skilled artisans who owned and carried their own tools of trade... An old weaver, whom General Chu referred to simply as \"the Old Weaver\", came each winter to weave cloth from the cotton thread spun by the women of the Chu family. The coarse woven cloth was then dyed an indigo blue, hung on long bamboo poles to dry, after which the women cut and sewed it into garments for the family, into quilt coverings or other uses of the household... These itinerant artisans were a part of the peasant economy. Coming from the big towns or cities, they were much more advanced and independent than the peasants, to whom they brought new ideas. They were even folk historians and some of them could read and write. They lived in the homes where they worked, and each evening the family gathered about to listen to their talk... The Old Weaver who wove cloth for the Chu family each winter seems to have been a Hakka also. He was a grim old fellow with a scalding tongue who would set up his long narrow loom in the courtyard or, if it was too cold, in the kitchen, and begin his weaving... the old man's long brown hands worked as swift as light. He could weave twenty chih, some twenty to thirty feet of cloth, a day, for which", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213402, "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-1994", "page_number": 224, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "212\n\nStockholm Statens Etnografiska Museum, 1866\n\nSkrine, CP, Chinese Central Asia, London. Methuen, 1926 (Hong Kong Reprint Oxford University Press)\n\nSladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton, The Japanese at Home, 5th edition, with Bits of China, London and New York Waid, Lock and Bowden, 1895\n\nSmedley, Agnes, Chinese Destinies - Sketches, New York Vanguard, 1933\n\n- China Correspondent, London Routledge and Kegan. 1934\n\n- Battle Hymn of China, New York Knopf, 1943\n\n+\n\nSmith, Carl T, Chinese Christians Elites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong, Hong Kong Oxford University Press, 1985\n\nSmith, Richard J, Mercenaries and Mandarins: the Ever-Victorious Army in Nineteenth Century China, New York KTO Press, 1978\n\nSmith, Ronald Bishop, A Projected Portuguese Voyage to China in 1512 and New Notices Relative to Tome Pires in Canton, Bethesda (Maryland) L Decatur Press, 1972\n\nSpence, Jonathan, To Change China: Western Advisers in China 1620-1960, Boston Little Brown, 1969\n\nThe Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, New York Viking Penguin, 1984\n\nStaunton, Sir George Leonard, An Authentic Account of An Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, London G Nicol, 1798\n\nStein, Sir Mark Aurel, Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1921\n\nStern, Simon Adler, Jettings of Travel in China and Japan, Philadelphia Porter and Coates, 1888 (WB11894)\n\nSzczesniak, Boleslaw, The Writings of Michael Boym, Monumenta Serica XIV (1949-55), 481-538\n\nTaylor, Francis, mss (Bodleian Library Ms Rawl D391/95-98) Letters of Francis Taylor to Dr Edward Browne April 25, 1703 off Ancuago on coast of China,\n\nTeignmouth, Henry Noel Shore, (b 1847), The Flight of Lapwing, a Naval Officer's Jottings in China, London Longmans, 1881\n\nThomas, James A, A Pioneer Tobacco Merchant in the Orient, Durham NC Duke University Press, 1928.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215944, "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-2002", "page_number": 243, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "177\n\n3 xii\n\nThe whole plan was discussed with RAC North, Secretary for Chinese Affairs and JA Fraser, Defence Secretary who agreed. When Harrop went to Chongqing the first person she contacted was her old friend from pre-war, Madame Soong Ching Ling.\n\nMadame Soong was the widow of Dr Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic and a former Hong Kong resident himself, and graduate of the Hong Kong Medical School which predated Hong Kong University. When Chiang Kai Shek and his extreme rightist faction won the power struggle for control of the National Government, Madame Soong moved to Hong Kong where she and other supporters of the left wing principles Sun had espoused were able to operate with more latitude. She headed an organisation known as the China Defence League which raised funds in support of the anti-Japanese war effort in China, and had connections with many left wing liberal groups, both within China and among the western intelligentsia in Hong Kong and China. This organisation was effectively a form of interface between the KMT Old Guard and more progressive groups. Agnes Smedley, Rewi Alley, Anna Louise Strong and other westerners with strong contacts with the Communist Party under Mao Ze Dong mixed in the same circles as Madame Soong and her supporters, which included Sun Fo, Dr Sun's son by a previous marriage. Sun Fo himself, though he lived in Hong Kong, frequently travelled to Moscow, ostensibly for 'medical treatment,' often staying for long periods. The league did humanitarian work, organising aid for the millions of refugees in Guangdong and in Hong Kong. Percy Chen, son of Dr Eugene Chen, Dr Sun's Foreign minister and close friend worked closely with this aspect of the League's activities. Chen was a socialist and would later declare for the Communist Party. Significantly, FW Kendall had worked with the league in organising programmes to cope with refugees. He himself was something of a refugee, having lost his livelihood in the same Japanese push in Guangdong. Contacts between this left faction of the Guomindang and British people in Hong Kong of a progressive frame of mind were also significant. Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, known as 'Red Hilda' not only for the colour of her hair, but for her politics, was part of this group, rather than a member of the conventional, highly stratified world of colonial society. Her husband may have been a member of the government administration but she did not subscribe to colonial or establishment values. Kendall also worked with Selwyn-Clarke, as did his Chinese wife, who was to be one of the Selwyn", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]