[ { "id": 204504, "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-1962", "page_number": 136, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "BRITAIN AND CHINA\n\n121\n\neither upon more powerful allies or groups of nations such as the U.N. or SEATO. And the policies which Mr. Luard would most like to see the British government influencing are the transfer of the China seat in the U.N. to Peking; KMT withdrawal from the offshore islands; and the abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek's claim to the mainland. These accomplished, he contends - rightly, I think - that the Peking government, mollified and with the equanimity which comes from assured status, would pursue the extension of its aims with less belligerence.\n\nBritain's next move, in order to prevent the spread of Communism (it is a pity that Mr. Luard does not analyse for us why this should be a British policy, since, as he says, most Britons are ideologically vague) should be to cultivate friendly relations with the peoples of other nations. This is better than just being friendly with governments, which after all can collapse overnight. Further, many governments are highly unpopular and associating with them merely brings one into disrepute. Britain must also be prepared to contribute money to under-developed non-Communist countries to supply them with the capital needed for investment; otherwise they might be tempted by the economic advantages of Communism, the chief of which is the high rate of internal saving it makes possible. Britain, with her comparatively high standard of living, can well afford to give more to the shockingly poor countries of the east.\n\nMr. Luard's last advice to the British government is to try to make possible more visits from Chinese leaders to the west. He is undoubtedly right in his assessment of the ignorance and misunderstanding of the outside world which exist on all levels in the Chinese government, and there can be no doubt that travel in Europe would help. To think that Britain can do much in this sphere at present is perhaps optimistic; it might be worth giving the advice to one or two of the governments of eastern Europe, who are more likely to be believed in Peking than the British, and who, for all their Communism, have both knowledge and understanding of the west. Despite that, however, this analysis of the paths which British policy might follow is a splendidly thorough and practical one. To this the rest of the book leads up; the author's eye is firmly on the present and the future, his intention being to explain why China is as she is and what Britain can do about it. He succeeds admirably.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204591, "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-1963", "page_number": 72, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "BRITISH LEGATION AT PEKING\n\n61\n\nacquire at Peking a site for Building, or may hire Houses, for the accommodation of Her Majesty's mission, and that the Chinese Government will assist it in so doing\". Then, when the Imperial Government appeared to procrastinate over the ratification of these treaties, another English and French force fought its way to the capital and compelled the Manchu authorities to ratify them by the Convention of Peking. This was signed by the British envoy, Lord Elgin,1 and by Prince Kung,2 the chief Chinese representative, on October 24th, 1860 in the Hall of Ceremonies situated in what was later to be called Legation Street. The second clause of the Convention stated that \"Her Britannic Majesty's Representative will henceforward reside permanently, or occasionally, at Peking, as Her Britannic Majesty shall be pleased to decide”. \n\nLord Elgin proposed that Prince Kung's own residence should be rented to the British, but Prince Kung memorialized the throne as follows: \n\nAs regards the matter of the English residing at the capital in the near future, we have been discussing it with them during the past few days. The chief barbarian official [Lord Elgin] considers that the quarters in Prince I's [Prince Kung] palace are spacious and he insists that it is to be their future residence at the capital. Moreover, he stated that there were still open spaces in the palace and that he wants to build houses there himself. It seems to your ministers that to \n\n1 James Bruce, eighth Earl of Elgin. He served as Governor-General of Canada 1846-1854. In 1857 he was appointed envoy extraordinary to China and signed the Treaty of Tientsin in 1858, returning to England early in 1859. In 1860 he was again sent to China as special envoy, and signed the Convention of Peking. He returned to England in 1861 and was appointed Governor-General of India in the same year. He died in India in 1863. \n\nHis younger brother Frederick William Bruce held the post of Colonial Secretary at Hong Kong from 9 February 1844 until 27 June 1846. In 1857 he accompanied his elder brother to China as principal secretary. He was appointed minister plenipotentiary to the Emperor of China in December 1858, but had to wait until March 1861 before actually taking up residence in Peking. He left China on his appointment as British Minister to Washington in 1865. \n\n2 I-hsin (1833-1898), the first Prince Kung, was the sixth son of Emperor Tao-kuang. When the joint French and British forces approached Peking in September 1860 the Emperor Hsien-feng fled to Jehol leaving his half-brother, Prince Kung, to make peace with the allies. When a prototype Chinese foreign office, the Tsungli Yamen, was set up in 1861, Prince Kung was in charge of it, and he played an important part in Chinese affairs for the next fifteen years.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206217, "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-1971", "page_number": 34, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "28\n\nSTEPHEN UHALLEY, JR.\n\nand justify their active support of the attack on the city. This then is what happened on the morning of May 10th. According to the Ch'ing official, Hsü Yao-kuang, the provocative shots were fired at a foreign vessel and actually killed two foreigners.36 Dew jumped to the conclusion or feigned to believe that it was the Taipings who had done the firing, and immediately joined in the fight. Dew's own account is nonchalant, noting merely that the Taiping guns were silenced and that he then went to dinner at noon. At 2 p.m. storming parties mounted the walls, and at 5 p.m., after all opposition had ceased, the \"Governor” (probably the tao-t'ai) and Ch'ing soldiers landed from their junks. Dew turned the city over to the Manchu official and withdrew his men.37 The disposition of the Ch'ing troops during this attack is implicit in this report, but another unofficial source was more explicit, reporting that the Chinese allies could not be made to move toward the walls, so that in the end, even the actual breaching of them had to be undertaken by foreign troops.38 Obviously, under the circumstances of such an attack by Ch'ing forces, the Taipings had little alternative but to return fire toward foreign vessels which were interspersed among or in close proximity to the pirate fleet, both as the action began and as it continued.\n\nAfter a determined resistance, and after both of their generals, Huang and Fan, had been badly wounded, the Taipings retired from the city. The contrast between what happened during the retaking of the city at this point and the record of the Taiping seizure of the city several months earlier is interesting. It will be recalled how universal had been the favorable comments regarding the bloodless Taiping takeover. As for this latest occupation, the report of the correspondent for the China Mail speaks eloquently: \"The rebels retreated through the west gate; the pirates then entered the city and began the work of destruction, and in a few hours did more damage than the rebels did in the whole of the five months that they had possession.\" The same account goes on to speak of the executions and the tortures that were perpetrated over the next couple of days, and notes specifically that the British Consul's Chinese servant was \"one of the principal murderers and torturers of the poor fellows found in the city.\"39 Cheng A-fu was subsequently given the status of a petty official in Ningpo, as a reward for his service.40", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206218, "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-1971", "page_number": 35, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "THE TAIPINGS AT NINGPO\n\n29\n\nNingpo, for a long time had been a difficult city to administer, but the Taiping occupation seems in retrospect to have been an exceptional period. To better appreciate this it is worth considering Ningpo in a somewhat broader perspective. For example, a year and a half before the Taipings took the city, a Jardine Matheson Company agent reported that the Ch'ing officials were unable to control the pirate-infested countryside.41 Three months after the Taipings left Ningpo, the Jardine agent gloomily reported that trade was bad and would remain so until \"a stop was put to the squeezing on the part of the Imperial Authorities.\"42 Six months after the departure of the Taipings, the agent revealed that Ningpo was in the throes of civil chaos. The unpopular tao-t'ai had been forced into hiding following a dispute with men from Frederick Townsend Ward's so-called Ever Victorious Army. The situation was resolved by Captain Dew who actually had to reoccupy the city. Dew and Harvey ignominiously had to search long and hard to find the affrighted Ch'ing official.43 Small wonder then, that the Jardine agent's report of January 1863, speaks of how the country people of Ningpo are now fondly recalling that the Taipings had always paid for what they took.44\n\nJudgment on the victorious expulsion of the Taipings from Ningpo has been varied. Consul Harvey congratulated himself:\n\nFor my part, let me state that it will be a source of great satisfaction and I may add, of pride, in after time to think that I have been placed in a position to use my feeble pen, and to have exercised my humble powers (always within the limits of my official duties) in weakening and undermining, as perseveringly and indefatigably as I have been able, the most gigantic imposture and the most blasphemous structure that ever disgraced ancient or modern pages.45\n\nForeign Secretary Russell, from London, also congratulated Harvey for the \"judgment, courage, and temper, which he displayed on all occasions....\"46 Another influential writer on these events termed Dew's accomplishment \"a brilliant feat of arms.\"47 But the Hong Kong Daily Press, for one, expressed the view of many contemporaries: \"There never was a falser, more unprovoked, or more unjustifiable act than the taking of Ningpo by the allies from the Taipings. It should, in fairness, be recorded to the eternal disgrace of Captain Roderick Dew, of HMS En-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206970, "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-1974", "page_number": 41, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG\n\n35\n\nCollège Stanislas at Cannes. In 1877 he entered the military academy of Saint-Cyr;22 after passing out from Saint-Cyr, he joined the famous Saumur cavalry school. He was to remain a magnificent horseman all his life.\n\nThe turning point in Morès' life came in 1881 when he met Medora von Hoffmann, the daughter of Louis von Hoffmann,23 a New York banker of German extraction, who had a villa, like Morès' father, at Cannes. Morès resigned from the army and in February 1882 married the petite, blonde Medora, who was to bear him three children. In August 1883 they travelled to the New World and Morès soon after started work in his father-in-law's bank.\n\nMorès was an astute banker but when his cousin, Count Fitz-James, returned from a hunting expedition to the Dakotas and regaled him with tales of his adventures, he decided to throw up his banking career and head west to the area of the Dakotas called the Bad Lands. In April 1883 Morès, together with William Van Driesche, set out by Northern Pacific Railway from Chicago for the Little Missouri River. After an inspection of the country he decided it was ideal for cattle ranching. He bought a large tract of land, built his own town--Medora--and a twenty-eight room château24 on a spur overlooking the river and the new town.\n\nThe Marquis, who had begun to fence off his land, soon made enemies among the badmen of the area. Three in particular – Luffsey, O'Donnell and Wannegan--on several occasions attacked the château at night and their gunfire was returned by the intrepid Marquis and Van Driesche. The series of incidents culminated in the ambushing of the trio by the Marquis and two of his cowboys. Luffsey was killed, the other two wounded and taken prisoner. The incident did not end there, for the Marquis was charged with murder, held in custody and nearly lynched by an excited mob.\n\nMorès established his own abattoir, meat-packing and processing plant at Medora and hoped, thereby, to undercut the prices for dressed meat set by the monopolistic 'beef barons' of Chicago--the Armours and Swifts--but he was opposed not only by them but by their business allies, the railroad magnates. By 1885 it was clear that Morès' cattle empire was tottering, that he could not compete with the stockyards of Chicago, and that his scheme to provide cheap meat to Westerners and Easterners alike had totally failed. He returned to New York with his family, but at once attempted", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206983, "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-1974", "page_number": 54, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "48\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nOn 9 June, after the party had left Mechiguig and was passing through a grove of tamarisks, Bechaoui, who had now joined the caravan, suddenly seized Morès' carbine and unhorsed him. He was cut in the head by a blow from a sword but managed to get on his feet and back up against a tree, from which position the lion-hearted adventurer opened fire with his revolver on his assassins. Surrounded by over forty Touaregs, he fought bravely, killing and wounding a number of his assailants. Then he was felled finally by two shots, and a knife plunged into his heart. And so the Emperor of the Badlands died amidst his servants in the desert.\n\nIt is not necessary to detail what happened after the Marquis' death—the long search for and trial of his assassins, 52 his apotheosis as a great national hero, the creation of a nationalist legend—except to add that his body was recovered by a French patrol, shipped to Marseilles; then conveyed to Paris and to a magnificent ceremony at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The funeral oration was declaimed by Maurice Barrès, the novelist and perfervid nationalist; the distinguished mourners were joined by contingents of butchers from La Villette, though accounts do not tell us whether they came wearing their Stetsons. The London Times reported of the funeral;\n\nSpeeches were delivered today in which the murder of Morès was attributed to the Jews and the English and the listeners cried, \"A bas l'Angleterre! A bas les Juifs!”\n\nEven on his catafalque the stone-cold Morès was a centre of agitation.\n\nIt is not a coincidence, I feel, that many people continued to doubt the official versions of the deaths of both these adventurers. Although Owen, who signed Mayréna's death certificate, declared that death was due to snakebite, the symptoms exhibited by the dying man were not those usually associated with death from a venomous snake—there was only one puncture of the skin and death came too rapidly. It is possible, then, that Mayréna either killed himself by taking poison and pricking his own leg to simulate a snakebite; or that the libidinous Mayréna was killed by a poison arrow shot by a jealous Malay. Morès' death, on the other hand, has been blamed by French nationalists on the dastardly British Secret Service and even, according to another version, on a conspiracy hatched by Constans, his political allies and Jewish friends. In both cases we are not likely to resolve the puzzle at this date.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207059, "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-1974", "page_number": 130, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "124\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nLocal people were placed in a difficult position when pirates or, in periods when China was at war with Britain and her allies, imperial war junks occupied their anchorages. At least two such instances occurred in the 1850s. In February 1857 two British vessels attacked war junks at the Chinese naval anchorage of Tung Chung on Lantau where there was also a fort and permanent garrison. The local population which had probably taken no part in the fighting had to make its peace with the squadron the day after it had burned the junks and dismantled some of the batteries on shore. An offering of two bullocks and some pigs, was sent with a letter from the elders begging the commander to spare their settlement.1 The same thing happened at Tai O, also on Lantau, in November 1854, when an expedition was sent to deal with pirate junks that had fired on the chartered steamer Queen, an American naval vessel. After shelling and an attack by the boats of the squadron, the pirate junks and storehouses were destroyed. An American naval officer, Lieutenant G. H. Preble, captured a pirate flag, inscribed with characters which, he wrote, 'state it is the flag of Lue-ming-suy-ming of the Hong Shing-tong Company, Chief of the Sea Squadron, and that he takes from the rich and not from the poor, and his flag can fly anywhere'. Local people did not see him in quite this light, for Preble records that ‘no sooner had we destroyed the piratical vessels, than a large fleet of fishing junks came into the Bay rejoicing and anchored'. These persons had to drive off a pirate attempt to take and make off in their boats during the night. The next morning a deputation of the chief men of the village came on board his steamer 'with a present of chickens, pork, fish, etc.'2\n\nIn this period, as at an earlier time, villagers took what measures they could to protect themselves from such villains. In the larger places like Cheung Chau, it was apparently possible for local people to prevent their being taken over by pirates as had happened at Tai O. As I have described in another place, their leaders established a Security Bureau in the early 1850s and repaired it when trouble again threatened some years later. In the villages\n\n1 Illustrated London News, 9th and 16th May 1857, pp. 463, 473-474. 2 Szczesniak, pp. 262-266. Another account of this expedition is given in Tronson, pp. 61-62. He calls the place 'Tyhoo', and Preble, 'Tyho'.\n\n3 Hayes 1963. Cheung Chau itself had previously been thought to harbour pirates; see CO129/6, No. 26 of 21 June 1844, in PRO London.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207356, "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-1975", "page_number": 124, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "116\n\nRICHARD J. SMITH\n\ndeterioration of prospects in their homeland. Many foreign military men in the Chinese service came from aristocratic families, some as hostages. At times barbarians came to China as temporary allies, returning home after a limited tour of duty.\" Although the general tendency was to measure barbarian devotion by the yardstick of cultural submission, Chinese policymakers recognized that personal, bureaucratic and economic pressures necessarily complemented cultural controls. If an individual did not wholly accept the constraints of Chinese culture and the Confucian value system, he might still be ensnared by having a material stake in Chinese affairs or at least bound by personal relations and institutional limitations.\n\nEconomic inducements were particularly important, given the common stereotype of foreigners as \"animal-like\" and avaricious.18 In the eyes of many, barbarians could never possess what Ch'en Yen described as a “Chinese heart” (Hua-hsin). As the Han thinker Tung Chung-shu put it: \"People like the Hsiung-nu cannot be converted by humanity and justice, but can only be appeased with huge profit, and tied down by an appeal to Heaven.\"19 Chia I, another Han scholar, developed the strategy of the \"three standards and five baits” (san-piao wu-erh), designed to spoil the senses and win the hearts of barbarians through flattery, personal attention, imperial favor and material attractions.20 Yet another policymaker, the Ming statesman Chang Chü-cheng, sought to combine the carrot and the stick. In response to the question, \"How can one hold responsible the arrogant, bellicose barbarians who have surrendered only recently?\" Chang answered: Treat the foreigners like dogs, throwing them bones when they wag their tails and whipping them when they bark.21\n\nMultiple restraints were deemed essential to the effective management of foreign military employees, for military affairs remained a closely guarded sphere of imperial control. The use of aliens in a civil capacity involved comparatively few risks. Outsiders with administrative ability were often genuinely attracted by the refinements of Chinese culture and, in any case, were checked by the usual limitations of civil bureaucratic power. But foreign military men, more likely to be unlettered and unimbued with civil virtues, were less susceptible to cultural and bureaucratic restraints. Since such individuals might command or control large numbers of troops, it was of special concern to the Chinese that their loyalty be both", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207359, "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-1975", "page_number": 127, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "EMPLOYMENT OF FOREIGN MILITARY TALENT\n\n119\n\ninto the family of the famous minister and military commander Ho Kuang.29\n\nBut the Han experience in employing outsiders had negative as well as positive effects. While Hsiung-nu might defeat their fellow barbarians in battle, they might also revolt against the Chinese—witness the uprising of the \"Dutiful Barbarians of Huang-chang\" (Huang-chung i-ts'ung hu) in 184 A.D. Financial inducements, honors—and even the Han practice of requiring barbarian soldiers to give up members of their families as hostages—did not always prove sufficient in controlling barbarians with conflicting interests or wavering fidelity.30 Yet on balance, China benefitted from the use of foreigners during the Han, and Chin Mi-ti, like Yu Yü, received the praise of later generations for his faithfulness and devotion to the Middle Kingdom. As a tribute to Chin's loyalty (and in acknowledgement that disloyalty was not a peculiar barbarian trait), the T'ang scholar, Ch'en Yen wrote: \"In the case of the revolt and failure of Lu Wan and Shao-ch'ing [Li Ling] were they not barbarians? In the case of the loyalty of Chin Mi-ti, was he not a Chinese?”32\n\nAfter the fall of Han, subsequent dynasties—both Chinese and foreign—used barbarians in numbers and positions appropriate to circumstance.33 The T'ang is especially noteworthy for its widespread use of aliens in various military and administrative capacities. Turkish tribes, particularly the Uighurs, became indispensable allies of the dynasty, fighting barbarians beyond China's frontiers as well as supplying troops for use against internal enemies. In 757, for example, the Uighur heir apparent (Yeh-hu) led some 4,000 Uighur cavalry forces successfully against the rebel An Lu-shan, for which he was honored with a long edict of praise, gifts, and substantial awards of title and rank.34\n\nOther foreigners, employed permanently in the T'ang service, were such famous generals as Ch'i-pi Ho-li, Kao Hsien-chih, and Li K'o-yung. Ch'i-pi, the grandson of a Turkish (T'u-chüeh) khan, gained high rank and eventual enfeoffment as a duke for his military efforts against various barbarian tribes during the reign of Kao-tsung.35 Kao, a Korean whose father had been an officer in the Chinese army before him obtained numerous high military positions before he fell victim to intrigue following his defeat in the fateful Battle of Talas (751).36 Li was an opportunistic fourth-generation commander of Sha-t'o aristocratic background, whose father had", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207361, "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-1975", "page_number": 129, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "EMPLOYMENT OF FOREIGN MILITARY TALENT\n\n121\n\nallies, for example, occasionally directed their military efforts against, rather than for, the dynasty; and even the Uighurs sometimes became overbearing and troublesome.42 There were, moreover, tensions between barbarian and Chinese officers, as well as conflicts between various competing barbarian commanders. But perhaps the most vivid illustration of the dangers involved in utilizing foreigners was the famous rebellion of the \"mixed-breed\" barbarian, An Lu-shan, which the Uighur heir apparent had helped combat in its early stages. Contemporary observers saw this uprising not as a civil war between the central government and a local \"warlord,\" but rather as a conflict between the Chinese and a barbarian. Chinese historians went so far, in fact, as to maintain that the rebellion occurred \"because An Lu-shan and other barbarians were given important military and political offices.\"43 Whatever the merits of this view, we may safely assume that An did not rate a biography in Li Te-yü's I-yü kuei-chung chuan; and although foreign troops and individual barbarian commanders assisted in the restoration of imperial rule, and helped sustain the Tang dynasty for nearly a century and a half after the revolt, resentment and distrust of barbarians became increasingly evident as neo-Confucianism rose to prominence.\n\nThe Use of Foreigners in Post-T'ang Times\n\nChinese anti-foreignism, already on the rise in the later years of T'ang, received reinforcement from neo-Confucianism, with its emphasis on the superiority of Chinese culture and the closer identification of Confucianism with that culture. At the same time, the stress on civil virtues and the growing importance of the vaunted examination system as a channel for upward mobility led to a general decline in martial spirit.44 Yet even as China turned inward, her ever-present need for foreign military and administrative expertise assured that outsiders would continue to find their way into the Chinese service. This proved true in the Sung, when specially trained \"barbarian troops\" (fan-ping) operated against internal and external enemies, and barbarian commanders (fan-chiang) such as Kuo Yao-shih (a surrendered Liao officer) rendered similar service. Kuo is particularly noteworthy for having led a military force known as the Ever-Victorious Army (Ch'ang-sheng chün) which, in some respects, resembled the contingent with the same designation raised by Frederick Townsend Ward in the latter stages of the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864).45", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207364, "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-1975", "page_number": 132, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "124\n\nRICHARD J. SMITH\n\nTo be sure, the Ch'ing dynasty was not blindly anti-foreign, having accepted both Russians and other Europeans (the Dutch) as allies, and having allowed a number of Russians to be \"naturalized\" (kuei-hua) and incorporated into the elite Banner forces.58 But the ever-tightening strait-jacket of neo-Confucian orthodoxy under the Manchus, and the rise of anti-foreign (particularly anti-Christian) propaganda, did not portend a friendly reception for Westerners when they attempted to \"open\" China by force in the nineteenth century.\n\nThe Nineteenth Century Context\n\nBy the mid-nineteenth century, the West had earned China's well-deserved distrust for its aggressiveness and intractability. Pronounced anti-foreignism (championed, ironically, by a scholar of Mongol extraction in the 1860's) blossomed after the Opium War of 1839-1842 and grew apace with further Western economic, military and religious activity in China. During the Opium War, the throne had countenanced, and even encouraged, limited and unobtrusive military assistance from Americans in the time-honored tradition of \"using barbarians against barbarians.\" In the area of Canton, for example, a few individuals \"dressed in Chinese costume\" assisted the Chinese in building fortresses and casting cannon.59 But by the Hsien-feng emperor's reign, China had adopted a belligerent anti-Western stance, and despite the panic precipitated by the Taiping outbreak in 1850-1851, the throne seemed totally indisposed to accept any kind of foreign assistance against the rebels. The situation did not change appreciably until 1860, when the British and French occupied Peking in an attempt to enforce the provisions of the Treaty of Tientsin (1858).60\n\nAfter the signing of the Peking Conventions in late 1860, which ushered in a new period of \"cooperation\" between China and the foreign powers, Western barbarians began playing a prominent role in Chinese military affairs. A number of diverse individuals became involved: Foreign military men and diplomatic officials, customs personnel, swashbuckling adventurers, and even missionaries.61 On the whole, the participation of these individuals fell within the bounds of China's long tradition of \"borrowing talent from foreign lands\" (chieh-ts'ai i-ti).62 But unlike alien employees in earlier periods of Chinese history, Westerners in the nineteenth century were a new breed of barbarian, confident of their own cultural and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207370, "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-1975", "page_number": 138, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "130 \n\nRICHARD J. SMITH \n\nArmy,83 Others, such as Captain Coney, Baron de Meritens, and William Winstanley, headed foreign-training programs established in treaty port areas. Still others, including John Pennell, Halliday Macartney, and William Mesny, served in Chinese armies as individual instructors or officers.85 Forced by circumstance to employ these foreigners, the Chinese became quite adept at handling them—despite China's disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the West. \n\nAs in the past, Ch'ing officials paid their foreign employees well, at the same time subjecting them to close surveillance, and fostering personal relationships with them as a means of control. In addition, however, they also took special pains to define regular channels of communication and command, and specified roles and responsibilities through the use of detailed regulations and written agreements.86 Furthermore, in rewarding loyal foreign service, the Chinese authorities went beyond simply arranging for edicts of praise and encouragement, the dispensing of ranks and titles, and the bestowal of traditional marks of imperial favor such as peacock feathers, silk, animal skins, and silver. They also began notifying foreign governments of the accomplishments of their respective nationals, and distributing foreign-style (as opposed to Chinese-style) medals—a rather significant departure from traditional practice. The throne even went so far as to acknowledge in 1864 that since Westerners especially esteemed foreign-style medals, these awards were the most generally appropriate expression of imperial gratitude.87 \n\nTo be sure, Peking continued to reward evidence of cultural submission, casting it in traditional terms of imperial condescension. The cases of Pennell and Mesny provide striking examples of this tendency.88 Moreover, throughout the nineteenth century, even as the Chinese world order crumbled about them, Ch'ing policymakers continued to use expressions such as \"turning toward Chinese civilization,\" \"cherishing and soothing men from afar,” and “using [the doctrines of] China to transform the barbarian.\" Policymakers also persisted in referring to both ancient and more modern precedent in order to justify (or argue against) the employment of barbarians in Chinese military affairs. Allusions to the use of foreign \"allies\" as the Hsiung-nu and Uighurs, as well as references to such diverse individuals as Yu Yü, Chin Mi-ti, Ch'i-pi Ho-li, and Gordon, continue to crop up in Ch'ing documents of the 1890's", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207468, "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-1975", "page_number": 236, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "228\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nof electricity and water supplies and firewood, increasingly frequent air attacks and I suppose the general problems faced by the Japanese in retaining a small unit isolated from other P.O.W. camps which they had to supply and guard.\n\nThe fifteen months which remained to us in occupation of Bowen Road proved to be a long drawn-out test of our endurance. We knew from the local newspaper about the Normandy landing by the allies and thereafter we traced on our school atlases subsequent progress in Europe. We gauged progress on the Russian front from the place names, while the names that appeared in the accounts of the Pacific war betrayed the progress being made there against the Japanese even though they always emphasised the staggering losses claimed to have been inflicted on their enemy in all their encounters.\n\nProgress was more rapid than I for one had thought possible, but our own existence in Bowen Road became increasingly circumscribed as the boundary wire was brought even closer to the main hospital building. In January 1944 our staff were removed from their barrack block to occupy the fair-sized Ward 3 on the top floor of the hospital. Gates in the wire allowed our men to get to their own gardens for a few hours by day; by November the wire was brought even closer so that all buildings were excluded from us except for the cookhouse and the mortuary,\n\nDuring January 1944 we had to cut the rice ration from 383 to 354 in order to conserve stocks, and by now rice was being weighed out at the steward's store into the utensils of each ward and mess. All staff under commissioned rank began to receive Japanese pay, 25 sen for a warrant officer, 15 for a sergeant or corporals and 10 for a lance corporal or private, so it had taken three years before our captors allowed this trivial right. Pay for commissioned officers arrived pretty regularly and in June all received their Japanese banking accounts to check. All contributed fixed proportions of their pay to the Central Hospital Fund from which small monthly payments of five or six yen were made to staff and N.C.O.'s in charge of wards. Disbursements continued to be made from the fund to provide extras for patients in need, supplements to improve the general diet and cigarettes or cash instead to all except commissioned officers. Small purchases of various stores needed in the hospital were also made. In April 1944 the contributions to our fund which had been coming from our officers in P.O.W. camp in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207481, "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-1975", "page_number": 249, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n241\n\nin the operating theatre had about 15 hours in hand and all instruments except those in constant use were vaselined and stored in airy places. Typically, after all the fuss, mains electricity was restored on 10 September for two hours in the morning and one hour in the evening and we were again allowed to use our remaining generator. By 19 October our allowance of current for lighting was subjected to a further 40% cut and our power to an 80% cut. We now used the theatre on one day a week using our own generator, but the need for individual diets and surgical procedures had dropped very substantially. By 25 October all mains electricity was cut off and thence forward we used our small generator for short periods on Tuesdays and arranged our work to coincide with these periods.\n\nDuring 1943 we heard regularly the sounds of American bombers passing overhead but Hong Kong itself was rarely attacked. In February 1944 came the raid after which we had to crop our hair short, and by August raids and alerts were frequent and I noted eleven in my diary for that month. In the hospital our air raid precautions worked well enough and no accidents occurred as a result of patients being hustled downstairs by guards in the pitch dark. As I could not influence the guards myself I tried to get our administrators to send someone down during air raids to help to calm the guards. No one ever came, though eventually we got a telephone line between the hospital and the Japanese administrative quarters which I could use when I wanted, though it proved to be of little practical value. During September and October raids and alerts by day and by night were frequent and there was a particularly heavy raid on 16 October. In November and December the alerts and raids continued and on Christmas Eve we had three raids between noon and seven o'clock, four on Christmas Day and three on Boxing Day and the spate of alerts continued till the end of the year. One raid occurred, as I have noted earlier during a Red Cross inspection on 22 December and there had been raids also on each of the preceding three days.\n\nAt 31 December 1944 our total ration strength in the hospital was 200 and my sketch of the events of the year illustrates the increasing pressures being brought to bear on the Japanese by the allies, mainly of course the Americans. In the hospital the general feeling by the end of the year was one of buoyancy since the evidence of an approaching end to the war was clear. I shared", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207513, "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-1975", "page_number": 281, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n273\n\noccupied and privacy was non-existent. Privacy during sexual play was essential thirty years ago except in certain centres which were catering for unusual tastes; my observations suggest that privacy seems to be not essential at the present time.\n\nAfter the sisters and auxiliary nurses left I wondered if we might discover some homosexual manifestations. The sexual instinct is one of the last to be submerged by physical deterioration due to hunger and this is shown by the reproduction rate remaining high in countries where the population is often on the verge of starvation and is always undernourished. In my many conversations throughout the hospital I never heard any talk of homosexual practices going on.\n\nI set out to confine this account to events in the Military Hospital but I must include a short tale about the Civil Internment Camp in Stanley where both men and women were held. I understood that the Japanese authorities there issued an order which ran in the following terms. \"Sexual intercourse is prohibited except between husband and wife or close friends\". This story may be apocryphal but the language in which the order was supposed to be couched is typical of the rendering of our language by many, perhaps most of the Japanese interpreters I met and could well be true. Anyway it is a good story and perhaps worth telling.\n\nTHE ATOMIC BOMB\n\nIn Kowloon we had no idea that two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan and had provided the final weighty argument which forced the Emperor to assume responsibility on 15 August 1945 for ordering his forces to surrender. I have recalled earlier that I had no doubt even in the early days that the power of the Allies would eventually overcome the Japanese, but the only picture I could conjure up to myself was that of a long slogging series of attacks up the coast of Asia and against the multitudes of islands in Japanese hands, all fiercely defended. I thought that this process would take many years and would certainly be reinforced by a tight blockade by the Allies. Huge tracts of Chinese territory round Hong Kong were in Japanese hands and as the situation for the Japanese deteriorated, such was their reputation that I could not imagine them allowing a large number of prisoners to consume valuable food. I thought the outlook was dismal in the extreme", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207828, "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-1976", "page_number": 216, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963 201\n\nthe Man and their allies rallied local support to form a new market on the other side of what in British times has come to be known as the Kwun Yam River. This was the beginning of the market town of Tai Po in its present form. (The story up to this point is told by Sung Hok-p'ang, 'Legends and Stories of the New Territories. I. Tai Po', The Hong Kong Naturalist, vol. VI, no. 1, May 1935. The stone slab recording the magistrate's decision no longer stands in the temple; when the temple was recently rebuilt the stone was cast into the yard where it now lies, often encumbered with rubbish, a neglected minor monument of late Ch'ing history).\n\n19. The new market in a short time consigned the old one to a decrepitude familiar to anyone who has walked behind the Jockey Club Clinic which now stands next to the Tin Hau Temple. Soon the founder of the new market put up the first of the bridges to span the Kwun Yam River; the subscription list for the bridge is recorded on two stone plaques set into the wall of the Man Mo Temple which had been built as a centre for the new market. A room in the temple still houses the public weighing scales from which the founders and their successors have derived an income.\n\n20. The story goes that the Man who led the revolt against the Tang monopoly called a meeting of the leaders of seven yeuk around Tai Po, each of these taking a share in the new market in the form of shops. The land on which the market was built appears to have been for the most part the property of the Man. Now it is probable that the Ts'at Yeuk dates from this point in time. My informants take this view. And there is one piece of information which tends to confirm it: one of the constituent yeuk is Cheung Shue Tan which, according to what I was told in Sha Tin, was previously a member of a yeuk-complex in this latter area; so that it may well have changed its allegiance at the time of the founding of the new market at Tai Po. But even if the Ts'at Yeuk came into being so recently, the yeuk themselves can hardly have done so for they appear to have been the material out of which the complex was formed. Many locals assert that the yeuk did not antedate the Ts'at Yeuk, but I am inclined to think that we are dealing here with a very old form of grouping, as comparative evidence will suggest. The seven yeuk were Lam Tsuen, Cheung Shue Tan, Ting Kok, Shuen Wan, Hap Wo, Tai Hang, and Fan Leng. Together they had over seventy villages, but the yeuk were of unequal size, so that while, for example, the Man settlement at Tai Hang formed a yeuk", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207833, "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-1976", "page_number": 221, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "206\n\nMAURICE FREEDMAN\n\nship of the struggle over the market; for up to that point they were perhaps strong enough to be independent, becoming a yeuk (and so assimilating themselves to an older pattern) in response to the needs of the new situation. (I may add that the Man of Tai Hang, the Liu of Sheung Shui, and the Tang of Lung Yeuk Tau were three particularly prominent clans in the area, and that their interrelations probably fluctuated as their respective fortunes waxed and waned. When the Man and their allies ruined the old market a Liu of Sheung Shui wrote a poem congratulating the Man leader; the poet was clearly pleased to see Tang 'arrogance' humbled). The villages in the Luk Yeuk of Sai Kung were subject to Tang landlords or taxlords (which they were it would not be possible to decide without a long debate on the relation between rent and the taxes exacted, officially or otherwise, by strong clans), and they may have used their contacts with the Kowloon organisation to protect themselves. In a part of the Empire where the state could certainly not be relied upon to redress wrongs and protect property and lives, the weaker communities were forced to seek among themselves (and sometimes, as the case of the Ts'at Yeuk illustrates, with the aid of a stronger one) protection against oppression by local powers. In many parts of what were to become the New Territories the Tang were regarded as being unduly dominant, their riches, scholarship, and connexions with officialdom being the bases of their strength; and smaller communities banded together against them. But on their home ground in the Yuen Long area Tang dominance was so complete that yeuk could not emerge. That, at least, is one possible conclusion.\n\n27. It is time now to examine the word yeuk more closely. It can be taken to mean a pact or agreement, and several of my informants interpreted yeuk and yeuk-complexes as contracts or joint enterprises freely entered into. (It is like a business partnership, one man told me, in which people take shares). But in fact it is possible to argue that what we have been examining at the end of the Ch'ing dynasty may not have been some spontaneous and popular form of grouping so much as a development of an official and imposed system of control. Yeuk is an abbreviation of heung yeuk (‘hsiang-yüeh'), a term with a long history in Chinese local government and administration. It appears first in the Northern Sung period when (late eleventh century) a Confucian scholar set out a scheme for a kind of village self-government in which country people were to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208009, "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-1977", "page_number": 48, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "32\n\nG. C. EMERSON\n\ntoilet and small shower. Most of these flats were occupied by six internees. A building which had housed single Indian warders before the war was turned into a hospital by the internees and called Tweed Bay Hospital. On a hill overlooking the prison grounds were two lovely homes, one for the Prison superintendent and one for the Prison Doctor; these were used as Japanese headquarters. Other buildings were used for housing, ration distribution centres, kitchens and other needs.\n\nDuring the final hours before surrender on Christmas Day, very heavy fighting occurred on Stanley peninsula as the Allies were pushed back towards Stanley Fort. In buildings at St. Stephen's and within the prison grounds, hand-to-hand combat had taken place. Also, at St. Stephen's, Japanese troops had gone on a rampage of killing and raping at a hospital set up there for wounded soldiers. On the site today of that atrocity is the chapel of St. Stephen's College. I had been told by a former internee that a woman who had entered camp from the Peak had brought with her the altar cross from the Peak Church.* The first time I visited St. Stephen's chapel, in 1972, through curiosity I picked up the cross on the altar and discovered it to be the very cross brought into camp in 1942 and used throughout internment.\n\nTwo other areas of note in the camp were the cemetery and Tweed Bay Beach. During internment, the cemetery became a very popular place as it was an oasis of peace and quiet in the over-crowded camp. Many internees spent hours sitting there reading, chatting quietly with friends or just thinking. On a radio programme in 1961, one woman recalled:\n\nWhen we wanted to get together, we'd always say, 'we'll meet you at the graveyard'. It sounded very funny but to us it was a wonderful spot. It was very peaceful there with the old trees and all the old graves. ... we could look out at the sea. We used to stare and stare and imagine we used to see ships coming in.\n\nAlso in the cemetery, some internees found a private spot for romantic liaisons, and here hundreds of internees gathered to watch the Americans and Canadians go out to the repatriation ships in June 1942 and September 1943.\n\nRural Building Lot No. 23. It was not rebuilt after the war.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208269, "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-1977", "page_number": 308, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "TIL\n\nPlate No. 41. The memorial tablet to the Shing Mun villagers and their allies killed in the village war of\n\nthe 1860s, at the Hip Tin Kung temple at Kam Tin.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208573, "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-1979", "page_number": 30, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "THE U.S. AND THE QUESTION OF HONG KONG 1941-45\n\nFar Eastern Affairs in the Department of State in 1944, terms “the most difficult supply operation of the entire war\" over the towering hump of the Himalayas. The second difficulty was connected with the priority given to the European theatre. The result was that much of the promised materials to China was often diverted, much to the distress of Hornbeck and others, from its original destination for the European fronts.? Speaking in more specific terms, by late September 1942, US$3.1 billion worth of lend-lease materials were sent to the British Empire, $750 million to Russia, and only $112 million to China. The disparity became even more remarkable by early June: $7,030,000,000 to the British Empire, $1,899,000,000 to Russia, and only $133,000,000 to China.8\n\nUnder the circumstances, it is understandable that the United States should entertain grave anxiety regarding China, especially over a possible collapse of Chinese resistance against Japan. This concern, which the Chinese did everything to keep alive, was universally shared by senior men in the Washington government, including the president himself, H. L. Stimson, then secretary of war, Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the Treasury, Leahy, and many involved in Far Eastern affairs in the Department of State, principally Hornbeck.9 While some doubt was expressed as to how much China could and was willing to contribute to the war effort in the east, the consensus was that her collapse would be a fatal blow to the United Nations, especially the United States, in the Pacific theatre. This event, therefore, must be prevented at all cost.\n\nIt was only natural that the United States, torn by anxiety, should be obsessed with the desire to compensate China as best she could. Consequently, the American government announced at the beginning of 1942 a loan of 500 million dollars to China, with next to no strings attached.10 Meanwhile, the move to push for the allies' recognition of China as one of the great powers, of which Hornbeck claimed himself to be the originator, became increasingly prominent in the American government.11 The outcome was the American insistence that China be included as a signatory, together with Britain, the U.S.S.R., and the United States, of the Declaration of Four Nations on General Security, signed in Moscow on 30 December 1943, and that Chiang Kai-shek, together with Roosevelt and Churchill, be a party to the Cairo Declaration, issued on 1 December 1943.12 The American eagerness to compensate naturally did not allow Madame Chiang Kai-shek's visit to the United States,\n\nPage 30\nPage 31", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208586, "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-1979", "page_number": 43, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "16\n\nCHAN KIT-CHENG\n\nAmerican and British representatives would be invited to participate. After the surrender he would authorize the British to land troops for the reoccupation of Hong Kong.37 In a private letter in reply to Chiang, Truman reiterated that his decision was in no way related to the question of British sovereignty in Hong Kong.68\n\nChiang Kai-shek remained reluctant to concede the main point. However, he realized that he needed American aid in getting his forces to Hong Kong. Consequently, he communicated a further compromise to Truman on 23 August: he had notified the British that, as supreme commander of the China theatre, he agreed to delegate his authority to a British commander to accept the surrender of Japanese forces in Hong Kong.69 Although Truman regarded Chiang's concession as \"quite reasonable\" and hoped that it would settle the matter,70 it was not acceptable to Britain. While he deplored the Sino-British friction, Truman clearly did not contemplate taking further action.71 It was therefore a relief both to Britain and the United States that Chiang eventually accepted Britain's revised offer that Harcourt accept Japan's surrender on behalf of both Britain and Chiang as supreme commander of the China theatre.72\n\nHong Kong was thus reverted to British rule, much as the Americans, both in official and unofficial circles, had clamoured against during the Pacific War. Such clamouring, especially during the first half of the war, no doubt troubled the British and encouraged the Chinese. But, in the main, American wartime policy, if one can at all speak of a conscious and consistent policy, regarding the postwar status of Hong Kong had been characterized by much talk and little action. \"Hopes\", \"wishes\", \"opinions\", \"views\" were abundantly expressed to Britain, but little can be said of direct and persistent American pressure on the subject.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Author's article, \"The Question of Hong Kong during the Pacific War, (1941-45)”, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, II, no. 1 (October 1973), pp. 56-78.\n\n2 C. Thorne, Allies of a Kind (London, 1978), p. 156.\n\n3 Thorne, ibid., pp. 172-3, referring to opinions cited in the New York Times, the Chicago Daily News, and the Christian Science Monitor.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208663, "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-1979", "page_number": 120, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "THE MARYKNOLL MISSION, HONG KONG 1941-46 \n\n93 \n\narticles is opened. The display was most interesting, and American skill and ingenuity were much in evidence. Articles included various forms of clothing, shoes, slippers, clogs, chairs, stools, baby cribs, thermos bottles, a fireless cooker, clothes pins, knitting needles, scales, a vise, etc., etc. A small wood turning lathe was also shown, and hats woven of grass. The repatriates' departure has been postponed until the end of the month. \n\n11—It is reported that the recent escapees have been captured, they not having succeeded in getting out of the Colony. A large scale having been found somewhere, the Americans weigh in, with Dr. Hackett and the Maryknoll Sisters, nurses, Sisters Camillus and Dominic, assisting, the latter, by the way, having long since returned to Camp from the Civil Hospital. The following statistics will give a graphic idea of our present status: Father Toomey lost 18 lbs; Troesch, 28; Meyer, 38; Downs, 13; Keelan,?; Bauer, 50; Allie, 18; Reardon, 27; Callan, 11; O'Connor, 16; Hessler, 0; Walter, 12; Knotek, 12; Quinn, 23; Walsh, 22; Madison 36; Moore, 9; Tackney, 23; Norris, 15; Brother Anthony, 50; Brother Cornelius, 6; Father O'Connell, 0; Siebert, ?; Gaiero, 19; McKeirnan, 14; Brother William, 23. A Mr. Hill, in the Camp, lost 65 lbs. \n\n12—Masses now at 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. Today, Confirmation at the Mass, when Bishop O'Gara confirmed four children and two adults. Today, the Britishers follow suit and are weighed in. Perhaps this presages better food. Report has it that two Britishers were caught stealing sweet potatoes in Stanley village, which is out of bounds. When warned that they were in danger of being shot, they said they were so hungry that they took the chance. Then they were assured of better rations, so says the rumor. Let's hope it is more than a rumor. Speaking of rumors, they still flood the Camp, and they range from the abdication of Mussolini, to the landing of the Allies in Europe, and to the proximity of the Chinese troops ready to retake Hong Kong. According to the Japanese paper, the American Navy has been sunk several times, and they are going to crush the United States. \n\n13—Bungalow No. 7 vacated by its British occupants to give way to the segregated American repatriates, who move in after the British got out, only to find that the British had pretty well despoiled the whole building, thinking that the Japanese were moving in. It is also reported today that the American Consular officials' bag—\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209169, "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-1981", "page_number": 72, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "58\n\nHUIBERT SEIWART\n\nculture is by no means absolute. As can be observed in the above quoted text, the real contrast is not between the Chinese and the Western cultural traditions but between spiritual and materialistic approaches to life. To be sure, the spiritual culture is represented above all by the religious and moral traditions of China, while materialism is seen as the product of Western civilization. But at the same time it is admitted that in the West there also exist spiritual traditions, namely the two religions Christianity and Islam.\n\nIn this view Western civilization is not objected to in its totality, only its materialism is rejected. The menace of the modern world results from the fact that the West has submitted to materialistic thinking and this materialism gains more and more ground in China as well. Since the Chinese religious traditions and the Western religions are equally opposed to this materialism, they are all fighting for the same cause, they are allies not adversaries.\n\nThe recognition of Christianity and Islam as true religions equal to the Chinese religious traditions can be observed at different intellectual levels. A rather superficial level is represented by some of the fu-luan cults. While the deities which manifest themselves by the writing-stick originally all belonged to the traditional Chinese pantheon, it does happen today that Western gods, above all Jesus and Mohammed, give revelations by fu-luan. This integration of Western deities into the fu-luan cults may be seen as symbolic of the lack of opposition to Christianity and Islam; it is no proof, however, of any deeper understanding of these foreign religions. Actually, as far as I could observe, the knowledge of the general fu-luan believer and even the mediums about Islam is virtually non-existent, though somewhat more is known about Christianity. When I asked a medium how Jesus and Mohammed could manifest themselves in a Chinese temple, I was simply answered that in heaven no boundaries between East and West exist and all gods live in the same heaven3.\n\nWhile the recognition of Christianity and Islam in the fu-luan cults is purely formal, allowing Jesus and Mohammed a status equal to the Chinese gods, the teachings of I-kuan Tao go one step further, trying to integrate the doctrines of these Western religions. To be sure, a manifestation of Jesus during an I-kuan Tao fu-luan session is recorded as early as the year 1939, and we might suppose that at that time their understanding of Christianity was much like that of today's fu-luan cults in Taiwan. But in recent years texts have been published which prove beyond doubt that one is earnestly attempting", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209217, "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-1981", "page_number": 120, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "106\n\nCARL T SMITH\n\nHis trusted allies had turned against him.\n\nIn his communications with the Colonial Office he was strangely silent about the support for the Bill by the Anti Mui Tsai Society and the labour unions. It seemed to be on the opinion that the only views of Chinese to be taken seriously were those of his long-time advisers, and now they were deserting him. One of the Colonial Office administrations minuted a letter from Governor Stubbs:\n\nIt seems to me the advice we have received on the general question of mui tsai has been throughout faulty and incorrect and in certain respects misleading. It seems also the Hong Kong Government does not desire to press the Secretary of State's reform on the Chinese.12\n\nOn December 23, 1922 the Mui Tsai Bill was gazetted, and on December 28 it received its first reading in the Legislative Council as \"An Ordinance to regulate certain forms of domestic service\".\n\nThe Editor of the Daily Press, a strong advocate of abolition, felt the remarks of the Attorney General in introducing the Bill reflected the reluctance of the Hong Kong Government to implement the instructions of the Colonial Office:\n\nThe Attorney General in introducing the Mui Tsai Bill can hardly be said to have shown... fully sympathy with the object of the Bill... The attitude of the local Government to agitation for abolition has been hostile all along,13\n\n13\n\nChinese Chamber of Commerce Meeting – January 1923\n\nThe members of the Protection Society had second thoughts about the approval given by four of their representatives on the joint committee to assist in drafting a bill (three did not sign the agreement). An extraordinary meeting of the Chamber of Commerce was held early in January to air reservations about the proposed Ordinance. Mr. Li Po-kwai (1871-1963), a wealthy property owner, presided. Among the members in attendance the following were named:\n\nThe two Chinese Unofficial Members of the Legislative Council, the Hon. Mr. Chow Shou-son and the Hon. Mr. Ng Hon-tsz\n\nMr. Ho Fook, a former member of the Legislative Council\n\nLo Chueng-shiu, a compradore of Jardines and brother-in-law of Ho Fook\n\nHis son Mr. M. K. Lo (later Sir Man-kam Lo), a solicitor and\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211261, "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-1987", "page_number": 322, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "297\n\nthat guided the administration of the city of Canton during its four year occupation by the Allies, during which he laid the foundations of his knowledge of written and spoken Chinese, he joined the Chinese Maritime Customs at Ningpo. When that city was captured by the Taiping Army, he assisted the Sino-French \"Ever Triumphant Army\" to recapture it, and later commanded it in the operations that led to the recapture of Hangzhou, for which he received high rank and honours from the appreciative Ch'ing government. Contacts made during this time led to employment after the Rebellion, in and outside China, that lasted until his death in France in 1886. His principal achievement was the construction and administration of the Fuzhou Dockyard and its fleet of warships in the face of many difficulties. Ironically, they were destroyed by naval forces of his own nation during the hostilities of 1884-85 between France and China over Vietnam.\n\nGiquel was a rare bird for his times. Apart from his linguistic proficiency and administrative capacities, he was sympathetic towards China at a time when this was not common among his contemporaries. Moreover, he sought ever to combine his duties to his employers, the Chinese, with his loyalties towards his native land, a veritable tightrope which he conscientiously trod throughout his working life. As Dr. Leibo observes, \"A less committed individual might never have attempted such a balancing act”. (Transferring Technology, p. 5). He gave offence to many influential Frenchmen and to his government in 1872 by an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes in which he suggested that the French Concession at Shanghai should be merged with the International Settlement, and criticized French policy towards China in various aspects.\n\nWhy this should be so is hinted at by an English account which indicates how different Giquel must have been from most of his fellows. Even allowing for the fact that this is an English account, written at a time of strong rivalry between the two powers and by one side of an old and mutual antipathy, it speaks for itself:\n\nFrench officers are so quick to take offense (sic) — so quick to obtain satisfaction - so imperious, so impractical, and so totally uncommercial that they are viewed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211325, "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-1988", "page_number": 41, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "17\n\nenter the city walls added to the general tension. More specifically Governor-General Yeh Ming-chen, perceived by local Europeans as an obstacle to peace, as they understood it, was quite unwilling to meet the British demands. As for the French, certainly their desire to establish an influence for themselves equal to that of the British by championing the rights of missionaries added impetus to French interest in a confrontation. As is well known, pretexts once desired are usually found. For the British, the Chinese boarding of the Arrow near Canton was said to be an act of lèse-majesté against the British flag (regardless of the reality of the ship's status). And for the French the convenient death of a French missionary played its role in bringing the combined flotilla before the walls of Canton in late December 1857. There several thousand British and French soldiers soon gathered to make their assault.\n\nFor those not immediately responsible for the military assault the enormity of the undertaking they were involved in must have caused considerable reflection. They were about to attack and presumably occupy an enormous city of more than a million inhabitants. There was no telling, assuming a successful assault, how long they would be required to hold it. But Canton's future administration would be a quieter challenge and one less immediate than the more pressing matter of first taking the city. The actual assault has been often discussed. It suffices here to note that the city's capture, apparently due to the Governor-General's poor planning, was a reasonably simple affair.\n\nWithin days of occupying the city it was clear that the allies would be quite unable to govern it directly. The principal issue was that they were faced with the administration of a city of more than a million people when no more than three among the allied forces could even communicate in Chinese. Of the British only Harry Parkes, the future allied commissioner of the city, and Thomas Wade, later ambassador to Peking, knew Chinese.\n\nThe French, for their part, were without a senior officer able to communicate at all. Their only contribution in this regard was the presence of a certain Marques who was then serving the French mission as a Chinese secretary. For the French, more than for the British, the lack of Chinese linguists was to be a major impediment to their activities throughout China and for years to come. Almost ten months later Paris", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211326, "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-1988", "page_number": 42, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "18\n\nwas informed that while the British had twelve Chinese language linguists available, including a number of former officials and students, the French still had only three officials and several students with appropriate language skills. It was obvious that the city's administration would be a far greater challenge than merely capturing it,\n\nEstablishing a functioning government was an absolute necessity because looting, first begun by the victorious Allied troops, had been taken up by the local Chinese. The situation was becoming quite out of hand. Organized bands of looters were active throughout the city. A decision had to be made. The only obvious choice was recognition that the local Chinese bureaucrats, individuals only just defeated and imprisoned days before, would now have to be released and recruited to administer the city through an arrangement whereby the allies would supervise them even as they supervised the Cantonese.1 There was little time to lose, even the local Chinese had begun to insist that the new \"authorities\" do something. On the Third of January Gros received three petitions insisting that the looting be suppressed.*\n\nSince using the imprisoned Governor-General Yeh, who had enraged the foreigners for so long, was quite out of the question, they decided to recruit one of Yeh's former associates, the Governor of Kwangtung, Po-Kuei. The Governor, himself a prisoner of the allies, was understood by Baron Gros to be a rival of Yeh's and apparently willing to resume his former duties. It was understood as well that Po-Kuei's involvement would facilitate the return of the many minor officials whose co-operation would be required as well.2 Gros himself was skeptical about ruling through the local Chinese, but it was clearly the only feasible plan. It was assumed that with appropriate supervisory mechanisms a satisfactory arrangement could be worked out.\n\nAs for Po-Kuei himself, one of his principal concerns was whether the city, having once fallen to the allies, might soon become a rebel stronghold of the Taipings. The allied assurance that they intended to hold the city against any assaults until a settlement could be reached with the Emperor, must surely have reassured the Chinese Governor. Having the city in the hands of the Taipings would probably have been an even greater crisis than the European presence.3", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211328, "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-1988", "page_number": 44, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "20\n\nthe available administrative records that both Governor Po-Kuei's co-operation and that of his staff were vitally important to the smooth running of the occupation. This was understood quite early when initially there had been considerable concern that the Governor would not be able to gain the support of his staff and then again later, when tensions arose, the Governor's efforts to abandon his post were blocked since without his co-operation nothing could be done. A year later when Po-Kuei died, there was considerable concern lest his successor be less co-operative.\n\n20\n\nAware both of their need to work through the Chinese and the complications of the situation, the allies put considerable thought into planning an appropriate division of responsibilities for the new city government. Po-Kuei was duly sequestered in the inner sections of the official yamen while allied sentries watched everyone who communicated with him. The Allied commissioners, Holloway, Chesnez and Parkes, occupied quarters in the outer sections of the same compound. Po-Kuei himself was informed that he could continue to administer justice and keep order as long as he accepted the supervision of the commissioners. Meanwhile, the commissioners, themselves under the authority of the military commanders, prepared to approve all of Po-Kuei's proclamations, as well as dealing with those legal cases which involved foreigners. Over time they involved themselves as well in the organization and administration of the mixed units of police which were soon set up to patrol the town. It was agreed that the commissioners would meet each day in council at eight in the morning; then one or more of them would confer with Po-Kuei to discuss those matters requiring his attention. From ten to one the commissioners planned to listen to public complaints.\n\n24\n\nAs for the expenses of the occupation, which eventually lasted more than three years, that is until the autumn of 1861, they were initially paid for by the allies but within a few months the Chinese government assumed financial responsibility for the city's administration.\n\nOccupation: the early months\n\n24\n\nAs already mentioned, among the principal early concerns were arrangements to police the city to stop looting, by both allied soldiers and Chinese troops, which had begun early in the first days after the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211329, "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-1988", "page_number": 45, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "21\n\nassault. As far as their own soldiers were involved, a dramatic and severe flogging by the allies of the offenders is said to have aroused Chinese admiration.” But most importantly, beyond the immediate necessity of restoring order, a regular system of patrolling the streets had to be devised. Unfortunately, the initial efforts proved counterproductive.\n\n26\n\nAt first, the Allies had sent out groups of soldiers on an ad hoc basis to patrol the streets. But the regular European troops proved to be much less effective than they had been in the city's capture only a few days before. In fact, their mere presence marching through the city's winding streets caused such a stir among the local population that bands of Chinese thieves, following close behind, found their passing to be an excellent opportunity to shoplift from the market stalls. It was obvious that a less conspicuous method of patrolling was needed. Thus the decision was made to establish mixed units of Western and Chinese troops. By late January, several hundred such units had been organized to patrol both the city and the suburbs. They were told not to dress in uniform and included British, French, Chinese, and Manchu troops. About half a dozen police stations were established around the city, and from them, both night and day, the new units emerged to carry out their duties.27 Happily, the units co-operated well and were apparently less disruptive than the formal military units had been. According to some observers, the sight of the double files of Europeans and Chinese, each led respectively by a sergeant and a petty mandarin, was not as well worth contemplating.** When criminals were apprehended, the procedure of having the Europeans dealt with by the allied tribunal, while Po-Kuei took responsibility for the Chinese, seemed to work quite well.\n\nBy the early spring, the occupation seemed to be settling into a routine. Many of the shops were opening again despite the considerable damage caused by the bombardment, and commerce was active.\" Nevertheless, if open hostilities had ended, the Cantonese, who had so long resisted the foreign demands, were hardly co-operative. In fact, so unco-operative was the general population that there was, in early January, talk of lobbing a few more shells into the city just to make sure the inhabitants were sufficiently cowed. However, both Gros and Elgin, the chief diplomats of the mission, were against the idea, and nothing came of it.\n\n30\n\nMonths later, the situation had only slightly improved. By March, the\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211330, "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-1988", "page_number": 46, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "22\n\n*\n\ncity was calming and civilian foreigners were cautiously venturing within the city walls. But confidence had hardly returned. As for their partner in the co-operation, the Governor Po-Kuei, the allies certainly did not trust him. In fact the French suspected that Po-Kuei, despite his apparent willingness to co-operate, was secretly working to undermine their authority,\n\nThe long summer of 1858\n\nAs mentioned above, despite the relative peace of the first weeks of the occupation, a calm which has often been assumed to have continued throughout the city's occupation, the allied forces soon found themselves caught up in a full-fledged resistance movement which lasted throughout the summer of 1858.\n\nEspecially common during the spring of 1858 were attacks on isolated individuals in the environs of the city. The assaults were serious and frequent enough for the French to carry out reprisals against those natives living in the vicinity of the attack. At first it was thought that such a show of force would be effective, but within weeks Cantonese anger had become so obvious that consideration was seriously given to re-establishing the blockade. Harry Parkes, despite his language skills, was, for example, reported to be no longer safe walking the streets without an armed guard. Assassination attempts against allied sentries and others had become commonplace.\n\n3.7\n\nGrowing alarmed, the allied commissioners met with Po-Kuei and demanded any information he had on potential Chinese attacks against the city. They also protested against anti-foreign proclamations which had appeared advertising rewards for the heads of foreigners or Chinese collaborators. To their frustration Po-Kuei's attitude seemed to be one of indifference. The commissioners insisted that the searches for arms, already begun by the military commanders, be endorsed by Po-Kuei.\n\nAs for the regular commercial life of the city, by May it was winding to a stop as tensions continued to increase. By June it was obvious that the provincial authorities were encouraging the Cantonese in their resistance. The new governor-general of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, Huang Tsung-han, issued a long manifesto reminding the locals of their", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211332, "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-1988", "page_number": 48, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "24\n\nlife of the city was clearly grinding to a halt. Moreover the British, French and American consuls had withdrawn from the city. The French, seeking to demonstrate strength, had gone on the offensive, burning nearby suburbs. Undeterred, the Chinese forces continued to lob bombs at allied positions during the hours of darkness.\n\n44\n\nAs the summer proceeded the attacks became ever commonplace. Real antagonism had developed between the allied forces and the local population. Attacks on foreigners by armed braves were occurring daily, often in broad daylight, so brazen had the population become. Especially at risk were the British sepoys whom the Chinese had taken to carrying off at the rate of one or two a day,\n\n45\n\nIt was becoming an open state of siege. Many of the local Chinese, no doubt seeking to save themselves, had begun to abandon the city. In early July word came to Baron Gros that the Governor-General had put out a circular calling for the complete annihilation of the foreigners.\" It now seemed likely that a full-scale attack against the allied positions might soon take place. The allied leaders had certainly come to regret their decision to have the Chinese administer the city for them. Elgin was convinced that the arrangement had given a false impression of allied weakness and furthermore discouraged those who might have been willing to co-operate. It was clear in the opinion of Elgin and Gros that martial law needed to be proclaimed and the Chinese administrators removed from power. However, for reasons that are not clear, it does not seem that such martial law was ever proclaimed even temporarily. Again, language problems may have made such a decision impossible.\n\n49\n\nBy late July a full scale Chinese attack was launched against the city walls. Encouraged by provincial Chinese officials, the Kwangtung Militia even attempted unsuccessfully to retake the city from its captors. A large body of Chinese braves attacked the Eastern Gate, the very area the allies had successfully assaulted the previous winter. Unfortunately for the Chinese they were less successful. They took several hundred casualties and inflicted no allied wounds. In the immediate aftermath of the efforts to retake the city, the assaults diminished and it appears that the Chinese abandoned their effort to challenge the occupation seriously. 50 Nevertheless, harassment of individual foreigners continued to be quite", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211333, "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-1988", "page_number": 49, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "25\n\ncommon as were allied reprisals. The city itself was at a standstill. Large numbers of Chinese had evacuated and the British traders had long since departed.\n\nConsidering the size of the allied force it is amazing they felt they were able to hold the city at all. In mid August the British had only four to five thousand troops in Canton and the French somewhere between 400 and a thousand. The French numbers were especially limited due to preparations, then under way, for an expedition to Indochina. Moreover, the thirty to forty ships of the British overshadowed the mere three ships available to the French members of the occupying force.\n\n5.3\n\nBaron Gros, responsible for the city's occupation, warned Paris that the situation was especially grave and that he had word that the authorities, although aware that a peace treaty had been signed, were nevertheless pressuring the Chinese to continue their opposition to the occupation. To Gros' additional frustration the attacks continued throughout early August and the heat, which was apparently unbearable, made sorties against the braves impossible. Some sections of the city had simply been abandoned. Things were so tense that Po-Kuei, the Chinese Governor, who had been willing the previous winter to co-operate with the allies, tried several times that summer to abandon his post. Apparently the French had to literally force him to return and co-operate.\n\n50\n\nHappily, though, as news of the treaties signed to the north spread more widely, the resistance subsided. By early September the population had begun to return to the city and the allies, feeling more at ease, again allowed junk traffic near the city walls. Although it would be quite some time before things returned to a reasonable semblance of calm, they had, it now seemed, survived the long hot summer of 1858.\n\nThe Occupation and the Coolie Trade\n\nAlthough tensions in the immediate environs of Canton did not again reach the levels of the first summer of the occupation, there nevertheless remained issues which threatened to provoke even worse resistance to allied control. Chief among these concerns were those aroused by the kidnapping of locals by coolie merchants.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211360, "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-1988", "page_number": 76, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "Introducing a motion for the adoption of the recommendations of the sub-committee, Mr. Bowley stated that in the Peace Treaty then under discussion provisions were made for an International Labour Convention and for a League of Nations. In the proposals for both organizations the welfare of women and children were dealt with. Appended to the section of the Peace Treaty dealing with the Labour Convention was the affirmation of the principle of an eight hour working day and a forty-eight hour week.\n\nMr. Bowley reminded the Board that the matters being proposed were on the agenda of the Labour Convention which was to be held in Washington, D. C. in the United States in October 1919. These developments had a particular meaning for Hong Kong as a British outpost in the East, for if Hong Kong took action as a part of the British Empire it might influence “our neighbouring allies' China and Japan, both of whom were parties to the Treaty and who had accepted both the League of Nations and the Labour Convention.” He continued. “If Hong Kong, China and Japan are to be included in the comity of nations on equal terms, it behoves us and our neighbours to consider these questions very carefully”.\n\nHe contrasted the absence of factory legislation in Hong Kong with Britain where such legislation had been gradually developed and enforced over the past eighty years. One reason for the difference between the two places was that Hong Kong until only recently had not been much of a manufacturing centre, but now there were many new factories. \"The time has come\", he said, \"when some, at least, of most of the elementary principles of the Factory Acts should be introduced into the Colony”. The experience of England had been that factory legislation had to be related to provisions for education and it would be difficult to apply the same laws to Hong Kong if there was no movement at the same time toward compulsory education, but since the Sanitary Board had no jurisdiction over education, the committee had concluded that it was impossible to prohibit employment of children even of the tenderest age, for it was better for children to be occupied with light tasks with their parents than playing in the gutter. Moreover, the criminal law contained provisions for the punishment of parents or masters and mistresses who ill-treated or neglected their children or child servants. So until something was done about universal education, the present measures were as much", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211752, "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-1989", "page_number": 167, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "142\n\nsteady waves. This sensible and pragmatic defence plan lead to the villages near Kan Tau Wai being formed into five Yeuk, which radiate out from Kan Tau Wai like the spokes of a wheel. The villages to the north-east, furthest from Kan Tau Wai, formed a sixth Yeuk: its duties were to guard the other entrances to Ta Kwu Ling, the Fan Li Au and to keep an eye on the Cheung's allies in the area, especially Lin Ma Hang and Sai Ling Ha. The arrangement of the area into six Yeuk lead the area to be called the Ta Kwu Ling Luk Yeuk (\"Ta Kwu Ling Alliance of Six\"). The Yeuk seem to have been very united in their opposition to Wong Pui Ling — the deaths of villagers in the fighting were very evenly shared between them.\n\n29\n+\n\nThese arrangements required the Ping Yuen Hap Heung to be split, Ping Che joining Tong Fong and Kan Tau Wai in one Yeuk, centred on the Ping Che Road, and Ping Yeung with Nga Yiu Ha and Wo Keng Shan forming another centred on the Miu Keng road. The Loi Tung villagers had no interest in the Law Fong bridge, and did not join the Ta Kwu Ling alliance; their political interests lay elsewhere. Similarly, the old grouping of Kan Tau Wai, Lei Uk and Tai Po Tin had to be split, with Lei Uk and Tai Po Tin being joined with Shan Kai Wat further along their common access path. These arrangements seem to have been introduced no earlier than about 1850, and were limited to defence and mutual assistance matters; ritual and other arrangements continued to operate according to the older groupings. Hence the management of the Cheung Shan Kwu Tsz was unaffected, and even though Loi Tung and Man Uk Pin were probably friendly with Wong Pui Ling, the political contacts of the villages near the pass did not end, and probably helped to stop the dispute escalating too far.\n\nAlthough it is something of an irrelevance to this article, it is, perhaps, worth saying something further about the Luk Yeuk. The alliance was successful in its war with Wong Pui Ling: the bridge was built (it was a very fine, three-span granite structure), with an inscription set up at the bridge foot detailing the donors. Wong Pui Ling had to accept defeat, and see its influence disappear throughout Ta Kwu Ling and beyond. The Ta Kwu Ling villagers, after peace had been secured, set up an organisation to ensure that the area could go back onto a “war footing” at short notice if required. This was the Shing Ping She (\"Peace Secured Society\"). This organisation ensured that all the young men were trained in martial arts, and that patrols \"to keep the peace\"", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211807, "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-1989", "page_number": 222, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "197\n\nfrom Shanghai on the 20th. Despite that, the \"soirée\" was \"kept up to a late hour with great spirit\". The programme consisted of tunes by Dabney, de Costa and Tripp: one of them was called \"Japanese make yourselves ready\" (NCH 26.5.1855).\n\n23.1.1856 (Wedn)\n\nE. MAYHEW: \"Make your Wills” (1836)\n\nT: Farce (1 act)\n\nW. BROUGH: \"No 1 Round the Corner\" (1854)\n\nT: Farce (1 act)\n\nJ.M. MORTON: \"Whitebait at Greenwich\" (1853)\n\nT: Farce (1 act)\n\nC: Amateurs\n\nF: Music\n\nTh: D\n\nN: Once more politics crept into the theatre since, due to the Anglo-French campaigns in the Crimean War, \"the proscenium was very tastefully emblazoned with the arms and ciphers of the Allies”. The drop scene now represented the \"Lake of Geneva with the far famed Castle of Chillon” (far famed because of Lord Byron's poem \"The Prisoner of Chillon\"). For a change the Herald allowed itself some criticism of the amateurs, but about the costumes only: \"We are perfectly aware of the great difficulties which beset the wardrobe department of the Theatre here, but still we think that two or three alterations might be made with advantage. It must be remembered that the assumption of a part on the stage requires the submergence of the individual into his assumed character. Proteus must not be more unlike his last shape than the actor must be unlike his mere self and the difficulty of effecting this is enormously increased by an appearance in every-day costume. In melodramatic pieces some decided change is absolutely necessary because success depends on the power of exciting the sympathies of the audience for the various situations of the actors and it is quite impossible that the desponding accents of one young gentleman or the grasping villainy of another (both of whom we know to be very good fellows and far from desponding or hypocritical characters) in the garb of 1856 can excite these sympathies. In Farce it is less important because the effect depends upon a successful appeal to our sense of the ludicrous and this may be done by situations which are quite within the range of every-day life. (...) It also struck us that a little more attention to the chronology of dress would be attended with increased effect; there were two or three anachronisms: for instance the mob cap of Mrs. Foreright (a most admirable 'make-up' by the way) hardly accorded with the modern elegance of Clara; or the venerable beard of the implacable Mr. Ireton with the modern costume of his disinherited son. It is astonishing how greatly unity in these matters adds to the effect of such performances and in spite of the difficulties of such performances and in spite of the difficulties of securing dresses we think a consultation between the Manager and the performers might produce a harmony which would be attended with the best effect”. The music too was thought to be \"ineffective\", but for the remainder it was, as usual, amusing, with Whitebait at Greenwich as the hit of the evening. The character of Buzzard — by no means a graceful one — was played with great effect and we heartily congratulate Mr. SLOWCOME upon the power he displayed\". In Make your Wills the reviewer could not \"forbear mentioning the excellent impersonation of Joseph Bragg by Mr CLAY\" (NCH 26.1.1856).\n\n21.2.1856 (Thur)\n\n—\n\nJ.S. COYNE: \"The Infanticidal Farce\" (1846)\n\nT: Farce (1 act)\n\nMrs. C.G.F. GORE: \"A Good Night's Rest\" (1839)\n\nT: Farce (1 act)\n\nJ.M. MORTON: \"Slasher and Crasher\" (1848)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212027, "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-1989", "page_number": 442, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "417\n\ninterested in modern China or who are interested in the British in Asia. Dr. Atwell has made a significant contribution to our knowledge of how the British administered one small locality and coped with the demands of modern forces. Her work can be used as a guide or spring board for comparison of British colonial policy in other East Asian places, such as Brunei and the Straits Settlements, Hankow, Tientsin and Shanghai, say, with Hong Kong tossed in for good measure.\n\nWEI PEH T'I, Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong\n\nSteven A. Leibo, Transferring Technology to China, Prosper Giquel and the Self-strengthening Movement, China Research Monograph 28, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Center for Chinese Studies, 1985.\n\nProsper Giquel, edited by Steven A. Leibo, A Journal of the Chinese Civil War 1864. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1985.\n\nThese two works, one of compilation and assessment based on a doctoral dissertation, the other of translation (with the help of Debbie Weston) and annotation with a lengthy introduction, have a considerable intrinsic interest because they deal with a rather extraordinary man. They have also a degree of relevance, over a century later, for the West's involvement with present day China's modernizing programme.\n\nThey are to be read in conjunction with other modern works on this period of China's self-strengthening efforts, including those listed in Dr. Leibo's introduction to Transferring Technology.\n\nProsper Giquel, a French naval officer, came to China during the Second China War. After service with the Joint Commission that guided the administration of the city of Canton during its four year occupation by the Allies, during which he laid the foundations of his knowledge of written and spoken Chinese, he joined the Chinese Maritime Customs at Ningpo. When that city was captured by the Taiping Army, he assisted the Sino-French \"Ever Triumphant Army” to recapture it, and later commanded it in the operations that led to the recapture of Hangzhou, for which he received high rank and honours from the appreciative Ch'ing government. Contacts made during this time led to employment after the Rebellion, in and outside China, that lasted until his death in France in 1886. His principal achievement was the construction and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212349, "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-1990", "page_number": 291, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "In the Ming, it may have been the Wongs of Fuk Tin who dominated the area, with their market at Lung Tsun Hui. It was at Chek Mei (赤尾, Chimei) within this village cluster that the sub-Magistracy for the area was established in 1370. By the nineteenth century, however, the dominant position in the district had been secured by the Cheungs. Sham Chun was essentially their market, built on their land, in that part of the district most closely controlled by them. The market stood, as a result, at an economically less than ideal site. It was built away from the Sham Chun River and the landing place, about half a mile down the Ching Shui River, at a point navigable even by the smallest skiffs only at the highest tides. Goods exported from the market had to be carried by coolies the half mile to the landing place at the junction of the rivers before being loaded onto the boats. Politically, however, the site was ideal for the Cheungs. The landing place, however, was within the area of dominance of the Yuens. The landing place was built on their land, in the centre of their village area.\n\nDistrict politics throughout most of the nineteenth century centred on attempts by the Cheungs to bring the landing place within their area of control, and by the Yuens to preserve their independence. The other clans of the district tended to be brought into the conflict as allies of one side or the other. The document translated below suggests that conflicts over control of the landing place broke out in 1836, 1856, and 1875.\n\nControl of the landing place brought with it, effectively, the right to collect the tolls charged for the movement of people and goods there. There were two theories on the collection of toll. The one was that toll was the right of the people who owned the land behind the landing site: they had had to give up land to build a road to service the landing stage, and the toll was the compensatory payment for the loss of income from the land thus rendered useless for agriculture. The other was that the landing place was outside the area privately owned: it lay on the riverbank muds, and was \"Government Waste\". Toll was the right of the Government to levy or grant away, and the adjacent owners of agricultural land had no rights over it. Travellers had the right to pass freely along the field-bunds as elsewhere. The Yuens, as the owners of the adjacent land, naturally tended to consider the first view was the correct one: the District Magistrate, and usually the Cheungs, tended to believe the second.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212357, "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-1990", "page_number": 299, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "276\n\nthe river more or less helpless unless a steam launch either towed them out, or at least assisted in turning them round. The wharf proposed was to be built very close to the Imperial Maritime Customs station: the Customs supported the proposal since it would make their anti-smuggling work in the area far easier.\n\n―\n\nA lease (for a smaller area of 850 feet not so obviously blocking the channel) was granted by the Hong Kong Government. The Tung Ping Kuk, however, (represented by two Cheungs and a Wong; by this date the Wongs were normally allies of the Cheungs, being united by their mutual antagonism to the Tsois whose land lay between them) complained to the San On Magistrate, who promptly had the Yuen elders imprisoned for the \"fraudulent attempt to divert the toll from the Kuk to themselves\". The District Magistrate also made a strong statement of the rights to take toll being a Government right, founded on Government ownership of the wastes of the river bank. The Kuk sent young men to tear the new wharf down. The affair then petered out - the Magistrate was willing to take a far more active role in 1903-1905 than in 1875 or earlier, and the opening of the railway a couple of years later made all discussions of rights to toll somewhat academic, since trade now began to flow in different directions altogether.\n\nThese documents show three points of interest: the ineffectiveness of the Magistrate in settling affairs of this sort in the mid/late-nineteenth century; the critical importance of control of markets, roads, ferries, bridges and other nodal points of the traffic system in local politics; and the blood-thirsty and implacable nature which inter-village disputes could assume.\n\nThe disputes over the ownership of the landing place at Sham Chun lasted some seventy years, from the 1830s to 1905. Effective action by the District Magistrate seems to have been limited to the period 1903-1905: the actions of the Magistrate in 1875 were ineffective in the extreme, and there seems to have been no action at all in earlier disputes. In 1875, it was only when the dispute had escalated to such a state that the army was forced to intervene that any effective Government action was seen but it came very late. In other inter-village disputes in the area in this period the same ineffective inaction by the District Magistrate can be seen. There seems to have been no action taken by the District Magistrate in the bloody fighting (about 1850-1860) between Wong Pui Ling and Ta...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212423, "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-1990", "page_number": 365, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "342\n\nview of the world, its acceptance had been prepared by anarchist and socialist ideas already current since the nineties. Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu were the progenitors of the Chinese Communist movement. Both were university intellectuals. And, as Luk points out, although Chen Duxiu has been portrayed as a determinist who favoured bourgeois leadership and a bourgeois dominated period after national revolution, this view of him is unfounded. He believed in revolution by the masses and saw, early on, the importance of the peasants as a means of achieving it.\n\nLuk awards a relatively minor role to Mao Zedong in the development of party ideology and buries, once and for all, the simplistic idea propagated by some popular writers that Mao's was the first lone voice that revolution was possible only through the countryside. Mao brought the weight of personal knowledge and experience to bear on the question, but there were others, more influential, who thought as he did.\n\nThe greatest difficulty experienced by the Communist party-founders in China was in applying Russian Bolshevik doctrine to a Chinese situation. What did Lenin mean by \"feudal conditions\"? How important was the Chinese proletariat, numbering only a few millions, even though for the Russians its role was crucial? There were many more such questions giving rise to internal contradictions and differences.\n\nThe Communists in China, as we know, joined the Guomindang as a \"bloc-within\" and in 1927 Chiang Kaishek turned on his unwelcome allies and nearly destroyed them. But despite this catastrophic set back the ideologies already developed in the party were largely maintained. According to Luk, Mao Zedong was later to take over all the main ingredients of the revolutionary model of the 1920s. The major difference now was that the CCP, after 1927, was on the one hand more determined to establish itself as an independent political and military force and on the other hand, was by now well aware of the limits of class struggle and willing to adjust its policies accordingly. It is said that, to carry out revolution successfully, both ideology and organisation are indispensable. By the late nineteen-thirties the CCP had developed both these weapons to a formidable degree.\n\nANTHONY LAWRENCE", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212615, "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-1991", "page_number": 169, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "I should like here to explain that the Japanese intelligence service is efficient; very little that goes on in China is not quickly known to it. But obviously considerations of security, no less than a courteous regard for a great Ally, require a severe discretion in what may or may not be mentioned while a war is still in progress; unperceived by the reader there will be gaps in the story which follows, a story of some minor assistance given to our Chinese Allies in the 3rd War Zone by the British, when themselves hard-pressed during 1942. For similar reasons, where persons are concerned, I propose to refer to them by their Christian names.\n\nI had asked that the Chinese government should provide me with an interpreter for my trip; but Michael was much more than that. He had been educated in Peking and at the Chelu University in Tsinanfu, and was the type of modern young Chinese patriot, on whose enthusiasm, integrity, and sense, the future of China depends. The horizon of these young Chinese is only too often limited by the fact that not only have they never travelled outside China, so that their knowledge of the foreigner is confined to the few they may have met in their schools or in their immediate environment, but also they know so little of their own enormous country. The displacement of schools brought about by the Japanese aggression has helped much to overcome the second difficulty; and it is to be hoped that far more extensive opportunities will be provided after the war to enable the youth of China to visit foreign countries. In the past, by reason of proximity, Japan has received most Chinese students; followed by the United States, where special endowments, arising initially from the excessive claim made for indemnity at the time of the Boxer trouble, and the facility of “earn while you study”, have attracted students. A few, far too few, have come to England.\n\nMichael spoke fluent English, had seen much of his own country, and for his years carried a wise head on his shoulders; he had, moreover, a most engaging personality. For a year he was my constant companion, on whose advice I came to rely much. I found also awaiting me at Kweilin members of General Ku Chu Tung's staff. We left for Hengyang by train, and thence motored a thousand kilometres to Shangjao, the headquarters of the 3rd War Zone. I was the first foreign officer, Russian liaison officers apart, to visit the 3rd War Zone in two years: I was, in fact, a visible token of the assistance which China might now expect from her new allies, and my reception was correspondingly cordial. I was shown everything; the Arsenal, in a cave; The Prisoners of War cage, where some twenty Japanese were kept pending transfer further west;", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212622, "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-1991", "page_number": 176, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "156\n\non the door panels drew attention wherever they passed, the Allies were arriving. Alas, the advance party was the only party we were to receive: the attack on Burma was developing very quickly and all supplies and reinforcements were diverted there. Then the Burma road was cut, and as time advanced we found we had to get along with what we had. It was not as if we had even a first claim on such supplies as had already reached China for the British Military Mission. Our particular activity was not the main interest of the Mission, and we were not on any priority list.\n\nHowever, the future was concealed from us. We started off, full of enthusiasm, for Chin Ya in our four lorries accompanied by the General Commanding the Engineer Troops of the 3rd War Zone, a particular friend of ours, and reached our destination without incident. Mac's arrangements had all been completed and we were able to enter immediately into the quarters prepared for us.\n\nI was a little uneasy about the magazine, a flimsy outbuilding, used as a temple and distant a hundred yards from the village. We removed the idols from the shelf at the back, stacked our explosives there and on wooden racks built for the purpose, so as to keep them off the damp floor; and locking the door posted a sentry over it, hoping for the best. There were several tons of explosive; had they gone up they would have taken the village with them.\n\nA row of houses had been taken over for the students; in a small wood at the back three open thatched sheds had been erected as lecture rooms; and the top floor of the largest house in the village, owned by a widow, was occupied by our Chinese assistants. The widow lived on the bottom floor; she was old-fashioned and had strong objections to our installing windows in the walls of her house to admit light to the rooms. There was a local superstition that windows let the money fly out, thus impoverishing the occupants; all the houses in the district had only little slits, inadequate to relieve the gloom inside. With Michael's assistance we persuaded her to allow us to put in roughly made window-frames, fitted with wooden shutters for use if it rained; we, of course, had no glass.\n\nTwo temples had been reserved for our own quarters: the one, at a little remove from the village, I used as my office and living quarters: the other contained a large hall facing a small yard, open to the sky.\n\nI\n\nI", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212640, "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-1991", "page_number": 194, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "174\n\nteams should decide to be active at the same time. Of course, it was always possible, once China had Allies who would unquestionably win the war, whatever happened, that the negative policy might be overdone: should that happen, I am myself convinced, it would not be in accordance with the inclination of the frontline troops, if we can take those who passed through our school as typical, or of guerilla generals.\n\nThe idea of catching the Japanese by a mine, which might explode when those who had set it were many miles away, appealed immensely to the Chinese mind; but the urge was subject to the necessity of not drawing too heavy a retaliation onto the local population. The Japanese expected the local population to inform them of guerilla movements in the vicinity and inferentially any successful guerilla exploit was due to collaboration with guerillas and punished accordingly. Actually, of course, the population supported the guerillas so long as the guerillas did not make life too difficult by attracting too much Japanese retaliation. The guerillas depended, not only for success, but for mere existence, on the intelligence of Japanese movements provided by the local population. When it came to carrying out an operation; for instance, the capture of a small fort, the Chinese much preferred to capture it by guile. The Japanese garrison, who like all soldiers preferred to be waited on to doing anything themselves, would have a Chinese coolie to carry water from the well, a Chinese cook to prepare their meals, a boy to sweep out the quarters, and they would allow hawkers selling vegetables and such things to come in with their wares. These Chinese might be in the employ of the guerillas to a man. These Chinese, who as a nation are perhaps the best judges of character in the world, would soon learn all the weaknesses of the garrison and could make their plans accordingly; but the plan would have to take account of possible retaliation on the civilians involved, and might entail their entire removal from the district. On the other hand, in retaliating, there was a limit beyond which it did not pay the Japanese to go; in their own peculiar way they realised the advantage of attracting the population to their point of view. It resulted in a sort of balance being struck where the Chinese could judge just how far it was wise to go in carrying out any given policy of sabotage or more direct attack.\n\nI have heard criticism of the trade which was allowed to flow between free and occupied China. At Chin Ya we were on one of the main roads over which this commerce passed. Every day you could see strings of coolies, or rickshaws, going towards the Japanese lines laden with tea,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212649, "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-1991", "page_number": 203, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "184\n\nand the Aurora University, the former French university, unknown to the members of the staff at the Department of Botany, where I have the pleasure and the good fortune to work. This excited their curiosity, they had never heard of a French Museum in Shanghai. That led Mr. Liu Zhong Ling, the organizer of this conference to invite me to give a talk on the History of the Heude Museum.\n\nThe following is a poor result of memory work and information plucked from a few available sources. Charles de Vol's book, Ferns and Fern Allies of East Central China, published by the Heude Museum in 1945 has been of great assistance in writing this paper.\n\nThe Zi-Ka-Wei (Xu Jia Hui) Museum\n\nThis Museum was situated at the S. W. of Shanghai, just on the border of the Old French Concession. It was established in 1868 by Pierre Heude SJ., the year of his arrival in China.\n\nP. Heude made extensive collections in the Kiangsu, Anhwei and Chekiang Provinces. Between 1868 and 1880, he organized 13 expeditions. Though he collected plant specimens, he was essentially a zoologist, interested in molluscs, reptiles, fishes, birds and mammals. From 1892 to 1902, he extended his field work to the Philippines, Indonesia (Java), French Indo-China (now, Vietnam), Siam (Thailand), Polynesia, Japan and other neighbouring countries.\n\nI remember possessing a large volume on Conchology of Freshwater Molluscs. The pages were filled with series of scientifically and artistically drawn specimens well marshalled all through the book, with full descriptions and notes. A page advertising his works I discovered at the back of volume VI book I of the Zikawei publications shows the astonishing achievement of that remarkable man. On two pages, some of his works are listed:\n\n5 tomes or large volumes each comprising 4 books, that is 20 books. A total of 1,100 pages, large format (in 4to) with 270 plates, some in colour (brush-painted). The content very impressive. (see below)\n\nRiver Conchology of the Kiangsu Province and Central China\n\nStudy on the Trionyx", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212650, "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-1991", "page_number": 204, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "185\n\nTerrestrial Molluse of the Blue River Valley\n\nComparative study on the Cervidae and Suidae in China, Philippines, Indo-China, with osteographic and odonto-graphic descriptions.\n\nNotes on the Capricorn, Kemas and Pseudosikas of China and Philippines.\n\nOdontologic Study of Carnivorous Mammals\n\nRuminants, Water Buffalo, Bubalus Moinitensis\n\nCervidae, Hippelaphus of Malesian Islands.\n\nOdontologic Study of Ruminants\n\nThe Spotted Deer of Japan\n\nInsectivores and Marsupials\n\nNotes on the Capricorns of Northern Shensi Province\n\nStudy on Chinese Bears and other Ursines.\n\nThe Capricorn of Setchuan and of East Tibet\n\nThe Bears and allies\n\nThe Euhydris, the Bear and the Otary\n\nThe Eastern Talpidae\n\nStudy on the Rodentia\n\nDiscussion and Homologie\n\nRevision on the Classification of the Deer (the Sikas), The Group of the Goto.\n\nOdontology of the Chinese Boar, The Deer of the Philippines\n\nThe Lemurs, Tarsians, Galeopithecians, Gabians.\n\nMicropithecians-Anthropoids-Odontology-Man\n\nStudy on the Ursidae etc.\n\nFrederic Courtois S.J. succeeded Pierre Heude as Director of the Zi-Kia-Wei Museum. He was a botanist and ornithologist. He was interested in plants and birds. From 1906 to 1928, he organized expeditions almost", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212824, "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-1992", "page_number": 133, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "118\n\nassistance which it might be possible to provide, and, soon after, the Myosa left to return to his country.\n\nIn August 1943 British troops were poised on the Assam border at Imphal, Tamu, and Tiddim, awaiting sufficient replenishment of equipment and the cessation of the rains to undertake the return advance into Burma; and there was activity down in the Arakan: while General Stilwell's Chinese divisions, retrained, reinforced, and re-equipped in India after their withdrawal from Burma, were just beginning to feel their way forward from Ledo, away up at the northern end of Assam, down the road which later was to become famous as the Ledo road. General Wingate's first expedition into Burma had just been completed, with heavy loss on our side, but with much success in confusing the enemy and disorganising his effort to consolidate his positions. The shape of future operations depended on the enemy's dispositions, so that any information which could be collected in eastern Burma would be useful: and in Kokang it might also be possible to organise patriot parties to assail his communications.\n\nIt was not an easy matter to obtain the consent of our allies for the passage of a British party to Kokang. The Chinese have unfortunately imitated the Japanese in a predilection for red tape; formalities are extended ad infinitum. It was fair enough that any British officer who entered China should require a pass issued by the Chinese authorities - though no such restriction attached to the presence of Chinese officers in India - but was it really necessary that the power to issue the pass should be retained by the highest authority in the land, the Military Affairs Council which would correspond with our Committee of Imperial Defence and that it should have to carry the personal chop of the Generalissimo? It did not make for speed in administration. It should also be remembered that the Chinese refused to serve in Burma under British command: that is how General Stilwell first came on the scene; and I think it is fair to say that our American allies had come to look on the Far East, and perhaps more particularly China, as their own special sphere of operations, where there was no room for any British.\n\nMy appointment was from the Army in India, which in those days, before the South East Asia Command had been established, was responsible for the operations in Burma. The proposal for assistance to the Myosa was submitted by the British representatives in Chungking to the Chinese government with a request that the necessary passes be", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212831, "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-1992", "page_number": 140, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "125\n\nto hold the local headman responsible for the collection of the number required; they were paid for at fixed military rates. Throughout Yunnan commerce in peace time moves by pack saddle. The Yunnan mule is a large strong animal, at one time much in demand for work in Burma; but now the wear and tear of war had created a shortage. We had to wait some days at Paoshan before the necessary number of beasts was produced, and then we only got off because I had carried introductions to some of the local gentry, who willingly came to our assistance.\n\nWe took seven days to reach Shunning, over a series of mountains; the mule track went up and up and up, and down and down and down; it seldom ran level and we seldom covered more than ten miles by the map in a day. In actual ground covered the distance was often double. We arrived at Shunning in time for the Chinese New Year. We had to wait over for the festival, a day on which no one will work, and the general commanding the Army very kindly invited us to a feast prepared for his American allies. Here again we stayed at the American mess and were made most comfortable. From Shunning to Tetang we took five days; mules became scarcer and on several stages bullocks were brought in from the fields to carry our wireless sets and equipment. Pack bullocks move more slowly than mules, but get there eventually. Our chief trouble was in trying to get off sufficiently early in the morning. On arrival at the destination for the day, the headman would be warned how many beasts we would need the next day, and he would promise to have them ready for an early start at 7 o'clock. But there was often difficulty in collecting the requisite number and it might not be till long after midday before we could move off. It was wearing on our patience.\n\nIt was on this stretch that I received further confirmation of the sort of trouble we might expect. At one deserted village, where we stopped for the night, we were joined by a stranger who appeared friendly enough. He was later heard haranguing the Chinese members of our party in Cantonese which he thought we did not understand, asking them why they worked for the foreign British, telling them it was unpatriotic to do so, and threatening them with dire consequences.\n\nI cannot tell the whole of our difficulties, only sufficient to make the story clear; but that much I believe should be told. It is only fair to the British public, particularly at a time when the most important conferences are to be held concerning arrangements for the future peace of the world, to know how their compatriots fare in foreign countries, and how", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212842, "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-1992", "page_number": 151, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "136\n\nme whether I was afraid I would be arrested and carried off in the same way! It was because of the Lopez incident that for a long time some of the most useful men in Kokang, intimidated by Chinese threats, did not dare to work for us.\n\nAt Hsintang we occupied the thatched wooden building which the people of the village had erected for Lopez and in which he had been surrounded and arrested. It had two stories, with three small rooms on each floor, and packed into these rooms were no less than twenty beds, in layers. Though small, the building could thus house the whole of our party. All the furniture was made of bamboo, the beds, the steps leading to the upper storey, the stools on which we sat, and the table off which we ate. In the centre room below, Lopez had installed a mud fireplace, where of an evening we lit a fire, because here we must have been somewhere about 7,000 or 8,000 feet up and the nights were bitterly cold. The chimney, a hollowed bamboo over which we had to throw water every now and then, was unsatisfactory and the smoke hung about the top floor to the discomfort of those trying to sleep above.\n\nOur wireless was a great asset; it made such a contrast to the isolation which had been our lot when in eastern China. We could send and receive signals, and by laying the headphones in a tin basin, we could make a near-enough imitation of a loud-speaker to sit by and listen when the news came in. It was about this time that the Japanese made their desperate attack on the British at Imphal in an attempt to cut the railway, which supplied General Stilwell's Chinese divisions; in this attempt they were to exhaust themselves, and open Burma to reoccupation by the Allies. A little later General Wingate's second l.r.p.g. - long range penetration group - operations were launched. We were later to discover that the withdrawal of Japanese troops from all along the Salween to meet Wingate's threat offered an explanation of why they failed to raid across the river to disperse us.\n\nStan rejoined us, reporting that there was no flat territory in central Kokang, but that he found a hill slope which would do well enough as a dropping zone. The slope was near the large village of Lunghtang, two days march south, and we prepared to move there. The country became more open; the jungle on the mountain slopes was replaced by long grass. We passed herds of brood mares, with their young. The Myosa in the past had been the contractor for the supply of mules to the Burma Government; we were passing the breeding centres. A lonely", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212992, "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-1993", "page_number": 60, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "Reactance \n\nMeta- \n\naccounts \n\n- \n\n39 \n\nturning the tables on rivals, this could be in past, present or prospective modes, e.g. reversing defeats to victories, warning victorious rivals that there lies the possibility of a reversion of loser status to winner status. \n\nevasive depictions/ explanations of failures, e.g. not naming specific reasons for losses, or it still awaits investigations for the loss, reinstatement of intentions, e.g. friendship first, competition second. \n\nModulation - most in presenting favourable elements such as victories, good performance, e.g. winning a match because of luck. the rivals also playing well; low-key presentation of favourable elements, e.g. bottom page, small proportion of successful results. \n\nEvasion \n\nSilence/ Negligence \n\nMum \n\n- \n\nReprehension - \n\nBlasting/ \n\nVilification \n\nhiding the success of rivals, e.g, little coverage of rival's success or coverage put against a large pool of other information, empty explanations of rival's success, e.g. luck. \n\npurposely abstaining from reporting poor results, or poor performance, or unwelcomed reactions from others, or no reports on losses (this could be checked with other sources for the results in the selected events); little report on the above. \n\nno report/ little report on losses or poor performance of, or unpleasant reactions from others to \"allies\". \n\nemphasis on responsibility of rival (others) in negative results, eg after a hard fought match, or despite foul play/ fierce play by rival, the rival loses \n\nemphasis on negative results of others, e.g. large amount of description on other's losses, poor performance etc. \n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213367, "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": 189, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "173\n\nThus, the worship of Tin Hau had no connection to the legend of Cheung Pao. She might be worshipped by other pirates at that time.\n\nNOTES\n\n1] pp. 12-13, History of the Pirates who infested the South China Sea from 1807 to 1810 (by Murray), 1831 edition.\n\n2] p. 2, A Brief Record of the Pacification of the South China Sea (TCA), 1842 edition.\n\n3] pp. 13-15, History of the Pirates who infested the South China Sea from 1807 to 1810, 1831 edition.\n\n4\n\nFor the detail of the sands made by the pirates of the Red Flag Squadron and its allies, see\n\nCh 81, Kwangchow Fo Gazetteer, 1879 edition,\n\nCh 22, Pan Yu Gazetteer, 1871 edition,\n\nCh 22, Heong Shan Gazetteer, 1879 edition,\n\nCh 31, Shun Tak Gazetteer, 1856 edition.\n\nCh 33, Tung Kwan Gazetteer, 1911 edition and\n\nCh 14, San Hui Gazetteer, 1841 edition.\n\n5] Ch 81, Kwangchow Fu Gazetteer, 1879 edition.\n\n6] * Ch 10, Chia Ching Tung Wah Gazetteer, 1884 edition.\n\n7\n\nLegends said that there are caves of Cheung Pao Tsai on Cheung Chau Island, Tap Mun Island and at Chung Hom Kok and Stanley on Hong Kong Island.\n\n*\n\n8] pp. 11-12, History of the pirates who infested the South China Sea from 1807 to 1810, 1831 edition.\n\n9] pp. 2-3, A Brief Record of the Pacification of the South China Sea, 1842 edition.\n\n10\n\np. 7, History of the Pirates who infested the South China Sea from 1807 to 1810, 1831 edition.\n\n[Ibid., pp. 15-16.\n\n12. The Temple of Samui Po is at Lung Tau Wan (Long Chau Wan) on the Island of Taipa in Macau – it is in ruins. However, the stone tablets of the 1859 and 1864 repairs can still be seen.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213629, "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-1995", "page_number": 225, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "199\n\n# THE CHINESE LABOUR CORPS IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR LABOURERS BURIED IN FRANCE\n\nDAN WATERS\n\nThis article complements the piece by Keith Stevens (RAS Journal No. 29), about Chinese Labour Corps members buried in England during or just after the First World War (1914-18).'\n\nBy 1916 there was a shortage of manpower in Britain. Conscription was introduced into the armed services and more men were recruited from various parts of the British Empire. These included Chinese who actually mostly came from Shan Tung (Shandong), but some were recruited from Honan (Hunan) Province. Together with British missionary and sinologue officers, many labourers were shipped from Weihaiwei (now called Weihai). This was British Territory and served as a naval base from 1898 until the Union Flag was lowered in 1930.3\n\nServing under British military discipline, in the region of 100,000 Chinese were shipped to France to dig trenches and construct fortifications for the allies. About 2,000 died from illness, wounds, or injuries sustained during or just after the war. Some were blown up by mines as they cleared battlefields after hostilities had ceased. Others succumbed to the influenza epidemic that swept Europe in 1919. A handful were shot dead in a mutiny near Boulogne. Those that did not return to China lie far from their native soil, in such places as Abbeville Communal Cemetery Extension, Albert French National Cemetery, Arques-La-Bataille British Cemetery, Asco Communal Cemetery, and Ayette British Cemetery, in France. The largest and most decorative is the Noyelles-sur-Mer Cemetery, which has a portico built in Chinese style.\n\nOne September morning in 1995, my son, Barry, and I drove from Brussels to Foncquevillers, a village situated in the fertile, undulating French countryside between the Arras-Doullens and the Arras-Amiens roads. There are a total of 645 graves in this military cemetery, which is bounded by a brick wall and a hornbeam hedge. It is planted with catalpa and other trees. Many of the graves here are seldom or never visited by outsiders. In this well-cared-for tranquil spot, there are two graves of Chinese Labour Corps labourers, one of a French civilian.\n\nPage 225\nPage 226", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213892, "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-1996", "page_number": 244, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "218\n\nLaboratory in 1923. The site was about 200,000 square metres, and the buildings were the government offices in Canton, which were to be sold to the Bank of Canton for a nominal price of just $550,000. This figure was eventually adjusted to only $220,000, being the deduction of the overdue interest that Sun had to pay to the Bank of Canton for all the loans that he had previously borrowed from the Siyi men. Showing their generosity, the Bank of Canton promised to pay $5,000 for the removal of the government offices from the site of the Laboratory. The agent in this purchase was none other than Yang Xian (), the Minister of Finance, a member of the Siyi \"thirty men subscription team\" and a principal shareholder of the Bank of Canton. After the purchase, the Bank announced its intention to sell the Experiment Station. They asked for a price of $850,000, four times the purchase price.\n\nThe sales of \"public properties\" evoked severe criticism by the press, and by those lineages, temples and monasteries whose properties were being confiscated. The Cantonese expressed their resentment toward Sun in a very satirical way; the Chinese press recorded that a \"Sun Yat-sen hairstyle\" was then very popular in the province. The Cantonese were abandoning the old method of using vegetable liquor to fix and to gel their hair. They simply let loose their hair. The idea of the \"Sun Yat-sen hair-style\", therefore, was intended to laugh at Sun's practice of letting loose everything in the province and leaving things in a great mess.\n\nThe Coming of the Soviet Influence\n\nThe Siyi men's attempts to re-organize the financial situations in Guangdong were never successful. Among other examples, a record in the Shenbao reported that soon after Yang Xian was appointed the Minister of Finance, a small band of Yunnanese soldiers came to his office to cash in a future cheque of $3,000 issued by Sun Yat-sen. When the office failed to pay immediately, Yang Xian was searched, fastened and detained by the Yunnanese soldiers. He was released only after his relatives paid the \"ransom\" of $3,030.\n\nSun Yat-sen, thereafter, turned to another alternative. When Sun Yat-sen returned to Canton in 1923, he brought with him two groups of allies from Shanghai. The first group was the Soviet advisors, and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213969, "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-1997", "page_number": 38, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "Africa and South-east Asia to be suspicious of the pretensions of local leaders whose personal interests were not always easily identifiable with those of the common man—or, in their new surroundings, the worker in the plastics factory and his family. They had been conditioned by British policy and practice elsewhere to accept a goal of parliamentary democracy and self-determination as the norm; and while admitting that Hong Kong was, in the other cant phrase, “unique,” they saw no reason for it to be utterly different in ethos.\n\nSomeone who appreciated the subtle differences within colonies and between their officials was the last Colonial Service Governor, Sir David Clive Crosbie Trench GCMG MC. Trench had started his service in the Western Pacific, where as a District Officer in the Solomon Islands he had been a wartime \"coastwatcher\" in the mountains, reporting on Japanese activity, and had earned a military decoration during the Allies' reoccupation. He was one of the few Administrative Officers to benefit from the old Colonial Office's unspoken \"seven year rule.\" Under this, those who had spent that length of time in the supposedly enervating climate and mores of the Pacific should be sent to more politically and mentally bracing parts of the empire, the better to come back refreshed when more senior (determined Resident Commissioners in the Western Pacific, who thought seven years only just enough to train their juniors in the proper ways, usually managed to circumvent this best-laid plan.) Trench came to Hong Kong after the war, where he acquired a strong and popular reputation, notably in the Labour Department, as reorganiser of the Fire Brigade and as Deputy Colonial Secretary (DCS). It was no surprise when he went back to the Western Pacific as High Commissioner; there he presided over the creation for the egalitarian Melanesian society in the Solomon Islands of a novel democratic form of government based, via a constitution already adapted for Ceylon, on the pre-war London County Council, with committees instead of ministers (some of whose chairmen, however, inevitably assumed ministerial pretensions.) After three years, he returned to Hong Kong as Governor in 1964.\n\nBefore he had left, Trench had naturally always shown greater sympathy with and understanding of the \"interlopers,\" as the aforesaid subset was vulgarly known, than did some of his senior colleagues. Although relations with a governor were inevitably more remote than those with a senior secretariat officer had been, he contrived not to be", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214300, "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": 158, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "122\n\nhis birth and childhood, and my favourite stamping ground in China Taiyuan, the capital of Shansi province, to his first wife, the daughter of John Mesny, a junior employee of the Chinese Imperial Customs Service, the life of whose elder brother, William Mesny, was the subject of my earlier research [vide.: my paper in the Journal of the RAS HK Branch: Volume 32, 1992]. Sowerby roamed far and wide throughout northern China before serving for a while in France as an officer with the Chinese Labour Corps [vide: my Note on Chinese Labour Corps Graves in England in the Journal of the RAS HK Branch Volume 29, 1989]. He then visited Fukien province and met Caldwell whose book on the Blue Tigers of that province had intrigued me when I was much younger. Finally, I was drawn to Sowerby's life story because he was not only a dedicated member of the North China Branch of the RAS in Shanghai for whom he wrote prolifically and eventually became its President, an honour he held for some five years, 1935-1940 but also because he produced his fascinating bimonthly journal on both everyday and exotic Chinese subjects. Since his death nearly fifty years ago he has faded into insignificance and is forgotten by all but those who happen to come across his books and journals.\n\nArthur Sowerby was an explorer and author who lived through very exciting times, first as the son of a Christian missionary in the Chinese interior at the time of the decline of the Manchu dynasty, through the Revolution of 1911 and the fall of the Manchu dynasty to the War Lord period during which he roamed some of the more remote areas of northern China. This was followed by the crises and struggle between the Nationalists and the Communists, the incursions and eventual full-scale invasion by the Japanese, his incarceration in an internment camp in Shanghai during the Second World War, ending with learning during his latter years in retirement, first in England and then in the United States, of the Communist victory in 1949 and, just before his death, of the Korean War when China sent its \"Volunteers\" to aid the North Koreans against the South Koreans and their allies which included the Americans and British. During the last thirty-five or so years of his life he suffered great pain wracked as he was by arthritis.\n\nIt was said that he could speak Chinese ‘like a Chinese.' There is no reason to doubt this as he must have learned it at his ayah's knee though he appears never to have made any effort to learn to read and write the language. During his life in China, the next forty or so years,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214325, "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": 183, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "147\n\nPLUM PUDDINGS AND SHARP BOYS “ONE TOUCH OF NATURE MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN”\n\nAN ANALYSIS OF THE CHINA COVERAGE IN THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS,1\n\n5 JANUARY TO 23 SEPTEMBER 18612\n\nGILLIAN B. BICKLEY3\n\nWhether or not the British public had a particular interest in China before 1861, it is impossible that their interest can not have been heightened by the stirring diplomatic news coming out from China in the last days of 1860 and the early days of 1861. This raised interest was further fuelled by the human interest touches written into features appearing over the next several months, and by the media's developing focus on a desire for a better understanding between the British and Chinese peoples.\n\nWhat British readers could have known previously about events in China was briefly as follows. After the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin on 26 June 1858, the Allied land force of Britain and France had evacuated Tientsin on 6 July without any force having been sent – even as a token – to the Chinese capital, Peking. It was generally considered, however, that the retirement of the troops was premature and that eventually a force would have to be sent to Peking to prove that the allies had established their positions in China.\n\nThe expected peace demanded under the Treaty did not materialise. Small attacks continued to be made by armed parties on British occupied positions. On 8 January 1859, correspondence was found which confirmed that the Emperor had no intention of keeping the Treaty, and had in fact issued orders that the British were to be prevented from entering the Pei-ho River and trading on the Yangtse, contrary to the provisions of the Treaty.\n\nIn June 1859, the British fleet escorting Lord Elgin, the first British Minister, to Peking, to exchange the ratifications, was brought up sharp by the forts at Takoo, at the entrance to the Peiho River. Men and material were lost, and there was grave damage to prestige.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214350, "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": 208, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "173\n\nTHE DEIFICATION OF HEROES FOLLOWING THE STRUGGLE BY THE VASSAL STATE OF CHOU TO OVERTHROW THE SHANG DYNASTY\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nThe lives of a great number of Chinese historical figures, heroes, worthies, bandits and revolutionaries, sovereigns and commoners over the centuries have become mythologized and the subjects of teashop story tellers. Their deeds and words have been fictionalised, themes known to the majority of Chinese. Some have found their way into religious life and become deified worthies. Many of these tales, ostensibly biographies of deities, are predominantly fantasy wedded with historico-fictional legends, a number of which comprise two or more volumes, others involve an enormous cast of heroes and worthies as well as scores of supernatural characters. Three major historico-legendary tales in particular have coloured popular religion beliefs. These are The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West and The Deification of the Gods. Other works have also been sources of peasant knowledge about individual deities such as The Romance of the Sui-Tang [Sui-Tang Yanyi].\n\nWe are particularly interested here with The Deification of the Gods. [Fengshen Yanyi: a novel also known to foreigners as The Investiture of the Gods]. 'The Feng-shen Yen-i addressed the moral and philosophical question of the origins of the gods and is an unsophisticated version of history describing the overthrow of the dynastic house of Shang by the vassal Zhou which took place some 3,000 years ago, at a mythological time when the \"human\" gods were created. It has an overlay of Buddhism despite this religion in practice not reaching China until some thousand years after the overthrow of the Shang and the establishment of the Zhou and not incorporated into Chinese religious beliefs until the time of Christ. It is the story of the decline of a dynasty, the Shang, with its depraved, dissolute and brutal ruler, under the spell of a beauty, his concubine, leading at first to his ineffective attempts to subdue his vassal Zhou state, and later to the Zhou mustering its forces and allies to attack the Shang and lay siege to its capital.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214926, "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-2000", "page_number": 22, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "Thank you must go to Chartered Surveyors Bill Greaves and Bob Horsnell, both long-time residents on whom our Volunteers depend for leadership. Historian Tim Ko has also helped in various ways. We are grateful to all concerned.\n\nFriends of the HKBRAS\n\nOur group of \"Friends\" in Britain, who held their first meeting in July 1998, consisting largely of HKBRAS members who lived in Hong Kong for many years, has had another active year. Their activities are detailed in a separate report written by HKBRAS Immediate Past-President, David Gilkes, who is now Chairman of the Friends in Britain. I will shortly present his report at this AGM. Of course, our Branch keeps in close contact with the Friends. Past President James Hayes wrote '[The standing of HKBRAS] is mirrored by the success of the Friends in UK and is very gratifying.' The Friends deserve our congratulations on their achievements. The setting up of this overseas group has been one of the most important events that have happened in recent years. It allows our members who return to Britain to live, to maintain links with the Territory and our Hong Kong Branch.\n\nIn an effort to strengthen contacts among our overseas members who are not members of the 'Friends', we circulated a letter together with the 1999/2000 President's Report. In return, we received replies from Messrs Roderick MacLean MBE and B C Fawcett, who both now live in Britain. The latter is researching the Chinese Labour Corps that served with the Allies in France during World War One. It is good to hear from old friends.\n\nHKBRAS Library and finance\n\nBoth our Honorary Librarian, Julia Chan, and our Honorary Treasurer, Robert Nield, who have contributed so much to our Branch, have prepared their own reports. These they will present at this AGM. I wish to make it clear that we depend on the professional experience of Julia and Robert a great deal. We are grateful for their assistance over many years. We are also grateful to the staff at the City Hall, and the staff of PricewaterhouseCoopers for their unfailing assistance and support. We are especially grateful to Mr Christian Stewart and to Ms Ada Loi, and of course to Robert for doing most of the work for our\n\nxxi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214981, "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-2000", "page_number": 77, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "33\n\nTHE CHINESE LABOUR CORPS IN FRANCE\n\n1917-1921\n\nBRIAN C FAWCETT\n\n\"What were the Chinese doing in France during the First World War?\"\n\nThe above is a frequent question, not only posed by people in the UK but also, as we found, by amazed French people in their own country.\n\nTo answer this, and also as a possibility for a visit by a larger group of Friends of the RAS [Hong Kong Branch] in the UK, a small group under the guidance of Keith Stevens, accompanied by Jenny Welch, Paul Bolding, John Tamplin, David Mahoney, my French wife, Claudine and myself, decided to investigate. Claudine and I have also made separate visits, but more of our findings later.\n\nIntroduction\n\nBriefly the reasons as to why the Chinese were in France may be stated as follows:\n\nAs China was not a belligerent nation, her nationals were not allowed by their government to participate in the fighting. The recruiting for labourers was launched by the War Committee in London, in 1916, to form a Labour Corps of labourers from China to serve in France and to be known as the Chinese Labour Corps [CLC]. This was because, as the war progressed, Great Britain and her allies required more manpower for their Forces, so releasing those men who were assisting at the docks unloading necessary supplies and war material. The Allies regarded such recruitment of labour in market and business terms rather than as politically significant Chinese participation in the war. The Chinese did declare war against Germany and Austria-Hungary on 14th August 1917, for reasons of domestic policy and also to ingratiate themselves with the Powers and win resources from them which would support a military campaign to reunify the country under Beijing's rule.\n\nThe scheme to supply men was originated in June 1915 by Liang", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214982, "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-2000", "page_number": 78, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "34\n\nShiyi' who suggested that an army be sent to Europe for training and service with the Allies. He continued to promote China's participation hoping for future political and financial advantages which might accrue providing further expansion of his own empire of bureaucratic and financial interests.\n\nLord Inchcape, the chairman of the Port and Transit Executive Committee, had already suggested the formation of Transport Workers Battalions to assist in clearing ships' cargoes for speedy turn-around. Some considered that delays in this area resulted from dock-workers not working a full day or were too few in number to carry out the work. To placate the unions, their representatives were appointed to serve on the Committee. Ernest Bevin, the national organiser of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Worker's Union [the Dockers' Union] considered that the port authorities intentionally created labour shortages as an excuse for employing non-union labour. After an agreement had been reached with the Government as to further representation by Union members to serve on the Committee, Ernest Bevin became a member of the Committee. However, because it was considered that agreement with the Unions would not be reached, as to the employment of foreign labour, it was decided to look elsewhere for additional manpower. Throughout the war, trade union pressure prevented the introduction of Chinese labourers to the British Isles.\n\nMany years previously, Chinese had travelled to work, under contract or treaty provisions in, for instance, the gold mines of South Africa. They were tempted to do so due to poor conditions in China and because of the comparatively high wages offered.\n\nRecruitment\n\nThe French pioneered the scheme to recruit Chinese to serve as non-military personnel, negotiations being conducted by government officers posing as civilians to protect the Chinese Government and its neutrality from controversy. The contract to supply 50,000 labourers was agreed upon on 14 May 1916 and their first shipment left Tianjin for Dagu and Marseilles in July 1916. In February 1917, in the Mediterranean the French steamship Athos was sunk with the loss of 543 Chinese lives, but this did not deter the Chinese from enlisting to serve with the French or British.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214997, "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-2000", "page_number": 93, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "49\n\n'I am a Christian, Sir.'\n\n'Very good,' replied the officer, 'I hope I am one too.'\n\n'But I am a Presbyterian, Sir, and at the Depot there were others of that religion, and we could have a service together. In my hut now there are no Presbyterians, and all are wicked.'\n\nMutinies did, however, occur, not only amongst service personnel of the Allies, but also amongst the various Labour Corps. Some were court-martialled and punished in various ways, i.e. hard labour, penal service, imprisonment or even death.\n\nIn September 1917 some British soldiers stationed at the base camp at Etaples, south of Boulogne, caused trouble and rebelled. Word of this spread to some unwilling Chinese and Egyptians, working at Boulogne, who then stopped work unloading supplies and went on the rampage. Field Marshal Haig ordered this to be quelled and, as a consequence, 27 unarmed strikers were shot dead, 39 wounded and 25 imprisoned.\n\nOn 10 October 1917, in a serious shooting incident in the Fourth Army area, 5 Chinese labourers were killed and 14 wounded. The inquiry into this incident came to the conclusion that this was due to the CO not appreciating the standard of discipline required to be maintained between his officers and British NCOs as regards the treatment of labourers.\n\nOn 16 December 1917, a mutiny, as a result of bullying by British NCOs, was reported amongst 21 Company CLC at Fontinettes. The armed guard fired on the mutineers, killing 4 and wounding 9. A Canadian soldier was also killed. The next day, a British infantry platoon forced the Chinese to resume work and, after the ringleaders were jailed, normality was restored on 23 December.\n\nOn Christmas Day 1917, labourers of 151 Company CLC conspired to kill their Sergeant Major, a \"half-caste\", as he had been an extortioner and had forced the men to work too hard. Two hundred men of the Royal Welch Fusiliers rounded up some of the mutineers whilst others had fled to near the HQ of 5 Corps at Locre. On Christmas Day, D. H.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215021, "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-2000", "page_number": 117, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "73\n\nmiles south of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. It was assumed that the twinning was linked in some way with the CLC cemetery but why a small town of Hokkien-speaking Chinese, ethnic Min Nan from Fujian province who during the era of the CLC were under Japanese colonial rule, would have any links with the deceased northern Chinese of the CLC, is hard to see. Perhaps the fishermen of Tungkang fled Shandong province ahead of the Communist advance in 1948 and settled there and have family memories of the labourers. Possibly some members of the CLC returned to China and they, or their off-spring, emigrated to Taiwan. Another possibility could be that they wished to remember and commemorate their fellow countrymen, now resting in a foreign country\n\nit is a subject for further investigation. Two characters are carved into the side of the plinth of one, Yidou which simply\n\n益都 means of Benefit to All.\n\nMy wife and I hope to return, to explore the area more fully as we have enjoyed our brief visits.\n\nMemorial\n\nIt is very surprising that after all the assistance the Chinese, together with their British officers and NCOs, rendered to the Allies, especially the British, there is still no specific memorial to them, whether they survived or died, other than the various cemeteries, mainly in Belgium and France, in which they lie buried. It is never too late to consider erecting a memorial at one of their major base camps, such as Noyelles-sur-Mer, but I suppose the Governments of the main countries concerned would not be interested in such a project.\n\nOn my\n\nvisits to World War I battlefields in Belgium and France, and if the opportunity arises for me to visit a cemetery in which members of the CLC, whether officers, NCOs or Labourers are interred, then I pay my respects, considering that, even though there may be few graves or many, I am honouring all who gave up their lives.\n\nFinale\n\nVarious articles, books and unpublished reminiscences have been used in the preparation of this article. It is not my intention, and never has been, for me to view the various files held at the Public Records", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215676, "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-2001", "page_number": 453, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "INTELLIGENCE Pohang is the only port on the east coast of Korea held by the allied forces capable of taking ships of any size. It was here that the 1st Cavalry Division disembarked with all its equipment early last month. More important than the port is the airfield known as K3, the best natural airfield possessed by the allies in Korea. Mustangs based here have been giving constant support to ground troops in this coastal sector. Its loss would mean that air craft henceforth would have to operate either from Taegu, 49 miles to the west, or from Pusan, 60 miles to the south.\n\nThis Pohang affair, even if the situation is restored once again, shows up the whole weakness of the allied position in Korea. Intelligence must have been gravely at fault to permit such a situation to develop. Held on the coastal road between Yongdok and Pohang the North Koreans simply worked their way round the flanks as they have done on many other occasions in the campaign. Strategically and tactically, the northern command, exploiting the terrain and their superior man-power, have shown considerable skill in avoiding a full-scale frontal battle where superior American fire-power would tell, and in concentrating on feeling out the weak point in the allies' flank and rear.\n\nThe Naktong River line, which is being held only with difficulty, guards the western flank of the allied bridgehead in Korea. Across the north there is no such natural barrier, only 30 miles of mountain ridges. Again one is obliged to wonder exactly how large a bridgehead the allies can expect to hold with the forces at their disposal.\n\n405", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215691, "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-2001", "page_number": 468, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "421\n\nbeing starved. The complainant was later severely beaten by the Japanese. This prisoner could well have been HKBRAS member the late KMA Barnett although the book does not say so.\n\nWhen I have talked to ex-POWs I have seldom heard mention of acts of kindness by Japanese guards. As an ex-POW Dr Solomon Bard, who is well known to many HKBRAS Members, holds views which many regard as exceptional. He maintains there was 'no unprovoked cruelty within his experience. There are also instances quoted, in Long Night's Journey into Day, where individual Japanese were considerate to prisoners. This was more likely if a prisoner spoke Japanese.\n\nTo counterbalance instances of kindness there was the case of the American prisoner who requested permission to urinate. Permission was refused. Eventually, in agony, he broke ranks and urinated nearby. Afterwards he was made to lick his urine off the wall.\n\nThere is no doubt that, by and large, prisoners were severely treated. We have to remember, however, there was a war on and, in many cases, Japanese guards were little better off than their prisoners. Generally, when the war turned against them, both Japanese service personnel and civilians readily tightened their belt the extra notch. Japanese soldiers were brutalised from the day they entered service. Life in the Hong Kong camps, however, was not as bad as being a prisoner in Manchuria (Unit 731 and others) where inmates were subjected to inhumane medical experiments. In some camps in German-occupied Europe there was state-sponsored genocide, among the Jews for example, the full details of which did not come to light until the end of the War [Hon. Editor - As an aside, I recently paid a visit to Auschwitz, an experience which will haunt me for the rest of my life].\n\nMost prisoners in Hong Kong could envisage the war continuing for several years more and, when the Allies started to fight back and for the Japanese the going became even tougher, Allied prisoners were under the impression they would eventually be killed off in batches. The atom bomb saved the day. Although I fought against the Germans and the Italians, and not the Japanese, I remember no one at the time shedding tears at the dropping of the bomb on Japan.\n\nAlthough bushido and chivalry are in some respects similar this is", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215802, "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": 101, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "34\n\nBETWEEN THE NINE DRAGONS AND A DIVINE WIND: HOW HONG KONG'S WEATHER MIGHT HAVE AFFECTED AN ALLIED INVASION TO RETAKE THE TERRITORY*\n\nCHOHONG CHO\n\nSynopsis\n\nIn the War in the Pacific during World War II, the question of whether or not to engage Japan directly in China was a major one for Allied planners. If the Japanese weren't enough of a problem, an age-old factor - the weather - certainly would have provided the Allies with additional concerns. The Pacific and Asia are home to some of the most extreme weather in the world.\n\nHong Kong, a possible target in any Allied campaign in China, played host to some of this extreme weather. What this study attempts to do is to consider how Hong Kong's adverse weather conditions could have affected an Allied operation to recapture it from the Japanese.\n\nBackground\n\nAfter Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in December 1941 and Great Britain was expelled from the Pacific, only the U.S. was left to face Japan in this theatre. The U.S. itself was in bad shape, as most of its Pacific Fleet had been mauled at Pearl Harbor. On the Asian mainland, Japan was still busying herself with China and Britain. A stalemate had developed with the former, while the latter was being pushed out of Burma into India.\n\nHowever, the U.S. Navy's (USN) aircraft carriers were not caught in the Pearl Harbor debacle, and during much of 1942, they bore the brunt of the action against the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the Pacific. In a series of three engagements with the IJN (at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal), with inferior numbers accompanied by\n\n*The author would like to thank Mr. Ko Tim-keung for bringing a draft of this article to the attention of the Hon. Editor, and Professor Elfed Roberts for his comments on an early version of the draft.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215803, "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": 102, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "35\n\nheavy losses, the USN stemmed and then turned the tide of Japanese conquest by early 1943.\n\nAfter evicting the Japanese from Guadalcanal, the Allies (mainly the U.S. and Australia) took advantage of this opportunity to move north against other Japanese positions in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. This was the Southwest Pacific Area.\n\nThe USN, while assisting the Allied drives in the land-dominated Southwest Pacific, continued to wait for a chance to launch its own offensive in the Central Pacific Area, which was dominated by ocean. Such a drive was not opportunistic like the Southwest Pacific drive, but had been envisioned for almost 35 years prior to the war in the form of War Plan Orange (WP Orange).\n\nThe origins of WP Orange could be traced even further back to the last years of the 19th Century. During this time, many Japanese emigrated to the continental U.S. and Hawaii, and incurred the hostility of White Americans. In time, such acts aroused Japan's fury, who considered herself a great power after her defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Alarmed over Japan's growing influence in the Pacific, American war planners began to draft the forerunners of WP Orange in 1907.2\n\nIn brief, WP Orange pitted the U.S. (Blue) against Japan (Orange). Orange planners expected the U.S. to lose the Philippines early in the war (which was what happened). The USN would steam all the way across the Pacific to recapture the Philippines, defeat the IJN in a decisive battle, and lay siege to Japan, eventually forcing her surrender.3 As for China (and Hong Kong), Orange planners had cautioned against trying to establish an American presence there. The Japanese were expected to have firmly planted themselves in and around China by the start of the war, and it was advisable for the U.S. to not undertake a campaign on the mainland.4\n\nThe reality in 1943, however, was that there were other participants in the war, like Britain and China. Both had interests on the Asian mainland, and they could not be ignored. A common interest was Hong Kong, which both China and Britain wanted to recover after the war. At the start of the war, Hong Kong was a British responsibility, but", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215804, "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": 103, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "36\n\nafter Britain lost Hong Kong, the closest Allied power to the territory was its original owner China. Then there was Hong Kong's status as a port. Any mainland port that touched the Pacific attracted the attention of the USN, because it was in its interest that China continued to keep the bulk of the Japanese Army occupied on the continent while the U.S. seized Japan's possessions in the Pacific. Hence, Allied commanders like Admiral Ernest King, the USN's highest-ranking officer and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), thought that the U.S. had a major responsibility to help keep China in the war,\n\nIn 1943, China was tying down 20 per cent of the Japanese Army. No major fighting had occurred there for a while, but the Allies knew that this relative calm might not last. The fear that Japan would resume her efforts to knock China out of the war was real, and Allied planners wanted to prevent this by keeping the Chinese Army (of the Nationalist government) battle-worthy. To do this, they had to establish and maintain secure lines of communication (LoC) into China. As Japan had already occupied China's ports and the lone road into China from Burma (the Burma Road), the sole means of supplying China was through a risky, costly, and feeble air route over the Himalayas (the Hump).\n\nThe best method of supplying China was to recapture a port on the China Coast and establishing LoC to the interior of China. Initially, the Chinese Army was allotted the bulk of this task - if it could be strengthened by deliveries over the Hump and (if the Allies could retake it) the Burma Road. But by 1943, supplies over the Hump remained minuscule, the Burma Road was not reopened, and the Chinese (Nationalists, Communists, and third-party elements) preferred to fight among themselves rather than against the Japanese. With the Allied drives in the Pacific gathering momentum, the main responsibility for a campaign to recapture a port on the China Coast eventually fell to the U.S.\n\nHong Kong and Shanghai have long been the two best ports on the China Coast, with each possessing excellent harbour facilities. But Hong Kong rated ahead of Shanghai as the initial port to be opened up in China because of the strong Japanese presence around Shanghai. In the Hong Kong-Canton area during 1943, the Japanese still occupied only a beachhead. As long as Hong Kong remained a beachhead, and the Chinese forces ringing it maintained a measure of resolve, Japanese", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215805, "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": 104, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "37\n\nforces to the north would tire themselves out trying to link up with the beachhead. Should the Chinese collapse in the face of a Japanese attack, then an Allied campaign to recapture Hong Kong would be jeopardized.\n\nJapan had an incentive to retain Hong Kong. Besides being a part of Japanese-held China, Hong Kong also lay just outside Japan's Inner Zone. This zone included Japan Proper, Korea, Manchuria, North China, Formosa, the Pescadores, the Ryukyus, and the Japanese half of Sakhalin Island. Well before the war, the British had already gained an appreciation that a Hong Kong in Japanese hands would augment the defence of the Inner Zone. Moreover, Hong Kong helped guard Japan's LoC to points west and her oil supplies in the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese could still afford to trade space for time by forfeiting many other parts of their Pacific empire to the Allies, but they were certain to defend their Inner Zone and the positions that anchored their LoC to and from it with the utmost vigour. If the Japanese lost Hong Kong, this would provide hope to people living under Japanese rule elsewhere, while it would send a message to the Japanese people that the war was proceeding unfavourably for them.\n\nBy late 1943, the Allies had gained the upper hand over the Japanese in the Pacific. It was the Allies who could dictate where the next move would fall. As China was still in the game, Allied planners began to take a closer look at the feasibility of a Hong Kong campaign. One opponent the Allies couldn't overcome, however, was Mother Nature, so heed was paid to Hong Kong's weather and how it could affect an Allied campaign there.\n\nA timeless enemy\n\nNature at its cruellest is a phenomenon that humanity's best efforts still cannot match. Even during a high-technology conflict like World War II, the weather proved to be as indomitable a nemesis as it had been throughout the history of war.\n\nWith World War II being fought over a greater expanse of the planet than any other war in history, its participants had to endure extreme variations in the weather, like the freezing cold of the Arctic and the Soviet Union to the sweltering heat of New Guinea, or the oppressive humidity of the South Pacific to the barren aridity of North", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215806, "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": 105, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "38\n\nAfrica. History has shown that the weather, a factor that most folks accept as a part of daily life, has helped decide the outcome of a few military campaigns.\n\nHong Kong's climate was not as extreme as that of the Soviet Union or North Africa, but it could be a potential nuisance or menace to opponents battling for its control. Up to this time (1943), it had not shown itself to be a factor during the two most recent times Hong Kong changed hands in 1841 and 1941. If the Allies returned to reclaim Hong Kong by force, they would likely be deprived of such a walkover.\n\nUsually, the weather favours the defender, because he should have a greater degree of familiarity with his stronghold and probably be more entrenched against the invader and the weather. Although Hong Kong had been British territory for 100 years before the war, Japanese knowledge of Hong Kong was fresher because they were in control of it. Allied knowledge of Hong Kong's weather was an inadequate substitute for actually being in Hong Kong. Things were certain to change in the territory after the British were kicked out, and they did.\n\nFactors to consider\n\nHong Kong's collection of unfavourable weather included rainfall, cloud and fog, temperature, humidity, and winds. All of these factors had already been experienced by the Allies elsewhere. If they considered the control of a specific territory to be crucial, then they would do just about anything to obtain it. Therefore, any objective's weather could be no more than a secondary factor. Simply put, if an objective is chosen, the rationalisation would be that it was chosen regardless of its weather - because the advantages of having it outweighed the potential disadvantages posed by the weather or any other factor. Its weather would be played down, and the attackers would be prepared to suffer the consequences of trying to take it. On the other hand, if an objective is rejected, its weather could be played up (especially if it was potentially violent) as a cause for the rejection.\n\nRainfall\n\nHong Kong received an average annual total of 85 inches (2,159 mm) of precipitation, with the bulk of this amount falling in the middle\n\nPage 105\n\nPage 106", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215807, "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": 106, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "39\n\npart of the year (May to August). In fact, it rained about two out of every three days during the months of June and July, with June having a better than 40 per cent chance of experiencing three or more consecutive days, and even a 25 per cent chance of having at least an entire week, of rain.\n\nIn a largely undeveloped place like Hong Kong during the war, heavy rains falling on land usually translated into mud. Thus far in the war, both sides had already experienced the difficulty of moving across mud in various theatres. In Hong Kong, only the urban areas had all-weather roads, so its roads and terrain outside of the urban areas were trafficable only during periods of dry weather.10\n\nThen one must remember that 75 per cent of Hong Kong was mountain. By the nature of their sloped sides and rocky terrain, mountains are already difficult to traverse in good weather. In times of bad weather, mountains are even harder to negotiate, especially if they have been stripped of vegetation. This was the case with Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. As the war dragged on, supply shortages of everything became acute. Whereas coal was the preferred fuel for industrial and residential use, the increasing difficulty of importing this item into Hong Kong forced people to switch to firewood. This resulted in the felling of trees throughout the territory, thus depriving the mountains of the foliage that anchored their soil, and increasing the chances of erosion and landslides.\n\nMachinery was the epitome of the Allied arsenal, and embodied from its factories, to its logistical functions, and finally to the fighting machines on the frontline. But machinery was also very susceptible to the weather. In Hong Kong, with its high rainfall and lack of all-weather roads outside of the city, construction activities would be needed to improve its roads for the vehicle-oriented Allies. But construction would be curtailed during periods of heavy rainfall.\n\nWithout a suitable system of roads, the Allies would be unable to take full advantage of their superior mechanised transport in Hong Kong. The necessity of supporting China with a strong LoC inland from Hong Kong would have taxed its inadequate roads past their limit. Estimates for the portion of supplies landed each day that could be transported inland to support the Chinese amounted to no more than 25 per cent,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215808, "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": 107, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "40\n\nand this was on a good weather day. An alternative was to utilize the sole railroad in the territory - the Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR). However, the KCR was primarily a passenger railway, so rolling stock for transporting freight was in short supply,12\n\nA third option was to transport the supplies by water via the Pearl River and its tributaries, which lead up to Canton and points beyond. This method, if fully operational, would greatly increase the amount of supplies headed inland. It too was dependent on various factors, like Allied control of both banks of the Pearl, the availability of suitable river craft (Canton could still handle large vessels, but as the river branches out and tapers off, smaller vessels would be needed), and the weather.13 Without modifications, the mediocre communications inland from Hong Kong would not do justice to its generous port capacity.\n\nAs for ground operations, the Allies enjoyed a crushing supremacy over the Japanese in the quantity and quality of their armour, but Hong Kong's mountainous terrain would have ensured that armour could see only limited duty there.\n\nOn a bad day, mechanised transport would become bogged down on Hong Kong's muddy roads. The Allies would have felt Hong Kong eerily similar to Italy, a place that was also mountainous and experienced high rainfall. There, the Allies had armour superiority, but it was of limited value, and their advance was slow. Their advances along the coast were a bit faster because it was relatively flat, just like Hong Kong's. However, during bad weather days, a lack of natural ground in many of the coastal areas (due to urbanisation) to absorb rainfall could cause flooding. In addition, there was human-induced flooding. Southern China was still mainly an agrarian region, where farmers would deliberately flood their fields in April of each year to fertilize their crops.14 That added at least a month to the flood season.\n\nInfantry would also find the combination of rainfall and challenging terrain as harsh for them as they would be for their vehicles, if not more. Without substantial support from mechanised forces, infantry would be deprived of a vital factor to combat the Japanese.\n\nAir support, a key ingredient in offensive operations worldwide, and one in which the Allies enjoyed superiority and obviously hated to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215809, "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": 108, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "41\n\ndo without, would also be affected by heavy rainfall. Incendiary bombing, which would become a favourite strategy with the Allies against Japanese targets elsewhere as the war progressed, would naturally be less effective during the middle part of the year in Hong Kong. Heavy rainfall also affects the performance of propeller aircraft by cooling their engines excessively.1 Overall, air operations of all kinds would be less effective or even grounded during periods of heavy rainfall.\n\nThe flip side of air operations is anti-aircraft defence. A simple, inexpensive device employed as an anti-aircraft measure was the barrage balloon. This was a large hydrogen-filled, dirigible-shaped balloon attached to a steel cable anchored to the ground or a ship and floated several hundred to several thousand feet above it. The cable was stronger than it looked, and was meant to discourage low-level air attacks by having the ability to damage or clip the wings of a low-flying aircraft. This forces the aircraft to fly higher, which decreases its attack accuracy, and aids the effectiveness of one's own anti-aircraft artillery and intercepting aircraft.16\n\nHowever, a hydrogen-filled barrage balloon (in the days before helium use was common) is highly flammable. This is a liability during a thunderstorm, during which a spark of lightning could turn a barrage balloon into an incendiary hazard that is more dangerous to its user than to the enemy.\n\nCloud and fog.\n\nCloud and fog often went hand-in-hand with heavy rainfall to restrict air operations. Reconnaissance of Japanese positions would be very difficult. High level bombing or close support, favoured by the Allies and employed extensively in other theatres, would have to be cut back or even cancelled. If cloud and fog were present at the beginning of the amphibious stage of the Allied assault on Hong Kong, when the Allies would be at their most vulnerable, crucial air support would be inadequate or even lacking. If the Japanese contested the landing, and this was expected, the Allies would be faced with a precarious and probably dangerous situation.\n\nWhile cloud and fog are most prevalent during the beginning of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215810, "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": 109, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "42\n\nthe year, relatively clear months like July and August might also be problematic since the middle of the year was the rainy season. Air power, one of the Allies' biggest assets, might not realize its full potential over Hong Kong.\n\nAnother factor in which the Allies were much better endowed than their opponents was artillery, including naval gunfire. The latter had been, and would continue to be, invaluable in pulverising land targets before the actual amphibious landings. But naval and land-based artillery were very dependent on aerial and ground observers to achieve accuracy. If these were limited by cloud and fog, enemy targets would be inadequately softened up or even missed, thereby leaving more of the work to the ground forces. Then the role of Hong Kong's ubiquitous mountains would become even more prominent. Even on a good day, artillery cannot completely neutralise an enemy who is well dug into a mountain. But it can still keep the enemy pinned down, making it hard for him to shoot back or launch counterattacks. A deficiency or absence of artillery and aerial support brought about by cloud and fog provides the enemy with a chance to come out and pull off a few surprises, especially an enemy who lives by the sneak attack like the Japanese.\n\nConversely, barrage balloons benefit from low ceilings because they could hide in the overcast sky, with only their thin wires exposed, and wait for unsuspecting enemy aircraft that may be flying low. Barrage balloons could be worthy supplements to the progressively effective Allied combat air patrol (CAP), which was a constant umbrella of aircraft patrolling the skies over any Allied position. When the CAP is limited by cloud and fog, barrage balloons can partially fill the void. The winter months in Hong Kong (the beginning of the year) were generally the best time to employ barrage balloons.\n\nTemperature and humidity\n\nHong Kong's temperatures only go in one extreme - upwards. Even during winter, they almost never approach freezing (32°F/0°C). February, Hong Kong's coldest month, averages a tolerable 59°F (15°C) Certainly Hong Kong would not be mistaken for the Soviet Union or Alaska.\n\nBut the mid-spring to summer months (April to September) would", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215811, "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": 110, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "43\n\nnot be so kind to either side, though. Most days in Hong Kong during these six months would be too hot, too humid, or both. In fact, it was possible for every day in July and August (62 straight days) to experience temperatures exceeding 80°F (27°C). On some days, the temperature neared the 100°F (38°C) mark. Combine this with a punishing humidity (almost 90 per cent relative humidity from April to August), and the result is a formula for misery.\n\nGround operations may be affected because of the painful effects high temperatures and humidity could have on infantry during the heat of battle. Dehydration and heat stroke, just two of the maladies associated with high temperatures and humidity, don't bear the same negative connotation as malaria, but both were just as effective at putting soldiers out of action. The Allies had already experienced these hazards in the Pacific and Burma, both of which boasted even higher temperatures and humidity than Hong Kong. In many of these campaigns, the conditions brought about by the temperature and humidity, like disease, were even more effective than the Japanese in causing Allied casualties.\n\nOn the logistical front, temperature and humidity also affect machinery, of which the Allies had plenty. The tools of war are always operated more intensely than peacetime machinery, and hence are always in need of maintenance. While it is usually more durable than peacetime machinery, military hardware is also more complex. In addition, due to its constant employment, military hardware inevitably breaks down and undergoes attrition, capture, and destruction. The desire of the Allies to maintain the strength and condition of their war machines at optimum levels was part of the reason why their support personnel well outnumbered fighting personnel, especially in the American ranks.\n\nHaving to service the hardware in a hot and humid environment like Hong Kong would be quite an ordeal for maintenance personnel. Moisture from the humidity accelerates the depreciation of equipment. High temperatures, combined with the high temperatures already generated by machinery being brought in during the heat of battle, only further complicate the maintenance problem. If the machinery cannot be serviced in a relatively cool place like a hangar or a shady spot, then the personnel may have to wait until night time or early in the morning, which would consume valuable time. Due to the wholesale clearing", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215812, "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": 111, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "44\n\nof Hong Kong's forests for fuel, shady spots were increasingly hard to come by as the war progressed.\n\nOn a more insidious note, temperature and humidity could affect the employment of chemical warfare. Thus far in the war, the use of chemical warfare had been minor, with both sides retaining their stockpiles of chemical warfare agents as deterrents rather than as first options. But as the war increased in ferocity, there was always the possibility that one or both sides might resort to more unconventional means on the battlefield.\n\nHong Kong, however, probably would not have been a good place to start for any side that wanted to resort to chemical warfare. Depending on the type of chemical agent used, Hong Kong's high temperatures and humidity during the middle of the year could be too adverse towards the effective employment of certain chemical warfare agents. Too high a temperature (above 75°F/24°C) could cause a premature evaporation of some agents, and excess humidity means that more water is present to react with some chemicals and therefore dilute the agents. At the other end, too low a temperature (below 32°F/0°C) or humidity could also be unfavourable for chemical warfare. Hong Kong's temperatures never go that low, and its period of low humidity occurs during the last three months of the year, which for most other factors related to the weather was the best time of the year for a Hong Kong landing.\n\nWinds\n\nBeing on the China Coast, Hong Kong received its fair share of winds, and then some. Winds could be unpredictable because they can change direction and speed. On the ground, a wind velocity of greater than 30 miles per hour (48 kilometres per hour) affects the accuracy of artillery fire control. If chemical warfare were employed, winds of greater than only 16 mph (26 kph) would blow any chemical agents (in gas form) off course, and a reverse wind could blow the agent back to the offending side.\n\nAside from thunderstorms, winds of greater than 30 mph (48 kph) could also diminish the value of barrage balloons. If the Japanese decided to attack the invading Allies in Hong Kong by air, they could try to exploit Hong Kong's mountainous terrain by flying low and using", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215815, "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": 114, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "47\n\nHarbour, and engulfed everything in their way up to a quarter mile (400 meters) inland. At least 200 people were killed (a heavy loss, considering that the area was sparsely populated back then), and the Tai Po Road (one of Hong Kong's few major roads at the time) and KCR were temporarily put out of commission, which isolated the survivors from the rest of Hong Kong for two days.26\n\nIn Victoria Harbour (between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island), 28 of the 101 steam vessels present were stranded, resulting in five deaths. Shore facilities on both sides of the harbour were wrecked, including Kai Tak Airfield. Fortunately for this part of Hong Kong, which was and remains the most congested part of the territory, no tidal wave struck here because the eastern entrance at Lyemun Pass was too narrow for enough water to break through. But Victoria Harbour was still vulnerable to strong winds and rough seas, which were what caused all that damage in its vicinity.27\n\nThe implications that the \"Great Typhoon of September 1937” (typhoons didn't acquire female names until after the war) had on a potential Allied landing in Hong Kong were profound. First, all kinds of operations would be impossible during a typhoon. Everyone would worry about how to take shelter from the storm rather than fight the enemy. Given the expected relative positions of the two sides, the Allies were sure to be more exposed to the elements than the Japanese because they were on the offensive and had to establish LoC inland. Second, Hong Kong was intended to serve as a port of entry for LoC into China. With its extensive waterfront facilities, Victoria Harbour would have served as the primary berthing area for ships, and Tolo Harbour was considered a good secondary anchorage. Depending on the path of any typhoon that hits Hong Kong, Victoria Harbour may be afforded some protection by the mountains that surrounded it on the Kowloon side.28 Tolo Harbour (and neighbouring Plover Cove) was roomy and calm enough for ships - as long as there was no typhoon.29\n\nOnce a typhoon hits Tolo Harbour, as it did in 1937, this area is at a disadvantage. Typhoons usually approach Hong Kong from the east or southeast, and Tolo Channel and Tolo Harbour are in the eastern part of Hong Kong. The winds in a typhoon blow in an anti-clockwise direction, which is an arc-like motion from east to west when one is facing north. In the case of Tolo Channel (which is the outlet to the sea", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215816, "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": 115, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "48\n\nfor Tolo Harbour), its entrance faced the northeast, which was like an open door for a typhoon. The 1937 typhoon took advantage of such a tailor-made entrance to surge through it with a tidal wave.3\n\n30\n\nIf a typhoon during peacetime could cause so much damage, then one of similar magnitude during wartime, when the stakes are higher, could really set back the Allied timetable. The Tai Po Road would likely have served as a conduit to funnel supplies north to China, and a disruption to its service (even temporarily) would do much to hurt the supply situation. Moreover, if LoC by land into China were that vulnerable, then LoC by sea to Hong Kong would be even more precarious. Such a supply line would likely come from the southeast and pass through the strait between Luzon and Formosa. This region also happened to be a major alleyway for typhoons, not to mention an area of strong Japanese concentrations if either Luzon or Formosa (or both) continued to be in enemy hands.3\n\n31\n\nDue to their extensive commitment in the Atlantic, Allied merchant shipping and its escorts were more precious commodities in the much larger Pacific. The Japanese had not made it a policy to attack supply vessels thus far in the war, but that did not mean they would not alter this policy as the Allies pushed closer to the home islands. A typhoon, however, would not wait nor discriminate. While ships at harbour enjoy a little bit of protection from a typhoon, ships at sea don't have this benefit. The only option was evasion, and that depended on knowing the whereabouts of the typhoon. As noted earlier, this was an extremely difficult task during World War II.\n\n32\n\nAnother category of shipping in which the Allies weren't as well endowed as they would have liked was landing craft. These vessels were mandatory for Allied operations in the Pacific. But Europe received first priority for landing craft for much of the war, leaving just enough for the Allies to take to the offensive in the Pacific. Hong Kong's ability to serve as a lifeline into China depended entirely on a secure LoC that could be established to it by sea, and this in turn depended on the ability of the Allies to secure Hong Kong from the sea by an amphibious assault. The more landings the Allies carried out, the greater the toll on their landing craft, as the same craft would be used over and over. But landing craft were rather lightly-protected ships, which also made them prone to attrition through enemy action, breakdowns, and the weather.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215817, "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": 116, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "49\n\nSo whether Allied LoC were disrupted by the Japanese or a typhoon, the end result would be the same: troops and supplies prevented from achieving their objectives, and Allied strategy would be hampered. The Allies could do something about the Japanese, but not much about a typhoon.\n\nAs nasty as it is, a typhoon does have a redeeming factor. The rain that accompanies it can help alleviate the water supply problem in a place as dependent on rainfall for its fresh water as Hong Kong (which itself has no rivers). During wartime, an adequate water supply was a most invaluable resource for both sides.33\n\nThe B-29\n\nThere was another important reason for recapturing Hong Kong: to use it as a base from which to bomb Japan. Before the war, China was thought to be the best place from which to do this.34 During her conquests of 1941-1942, Japan had wisely expanded her perimeter far enough so that she would be impervious to retaliatory bombing raids by Allied land-based aircraft, or so she thought. The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942 was as unorthodox as it was daring, having been accomplished by land-based bombers operating from aircraft carriers, but it was not practical to replicate on a large scale. If the Allies wanted to devastate Japan, they needed a real land base and a bomber with enough range and bomb capacity to reach Japan.\n\nThat bomber was the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. It was classified as a Very Heavy Bomber (VHB), and it was, with a maximum bomb load of 10 tons, a range of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), and a top speed of 358 mph (577 kph). But it could not display all of these qualities at the same time, for speed and range decreased as the bomb load increased. The B-29 had been originally designed to operate from across the Atlantic to hit Germany, but once the older Allied bombers were performing adequately against Germany by 1943, the decision was made to operate the B-29 in the war against Japan. Initially, China was believed to be the best place from which to operate the B-29s.\n\nSoutheastern China, of which Hong Kong was a part, was deemed the best part of China to begin B-29 operations against Japan.35 The prerequisite, of course, was a strong enough LoC being established", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215819, "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": 118, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "51\n\nHong Kong's temperatures don't go as high as India's, but they are hot enough to affect machinery. The B-29's new instruments were especially vulnerable. In tropical areas (Hong Kong is semi-tropical), temperatures inside a B-29 during a hot day could reach 150°F (65.5°C). Besides affecting crew comfort, the heat takes a toll on the B-29's engines, which would be damaged if the temperature of its cylinder heads exceeded 428°F (220°C). If the engines haven't yet been damaged, they would have suffered decreased efficiency due to the higher temperatures, thereby requiring longer takeoffs. Temperature variations also affect the air pressure of a B-29's tyres. Improper inflation of tyres affects the takeoff and landing distance of an aircraft, and could result in shorter tyres life.42 Hence, early morning takeoffs were recommended if the B-29 were to operate from Hong Kong. A temperature of 75°F (24°C) demanded a 10 percent increase in runway length (due to the lower efficiency of the B-29's engines), and 20 percent if the temperature reached 100°F (37.7°C). But summers in Hong Kong would not be conducive to the efficient operation of a B-29, for even early morning temperatures during this period would have reached or exceeded 75°F.44\n\n43\n\nHumidity and heavy rains can cause corrosion, fungal build-up, and ultimately malfunctions on idle B-29s. Electrical equipment is particularly at risk to such weathering, and when that is gone, the B-29 has lost its technological edge. Idle engines are also affected by heavy weathering, which can contaminate engine oil with impurities and thus damage the engine.45\n\nThen there is the all-powerful typhoon, which could pose a serious threat to B-29 operations. In July 1946, Hong Kong was hit by another typhoon, and Kai Tak got the worst of it. Winds of up to 130 knots were recorded. The runway was holed, and five transport planes and two Sunderland flying boats, all unserviceable, were lost - a testimony to the vulnerability of grounded aircraft to the weather and anything else. The toll would have been higher had some aircraft not been evacuated prior to the typhoon's arrival. Although the Allies did not have the power of foresight during the war, they already knew about the 1937 typhoon, which also damaged Kai Tak.46\n\nA loss of seven planes might have seemed tolerable to the materiel-rich Allies, but not so in the case of the B-29. It was the most expensive project of the war (US$3 billion in those days) - even more expensive", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215820, "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": 119, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "52\n\nthan the US$2 billion Manhattan Project that built the atom bomb - and its total production run stopped just short of 4,000. (In comparison, the combined production run for its predecessors - the B-17 and B-24 - surpassed 30,000.) As previously mentioned, the B-29's novelty was enough to render some of its numbers unserviceable due to mechanical failures. But a low production rate and a shortage of trained air crews and fuel also contributed to its meagre deployment when it first went into action in 1944. In a place like Hong Kong, bad weather could reduce the number of operational B-29s even further.\n\nThe fuel shortage problem was exacerbated when the JCS ordered that bombing operations against Japan commence before Hong Kong's recapture.48 Thus, the B-29s began bombing Japan from bases in Central China. Such extreme distances for the time - about 1,600 miles (2,575 km) from their targets - increased the fuel consumption of each aircraft and reduced its bomb load to two tons. As a land or sea route into China had not yet been reopened, all supplies had to be flown in over the Hump by the B-29s themselves (sometimes supplemented by B-24s), which was a wasteful task because each B-29 had to expend two tons of fuel to haul one ton of supplies.49 These early bombing missions were inauspicious, with a good raid numbering only about 100 unescorted B-29s (compared to the 1,000-plane raids the Allies were by then routinely making against Germany), and usually less. The primitive airfields of Central China were not all-weather; although the runways would be painstakingly constructed to such standards, and a few B-29s would sometimes be mired in mud after heavy rains and therefore written off for a mission,50\n\nTokyo (enemy capitals were used as benchmarks), however, lay beyond the range of a B-29 operating out of Central China. If B-29s were to operate from Hong Kong, which was about 1,800 miles (2,897 km) from Tokyo, each bomber would theoretically be able to carry only about 20 percent of its maximum 10-ton bomb load. This doesn't take into account other factors, like the need to fly off course and make evasive manoeuvres during combat, and obviously the weather. This would necessitate cutting back even further on bombs in favour of more fuel. While B-29s based in Hong Kong could bomb other areas of Japan that were closer, the Allies knew that only an ability to get off consistent and heavy strikes at the Japanese capital would have the desired political, if not military, effect on the enemy. Hence, a bomber", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215821, "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": 120, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "53\n\nutilizing only 20 per cent of its bomb capacity was not the way to obtain satisfactory returns on a US$3 billion gamble. Even worse was a bomber that could not make it to the runway due to breakdowns or adverse weather.\n\nEventually, the Allies captured the Marianas Islands in the Pacific, and the B-29s were transferred there. The Marianas also suffered from typhoons, but they were closer (no more than 1,600 miles) than Hong Kong to Tokyo. When the B-29s began bombing Japan from the Marianas, each plane carried about two tons of bombs. The results continued to be unsatisfactory, and were an indication of how the B-29s likely would have fared had they operated from Hong Kong. Not until the Allies acquired more aircraft and tried a new tactic - stripping down each B-29, loading it with six tons of incendiary bombs, and making them fly lower to ease the stress on the engines - did Tokyo begin to burn, as it did in March 1945, when as many as 100,000 of its inhabitants were incinerated in one raid,\n\nAside from its distance advantage, the Marianas were also safer from Japanese interference than Hong Kong. This advantage became even more significant later in the war, when Japanese control of the Pacific ebbed, but swelled in China. Should the Japanese not contest an Allied landing or Hong Kong, they were expected to harass the LoC established into it with a sizable naval force. The Hong Kong area was a good place for the Japanese to make their stand. They had shorter LoC plus the potential support of land-based aircraft from nearby Japanese-held areas. The Allies, presumably coming from the southeast, would have extended LoC that were potentially vulnerable to attack on the flanks, and such LoC would be passing through a typhoon-infested area.52\n\nSo it was evident how vital a secure LoC into Hong Kong from the sea was in order for B-29 operations to begin from there. In the absence of such a LoC, the strategy of having the B-29s fly their own supplies to Hong Kong (if the Allies somehow managed to recapture it by land), like they did for Central China, would be impractical. Even without Japanese interference, the weather alone was enough to ensure that establishing and maintaining LoC into Hong Kong would be a monumental undertaking indeed.\n\nBut, until the Central Pacific drive made better progress, China\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215822, "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": 121, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "54\n\nremained an integral part of Allied strategy to defeat Japan. Even if her expected contribution to Allied victory over Japan had been downgraded and a squadron of B-29s based on the mainland was not as promising as a combat-ready Chinese Army, the politics of basing such a new and promising weapon on Chinese soil were thought to be enough to boost Chinese morale.53\n\nThe issue is in doubt\n\nBy the end of 1943, Allied planners had not settled on a decision to drop Hong Kong from the list of future objectives, nor did they elevate its status to that of a territory whose possession was beyond debate. In short, if a campaign in China was likely, a port on the China Coast would need to be opened up, and Hong Kong was a leading candidate for such a port. The development of the war in 1944-1945 would determine Hong Kong's importance.\n\nAs the USN's Central Pacific offensive gathered momentum in early 1944, the adjacent Southwest Pacific offensive under General Douglas MacArthur also stepped up its pace so as not to be left behind. The competing dual advances sped up the Allied timetable, and brought the Allies to within striking distance of Japan by summer 1944.\n\nIn China, it was a different story. Chinese forces here had not faced a major Japanese attack since 1938. When the Japanese attempted to link their possessions in the south (including Hong Kong) with the large portion of China they held north of the Yangtze River with a major offensive in the summer, the Chinese forces standing in the way largely disintegrated without offering much resistance. By early 1945, the Hong Kong beachhead had linked up with the rest of Japanese-held China. By now, the prospect of recapturing Hong Kong from the sea, while still not entirely infeasible, was made harder due to the potential ease with which the Japanese could reinforce Hong Kong from the interior of China. Intelligence reports indicated that the Japanese probably intended to wage a last-ditch defence of Hong Kong like they were already doing in the Pacific.54\n\nJ\n\nThe Japanese eventually overextended themselves in China, while China belatedly began to receive supplies in some quantity once the road link from Burma was reopened and the air link over the Hump", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215823, "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": 122, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "55\n\nbecame more secure. This allowed the Chinese to reoccupy some of their lost territory as 1945 progressed. Talks of an attempt on Hong Kong from the interior of China were revived, although a Hong Kong in Allied hands was now considered a luxury rather than a necessity. The USN was still expected to make a contribution, even if it was only to finally open up a port in China to further alleviate her supply situation, and the possession of which would complete the blockade around Japan and the Inner Zone,55\n\nWhether the USN, the chief underwriter of the Allied offensives in the Pacific, had enough resources for only a luxury objective was another story. As the Allies neared Japan, they encountered the wrath of two types of \"divine wind.\" The first was man-made in the form of massed Japanese suicide plane attacks on the USN and Britain's Royal Navy (RN). This was the Kamikaze, and was the ultimate desperation measure employed by the Japanese in a bid to stem the Allied advance. While the measure eventually failed, it proved extremely nerve-wracking for the Allies to face it down, and men and ships were lost in fighting off this threat. The prospect of more Kamikazes awaiting an invasion of Japan did not sit well with the USN.\n\nThe second was the more natural typhoon. The USN's Third Fleet had the misfortune to be caught in two of them during the last nine months of the war. The first typhoon hit the Third Fleet in December 1944 off the Philippines with winds of 125 knots. It claimed three destroyers sunk and 28 other ships damaged, 146 aircraft destroyed, and almost 900 dead or wounded. The second typhoon struck in June 1945 off Okinawa. This one wasn't as deadly, with winds kept below 100 knots, but it still damaged 33 ships, destroyed or damaged 92 aircraft, and killed or wounded 10 men.56 The Japanese could not have done so well in a conventional attack by this stage of the war.\n\nThe end of the war did not spare the USN from further punishment. In October 1945, a large assembly of support vessels was struck by a typhoon off Okinawa. Winds of 100 knots and waves as high as 35 feet (almost 11 metres) combined to damage, ground, or sink almost 270 ships, most of which were amphibious vessels. The typhoon also damaged over 60 aircraft and inflicted almost 200 casualties, including 36 dead. Shore facilities and supplies were also extensively damaged or destroyed. Fortunately, the war was over, or else the loss (even", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215824, "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": 123, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "56\n\ntemporarily) of so many valuable amphibious vessels would have set back any invasion of Japan, or elsewhere.\"7\n\nIn addition, after Japan agreed to surrender in August 1945, several ships of the RN heading to Hong Kong to re-establish British rule over the territory were caught in a typhoon and suffered losses.58 In all four cases, together with the 1937 and 1946 typhoons that straddled the war, the Allies suffered substantial losses without being able to hit back - because there was nothing to hit! Hence, the Japanese got their \"divine winds,\" but none were able to save them from defeat,\n\n## Conclusion\n\nIt should be noted that neither of the two typhoons that consumed the Third Fleet nor the one that hit Okinawa right after the war were as powerful as the 1937 or 1946 typhoons that hit Hong Kong. Still, the typhoons were strong enough to rattle and even damage the largest and best-protected warships, including collapsing the forward flight decks of two aircraft carriers and slicing the bow off a heavy cruiser in the June 1945 incident. (The ships survived, but the cruiser and one of the carriers were knocked out of the war.)59 Support vessels, which are not as sturdy nor as fast as the biggest warships, would stand to suffer even more from a typhoon, as demonstrated by the October 1945 storm.\n\nFor the weather to prevail in a military campaign is one of the most cost-ineffective ways to lose the campaign. The enemy would have suffered few or no losses in return, which is damaging to morale. On the other side, however, if by a certain stage of the war the weather has become one's most formidable ally, then that is usually an indicator that he has shot his bolt, and has to depend on something outside of his control.\n\nThe weather factors examined range from seemingly trivial to potentially devastating. All, however, are capable of causing unnecessary losses if either side has paid insufficient heed to any of them. In land operations on terrain as mountainous as Hong Kong's, more weight is put on the ability of the foot soldier to achieve key objectives, because the help afforded by machinery would be relatively limited. But the foot soldier is usually more vulnerable to the elements than his supporting machinery. Certainly, machinery could be replaced,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215825, "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": 124, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "57\n\nbut it was harder to replace soldiers with combat experience.\n\nBecause the weather changes from day to day, so must the extent to which it could influence the approval or rejection of a certain operation in war. Hong Kong's weather, as formidable as it was, could not by itself determine if it merited recapture or not. Nor could any objective's weather be the lone factor. If it was, then many of the war's campaigns would not have taken place. If the control of a specific territory was judged crucial, then the powers concerned would do anything within their capacity to seize or retain it.\n\nNo place in the world has perfect weather at any time of the year. In Hong Kong's case, its worst weather occurs during the middle of the year. Had a Hong Kong operation taken place, Allied planners would have naturally preferred that it take place towards the end of the year. That would give the Allies up to six months of relatively trouble-free weather with which to work.\" A Hong Kong operation was bound to include amphibious landings, and these were very susceptible to bad weather. It was important for the Allies to gain at least a foothold on land, as it would give a political and psychological boost to the Allied war effort, as well as put them in a better position militarily vis-à-vis Japan. The China Coast was a perimeter within Japan's empire, and any breach made here would accelerate Japan's demise. So that first foothold was vital, just as it was equally vital for the Japanese to prevent it. In Japan's history, foul weather had worked in her favour when she had to defend against an amphibious invasion, so it wasn't unprecedented for the weather to play a decisive role in war. For the Allies, the last thing they would want was to see a Hong Kong operation in progress be thwarted by a non-human entity like the weather. Such a contest would be a no-win situation for the Allies.\n\nIn the end, the Allies never carried out any landings on any port on the China Coast. Their destruction of the IJN and blockade of Japan by sea and air was so complete that they didn't have to worry about the Japanese in China, which remained a secondary theatre at the end of the war. Hong Kong's weather was never specifically mentioned as a factor, but was probably on the minds of some Allied planners after the poundings their navies had taken in the last months of the war. Hong Kong returned to British, and eventually Chinese, rule, and was fortunate to have not undergone a destructive campaign for it to change hands again.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215936, "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": 235, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "169\n\nindependently of each other, with little communication. History is written about those who create documents, not by those whose duty was to leave no trail. Nonetheless, it does appear that there were several groups quietly focussing on different aspects of resistance, not all military, should the day come when the Japanese took over.\n\nUsing his cover as a businessman working for Butterfield and Swire, where his \"manager,\" Mike Turner, also seems to have had SOE connections, Kendall also travelled through China, setting up contacts and listening posts, including those installed by Chauvin and Chinese intelligence. Indeed, because SOE tapped into an existing Chinese network, the intelligence it was able to access was far more sophisticated and accurate. SOE continued to fund another Chinese organisation, the RII (Research and Information Institute) throughout the duration of the war. This was a Chinese operated service using British equipment and a small British staff, working for, not in charge of, the Chinese. Many of its reports still exist, showing just how detailed was the information they gathered: exact ammunition supplies and strengths of Japanese units, area by area, names of officers, postings and movements. When, later in the war, efforts were made to amalgamate various British agencies operating in China, SOE managed to insist that RII was to remain separate and unaffected because it was a Chinese force.\n\nDespite what seems to have been a working relationship between the SOE and various forms of KMT intelligence, it is evident that Kendall also cultivated strong links in the hinterland of Hong Kong where KMT influence was weak. These areas were relatively remote and fiercely resistant to central government influence. The villagers were clannish, and their communities closed, united internally by family and traditional ties. Many of these villagers had emigrated overseas to work in places like South America and Malaya. They also had traditional systems of defence and security, but piracy and banditry were endemic, almost part of the economy. These regions were alien territory to urban Hong Kong people, European or Chinese, who as outsiders would have been treated with suspicion. Political loyalties varied, and before Hong Kong was attacked, people had no automatic regard for the British who were not yet ‘Allies, and whose record in China was not edifying. In many ways, this work was much easier after the occupation when locals and British forces, though humiliated by defeat, shared common ground. Kendall went into these areas, often alone, meeting and talking\n\n+", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216044, "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": 343, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "277\n\npleaded with him and explained that she was a good person and truly loved her husband. She added that she was due to bear his child in the not too distant future. The Abbot, who is the villain of the tale, would have none of it and White Snake at her wits end called on her allies, the fish and crustaceans of the Great River to her aid. The violent and prolonged rainstorm flooded the entire area around Jin Shan island in an attempt to free her husband and as the waters rose White Snake again pleaded with the Abbot offering to call off the dangerous river waters. He refused to listen, used his own cloak to quell the waters and even tried to catch her in his magical urn to incarcerate her but to no avail as she was protected by Wen Chang, the God of Literature, as her future son was destined to achieve the status of Zhuang Yuan, the First Scholar in the whole country. The Abbot immediately knew that he was no longer able to catch or destroy White Snake but would be able to do so once she had borne the child.\n\nThe Abbot gave Xu his magical urn and explained that once the son had been born he was to capture her in it and she would then be incarcerated forever. Xu returned home and after tearful explanations from both husband and wife they were reconciled, though once the child was born Xu threw the urn at his wife. Having been captured by the magic urn she turned back into her original form. Almost immediately the Abbot materialised and took the urn with its prisoner and placed it under the Thunder Peak Pagoda on the shores of Hangzhou's lake. Xu bitterly repented betraying his wife and sought obscurity as a solitary Buddhist monk far away.\n\nThe son grew into a handsome and talented youth and only when he had become the long forecast First Scholar, a Zhuang Yuan, was he told the sad tale of his ill-fated father and mother. At an auspicious time on an auspicious day he prepared an elaborate sacrificial ceremony in memory of his mother and there, before the Thunder Peak Pagoda he knelt in prayer. His mother, freed for a very short period as a gesture by the local guardian deity, appeared dressed in white. She approached her son and full of tears explained her love for his father and the sad ending, and especially the dreadful punishment she was suffering for having caused the deaths of so many innocent people in and around Zhenjiang by ordering the land to be flooded. She was escorted back to the Pagoda to continue her agony - for all eternity.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]