[ { "id": 205102, "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-1966", "page_number": 58, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS\n\n53\n\nbeyond China's borders. A Sino-Korean world map going back to the fourteenth century has been discovered where not only Asia but also Europe and Africa are shown, the latter continent even in a triangular shape that is comparatively close to geographical reality. Not less than 100 place names are given for Europe and about 35 for Africa. It must be hoped that the Western parts of this world map will be studied in the near future because this will furnish valuable evidence for the incorporation of Arabic and Persian geographical knowledge into Chinese geography. But it does not seem that this knowledge, restricted as it certainly was to a few geographers, was ever assimilated with the Chinese world conception which continued, in spite of this geographical information, on entirely traditional lines. The idea of China as the Middle Kingdom and center of the world was not really challenged, and not much curiosity on what lay beyond China was aroused among the Chinese intellectuals. What Chinese texts of the Yuan period have to say on countries beyond the sea is usually a poor extract from an earlier work of Sung date (ca. 1225), the Chu-fan chih \"Description of Barbarians\" by Chao Ju-kua. The foreign domination of China by the Mongols did not stimulate interest in foreign countries but rather encouraged a latent tendency of xenophobia.\n\nThere is another passage in a Chinese text which should be mentioned briefly because it concerns the first Europeans who came to China in the Middle Ages. This was some years before the Polos reached China, which was in 1265 or 1266 if we are to believe that they ever were in China at all, a question which is not yet settled. It has been suggested that in Polo's description of China there are some unsupported boasts about his having been governor in Yang-chou and his taking part in the siege of Hsiang-yang as artillery engineer. It is true that the Chinese sources mention foreign engineers who built stone catapults for attacking the city, but their names are Arab and they came from Baghdad. No Po-lo mentioned in the Yuan-shih or other sources can be identified with the Italian Polos; all the Po-lo's of the sources have had a good Altaic name, Bolod (“steel”), because they were of Mongol or Turkish extraction. And there are also a few glaring blanks in Polo's otherwise very detailed account. He never mentions tea, but this may be because he did not like tea or the Mongols in China never offered him any. He never mentions the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205330, "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-1967", "page_number": 92, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "The China Coasters\n\n85\n\nwere very small, but had very powerful engines and steering gears. Only the high passenger and freight charges enabled them to run at a profit. One of the most important cargoes from the Upper Yangtse was tung oil, which was latterly carried in bulk. This oil was used in the manufacture of high quality paints and lacquers, and was so valuable that the privilege of cleaning out the cargo pumps after discharge was one of the most highly prized perquisites of the engine room staff. The Upper Yangtse was too dangerous for night navigation, so that the Gorge boats anchored each night at dusk, and set off again at dawn. Officers on these ships were paid a special bonus after a season on the Upper River, and also given local leave.\n\nBecause they operated in inland waters, the Yangtse riverboats were exempt from certain of the manning regulations which applied to deep sea British ships. Certificated masters and chief mates were always carried, but sometimes the second mates had no British qualifications, and were either White Russians or Chinese. During the inter-war years these White Russians were often former officers of the Imperial Russian Navy, and without exception were very capable and efficient. On the engine room side the chief and second engineers had British qualifications, but sometimes Chinese third engineers were employed,\n\nThe opium clipper tradition inherited by the 'China coasters' resulted in smart and well run ships, a credit to the owners and crews concerned. The pre-war 'China coasters' were probably the smartest ships in Britain's Merchant Navy, and their bright paintwork, gleaming brass work, and smart red-sashed quartermasters would have gladdened the heart of old Admiral Benbow. Their closest rivals under the Red Ensign were the coasters of the Straits Steamship Company which were based on Singapore, and which traded round Malaya and the East Indies. 'China coasters', apart from officers, had all Chinese crews, while the Straits coasters and their Dutch K.L.M. rivals had Malays on deck and Chinese down below, a good combination in pre-Sukarno days. Sailors and firemen sometimes spent a lifetime on one ship, and often the bosun and Number One Fireman would have started their careers on the same ship twenty-five years earlier. The Arab and Indian practice of the bosun and Number One being responsible for their department was followed on the China coast, and each department was very much a family and clan affair.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206081, "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-1970", "page_number": 161, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "156\n\nS. F. BALFOUR\n\nbetween A.D. 785 and 805 by a Chinese called Chia Tan and which are published in the T'ang official history. The text concerning our region reads:\n\n\"From Canton travelling towards the South East for 200 li you reach Mount T'un Mun.\n\nThe name T'un Mun or garrisoned entrance is still given to the Castle Peak region. The landmark is in fact Castle peak itself. It must have been known centuries before the publication of the text we have cited and the foreign ships coming to and from Canton must have anchored in its neighbourhood in such numbers that a Chinese garrison was sent to control and protect them. This garrison was appointed during the Tang dynasty.\n\nThere is some difficulty in placing the locality of the anchorage. It may have been Castle Peak Bay itself, or any of the harbours between it and Fat T'ong Mun. The Arab Chain of Chronicles gives the following description of the route to Canton:\n\n\"Seven days are needed to pass through the Straits between the mountains. Then you reach fresh water and proceed to Khanfu.\n\n**\n\nThere may, of course, have been confusion in these accounts, and the area of approach to Canton also called by the Arabs \"the Gates of China\" may have been elsewhere than our region. On the other hand this description fits in with the nature of the passage from Fat T'ong Mun to T'un Mun in all respects except that it takes less than seven days to pass through. Perhaps, however, these seven days were meant to include the administrative delays which ships entering Canton were bound to encounter.\n\nThere is no local tradition or archaeological evidence of the passage of foreign traders past T'un Mun, or of the site of the garrison. One theory is that it was near Castle Peak Bay and at that period there was a channel connecting with Deep Bay which made the Castle Peak range itself an island. Amongst other things the garrison was in charge of the salt fields in the district, and it seems quite likely that at that time the salt fields covered this channel.\n\nThe mountain itself is supposed to have been visited by a Buddhist saint in 428 A.D., who journeyed across the sea in a", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216324, "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-2003", "page_number": 83, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "32\n\ncould see, and it seemed as if it were one vast garden'.\"\n\nParkinson, Trade in the Eastern Seas (1937) writes: \"When the whole [EIC] China fleet was collected there, twelve or sixteen of the largest merchantmen in the world, together with the country ships, the spectacle must have been magnificent.\" He records that sometimes the Viceroy at Canton would come down to visit the fleet. The ships would be decked to receive the great man, with yards manned and officers in full dress.12\n\nCanton\n\nCanton was, and is, the capital of the Guangdong Province. One of the larger and richer cities of the Chinese Empire, and dating back to pre-Han times, it had long been a major sea port for overseas trade, notably in the Tang Dynasty when it had a significant Arab and Muslim population. During the turmoil which accompanied the change of dynasty from Ming to Qing, it upheld the Ming, endured an eleven-month siege in 1650, and suffered a wholesale massacre of its inhabitants. However, it recovered, and by the mid-nineteenth century was credited with a population of around one million persons. It was renowned for its manufactories, carried on by human industry, without the aid of machinery, particularly in silk and cloth, women and children included, whilst trade - international and regional trade - was described as being 'the great business of life'.13\n\nCanton was a walled city (actually two walled cities in one, the Old and the New) with major suburbs along the Pearl River, and to the West.14 As befitted its status, it contained the yamens (office-residences) of many senior government officials, including those of the governor-general of the two linked provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, the governor of Guangdong, the Canton prefect, two county magistrates, the Tartar general, the provincial naval commander, and the like, as well as those officials with charge of other, specialised concerns, and (of special status, since he was responsible directly to Beijing) the Hoppo or Superintendent of Maritime Customs, who oversaw the foreign trade and its accruing revenue.\n\nThe Foreign Factories (British, French, Swedish, Spanish, Danish and Dutch) of the river suburb were so-called from their being the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216509, "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-2003", "page_number": 268, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "220\n\nBuddha. After all, the Greeks had settled here even earlier, in the third century BCE. Other examples, before being blown up in 2001, were the huge images of Buddha carved out of the cliff in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, with their moulded mud and stucco draperies. Alexander's forays and settlements to lands well to the east of his Macedonian homeland remind us that several of the cities that Tucker describes were far more ancient than the Silk Road. Babylon, which fell to Alexander in 331 BCE, had already by then been the Middle East's most magnificent city for over fifteen hundred years. The earliest city to occupy the site of Chang'an was in existence before 1000 BCE.\n\nTucker manages to convey a huge sweep of history and geography. You will need time to read this book as, if you merely dip into it, you will lose the interconnecting threads, which are the crux of his thesis, i.e. that, throughout fifteen hundred years, numerous cultures met along the Silk Road and nourished each other's creative spirits. You will need to read it at a table because it is too heavy to read on your knees. And you will need an atlas alongside it that has maps showing some realms not often shown on a single spread. Your maps will need to show the geographical proximity of the towering mountain ranges of the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush with the drainage basins of the Aral Sea to their west and north and with the upper tributaries of the Indus to their east and south. The passes connecting these regions beckoned both Alexander and, nearly two thousand years later, Tamerlane, both intent on conquering and settling the north of the Indian subcontinent. You will need a single map to show the vast latitudinal spread of the great grasslands, deserts and semi-deserts from Turkey to northern China over which the nomads galloped. It was along these northernmost routes of the Silk Road that the Mongols charged on their terrifying way to Vienna, besieging it in 1241 and only withdrawing because they had to travel back, unexpectedly but unavoidably, all the way to Karakorum to appoint a new Grand Khan. The Silk Road saw many such events that were turning points in history, such as when in 1218 the governor of a city in what is now Kazakhstan killed an envoy of Ghengis Khan, suspecting that he was a spy, an action that precipitated the wrath of the Khan, and \"was to propel the world into an abyss, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the deaths of millions of people from the Danube to the Sea of Japan' (p.221) - because Ghengis Khan's horsemen set out to avenge this insult, inflicting terrible retribution on all in their path.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]