[ { "id": 205636, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1968", "page_number": 178, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n173\n\nestates of which none can be said to have the identity inhering in its predecessor. The so-called joint family has a short life.\n\nRitual primogeniture is inherent in the worship, but rests on a true primogeniture of a much older phase. No one son can step effectively into his father's shoes and exercise authority over the same range of people. Married sons are not seen as a threat to the father's position and the father, also, does not, once in his soul-tablet, support the authority of sons over their juniors. In a nut-shell then, the ancestor is worshipped but cannot be used as a major instrument of domestic discipline.\n\nMiss Ward's paper is very different in subject matter and theoretical interest to that of Dr. Freedman's but again is concerned with matters on which Professor Firth has done considerable work: peasant communities, including fishing communities, and their economies. \"Chinese Fishermen in Hong Kong: their Post-Peasant Economy\" is based particularly on data derived by Miss Ward from the village of Kau Sai which is on the shores of a narrow strait between two small islands in the Port Shelter area of Hong Kong's waters. It was there, in the early 'fifties, that Miss Ward first began her field work on the boat people.\n\nThe essay discusses problems of economic and social change. Miss Ward talks of the rapid technological changes in the fishing industry (whereas in 1952 in Kau Sai all but one boat had been wind-driven, by mid-1963 only one was not mechanized). She argues that this was possible because the economic attitudes of the fishermen and the social structure of fishing communities were already favourable. When the opportunity to adopt useful technical change was offered, it was likely to be seized upon unless blocked by something else. By 1950 the opportunity to mechanize did appear -- engines were available. By then the possible educational block had also been partly removed, and government action in freeing the market, injecting money and providing training courses and encouragement was all that was required to set a revolution in action.\n\nThe essay deals with the effects of mechanization and change on different kinds of fishermen, and changes in social structure consequent on such developments, highlighting as a factor of general importance the movement of boat-people to land-dwellings. This affects particularly the position of women, changing their opportunities to earn an independent income either by working in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205637, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1968", "page_number": 179, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "174\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\na factory or in petty trade, or some form of out-work, for example making plastic flowers, extremely popular since about 1960. It also affects the future of young members of the boat community since children, once living on the land, can attend school regularly.\n\nLand people have long regarded the boat people as near barbarians and have myths about their \"un-Chinese\" activities, but Miss Ward argues movement ashore will change their status generally, and in the long run the cumulative effects of all the developments connected with economic change will be to integrate the fishing folk completely into the rest of the Chinese population. Miss Ward's main work has been with the Cantonese speaking fishing folk. One might wonder, however, whether the rate of integration will be the same for the \"Hoklo,\" speaking a different dialect. Land-dwelling speakers of this dialect have still a long way to go to full integration in Hong Kong.\n\nHong Kong, 1968.\n\nMARJORIE TOPLEY\n\nTHE AWAKENING OF CHINA 1793 - 1949: Roger Pelissier (edited and translated by Martin Kieffer) London, Secker and Warburg, 1967, pp 532. 63/-\n\nThis book, part of a series entitled \"History in the Making\", is really a collection of short extracts, few of them more than several pages culled from numerous Western works. English, American and, usefully, (the compiler being of that nationality) French sources form the bulk of the publications from which the selection is made. The extracts are linked by a connecting narrative to form a continuous sequence of historical experience extending from the Macartney Embassy in 1793-94 to the débâcle of 1948 - 49 when the Chinese Communists took over control of all China.\n\nWhilst the narrative is, in places, open to question, this publication deserves to be widely known and read. This is partly because the books from which the extracts are taken are, in most cases, long out of print and sometimes difficult to obtain; but mainly because it provides a superb sweep of modern Chinese history, carefully assembled. The richness of the material is remarkable and the authors are compelling partly, one suspects, because of the vital nature of what lay before their eyes. The writers are", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205734, "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-1969", "page_number": 40, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "34\n\nR. G. GROVES\n\nmarket, central market, local and regional cities. The following discussion will be concerned with standard and intermediate markets.\n\nAs already mentioned, Skinner's analysis has to do with more than the distribution of economic activities. It comprehends the distribution of all significant social relationships through space and time. Thus, the standard marketing area is seen as constituting also a standard marketing community—the social world of the peasantry,10\n\nSkinner argues that the standard marketing community is relatively self-contained—the boundaries of the standard marketing area are also the boundaries of social networks for the peasant members of the marketing community. Most enduring social relationships are contracted and maintained with members of one's own standard marketing community. The nodes of these networks—be they economic, political, kinship, or religious—are to be found in the standard market town, the marketing schedule of which imposes a rhythmic pattern upon the acting out of social relationships. Indeed, the market town was so important that control of it sometimes became an aspect of competition for political and economic ascendency between rival lineages or groups within the marketing community.12\n\nThe standard market town was commonly dependent upon two or three intermediate market towns, the distribution of economic activities within the system being achieved through co-ordinated periodic market schedules. The intermediate market town performed, for members of local elites, functions similar to those performed by the standard market town for peasant members of the marketing community. \"Everything which set them apart from the peasantry encouraged their attendance at the intermediate market.... while the regular needs of the peasants were met by the standard market, those of the local elite were met only by the intermediate market.\"4 The intermediate marketing area, transcending those of its dependent standard markets, provided a wider context and a more extensive network of relationships for the pursuit of such gentry interests as scholarship, politics, and profit.\n\nFreedman has taken up that part of Skinner's analysis which deals with the relationship between marketing systems and lineage", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205735, "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-1969", "page_number": 41, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "MILITIA, MARKET AND LINEAGE\n\n35\n\norganization.15 He first distinguishes between \"local lineage\" and \"higher-order lineage\". \"What defines the whole class of local lineages... is that they are corporate groups of agnates living in one settlement or a tight cluster of settlements.\" Larger aggregations are also possible: \"a local lineage may be grouped with other local lineages of the same surname... the whole unit in turn being focused on an ancestral hall or other piece of property. For this larger scale group... I propose the term 'higher-order lineage'.\n\nFreedman then considers Amyot's data on lineage organization in Fukien province. Amyot draws attention to the significance of the hsiang for lineage organization.16 A hsiang may be “either a complex of villages or hamlets forming some kind of unity, or again, the largest village of this complex from which the latter derives its name. It is usually a market center\n\n20 Amyot argues that “lineage organization is constantly associated with a specific district or hsiang of relatively small dimensions. Members of lineage sub-branches \"do not have the same kinds of interrelationship across spatially separated sub-branches as they have within the limits of one territory or between contiguous territories.\" In Freedman's view, what he has termed \"higher-order lineages” are \"likely to be confined to the small areas formed by hsiang.22\n\nFreedman notes that Skinner has used Amyot's data to support his suggestion that the standard marketing area—the hsiang of Amyot's analysis---constitutes the \"catchment area\" of the higher-order lineage. He concludes: \"it may well turn out... that in fact vicinage and standard marketing area are usually congruent and that they provide us with the key to understanding how local lineages are normally grouped together.\"23 The large, gentry-led, higher-order lineages of southern Hsin-an appear to be an exception. Their component local lineages were widely separated and were not encompassed within a single standard marketing area. Freedman suggests that, in these instances, the intermediate market town may have provided that linkage necessary for higher-order lineage organization.24\n\nThis summary, though it does less than justice to the work of Professors Freedman and Skinner, may suffice to indicate two convergent lines of analysis one concerned with lineage organi-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205761, "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-1969", "page_number": 67, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "33 Ibid., p. 113.\n\nMILITIA, MARKET AND LINEAGE\n\n61\n\n34 This event has a tangled academic history. The establishment of the association by the twenty-four villages was originally reported in the Chinese Repository (IV, 1836, p. 414), and is quoted by Wakeman (op. cit., p. 63) from that source. It is also quoted by Hsiao (op. cit., p. 309) as an example of inter-village co-operation for the purposes of defence and the maintenance of order. Skinner (op. cit., p. 39, n. 80), quoting from Hsiao, argues its significance for the analysis of standard marketing communities.\n\n35 Wakeman, op. cit., p. 39.\n\n36 Skinner, G. W. \"Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China Part II\". The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. XXIV, no. 2, February 1965, pp. 207f.\n\n37 Only those aspects of the New Territories most relevant to the argument will be discussed. There is a growing literature about the area which, taken together, gives considerable detail. Freedman, op. cit., p. viii, provides a bibliographical note on published works.\n\n38 The land frontier of the territory begins just north of the Sham Chun river and runs eastward from Deep Bay to the market of Sha Tau Kok. J. H. Stewart Lockhart, the then Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong, was deeply opposed to this boundary. \"It cuts in two the rich valley of which Sham Chun is the centre, and, while excluding that town, divides the villages in the valley hitherto linked together by family ties and common interests; all these villages regard Sham Chun as their central and most important market, where they dispose their goods and make their purchases\" Papers Laid Before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, Extracts from Papers Relating to the Extension of the Colony of Hong Kong, 1899, Hong Kong, 1900, p. 196.\n\n39 Ibid., p. 187. Stewart Lockhart's population estimates cannot be regarded as very accurate. By 1900 he thought the number of villages to be 597. Papers Laid Before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, 1900, Hong Kong, 1901, p. 252. The Hong Kong census of 1911 gave the total population of the territory as 104,101. In the Northern District alone, 398 villages were enumerated. Papers Laid Before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, 1911, Hong Kong, 1912, pp. 103ff. On the other hand, as guesses go, Stewart Lockhart's count is by no means disreputable. His estimate of 100,000 is not all that far from the 1911 census figure cited above. Other examples could be given which suggest that his estimates are sufficiently accurate to indicate general magnitudes of population, if not precise numbers.\n\n40 Papers Laid Before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, Extracts..., op. cit., p. 188.\n\n41 This discussion will be confined to that part of the territory which used to be known as the 'Northern District' and will not consider the markets at Sai Kung, Tsuen Wan, Sham Shui Po, and Cheung Chau island. For brief accounts of these, see Hayes, J. W., \"The Pattern of Life in the New Territories in 1898\"; \"Cheung Chau 1850-1898: Information from Commemorative Tablets\", Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 11, 1962, vol. III, 1963.\n\n42 Papers Laid Before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, 1911, op. cit., pp. 103f.; Correspondence (December 15, 1903, to February 27, 1907) Relating to the Proposed Canton-Kowloon Railway, Eastern No. 88, Colonial Office, London, 1907, pp. 85ff.\n\n43 For example, the marketing schedule of the two Tai Po markets was 3-6-9. That is to say, the markets met on the 3rd, 6th, 9th, 13th, 16th, 19th, 23rd, 26th and 29th days of each lunar month. The same principle applies to the schedules of each of the other markets. Normally, in specifying a schedule, only the first three days are given.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205968, "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": 48, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "HONG KONG CADETS, 1862 - 1941\n\n43\n\nin academic performance, and a significant number excelled at sport. The fathers of the cadets were in most cases members of the older professions — law, medicine, and especially the church, although two, for example, were M.P.s.29 Few, if any, of the fathers were businessmen or shopkeepers, and none could be regarded as aristocratic. In sum, the typical cadet came from a solid, though not rich, upper middle-class family, went to a public school, but not to the most prestigious, and then went up to one of the older universities, where he read classics or history and was noted for his application to study and interest in healthy recreation. The bounder, the aesthete, the hearty, and the rake, were not represented in the ranks of the cadets. The origins of the Scots were humbler; many had schoolmasters for fathers, whereas the Irish tended to come from the smaller landed families, from the parochial gentry rather than the squirearchy.\n\nTwo things should be noted about the curriculum vitae of the typical cadet. Firstly, it fitted him for the type of job he was expected to carry out as a colonial civil servant in Hong Kong – the need to apply himself with diligence and intelligence to a series of prosaic tasks, and to sustain interest in the minutiae of bureaucratic life; and secondly, the common social background and education of the cadets helped to create an esprit de corps, a class and caste feeling, and an intuitive understanding of other cadets, which helped maintain morale and discipline within a hierarchical service. Cadets, it may be surmised, understood one another without the need for excessive interpretation of motive.\n\nGiven this common background, training, and the fraternity of class, cadets came to the field with many shared assumptions about, and attitudes towards, the people they governed in the colonial territories. Robert Huessler, for example, argues that the attitude of British Colonial officials 'was not unlike that which they maintained from childhood towards the lesser orders at home. One ruled the people and protected them from local and foreign injustice. Otherwise one lived apart'.30 Perhaps a better analogy would be the model prefect at an English public school. The model prefect is expected to be fair, just, upright, dignified, and withal concerned about his charges. However, he is not likely to support ideas of equality and permissiveness; he must exercise authority.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206316, "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": 133, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "The District Watch Committee\n\n127\n\ncame from a few clearly defined areas in Kwangtung Province, because the great majority of the Chinese congregated in the urban areas spoke Cantonese4. Lennox Mills compares this situation in Hong Kong, which made government relatively easy, with pre-war Malaya. This homogeneity, he argues, ‘makes it possible to control them through the District Watch Committee. (On the other hand) the Chinese in Malaya are drawn from various provinces and are divided by provincial hostilities of long standing. The wealthy and educated Chinese in some districts come from a different province from the majority of coolies; and, in addition, the interests of the recent immigrants often differ from those of the Straits Chinese who are permanently settled in Malaya. A committee representing the Chinese of Malaya would necessarily reproduce the various schisms which divide them, and the members would in some cases have no influence over the coolies in their districts'4. In Hong Kong, however, the Chinese were not divided to any great extent by dialect or provincial hostilities, only by differences in wealth and status. The members of the District Watch Committee originated from a small number of hsien (counties) in the Canton delta, from districts and towns close to the Pearl River, the main channel of communication between Canton and Hong Kong before the completion of the Kowloon-Canton Railway in 1912. A high percentage of the committeemen were born in, or originated from, Tung Kwun (Tung-kuan hsien) and Heung Shan (Hsiang-shan hsien)42; and the merchants from these areas had their own district associations in Hong Kong.\n\nClearly, the members of the District Watch Committee had much in common: they spoke mostly the same dialect, they came from the same district or closely related districts in China and they were, if not merchants, then involved in some type of commercial pursuit—land speculation, owning and managing property, banking and insurance, finance, compradoring43. All in all, they formed a remarkably homogeneous group, united by many ties; and it would seem, rarely divided for long by political differences. Not surprisingly, some of them were inter-related through ties of blood and kinship44. There were few family dynasties in Hong Kong but a small number had children who served later on the Committee45. In the nature of things, members must have disagreed about some of the issues raised at the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206428, "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": 245, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n219\n\ntestify, long ago revealed the theoretical relevance of much of the earlier literature on China: it is pleasing to note, therefore, that some of the contributors to this volume are now combining field research with an extensive use of the available documentation on China. This has led to a much more sophisticated treatment of theoretical problems and has, I feel, made such works much more interesting to read and more intellectually attractive for people in other disciplines.\n\nThe essays in this volume, apart from one by Professor Arthur P. Wolf, were in their original form papers written for, and discussed at, a conference on Kinship in Chinese society, held in New York in 1966 and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (New York). As it is not possible for a workaday sociologist to discuss every paper meaningfully and in detail in a short review, I shall comment on only a few of the papers, not because they are necessarily the best or the more significant but simply because I have some comments on them.\n\nThe first essay is by Professor Myron L. Cohen, who discusses a key problem: the structure of the Chinese family. Professor Cohen argues that the relevant components of the chia (family) can be reduced to three: the chia estate, the chia group, and the chia economy, and that the connection between the three components can assume a variety of forms or types. As he writes, 'the Chinese family has by and large been described in terms involving or assuming the existence of a chia in which the estate is concentrated, the group is concentrated, and the economy is inclusive'. Much of his essay is taken up by a rigorous discussion of chia variations, such as that an inclusive economy can be found in association with a dispersed estate and, of necessity, a dispersed group. Professor Cohen concludes that 'the possibility arises that a good deal of the movement of persons in Chinese society, movement connected with \"horizontal\" or \"vertical\" social and economic mobility, or with efforts to achieve such mobility, in fact occurred within a chia framework'. The points he makes are important and crucial: they illuminate basic concepts used to understand Chinese society; and I am persuaded by his claim 'that there may be more to domestic units than meets the demographer's eye'. There is certainly some evidence from nineteenth century Hong Kong to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206429, "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": 246, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "220\n\n \nBOOK REVIEWS\n\n \nsupport his thesis about variations in the three components of the chia. But ideally of course — and one is asking too much — we would like to know, if only by some crude measure, the statistical frequency of these variations. Were some variations so rare that they were clearly aberrations evolved by a few families? Thus in Western societies typically most husbands and wives live together; there are however some few cases — they do exist — in which eccentric husbands or wives live in separate households but continue to meet at need. How much attention should one pay to this rare family form? How many cases would make a variation significant in terms of social structure? The question is a worrying one.\n\n \nThe essay by Mrs. Margery Wolf on child training and the Chinese family is brilliantly written: sensitive, perceptive, acute. She shows how the way in which Chinese children are raised — the elder brother having to defer to the younger for some years — helps to develop tensions between them when they become adult. She also traces the process of fen-chia (partition of chia) to the competition that develops between the wives of married brothers; for wives come from stranger families and, unlike brothers, their loyalty lies primarily with their own little tribe of husband and children. Professor Freedman has been accused in a review of cutting the Chinese father down to size: Mrs. Wolf pursues this theme. She argues that the Chinese father, but not necessarily the mother, becomes a lonely and pathetic figure in old age, an authority in decay, with the power to make family decisions gradually eroded as the son or sons reach the plenitude of their vigour and manhood. Mrs. Wolf discusses not only the 'typical' family but variations — the sim-pua (hsin-pao) (little daughter-in-law), the practice of providing sons with wives by adopting an infant girl, and the custom of uxorilocal marriage. The treatment of these variations forms an important segment of her paper and throws much light on the developmental cycle of the family. Reading her paper, I was immediately reminded of the picture presented by Arensberg and Kimball in their classic study of the Irish small farmer and of his destiny when old.* Mrs. Wolf's paper is full of subtleties and insights, as one would expect from the author of The House of Lim.\n\n \n* Family and Community in Ireland (Harvard University Press, 1940).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206430, "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": 247, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n221\n\nProfessor Jack M. Potter's essay on land and lineage in traditional China draws heavily on the data collected for his Hong Kong study, Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant (1968). He sets himself the problem of trying to account for differences in the distribution of strong lineage organization in various parts of China, of lineage structure Type Z, as described and formulated by Professor Freedman. The hypothesised factors favourable to the development of a strong lineage are given by Professor Potter as a rich agricultural environment, frontier conditions, the absence of strong governmental control, and commercial development; all present, he concludes, in the New Territories of Hong Kong, where the Ping Shan Tang lineage flourished. He also argues that in all areas lineage organization would tend to be weaker under strong dynasties and stronger in inter-regnal periods or under weak dynasties. Professor Potter affirms that the four variables 'can form a set of inter-related hypotheses that, if validated by further research, would allow us to predict when and where strong lineage organization tended to appear in Traditional China'. But I should also think that strong lineages must depend very much on the quality of the personnel contained within them; for some human groups do seem to produce a more adroit leadership for a longer period of time than others. An institutionalization of virtue, as it were, may take place in some groups (lineages) more readily than in others.* And the task of plotting the frequency of powerful lineages in China has scarcely begun, so far as I know.\n\nThe study of Chinese society by Western scholars has been mainly androcentric in its selection of problems, thus reflecting Chinese views of their own social universe; but both Professor Freedman and Professor Arthur P. Wolf in their respective papers pay attention to the ambivalent and ambiguous status held by women in Chinese society. Professor Freedman's essay on ritual aspects of Chinese kinship and marriage discusses, among other matters, the problem of 'how is a woman to reconcile her duties as wife and daughter-in-law with those she has as sister and daughter?' The rites of marriage, he argues, \"are not to be taken as simple statements capable of being given clear and unambiguous meanings by those who participate in them. Rites, as symbolic\n\n* Dialect groupings may constitute another variable that has not yet been examined.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206908, "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-1973", "page_number": 185, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS \n\n179 \n\nIn my opinion much of the earlier discussion tends to be more an aesthetic exercise, a presentation of personal standards of elegance. Most if not all of the proposed systems work and do their job well enough. Most of the counterproposals were made with such goals as simplification, economies at the printers, or the revelation of linguistic truths in the analysis. These, and a number of other goals, are of course valid and important, but the combination of these goals and the possible differing priorities in achieving them creates literally an infinite number of possible transcription systems, most of them basically acceptable. The first requirement is essentially linguistic and says in over-simplified terms that the system should be non-redundant and unambiguous. If carried to its logical extreme this would generally produce systems satisfying only to linguists, systems in which the minimum inventory of symbols is used to transcribe all the contrasting sounds of Chinese. The trouble with such systems is that they often disturb everyone else in the field by forcing them to learn too many rules to cover situations in which a given symbol may have multiple pronunciations conditioned by the preceding or following symbols. For example, in the Pinyin system now preferred by Peking, the letter u is pronounced [u] or [ü] depending on whether it follows j- or zh- respectively.\n\nThis sort of thing takes care of a perfectly good linguistic fact about the language, but to the average reader or beginning student it is irritating and troublesome to find one letter with two contrasting pronunciations. The effect is generally more confusing than helpful. Therefore, although leaving something to be desired by the linguist, the more popular systems usually work on a principle of one symbol for one sound and ignore the details of linguistic complementary distribution. But the arguments still flare up about the desirability of such an approach, or even about the choice of symbols in cases where multiple choices seem possible to the disputants. No less a figure than Bernhard Karlgren (\"Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese\", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 26, 367) has implied that the reason English and American speakers have so much trouble pronouncing words like 'self' and 'master' is because Wade-Giles spells them tzŭ and chu respectively, whereas in fact the initial consonants of these words are of two quite different values. He argues that the transcription has ignored the complementary distribution between velar and retroflex initials, and he uses a system which", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207324, "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": 92, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "84\n\nHELGA WERLE\n\npromises the wet-nurse that, if he becomes a mandarin, he will erect such a monument to her chastity, whereupon the wet-nurse cries. Asked why, she answers that this is not possible and that his father knows very well why.\n\nAct VI\n\nThe eldest of the Su clan together with the Hsiu-tsai Yang come to visit Mr. and Mrs. Su. Mr. Yang, whom the parents see now for the first time, is very aggressive and accuses his parents-in-law of being responsible. Mr. Yang makes a very bad impression on them, being ugly and of mean character. They are determined to get out of this marriage contract. But Mr. Yang threatens to take them to court. Mr. Su finds it difficult to answer why he does not want to keep his word. How can he and his wife confess that their daughter has fallen in love and that they support her romantic choice? It would be against all rules of decency. So they repeat the fact that she is their only child and still so young, and that the Yang family is living so far away. But Mr. Yang argues that she is already over 16, which is the right age for a girl to marry.\n\nT'ao-hua is also present and argues with Mr. Yang with her quick and sharp tongue. The parents are pleased to get help against this ruffian, but the eldest Su is appalled. \"How can you allow your slave-girl to have a say in your affairs?\" he asks. At this point the parents realise that this is against all the rules, and they send T'ao-hua away.\n\nHowever, the eldest of the Su clan is annoyed by the arrogant behaviour of Mr. Yang. He asks him to leave and let him handle this awkward matter. When the three of them are alone, the parents try again to persuade the eldest Su to help them to get out of this contract, and start to explain why. But the eldest does not want to listen, and states what a shame it would be for the whole Su clan if the daughter is allowed to follow her own inclination. The eldest finally forces the parents to send their daughter to the Yang family's house on the next morning. The eldest Su exits with a content 'haha', as the mother is scolding the girl's father, saying that it is all his fault.\n\nAct VII\n\nThe daughter Lu-niang in her chamber is desperate at the news that she has to be married tomorrow to the Yang family. When", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207348, "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": 116, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "108\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nsituations. Thus attitudes toward the lower orders were often ambivalent.\n\nBut a further reason should be advanced: working class Europeans were seen as lowering the prestige of the white man in the East. They were, by definition, poor; they lacked ton and breeding; too often they hobnobbed with—even lived with—Asians; they did not cultivate the unruffled ease and dignity of the Taipan. A journalist asserted: 'there is always an expensive necessity for maintaining foreign prestige. It makes for greater contentment and a good type of resident, and it is good for the Chinese in that it elevates economic standards by example'.33 The key words here are 'foreign prestige'. The European lower orders, it was thought, undermined this sought-after prestige and, by their presence in the East, helped weaken respect for the European merchant in Hong Kong and the Treaty Ports.\n\nRELATIONSHIPS WITH THE CHINESE\n\nH.E. Maude argues that in the South Seas beachcombers and castaways were emissaries of western culture and that 'the European came to be regarded for more practical reasons—as an economic and political asset';34 for example, he brought with him certain skills, such as the maintenance of small-arms and cannon, valued by the South Sea islander. In Hong Kong the situation differed: the beachcomber (there were no castaways) and other low status Europeans had little expertise to offer the Chinese; for the Cantonese, in particular, were skilled craftsmen in wood, metal, stone, ivory, and other materials. Working class Europeans could neither compete nor enter into competition with Chinese workers, artisans, and craftsmen. Hence, for this and other reasons, no true European proletariat ever established itself, apart from a class of mechanics employed in European-owned enterprises.\n\nAn obvious factor that inhibited interchange between Chinese and working class Europeans was the problem of language. Very few Europeans could speak colloquial Cantonese in the nineteenth century. This was true of most police, turnkeys, inspectors, and supervisors. Such communication as took place was through the medium of pidgin English, 'an extraordinary jargon', according to Samuel Couling, 'in use between native servants, shopmen, etc., on the one side, and foreigners who do not speak Chinese on the other", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207354, "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": 122, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "114\n\nRICHARD J. SMITH\n\npolicymakers tended to respond to the unprecedented situation in terms of their own sophisticated tradition of \"managing\" barbarians. The theoretical foundations of this tradition have been much discussed, although usually with reference to China's external relations. Its practical application has received little systematic study apart from inquiries into the structure and operation of the well-known tributary system. Against the background of Chinese tradition in both its dimensions--theory and practice--this article examines the major features of Ch'ing policy toward foreign military employees in the T'ung-chih period (1862-1874), when Western influences first became a significant factor in China's military affairs. It argues that behind the rhetoric of the Chinese world order throughout the imperial era lay realistic, sophisticated and generally effective policies of \"barbarian management,\" which were neither inherently \"unmodern,\" nor even uniquely Chinese. Furthermore, it suggests that the Ch'ing throne was more flexible in its outlook toward Western barbarians than is generally recognized, and that its failure to go further in abandoning its Sinocentrism may be explained largely by the behavior of the barbarians themselves.\n\nThe Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Policy\n\nClassical sanction for the use of foreigners to serve Chinese purposes may be traced to the Tso-chuan (Commentary of Tso), a work written during the chaotic Warring States period, which referred to the practice of using the talents (lit., materials) of the semi-barbarian Ch'u state for the purposes of the Chin state (Ch'u-ts'ai Chin-yung). As employed by later writers, the phrase usually implied the notion that barbarians would willingly turn toward or revert to Chinese civilization (hsiang-hua or kuei-hua) and offer their allegiance. Other classical literature reinforced this view of China's cultural superiority, emphasizing the natural gravitation of foreigners to the Middle Kingdom.10 Mencius provided the neat formula, \"using [the doctrines of] China to transform the barbarian\" (yung-Hsia pien-i), a phrase which became the standard expression of Chinese ethnocentrism for the next twelve hundred years.11 The reverse theme (yung-i pien-Hsia) served as a derogatory epithet to be hurled at those who had allegedly departed from the Chinese cultural tradition.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208350, "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-1978", "page_number": 74, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "58\n\nMARGARET N. NG\n\n曾子曰:君子以文會友,以友補仁。\n\n12 Ibid., 1, 4. 曾子曰:吾日三省吾身。\n\n13 Ibid., XIX, 21. 曾子曰:君子之過也,如日月之食焉。過也,人皆見之。更也,人皆仰之。\n\n14 Ibid., XIX, 8.\n\n15 Ibid., V, 15. 子曰:敏而好學,不恥下問,是以謂之文也。\n\n16 Ibid, II, 17. 子曰:由,誨女,知之乎。知之為知之,不知為不知,是知也。\n\n17 Ibid, II, 15. 子入太廟,每事問。或曰:孰謂鄹人之子知禮乎。子入太廟,每事問。子聞之曰:是禮也。\n\n18 Ibid., I, 8.\n\n19 Ibid., XV, 7. 邦有道則仕,邦無道則可卷而懷之。\n\n20 See Note 3 above.\n\n21 In Gerhart Piers and Milton Singer, Shame and Guilt, Charles C. Thomas, U.S.A., 1953, Piers argues that shame can be internal and the required audience can also be internalized. But his arguments mainly concern the development of shame as a reaction formation in individuals in Western culture. Incidentally, he also characterizes shame as the realization that one has fallen short of an ideal self.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210375, "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-1984", "page_number": 346, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "325\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nChina Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries, edited by Morris Rossabi, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983, xiv + 419 pages.\n\nThis book is intended to show that China's long accepted self-view of its traditional foreign relations is not true: China did not always devise its own world order, neither did she rule out equality with any nation, the editor argues. Also, Professor Rossabi points out that China did not always treat foreign rulers and their envoys as subordinates or inferiors. It is the editor's explicit purpose to show that China was capable of conducting modern diplomatic negotiations and could accept the reality that China was only one among the many equals, at least during the Sung and Yuan periods.\n\nWorking under this general thematic guide, eleven authors set out to study different aspects of China's foreign relations during the period. The general impression one derives from reading these essays is that the relations between the Sung and other states covered a full-range of activities, and with the comprehensive nature of such relations, the Sung had to be realistic and rational, and had to abandon the time-honored myth that China, being the center of all-under-heaven, should play the key role of determining the terms of foreign relations. In general, China seemed to be quite willing to reverse such a “suzerain-vassal” relationship and readily to accept its neighbours as high in the hierarchy of the contemporary world order. This was especially true of China's uneasy relations with the state of Liao, carefully documented by Tao Jing-shen. That China was willing to accept the, to her, often humiliating arrangements was mainly because she benefited from a favourable balance of trade, a factor particularly evident from the pattern of its commercial relations with other states, studied in depth by Professor Shiba Yoshinobu.\n\nActually, the Sung was in the great tradition of ancient China's \"multi-state system\". As pointed out so eloquently by Professor Herbert Franke, the Sung was not unique in adopting \"the bilater-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210376, "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-1984", "page_number": 347, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "326\n\nfor a di-al relations .... and the multilateral relations... plomacy that was modelled on patterns inherited from antiquity” (p. 141).\n\nOn the other hand, Professor Charles Peterson argues that the Sung policy towards the Mongols and the Jurchen state of Chin was so much burdened or preoccupied by the revanchist heritage that the decision to destroy the Chin seemed awkwardly irrational. Moreover, Peterson points out that the Sung Mongol policy \"showed [even] less consistency” (p. 230). Perhaps the relationship with the Mongols was way beyond what is commonly defined as “diplomacy” and the quite flexible “multi-state system” or “bilateral relationship” had in this instance reached its limits of usefulness. In any case, the Sung certainly made the best use of the \"multi-state system\". However, there is a problem in this interpretation.\n\nBut let me turn first to the \"yin-yang” model presented by Professor Gari Ledyard. One suspects that Chinese ways (and not just way) of conceptualizing the world order were never uniformly or consistently applied. My understanding is that the Chinese liked to think that they were always in the offensive yang position, and so always managing the Asian world order but the reality is that China was often also in the yin phase. Ledyard's essay gives one the impression that a yin-yang analytical approach to Chinese history could help us understand Asian history as a whole. This is interesting: even taking for granted the inadequacy of the dynastic cycle approach, this interpretation of Asian history remains Chinese history writ large.\n\nComing back to the common assumptions shared by the Chinese and the Mongolians concerning the origin, character and extent of their right to rule the world, it thus seems that whenever China was in the yin phase, other states would be glad to play the role of suzerain, thus unwittingly perpetuating the Chinese conception of world order. If even the Mongols, and certainly the Liao and the Chin, sought to create a world order based on a hierarchical approach, by relegating different states to different statuses, then the Sung really did not have a chance to even pretend that it was treated “equally\" or that it was conducting “equal\" foreign", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210669, "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-1986", "page_number": 20, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "ments best illuminate the unique social ethos of Hong Kong in the 1980s.\n\n7\n\nHong Kong has gone a long way being a city of immigrants. It quietly absorbed uneven waves of refugees who have eventually become a cultural mainstream. If recent immigrants appear to display a socially disjointed character, those who fled China in the late 1940s were probably no different. In fact, descriptions of family migration in the post-war period show that \"it was not well planned and it usually involved drastic interruptions of family relationships because of continuous and morally damaging uprootedness necessitated by events and dictated by risks of personal security.\"* Nevertheless, Lau (1982) argues that a fragmentary, attenuated, but utilitarian familial structure has arisen from the disorderly processes to absorb the immigrants without causing serious strain on public resources. The familial group is still valued across social classes as the basic unit for mutual help and affiliation. This gives social relations a characteristically \"Chinese\" flavour; but utilitarian motivations built into the familial group makes it less significant as a source of and target for its members' social status. Lau (1982: 67-78) also sees that major normative orientations have emerged among Hong Kong Chinese that display a high value for material advancement as much as for social stability, a very short-term time horizon revealed in the population's search for maximum gain in the shortest possible time, low social participation, and general political aloofness. Though these orientations differ from traditional familism only in degrees, it nevertheless has been a new adaptation to a laissez-faire colonial environment (Lau 1982: 82-85).\n\nThe normative orientations were in varying degrees sustained by a social economic structure different from the pre-war era. Analyzing a household statistical report of 1976 (a time before the influx of recent immigrants), a sociologist listed three major social categories in Hong Kong whose attitudes he believed would exert considerable influence for the decade of the 1980s.* There was the capital-owning elite comprising 11 percent of the working population. They controlled large-scale native enterprises and maintained interests in foreign-owned enterprises as well. Through institutionalized channels of political consultation, charity, and\n\n3", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211062, "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": 123, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "98\n\nNOTES\n\nResearch for this paper was carried out in Hong Kong in the Spring of 1984. We would like to thank John Dolfin, Director of the Universities Service Centre, for the use of that invaluable facility during our research, and John Ashton of Memorial University for some helpful suggestions. Parts of the paper were included in a presentation at a colloquium of the Sociology Department, Hong Kong University, May, 1984.\n\n1 \"Wong Tai Sin\" is the most common transliteration in Hong Kong of the god's name. The pinyin transliteration is Huang Daxian. Here, the common Hong Kong transliterations are used, except for place-names in China such as Guangzhou (Canton), Guangdong (Kwangtung), and Chejiang.\n\n2 The cases to be described are here termed motifs in the sense used by Allen and Montell (1981:38-9), who note that \"the characteristic feature of these migratory narrative elements is their transferability among stories about different events or persons.\"\n\n3 This is the only Wong Tai Sin temple known to most believers in Hong Kong, and the prominence of the god in Hong Kong has occurred entirely as a result of the success, for various historical reasons, of this one temple. There is also a private Wong Tai Sin temple in Kowloon, as well as a small private shrine in Macau, but they have had no influence on the popularity of the god.\n\nbut\n\nSome temples in Guangzhou were indeed destroyed early in this century by Nationalists rather than by the elements (see for instance Rhoads, 1975:255). Perhaps our informant's account of the destruction of the temple was a tradition dating back to these events.\n\n5 The fact that the icon of the god brought to Hong Kong from Guangdong is a picture rather than a statue suggests, as we argue in another paper (Lang and Ragvald, 1988), that the god was worshipped in Guangdong as the patron god of a family herbal medicine business (see Day, 1969, on these \"paper gods\" and their role in family worship).\n\nThe organization which manages the temple, the Sik Sik Yuen, has published the official history of the temple in commemorative brochures, especially: Sik Sik Yuen, 1971; 1981; 1982,\n\n7 Ogura (1980) argues that the drifted deity tradition evolved from an earlier tradition of belief in periodic visits by gods from their abodes beyond the sea. There is no such tradition in the Hong Kong area.\n\n1 The temple's version of the Taoist hermit's life on earth before he became a god is in the form of a short autobiography, supposedly dictated by the god to a Taoist. It appears on a plaque in the temple, and also in brochures published by the Sik Sik Yuen. It has been discovered by Dr. Shiu-hon Wong of Hong Kong University that this account follows closely a capsule biography of the hermit written in the 4th century A.D. as part of the collection \"Biographies of Immortals\", by Ge Hong. This literary version holds that the Taoist hermit Wong, while herding sheep in Chejiang province, discovered a method of achieving immortality. He also manifested his power by turning a hillside of boulders into sheep. These two achievements figure prominently in the temple's \"autobiography\" of the god.\n\nThe story of a saint whose body remains uncorrupted and even sweet-smelling long after burial is a common motif in Christian legends. Loomis (1948:54) cites about two hundred instances.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211514, "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": 231, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "257\n\nfrom a “lineage-village\", the localized lineage represents the empirical reality of the lineage or descent group as a sociological fact. That is to say, from the perspective of any functionalist theory, it is not theory, it is not enough to say that the lineage is symbolically real as a concept or ideology; one has to be able to see its existence in the form of some kind of corporate group, bearing all the social and political functions hypothesized by the model. For Freedman, the sociological reality of the localized lineage comes closer than Fortes \"to the ground\" insofar as he attaches theoretical significance of the lineage to the maintenance of a landed estate, which remains analytically distinct from the notion of a territorial dominion. It is in reference to the localized lineage (rather than the ideology of descent) that the very phenomenon of a ritualized ancestral cult becomes theoretically relevant. Having said that, it should be clear then that the relationship between the corporate descent group, the economics of the ancestral estate and ritual activity centered upon the ancestral hall is an arbitrary one intelligible only in terms of Freedman's model. For one thing, Freedman's choice of the ancestral hall as a criterion of lineage segmentation was quite obviously fabricated in order to demonstrate the existence of asymmetric segmentation (another illusion), which then served to polarize the divergence between lineages types A to Z. Yet as Faure's data and my own observations suggest, there appears to be a rather early (genealogical) cut-off point after which the establishment of ancestral halls clearly do not follow the pattern of segmentation (in terms of fong) even when there is sufficient corporate wealth to permit such construction. Faure argues that there is a difference between \"official\" and non-official types of ancestral halls; I argue on the other hand that in all cases, it is the definition of the village which predicates the conditions upon which an ancestral hall is or is not built. By implication, therefore, the corporate cult of the dead centred upon the ancestral hall must be a local (not localized in sociological terms) phenomenon as well which should be seen as analytically distinct from the process of ancestor worship (in terms of tsung) as understood by the worshippers themselves as lines of divinity. Or to put it in another way, there is nothing in the concept of tsung which necessitates the existence of the ancestral hall; the localized corporate cult of the dead centred upon the ancestral hall then should not be confused with ancestor worship from a native's point of view.\" The cult of the dead as a (sociologically corporate) phenomenon therefore must have a different reason for being, which I now associate with the village.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211549, "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": 266, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "242\n\nof different forms of “lineage society\". The final chapter assesses his findings in relation to prevailing theories put forth by anthropologists and historians of China.\n\nHistory-cum-anthropology as it is, the worth of this book can only be seen accurately in terms of whether all this history (or anthropology) makes for good anthropology. Bolstered by the admissions of the author himself, I see no other way of assessing faithfully the merits of Faure's ambitious thesis. Incidentally, I should mention that, assuming that the reader can manage to digest the mass of names, places, dates that fill the entire book, it is not easy to comprehend at first reading the gist of his overall thesis, in spite of his clear table of contents. Unknown to the reader until the last two chapters, the book attempts to be both an analytical construction \"on the ground\" of lineage and village in the New Territories and at the same time an historical reconstruction of those same social phenomena over time. Theory and history then collaborate in the final chapter to deliver a two-pronged attack on anthropological and historical writings on the subject of lineages in a way which could not have been anticipated in the beginning, given the author's \"modest\" goals. The detective mystery is an unwise format for a scholarly treatise, one which ultimately detracts from the message put forth. Especially given the chaotic state of interpretation with regard to what scholars of different interests believe to be Freedman's theory, confusion at the level of ideas is most unforgivable. Forcing the reader to hack through a jungle of facts just to get to that message is even more unforgivable.\n\nIn any case, I believe that the book's essential argument falls into two parts: 1) the author's analytical construction of what he sees to be the actual state of lineage and village organization in the New Territories today and 2) his interpretation of the theoretical import of this kind of \"lineage society\" seen in the context of the political history of the New Territories from the fourteenth century onward. The aspect of Freedman's thesis which is crucial to Faure's alternative theory of the lineage, especially in Chapters 3-6, concerns his apparent emphasis upon \"the coincidence of agnatic and local community\" which is constitutive of lineage-village as understood by Freedman et al. Underlying this coincidence agnatic-cum-local community, in his opinion, is the importance Freedman placed upon the maintenance of propertied estate and ancestral worship. Faure argues instead that the making of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211550, "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": 267, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "243\n\nprimordial village is about what he calls \"the rights of settlement\". Or as he (p. 8) put it, “most lineages possess little beyond the rights of settlement\". His examples illustrating these rights of settlement show that outsiders can come to terms with incumbents of an existing village by marriage, employment, litigation or force. So if settlement is negotiable in these ways, then multi-lineage villages should be, contra Freedman, a normal phenomenon as well. It is only when village membership has been gained according to these rights of settlement that the village can begin the process of lineage-building. Chapter 2 cites several such examples of lineage-village within a village. Proceeding to higher levels of village organization, Faure argues that the village as a local or territorial community has a religion of its own which is distinct from and equally important as ancestor worship in the expression of territorial identity. As he (pp. 70-71) put it explicitly, \"the earth-god shrines and temples reflect a different aspect of the villager's religion, but like the ancestral hall, they are foci of local organization. . . . The act of founding the temple sets up a bond between the village and the deity\". Village religion is important in his subsequent discussion of villages and village clusters to show that the definition of a village and village clusters do not necessarily follow the expectations of a descent model. Likewise in the case of village alliances, Faure argues that all such alliances found to exist within the traditional New Territories, even those archetypical regional defense alliances, were territorially rather than lineage based in nature (perhaps contrary to the kind of “system” described by Kuhn (1970)). More importantly, such alliances, according to Faure, have only existed since the mid-19th century and well after the peak of the Five Great Clans era (for discussion of the latter, see Baker 1966).\n\nThe latter half of the book essentially sets up his attempt in Chapter 10 to reconstruct the political history of The Five Great Clans during the 14th-19th centuries, in contrast to the development of lineage communities that one sets in the aftermath of the \"great\" era. In fact, much of his reconstruction is an attempt to demystify the stature of these great clans by showing how they and the gaudy ancestral halls they created to embellish their image represented primarily the unintentional creation of official policies. Or as he (p. 165) put it, “real lineage society did not depend on ornate ancestral halls”. All of this finally permits him in the final analysis to criticize historians for glorifying the ancestral", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212116, "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": 58, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "35\n\nAn analysis of the rituals performed. Segawa shows that observation of the Jiao festival reveals not only traditional territorial alliances, but also past rival relationships among communities. Looking at the case of Pat Heung as an example, he illustrated that the Jiao closely reflects the past feuds between a village alliance and its neighbouring landlord community, Kam Tin. He argues that, besides its ritual and symbolic meanings, the Jiao can be seen as a \"rite of solidarity”. That is, the community maintains its unity through regular worship of the heroes and feud victims, at the Jiao festival.“\n\n45\n\nBesides traditional alliance-rival relationships, a study of a Jiao festival also reveals a society's internal social conflicts. Group consciousness and inter-group competition, which are obscured by modern city life, can be observed from the Jiao's organizational and symbolic representation. The deliberate exclusion from the \"Hang Fu” [a ritual to purify every household at the end of the Jiao festival] ritual of some households in Lung Yeuk Tau reminds one of the existence of \"Hahu\" or bondservants in the community in the past. In Cheung Chau, the Tanka boat people are denied participation in some rituals. The festival area that is to receive the purification, blessings and protection from the gods does not include the site of traditional Tanka settlement.\"\n\n46\n\nMy paper in Bunka Jinrui Gaku (Cultural Anthropology) no. 5 shows the family structure and kin relationships of different communities through a study of name lists posted at Jiao festivals. Through a comparative analysis of the name lists of three communities, it was shown that the structure of a community is clearly reflected in their name lists. The names of members of a single lineage community are written according to the principle of lineage. In other words, members of a registered unit are linked by a focal ancestor. On the other hand, in a typical name list of a multi-lineage community, be they settled in one or more localities, names are listed in the structure of a family, extended or nuclear, whose members are related to a surviving parent.\"\n\n47\n\nStudies of Jiao festivals provide an excellent source of reference to the understanding of social and political changes. A Jiao festival shows not only the ritual and social lives of the villagers, it reveals also the community's internal and external relationships. As shown in Table 2, at least 28 communities in Hong Kong celebrated Jiao", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212268, "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": 210, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "opposition to missionaries. A recent case in point is the brilliant article by Andrew Nathan on the use of value judgements in cross-cultural studies. Arguing for \"evaluative universalism\" rather than \"cultural relativism\", Nathan uncovers a number of hidden biases in the last thirty years of American sinological studies. His \"evaluative universalism\" is informed by a relatively sensitive account of the nature of value judgements. Rather than support an uncritical absolutist stance, he argues that scholars must make explicit and reasoned value judgements of foreign cultures by employing the values they believe to be valid. In this way, the validity of the values can come under legitimate scrutiny, and the beliefs of the investigator in the validity of these values can be tested by norms of rational discourse.\n\nIn the process of elaborating his position, Nathan at least three times suggests generalized criticisms against missionaries. Implicit in these generalizations is the claim that missionaries are driven by zeal, and so are incompetent and biased judges of foreign cultures, not fairly stating the value judgements of the cultures they are proselytizing. Exactly these kind of general statements, especially when embedded in the text of a notable scholar, would discourage inquisitive souls from the hope of ever finding a missionary who would be something more than a cross-cultural misfit. But Legge was precisely such an exception.\n\nPragmatic Difficulties\n\nLargely as a consequence of some of the above mentioned misunderstandings, James Legge has been generally neglected and we should ask, \"Why?\"\n\nI would like to suggest here four pragmatic reasons for this oversight.\n\nFirst, the immensity of the scope of Legge's work is simply forbidding. The sum of all his efforts included translations of nine Confucian classics, descriptions and evaluations of four religious traditions (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Christianity), data involving materials from China, Japan, Korea, India and Europe (he was literate in Latin, French, German, Italian, English, biblical Greek and Hebrew as well as several Oriental languages). A proper\n\nPage 210\n\nPage 211", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212400, "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": 342, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "319\n\nchange these arrangements at will (and indeed in a few instances did so), for most matters imperial respect for established statutes prevailed and advice on the wisdom of proposed changes was sought and followed.' (p.6). This was not the case with the inner court in the eighteenth century. It was the creation of the Emperor. But Bartlett argues that by the end of the century the Grand Council straddled the roles of pawn and directorate. The result was a greatly expanded inner-court dominance, but one where both ministers and monarchs could be strong. While the framework for autocracy continued in place, the expansion of inner-court work and the ministerial skill and labor essential to accomplishing it weakened the monarchs' ability fully to oversee and direct the government.\" (p 7).\n\nHere I might take issue with the statement that the Grand Council weakened the monarch's ability to direct government; rather, it permitted him to do more than he could alone. It is at this point within the system that the individual comes into play, and the balance between monarchical power and conciliar power was less a question of institution, and rather varied on the basis of the personal qualities of the incumbent emperor, as well as the qualities of certain officials such as Heshen.\n\nThere is the risk in working with thousands of documents of losing sight of the wood for the trees. The reader is forewarned by the author that Part One covering the Yongzheng reign is very detailed. This reflects the evolution of the Grand Council as the Yongzheng and Qianlong Emperors experimented with the Inner Court before it was enshrined in statute. In Part Two Bartlett soars above the foliage to give us an overview of the mechanism of government.\n\nMonarchs and Ministers is a seminal work, and opens up many avenues of research. We must study the officials who held concurrent titles in both the Inner and Outer Court, and determine if their authority derived from their positions as Grand Councillors or from their incumbency as presidents of various boards (much as we ponder the power of government officials that derive from their party membership in modern China). This book also looks outward from the Inner Court, and we would do well to look inward from the Outer Court. We should not underestimate the value of Bartlett's analysis of the types of documents existing in the archives. There was no guide to the materials; who drafted them, who read them.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212426, "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": 368, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "345\n\nCollar, Hugh, CAPTIVE IN SHANGHAI: A STORY OF INTERNMENT IN WORLD WAR II, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990. xvi + 160 pp. Index. Hugh Collar, unofficial head of the British in Shanghai after the Sino-Japanese War became a part of World War II, wrote an account of the international community under Japanese internment. This is a rambling but often interesting account, edited by Pauline Woodroffe.\n\nAN\n\nLiu Binyan, CHINA'S CRISIS: ESSAYS FROM INTELLECTUAL IN EXILE, translated from the Chinese into English by Howard Goldblatt, Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 1990. xxv + 50 pp. Index. This volume comprises a series of five lectures given at Harvard in 1988-89 by one of China's most eminent dissidents. Liu, who had suffered for his intellectual principles during the 1950s as well as during the Cultural Revolution a decade later, was expelled from the Communist Party and was banned from publishing. There is a Foreword written by Professor Merle Goldman.\n\nMehrotra, Santosh K., INDIA AND THE SOVIET UNION: TRADE AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, Notes. Bibliography. Index. As the title indicates, this work is about the economic relationship between the Soviet Union and India (an industrialized planned economy and a developing market economy). The period covered is between 1955 and just before the book went to press.\n\nASIAN DEVELOPMENT OUTLOOK 1992, 1992. 313 pp. This study of economic development in the Asian countries containing a large amount of information with useful statistics, was published by the Asian Development Bank and Oxford University Press.\n\nDardess, John W, CONFUCIANISM AND AUTOCRACY: PROFESSIONAL ELITES IN THE FOUNDING OF THE MING DYNASTY, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. 358 pp. with 1 map. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. Professor Dardess argues that, far from being a 'socially indeterminate category', the body of elitist professional Confucian public servants consciously created a highly centralized state at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, leading to five hundred years of autocracy in China.\n\ndeBary, William Theodore, FIRST ASIAN CIVILIZATIONS: A", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212963, "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": 31, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "status, good role performance and virtuous behaviour, then there is potential for him to get a big face. That is why high officials, because of their positions in the bureaucracy; rich people, because of their performance in economic activities; and clergymen, because of their morally upright behaviour; are often found to have great face.\n\nBut a person's status, role performance and evaluation of his moral conduct are always externally determined. They have to be put against a set of standards of a social framework. The face so formed by status, role performance and moral conduct have yet to depend on others' reactions or imagination of these reactions in social intercourse (Figure 2).\n\nKEY\n\nFIGURE 2. An Optical Theory Representation Of Face\n\nBASIC FACE/\n\nNET FACE\n\nATTRIBUTES OF FACE\n\nBASIC FACE AT D1\n\nBASIC FACE\n\nAT D2\n\nNET FACE 1\n\n... mun umgens im me\n\nNET FACE 2\n\nIf others take note of a person's status, role performance and moral conduct, he may pay due respect to him. The respect and reactions to the basic face of the person concerned is just like a mirror, reflecting how big or how small it is. This mirror can have different curvatures depending on the characters of 'others', whether they are professionals, laymen, relatives, neighbours and so on. The distance of the basic face can be viewed as the context of the person's face, whether he stands in a group of sharp people or gulls. The curvatures of the mirror and the different against images differ according to the person's basic face. That is to say, the same basic face may be enlarged or diminished in social intercourse depending on the 'others' and the context.\n\nHere, it is necessary to stress the manifest quality of face. As others' reactions, like time, form the fourth dimension of face, then actions concerning face have to be seen, they have to be externalized. This has been pointed out by scholars like Fei, who, from a normative approach, argues that face is apparent conformity (Fei, 1947:88). Whether we agree with him or not, it cannot be denied that face has a manifest character.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "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": 213923, "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": 275, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "253\n\nBOOK REVIEW\n\nNICOLE CONSTABLE (1994), Christian Souls and Chinese Spirits: a Hakka Community in Hong Kong, Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press.\n\nThis book studies the complex identities of the Hakka Christians in Shung Him Tong of the New Territories of Hong Kong. It discusses how the Hakka identity is constructed through the eyes of their fellow Hakkas, by Hakka historians, European missionaries as well as local institutions like the church and family. According to Constable, the Hakkas were always regarded as poor and stingy in Chinese popular belief. They never enjoyed equal status with other ethnic Chinese. However, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the writings of Hakka historians and European missionaries, the Hakkas reconstructed their ethnic identity and claimed to be \"orthodox Chinese\" (Chapter 2). In the process of identity reconstruction, they transformed negative Hakka characteristics into positive ones, and then belief in Christianity reassured them that they were on the right track. In order to be good Christians, the Hakkas in Shung Him Tong secularised and rationalised Chinese customs and religious practices (Chapters 5 and 6). For instance, feng shui (geomancy) is re-interpreted as \"common sense or as a purely aesthetic consideration\" (p.126). The dual Chinese and Christian identity of the Hakka Christians was not at all stable. It had to be negotiated from time to time because of continuing social and cultural changes.\n\nConstable argues that to understand the Shung Him Tong Hakka Christian's ethnic identity, one has to adopt three anthropological approaches. The first is to identify the cultural markers of the Hakkas, for instance their architecture, language, skin colour, etc., and to know how these characteristics were adapted to new social and cultural environments. The second is to understand how their social and economic boundaries are drawn to define social groupings, but also how church and other cultural symbols are used to redefine ethnic identity. And the third is to see how the shared history and ancestry consolidate the ethnic identity. These three approaches to the study of ethnicity complement one another. Constable skilfully incorporated interviews and observations with the Basel Mission Archives to illustrate the ethnic identities constructed by the early founders of the Christian community and how the identity varied in different times and places. Through her discussions,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214736, "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-1999", "page_number": 151, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "THE BATTLE OF HONG KONG:\n\nA NOTE ON THE LITERATURE\n\nAND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE DEFENCE\n\nLAWRENCE LAI WAI-CHUNG\n\n115\n\nAbstract\n\nFrom the stance of a person growing up in Hong Kong, this short note re-assesses the Battle of Hong Kong of December 1941 as recorded in the English and Chinese literature largely found in the University of Hong Kong Library. It examines the views of political leaders, war historians, veterans, and civilians of different persuasions and makes some informed speculation about their focus. It argues that a common omission is the relative fighting power of the defender of Hong Kong. The essay argues that the performance of the Hong Kong garrison was much better than the defenders of Crete or Singapore. It makes a few speculative suggestions as to the effectiveness of the defence and concludes by making a case for further research into the Battle from historical and military science points of view.\n\nIntroduction\n\n\"Memories of the war in Hong Kong, of the sharp and bitter struggle which ended with the capture of the Colony on Christmas Day, are kept on a more realistic plane than most other places....It was by tacit agreement decided that the war in Hong Kong had best be forgotten.” This statement in a publication of Ricci Hall of the University of Hong Kong (Ricci Hall 1954) reflected the peculiar political context of Hong Kong as a Crown Colony in China. The Union Jack as a symbol of British reign in Hong Kong has gone, and the ruins of the Second World War, associated with Hong Kong's immediate colonial past, lie wasting. The military cemeteries in Stanley and Sai Wan, however, have been as well maintained as before. The respect for those who sacrificed their lives for a just cause has not been altered by a change in governance.\n\nAuthors from the belligerent countries have intensively studied military operations in Europe and North Africa in the Second World War since the end of hostilities. The intensity of the studies is", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214797, "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-1999", "page_number": 212, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "177\n\nquite the reverse. Richard Coyne (1999) has recently pointed to the romantic stream in digital narratives, which implicates them in notions of utopia through the discourse of the 'global village and the electronic cottage', the return to a tribal stage of freedom and a Golden Age equality, the ideal of preindustrial arts and crafts. It may well be, as Coyne argues, that such 'digital narratives', whether romantic or rationalist, necessarily provide spaces of interpretation rather than referring to contextual realities beyond language.\n\nPerhaps as part of a general tendency in anthropology away from getting dirty hands by doing fieldwork in local sites, my more recent research has tended towards a great interest in the power of the Internet, and its World Wide Web, to forge new ties of community between Hmong in France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, French Guyana, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and China (Tapp 1999). Of course the Hmong voices represented on the Internet are the voices of those most in the position of being able to represent themselves in this way; that is, the most educated, most literate, and those with computer access. Yet these representations of themselves, both those aimed purely at other Hmong and those aimed at others, are of considerable interest for the way they so often speak directly of the losses and separations suffered by the Hmong community as a whole, and the need to reunite and re-bond, the memories of particular households and the life in Laos or Thailand, or an ancestral home in China. Evans (1998) also draws attention to the power of these nationalist images of homeland among groups of overseas Hmong refugees from Laos.29 These are moving, and deeply felt, images, and they are not necessarily emanating from those Hmong with a particular political agenda, or even from those Hmong who individually left Laos themselves, but often from members of the younger generations, college students who cannot themselves recollect such pasts or places.\n\n20\n\nCoupled with the facts of overseas Hmong tourism to South East Asia and China, return family visits and the emergence of small-scale transnational businesses, we must I think see these Internet representations, these uses of the Internet together with other forms of telecommunication, as directly contributing to the formation of a new kind of Hmong identity and Hmong community, on a global scale, the kind of identity which more nearly approximates our understanding of a nationality or national group, perforce without a state or sovereign", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214798, "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-1999", "page_number": 213, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "178\n\nterritory of its own, than it does to the communal assertion of a localized Hmong identity which nevertheless crosscuts national borders.30 We are witnessing the formation and crystallisation of an almost Herderian national consciousness, on a global scale, out of an ethnic consciousness, which was more closely tied to local (yet still importantly non-national, trans-national) roots. And yet it is the very displacement from those local roots which has given rise to this sense of a global, national identity and consciousness, and that national consciousness is importantly directed towards a rediscovery and resuscitation of what it imagines to be those local roots. It is therefore a veritable 'phenomenology of locality' (Lovell 1998), which we need in order to understand these processes.31\n\nThis is the idealistic view, which I tend to espouse; but there is also clearly a more cynical one, which I will put to you since the question is so often with us; in the form of Reader's Digest articles or whatever.32 It may be that these kinds of communication in cyberspace, through electronic mail and on-line chat, video conferencing and computer role games, these virtual encounters, actually prevent real relations and contacts taking place, and act as a kind of surrogate for them. We hear this sort of argument in mass media discussions about teen (and pre-teen) email and chat shows, and again, social science cannot provide us with any easy, ready-made answers. We have all heard of Internet ‘romances' where virtual communications led to real weddings, and we have heard of some of the tragedies too! Are these touristy visits, these Hmong chat-rooms, surrogates for something 'real' which could be happening, an unreal attempt to assert a sense of global unity among a community which is actually fractured and divided? Sydney Cheung (1998) deals similarly with some of the problems of distinguishing 'virtual' from 'real' communities in this respect, drawing attention to the emergence of a real-life 'Chinese Tea Association' from a Japanese cyber-group of Hong Kong devotees, while Lozada (1998) argues strongly for the ‘Hakka Global Network' as a real community.33\n\nThe question is actually ultimately one very similar to an age-old problem posed in classic aesthetics and theories of ideology; to what extent can art (and cultural production in general) fulfil a useful social function, opening new potential vistas for the future; to what extent does it provide a panacea, an unreal and distancing, or mystifying, substitute for 'real' experiences? It is easy to see that there can be no overall", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214993, "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": 89, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "45\n\nwas selected and marked with the so-called Chinese eyes like those on a sea-going junk. It served with the 6th Battalion first as Fly-paper though subsequently it was re-named Fan-tan. The 6th Battalion later adopted the eyes as a regimental symbol. Mr David Fletcher of the Tank Museum at Bovington, in correspondence with the author, was not aware that this symbol was not generally adopted in the Great War. The 6th ultimately converted to Whippets, on which Mr Fletcher had never seen the Eyes symbol. When the 6th Battalion was disbanded after the Great War its various honours and customs were passed to the 4th Battalion which then adopted the Eyes as a Battalion symbol. The 4th Battalion used it on their vehicles from the 1920s and, when they amalgamated with the 1st Battalion RTR in 1993, it was adopted by them. In the 1930s the 6th Battalion was reconstituted and was still around to take part in the 1956 Suez action and never got back their Eyes symbol!\n\nIn the main exhibition hall of the Imperial War Museum in London there is a Mark V tank with \"European\" eyes. These tanks were introduced in the Spring of 1918 and first saw action at Le Hamel in France in July 1918. This tank, Devil [T9171] was believed to have served with B Company of the 4th Battalion of the Tank Corps and was still in service in 1925. This tank, belonging to the 4th Battalion, would have been entitled to the Eyes symbol.\n\nCamps and Recreation\n\nCamps were maintained behind the Front lines, some of the larger being at Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk with the Head Quarters at Noyelles-sur-Mer. Hospitals were at Noyelles-sur-Mer, Arques, Moulle and Calais, with the Shorncliffe Military Hospital at Folkestone also being used for sick and injured Chinese. There was a prison for Chinese at Noyelles.\n\nLabourers died as a result of disease, bombings, gassing and, after the war, when clearing the battlefields and when digging graves, by the many unexploded bombs and grenades. Many also died as a result of the post-war influenza epidemic known as the Spanish Flu. I have seen two photographs, taken of the funeral procession of the German flying ace, Baron Manfred von Richthofen [the Red Baron] at Bertangles cemetery on 22nd April 1918 and amongst the crowd looking over the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215037, "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": 133, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "Abbeville Communal Extension, Somme\n\nAlbert French National, Somme Arques-La-Bataille British, Seine-Maritime Ascq Communal, Nord\n\nAuberchicourt British, Nord\n\n*\n\nAyette British, Pas de Calais\n\nAyette Indian and Chinese, Pas de Calais\n\nBagneux British, Gezaincourt, Somme Bailleul Communal Extension, Nord\n\n \n 1\n 71\n \n \n 4\n 3\n \n \n I\n 34\n \n \n 2\n 31\n \n\nBeaulencourt British, Ligny-Thilloy, Pas de Calais 14 Bellicourt British, Aisne\n\nBlargies Communal Extension, Oise Bourlon Wood, Pas de Calais\n\nCaudry British, Nord\n\nCharmes Military, Essegney, Vosges\n\nChocques Military, Pas de Calais\n\n \n 7\n 3\n \n \n 21\n 1\n \n \n 3\n 19\n \n \n 4\n 1\n \n \n 16\n \n\nCroisilles British, Pas de Calais\n\nCross Roads, Nord\n\n \n 2\n 2\n \n\nDaours Communal Extension, Somme\n\nDernancourt Communal Extension, Somme\n\n \n 6\n 3\n \n\nDon Communal, Annoeullin, Nord\n\n \n 2\n \n\nDouai British, Cuincy, Nord\n\n \n 3\n \n\nDoullens Communal Extension No2, Somme\n\n \n 1\n \n\nDuisans British, Etrun, Pas de Calais\n\n \n 2\n \n\nEbblinghem Military, Nord\n\n \n 1\n \n\nEtaples Military, Pas de Calais\n\n \n 1\n 4\n \n\nFoncquevillers Military, Pas de Calais\n\n \n 2\n \n\nHazebrouck Communal, Nord\n\nFosse No 10 Communal Extension, Sains-en-Gohelle, Pas de Calais\n\nGezaincourt Communal Extension, Somme Haute-Avesnes British, Pas de Calais\n\nHuby-St Leu British, Pas de Calais Lapugnoy Military, Pas de Calais Le Fermont Military, Pas de Calais\n\n \n 49\n \n \n 4\n \n \n 12\n \n \n 1\n \n \n 5\n \n \n 2\n \n\nLe Portel Communal, Pas de Calais\n\n \n 1\n \n\nLe Quesnoy Communal Extension, Nord\n\n \n 2\n \n\nLes Baraques Military, Sangatte, Pas de Calais 197\n\n \n 4\n \n\nLes Rues-des-Vignes Communal, Nord\n\n \n 1\n \n\nLille Southern, Nord\n\n \n 2\n 2\n \n\n89", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215774, "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": 73, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "their petition. Even before 1826, the Spanish silver dollar and local copper cent had been used widely by the Straits merchants in their trade and commerce, (even though in theory, in 1835, the rupee was the currency of account for official purposes until 1867).\n\nThe directors of the EIC, considering only the Indian Empire's interests,29 established a uniform rupee currency throughout its territories, which of course included the Straits Settlements. In 1854, a bill was introduced to the Indian legislative council 'to improve the law relating to the copper currency in the Straits,' which provided for a copper currency based on fractions of the rupee.30 According to the Currency Act, the Indian pice was to be made legal tender instead of the copper cent and the rupee was to be enforced as legal tender.31\n\nThis Act was fiercely objected to by the Straits merchants, and in response to the opposition, the directors ordered the act to be repealed in 1857. Mr Ballie (Secretary of the Board of Control of the EIC) argues that 'it was very natural that the governor-general should desire to establish a uniform currency throughout the whole of the territories subject to his authority'32 and that after the complaints made at Singapore, this grievance was redressed, and that therefore the petitioners did not have a right to complain.**\n\nPage 36\n\n33\n\n35\n\nThe 1867 Act legalised a currency which was already assured,” and by the time the transfer to the Colonial Office took place, the currency issue was virtually resolved. However, as it was a problem that could have been prevented instead of cured, I would accord little credit to the Indian government's role in this issue.\n\nPiracy and western laws\n\nThis was another arguable \"problem\" that was cited in the petition, and used as an example of the Indian government's inefficiency. Piracy was widespread in the Straits until the mid-19th century, and was a threat to the property and commerce of the merchants. The pirates that predominated in the 1830s and 1840s were pirates of the Sulu archipelago, Illanun pirates from Mindanao and Dyaks from North Borneo. Complaints were that 'no systematic measures of protection have ever been adopted or carried out by the EIC, who have been content to leave the service to be performed by the Royal Navy.”37", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215777, "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": 76, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "were pledged to protect and three over whose external relations they had a right of control.\"55 Hall strongly claims that, 'the Malay States were in a state of chronic unrest, external and internal,56 and had become completely incapable of putting their house in order. Intervention, therefore, could not be avoided. There was indeed constant intervention, notwithstanding all the rules to the contrary and all the thunders of Calcutta and the East India House, '57\n\nHowever, in spite of Thio's and Hall's assertions, the truth of the merchants' complaint is not invalidated, because between 1824 and 1873, British rule in Malaya was indeed ‘inactive,258 as their official policy was still in accordance with Pitt's India Act. In several cases, the actions of the Straits Settlements government implied some form of intervention, or at least limited interference in the affairs of the Malay States, when they violated the policy of non-intervention; but even then, nothing more elaborate was undertaken than the occasional punitive expedition, which was not enough, in 'the interests of British commerce.'60 Insofar as this was concerned, it would appear that the Straits merchants did have a legitimate complaint to the House of Lords, because their statement would appear to have been bona fide and to hold a substantial amount of evidential truth. The influence of Pitt's India Act (that is, EIC non-intervention) remained until 1874, when a new law was passed, and the British took on an active, intervening role in the Malay states.\n\n59\n\nJudicial system!\n\nThe main complaints of the merchants were that the Law was administered by unprofessional persons, that is, the administration of justice was in the hands of local officers of government, civil or military servants of the EIC, and the 'impractical schemes [that] were propounded' (for example, the Currency Act, port dues and stamp duties). LA Mills renders a counter attack to this point; he argues that 'although there were delays in dealing with problems which caused the Straits Settlements to suffer at times, on the whole the results were not serious. Of the problems which arose between 1826 and 1867, very few were of importance, so that injury caused in the delay in settling them was not great. The population was small and generally law-abiding. The Straits Settlements had practically no foreign relations (the main task of the government was to watch Siam and Holland,\n\n63\n\n262", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216508, "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": 267, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "219\n\nLuoyang at Binglingsi (where a ferry took Silk Road travellers across the Yellow River) also shows influence from further west, this time from Gandhara (see below). These caves date from around 420. Indian influence was significant too in the magnificent complex of four hundred and ninety-two caves at Dunhuang, 'the art gallery in the desert', nearly fifteen hundred kilometres (as the crow flies) northwest of Chang'an. The practice arose at Dunhuang of travellers making offerings for a safe trip as they set off into the Taklamakan desert, or for a safe return, in the form of commissioning Buddhist devotional cave paintings. Dunhuang also became a monastic centre, particularly flourishing after the great fair at Zhangye (nine hundred kilometres northwest of Chang'an) in 609, which was sponsored and attended by the Chinese Emperor Yangdi. Among those who travelled to attend this fair were people from twenty-seven different nations, according to Tucker. This indicates the greater freedom of travel established by this period, and it is not surprising that Gandharan influence is to be seen in Dunhuang's paintings, although Tucker argues that their style is distinctively Chinese.\n\nClearly, by the time of the Zhangye fair, the Silk Road was thriving. By then, Xinjiang Province (meaning 'New Dominion') had been firmly in Chinese hands for four centuries. The roaming hordes of nomads that had formerly menaced travellers on the routes through the Province had been brought to heel by Chinese military control and lines of forts extended west into the desert beyond Dunhuang. One of the most important power groups beyond the Taklamakan desert with which the Chinese had established good relations beginning with Wudi's efforts in 105 BCE was the Kushan Empire (c. 2nd century BCE to 3rd century AD), the territory of which straddled the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush, and is now occupied by Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. It had been established by a formerly nomadic tribe, the Yuezhi, which had settled after fleeing west from the nomadic Xiongnu. The Kushan Empire, with its provinces of Bactria and Gandhara, was the primary nexus of cross-cultural interaction along the Silk Road, straddling as it did the mountains and passes between the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Persia, and the plains and great river valleys draining northwest into Europe. It was in the Kushan cities of Peshawar (now in Pakistan) and Mathura (India), where magnificent schools of art emerged that blended western and eastern influences and that, in turn, spread further east into China. For example, in what is now the north of Pakistan, then known as Gandhara, Greek sculpture strongly influenced statues of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216510, "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": 269, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "221\n\nTucker establishes a framework, too, for the rise of Islam. An Arab attempt on Constantinople in 718 seems to have failed only because of outbreaks of the plague, and famine, in the Arab forces. Chillingly, Tucker argues that it was only these chance events (though famine, surely, could have been attributed to mismanagement) that gave Christianity time to strengthen its precarious hold in Europe. And, on the eastern frontier of Islam, a Chinese army was defeated by an Arab force at the River Talas in modern Kazakhstan in 751, and this meant the end to Tang hopes to control Central Asia beyond Xinjiang. Tucker argues that it was Chinese captured at the Talas River who introduced the technology of paper and silk manufacture to Damascus and Samarkand.\n\nOther books on popular reading lists about the Silk Road tend to be books of travel. Some are almost gazetteers, while others concentrate on archaeologists' researches. This book is different, focusing as it does on telling the Silk Road's history and demonstrating the links between the art forms that emerged from each era and culture. To give an idea of the scope of the book, here are the Section headings:\n\nBeginnings (three chapters: on the Silk Road's precursors; on Nomads; and on the Kushans)\n\nChina (three chapters: on the introduction of Buddhism to China; on Luoyang, and on Xi'an)\n\nThe Silk Road between Xi'an and Dunhuang (one chapter) The Silk Road through China beyond Dunhuang (two chapters, one each on the northern and the southern routes)\n\nThe Silk Road through Central Asia (ten chapters including one on The Coming of Islam to Central Asia; one on The Mongols; one on Tamerlane and the Timurids; and the rest focusing on different routes.\n\nPersia and Beyond (nine chapters, including one on The Parthians and The Sasanians, seven on different routes, and a concluding chapter on The End of the Road: The Silk Road in Decline).\n\nThe pattern, then, is to use some chapters to describe chains of events, and others to present the artistic achievements of specific periods. In addition, there are useful chronological tables on China; on the pre-Islamic States of Western and Central Asia; on the Islamic States; and on the Emperors of Byzantium. Tucker also provides a Summary of Traded Goods.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216511, "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": 270, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "222\n\nand (from Needham) a “Summary on the Transmission of Mechanical and other techniques from China to the West'. There is an index, and an extensive bibliography. Tucker acknowledges the assistance of experts in many cities along the Silk Road, and also his wife, Antonia Tozer, who accompanied him on several of the journeys that he undertook while writing the book and whose photographs comprise the majority of those included. Other sources of photographs include the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, Tucker's alma mater.\n\nNo book is perfect, and although my background does not qualify me to comment on the content and arguments of this one, I have one major reservation about the way Tucker argues his thesis, and several reservations about the book's presentation.\n\nMy first point relates to Tucker's failure to compare the relative significance of the overland Silk Road with that of the maritime Silk Road. An excellent, though very different and far briefer, companion to Tucker's book is a volume produced in 1996 by the Hong Kong Museum of History, edited by Royal Asiatic Society (Hong Kong) member Dr. Joseph Ting.2 Contributors to this edited volume make it clear that the cultural exchange between China and countries to the west was just as significant by sea as by land. Admittedly, Tucker notes a contemporary account in around 800 that describes Chinese junks in Baghdad, and several maps indicate the maritime routes, but his single-minded focus on the overland route detracts from a more balanced picture of the relative significance of the two routes. In fact, Patricia Ebrey comments that the trade along the sea routes in the Tang Dynasty was higher in volume than that by land. Tucker's concluding chapter implies that it was European voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century that led to the development of the sea routes between China and the west. His emphasis on Chang'an, which is appropriate as it was a major destination for travellers along the overland Silk Road, might lead readers to overlook the significance of Guangzhou, a city which dominated the maritime Silk Road for centuries, and in which the cultural mix in the Tang dynasty was as great as in Chang'an.\n\nThis leads me to wonder whether the extant art and history of the Chinese influence in the ports used by Chinese vessels on route for India, the Middle East and East Africa have been investigated, and whether this would be a worthy subject for a book. I note a tantalising\n\nPage 270\n\nPage 271", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]