[
    {
        "id": 207239,
        "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": 7,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "CORRIGENDA\n\n(i) Readers may find the following list of sub-heads in Dr. Bowie's article on The British Military Hospital Hong Kong 1942-1945 useful for reference purposes.\n\nIntroduction\n\nPrelude: up to 8 December 1941\n\n8-25 December 1941\n\n26 December 1941-7 August 1942\n\nThe Period of the Infections\n\nThe Period of the Deficiency Diseases\n\nThe Period of Slow Decline\n\nFood\n\nJapanese Rations\n\nAdditions to Japanese Supplies of Food\n\nGifts from Friends in Hong Kong\n\nSupplies bought with Officers' Money\n\nRed Cross Food Supplies\n\nEffects of Supplements on General Diet\n\nFeeding the Patients\n\nFeeding the Staff\n\nDeliveries of Japanese Rations\n\nStoring the Food\n\nCooking the Food\n\nDistribution of Food\n\nArrangement made by our Friends in Hong Kong\n\nBody Weights\n\nJapanese Administrative Staff and Guards.\n\nTrading\n\nSupplies of Drugs and Dressings\n\nEntertainment\n\nAugust-December 1942\n\nThe Year 1943\n\n1 January 1944-23 March 1945\n\nReasons for the Move of the Hospital in 1945\n\n24 March-9 September 1945\n\nCasualties and Evacuation of Wounded During Hostilities\n\nResponsibility without Power\n\nSex\n\nThe Atomic Bomb",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 207513,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1975",
        "page_number": 281,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n273\n\noccupied and privacy was non-existent. Privacy during sexual play was essential thirty years ago except in certain centres which were catering for unusual tastes; my observations suggest that privacy seems to be not essential at the present time.\n\nAfter the sisters and auxiliary nurses left I wondered if we might discover some homosexual manifestations. The sexual instinct is one of the last to be submerged by physical deterioration due to hunger and this is shown by the reproduction rate remaining high in countries where the population is often on the verge of starvation and is always undernourished. In my many conversations throughout the hospital I never heard any talk of homosexual practices going on.\n\nI set out to confine this account to events in the Military Hospital but I must include a short tale about the Civil Internment Camp in Stanley where both men and women were held. I understood that the Japanese authorities there issued an order which ran in the following terms. \"Sexual intercourse is prohibited except between husband and wife or close friends\". This story may be apocryphal but the language in which the order was supposed to be couched is typical of the rendering of our language by many, perhaps most of the Japanese interpreters I met and could well be true. Anyway it is a good story and perhaps worth telling.\n\nTHE ATOMIC BOMB\n\nIn Kowloon we had no idea that two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan and had provided the final weighty argument which forced the Emperor to assume responsibility on 15 August 1945 for ordering his forces to surrender. I have recalled earlier that I had no doubt even in the early days that the power of the Allies would eventually overcome the Japanese, but the only picture I could conjure up to myself was that of a long slogging series of attacks up the coast of Asia and against the multitudes of islands in Japanese hands, all fiercely defended. I thought that this process would take many years and would certainly be reinforced by a tight blockade by the Allies. Huge tracts of Chinese territory round Hong Kong were in Japanese hands and as the situation for the Japanese deteriorated, such was their reputation that I could not imagine them allowing a large number of prisoners to consume valuable food. I thought the outlook was dismal in the extreme",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 207515,
        "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": 283,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n275\n\nA direct assault on the Japanese homeland using conventional weapons was being prepared at the time the bombs were dropped. In spite of their reduced nutrition and lack of supplies of all kinds, there seems little doubt that an Allied invasion of Japan would have been bitterly resisted and would have proved very costly. The cost of the invasion of the sacred territory will now never be known. It seems quite possible that in the prevailing mood at that time, reprisals of all kinds might have been ordered to be taken upon any Allied personnel in Japanese hands. The execution of the airmen captured in the Doolittle air raid on Japan in 1942 comes to mind.\n\nI do not intend to examine the morality or the political implications of the use of the atomic bomb at all, nor the fact that two were dropped. Opinions on these matters will always differ. I confine myself here to what I see as the facts as they affected us. A Japanese-Chinese war in the neighbourhood of Hong Kong would have been prolonged; situations would certainly have arisen in which our safety would have been jeopardised, and at best, many of us might not have survived at all. The decision by President Truman to use the atomic bombs resulted in our release almost overnight. Seen in contrast with the other possibilities which might have been envisaged, this was a wonderful outcome.\n\nA VIEW IN PERSPECTIVE\n\nThirty years after the events and after making allowances for the discreet phrasing of my diaries and for the effects of the passage of time in scaling down the few peaks of elation and levelling up the much more numerous troughs of depression, I conclude that we, the staff and patients in the British Military Hospital, Hong Kong, fared better than many other prisoners in Japanese hands. The published accounts of others, most of them written nearer to the events than my present story and so perhaps more influenced by passion, are far too numerous and ring true. I am allowing myself now to speculate on the somewhat privileged position we enjoyed, privileged that is by the standards of those who were Japanese prisoners.\n\nFirstly, our unit fell into Japanese hands as a fully equipped and staffed hospital with a full complement of patients seriously wounded in action, and hence, perhaps, in the eyes of our captors, more worthy of consideration than men who had surrendered, even though",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
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    },
    {
        "id": 213984,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1997",
        "page_number": 53,
        "title": "RAS-1997",
        "content_text": "19\n\n# THE CRAFT OF THE BAMBOO SCAFFOLDER\n\nDAN WATERS\n\nAdmired by Taoists for its resilient beauty, tenacity and flexibility, bamboo symbolises endurance and the lifestyle of an upright, virtuous gentleman. It has rings marking, as it were, important events in a person's life. It is fast-growing and has great powers of survival. Not long after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945, bamboo on the devastated site was said to have sprouted new shoots.\n\nBamboo also, with classical, delicate leaves like painting on porcelain, bends but seldom breaks. The tender sprouts are a popular vegetable. With its unbounded usefulness it is employed to make waterpipes, poles for hanging out washing, mats, incense sticks, wide-brimmed hats to offer protection from the sun, shields used by riot police, chopsticks, pillows, divination blocks for temples, carved ornaments and countless other types of utensils. The elderly will have slept in bamboo cradles as children. Their coffins will be conveyed at their funerals by bearers using bamboo carrying poles.\n\nJames Stewart Lockhart, a senior Hong Kong civil servant who played a major part in the taking over of the New Territories by Britain from China at the end of the last century, described bamboo in a large, undated notebook, as follows:2\n\nTo start with, the bamboo has seven virtues of its very own: it is clean and unspotted in itself; a sheaf covers the stem as it pierces the dark earth, so the bamboo has protection from the world; being hollow it is symbolical...of a pure heart; it is strong and unyielding; the stem being divided into segments is orderly; the stalk is pure green without blemish; and is lastly eternal and enduring.\n\n3\n\nAlthough the Victorian naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace,3 described bamboo as one of nature's most valuable gifts, the main purpose of this paper is to look at bamboo as a material for scaffolding, together with the methods of training and the role of the bamboo scaffolder.\n\nA legendary sage named Yau Chao Shi is said to have lived 5,000",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579",
        "rank": 0
    }
]