[ { "id": 206384, "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": 201, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "THE COLONY OF HONG KONG\n\n175\n\non from them a little way was the Cemetery, still a small enclosed space, which, it had been thought, would be sufficient for the needs of the Colony. Hardly any one but myself, I suppose, ever thinks now of paying it a visit. Beyond that, hardly any buildings were met with, till we came to Spring Gardens, where two or three English firms had begun to occupy the ground on the left. Then came Hospital Hill, with diminutive buildings on it, devoted to the same purposes as the larger erections that now crown it; and Morrison Hill, where the school of the Morrison Education Society was in vigorous action, with the Hospital of the Medical Society, the foundations of which can hardly be traced now, but where I found hospitable quarters for several months. Arrived at the Happy Valley, there were to be seen only fields of rice and sweet potatoes. At the south end of it was the village of Wong-nei-ch'ung, just as at the present day, and on the heights above it were rising two or three foreign houses, with an imposing one on the east side of the valley, built by a Mr. Mercer of Jardine, Matheson and Co.'s House. All these proved homes of fever or death, and were soon abandoned.\n\nBeyond the Valley somewhere was a range of buildings, which had already become tabooed as unhealthy, and then came the offices of the great Firm, with the workmen still busy about them, and far from being what they are at the present day.\n\nIf I have omitted to mention in this retrospective view of Victoria as I first saw it any of the foreign houses then existing, they can only be a very few. When I contrast the single street, imperfectly lined with hastily raised houses, and a few sporadic buildings on the barren hill-side, with the city into which they have grown, with its praya, its imposing terraces, and many magnificent residences, I think one must travel far to find another spot where human energy and skill have triumphed to such an extent over difficulties of natural position. I sometimes fancy Britannia standing on the Peak, and looking down with an emotion of pride on the great Babylon which her sons have built.\n\nAlthough I was charmed with the general appearance of the place, and the energy that was manifest in laying out the ground and pushing on building, I found many of the residents oppressed with gloom because of its unhealthiness. 1843 was, no doubt, a very sickly year, more so, perhaps, than any one has been since. The left wing of the 55th Regiment lost a hundred men between", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206619, "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-1972", "page_number": 167, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "ARCHAEOLOGY IN HONG KONG AND SOUTH CHINA (1938)\n\nW. SCHOFIELD*\n\nOf all the ancient and famous seats of early civilisation, China is the one where the smallest amount of scientific investigation has hitherto been done. Years of excavation and research have revealed to us many of the details of the life and history of Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Palestine, Minoan Crete, the Hittite confederacy, and prehistoric India; but of China all that was known came partly from the chance finds of curio-hunters, about which their finders carefully suppressed all information of scientific value such as provenance, depth of burial, and context of other finds; and partly from the literature of the Chou and Han dynasties, which, valuable as it is, is a distorting medium for historians.\n\nIn the last ten years, however, scientific investigation has been started. The Chinese National Research Institute has excavated several important dwelling sites in North China, including that of the capital of the Shang dynasty. Several distinguished foreign scholars, mostly Swedes, have conducted explorations and excavations in the service of the National Government, and various provincial societies of scholars and archaeologists have worked in their own areas. A few years ago the Research Institute discovered and excavated untouched graves of the great Shang civilisation; the report on their work is eagerly awaited.\n\nAll this activity, however, relates to the area of North China traditionally known as the centre of ancient Chinese civilisation. From China south of the Yangtse and especially from its coast provinces, hardly any object had been known to come that was\n\n* Mr. Schofield (1888-1968) was a Cadet Officer in the Hong Kong Civil Service 1911-1938. Previous contributions will be found in the 1968 and 1969 Journals, (Vols 8 and 9).\n\nThe first of these, Ch'eng-tsu-yai (*‡A), a Report of Excavations of the Proto-historic Site at Cheng-tzu-yai, Li-ch'eng Hsien, Shantung was published as Archaeologia Sinica Number One by Academica Sinica Nanking 1934. A translation into English by K. Starr has been published by the Yale University Press, Yale Publications in Anthropology, No. $2, under the title Ch'eng-tzu-yai: The Black Pottery Culture Site at Lung-shan-chen.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213612, "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": 208, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "181\n\nSINGAPORE'S DISAPPEARING TEMPLES AND THE DECLINE AND APPARENT DEMISE OF A POPULAR RELIGION CULT\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nI first passed through Singapore in the mid-1940s and scarcely noticed Chinese temples even though, as I later discovered, they were everywhere. Then, during my first comparatively lengthy stay on the island in the early 1960s, during a carefully planned tour of each of the squares on the Street Guide, I found that there was hardly an area without at least one and often two or three, ranging from small single hall temples to the largest multi-hall and airy Buddhist temples. The majority were popular religion shrines and temples, relatively small and certainly far removed from the comparatively spotless cleanliness of the Buddhist temples. However, the atmosphere and the friendliness of the devotees more than made up for it.\n\nIf we look back at dynastic China there has been a rigid continuity of tradition in temples and temple life and even today we can be in the present and yet in temples in communion with the past. Nothing changed over the ages despite temple contents being comparatively flimsy. Roofs remain the same, vermilion pillars have kept their colour and shape, images have varied little apart from the liberal use today of bright chemical paints and monks wear the same garb. Unlike the edifices of Ancient Egypt, Babylon and Sumer, built to last forever, temple contents and structures have remained century after century being rebuilt as and when necessary and are still in use, though often in mainland China the images are in a parlous state and covered in dust.\n\nEach of the popular religion temples in Singapore had some unique aspect, something which rewarded my diligence. This might not necessarily be part of worship. It could be the tales told about the deities, or the origin and development of the temple. At that time I was primarily interested in identifying the deities and sorting them into categories. It took some time to find the most convenient way to record the information I was collecting. Eventually it began to fall into place and, of course, the more I discovered the more questions I raised, and so it went on,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216509, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2003", "page_number": 268, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "220\n\nBuddha. After all, the Greeks had settled here even earlier, in the third century BCE. Other examples, before being blown up in 2001, were the huge images of Buddha carved out of the cliff in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, with their moulded mud and stucco draperies. Alexander's forays and settlements to lands well to the east of his Macedonian homeland remind us that several of the cities that Tucker describes were far more ancient than the Silk Road. Babylon, which fell to Alexander in 331 BCE, had already by then been the Middle East's most magnificent city for over fifteen hundred years. The earliest city to occupy the site of Chang'an was in existence before 1000 BCE.\n\nTucker manages to convey a huge sweep of history and geography. You will need time to read this book as, if you merely dip into it, you will lose the interconnecting threads, which are the crux of his thesis, i.e. that, throughout fifteen hundred years, numerous cultures met along the Silk Road and nourished each other's creative spirits. You will need to read it at a table because it is too heavy to read on your knees. And you will need an atlas alongside it that has maps showing some realms not often shown on a single spread. Your maps will need to show the geographical proximity of the towering mountain ranges of the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush with the drainage basins of the Aral Sea to their west and north and with the upper tributaries of the Indus to their east and south. The passes connecting these regions beckoned both Alexander and, nearly two thousand years later, Tamerlane, both intent on conquering and settling the north of the Indian subcontinent. You will need a single map to show the vast latitudinal spread of the great grasslands, deserts and semi-deserts from Turkey to northern China over which the nomads galloped. It was along these northernmost routes of the Silk Road that the Mongols charged on their terrifying way to Vienna, besieging it in 1241 and only withdrawing because they had to travel back, unexpectedly but unavoidably, all the way to Karakorum to appoint a new Grand Khan. The Silk Road saw many such events that were turning points in history, such as when in 1218 the governor of a city in what is now Kazakhstan killed an envoy of Ghengis Khan, suspecting that he was a spy, an action that precipitated the wrath of the Khan, and \"was to propel the world into an abyss, setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the deaths of millions of people from the Danube to the Sea of Japan' (p.221) - because Ghengis Khan's horsemen set out to avenge this insult, inflicting terrible retribution on all in their path.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]