[ { "id": 208209, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1977", "page_number": 248, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "232\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nREPTILES NEW TO HONG KONG\n\nThe purpose of these notes is to record the occurrence of one species of gecko (Reptilia: Sauria: Gekkonidae) and three species of snakes (Reptilia: Serpentes: Colubridae) not hitherto known as part of the fauna of Hong Kong.\n\nHemidactylus brookii Gray\n\nDuring the first six months of 1978 three live adult specimens of these geckos were sent to me by Father Anthony Bogadek for identification. All three had been caught in the same locality in the Sai Ying Pun district on Hong Kong Island. The first two, both males, had been found outdoors behind a piece of building material lying against a brick wall, one in late September or early October 1977 and the other on 1 March 1978. The third specimen, a female, was found inside a school on 3 June 1978. There is no doubt that at least a localized population of Hemidactylus brookii is now established in Hong Kong.\n\nThe known geographical range of this species includes ‘India' [and therefore Pakistan and probably Bangladesh], Sri Lanka, and parts of Burma, extending southeastward into the East Indian Archipelago and Singapore; it is also widely distributed in the northern half of Africa, and has been introduced into the West Indies (Smith, 1935, p.91). Its occurrence in Thailand and the Malay Peninsula is not clear as, while Boulenger (1912, p.43) records it from the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago', Smith (loc. cit.) states that it is: ‘not yet known from Siam, French Indo-China, or the Malay Peninsula except Singapore. . . .’ As regards its occurrence in China, Smith (loc. cit.) remarks:\n\nthere are two specimens in the British Museum said to have come from China, both were obtained more than 80 years ago.... Recently (Anon., 1977), this gecko has been listed for Fukien and Chekiang provinces, but without other details.\n\nIn its habits, Hemidactylus brookii is equally at home inside buildings as it is out of doors. It is due to their close association with man that the geographical ranges of several species of house-geckos have been artificially extended very widely in warmer parts of the world.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209689, "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-1982", "page_number": 346, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "324\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nNewspapers in Asia Contemporary Trends and Problems. John A. Lent. Heinemann Asia 1982 pp. xxiii, 594, appendices, bibliography, index.\n\nJohn Lent, the editor of this far-ranging study, is professor of communications at Temple University in Philadelphia. Some of the chapters dealing with various aspects of journalism and newspaper-publishing in 23 Asian countries are supplied by contributors, but Professor Lent himself has written those dealing with the subject of Press freedom and also chapters on Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Bangladesh, Korea, Macao and Vietnam. Of his 21 contributors all are residents of Asia, or American academicians and government personnel who have lived there for a number of years, and some worked for newspapers before entering academic life.\n\nContributors were asked to follow the same guide-lines as to form and content and as a result, despite some differences of approach, the reader can make country-to-country comparisons.\n\nThe result is illuminating and depressing. The conclusion to be drawn from this large-scale survey is that there are very few good newspapers in Asia; and that most governments do not favour press freedom and take steps to control or throttle the newspaper industry. Papers in many countries suffer severely from the rising cost of newsprint. Poor communications make it difficult to distribute copies of city-printed newspapers out to the villages where most Asians live; and the low rate of literacy in a number of Asian countries acts as a heavy restraint on readership.\n\nHowever there are exceptions to this overall gloomy picture. In Japan, for instance, the combined circulation of daily newspapers in 1982 was already well over 63 millions in a population of 120 million. This means more daily papers sold in Japan than in the whole of the rest of Asia. Japan is an almost totally literate country, and widespread information plays a vital role in the running of its highly industrialised society.\n\nNear the other end of the spectrum Indonesia, with about 20 million more people than Japan, has fewer newspapers now than it did fifteen years ago and fewer readers less than two million. More than half of them are in the capital, Jakarta. And there", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210964, "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": 26, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "OBITUARY: K. M. A. BARNETT, O.B.E.\n\nThree contributions to the memory of a remarkable man, Fellow of the RAS of Great Britain and Ireland (1949) and a founding member of the Hong Kong Branch: from James Hayes, Derek Davies, Solomon Bard.\n\nThree weeks ago one of the most distinguished retired members of the Civil Service passed away in England. Mr. K. M. A. Barnett's death was noted in the South China Morning Post on 30 October 1987. A factual account of his services was provided, beginning with his posting here as a young Cadet Officer in 1932 and ending 37 years later with his retirement from Hong Kong, but with a further 10 years' service for the United Nations Organisation in Malawi and Bangladesh on duties connected with the census.\n\nIt is difficult to do justice to this exceptional man. Few friends of his own or a later generation could claim to have covered quite the same ground, or in the same way. For this reason, letters of appreciation have to come from several persons, and not from one pen alone. Dr. Bard's letter printed on 20 November is a case in point, (see pp. 8-10 below).\n\nAs a Hong Kong civil servant his greatest achievement was probably the 1961 Census, the first for nearly thirty years. He established the office (the present Census and Statistics Department) and was its guiding genius. The work suited him to a “T”, for he was able to bring to its organisation and subsequent reporting, all the knowledge, experience and intellectual qualities that make it a lasting and major landmark in the history of Hong Kong's post-war development. Each segment of the land and sea population, by origin and occupation, each type of dwelling place (and they were legion in those hard times), education, marriage and much else was covered in the 3 volume report, and he personally wrote the manuals for the field staff and supervisors. He conducted further investigatory work, including the 1966 By-census, before retirement in 1969.\n\nMy own association with Ken Barnett stemmed from our being colleagues in the Administrative Grade of the Civil Service, and from shared interests. He was District Commissioner, New Territories when I was posted to the District Office (South) in 1957, and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210967, "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": 29, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "to go to supper and talk in less unusual surroundings.\n\nI hope I have communicated the main characteristics of the man: his great knowledge and capabilities, his friendliness and helpfulness, and his delight in life from which more and more as he grew older, he derived his serenity, compassion and wit.\n\n25th November, 1987\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nI have remarked before on the propensity of the Hongkong bureaucracy to lose, deliberately or otherwise, the services of its best and brightest. One such was Kenneth Barnett who died suddenly in October while happily playing with his grandchildren. He was 76. He had joined the Hongkong civil service in 1933, fought the Japanese as a volunteer and spent the rest of the war in prison camp. He had left the Hongkong Government as Commissioner of Census and Statistics at the age of 58. He was not the sort of man to take up a lucrative post locally where his years of public service could be profitably exploited by his new employers (as is the lamentable fashion these days); Barnett went to work for the United Nations as a demographer in Bangladesh and then Malawi.\n\nBarnett had one of those impressive brains somewhere up in the upper echelons of IQs. He was master of written and spoken Chinese in many dialects, including some of the more obscure tongues, and of a dozen other languages — each of which he was apparently able to absorb within a few months. He was an expert calligrapher and an authority on Chinese history.\n\nHe was the sort of man who polished cryptic crosswords off in 10 minutes, played chess in his head, littered his letters with obscure Greek and Latin quotations (which he generously assumed any educated person could understand), was an amateur archaeologist and anthropologist of note, and wrote poetry (I have quoted a couple in these columns most recently on 30 April, in which he likened the exoskeletons of Hongkong's buildings to a coral reef).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210970, "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": 32, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "7\n\nreader's thoughts must carry on.\n\n+\n\n+\n\nThis poem is an example of\n\nthe ferocious difficulty of putting across the idea in another language, while not losing the cameo effect.\n\nSoftly drips the clepsydra\n\nDim the incense glows\n\nKeen keen, a blade of wind\n\nBlows, rests, blows:\n\n春色惱人眠不滿\n\n:南風陣:郭\n\n上眠\n\nM] T\n\nAlong the wall, fantastic\n\nMooncast shadows creep\n\nSpring torments torments me\n\n+ 4\n\nWill not let me sleep.\n\nI forget who it's by; I have mislaid my copy, only I have many of these poems by heart; in [wartime prison] camp there was plenty of time for learning Tang and Sung poems by heart.\n\nI leave it to others to judge the quality of his translations and whether his verse was merely minor; instinctively, I find it comforting when those wielding power spend their spare hours writing poetry. But that is an illogical piece of sentimentality. Mao Zedong was a versifier. And a few weeks ago I interviewed President Ershad of Bangladesh. After telling me how well his country was progressing towards the restoration of full democracy (though admittedly the opposition and the press were, he felt, abusing their new freedoms), he presented me with another volume of his somewhat sentimental verse (REVIEW, 12 Nov.).\n\nAlmost as soon as he got back to Dhaka, the rage against his rule exploded against a man who wrote:\n\nPeace, only peace\n\nthat is all we want.\n\nDEREK DAVIES\n\nReprinted, by permission, from the Far Eastern Economic Review, 3rd Dec., 1987.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215465, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2001", "page_number": 242, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "191\n\nCloser to the ground\n\nThe call came, loud and clear, and 30 minutes later we were off, bound for the BAe 146 aircraft, a reassuring piece of British engineering, and the flight to Paro. Some Bangkok to Paro flights route via Dhaka in Bangladesh, but most call in at Calcutta. When, during my less-than-extensive research, I had seen ‘Kolkata' on the itinerary I presumed it was somewhere in Bhutan. But like Mumbai and Yangon, Kolkata is modern-speak for an old familiar name. I wonder if it will catch on?\n\nThe leg from Calcutta (obviously didn't catch on with me) to Paro was just over an hour—long enough to serve a boxed meal and deliver a warning to all passengers. The pilot came on the overhead speakers to tell us that the approach to Paro is quite unusual. 'Do not worry if you appear to be closer to the ground than normal. This is quite standard.'\n\nI thought to myself: 'This chap doesn't realise that he is dealing with 27 people who have done many landings at Kai Tak.' But, loyal as I am to all things Hong Kong, I have to say that the approach to Paro is a bit more hairy than Kai Tak used to be. It is rather like flying into Happy Valley as far as the foot of Blue Pool Road, doing a u-turn, and then landing on Queen's Road East using a runway about one-quarter as wide as Kai Tak's was.\n\nOn the walk across the tarmac to the terminal building I was able to talk to the pilot and congratulate him on such a challenging landing. He told me that he had been with his country's national carrier, Druk Air, for thirteen years, always flying 146s. In fact he started on them after only 250 hours experience. 250 hours! Even I have 350 hours of flying experience—but I am very happy to leave such interesting landings to him, full load of passengers and fuel and all.\n\nA pleasant surprise\n\nThe temperature on arrival was a pleasant surprise. On the plane, the pilot had initially reported -5°C, and then -2°C and just before landing +5°C. Obviously things warm up pretty quickly when the sun comes out. And it was certainly out when we arrived—clear blue skies and what felt like 15-20°C, although noticeably cooler in the shade.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]