[ { "id": 208668, "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-1979", "page_number": 125, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "98\n\nREVS. J. SMITH AND WM. DOWNS\n\nNow that we are getting a decent ration of flour we shall have to figure out ways and means to bake our own bread, for now the little we used to get from Hong Kong has ceased. The American council accordingly called a meeting in our community garage and discussed the question. In our community kitchen there was, of course, no oven made for baking purposes, so the best we can do is to use the few electric stoves scattered throughout the apartments. A few of these are set up in the kitchen and the baking begun. The Maryknoll Sisters and we each have an electric oven, and they start forthwith in turning out luscious loaves of bread. Father Meyer, too, in our block, starts experimenting with yeast and bread baking formulae, and soon has a tasty loaf set before us. Father Meyer's fame is extending throughout the Camp, and many are now coming to us for instructions on how to bake bread. Recently, Father Troesch managed to buy a few dried apples at the Canteen and, lo and behold, he shortly presented us with an apple pie! And a very creditable piece of the great American dessert!\n\n25—News received of the death on December 7th of Father Toomey's mother, R.I.P. Father Madison presides at an \"Information, Please\" at the Club Hall. After the recent escapes from the Camp, the construction of a barbed wire fence all around was begun and today it was completed. We lose a little more of our freedom, and are now quite interned. Electric lights are also being put up along our borders. We understand that this is in accordance with international law governing internment camps. A new masonry gateway is also being built across the main road leading into Camp, with a guard post outside.\n\n26 Sunday, Father Charles Murphy preached at all the Masses today. There were no afternoon services because of a heavy rain storm, our first real storm of the season. A Bridge and Games tournament opens. One duck egg in our rations this morning, and this evening we get our first \"seconds\" under the new arrangement, which, with a saucer of cornstarch from Father Troesch's larder, left us quite sated.\n\n27—The Dutch internees are told that they may be repatriated either to Holland or other Dutch possessions. A few Belgians and Norwegians also included. After some discussions, we Maryknollers get from our community kitchen our rations of flour, but three", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210155, "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": 126, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "105\n\nHONG KONG ISLAND BEFORE 1841\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nHail, little isle! and Hong's fair haven, hail!\n\nFirst-fruits of China to the ocean-queen! New orient realms, new navies' embryo sail Glass'd in thy shifting horoscope are seen. May British virtue shine, in thee confest; And in her colony be Britain blest!'*\n\nThe cession of Hong Kong evoked different feelings in both China and Britain. In China, needless to say, there was scarcely rejoicing. The sixty-year-old Tao Kuang emperor, monarch of China since 1820, when asked to sanction the proposed Treaty of Peace that granted Hong Kong to Britain, spent the rest of the day and most of the night pacing up and down the corridor of his Palace, deep in anxious thought. Several times he was heard to mutter \"impossible\" and to sigh deeply. At last, at 3 a.m., he stamped his foot and proceeded to the audience chamber where he affixed the \"vermilion pencil\" to the draft. One of his subjects, the great Chinese statesman Tso Tsung-tang (1812-1885), then an unknown and rather unsuccessful scholar, wrote four poems in which he expressed grief and indignation when he heard that the British had taken over Hong Kong; and when he learned the final terms of the peace he was so overcome that he thought seriously of retiring to some lonely mountain retreat for the rest of his days.\n\n2\n\n3\n\nIn England the young Queen Victoria, twenty-two years old and married with a baby daughter wrote to her uncle, the king of the Belgians, \"Albert is so much amused at my having got the Island of Hong Kong and we think Victoria ought to be called Princess of Hong Kong in addition to Princess Royal\".2\n\nHer Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was not amused. He received the news of the Chuenpi agreement (January 1841) between Captain Elliot, the British Plenipotentiary, and the Imperial Commissioner Kishen, with disappointment and disapproval.\n\n* See Plates 1-3", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214978, "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": 74, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "30\n\nAfter the First World War and the return to China of the Powers, a movement to finance a new westernized Chinese élite began among the Powers. Each country hoped that the Chinese educated by them would naturally favour their country of education; gratitude, ties of friendship, as well as cultural and emotional orientations, would see to that. This also Leopold, the astute King of the Belgians, had foreseen. He had spoken of it urging that young men be sent to Belgium for training. \"Ils seront des nôtres,\" they will be ours.\n\nAbout her own Western studies, she wrote the following equitable lines:\n\nI myself was, in 1935, a recipient of a scholarship derived from the Belgian Boxer indemnity fund; I went to study in Belgium, following in my father's footsteps. But it was, in the end, China's money which was being spent to educate me, it was the Chinese people paying the Boxer Indemnity of 1900 who paid for my years in Belgium. And so my gratitude must go to them, for making me in turn, as they made my father, a privileged person, a returned student from abroad. Later I was to study in England, on a British Council scholarship, and also be grateful to England. But this has not influenced me in the end. For truth is truth and it cannot be bought at any price.\n\nVigilant yet dispassionate, non-compromising yet lacking even the slightest urge for revenge, always eager to unveil painful truths about enslavement of one people by another, Han Suyin is a born defender of human dignity and human rights. In the pages of her autobiographical/historical cycle, multiple shrewd remarks about interference of indigenous Chinese and foreign powers' interests in Old China are a most natural and therefore a matter-of-factly element, masterly interwoven in a vast political and economic panorama of Chinese life in that pre-1949 epoch. After all, the so-called 'gunboat diplomacy' and also the other forms of political blackmail, extensively practised by the white powers to threaten feudal, backward and corrupt society in order to press even more lucrative concessions out of it, had directly affected Han Suyin's and her family clan's existence on an everyday basis. Surprisingly enough and in the circumstances incomparably more neutral (or even favourable) for her, Han Suyin wrote a stunning and remarkable book - And the Rain My Drink - devoted entirely to the declining post-World War II period of the British", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 } ]