[ { "id": 205106, "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-1966", "page_number": 62, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS\n\n57\n\nwith Chinese technique and art forms. This stone is so far the \"sole material monument\" of the Franciscan mission in medieval China. It has been suggested that there might exist another one. Christian tombstones from Ch'üan-chou were published some years ago, and it has been thought that the language on one of them is Latin. It must be Christian because the inscription begins with the sign of the Cross, but the attempt to read it as Latin and to regard it as the tomb inscription for Andrew of Perugia, the third suffragan bishop of Zayton — modern Ch'üan-chou — does not seem convincing. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the inscription is not in Syriac script.5\n\nThere is, however, another mission from the West that reached China and where even the dynastic history of the Yuan has recorded their arrival. It is that of the papal envoy Giovanni da Marignolli, Bishop of Bisignano. A medieval manuscript in Prague has recorded the Western part of the story. This embassy, if we may call it that, was occasioned by a letter from some Alan Christians in China dated 11th July 1336. Some of the senders can be identified with persons mentioned in Chinese sources of the period. The Pope, Benedict XII, answered with a letter dated 13th June 1338, and Giovanni da Marignolli left Avignon — the papal see in those years — in December 1338. He travelled first to Constantinople and proceeded from there to the Crimea and the court of Uzbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde. Another station was Almaliq in Central Asia. Finally the papal envoy reached Khanbaliq (Peking) and was presented to the Emperor, Shun-ti. Giovanni presented the emperor with gifts, among them a Western horse. After a few years in China the envoy went back to Europe via India and reached Avignon in 1353. The Chinese annals have recorded the exact date of the audience when Giovanni met Shun-ti, or, to call him by his Mongol name, Togon Temur; it was August 19, 1342. The Chinese dynastic history calls the country Fu-lang, another way of transcribing the name of the Franks, that is, the Europeans. However, Giovanni's name and that of the Pope, are not mentioned by the Yuan-shih. In any case, this embassy seemed so important to the compilers of the dynastic history that they recorded it, and this means something because the basic documents for Togon Temur's reign were already lost at the time of the compilation of the Yuan-shih so that the annals for his reign are notoriously incomplete. But even so it does not seem", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208349, "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": 73, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "IS FACE THE SAME AS LI?\n\n57\n\nsible. The fact is, the Chinese cultural superiority lies in the loyalty to li; and if I am right that li is not the same as face, and li is deeper than face, and the Chinese will shamefacedly admit the silliness of face but will be shocked to attack li, then the optimistic thesis of the authors is mistaken. It would be, moreover, amply clear that to argue the Chinese into relinquishing their sense of cultural superiority, we do not so much need a critical examination of face, as a critical examination of li\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Joseph Agassi and I. C. Jarvie, 'A Study in Westernization', in Hong Kong, A Society in Transition, edited by I. C. Jarvie in consultation with Joseph Agassi, Routledge, Praeger, London and New York, 1969, pp. 129-163.\n\n2 There is of course no consensus among the Chinese about face or even Confucianism. There was a time when the concern for face was open and considered unquestionably proper even though nothing lofty; the more old-fashioned still think there is something to be said about face, though they do not say it. There was a generation, in the early 1900's, during which Confucianism was fiercely attacked as obstruction to progress. 'Revolutionary' China still keeps the practice. Meantime, face as an art or even an expression is quite lost to the present younger generation of Chinese in Hong Kong, and Confucianism is no longer mentioned one way or the other. But the feelings for face and li, the cultural superiority, are there just beneath the surface, and emerges at scratch.\n\n3 I prefer the fuller expression of 'pride-shame' to just 'shame' culture, as pride is often as prominent as, if not more so than, shame in a so-called shame culture. This is originally suggested by Margaret Mead in 'Guilt, Ritual, and Culture', in Roger W. Smith (ed.), Guilt, Man and Society, A Doubleday Anchor Original, 1970, pp. 117-134. Correspondingly I use 'guilt-saintliness' rather than just 'guilt' culture.\n\n4 Margaret Mead, Co-operation and Competition among Primitive Peoples, New York, McGraw Hill, 1937, pp. 493-494. Ruth Benedict believes, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, London, Secker & Warburg, 1947, p.223, that shame is 'a reaction to other people's criticism'.\n\n5 Analects, III, 3, Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series, Supplement No. 16, A Concordance to the Analects of Confucius, Harvard-Yenching Institute, Peiping, 1940. Translations of quotations n. 5-19 are my own.\n\n Ibid., III, 4. 林放問禮之本。子曰:大哉問,禮與其奢也,寧儉;喪,與其易也,寧戚。\n\n Ibid., III, 8, 予夏問曰:巧笑倩兮,美目盼兮,素以為绱兮,何謂也?子曰:繪事後素。曰:禮後乎。子曰:起予者商也。始可與言詩已矣。\n\n Ibid., XII, 1. 子曰:非禮勿視,非禮勿聽,非禮勿言,非禮勿動。\n\n9 Ibid., XIV, 30.\n\n10 Ibid., XIV, 7.\n\n11 Ibid., XII, 23, 24. 子貢問友。子曰:忠告而善道之,不可則止,毋自辱焉。", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 } ]