[
    {
        "id": 211348,
        "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-1988",
        "page_number": 64,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "40\n\nwas easily dismissed by exponents with the reasoning that the illustrators of the Ming era had not the slightest idea what they were doing. Others, more sceptical, on the other hand, came to a different conclusion. The existence of this picture obviously proved that mo, like pixiu, was only a legendary animal.\n\nZhouyu\n\nThe third animal offered by scholars as the giant panda in Chinese history and literature was zhouyu.\n\nIn the Book of Odes, the zhouyu was depicted as \"A giant animal that could be as large as a tiger, that had white fur but was black in certain areas. It was not carnivorous, and displayed a gentleness as well as a sense of trustworthiness\".\n\nSo far, this portrait fitted the modern giant panda. There was one flaw, however, as the description of the animal went on to say that **its tail was even longer than its body**.\n\nSubsequent writings on the zhouyu, claiming to be based on actual sightings, however, did not mention the impressive length of its tail.\n\nIn one of the Confucian ritual texts, the Rituals of Zhou, it was stated that the term zhouyu was adopted as the title for the imperial official whose responsibilities were the upkeep of the emperor's menagerie of animals and birds. This use of the term implies that the animal of the same name was rare and valuable.\n\nIn the History of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, it was recorded that the zhouyu was sighted in 333 A.D. in Liaodong in eastern China, where fossil remains of the giant panda had been found. In the History of Five Dynasties, by the noted stateman and scholar of the Song era, Ouyang Xiu (1017-1072), the zhouyu was recorded to have been seen two times. In 908 A.D., residents of two localities reported sighting the zhouyu. These localities were Wuding and Bishan, both in Sichuan. Five years later, in 913 A.D., the animal again was seen by residents. (It is regrettable that the Chinese language makes no distinction between singular and plural nouns. Therefore it is not clear whether residents",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q",
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    },
    {
        "id": 211350,
        "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-1988",
        "page_number": 66,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "42\n\nThe search for the giant panda through Chinese historical records and ancient writings represented an interesting exercise. Nevertheless, no positive statement can be made that the Chinese had known about the giant panda before the pelt was brought to western attention.\n\nPère David, it is safe to say, may continue to bask in glory as the discoverer of the giant panda for the whole world, including China.\n\nbaixiong 白熊 Bishan 璧山\n\nBishi 壁溪\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nErya 爾雅\n\nLi Shizhen 李時珍\n\nLiaodong 遼東\n\nLolo 玀羅\n\nMing 明\n\nmo 貘\n\nOuyang Xiu 歐陽修\n\npixiu 貔貅\n\nSima Qian 司馬遷 Sichuan 四川\n\nShandong 山東 Xuande 宣德 Wuding 武定\n\nYunglo 永樂\n\nYunnan 雲南\n\nZhou 周\n\nzhouyu 州圉\n\nZhu Su 朱橚\n\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nBrightwell, L. R., \"The Giant Panda, Its History in Ancient China and Modern Europe”, Field 187:497-498 (London, 1946)\n\nDavid, Armand, \"Journal d'un Voyage dans le centre de la Chine et dans le Thibet Oriental\", Nouvelle Archives Musée Naturelle de Paris (Bulletins) 10:3-82 (Paris, 1874)\n\nFox, Helen (editor and translator), Abbé David's Diary, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949.\n\nDictionary of Ming Biography 1368-1644, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1976. Essay on Li Shih-chen (1518-1593) by L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, I:859-865.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 211631,
        "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-1989",
        "page_number": 46,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "21\n\nto be regarded as such by mankind and to be revered only as the representation of that power. However, over the centuries, he has developed into a god in his own right, depicted as a gilded image of an emperor sitting on a throne, and is accepted by the masses as the ruler of the Heavenly bureaucracy.\n\nIn T'aishan in Shantung province it was claimed that the Jade Emperor in mortal life had been merely a learned doctor of medicine who had lived during the 12th century AD at the Sung court in Kaifeng. He attended the emperor Hui Tsung during a serious illness and saved his life with a miraculous cure. He was known as Chang Yu-huang, but, on his death, he, like many a hermit, was deified by imperial decree.\n\nBritish representatives met the imperial representative, Li Hung-chang in 1876 in the temple (Yuh Huang T'ing) dedicated to the Jade Emperor to the west of Yent'ai (Cheefoo) in Shantung province to arrange the Chefoo Convention. Another incident involving the British in North China and connected with the Jade Emperor concerned Sir Meyrick Hewlett of the China Consular Service at the turn of the century during the clearing up after the siege of the British Embassy during the Boxer Rebellion. He found in the house of Sir Ernest Satow, HM Ambassador in Peking, a tablet with a background of sky-blue, framed in rich gold and inscribed with the four characters in gold — 'Huang T'ien Shang Ti'. Prince Ch'ing identified it as an item from the Temple of Heaven which had been missing for more than a year. When Sir Ernest asked how to restore it to its rightful place, the Prince begged the Ambassador not to send it round to his palace as should it be placed in the entrance he could neither leave nor enter his home without kowtowing twenty-seven times before it. Another more enlightened official helped out by bearing it off at dead of night in a Peking cart to the vaults of a European bank where it awaited a favourable day for restoring it to the Temple of Heaven. Some thirty-five years later, Sir Meyrick, paying his farewell visit to Peking, visited the Temple of Heaven and asked the attendants whether he could see the tablet, kept with the other tablets sacred to the emperors of the Ch'ing dynasty in a small temple opposite the Altar of Heaven. They replied that this was quite impossible, since even in post-imperial Kuomintang days no-one was allowed to see it. Sir Meyrick related the story of its recovery, upon which the attendants agreed to show him the tablet together with the tablets to the 28 Major Constellations, to Thunder and Lightning, and to the other forces of nature, but said that the tablets to the emperors were all lost after their",
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    },
    {
        "id": 211660,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 75,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "50\n\neach bearing a different surname. Depending upon which source you accept the maximum number of individual surnamed Pestilence Wang Yeh would appear to be a mere 106 or 132 out of the 360.\n\nThere are at least five or six different legends describing the origins of these spirits which vary enormously both in general and in detail with the most popular story heard repeatedly in Taiwan and South-East Asia being of 360 musicians deified by an emperor of China. Cautionary stories about the threat to the populace from the 360 Plague Gods were common throughout China but other than in Fukienese communities they were not referred to as Wang Yeh. In some versions the spirits of the musicians spread out all over China and in our major legend five particular spirits, deemed special protectors of the area, ended up in the Changchou and Ch'uanchou area of Fukien.\n\nThe different legends, in general, claimed that the group of Pestilence Wang Yeh were 'scholars killed by Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, the unifier of China in 210 BC, who ordered the burning of books and the burial of Confucian scholars'; 'T’ang dynasty literati who died as a result of the folly of the emperor T'ang Ming Huang (685-762AD)'; 'The 360 Ming literati who refused to serve the usurping foreign dynasty, the Ch'ing and hanged themselves, (mid-seventeenth century AD)'; 'The five scholars who killed themselves to save villagers from an infected well'; or, finally, are 'spirits of the man-in-the-street who died of plague and became Plague gods'.\n\nA few temple keepers claim that the Pestilence Wang Yeh are subordinate to the Lord of Mount T'ai and of the Underworld (T’aishan Ta Ti 泰山大帝).\n\nThe following are a number of the legends in greater detail. The first relates that during the reign of T'ang T'ai Tsung (627-649 AD) five scholars who had been unsuccessful at the imperial civil service examinations had stayed on in the capital living on what they could earn playing music. The emperor summoned them to the palace to play for him and had at the same time the Taoist 'pope' Chang T'ien Shih (Chang the Heavenly Master) in audience. The emperor wishing to test the 'pope's' magical powers ordered the musicians to play in the cellar whilst he told the ‘pope' that there were five demons in the basement. The 'pope' using his secret arts killed all five. The emperor was both appalled and ashamed of what he had caused and deified all five.\n\nPage 75\n\nPage 76",
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