[
    {
        "id": 212217,
        "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-1990",
        "page_number": 159,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "136\n\nAmerican films were flown over quickly from Hollywood, and pictures would often be released earlier in Shanghai than in London. When the newsreels of the war began to come along, they led to disturbances; the Germans got nasty and wanted to break things up. Cinema owners did not wish to see their cinemas wrecked and in the end the showing of newsreels was discontinued. Unfortunately, they also did not dare show pictures, like \"The Great Dictator\", which were critical of Fascist methods. The French were, however, determined to see \"The Confessions of a Nazi Spy\", an anti-Nazi picture which was doing much in the States to open the eyes of the population to the methods of the German 'Bund'. They stationed two armoured cars outside the cinema, while inside armed police, with drawn automatics, stood along the gangways. The picture had a very popular run for two weeks, without incident.\n\nSince the disturbances of 1927 the leading Treaty Powers had maintained garrisons at Shanghai. The Japanese forces were quartered in the section of the International Settlement north of the Soochow creek, where the majority of the Japanese population lived; the British, American, and Italian contingents guarded sectors of the perimeter south of the creek; and the French garrisoned their own Concession. There was a local understanding of live and let live, and even after the Italians came into the war, the Grenadiers of Savoy, decked out in patches of red on collar and sleeve, and the baggiest of plus-fours, continued to man their sector: but to avoid argument with Thomas Atkins and Jack Tar they were confined to their own particular taverns. Blood Alley remained an Anglo-Saxon preserve, where Johnnie Doughboy sometimes threw his weight about.\n\nIt was in January, 1940, that the Royal Navy stopped the Asama Maru, within a few hours steaming of the Japanese Coast, and removed 21 Germans from on board. The Japanese, of course, went up in the air at this alleged insult to the Imperial flag, and the British community in Shanghai questioned the expediency of the action. The incident was settled by negotiation, 9 of the captives being returned, and the Japanese undertaking not to convey in their ships military personnel of the belligerents. It is interesting to remember that, when the S.S. \"President Hoover\" ran aground on the East Coast of Formosa, in Japanese territorial water, closed to foreign shipping, the Japanese refused to allow the Americans to salvage her, but insisted on the work being done by Japanese firms. Soon after, the Asama",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212637,
        "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-1991",
        "page_number": 191,
        "title": "RAS-1991",
        "content_text": "17!\n\nFortunately our supply of waterproofing material was short. For proofing joints however we found local products, such as wood oil, bee's wax, and vegetable oil, made good waterproof compounds if mixed in suitable proportions.\n\nThe Chinese were very anxious that we should design a mine for use in the network of creeks and shallow waterways in the delta. The Chief produced some interesting combinations. I will describe one of these, which we called the Flamingo. It consisted of a bamboo stake about 3½ feet tall and pointed at the lower end. The top was cut to allow a long bamboo cross-piece to swivel at a point about three quarters down its length; the shorter arm of the cross-piece was weighted with a heavy stone so that it would pull up into the air the other much longer arm when released from a wire which held it down level. At the far end of the long arm a pipe mine was lashed, filled with H.E., connected to a pull switch. The idea was to drive in the stake in the soft mud at one side of the creek until the level cross-piece was about one foot under the surface of the water and parallel with the shore. The pull switch was made fast by a stone to the ground below and a string went off at right angles across the creek, also a foot or so below the surface. When a boat came along it pushed against the string, which released the retaining wire at the end of the long arm. The arm, pulled up by the weight at the other end, shot up; the sharp tug on the pull switch set off the pipe mine when it was about three feet in the air in such a way that the splinters burst all over the occupants of the passing boat. The Chinese were reluctant to use this mine as they were afraid it would catch their own boats. As Cyril said, \"They want a mine which will set itself, will distinguish between friendly boats and hostile boats, and will renew itself after going off.\"\n\nTo help in the manufacture of the various devices we designed, and to make tools for us, we operated our own little workshop. I had been lucky to secure the services of a most original character, Reginald. His father was a Chinese ship's carpenter, his mother was Irish, and for the first seventeen years of his life he lived in Limehouse. He then went out to his relations in China, joined the Shanghai Fire Brigade, and moved on from that to work under Rewi Alley in the Co-operatives. He managed a machine shop for the Co-operatives, but felt that because of his half-foreign blood he had not received fair treatment from them; so he left them to join us. He was able to borrow two lathes, a drilling, and a planing machine, from a Co-operative machine shop, which had been",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j",
        "rank": 0
    }
]