[ { "id": 209872, "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-1983", "page_number": 131, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "109\n\nNam Tong Island (“Southern Hall Island\"). This island is large and mountainous. Military defence work is currently going on there. It was formerly cultivated, but in 1929 the cultivated area was abandoned. There is an Aga light on the southern point. The channel to the north of this island is \"Buddha's Head Pass\". The harbour within this channel is well sheltered: there is a big temple on the mainland to the north of the channel. The chief place of interest on this island is the old fort near the north point, with a south wall thickened, apparently for mounting cannon. This fort is probably Chinese, perhaps built by pirates.\n\nHere we leave the islands of the South District, and enter the North District as we pass into Port Shelter. The interest of this place lies in its extraordinary geography and geology, and its wonderful beauty. The surf which beats on the high pillared cliffs of High Island, Bluff Island, and Basalt Island dies away as your launch passes into the long calm channels, and under the hills of the mainland there is perfect shelter, though I do not think the anchorages are good. Grassy hills come down to the waters' edge, and near Saikung the sea is studded with diminutive islets.\n\nThe soil of these islands appears extremely barren, as the population of the islands is very small. Fishing seems the chief occupation. Settlements are few. Yim Tin is named after some abandoned salt fields a little to the south of the (Roman Catholic) mission church: Kau Sai (\"West of the Channel\") explains itself. There is also a group of settlements in the southern part of High Island. These have the remarkable names of \"North Fork\", \"Tribute Rice Junks Bay\", and \"White Insect Wax\",32 This group and Yim Tin are the only places in these islands where cultivation is of any extent. \"North Fork\" is a most remarkable place. Someone has lavished money on it, the houses and the ancestral temple are well built, a high platform held up by a big masonry retaining wall stands in front of them, and a small stream by the village is crossed by a fine three-span bridge all of stone: it is the sort of stream for which the rest of the Territory think six stepping stones are ample. I have no idea how these names originated, except that the bay may have been an anchorage for junks carrying the tribute rice north from Canton to Peking.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209873, "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-1983", "page_number": 132, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "110\n\nThe very latest is that some enterprising folk of these parts have committed a piracy on a junk there, and five or six of them are up before the District Officer, South, on a committal charge.\n\nAt the northern end of High Island is the interesting feature called the Dry Channel or Kon Mun. It is a fiord formed by the sunken mouth of the valley running northwest by Lan Nai Wan, which is connected on the west with the other channels. Into it has poured the whole of the silt from the upper valley: and as this point is precisely where the two tidal waves sweeping round High Island meet, the silt is heaped up there without any chance of it getting carried away. Nothing bigger than a small sampan can traverse it, and then only at high water.3\n\nLeaving this fascinating island group by the often stormy route past Conic Island and Fung Head, we reach the mouth of Taipo Harbour, with Kang Chau (a little rock built up of volcanic ash beds), Grass Island, with the fishing village of Tap Mun on it, and Port Island. This last island is uninhabited.\n\nThe islands in Taipo Harbour are mostly of sandstone and shale, but are otherwise of little interest. They are Harbour Island, Centre Island, and lastly, the island near Taipo station where the District Officer, North, lives, though since the causeway carrying the road was built, this is no longer an island.\n\nGoing out again round Bluff Head, we come to another island-studded stretch of sea. Three large and sixteen small islands occupy it, and it is a most beautiful piece of water. Double Island, the first you come to, is in two halves joined by a low, narrow neck: the Crescent Island, beside it, is uninhabited, but Kat (\"Lucky Harbour\") Island, not being very lofty, has a good deal of its surface under cultivation.\n\nThere is yet one more island, and this is in some ways the most curious of all. It lies away across Mirs Bay, two miles from the Chinese coast, from which it draws a good deal of its drinking water by means of waterboats. It is called, very appropriately, Pingchau (\"Flat Island\"). When I was there, I did not see any paddy whatever; all cultivation was dry, and often the fields were unterraced and sloping, quite different from other parts of the New Territory, yet the island is populous, in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212748, "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-1992", "page_number": 57, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "42\n\nbreach of good manners, but the veteran told me that the pony was a very nice one, presented to him by the late Marquis Tseng, and then added the doctor, you see I have the regular Peking wheels, not those flash Shansi wheels, and my man does not wear an official hat. This last item is another fault rather than a virtue, which shows that thirty-two years' constant residence has not sufficed to enable the good doctor to learn all the niceties of Chinese etiquette.'\n\nAmongst the scores of interesting items about his various achievements minor themes emerge such as his ability to play Chinese chess. This he used to while away the long hours during the lengthy trip up the Yangtze in early 1868 when he played with Fan Ho-ting. On a somewhat contradictory note he later claimed that General T’ang Chiung had taught him how to play wei-ch'i [Chinese chess] in his camp at Chung-an Chiang in Kueichou in 1868/9. Though Mesny said that he could beat several good players in camp he never seen anyone beat T'ang who was famous for his ability at the game.\n\nThere were however occasional instances of inexplicable ignorance, more often than not surprising in view of the depth and width of his knowledge but never the less excusable as they were nearly always on specialised subjects, such as the story he related about the turtle and snake. Mesny, both in a letter to a Shanghai newspaper in March 1883 and in his Chinese Miscellany some twenty years later, referred to seeing a snake and turtle together crossing the Chung-an river below Kueichou. During his lengthy description of his first Kueichou campaign he states that he was at an elevated position on the bank of the river at the foot of the bluff where the Commander-in-Chief had his headquarters, when he saw a turtle swimming with its head out of the water about thirty yards off. His shot, he saw in the clear water, had beheaded the turtle which sank fast and half cut through the neck of the snake which floated to the surface dead. He then went on to describe how the snake had been connected,\" mating to conceive the most venomous of reptiles called the pang pang-she or cudgel snake or the ch'ing-chu piao, a small dark-coloured springing or darting or leaping toad-like reptile. People told him that when a turtle and snake were so coupled they were referred to as kuei-she er chiang-chun, that is 'a turtle and snake both military commanders', which meant that they were to be feared or dreaded. That particular shot of Mesny's was reported far and wide in quick time. This, mused Mesny in another section of his Miscellany, proved to Mesny what the Chinese have often asserted, that is, the snake and turtle love one another\n\ni", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214425, "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-1998", "page_number": 283, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "between 1935 and 1937 consisting of three 9.2 inch?\n\n249\n\nAs part of a colony-wide reorganisation and modernisation programme of the armament, a new battery was constructed at Stanley with three 9.2 inch calibre Mark X guns mounted on Mark VII mountings. One of these guns came from the battery at Devil's Peak and the other two came from Mount Davis, as both of these batteries were being modernised. The gun shifts were difficult and complex operations as the guns were very heavy, the barrel and breech assembly weighing 28 tons. Everything was done by hand and the pieces, and all their mountings, were transported to Stanley by sea. The two lower guns (No. 2 & No.3) were situated on concrete emplacements now occupied by parabolic antennae dishes in the Cable and Wireless Ltd. Satellite Earth Station complex. These two guns could only fire out to sea and were later encased in concrete gunhouses or casemates by the Japanese who seemed to have kept them in service during the Occupation. The gun houses were demolished and the guns were cut up for scrap in 1952.\n\nThe No. 1 9.2 inch gun mounted on top of \"Gun Hill\" was equipped with all-round traverse, that is, it was able to engage any target, for it was mounted on a circular platform which was rotated mechanically. It was this gun which bombarded the Japanese almost continually from the 14th to 24th December, 1941, firing at the rate of three rounds per half hour at targets as far away as Kowloon City. The shells weighed more than a hundredweight each. The gun was able to fire at this great range due to its mountings which gave a thirty-five degree angle of elevation.\n\nAfter the completion of the new Stanley Battery, two 6 inch naval guns were installed on the Bluff forming a second emergency battery known as Bluff Head Battery. These smaller guns had an effective range of 9,500 yards and also seem to have been equipped with all-round traversers as they could engage land and sea targets. These two batteries were reinforced in December 1941 by two 3.7 inch howitzers in a position in Stanley Village with an observation post in the Officers Mess, and an anti-aircraft battery at Tai Tam Tau. The Japanese reported that \"long-range fortress artillery bombardments were extremely effective.\" Targets were engaged with clock code observation by the Infantry and also where possible by direct observation. In addition, many targets such as road junctions and bridges had been registered and carefully tabulated in the months leading up to the Japanese attack so that direct observation was not really necessary to know that the shells were on target. Japanese artillery set up at the captured", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214429, "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-1998", "page_number": 287, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "253\n\na quick sweep of the area then douse. 'Douse lights' was the official term used when passing an order. Coast artillery searchlights could not be used in an anti-aircraft role as they had very little elevation.\n\nThe Bluff Head Battery\n\nThe Bluff Head Battery was set up as an improvised emergency battery sometime after 1938 in the event of war. Although no two batteries were exactly alike they all conformed to a general pattern. A typical emergency coastal battery, such as that set up on the Bluff, would consist of two guns either fitted with their own gun shields or mounted in temporary steel framed casemates covered with sandbags which would later be rebuilt in brick or concrete, with sunken expense magazines or shell stores and air-raid shelters or dugouts for the gunners between them. There would be two searchlight emplacements, one on each flank of the battery, so that the guns could be used at night. A battery observation post equipped with range finder, predictor, and fire-control equipment would be sited behind the guns, if possible on higher ground, otherwise in a two or three storey tower, or in a convenient nearby building.\n\nThe battery would have been surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, and protected by infantry defences such as pillboxes, sandbagged machine-gun emplacements, and slit-trenches. The searchlights were housed in small brick or concrete shelters protected by steel shutters, each searchlight powered by its own diesel-engined generator housed in a small engine room at the rear of the shelter. Alternatively wet cell accumulator batteries in series could be used and probably were at Stanley, as a number of carbon rods, which were a component of this type of battery, have been found discarded in old bunkers and several old battery charging rooms have also been found. Emergency sandbagged searchlight emplacements could also be set up quickly if required.\n\nOther Gun Emplacements\n\nA mobile anti-aircraft battery, 18th AA Bty, 5th AA Regt RA, is known to have been captured at Stanley on 25 Dec 1941. An AA position is shown on old wartime maps on the spur above Tai Tam Tau,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214433, "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-1998", "page_number": 291, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "LEGEND\n\ngun emplacement\n\nMGP\n\nFinckhe\n\n12 15/\n\nCASL\n\nTHE BLUFF HEAD\n\nBCP\n\nBATTERY\n\nStatko\n\nFP\n\n1116\n\nBarracks\n\nMost\n\n6 fn gun\n\nCASL\n\nklau\n\nin gun.\n\nCASL\n\n-\n\nbattery buildings\n\n黄麻角\n\nCASL coast artillery searchlight\n\nWong Ma Kok\n\n(Bluff Head)\n\nBCP battery command post\n\nMGP machine gun post\n\nFP footpath\n\nDKI gate\n\nStanley Fort\n\n257\n\n1", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 } ]