[
    {
        "id": 211674,
        "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": 89,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "64\n\non earth had induced me to make such an appalling selection of colours. When I explained that the selection had very kindly been made by Mrs. L..... the temperature quickly rose to boiling point. As the ladies said, \"Why, Mrs. L. . . . hardly ever comes to the Club; and she never plays bridge\". I beat a hasty retreat to drown my sorrows at the bar, and soon after found it convenient to give up bridge altogether.\n\nIn the Club the consumption of liquids, refreshing or otherwise, varied. Sometimes it led to peculiar situations. There was the occasion in 1924 I think when late one night the two other members of the Municipal Council, by which the small affairs of the Concession were managed, took offence at the vinous truculence of their Chairman, and called in the police to remove him to cool his heels in the cells. Unfortunately the two strong-minded, but junior, members of the Council on the following morning, when they awoke refreshed by a night of comfort at home in bed, had quite forgotten the events of the previous evening; and it was not till later in the day, after he had himself come to, that they received a plaintive reminder from their Chairman requesting that he might be released from his own police cells.\n\nThroughout the period of 1911-1926 the Treaty Ports, such as Kiu Kiang, provided harbours of refuge, to whose security hundreds of thousands of Chinese threatened by the tide of civil war, fled.\n\nKiu Kiang had had its share of recent disturbances. For Sun Yat Sen, having applied to British officials for help and having met with a refusal, based on the correct British attitude of non-interference in the internal affairs of a friendly country, had turned to Russia. Michael Borodin with a group of Bolshevik advisers had consequently proceeded to Canton to advise the Kuo Min Tang Revolutionary Party and there, with consummate skill, had created the intellectual cohesion necessary to the effort of unifying China. Borodin appealed to the deep-seated exclusive instincts of the sons of Han, the inhabitants of a kingdom, which from time immemorial had been called the Middle Kingdom, because all other peoples existed only in outer darkness.\n\nThe instrument was the Chinese Revolutionary Army, led by officers indoctrinated with Kuo Min Tang ideology at the Whampoa Military Academy, of which General Chiang Kai Shek was principal. By October of 1926 this army, fighting staunchly through incredible hardships against",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 211676,
        "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": 91,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "66\n\nAnother time the alarm went, due to a slight misunderstanding at one of the gates. It was approaching dusk and the sailor sentry, who had no doubt been standing guard at this particular gate at the back of the Concession for some time, was beginning to get bored. The gates, of wood, with a small window through which persons on the far side could be inspected, were open. Outside stood a row of hawker's stands, for the most part purveying cooked foods to the coolies who passed in and out. The stand nearest to the sentry held a large copper pan, of the sort in which rice is cooked, over a small fire. At the moment the pan was empty, and the sentry, being of an enquiring mind, wondered what would happen if he put a rifle cartridge in it. The experiment produced a loud bang and several holes through the bottom of the pan. An infuriated hawker, supported by increasing numbers of excited fellow tradesmen, shouted curses at the sentry and loudly demanded large sums of money in compensation for the damage done. At the sound of the explosion the naval guard in a near-by house turned out. The petty officer in charge was a great barrel of a man, an old tarpaulin of long service in many parts of the world where opportunities for cultivation of that diplomatic tact, in which the Royal Navy is so accomplished, must have been numerous. In less time than it takes to tell he had the situation well in hand, had paid one dollar compensation for the damage done, had closed the gates, and had nipped an incipient riot in the bud. It was considered unwise to allow a \"matelot\" of such an enquiring mind ashore again, and for the remainder of that destroyer's stay at Kiu Kiang he was confined to his ship.\n\nLate on an afternoon early in January, 1927, as the river water swirled past the hulks under the hard light of the wintry sun, a strange tall man walked down the Bund, accompanied by a number of Chinese dressed in civilian clothes. He wore the collarless buttoned-up jacket, the knee-high black leather boots, and the little leather-peaked brown cap, of one of Borodin's officers. His companions were members of the Revolutionary Kuo Min Tang party. They moved along looking at the houses, at the cross-roads, and at the foreshore, talking and gesticulating. Outside the Consulate they paused to read the pink posters and the green posters. They were planning the organisation of riots, the object of which would be to draw fire from the British sailors guarding the gates. The bodies of a few dead Chinese rioters, shot by the blackguard Imperialists, would provide excellent fuel to inflame still further the feelings of an excited populace; and would at the same time give ammunition for the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 211685,
        "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": 100,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "75\n\nhad developed to a point where Borodin and the other Russian advisers found it expedient to depart hurriedly overland for Russia.\n\nIn Kiu Kiang, though situated in between these centres of disturbance, the local tension eased and we returned to the shore in April; it was not, however, until the end of the year that the British authorities considered conditions sufficiently stable to justify the return of the women and children who had been evacuated.\n\nKiu Kiang is a small, relatively unimportant place: the interest in the change of the status of the Concession lay rather in the new precedents set than in the local readjustments. A Chinese Commissioner was appointed to supervise the various municipal services, and if the change resulted in the removal of a long-felt grievance in the alleged loss of sovereignty, the advantage outbalanced such small inconveniences as the fact that the drains smelt a bit more, the police force was a little less efficient, and the number of clerks in the municipal office increased five-fold.\n\nThe political disputes in the ranks of the Kuo Min Tang party before the end of the year brought about no less than three changes of the official appointed to administer the Kiu Kiang Concession; and each change also involved a complete displacement of the municipal staff and police, as the new man always had his own henchmen to provide for. In one instance the departing official went in such fear of his life that he applied for a safe-conduct on a British gunboat and hurriedly left for Shanghai.\n\nIn August revolt broke out in the Revolutionary Army in Nanchang, a hundred miles south of Kiu Kiang. Two divisions under Generals Yeh Ting and Ho Lung mutinied and marched south to establish a communist state on the borders of Kiangsi and Hunan provinces. These communist forces, while guilty of the grossest cruelty to any rich Chinese \"capitalists\" they might catch, were able to attract the support of the poor, and more particularly of the landless peasantry to whom the communist policy of agrarian reform greatly appealed.\n\nConsequences of importance to the future of China flowed from these events. In the first place Chiang Kai Shek looked more and more for his support to the wealthy Chinese merchants and bankers of Shanghai.\n\nIn the second place, the seeds were then planted of the irreconcilable",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    }
]