[
    {
        "id": 205060,
        "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": 16,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "REGIONAL APPROACH TO CHINESE HISTORY\n\n11\n\nThirdly, historians have tended to think of recent Chinese history largely in terms of the \"impact of the West\", forgetting that for most Chinese the foreigner and his activities were of little real importance. They may have been important to Peking and to some members of the bureaucracy in certain areas of the empire, but the barbarian and his doings could not have loomed large in the day-to-day life of the average Chinese villager or even the average Chinese official. Yet most studies of nineteenth-century Chinese history have been concerned with the Opium Wars, the \"scramble for concessions\", the Boxer Uprising, the impact of Western thought on Chinese intellectual history. Even the Taiping Rebellion has been thought of largely in terms of its Christian origins and its impact on Sino-Western relations and little has been done, until recently, to treat it as a Chinese phenomenon, which ultimately it was. But what relevance did all this have for the fisherman in his junk off Lantau or the peasant farmer in Szechuan?\n\nIf there is any validity to the above comments about distortions in Chinese history, it may be that a useful corrective device would be a regional approach to Chinese history. We might be able to gain a better insight into the life and times of nineteenth-century China, for example, by limiting the scope of our studies to cohesive geographic and cultural areas. This would tend to neutralize the all-China, or north-China bias. It would put the impact of the West in its proper perspective. Above all, it might provide answers to the questions raised at the very beginning of this paper: for the person living at a given place and at a given time, what was really “going on”?\n\nAs an experiment, I have chosen the Hong Kong-Macao-Canton area of south China. This has the advantage of being comparatively small and relatively homogeneous in terms of language, culture, and economic base. Its people were aware of their regional cohesiveness, especially in comparison to outside-province people, though even within this area there were racial and linguistic differences. I have limited my study, more or less, to the first half of the nineteenth century.\n\nPolitically, the area approximated the territory included in the hsien,3 or districts, which occupied both sides of the Canton River estuary. The districts constituted about two-thirds of the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
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    },
    {
        "id": 207376,
        "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-1975",
        "page_number": 144,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "136\n\nRICHARD J. SMITH\n\n46 See K. A. Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, History of Chinese Society, Liao (907-1125) (Philadelphia, 1949), 8-10; also Igor de Rachewiltz, “Yeh-lü Ch'u-ts'ai (1189-1243); Buddhist Idealist and Confucian Statesman\" in Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett, Confucian Personalities (Stanford, 1962).\n\n47 Wittfogel and Feng, 9.\n\n48 See Herbert Franke, \"Sino-Western Contacts under the Mongol Empire,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 6 (1966), 52.\n\n49 Kuwabara, 96-99.\n\n50 See Henry Serruys, \"Mongols Ennobled during the Early Ming,” HIAS, 22 (1959); also Serruys, \"Landgrants to the Mongols in China: 1400-1460,” Monumenta Serica, 25 (1966), especially 394. As had been the case with other barbarians in China's past, the use of Mongol and Jurched troops in the Ming could be a liability as well as an asset. See Serruys, \"Sino-Jürched Relations During the Yung-Lo Period (1403-1424),” Göttinger Asiatische Forschungen (Weisbaden, 1955); 67-68, 71.\n\n51 See the summary discussion in Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, The Rise of Modern China (London and Toronto, 1975), 138-139; also George L. Harris, \"The Mission of Matteo Ricci, S.J.: A Case Study of an Effort at Guided Culture Change in China in the Sixteenth Century,” Monumenta Serica, 25 (1966).\n\n52 James B. Parsons, Peasant Rebellions of the Late Ming Dynasty (Tucson, 1970), 129.\n\n53 C. R. Boxer, \"Portuguese Military Expeditions in Aid of the Mings Against the Manchus, 1621-1647,\" T'ien-Hsia Monthly, VII (1938); S. Y. Teng and John K. Fairbank, China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839-1923 (New York, 1970), 13; North-China Herald, January 10, 1852. Boxer, 32, offers the explanation that the expedition was undermined by Cantonese who feared that the Portuguese, if successful, would be granted extended trading rights, while the North-China Herald suggests that when the men reached Nan-ch'ang they were ordered to return because \"the contemptible figure they presented completely disappointed expectation.\" It is probable that each of these interpretations has a measure of validity.\n\n54 Serruys, \"Were the Ming,” 136.\n\n55 Boxer, 35.\n\n56 Wills, Guns, Pepper and Parleys, especially chapter 2; Fu Lo-shu, A Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations (1644-1820) (Tucson, 1966), I: 32-33, 58; Teng and Fairbank, 34.\n\n57 The Ch'ing did, however, ally with the Russians against the Dzungars during the K'ang-hsi period and the Ch'ien-lung emperor did make good use of Western cannon (Hsi-yang p'ao) in his famous campaigns. See, for example, IWSM, TC 9: 30a-b; also Teng and Fairbank, 34; Swisher, 697.\n\n58 See Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, \"Russia's Special Position in China during the Early Ch'ing Period,\" Slavic Review, 13.4 (December, 1964).\n\n59 Chinese Repository 11: 64; Swisher, 98-99.\n\n60 See Masataka Banno, China and the West, 1858-1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), especially 45-53, 207-209; Swisher, 683-697.\n\n61 See, for example, IWSM TC 22: 11b-13b; also Richard J. Smith, \"Foreign-Training and China's Self-Strengthening: The Case of Feng-huang-shan, 1864-1873,” Modern Asian Studies, 10.12 (1976).\n\n62 For the use of this expression (or a variant) as late as the 1890's see WCSL 101: 9 and 129; 16.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
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    },
    {
        "id": 210566,
        "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-1985",
        "page_number": 173,
        "title": "RAS-1985",
        "content_text": "154\n\nWEI PEH TI\n\nteachers and preachers in China. Jane Hunter, in her research on women missionaries of that era, found that women who went to China under the auspices of one of the forty-one American women's missionary boards had come from humbler background than those heading for the settlement houses at home.\" Perhaps that was why Edith had joined the China Inland Mission founded by an Englishman instead of a local Baptist mission. Philadelphia, despite being the seat of the Continental Congress that renounced king and country in 1776, had retained the British mystique. Perhaps it was this snobbish preference for things British that led Edith to the China Inland Mission, which, by that time, had established a recruitment centre in the United States. Apparently both Edith and Louese had toyed with the idea of becoming missionaries while at school. In one of the letters, Edith asked Louese, “Do you remember your desire to be a missionary? Can't you spare one of these darlings (Louese's children) and consecrate one for Foreign Service?”\n\nJ. Hudson Taylor, who had worked in China under the China Evangelization Society during the 1850s, had become concerned that Protestant missionaries were more interested in establishing hospitals and introducing educational and social changes than in spreading the Gospel. He organized the China Inland Mission in London and brought the first group of twenty-four men and women missionaries under its auspices to China in 1866. As the name indicates, work of this organization was to be concentrated in the interior provinces, away from the treaty ports. The centre of the mission was located at Shanghai, with stations in the capital of each province and sub-stations in various towns. Despite hostilities shown by the local populace during the last decades of the nineteenth century and ravages on the missionaries and Chinese Christians during the Boxer Rebellion, the work of the China Inland Mission continued. By the time Edith arrived at Taiho in March 1903, a sub-station of the Anhui Mission at Wuhu, work in the vicinity had already begun. In 1905, there were 828 missionaries working in China under the umbrella of the China Inland Mission.\"\n\nTaiho was a market town at the juncture of the Sha and the Ying Rivers in the northwestern corner of Anhui. Even the most",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 210981,
        "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-1987",
        "page_number": 43,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "18\n\nLes yeux fixés au large et les cheveux au vent Nous nous embarquerons pour la Mer des Ténèbres Avec le coeur joyeux d'un jeune passager.\n\nLL\n\nJust as in the old days we would leave for China Our eyes looking out to sea and our hair streaming in the wind We shall sail henceforward for the Sea of Darkness Cheerful and lighthearted as a young traveller.\n\nThis is a major reversal, from the China ‘trip' into the Sea of Darkness. This is a remarkable and prophetic insight on the part of Baudelaire, a poetic formulation which is most relevant to our present-day intellectual crisis. We shall refer to it again a little later.\n\n—\n\n12\n\nAs the nineteenth century went on, as French political involvement in China and Vietnam became more effective, it was not unusual for French intellectuals to visit China and to empathize with her but always as isolated individuals. Such a one was Father Huc,1 a Catholic missionary whose minority voice, uncertain as it was, insisted on the specific values of Chinese culture and habits. China was a source of inspiration for diplomats posted there, such as Eugene Simon, whose book La Cité chinoise is a minor classic modelled on Fustel de Coulanges's standard essay La Cité grecque, and later Paul Claudel, a young consul in Tianjin, expressing his emotions in Connaissance de l'Est, a collection of poems in the Symbolist manner. French visitors to China included naval officers such as Pierre Loti, who had witnessed approvingly another sack of Peking by Western Allied forces after the Boxer Rebellion, or Victor Segalen, poet and archaeologist. Later still, intellectuals turned into revolutionaries, such as the young André Malraux who was involved in the 1926-27 Communist revolution in Canton, and who drew on this experience for his two major novels, Les Conquérants and La Condition humaine. Huc, Simon, Claudel, Segalen, Loti and Malraux had indeed very little in common except that they were somehow marginal figures on the French intellectual scene of their time. Even for those who were later to achieve international fame, such as Claudel and Malraux, China had not been much more than an",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 211418,
        "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": 134,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "110\n\n mourning for one year. He expressed his hope that Grandfather would marry again.\n\nWhen Uncle learned from Father's letter of 11 February 1900 that Grandfather, Aunt Yim and her husband had been taken to a camp, along with others, for quarantine during the Honolulu Chinatown fire on 20 January, he wrote that he was sorry to receive such news of ill-treatment and discrimination against the Chinese. At the same time, he announced the birth of a son named Ting Kin (Toby), who was growing rapidly and smarter by the day. Uncle sent Aunt and the infant to the village to escape the violence of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. To avoid being accused as a Nge Mow Tsz or being killed, he bought a queue to wear whenever he alighted from his sedan.\n\nThe next letter preserved was dated 22 February 1902, when Uncle wrote from Canton that he had resigned as house surgeon from the Bok Chai Hospital\n\nwhere he had been assisting an American whose name in Chinese was Dr. Kwan. Uncle was not able to save from his salary of 60 dollars a month and he was kept busy night and day taking care of emergency cases, and consequently felt too confined. He thought he would teach physiology and chemistry for two hours a day at the Shi Man School and would start private practice. He also announced the birth of a second child, a daughter named Moo Ching, on 5 February\n\n1902.\n\nWhile still in Canton, he wrote on 21 October 1902 that Grandfather was indeed wise to have chosen a ‘large-footed' girl to be Father's wife, because women in China were beginning to unbind their feet, and that Second Aunt was thinking of doing it also. He stated that Ting Kin was anxiously waiting for the parcel Father was sending him and had asked many times what the gifts would be. Uncle's office was located on 12th Street in Canton. On 9 March 1903, while on board the Rajaburi on the way back to Hong Kong from Singapore via Swatow, Uncle informed Father that he was considering Manila or Honolulu as the next place for him to practise. Butterfield and Swire had retained Uncle and several other physicians to be ship surgeons, but the health authorities of Singapore only allowed ships with Chinese Physicians from the Alice Medical College in Hong Kong to enter the harbour. Uncle was not considered qualified because he only had three years of medical school.",
        "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",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212004,
        "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": 419,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "394\n\nNOTES\n\nSee the map of the Kwangtung coast-line, Chapter 32 of Yuet Tai Kee, Wan Li edition 郭斐粵大記卷三十二\n\nShek Pai Wan is the old name of Aberdeen Harbour or Heung Kong Tsai Wan *** (which in Chinese means Little Hong Kong Harbour).\n\n1 Some of the incense products were sent north to the Provinces of Kiangsu and Chekiang\n\nSee Chapter 3 of Lin Tien-wai and Siu's Articles on the Early History of Hong Kong, the Commercial Press Ltd., Taiwan, R.O.C., 1985.\n\nSee 'The Lime Kilns and Hong Kong's Early Historical Archaeology', Special Session, Volume 7, Journal of the Hong Kong Archaeological Society, 1876-78.\n\n7 See note 1.\n\nIt was said that Hong Kong Tsuen had been robbed by pirates in the time of the Lung Ching Reign in the Ming Dynasty. (See Hui Tei-shan's \"A Brief Research on the History and Geography of Hong Kong and Kowloon\" Chapter 6 of Kwangtung Wen Mu X, 1940).\n\nSee Siu's \"Nam Tau Chai: the Middle Defensive Military Zone of Kwangtung in the Ming Dynasty'' in Essays of Research into Ming-Ching History, Chu Hai College, 1984.\n\n10 The Coastal Evacuation was carried out in the 1st year of the Kang Hsi Reign (1661).\n\nSee the map of the Coastal Defence of Kwangtung, Chapter 3 of the Kwangtung Tung Chi, 1731 edition.\n\nSee Chapter 2 of the San On Yuen Chi, 1819 edition\n\n12 See Chapter 178 of the Kwangtung Tung Chi, 1822 edition.\n\n13 See the Original Gazetteer and Census, May 15th, 1841.\n\n14 See p. 15 of Lai Chun Wai's Hong Kong 100 Years.\n\nThe English name given to Chik Chu is Stanley.\n\n16 Notable political events in China after 1841 were the 2nd Opium War (the Anglo-Chinese War), the Tai Ping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Revolution of 1911 and the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45. These changes assisted the increase of population in Hong Kong. Also, another rapid increase of population occurred because of the change of government in China in 1949.\n\nTAI YU SHAN FROM CHINESE HISTORICAL RECORDS\n\n1 In the past, Tai Yu Shan, known as Tai Hai Shan was also called Tai Kai Shan, Tai Yi Shan Mun Island. It lies to the west of Hong Kong Island. It has an area of 53.55 square miles, and is the largest island in Hong Kong.\n\nThe name 'Tai Hai Shan' first appeared in Chapter 87 of Yu Ti Ji Shing, a book published in the Sung Dynasty. It records,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212717,
        "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": 26,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "The Boxer Rebellion in north China in 1900, which involved the massacre of some western missionaries and a siege of the Legation area in Peking, did not reach as far south as Shanghai, though in his curriculum vitae Mesny mentions 'Volunteered for service at Peking 1900'. Unfortunately, we do not know whether his service was accepted or what he did during that period.\n\nThe Chinese Imperial government survived these rebellions but slowly became even weaker as the years went by. Western nations also took full advantage of Chinese imperial weakness until in 1911 the Revolution overthrew the imperial government and established a very weak republic which, after some further thirty or so years of both inner turmoil and invasion by the Japanese, ended with the Communist victory. Mesny lived through the first eight years of the Republic, and though they were stirring times, he must have had many nostalgic memories of his prowess and success in the Chinese imperial army, particularly in the latter days of the suppression of the Miao rebels, and the time when he was a prisoner of the Taipings, features which make his eye-witness accounts of value today.\n\nMesny lived in a China which followed a predominantly masculine routine. The majority of foreigners were either isolated loners or members of small groups in remote parts of China, or they lived in treaty ports, enclaves in which the relative comfort of 'home', friends, and social occasions made life bearable, even though foreign women tended to live circumscribed and artificial lives. However, his accounts lack such intimate detail of his and his family's lives. Despite the autobiographical notes in the Miscellany, not only in segments but selective in the extreme, Mesny remains somewhat of an elusive person, and, as none of his letters appear to have survived, much of his personal life would seem to be largely irrecoverable. His enigmatic snippets about his Chinese family are such that they do little more than fuel guesswork. We still lack an account of Mesny's private life in his later years, one in which we might hear the voices of his wives and children as clearly as those of the senior officers we have been provided in the Miscellanies, of the senior Chinese officers during the Kueichou campaign.\n\nMuch of the raw material provided by Mesny contains stark, bald statements which leave loose ends and strands which we cannot gather together without straying into the realms of guesswork. Regrettably, there would appear to be little chance of ever satisfying our curiosity from...",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212720,
        "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": 29,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "14\n\nmostly written by himself, which sadly adds little to our overall knowledge.\n\nOne of the problems is dating, not only of his personal life though the general outline is well defined, but also the dates prior to publication when he wrote up the notes and the final narratives. There would appear to be times when flashes of inspired hindsight have been included into episodes of his biography or into his essays on China's recent past, her problems and how they should be solved.\n\nMesny's writings have brought to life again a number of now long forgotten aspects of life in China in the nineteenth century. It was not a China of pagodas, silk, tea and pigtails but one of hostility, dirt, bug-ridden towns and villages, a mass of poverty-stricken peasants and the ever-present threat of early death from disease. We tend to forget or overlook the acceptance as a norm in those days of the complications and tedium caused by time, distance, and poor communications when it took days and even weeks of tiring travel on foot or on the backs of animals to reach the capital of a neighbouring province. Nowadays we also tend to imagine that during Imperial days the peasant population of China was fairly sedentary with little knowledge of much beyond the neighbouring village or the annual district fair. Mesny describes at one point how memories of distant parts of China were brought home to their villages by the many individuals who served with armies suppressing revolts in distant provinces such as Mongolia, Yunnan and Dzungaria [now part of Sinkiang province]; and, for example, how far and wide the Cantonese, as traders, had spread their presence. Mesny also vividly brings alive on a number of occasions the atmosphere in which foreigners, often alone or in very small parties, were out on a limb in far-flung parts of China with ever-increasing xenophobia, and with anti-foreign violence threatening their very lives.\n\nThe Miscellanies contained remarkably few illustrations. All were photographs of people apart from several poorly reproduced photographs in 1905 of astronomical instruments in the Peking Observatory before they were borne off to Germany by the German contingent during the Boxer rebellion in 1900, and one litho in Volume 4 of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, merely recording who it represented. The picture of Chu Yuan-chang in all his ugliness was also reproduced later in 1910 in a small book also printed in Shanghai written by William Kahler, 'Chinese Hotchpotch', accompanying one of the articles reprinted from",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212761,
        "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": 70,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "55\n\non him. Mesny had taken every opportunity to praise Tso and, in good Chinese fashion, looked upon him as his 'protector' or 'patron'.\n\nIn a comparatively brief single-page highlights-only curriculum vitae printed in the Miscellany in 1905, Mesny would appear to have been careful in his choice of words. He used the phrase 'Volunteered for service' not only when he went to Kueichou in 1868, about which he later wrote at length, but also in connexion with 'Manchuria' and 'Peking', the former during the Sino-Japanese War and the latter at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, neither of which has been mentioned elsewhere in the Miscellany. This suggests that he was not taken up on his offers of service, especially as his name does not appear in any of the standard writings on the Boxer era in north China and he does not describe or offer any anecdotes on the subject in his Miscellany.\n\nHis Miscellanies contain a large number of items culled from other works such as Mayer's Chinese Reader's Manual written in Peking in 1874 where Mayers was a Chinese Secretary to HM Legation, and published in Shanghai the same year by the American Presbyterian Mission Press. At one point Mesny claimed that W F Mayers was a friend of his; but reading between the lines one is tempted to see Mesny meeting Mayers over dinner at the Legation in Peking where polite conversation would lead to a discussion on the failure of the Chinese to help build a railway, with Mesny offering advice and suggestions and Mayers, again politely, concurring. This would appear to have been seen by Mesny as Mayers accepting Mesny's ideas and entrusting him with various tasks. Mayers in all probability forgot all about the conversation, but not so Mesny who repeated himself several times in his Miscellanies, explaining how he had offered advice and had been waiting for a follow up from Mayers which never arrived. It is a matter for speculation how often this type of conversation took place, with other parties forgetting, either with or without intent, their talks with Mesny.\n\nMesny periodically advanced oracular statements which in later years would be referred to as 'China-watching'. In 1899 he made several predictions about the 'inadequacies' of the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty and forecast that the end was 'very' nigh with a new reformed China ahead. He also predicted that the Russians for all their implied power would be unable to retain Manchuria against the Japanese who also, Mesny thought, might join up with China making a powerful empire under the Mikado as ruler of the Greater China and Japan. These predictions",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212771,
        "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": 80,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "65\n\n1900 ca 1900\n\n1901 December\n\n1904\n\n1905 Jan/Jun\n\n1907\n\nca 1910/1911\n\n1914 November\n\nca 1914/1915\n\n1914-1919\n\n11 Dec 1919\n\nClaims to have volunteered for service in Peking [Boxer troubles]\n\nMesny visited Nan-chang in Kiangsi where he met Hsiung Shih-fu, a young reformer\n\nInterviewed Viceroy Liu K'un-yı în Nanking.\n\nPublished Mesny's Chinese and English Almannac\n\nPublication of his final volume of his Chinese Miscellany\n\nMost Excellent High Priest in the Keystone Royal Arch Chapter, in Shanghai\n\nHis wife, Han, obtained a legal separation in Shanghai\n\nMesny moved to Hankow\n\nClaims to have passed a medical and then offered his services to the Crown [World War 1]\n\nEmployed by Messrs. Reiss and Co. in Hankow\n\nDied in rue de Paris in Hankow\n\nAppendix C\n\nThe Chinese Imperial Forces\n\nMesny's Involvment in the Suppression of the Miao Revolt\n\nThe First Campaign by Imperial Troops\n\nin Kueichou Province\n\n1868-1871\n\nand\n\nOrder of Battle of the Szechuan Force\n\nChinese Imperial Forces, with the aid of a number of foreigners and foreign arms, had by 1864 succeeded in suppressing the Taiping rebellion against the dynasty. They then turned to liquidating the other rebellions seething in various parts of China which included the Nien movement in northern China, the Moslem minority revolt in Yunnan province, another major Moslem uprising in the North-west, and finally the Miao aboriginal tribes which had revolted in Kueichou province.\n\nThe Miao, or Miao-tzu as Mesny refers to them, rose against the Ch'ing dynasty Manchu rulers of China in 1854 after discontent reached boiling point due not only to Chinese settlers colonising the best lands in the low lying areas of the province of Kueichou, but also to the exploitation of the Miao by Chinese officials and merchants. According to Mesny the passionate and untamed Miao gradually took back almost the whole province apart from the capital, Kuei-yang Fu, and the city",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 213905,
        "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-1996",
        "page_number": 257,
        "title": "RAS-1996",
        "content_text": "231\n\nTHE HAN LIN ACADEMY AND A CHINESE DEITY\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nThe Chinese Imperial Academy, Han Lin Yuan E, known to foreigners as the College of Literature or the Academy of the Forest of Pencils, was founded ca. 8th century AD and at any one time contained about five hundred of the most brilliant scholars of the Empire selected from the highest graduates at the national triennial examinations. Martin in his Lore of Cathay explained that those selected were in practice Chin-shih graduates who could pass a further examination called tien-shihPC, the palace examination. Their role was the advancement of learning generally, and included compiling dynastic histories, drafting and drawing up decrees, composing prayers for ceremonial occasions, drawing up patents for nobility and proposing posthumous titles for deceased emperors. They were, ex-officio, Imperial counsellors. The Academy also contained the Great Encyclopaedia of the Yung Lo emperor.\n\nThe Han Lin Academy formerly stood on the site which, in 1900 after the Boxer rebellion, became part of the extended British Legation. It had consisted of some twenty to twenty-five separate halls and was utterly destroyed in June 1900 by the Kansu Muslim soldiers of the Chinese provincial military force accompanying the Boxers, and commanded by General Tung Fu-hsiang1, in their attempt to burn down the besieged British Legation during the Boxer troubles. They only failed because the wind suddenly veered, saving the legation whilst the Academy was burnt to the ground.\n\nAdmission to the body was the highest literary honour obtainable by a Chinese scholar. Much has been written about the academic aspirations of individual Chinese down the ages and here we shall simply note the three degrees qualified at state examinations during dynastic times. They were the hsiu-ts'aiA, the county level examination which foreigners equate to the bachelor's degree, the chu-jenA, the provincial degree equated to the master's degree, and finally the chin-shih, the advanced scholar, at the national level triennial examinations, equated to the PhD. The one who passed out top of all in a year was known as chuang-yuan, the First Scholar of the Empire.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214369,
        "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": 227,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "193\n\nThese communist iconoclastic campaigns are by no means unique in Chinese history. Over the centuries one or other of the beliefs have found favour at the expense of others, temples have been razed, religious communities dispersed and images destroyed. Within the past century and a half we have seen the Taiping Rebellion of the mid 19th century which covered much of central-southern China; the Boxer Rebellion of the turn of the century in northern China; and the nationwide Anti-Superstition Campaign of the Republican Kuomintang in the late 1920s, all of which destroyed temples and their contents. From an historic preservation point of view it is worth recalling that temples within the two foreign colonies at the mouth of the Pearl River, held by Portugal and Britain, remained unscathed during these years and, in Macau for instance, some of the images and temples date back three to four hundred years.\n\nWe look forward then with great interest to see what will happen in the future to the urban and rural temples and shrines in Hong Kong and Macau. They are sure to survive though I have a horrible suspicion that sooner or later they might be converted to electronic devices.\n\nNOTES\n\nIt is not difficult to see how the confusion rose in Chinese minds. During the 19th and early 20th centuries Catholic and Protestant missionaries rarely co-operated and, in many places, actually denounced the other as heterodox. Also, the Catholic priests, berobed bachelors, with prayers and chants in a dead language, with church images and incense, were sufficiently similar to the Buddhists for the Chinese to empathise. Protestant missionaries on the other hand tended to be married and live isolated from their parishioners; they dressed either as pseudo-Chinese or in dark heavy western suits, and lived frugally whilst preaching of hell fire and damnation. To the Chinese these were two entirely separate religions.\n\nIf we take as a very rough estimate 6,000 temples in present day Taiwan where religious freedom is permitted and temples have been flourishing, then the figure of 20,000 in the coastal province in mainland China opposite to Taiwan across the Straits must include every possible shrine, never mind how small.\n\n3 I have to thank Professor K Dean of McGill University for this observation.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214971,
        "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-2000",
        "page_number": 67,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "23\n\nsuperpowers of that time, incessantly challenging one another, and by the Belgian, German and other colonial regimes soon following exactly in the pioneers' footsteps. All of them were hypnotised by China's reported wealth, by the trade of Central Asia and Tibet, and Szechuan was the key to Tibet. All were active in corrupting the declining Manchu regime, thus receiving multiple concessions as a reward, one of them being the privileges for Christian missionaries to preach their faith all over China. French endeavours made Szechuan into the main bastion of Roman Catholicism and the reservoir of missionaries to convert further regions of Central Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. These events, which resulted in a series of anti-European and anti-Christian riots and culminated in the Boxer Rebellion (1900), are well described in Chapter Five of The Crippled Tree (volume one of the aforementioned epic cycle):\n\nTheir [i.e. the French priests'] courage and ability to endure hardship might have been praiseworthy had it not been only too clear that the religious garb covered most unreligious actions. Catholic priests and bishops bought up whole villages in times of flood and famine, demanded and obtained on threat of military action the best land in cities for their churches, after evicting the inhabitants and paying no compensation. Catholic priests formed militia bands of their own, and claimed to rank higher than our own magistrates. Bishops were invested with the pomp and power of governor-generals. They used sedan chairs with eight carriers, a drummer going in front, and everyone in the street where they passed had to stop work, stand up, and unroll their headbands in obeisance to the Catholic bishop, on pain of being beaten with the heavy bamboo.\n\nThe Boxer Rebellion marked the end of the feudal epoch and announced an approach of an unpredictable Great Change. In the Boxer Protocol of 1901, imposed after the defeat, China had to pay an enormous indemnity sum of five hundred million dollars, open more ports and cities, accept a permanent garrison of soldiers in Peking and other towns and along the existing railways. Moreover, the Boxer Protocol abolished the Imperial Examinations, an inevitable part of recruiting imperial administration and training classical Chinese scholars. This reform prepared the way for the long awaited New Learning, i.e. for finally educating young people in Western science and technology, until then almost unknown in China. New Learning",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214972,
        "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-2000",
        "page_number": 68,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "24\n\npromised quick liberation from technological backwardness of China and consequently from the dependence on non-altruistic foreign assistance, or so at least hoped young, aware, fierce and idealistic Chinese patriots of the mandarin origin, Han Suyin's father, Chou Yentung, among them. Belonging to the upper class of the Old China's society, a scholarship was rather easily granted to him by the provincial government of Szechuan to study railway engineering in Belgium. He spent ten long years in Brussels (1903-1913), studying and working, and there he met his future wife, Marguerite Denis, and eventually married her in 1908. In Chapter One of The Crippled Tree Han Suyin briefly comments:\n\nWe are all products of our time, vulnerable to history. I was born because there had been, in China, a Boxer Rebellion (as the Europeans called it) in 1900, and because of this event, which the Chinese call the Uprising of the Righteous Fists, my Chinese father, instead of becoming a classical scholar, perhaps a Hanlin Academician, married my Belgian mother.\n\nRe-settlement of the Chou family from Belgium to China was a great disillusionment for both, Marguerite Denis and her young Chinese engineer husband. At that time (which - unfortunately enough - would end with the Communist Revolution only) Chinese were treated in their own motherland as citizens of the second category, by definition inferior to the whites. Han Suyin's great epic cycle on autobiography/history of China gives multiple examples to prove this abhorring and painful truth. The return trip alone was a bitter humiliation for the couple travelling such an enormously long way to the Chinese homeland with their first-born son. In Chapter Eighteen of The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin quotes fragments of her father's memoirs, which describe some details of that event:\n\nWhen we went to collect the tickets [for the English boat], the man in the booking office (tall, blond, low-voiced) said to Marguerite: \"But, madame, you can go in first class if you wish, but not monsieur. It is the rule.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Marguerite, astonished, \"but he is my husband. Of course I shall go with him.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
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    },
    {
        "id": 216419,
        "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-2003",
        "page_number": 178,
        "title": "RAS-2003",
        "content_text": "128\n\nimmediately led to political intervention by Russia, France and Germany which forced Japan to give way and retrocede Liaodong to China. This high-handed action by Western powers left a permanent scar on the Japanese psyche.\n\nIn the last years of the 19th century, as a result of Russian forward policy in the Far East, Russian pressure had forced the Chinese to grant them railway and territorial concessions in the southern part of Manchuria. This, as well as Russian interference in Korea, led to ever increasing Japanese fears of further Russian expansion within the Pacific region. The Russian Government used the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 as a pretext for sending thousands of troops into Manchuria, ostensibly to protect the China Eastern Railway. Her encroachment in Manchuria, which she had promised to evacuate after having occupied it on the pretext of protecting it against the Boxers but which she firmly held, disturbed the Powers.\n\nThe causes of war were not insignificant. During the years immediately following the suppression of the Boxers Russia saw an increasingly formidable Japan rise up before her. Put bluntly, Russia and Japan went to war to determine who would control Manchuria and Korea, with one of the main Japanese grounds being fear generated by the threat posed by the land-bridge of Korea pointing threateningly straight at Japan, with the belligerent Russians poised on Korea's northern border. Another, and possibly a more credible threat, was the probability that a strong, victorious Russia would lead to the dismemberment of the Chinese Empire. This would have made a case for Japan's 'defensive war' - to occupy Port Arthur in order to place herself in a position to prevent any such dismemberment by laying the first stone in her long-term plan for predominance in Peking.\n\nThe war 1904-1905\n\nAfter several years of Russian-Japanese political sparring the latter grew impatient with diplomacy and war became inevitable. The Japanese took the initiative. Their plan envisaged a swift knock-out blow against the Russian Far Eastern Fleet with a night torpedo-boat attack, followed the next day by her fleet attacking the Russian fleet off Port Arthur and defeating it. Their next move was to get two armies into the field, the first to be landed on the west coast of Korea at",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390",
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]