[
    {
        "id": 206913,
        "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-1973",
        "page_number": 190,
        "title": "RAS-1973",
        "content_text": "184\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nHowever, Mr. da Silva has much to offer us, and I hope will go on to develop his earlier work, taking further, among other good things, his interesting study of the terms used in agriculture and land use, extending them into the other dialects of the area in which some at least may have originated, and developing their connection with the cosmology of the peasant universe. I hope, too, that he will return to Hong Kong to trace for us the continued process of erosion of the traditional coastal pattern of life in a South Chinese island.*\n\nHong Kong. March 1974.\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\n* Interested readers may wish to know that Mr. da Silva wrote on the Fan Lau fort (on Lantau) in the 1968 Journal, and some notes on Ethno-botany in the 1969 issue.\n\nVILLAGE AND BUREAUCRACY IN SOUTHERN SUNG CHINA. Brian E. McKnight, University of Chicago Press, 1971, pp. xi, 219.\n\nAs its title indicates, this book is concerned with local administration in Sung China. Using the Sung Hui Yao Chi Kao, an official repository of imperial documents, and the collected papers of Sung officials, annalistic histories, local gazetteers and other miscellaneous works, Dr. McKnight describes the structure and staffing of village administration in this period. These sources enable him to recreate an otherwise little known aspect of Sung times; government at the village and sub-prefectural (hsien) level.\n\nLocal administration in the Southern Sung was carried out by employing local residents; at first by obliging members of higher-class families to serve for limited periods and, by the end of the dynasty, by employing persons for long periods. The latter were often professionals paid either by individual families or from the income of endowed estates and chosen from among the clerks in the local government offices.\n\nThe author provides a useful preface that deals with his sources and their limitations, and an introduction that places the governmental and social aspects of the Southern Sung period in the perspective of earlier practice and later developments. Besides any",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r",
        "rank": 0
    }
]