[ { "id": 204260, "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-1961", "page_number": 28, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n25\n\nMunia is a fairly common resident, especially in the New Territories, but it is hard to say how successful it is at nesting, for it tends to build several nests before eventually raising a brood. The Chestnut Munia, a handsome black and chestnut bird, is often found in quite large flocks in Mai Po marshes in autumn and some may be seen all the year round there, but it has never yet nested as far as we know,\n\nThe above is a very brief summary of birds that are likely to be seen in Hong Kong during the year. If readers would like to know more about them, they might first of all join the Hong Kong Bird-Watching Society. By doing so, they can get into contact with its fifty or so members, and will be able to join them on frequent expeditions to various parts of the Colony. They will also receive a copy of the Society's Annual Report and will be able to borrow books from its increasingly important and comprehensive bird library. Unfortunately the local bird-books, such as they are, are out-of-print and the ones covering neighbouring countries are expensive, especially if one considers how few of Hong Kong's birds each one covers. But three books in particular may be recommended in that between them they have pictures and notes on about 275 of our birds, besides unillustrated notes on a few more.\n\nThese are:\n\nR. T. Peterson, G. Mountfort and A. D. Hollom. Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe. Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin, 1954\n\nK. Kobayashi. Birds of Japan. Osaka, Hoikushi, 1956\n\nB. E. Smythies. Birds of Burma. London, Oliver and Boyd, 1940\n\nAll these and many more are available from the Society's library. A new 'Check-list of the Birds of Hong Kong' is due for publication later in 1960 and will contain notes on the status and distribution in the Colony of every species so far recorded here.\n\nDuring the last three years or so, members of the Bird-Watching Society have noted several problems of bird-life in Hong Kong, which, though not particularly difficult, are puzzling because of conflicting or incomplete evidence. I should like to end this article with a few examples, so that bird-watchers who feel so inclined can go out armed with an objective.\n\n(a) Does the Peregrine nest in Hong Kong? It may be seen occasionally all the year round. If so, where? Lion Rock, Sharp Peak or perhaps Tai Tan Yang are possibilities.\n\n(b) What are the curious little rails or crakes which are flushed every autumn by snipe-shooters in the marshes? One is not allowed to shoot them and they are only seen briefly in flight,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204646, "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-1963", "page_number": 127, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "114 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nwith Howqua, the great Canton hong merchant, until 1861 and were also associated with Baring Brothers, the London bankers, shows that the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company was far from being a purely American concern. The initiative in its formation and its success, however, was almost entirely due to the determination and ability of the Shanghai heads of Russell and Company, and in particular to Edward Cunningham, the firm's managing partner in Shanghai in the vital years of 1862, 63, and '64.\n\nBecause of American influence in the early days, and the similarity between navigational problems on the Mississippi and on the Yangtse, the luxurious river steamers which plied on the Lower and Middle Yangtse during the heyday of foreign trade were very similar to the Mississippi steamers of Mark Twain's day. They had the same tall, narrow funnel, and the long promenade deck extending almost the whole length of the ship, which Hollywood has made so familiar. At the forward end of this deck was the dining saloon, and at the after end the lounge. Both of these were elegantly, and even ornately furnished, the entrance to the lounge being flanked with potted shrubs leading to a wide stairway down to the lower deck. The best cabins were on the promenade deck. Unfortunately no one with Mark Twain's genius has written a ‘Life on the Yangtse' to match his Life on the Mississippi, an omission now very unlikely to be repaired.\n\nIn his journey up the Yangtse and overland to Burma in 1874, which was to end in his tragic murder, A. R. Margary travelled from Shanghai to Hankow by the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company's Hirado.\" Margary described his cabin as large and airy, and the Hirado as a wonderful structure and not like a ship at all. She had a tall narrow funnel in front of each paddle box, tier upon tier of cabins built on the smallest possible hull, and the general appearance of a gaudy palace of pleasure full of windows and terraces floating upon the water. Margary continued by mandarin boat10 to Yochow, and then across the Tungting Lake and by the Yuan River to the border of Kweichow, and then completed his\n\n10\n\n\"The Hirado was one of the largest steamers on the river at this time, being of 1,294 gross tons. She had been built in America for Dent and Company in 1866, and sold by them to the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company in 1867.\n\n10 A long, narrow junk divided into 5 or 6 compartments.\n\n1", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204648, "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-1963", "page_number": 129, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "NAVIGATION ON THE YANGTSE\n\n115\n\njourney by chair. He was the first Englishman to travel by this route, which it was hoped would develop into an important trade route from Upper Burma and West China.\n\nIn 1872 John Swire of London formed the China Navigation Company to trade on the Yangtse, and started by purchasing the two steamers of the Union Steam Navigation Company, following this up a year later with three ships of their own specially built on the Clyde. In this same year of 1873 the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company was formed, a Chinese company partly under government control and direction. This company purchased the steamers of the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company in 1877, and so became the owners of the largest river fleet. A few years later Jardine returned to the Yangtse with the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company, and by the early 1880's the greater part of the Yangtse trade was shared between these three companies: the China Navigation Company, the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, and the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company.\n\nThe formation of the China Navigation Company in 1872 was a logical development from that of the Blue Funnel Line by Alfred Holt in 1866. Alfred Holt and John Swire were close friends and business associates, and when the latter opened an eastern branch of his company in Shanghai he took over the agency of the Blue Funnel Line ships. One reason behind the formation of the China Navigation Company was to provide cargoes for the Blue Funnel ships to and from the Yangtse. Alfred Holt was unwilling to operate ships so far from his personal control, but was willing to support the Swire enterprise. The inauguration of the Blue Funnel Service to the Far East, the opening of a Far Eastern branch of John Swire and Company in Shanghai in the same year, and the formation of the China Navigation Company six years later, meant the introduction of a new and powerful combination to the China coast. Holt and Swire, in association with the Clyde shipbuilding family of Scott, were soon to play a very important part in the China trade, and in the shipping of the whole of the Far East. Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Japan, and Australia, were all to come within their orbit before many years had passed.\n\nIn 1881 the various shipping interests of Jardine were merged into the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company, of which Jardine were made permanent managers. For a list of the main shipping companies plying on the Yangtze see Appendix on p. 130.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204652, "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-1963", "page_number": 133, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "NAVIGATION ON THE YANGTSE \n\n119 \n\nThe restriction about navigation beyond Ichang was abolished after the Sino-Japanese War by the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, and three years later the indefatigable Little had the satisfaction of taking his Leechuan from Ichang up to Chungking, the first steamer to navigate the Upper Yangtse. The Leechuan was a twin screw, wooden, steam launch only fifty-five feet long, and too small to carry any cargo. Little acted as his own captain and chief engineer, and the Leechuan had to be pulled up the strongest of the rapids by trackers. Two years later, however, a larger paddle steamer Pioneer, built by Little and a group of associates, made the first commercial passage to Chungking. The Pioneer was built by Denny of Dumbarton, and was 180 feet long, 60 feet beam over the paddle boxes, and had a draft of 6 feet. She carried 150 tons of cargo and many deck passengers, and took seven days between Ichang and Chungking on her first trip. There is a photograph of her in Gleanings from Fifty Years in China by Archibald Little (Philadelphia, 1908), p. 141. Shortly afterwards the Pioneer was commandeered by the British government to bring British subjects down the Yangtse during the Boxer troubles, and she finished her career as H.M.S. Kinshi, the headquarters ship of the Senior British Naval Officer on the Yangtse.\n\nIn that same year of 1900 the British river gunboat Woodlark, which was 145 feet long, by 23 feet beam, but had a draft of only 3 feet, also reached Chungking, and in the following year Woodlark and her sister ship Woodcock reached Sui Fu, 100 miles beyond Chungking. It was in the December of that year that the first of many serious accidents occurred on the Upper Yangtse, when the German steamer Suichsiang went on the rocks at the Tungling Rapids, 36 miles above Ichang, and was a total loss.\n\nThe Yangtse has its source in Tibet, not far from the headwaters of the Yellow, Mekong, Salween, and Irawaddy Rivers. When this became known to Europeans it became the ambition of many travellers to go up the Yangtse as far as possible, and then to cross over the Himalayas into Burma or India. This journey had a fascination for Europeans very similar to that exercised by the Nile and Niger over their fathers and grandfathers. The naval expedition of 1861, which went up the river as far as Yochow, landed three Englishmen there who intended to follow the river to its source in Tibet, and then cross over the Himalayas into India. Captain Blakiston, Lieutenant Saral, and Doctor Barton of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205012, "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-1965", "page_number": 120, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n111\n\n-\n\nASIAN PERSPECTIVES: The Bulletin of the Far-Eastern Pre-history Association, Vol. VII, No. 1-2 (Summer-Winter 1963), Hong Kong University Press, 1965.\n\nThe 1963 issue of Asian Perspectives comprises the following four parts:\n\n1. Regional Reports\n\nThe achievements of archaeology, mostly up to the end of 1962, are discussed by the area specialists of the Far Eastern Prehistory Association for fourteen regions. These are: Eastern Asia and Oceania (W. G. Solheim II), Northeast Asia (C. S. Chard), Korea (Kim Won-yong), Hong Kong (S. G. Davis), Union of Burma (U Aung Thaw), India (B. B. Lal), Ceylon (P. E. P. Deraniyagala), Madagascar (P. Vérin), Malaysian Borneo (B. Harrisson), Philippines (A. E. Evangelista), Polynesia (Y. H. Sinoto), New Zealand (O. Wilkes), Melanesia (R. Shutler Jr.), Australia (F. D. McCarthy).\n\nEach report is accompanied by a valuable extensive bibliography. Editor Wilhelm G. Solheim II informs the reader that China and Japan are absent because these two countries have too many news items. This issue of Asian Perspectives for the first time covers India, Pakistan (in the section \"Notes and Articles\") and Ceylon.\n\nII. Topical Reports\n\nAn outstanding contribution in this section is a bibliography by M. E. Barker on \"Linguistics\" up to the end of 1962, which also includes unpublished manuscripts.\n\nIII. Notes and Articles\n\nA very remarkable report by Erika Kaneko on the archaeological survey of several of the Ryukyu islands in 1962 sheds new light on the present archaeological situation and on megalithic structures there (pp. 113-137). B. B. Lal's article (pp. 144-159) draws a comprehensive picture of \"A Decade of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology in India, 1951-1960.\" A. P. Khatri reports on field work during 1959-60, which, though it failed in its main object to discover fossil man's bones in India, brought\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205133, "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": 89, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "84\n\nHOLMES WELCH\n\nTT\n\nalso Mahayanists, to have a close relationship. The same did not apply to the Theravadins of Southeast Asia of Burma, Ceylon, Thailand, and Indo-China. Not only did they have a different kind of Buddhism (which many of them regarded as \"pure\" in contrast to the \"corrupt\" Mahayana), but there was a much greater language barrier than between China and Japan, which both used the same ideograms. Until Dharmapala's abortive visit to Shanghai in 1893, there had been virtually no contact between Chinese and Theravada Buddhists for many hundreds of years.\n\nIt was therefore a significant event when in 1930 Huang Mao-lin (Wong Mou-lam) was sent to Ceylon by the Pure Karma Association in Shanghai. His mission was to study Theravada and explain Mahayana or, as we might say today, to start a dialogue. In 1934 the Ceylonese bhikkhus Soma and Kheminda returned his visit. Unfortunately when they reached Shanghai they found no facilities for study and went on to Japan. Nonetheless, during their brief stay they spoke on the Buddhist radio station, XMHB, and met many Chinese devotees. They were followed the next year by Narada, another bhikkhu from the same temple (that is, the Vajirarama in Colombo). Narada visited Shanghai, Hangchow, Soochow, Hankow, and had a meeting with T'ai-hsü. In 1946 Soma and Kheminda again went to China, this time accompanied by Pannasiha, to start a Pali college in Sian at T'ai-hsü's invitation. When they arrived they found that the civil war had broken out in Shensi and that Sian was inaccessible. After spending three months in Shanghai they returned to Ceylon.\n\nWhereas Asian Buddhist visitors to China came mostly from Ceylon, Chinese Buddhists went not only to Ceylon, but to Thailand, Burma, India, and Indo-China. Usually they went as pilgrims or for re-ordination or to minister to the overseas Chinese, but sometimes their purpose was to study the Pali language and Theravada doctrine. This did not always work out too well.\n\nIn December 1935 four Chinese monks left for such study in Thailand, where they were welcomed by the Supreme Patriarch and lodged in a royal temple.33 Shortly thereafter five other monks were sent to Ceylon, where they received a Theravada", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205288, "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-1967", "page_number": 50, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "EXPANSION AND EXTENSION IN HAKKA SOCIETY\n\n43\n\nHalf-way up the valley Plum Grove Village (Mui Tsz Lam) climbs the lower slopes of a cone-shaped mountain peak, overlooking a widening stretch of land. No flat land is to be found here and farming takes place on stone terraces built on the slopes. There is plenty of water, running down the hillsides in small brooks. The third and uppermost settlement is another composite one, Grass Field Village (Mau Ping). It comprises three hamlets and some isolated houses. The valley ends in a bowl-shaped area, and the settlement is spread around on three steep sides. Farming is done entirely on stone terraces. Parts of this bowl are densely forested.\n\nRice production is a prominent feature of the valley. The irrigated fields are double-cropped but the yield is and has, within living memory, never been sufficient to cover the local consumption. It seems that even in a good year the basic food supply would last only for about seven months. Small holdings are characteristic of this valley. Bad soil and lack of arable land limit the possibilities of agricultural expansion, together with the frequent and serious damage caused to crops by typhoons. The torrents of rain accompanying the storms sometimes flood the whole area. The water carries away fertilizers and soil. On the other hand, the crops, especially the first, are exposed to periods of drought since, however well-watered the valley is, people find it extremely difficult to make use of the supply. There is a constant want of rain-water as the fields are often too far away from the brooks. The main stream pursues its way in a deep ravine and is hardly of any use at all, whilst its mouth is, as mentioned, filled with salt water during high tide. The hillsides are steep and the run-off of water is rapid.\n\nIn earlier days the rice produced in the village was consumed on the spot. According to the rice merchants in the market towns the quality of the grain from this mountain area is as good as any from the New Territories' plains. When rice mills operating in the Sai Kung and Sha Tin markets after the Pacific War (1941-45) started an exchange system, the villagers were presented with a new alternative. They could transport their high-quality rice crop to the market and there exchange it for inferior broken polished rice, generally imported from Burma or Thailand. This is now usually done, and on a 'picul for picul' system;", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205784, "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-1969", "page_number": 90, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "84 \n\nR. BRUCE \n\nlost Java and gained Singapore for a reluctant Company, and Malacca followed. Siam was eventually drawn into the picture not for her trade or her position on the way to China \n\na little \n\noff the route -- but, in fact, because of Kedah and the other northern Malay States. \n\nBy 1818 the Chakri dynasty had gained sufficient strength to instigate her vassal Kedah to attack the neighbouring Malay State of Perak. The Siamese army then entered Kedah itself and the Sultan fled to Penang. British merchants there were indignant and called on the Company to intervene, but the Supreme Council in Calcutta considered that \"a war with Siam would be an evil of very serious magnitude\". Their policy was one of conciliation. \"All extension of our territorial possessions and political relations on the side of the Indo-Chinese nations\" the Company declared, \"... is earnestly to be deprecated and declined as far as the course of events and the force of circumstances permit\". \n\nAs well as the Malay States there was the Burma question. The restive Burmese had extended their power to Arakan, thus making them neighbours of the British in India. By the eighteen-twenties Britain became involved in war with Burma in the southern part of the country. With the extension of the East India Company's interests to Siam's western and southern borders it became desirable that relations between the Company and Bangkok should be regulated on a peaceful basis. At the same time trading relations should be improved. The bad conditions of trade were described by Raffles as \"slavish and humiliating” for English merchants. He gave this account of the trade: \n\n“On arrival in port the most valuable part of the cargo is immediately presented to the King who takes as much as he pleases; the remaining part is chiefly consumed in presents to the courtiers and other great men, while the refuse of the cargo is then permitted to be exposed to sale. The part which is consumed in presents to the great men is entire loss; for that which the King receives he generally returns a present which is seldom adequate to the value of the goods which he has received; but by dint of begging and repeated solicitation this is sometimes increased a little.\" \n\nTo remedy the situation John Crawford was sent to Bangkok by the Governor General of India in 1822. \n\nPage 90\n\nPage 91", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206488, "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-1972", "page_number": 36, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "30\n\nLEIGH R. WRIGHT\n\nentered the Borneo scene in 1839 very much the idealist-humani-tarian, nineteenth century liberal, gentleman adventurer, in the colonial tradition of such forerunners as Francis Light of Penang and Thomas Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore and sometime British governor of Java. Even much of the colour and romance painted by the early travellers and story writers bears up under the careful scrutiny of the historian.\n\nJames Brooke came from stock which had produced a seven-teenth century lord mayor of London. His father and uncle were civil servants in the East India Company, and James lived until aged 12 near Benares on the Ganges in British India where he was born in 1803.\n\nBrooke himself entered the military service of the Company after a somewhat indifferent education which involved only two years of formal schooling in the Norwich Grammar School. He was severely wounded in a campaign of the first Anglo-Burma war in 1825, and after a prolonged convalescence resigned from the Company, largely, we are led to believe, because of disenchantment with its conduct of eastern affairs and because of widespread corruption among Company servants.\n\nWhen in 1835 Brooke's father, then a retired nabob living in Bath, died leaving him a comfortable fortune of £30,000, James bought a schooner and fitted out an expedition to Borneo and the Celebes Islands, an area in the East Indies with which he was familiar from earlier voyages and from exhaustive reading of the accounts of George Windsor Earl and Stamford Raffles.\n\nBrooke's schooner sailed in December 1838 under the colours of the Royal Yacht Club. He looked forward to satisfying his adventurous curiosity about Borneo and perhaps doing some trading. He particularly wanted to penetrate to the interior of Borneo, and had in mind exploring up the rivers which flowed into Marudu Bay, on the northern end of the island. He was a private voyager, but the colours of the Royal Yacht Club commanded respect in naval and colonial circles and he was well received in Singapore where he arrived in May 1839.\n\nI\n\nThere he was given a pseudo-official mission to perform in Borneo. Several Singapore-based vessels had recently been ship-wrecked or plundered by Bornean pirates and their crews sold into", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206775, "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": 52, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "46 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nsteamships in India operated on the Hoogly in the early 1820s, mainly as tug boats. \n\nThe first steamship in the Dutch East Indies was the Van der Capellen, a paddle steamer of 230 tons, designed to operate a coastal service in Java. The Van der Capellen was built by a consortium of British merchants in Sourabaya in 1825, and equipped with engines built by Fawcett and Company of Birmingham. \n\nDue to the close association between British India and Canton through the East India Company, it was not long before steamships were introduced on the Canton River. Although he did not live to see his scheme carried through, a Mr. T. J. Robarts of the Company's Canton staff is the pioneer of steam navigation in China. When on leave in London in 1821, just nine years after the Comet was launched on the Clyde, he suggested to the Court of Directors that a steam tug could be usefully employed on the Canton River. Because it was thought that the Chinese might object, his scheme was turned down, but Mr. Robarts decided to go ahead on his own. He ordered two 16 horse-power engines and a copper boiler from Henry Maudslay and Company of London, and a hull of oak frames; all of which arrived at Canton in 1822 and aroused great curiosity and admiration. Unfortunately, bad health caused Mr. Robarts to retire prematurely, and there was no one at Canton able, or willing to continue with his scheme. Everything was therefore sent to Calcutta, and arrived there in June 1822. \n\nThe parts were assembled at Kyd and Company's yard at Kidderpore, and the vessel, known as the Diana, was launched on 12th July 1823. However, the original oak hull was discarded in favour of a new hull built locally of teak. The name Diana was taken from the figurehead which had accompanied the original hull. The total cost of the Diana was 70,000 rupees, and the government declining to take any part in the enterprise--this was financed by a group of Indian agency houses. \n\nThe Diana ran successfully, but not profitably, on the Hoogly for a year, and was then sold to the government for use in the Burma War, 1824-1826. It was Captain Marryat, then the senior naval officer in India, who recommended her purchase to the government. The Diana took part in the first expedition to Rangoon, and proved so useful that she was retained on the Irawaddy for the whole of the war. She suffered at times from overloading, as not", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207664, "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-1976", "page_number": 52, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "THE TEOCHIU: ETHNICITY IN URBAN HONG KONG\n\n37\n\nAs mentioned above, the sale of rice in Hong Kong has always been dominated by Teochiu businessmen. Prior to World War II, the importation of rice into Hong Kong was virtually controlled by Teochiu in that the exportation of rice from Thailand, Vietnam and Burma was almost exclusively managed by Teochiu merchants in Southeast Asia (Chiu Chow Chamber of Commerce, 1971:91). Part of the imported rice was re-exported to Swatow and other cities in South China and Japan. Teochiu domination lessened following the introduction of a quota system for rice importation after World War II. However, Teochiu firms are still of considerable importance in the importation of rice. In 1955 the number of government-authorized rice importing firms was increased to 48; of these, 19 were owned or operated by Teochiu (Chiu Chow Chamber of Commerce, 1971:92) The 12 Teochiu rice wholesale firms, representing one-third of the number of such firms, are responsible for 65% of all wholesale rice transactions. Not surprisingly, 1700 of the 2,000 or so rice retail shops in Hong Kong are run by Teochiu (Chiu Chow Chamber of Commerce, 1971:92, 93). One Teochiu association estimates that 70,000 Teochiu, one-ninth of the total Teochiu population, earn their living from the sale of rice (that is, rice shop owners, employees or dependents of the former) (Cultural and Educational Association, 1964:34). This estimate is probably an overstatement but perhaps as many as 10% of all employed males are working in the rice trade. This specialization is clearly a result of and a reflection of the successful functioning of Teochiu international commercial networks.\n\nAnother pattern which is not reflected in the census occupation tables is the preponderance of Teochiu owned and operated shops of all kinds, including hawker stalls, cooked and uncooked food stalls in and around housing estates. No data is available classifying ownership of such small-scale businesses by ethnic group, but my own experiences suggest Teochiu ownership is considerably higher than the relative population sizes of different ethnic groups would suggest, even in areas of relatively low Teochiu residential concentration.\n\nAnother area of alleged Teochiu specialization is narcotic trafficking between Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Europe and the U.S. The production and distribution of heroin originating in the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia is said to be largely controlled by", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207763, "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-1976", "page_number": 151, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "136\n\nW. A. REYNOLDS\n\nport for the work came from American United China Relief (UCR) funds through the American Friends Service Council (AFSC); there were members from Canada, U.S.A., New Zealand, as well as China itself; and the self-sufficiency required was much greater than that of other FAU groups.\n\nThe original plan, worked out in late 1940 and early 1941, was for a group of forty men, equipped with 20 trucks, a mobile operating theatre and mobile workshop, to undertake two tasks. The first was the transport of medical supplies into China from Burma and the second provision of medical teams to work with civilian and military hospitals. The proposals had the support of the British Fund for the Relief of Distress in China under Dr. H. Gordon Thompson, the Foreign Office, the U.C.R. and the AFSC. The trucks and equipment were purchased in the US and shipped to Rangoon where they were assembled and driven up to China. Dr. R. B. McClure, a Canadian medical missionary born in China, was appointed to lead the Unit.\n\nIt will be remembered that in 1941 Japan occupied all the coast of China, transport up the railway to Kunming from Hanoi had ceased and the only land routes into the western provinces still held by the Government of the Republic of China under Marshal Chiang Kai Shek were the Burma Road and the road from the USSR via Sinkiang. When the Sino-Japanese war widened into the Pacific War on December 8, 1941, about half of the FAU group had arrived in Burma and China, the first trucks were being assembled in Rangoon and the rest of the party and equipment were on the high seas. All arrived safely and the Unit undertook a number of interesting tasks during the Burma fighting of 1942.1\n\nMedical Services and Supplies in China\n\nDespite the diversion of manpower and loss of trucks and fuel in Burma the work of transporting medical supplies in China got underway in 1942. In 1941 there were four organizations concerned with military and civilian medical services:—\n\n1) the Army Medical Administration (AMA)\n\n2) the Chinese Red Cross (CRC)\n\n3) National Health Administration (NHA) Weishengshu (衛 生 署) with its civilian hospitals and clinics.\n\n4) Over 100 mission hospitals, responsible to their own Mission Boards.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207771, "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-1976", "page_number": 159, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "144\n\nW. A. REYNOLDS\n\ntruck so that the payload of 2 tons was the maximum. However, by 1944 the charcoal trucks were being operated successfully over the Luhsien road with its high altitude as well as all the other routes. Charcoal was obtainable in most villages and was cheap in the mountain areas and the cost, per ton carried, was 1/5 of that of alcohol. The charcoal burners carried the major load of supplies through 1944 and the first part of 1945.\n\nThe successful Burma campaign of autumn 1944, the opening of the Ledo road and the petrol pipeline laid along it made a great difference to the Unit transport systems. Not only was the Unit allocated 25 Canadian W.D. 3-ton Dodge trucks in the summer of 1945 from ARC and UNRAA, but it was also able to obtain P.O.L. (Petrol, Oil and Lubrication) supplies from the US army free of charge. To quote from a letter written 10/6/45 “It was a great moment when at Kunming, Rupert (Stanley) and I drove up in a truck to the P.O.L. station and pulled up beside a real petrol pump (and bright red at that too) and said to the Sergeant \"Fill'er up\" and he filled her up to the tune of 22 gallons US. When I told him it was 34 years since I'd done that he registered the usual GI amazement that anyone could stand the place that long”.\n\nSystem Performance\n\nThe cargo carried by the system was in three categories: Medical and Relief supplies for NHA, IRC, ARC etc.; FAU maintenance and fuel supplies; and return cargoes. The Government transport administration ruled that no trucks should travel empty and on return journeys must take Government, usually military, cargoes. The Unit had a special pass, as a Christian pacifist organization, exempting it from taking soldiers or weapons and instead usually had cargoes of salt from the Yangtse valley south to Kweichow and Yunnan.\n\nThe system performance figures in terms of kilometre tons for the 4 years, as far as they are at present available, are given in Table VII. The number of trucks available on average through the years are given, and from this it will be seen that the operating efficiency in terms of kilometre tons per truck per year steadily increased. This was due to:---\n\n1) increased efficiency of the Charcoal truck operations, more than compensating for the deterioration of the diesel trucks", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207789, "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-1976", "page_number": 177, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA (With especial reference to the Upper Yangtze)\n\nA. D. BLUE*\n\nWest China, and in particular the provinces of Szechwan and Yunnan, interested British merchants in India before the end of the eighteenth century, and this interest increased after Britain got a foothold in Lower Burma in the early nineteenth century. Not until Britain was established at Shanghai and on the Lower Yangtze, however, did the British China traders take any great interest in West China. Until the 1860s, therefore, the initiative in opening West China to British trade came from the West, and concentrated on reviving the old caravan routes from Upper Burma into Yunnan. The Treaty of Yandabo between Britain and Burma in 1826, which established Britain in Arakan, Assam, Manipur, and Tenasserim, rekindled interest in these old routes. Sino-Burmese contacts went back many centuries, but were usually recorded from a diplomatic or military aspect, although it was well known that there had been considerable trade along these routes. At this time Canton was the only British foothold on the China coast, and the much shorter land route across Burma seemed to offer many benefits to British and Indian merchants in both India and Burma. Then, and for many years afterwards, India was the source of most of China's foreign imports, cotton and opium in particular, and much of British policy in the Far East was concerned with maintaining and extending this trade.\n\nAn interesting side product of this China-India relationship was the proposal to import workers from west China for the infant Assam tea industry. The East India Company had become interested in the possibility of tea production in Assam as early as 1823, when indigenous tea plants were found in the Upper Brahmaputra\n\n* The author served as an Engineer Officer with the China Navigation Company from 1928 until 1938, and was on the Yangtze in 1930 in the Shengking and again in 1934 in the Wuhu. He was captured by pirates in the Newchang river in Manchuria in 1933 and held prisoner for five and a half months. Five of his articles have been published previously in the Journal. \"European Navigation on the Yangtze\" in Vol. 3, 1963, \"Piracy on the China Coast\" in Vol. 5, 1965, \"The China Coasters\" in Vol. 7, 1967, \"Chinese Emigration and the Deck Passenger Trade\" in Vol. 10, 1970 and \"Early Steamships in China\" in Vol. 13, 1973.\n\nPlates 20-25 and the sketch-maps at the end of the volume illustrate this article.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207790, "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-1976", "page_number": 178, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA\n\n163\n\nValley. A tea committee was formed whose findings were favourable, and experimental tea gardens were opened at Jaipur in Upper Assam. By 1859 over 4,000 acres were under cultivation, and the industry was assured of a bright future. Ample British capital was available for expansion, the British public's appetite for tea seemed inexhaustible; but scarcity of labour was a serious handicap. Assam was thinly populated, and the planters were dependent on Bengalis, who took a long time to get acclimatised. The idea of importing Chinese labour by the overland route was suggested, as at this time Chinese labour was considered indispensable to economic development in the tropics, and the Indian government was sympathetic. There were several possible land routes between India and West China, some passing through Burma, and Article 9 of the 1862 Commercial Treaty between Britain and Burma allowed entry into British territory from the Burmese side. The tea planters, however, failed to recruit Chinese workers, and blamed their lack of success upon the difficulties and hardships of the overland routes. This led to pressure on the government to improve the major land routes, and to several expeditions across the debatable borderlands between India, Burma, and China.\n\nFrom the 1860s until near the end of the century, therefore, there was rivalry between British commercial circles in India and those in China, over access to West China. In addition to these two approaches, from India and from the Yangtze, there were others from the south; by the Mekong or Red River from Indo-China, and by the West River from Canton and Hong Kong. Anglo-French colonial rivalry was acute during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in the Far East. The French were keen to find and exploit a trade route to West China; and while Britain was investigating routes from Burma, the Yangtze, and the West River, France was investigating possible routes from the Mekong and Red Rivers.\n\nAs became widely known by the end of the century, and suspected by realists before then, West China and its borderlands comprise some of the most difficult regions of the world in which to build roads or railways, or in which to improve river navigation. There are high mountain ranges divided by deep valleys, densely forested in many places; and all the great rivers—the Yangtze, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Red River, and Salween—are seriously impeded by rapids", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207792, "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-1976", "page_number": 180, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA\n\n165\n\nboats as far as Bhamo, and then partly by land and partly by water into China. Other exports were amber, ivory, precious stones, betel nuts, and edible birds' nests; while in return Burma got raw and wrought silk, velvet, gold leaf, preserves, and chinaware. Similar reports came from other sources. By 1850, the possibility of extending trade from Yunnan into Szechwan was envisaged, and the glowing prospect of an extensive market for British goods in West China became an obsession among many British officials and merchants in Burma and India.\n\nCaptain McLeod's mission of 1836 is the first official British attempt to find an overland route to China. McLeod went from Moulmein, the port in the newly acquired province of Tenasserim, via Kungtang to Kenghang, a Shan state on the border of China. Here he failed to get permission to enter Yunnan, being told that if the British wanted to trade with China they should go to Canton, and that if he still persisted in wanting to enter Yunnan he would require official permission from Peking. McLeod had to admit defeat, and turned back.\n\nAfter this came a succession of other ventures from Assam and Burma, all—for one reason or another—failures. These culminated in the famous and ill-fated Dual Mission of 1874-75, which led to the Margary Affair.* This was a joint attempt to explore West China from the Burmese and Chinese sides. Previous to this the only important attempts to find a route between Burma and China from the eastern side had been Captain Blakiston's in 1861 and T. T. Cooper's in 1868.\n\nThe Royal Navy's expedition of 1861 which went up the Yangtze to establish the first treaty ports on the great river—Chinkiang, Kiukiang, and Hankow—continued 153 miles beyond Hankow to Yochow. Here they transferred Blakiston's party to junks in which they continued for another 1050 miles to Pingshan, nearly 1800 miles from the sea and 400 miles above Chungking. It had been intended to follow the Yangtze to its source in Tibet, and then cross the Himalayas into India. Because of unsettled political conditions at Pingshan and beyond, however, they were forced to turn back; but they had obtained valuable information about the Middle and Upper Yangtze.\n\nSee pp. 169-170 below.\n\nPage 180\n\nPage 181", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207795, "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-1976", "page_number": 183, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "168\n\nA. D. BLUE\n\nMeanwhile exploration continued from the south. Between 1866 and 1868 the French under Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier made their famous expedition from Saigon by the Mekong River through Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos to Talifu and Kunming in Yunnan. The Panthay Rebellion was then at its height, and the Chinese authorities refused them permission to proceed further up the Mekong. Garnier, who had succeeded to the leadership after Lagrée's death, had to abandon his plan to explore the sources of the Mekong, and turned east across Yunnan to the Upper Yangtze at Iping. Here boats were obtained to take them on the four weeks journey to Hankow. Garnier saw enough of the Mekong to realise that it could never rival the Irawaddy, let alone the Yangtze, as a trade route to West China, and French interest shifted to the Red River route from Haiphong through Tongking. During an enforced delay on the Siamese border, Garnier made the first thorough survey of the ruins of Angkor, and his expedition is important in that it encouraged French ambitions for an Indo-Chinese Empire.\n\nThere was no clear policy on the part of the various British parties concerned with developing trade with West China, nor over the best way to reach this region of supposed inexhaustible wealth. Lack of accurate information is also a constant theme in the history of British relations with West China. However, penetration and exploitation from the West, that is from India and Burma, attracted greater public and official support in Britain than that from the Yangtze by the China traders, though by 1874, a combination of circumstances led to a co-operative effort being made from both East and West, the aforementioned Dual Mission of 1874-75, which I shall now describe.\n\nThe Panthay Rebellion finally came to an end in May 1873 when the Imperial troops captured Momein, this completing the reconquest of Yunnan after eighteen years of civil war. During the ensuing period of rehabilitation the provincial authorities tried to revive the Burma-Yunnan overland route, and caravans reappeared after nearly twenty years' absence, undeterred by disbanded soldiers and lawless hillmen. By May 1874 the British Political Agent at Bhamo reported that more caravans were passing between Burma and Yunnan than for many years, and that British and Chinese merchants were sending such large consignments of goods", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207796, "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-1976", "page_number": 184, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA \n\n169 \n\nto Bhamo that the Irawaddy Flotilla Company doubled its service between Mandalay and Bhamo.* \n\nSimultaneously pressure in Britain from Chambers of Commerce persuaded the government to support the Indian government's plan to resume exploration of the Bhamo-Yunnan overland route, and to request co-operation from China through the British Minister at Peking. The King of Burma was also in favour of resuming trade relations with China, having been advised from Peking that China would like to resume \"the old relationship, and continue the practice of exchanging decennial missions\". \n\nLieutenant Colonel Horace A. Browne, a former Deputy Commissioner in Burma, was chosen as leader of the Burma party, which would go from Mandalay to Bhamo by steamer, and then overland into Yunnan by one of three possible routes. At the same time A.R. Margary of the China Consular Service would start from Hankow—then the limit of steam navigation on the Yangtze—and go by junk to Yochow at the entrance to the Tungting Lake, through the Lake and by the Yuan River to the border of Kweichow, from where he would complete his journey overland. Browne's party arrived at Bhamo on 15th January 1875, and were joined by Margary, who had left Hankow on 4th September 1874, two days later. The latter had had a comparatively uneventful journey, although at some places the population was decidedly hostile. At Yunnanfu, however, the officials were courteous and helpful. All through Yunnan Margary had passed ruined towns and villages, and seen the widespread destruction caused by the recent rebellion. \n\nOn 23rd January the combined party left Bhamo for Yunnan, accompanied by fifteen Sikh guards brought from India by Browne, and an escort of 150 soldiers provided by the King of Burma, who were to go as far as the border. At the last minute Browne decided to go by the Ponlyne instead of by the Sawaddy route, to avoid possible conflict with the Kachin tribesmen on the latter. A few \n\nThe Irawaddy Flotilla Company was formed in 1864 when Todd Findlay & Co. of Glasgow (who had a branch in Rangoon) bought four old river steamers and three 'flats' of the Indian government's Irawaddy Flotilla, which had given good service in the Anglo-Burmese Wars. Hopes of greatly increased trade between Burma and Yunnan were high, and there was keen competition to buy the Flotilla, including an offer from a French company, and one from Mackinnon & Mackenzie, who were then managing agents of the Calcutta and Burma Steam Navigation Company which later became the British India Steam Navigation Company.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207797, "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-1976", "page_number": 185, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "170 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\ndays later rumours of an ambush by Chinese and Shan tribesmen led to Margary deciding to go in advance as scout, and he left the main party on 19th February with five Chinese companions. Three days later word came back that he had been murdered at Manwyne, with rumours that 4,000 Chinese troops were on their way to annihilate the whole expedition. Before Browne had time to recover from this blow, the camp was attacked by an advance guard of the Chinese force, but was beaten off by the Sikh and Burmese soldiers. Next day confirmation of Margary's murder came from the King of Burma's commercial agent at Bhamo, and on 20th February Browne's whole expedition retraced its steps to Mandalay and Rangoon.\n\nMargary's murder, and deteriorating relations between the British and the King of Burma, prevented further expeditions from Burma; but ironically led to further progress on the Yangtze,\n\nSir Thomas Wade, British Minister at Peking, took advantage of the Chinese government's failure to protect Margary to press for further trade relaxations, and the result was the Chefoo Convention of 1876 between Wade and Viceroy Li Hung-chang. This provided for the opening of five more ports to foreign trade, and of the 400 miles of the Middle Yangtze to foreign shipping. Among the new treaty ports was Ichang, located at the upper end of the Middle Yangtze and 400 miles below Chungking, the main port of Szechwan. When the Convention was ratified in 1885, a supplementary clause provided for Chungking to become a treaty port; but not for free navigation on the 400 miles of the Upper Yangtze between Ichang and Chungking. This was granted after the Treaty of Shimonoseki between China and Japan on the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95.\n\nMore than ten years before this, however, the remarkable Archibald Little had appeared on the Yangtze scene. Little began his career as a tea taster in Kiukiang in 1859, but soon started up business on his own. He was attracted to the possibilities of trade in Szechwan and West China, and fascinated by the problems posed by steam navigation through the famous gorges of the Upper Yangtze. He made a trip by junk from Ichang to Chungking in 1883 to investigate trade and navigational prospects, and in 1887 attempted to run a steamer service between Ichang and Chungking, by the Kuling. This was a Clyde built stern-wheeler of 450 tons", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207803, "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-1976", "page_number": 191, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "176 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nChinese shipping in these years, and anti-Japanese boycotts led to the virtual disappearance of Japanese shipping for long periods. \n\nNot that these last few years were trouble-free for British ships. There were also anti-British boycotts, brushes with pirates, war lords, and lawless soldiers, and the famous 'Wanhsien Incident' of 1926 which has already been described. Then when Japan gained control of the Lower Yangtze at the end of 1937, the British presence on the Yangtze rapidly declined. Hankow became the capital before Nanking fell to the Japanese in December 1937, and Chungking succeeded Hankow before the latter fell in October 1938. As the Japanese moved up the river the British steamers moved ahead of them as far as possible, maintaining an increasingly restricted service, which by mid 1940 had been reduced to infrequent trips between Chungking and Wanhsien. During this period many Lower River steamers were abandoned. By mid 1940 the situation had become impossible, fuel was unobtainable, and the last few British officers were evacuated from Chungking by the new road to Kunming, then by the French railway to Haiphong, and finally by sea to Hong Kong. \n\nAt this time there were two Royal Navy gunboats still at Chungking, H.M. Ships Falcon and Gannet. The former remained to act as radio link for the British Embassy, while the latter was decommissioned and her crew sent to Hong Kong by the same route. \n\nSoon after this the Japanese occupied Indo-China, and the Haiphong-Kumming-Chungking lifeline was also denied China. The Chungking-Kunming road was then extended to Burma, and became China's most important route to the outside world, fulfilling the dreams of earlier generations of China traders. This was the famous Burma Road, sometimes identified with the whole 1,000 miles from Rangoon to Chungking, but more accurately with the 600 miles from Lashio (the railhead 130 miles above Mandalay) to Kunming. \n\nThus, after decades of neglect and oblivion, the Burma Road into China was restored to international importance. It was again disrupted when the Japanese conquered Burma in early 1943; but re-opened along a new western route when General Stilwell's American and Chinese forces built a road through North Burma to link Assam with the eastern section of the Burma Road. This route played a vital part in the Allied reconquest of Burma, Malaya, and Indo-China.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207810, "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-1976", "page_number": 198, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "The Ancient Mon--Pagan, Peru & NAKORN PATHOM\n\n183\n\ncentury. The main vestibule of Sulamani faces east and the upper storey is reached by two stairways built into the walls; it is almost the same height as the ground floor. Sulamani used to have good paintings but these have been lost and newer ones dating from the 19th century cover the old ones. The Dhammayangyi is a single-storey building rising in stepped levels and closely resembles the Ananda in structure. The quality of the brickwork is excellent.\n\nLastly, of the many temples to be visited in Pagan, there are two not strictly speaking temples. The Pitakat Taik was built as a library by Anawratha in 1058 to house the Buddhist scriptures he took from the sack of Thaton. It is a modest square building with small Mon windows, but the roof, rather elaborate, already bears the traces of baroque flamboyance of later Burmese styles; it was repaired in 1783 by King Bodawpaya and is currently being repaired again. The Upalithein is a long, low ordination hall of the 13th century with a battlemented roof. Inside are paintings of the 17th or 18th century which are bright and arresting, though without the interest and minute detail of the early paintings to be seen elsewhere in Pagan. Only the two temples near Minnanthu are omitted from this list of the major temples in Pagan; these are Nandamannya, which is a small vaulted chamber with one entrance and paintings of a Mahayanist Tantric nature from the middle of the 13th century, and the triple form of the Payathonzu temple, late 13th century, with paintings of a similar character in the corridors and vaults linking the three main cores. The two are difficult to reach without sturdy transport.\n\nIf this catalogue of temples gives the impression that there is nothing else to see in Pagan, it would be false. There is a cottage lacquer industry, another weaving traditional shoulder bags, and making cheroots; one can take boat trips on the Irrawaddy at sunset and make journeys by pony and trap and see the colourful display of fruit and vegetables in the village's markets. But the setting of these scenes of daily life is subservient to the temples, and the arid landscape, for Pagan is the centre of the dry zone of Burma, in which they are placed, is balanced in some measure by the majesty of the river flowing through. One is left with the impression of scrub, sandy tracks, and marvellous brown brick temples arising on all sides as far as the eye can see.\n\nIn Mandalay, to the north, where the evening cool in winter is even more striking than in Pagan, the two most impressive temples", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207813, "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-1976", "page_number": 201, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "186\n\nMICHAEL SMITHIES\n\nWith Pegu one is back to the culture of the early inhabitants of Burma, the Mons. Their original centre was around Thaton, further east than Pegu and this was certainly in existence by the 5th century AD. It was a Mon monk who had converted the Burmese King Anawrahta in the middle of the 11th century to Buddhism, and the king had requested certain relics and texts from king Manuha, who had refused. The result of the refusal was the destruction of the Mon kingdom but its cultural preeminence was recognised in the religion, architecture and art of early Pagan. After the fall of Pagan the Mons reestablished their kingdom, first at Mataram, and then, from 1369 at Pegu (Hanthawaddy or Hamsavati). They were temporarily ruled by the Burmese from 1539-1550 and again from 1551-1740; but Mon independence was due to be short-lived and the last king Binnya Dala was killed in 1747 by Alaungpaya and the Mons, like the Chams in Vietnam, then became a people without a country, though they still exist in large numbers in lower Burma near Moulmein and also in scattered villages in central Thailand.\n\nPegu is a day trip out of Rangoon, but as much as the present capital now reflects the condition of contemporary Burma, so Pegu is lost in its past. Its most famous sight is the Shwemawdaw pagoda, centred round a stupa with a broad stepped octagonal base and which is still taller than the Shwedagon in Rangoon. It is in many ways the palladium of Mon culture. Its foundation date is not known, but it was already raised in height by the Mon king Thamala in 825. In the twentieth century it suffered three severe earthquakes, and the present spire effectively dates from 1954 when restoration was completed. A number of ancient Buddha images was found when much of the stupa collapsed in the 1930 earthquake. Not very far from the Shwemawdaw is the spot where the two Hamsa birds alighted, one on the other's back, on a shallow spot in what was then the sea. The Hamsa is the symbol of the Mons and is also of course the mount of Brahma. This site is the Hinthagone, which now boasts a rather horrible modern shrine with vulgar paintings of hamsas but with a good view towards the Shwemawdaw. Hardly less vulgar is the reclining Buddha, the Shwethalyaung, reputed to be largest such image and certainly one of the ugliest. It was originally built in 994 but fell into disrepair and was restored in the 15th century. It was neglected again and became overgrown, to be rediscovered by a railway engineer at the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208572, "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-1979", "page_number": 29, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "2\n\nCHAN KIT-CHENG\n\nThe American sense of guilt was largely attributable to three factors: United States' military defeats in Southeast Asia, the American commitment to the policy of defeating Germany first before concentrating on Japan, and the American failure in delivering the bulk of lend-lease and other war materials promised to China. On the first point, according to Stanley K. Hornbeck who was political adviser to the Department of State, reports from American sources from or through Chungking indicated that the American defeat in the Philippines, together with the rapid collapse of the British position in Southeast Asia, had bred \"a sense of frustration and defeatism” among the Chinese.4 To be fair, however, one must add that China had been vastly more appalled and disillusioned by, and consequently more contemptuous of, the British performance.\n\nOn the second point, it was only natural that China was disappointed and embittered by the American policy of “Germany First”. Support for this order of priority was by no means unanimous within American government circles. Admirals Ernest J. King and William D. Leahy, General Douglas MacArthur (at his new headquarters in Australia), and Stanley Hornbeck, to give some examples, all expressed doubt about it and urged that a greater military effort should be directed against Japan. While President Roosevelt was firm on his decision to stand by the agreement reached at the 'Arcadia” Conference it did not mean that he was entirely free from embarrassment when faced with his Far Eastern ally, Chiang Kai-shek.\n\nM4\n\nOn the third point, immediately after Pearl Harbour, President Roosevelt had been generous in promising China war materials, including planes, mainly through lend-lease channels. However, the Americans soon realized that it was easier to make the promise than to implement it. Two difficulties were involved. The first was the problem of transport. After the fall of Burma and the seizure of the southern part of the Burma Road by the Japanese early in 1942, air transport became the only feasible means of getting supplies into China. Until the opening of the well-known Ledo Road (later on re-named Stilwell Road) early in 1945, the bulk of the supplies flown from India to China was transported by the Tenth United States Air Force between April and December 1942, and thereafter by the United States Air Transport Command in what Joseph W. Ballantine, who became director of the Office of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208574, "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-1979", "page_number": 31, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "CHAN KIT-CHENG\n\nOstensibly for medical reasons, at the end of 1942 and early in 1943, to pass unutilized. No effort was spared to make the visitor feel welcomed and cherished. She was a guest at the White House and at President Roosevelt's home at Hyde Park. She was invited to address the Senate and the House, and was welcomed by huge gatherings at all the stops she made from the east to the west coasts.13 A further and significant gesture of American friendliness was embodied in the United States' renunciation early in 1943 of her extraterritorial rights in China,14 a subject to be further dealt with later. One last example of the American compensatory effort during the first two years of the Pacific War was the passing of an act in December 1943, by large majorities of both Houses of Congress, repealing the longstanding Chinese exclusion laws, establishing an annual Chinese immigration quota, and making legally admitted Chinese eligible for naturalization as American citizens.15\n\nIt is imperative to spell out in some detail the general American attitude vis-a-vis China, not only to serve as background to the subject under discussion, but also because such attitude unavoidably influenced Britain in her dealings with China, including those over the question of Hong Kong. Ever since Pearl Harbour, China had made no secret of her resentment of Britain for having rejected China's offer of assistance in the defence of Hong Kong and Burma, for having been so catastrophically defeated by Japan in such a short time, and for, according to Chou En-lai who was then representative of the Chinese Communist Party at Chungking, having “discriminated against and treated as inferiors the Chinese who fought with the British at Hong Kong and in Malaya.”16 Britain, on her part, was anxious to improve relations with China and to collaborate closely with the United States in relation to their Far Eastern ally. She was, not unlike the United States, \"obsessed” for the greater part of 1942 with the fear that China might \"throw up her hands.\" The Foreign Office decided that all that Britain could do was to \"adopt an apologetic and ingratiating attitude towards the Chinese.\" However, the United States, much to Britain's annoyance, stole the limelight from all the major British attempts at appeasing China. Britain's offer of a loan of £50,000,000, with stringent regulations regarding expenditure to maintain equilibrium in her post-war balance of payments, was a clear anti-climax to the Chinese after the unconditional American loan.18 Although Britain renounced her extraterritorial rights in China simultaneously", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208575, "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-1979", "page_number": 32, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "The U.S. and the Question of Hong Kong 1941-45\n\nwith the United States, \"very little credit accrued to Britain, the assumption in Chungking being that Washington had pressed a reluctant London to agree to rendition.\"19 As opposed to the glamour of Madame Chiang's visit to the United States, Britain's “cordial invitation” to her to visit Britain, issued by the King himself, was decidedly ignored.20 Britain felt that her already difficult relations with China were aggravated by the fact that the “Americans [were] pathological about China, and keenly suspicious of any possible unfriendliness towards her on the part of others”.21 It was naturally feared that anything China demanded would have the sympathetic hearing of the United States, even at Britain's expense.\n\nBritain's future position in Hong Kong became all the more difficult to defend in view of the American wholesale denunciation of Britain's imperial and colonial policies. The American mentality towards the matter has been thus summarized: \"The idea became prevalent in America that the war the United States and the United Nations were fighting was not merely for self-preservation, but for the greater qualities of human rights and decency. There was a growing cry for a ‘Pacific Charter', to be on the lines of the Atlantic Charter, to guarantee freedom after the war to the non-self-governing countries in the Pacific. Or, at least, the Atlantic Charter should be extended to cover the Pacific region.”22 This mentality was shared by the president as well as the general public. It has been asserted that Roosevelt had been an anti-imperialist before the Pacific War, but he began a vigorous attack on colonialism everywhere early in 1943 after his trip to Casablanca, which apparently had a profound effect on his attitude towards colonialism.23\n\nTurning specifically to the American attitude towards Hong Kong, interest in the British colony was evident early in the War. There was clear indication that American public feeling \"would feel itself cheated if the outcome of the victory of the United Nations were to be simply the restoration of the status quo ante in Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, India and the Netherlands East Indies.\" There had been widespread speculation about the future of Hong Kong, stimulated by the speeches of such high officials of the administration as Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles. Critics in the United States frequently raised the question why Britain did not give up Hong Kong and relinquish her extraterritorial rights in China. It seemed almost certain that in the event of China demanding the return of Hong Kong, she could be confident of American sympathy", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208714, "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-1979", "page_number": 171, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "144\n\nREVS. J. SMITH AND WM. DOWNS\n\nMaryknollers being driven West in the face of the Japanese advance that we had to secure a house to serve them until they got flights out over the Himalaya mountains into Burma or India. Father Frank Keelan received from the Bishop of Kunming a good-sized building, formerly a club for the French who maintained the railway between Kunming and Indo-China, and turned it into a hostel for travel-weary Maryknollers who had been walking, or riding trucks, for weeks in order to reach this city. Father Jim Smith, who had been assisting Father Tennien in Chungking, took Father Keelan's place in Kunming when the latter left for the States, and while there set up a branch of Father Tennien's continent-spanning financial operation to assure a steady supply of funds to the missioners not yet driven out of their posts by the Japanese armies. Father Tennien's mission at this time was to close out this operation; his travels brought him to Calcutta and Chungking, and in the latter place, now manned by Father Tom Brack, it was decided to move the base of operation to Shanghai since the Government was leaving this wartime capital for its former site, Nanking, while the many foreign aid organizations were leaving for Shanghai. Since it seemed that Shanghai would now become the financial center for overseas remittances, he worked out a plan with Father Brack to begin closing down the Chungking operation and move to Shanghai. Following this, he then flew to Shanghai to look things over, and reported to Maryknoll that a priest should be assigned to that city to take care of financial matters for the Society. On his return to Hong Kong, Father Tennien received the first copy of his latest book, \"Chungking Listening Post,\" written while he was in that city during the war years. This copy he autographed and sent to General Wedemeyer, Chief of the American mission in China, and a personal friend.\n\nIn response to Father Tennien's request to set up office in Shanghai, the Maryknoll General Council requested him to do this personally and to continue to manage financial affairs until the post-war situation settled down.\n\n1946\n\nAt the beginning of the year, the Maryknoll Council decided to keep Father Tennien in Shanghai over his repeated requests to return to his mission in Wuchow where there was an unprecedented", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210794, "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-1986", "page_number": 145, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "128\n\nD.L. MICHALK\n\n1940 and 1941. Troops trained on Hainan included part of the 18th Division which was later landed at Kota Bharu and which pushed southward along the Malayan east coast, the 5th Division which was landed at Singora and Patani in Thailand, the Guards Division which was lent to the XV Japanese Army for the early part of the invasion of Thailand and Burma, and then reverted to the XXV Army to support the advance of the 5th Division (Wigmore, 1957). In fact, the 5th Division was shipped in troops transports from San Ya in December, 1941, to the Thai peninsula (Wigmore, 1957).\n\nAnother attraction for the invaders was the rich mineral resources of the island. Industrialists quickly developed a large, open-cut mine at Shi Lu Shan to provide the much-needed iron ore for the Japanese war effort. This necessitated construction of ports at Ba Suo and Yu Lin, and a railway link to transport the annual ore production of 2 million tonnes to these ports. To achieve the development targets demanded by Tokyo, Chinese were indentured and mustered into work-camps. Later Australian and Dutch soldiers captured in Indonesia were transported to a camp at Ba Suo to help with the work (Wigmore, 1957).\n\nA total of 267 Australians from the 2/21st Australian Infantry Battalion (or Gull Force as it was known) and 233 Dutchmen captured at Ambon were transported in the \"Taiko Maru\" to Hainan, arriving at Ba Suo in October, 1942. Conditions at the camp were harsh, and only 110 Australians remained when liberated by American forces on August 26, 1945. The opening of Hainan to foreign tourists enabled ten former Australian prisoners to return to Hainan in 1985 specifically to seek information on the fate of ten Australians who escaped from the camp and joined Communist forces in guerilla campaigns against the Japanese army (Nelson, 1985).\n\nLiberation and isolation\n\nAfter the defeat of the Japanese, the KMT regained control of the island, and when Chiang Kai-shek retreated from the mainland to Taiwan more than 100,000 of his loyal soldiers fled to Hainan. This meant that although the \"People's Republic\" was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211671, "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": 86, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "61\n\nTHE KIUKIANG INCIDENT OF 1927\n\nP. H. MUNRO-Faure\n\nThe turgid waters of the Yangtze rolled by to the sea, four hundred and eighty miles away. They swirled past the two hulks, alongside which river steamers came to discharge the cargoes of cotton material, hardware, salt, and those edible sea-products so dear to the heart of the Chinese gourmet; loading in return tea, porcelain, grass-cloth, and camphor.\n\nInshore small wavelets glistened in the wintry sun, and lapped along the edge of the dark mud, which sloped down to the water in front of\n\n* Editor's Note. Paul Hector Munro-Faure was born in 1894 of Swiss/Scottish parentage. Educated in England, he entered the Supplementary Army Reserve in 1912, and volunteered on the outbreak of War, being commissioned in the Sherwood Foresters. He was wounded on the Somme in 1916, and, on his recovery, was attached to the King's African Rifles, with whom he saw action in Tanganyika. By the end of the War he had risen to the rank of Captain. He was Mentioned in a Despatch for distinguished services in the field, and was commended in writing by the Secretary of State for War.\n\nAfter the War, he joined the Asiatic Petroleum Company, and remained in their service until the outbreak of the Second World War, as Manager of one or other of their offices in China. In 1937 he established a Chinese Refugee Safety Centre in Shanghai, and was later decorated for this by the Chinese Government with the Brilliant Star with Ribbon. In 1938 he was connected with the International Relief Committee in Nanking, by whose Chairman he was commended for his work for the displaced. He was also commended at this date by the Secretary of the Admiralty for his work in evacuating from that city civilians at risk.\n\nOn the outbreak of the Second World War he was commissioned as Major (shortly afterwards Lieutenant-Colonel) in the Special Operations Executive. He worked at first in the Bush Warfare School at Maymyo, Burma, which trained Chinese guerillas for behind-the-lines work. (For this school, see \"Prisoners of Hope\", Michael Calvert, (London, 1951), where Lt. Col. Munro-Faure is mentioned at p. 11). He then opened a similar school near the front lines in the Hangchow-Nanking area. For this he was awarded an OBE in 1943. Later still he worked between the front lines on the north-east frontier of Burma, attempting to ensure the continuing support for the British of the native princes of the region, in the face of Japanese, and particularly Chinese, attempts to replace the British as the dominant local power. He was commended for this work by his Commanding Officer. In 1944, he was recalled to England. After the War he was seconded as Oil Attache to the British Embassy in Romania. He retired in 1949, and died in 1956.\n\nLt. Col. Munro-Faure wrote a book of Memoirs in 1944-1945, in 11 chapters, covering his experiences in the Kiu Kiang Incident (1927), and between 1937 and 1944, together with an exposition of his views on the proper role of foreigners in China. The text is in the Imperial War Museum, London,\n\nBecause of the immensely valuable picture these Memoirs paint of the Kiu Kiang Incident (in which the writer was closely involved), of China during the early War years, and of the border areas of Burma during the period when the present troubles in the area were first developing, it is proposed to print them as a series in this and the next several issues of the Journal.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212218, "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": 160, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "137\n\nMaru was blown ashore at Hongkong during a typhoon, and the British without fuss readily agreed to allow the Japanese to salvage her themselves from right under the guns of one of the major forts of the Hongkong defences. They were hard at it when I was in Hongkong in 1938. Now, of course, all that unilateral courtesy was forgotten by the champions of Greater East Asia.\n\nIn May we were faced with Dunkirk, in June France collapsed. The Japanese applied pressure to both Britain and France to discontinue transfer of supplies to China over routes under their control. America gave no support. France agreed to close the Indo-China railway to such supplies. At the height of the negotiations with Britain, Mr. Stephen Early, the President's Secretary issued a statement asserting \"...the complete absence of any intention whatever on the part of the United States to interfere with territorial questions involving adjustments in Europe or Asia. The United States Government want to see, and thinks there should be, application of the Monroe Doctrine in Europe and Asia, similar to its interpretation and application for this hemisphere.\" Japan saw the green light. On July 18th Great Britain agreed to close the Burma road for three months to supplies of arms, ammunition, petrol, lorries, and railway material for China. Other supplies, of which there was an abundance, continued to pass through to the extent which the landslides, frequent during the summer rains, allowed.\n\nA week later America placed an embargo on the shipment of oil and scrap to Japan. America's anxiety to emphasize her determination to retain her independence of action thus created embarrassments for Britain in the Far East at a time when the British back was to the wall in Europe, and operated to the disadvantage of China. Had the American embargo been announced ten days earlier the Burma road would not have been closed.\n\nTiming is of the essence of warfare. \"Time, only give me time\", said Napoleon. It was not Germany, who missed the bus in the spring of 1940, as Mr. Chamberlain claimed, but Japan. In July, when the negotiations about the Burma road were in progress, the situation was very tense; I thought Japan would declare war. I was on the Reserve of Officers, and I was anxious not to be caught in Shanghai. From my Chinese contacts I had learnt a good deal about the guerilla organisation which was operating in the environs, and I thought I", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212226, "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": 168, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "145\n\nher over there until she could get a passage across the Atlantic to England.\n\nI had been hoping to be called up myself, and in the meantime saw a good deal of the two able liaison officers left behind by the British Army in Shanghai. One was a Japanese interpreter, and the other spoke Chinese. We were all impressed with the importance of the Chinese guerilla effort, and hoped that the British government would be able to provide technical assistance for their support. I am afraid that the seed then sown fell on stony ground. Regular generals do not comprehend the implications of guerilla warfare, nor do those schooled in concentration appreciate the advantages of dispersal; moreover, generals are not interested in small groups; they prefer the big battalions.\n\nWhen the time came, in May, and I was recalled to join up in Burma, I was glad to leave Shanghai. Many excellent people, detained by their duty, reluctantly remained there; but generally the atmosphere, so thick with complacency, had long jarred on me. As late as September 1941 the deluded residents of Shanghai were willing to oversubscribe fifty times a new share issue, which a British Cotton Mill Company elected at that time to place on the market. Long after the comforting assurance of the period of \"phoney\" war had ended so catastrophically in Europe, its demoralising effect continued at work in the Far East. At last, on December 7th, 1941, the house of cards collapsed; and the final bankruptcy of British leadership in Shanghai shewed itself, when the young men, caught there by that cataclysm, failed even to attempt to escape from a net, whose meshes were not closed until some weeks later.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212605, "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": 159, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "139\n\na game, I suspect, long known to Burma, which until 1937 was a mere annex to India. The counters were not only things, such as aeroplanes, or guns, or cement; but also persons, such as administrators, or pilots, or corporals. It all depended where you were on the list of priorities. Top priorities took their pick of what was going. When a battalion commander, or the head of a government department, is instructed to detail so many men to such and such a job, outside his own sphere of interest, being human, he will naturally discard the men he can best spare. They will not be his best men; he will get away with what he can. It would be dangerous to try to impose too far on a high priority. All is permissible. A low priority is fortunate to receive anything, but must accept what is offered. Burma was at the bottom of all the priorities.\n\nNeedless to say by the time our troops were due we had received no cooking pots, no hurricane lamps, no latrine buckets, and no brown paper. I borrowed what I could from our father and mother, the Yorkshire Light Infantry, and the night before the troops arrived went into the bazaar to purchase the rest out of my own pocket.\n\nOur troops were a grand lot: they were collected from the Commandos in all parts of the world. Some came from Australia, while others had only recently taken part in the evacuation from Greece. We were put through the motions of S.K. (silent killing) and taught the art of booby-trapping. Our Chief Instructor, Calvert, later to win renown as a Brigadier under Wingate, was a regular sapper, with a bent for thinking up ever more ingenious ways of perplexing the enemy. We developed all sorts of devices, and blew up as much as we dared. The Maymyo valley echoed to the sound of explosions, and the local inhabitants, or the visitors from the plains, would say, \"There are those Bush Warfare people at it again.”\n\nI must confess that my first impressions of Burma had been poor. Rangoon looked decayed and depressing in the heat. The walls of brick, covered with plaster, showed large mould stains, the result of the damp monsoon climate. On arrival at Maymyo, a stranger, insufficiently briefed, and knowing no one, I was shocked at the formality, in the second year of the war, which required every one to change into evening clothes for dinner at the Club. It may have been something to do with the name by which the school was known, or the free and easy ways of our Commando men, but at first people seemed to look on us with a slight suspicion, not unlike the attitude towards the stage villain who is expected to do the wrong thing by the modest maiden. However, in time the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212606, "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": 160, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "140\n\ninhabitants got to know us better; they accepted our lack of dinner jackets, our effect on the drink stock at the Club, our — regrettable — neglect of the traffic signals, and our other little mannerisms, and treated us right royally.\n\nThere were two seasons in Maymyo, the second and briefer one, lasting several weeks, towards the end of the rains in October. The Club, a long rambling creeper-covered building, became gay with visitors. It looked out over a pleasance, cleared from the jungle, and spreading a mile towards the reservoir dam, built by Turkish prisoners in the last war. It goes without saying that a race course and golf links were laid out over the meadowland, very pleasant to behold. But here we were next door to India. The plumbing in the gentlemen's cloak room, consisted of a row of rusty and battered enamel utensils, set out at more or less even intervals on a long low shelf. Without the door, a shadow hovered, poised to dash in the moment he heard the rattle of a utensil returned to the board. No Americans visited Maymyo while I was there. It would have been interesting to hear their first reactions to these Arcadian simplicities.\n\nAfter all Burma was a rich enough country; it was not any lack of money that left it a Victorian remnant. Amongst the Burmese there is no caste, nor is there any desire to work. The house servants everywhere are Indians, of whom there were over a million in the country. Of the annual increase of 5,000,000 in India, a substantial proportion must be of the sweeper caste. Amidst a population with so abnormal a rate of procreation, the border line between a sufficiency and famine is a fine one, easily crossed; and any modernisation of sanitary installations would create serious unemployment: thus in India the vested interest in caste puts the brake, not only on plumbing, but on all progress; and Burma, until recently had been the backwater of India.\n\nI spent six months in Burma, but had little opportunity to learn much of the country. I saw very little of the Burmese, and never met one of those attractive country maids, who wait by the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking out to sea. Of the seventeen million inhabitants, only ten million are Burmans; besides the Indians, there are 300,000 Chinese, and the remainder are tribesmen from the hills.\n\nThe history of Burma is a bloody one; the country had seldom for long been united. The Chinese under Kublai Khan, the Mongol,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212612, "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": 166, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "146\n\nis made up\n\nfor the job with any material handy. It may be fired electrically or by a spring designed specially for the purpose. There are three main kinds of spring: the pressure-switch, which goes off if you press on it; for instance, if you walk on it, or a train goes over it: the pull-switch, which is generally attached to a trip wire: and the release-switch, which goes off when you take a weight off it. When you set the trap, a cap is fitted to the switch. The cap fires a length of instantaneous fuse - this is a third kind of fuse - and that sets the charge off. Setting traps and dismantling them is a battle of wits. If you use the same kind of trap too often the enemy will tumble to it and learn how to discover and dismantle it: so you have to keep on ringing the changes. If you start with a simple pressure switch trap under a loose floor board, you can improve on it by putting a release-switch trap under a loose floor board, you can improve on it by putting a release-switch, duly connected up, under the charge itself. Then when the enemy comes along, he spots your trap, carefully eases up the floor board, maybe detaches the pressure-switch from the charge and thinks he is safe; but when he stoops to pick up the charge, the release-switch is set off and the trap explodes. That is a very simple illustration. In the course of several years of warfare the refinements in booby-trapping have been developed to the nth degree.\n\nIt will be seen that traps can only be used in places which our side is preparing to vacate. They must be carefully tabulated so that they can be located and taken up should our troops return: also, special precautions have to be taken in a district where there are friendly natives, lest they suffer. In many ways the use of booby-trapping can be a two-edged weapon.\n\nAt the end of November in 1941 I was included amongst several officers detailed to proceed to Chungking. Britain was still neutral in the war between China and Japan, and so we were instructed to wear plain clothes. We set out after lunch one day to motor the hundred miles to Lashio, where we were comfortably accommodated in the American hostel operated by the C.N.A.C. Next day, December 1st, 1941, we boarded the aeroplane and touched down on the island airstrip in the Yangking at dusk.\n\nBefore leaving Burma I acquired two useful items of equipment, the one a felt hat, of the kind used by Australians and Gurkhas, a comfortable head-piece, which kept the sun out and also a certain amount of rain:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212617, "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": 171, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "151\n\nalong the dismantled track ran no trains, under whose wheels we could get our dummy mines, as we had been able to do in Burma where the alarm created by their noisy, if harmless, explosions had often confused the Indian engine drivers.\n\nThe magistrate was helpful: he devoted two days to tramping round with us from village to village, until we could decide where accommodation for the school might be most suitable; and he promised to build a short length of road to connect the village finally selected with the motor road so that our lorries could drive right up to the door. The village was some miles outside a small country town; I shall call it Chin Ya, the Golden Duck.*\n\nNew Year's Eve fell while I was making these investigations. The local general, with that consideration which is the charming mark of Chinese breeding, fearing I should be lonely, invited me to dinner. Since arrival in the 3rd War Zone I had asked to be kept informed of any parties of foreigners escaping from Shanghai, but no news of any escapes had come through. It was accordingly with the greater pleasure, as we were sitting down to dinner, that I was surprised by the entry of a tall bearded figure, wearing a long Chinese gown, and heard myself addressed in English. He was the first foreigner to escape from Shanghai, an American, Mr. Hawkins, the manager of one of the branches of the big American bank which had offices in China.\n\nHe told us his story while we ate our dinner. Having only just returned from leave in the States, he was staying at an hotel, which happened to be near the Bund. Early on the morning of December 7th he was wakened by the sound of gunfire. He went out to investigate and found that Japanese destroyers were sinking H.M.S. Peterel in the Whangpoo River just off the Bund. He realised that war must have broken out and dashed round to his bank to 'phone his manager. He then returned to his hotel, packed a small bag, got into his car, and drove out to the stables in the western suburb, where a friend kept two ponies which he had permission to ride. He saddled the ponies, and riding the one while leading the other, passed through the gate at which a Japanese sentry stood guard where the road crossed the barbed wire barrier surrounding Shanghai. The barrier had originally been put up by the foreign troops holding the\n\n* It is in the Tianmushan mountains, near the border of Chekiang and Anhwei, near the country town Anchi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212622, "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": 176, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "156\n\non the door panels drew attention wherever they passed, the Allies were arriving. Alas, the advance party was the only party we were to receive: the attack on Burma was developing very quickly and all supplies and reinforcements were diverted there. Then the Burma road was cut, and as time advanced we found we had to get along with what we had. It was not as if we had even a first claim on such supplies as had already reached China for the British Military Mission. Our particular activity was not the main interest of the Mission, and we were not on any priority list.\n\nHowever, the future was concealed from us. We started off, full of enthusiasm, for Chin Ya in our four lorries accompanied by the General Commanding the Engineer Troops of the 3rd War Zone, a particular friend of ours, and reached our destination without incident. Mac's arrangements had all been completed and we were able to enter immediately into the quarters prepared for us.\n\nI was a little uneasy about the magazine, a flimsy outbuilding, used as a temple and distant a hundred yards from the village. We removed the idols from the shelf at the back, stacked our explosives there and on wooden racks built for the purpose, so as to keep them off the damp floor; and locking the door posted a sentry over it, hoping for the best. There were several tons of explosive; had they gone up they would have taken the village with them.\n\nA row of houses had been taken over for the students; in a small wood at the back three open thatched sheds had been erected as lecture rooms; and the top floor of the largest house in the village, owned by a widow, was occupied by our Chinese assistants. The widow lived on the bottom floor; she was old-fashioned and had strong objections to our installing windows in the walls of her house to admit light to the rooms. There was a local superstition that windows let the money fly out, thus impoverishing the occupants; all the houses in the district had only little slits, inadequate to relieve the gloom inside. With Michael's assistance we persuaded her to allow us to put in roughly made window-frames, fitted with wooden shutters for use if it rained; we, of course, had no glass.\n\nTwo temples had been reserved for our own quarters: the one, at a little remove from the village, I used as my office and living quarters: the other contained a large hall facing a small yard, open to the sky.\n\nI\n\nI", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212750, "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": 59, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "44\n\nacknowledging the initial concept having been his, or so he claimed.\n\n+\n\nHe has been described as 'an adventurer and an explorer, a plant collector and a Chinese general. He was certainly an adventurer though nowadays he would be referred to as a soldier of fortune, an adviser, an opportunist, and even a mercenary.\n\nThe question remains, how successful was he? Money certainly came his way at times though judging from his Will, he was not a particularly successful businessman. He certainly collected plants and sent them back to the British Consul in Canton and has one specimen, Jasminum Mesnyii, named after him. He bore the brevet rank of Lieutenant General in the Chinese Imperial army but to what extent this was a genuine rank rather than an honour and a courtesy rank, though fully earned during his military service, is hard to judge. Again, though accurately described as an explorer, he was in fact much more of a traveller in parts of China already settled by Chinese and visited earlier by other foreigners. The trek he made, as recorded by Captain Gill, from Ch’eng-tu in Szechuan province to Burma through what was then called lower Tibet has a different slant to what would have been Mesny's account. In Gill's Mesny is scarcely mentioned and he would appear to have been taken along by Gill as his interpreter. It would have been interesting to have read what Mesny would have, and indeed may have written about his journey of very nearly four months with Gill.\n\nHe saw himself as what nowadays would be called a go-between, a consultant, and in those days regarded, perhaps, as a fixer. Mesny had a few major bees in his bonnet the most barefaced of which was the value he put on the advice he constantly proffered to every senior Chinese official whose ear he could reach on how to modernise China. He had, for example, prepared a list of some nineteen items, suggestions presented to the Viceroy Chang Chih-tung, and although Mesny assures us that Chang accepted the list there is no evidence that he did anything about it or if he did, that he even mentioned Mesny in any memorials to the throne. Mesny wrote indignantly at one point in his Miscellany about his list of suggestions to Chang having been ignored, or put into practice piecemeal and inexpertly, penny pinching and ineffectually without any reference whatsoever to Mesny.\n\nIn 1906 at the very end of his fourth and final volume of his Miscellany he prided himself on his advice with the words 'All those great industrial", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212796, "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": 105, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "90\n\nThree Bold Adventurers to fight alongside the Nien rebels. After being captured and carried to Chin-chiang in a cage, he was saved by two British artillery officers serving with the Taiping forces.\n\nThe third time was in Hankow when Mesny took Damström along with him as a heavy-weight. The incident occurred after Mesny 'arrested' the dishonest Chinese merchant who had swindled Dupuis. [These incidents are probably not in temporal order].\n\nDupuis, Jean\n\nA French merchant born ca. 1828, who arrived and lived in Hankow in about 1860. He built up a thriving trade in armaments. Fluent in Chinese, he introduced Mesny to the Szechuanese officials whose invitation to serve with the Szechuan Force changed his life. Mesny remarked that Dupuis was a distinguished explorer and 'conqueror of Tonkin.'\n\nGill, William J: born Bangalore 1843\n\nServed in India after being commissioned into the Royal Engineers. Inherited a fortune and indulged his passion for exploration. One of his travels was through north Szechuan province, where first he travelled alone and then later with Mesny to Burma. He wrote The River of Golden Sand in 1880, and after several other travels, in Tripoli and Afghanistan, he was murdered by Bedouins in 1882.\n\nGiquel, Prosper M. [1835-1886]\n\nA French naval officer who arrived in China during the Second China War. Formerly Commissioner of Imperial Maritime Customs at Ningpo and Hankow. He assisted the Sino-French 'Ever Triumphant Army' that fought alongside Tso Tsung-t'ang's force in Chekiang province to recapture Hangchow and Ningpo, and later commanded the force in operations that led to the recapture of Hangchow, for which he received high rank and honour from the Ch'ing government. His principal achievement was the construction and administration of the Foochow Arsenal in 1866, and dockyard with its fleet of warships. He was the only foreigner besides Gordon to receive the honour of the Yellow Riding Jacket.\n\nPage 105\n\nPage 106", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212821, "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": 130, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "115\n\ncontrol. Lung Yun still maintained his own troops, well equipped and better paid and fed than those of Chungking, out of the revenues he had collected from the supplies which had flowed over the Indo-China railway and the Burma road. The control of the only communications into China had made the Governor of Yunnan a very rich man.\n\nMy experiences during the subsequent year were to be discouraging. In the past my championship of the Chinese cause had been unpopular with my own people; it had involved me not only in disapproval but also in financial loss. As the situation in Western China unfolded itself to me I began to wonder whether, after all, there was not a lot to be said for the view of the die-hards. Since my return to England I have made a point of studying the aspects to which I have drawn attention in these writings. I examined the history of Sun Yat Sen's Three Principles and the record of Kuo Min Tang teaching. I have set out the facts as they came to my notice, and will leave it to the reader to judge for himself how far the extraordinary incidents in which I was now to find myself involved sprang from independent impulses present in a backward province, or more directly from the nationalist teaching of Sun Yat Sen.\n\nAs the 'plane flies in from India, over the mountains of Yunnan, and begins to circle to come down to Kun-ming, the ribbon of the Burma road shows up below where it passes a cluster of villas nestling, some fifteen miles short of the town, at the foot of the hills on the edge of the lake. The 'plane crosses the tip of the forty-mile long lake to land on the large airfield at the far side of the city, 6,150 feet above sea level.\n\nAccommodation in the city was hard to find; for some weeks I stayed out at the lakeside. Owing to its height, Kun-ming enjoys an excellent climate all the years round, cool in summer, mild in winter. The great mountain ranges to the west absorb the moisture of the monsoon, leaving an adequate but moderate rainfall: apart from a period in the autumn the sun shines daily. The two Chinese characters Yun and Nan mean 'South of the Clouds,' an appropriate reference to the climate of Szechuan to the North East, where for six months in the year, at Chungking, they never see the sun.\n\nThe foreign community, in addition to the small number of French who were concerned with the operation of the railway line to the Indo-China border, included the Consuls of the leading countries, and an increasing number of American military personnel, attached to the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212824, "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": 133, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "118\n\nassistance which it might be possible to provide, and, soon after, the Myosa left to return to his country.\n\nIn August 1943 British troops were poised on the Assam border at Imphal, Tamu, and Tiddim, awaiting sufficient replenishment of equipment and the cessation of the rains to undertake the return advance into Burma; and there was activity down in the Arakan: while General Stilwell's Chinese divisions, retrained, reinforced, and re-equipped in India after their withdrawal from Burma, were just beginning to feel their way forward from Ledo, away up at the northern end of Assam, down the road which later was to become famous as the Ledo road. General Wingate's first expedition into Burma had just been completed, with heavy loss on our side, but with much success in confusing the enemy and disorganising his effort to consolidate his positions. The shape of future operations depended on the enemy's dispositions, so that any information which could be collected in eastern Burma would be useful: and in Kokang it might also be possible to organise patriot parties to assail his communications.\n\nIt was not an easy matter to obtain the consent of our allies for the passage of a British party to Kokang. The Chinese have unfortunately imitated the Japanese in a predilection for red tape; formalities are extended ad infinitum. It was fair enough that any British officer who entered China should require a pass issued by the Chinese authorities - though no such restriction attached to the presence of Chinese officers in India - but was it really necessary that the power to issue the pass should be retained by the highest authority in the land, the Military Affairs Council which would correspond with our Committee of Imperial Defence and that it should have to carry the personal chop of the Generalissimo? It did not make for speed in administration. It should also be remembered that the Chinese refused to serve in Burma under British command: that is how General Stilwell first came on the scene; and I think it is fair to say that our American allies had come to look on the Far East, and perhaps more particularly China, as their own special sphere of operations, where there was no room for any British.\n\nMy appointment was from the Army in India, which in those days, before the South East Asia Command had been established, was responsible for the operations in Burma. The proposal for assistance to the Myosa was submitted by the British representatives in Chungking to the Chinese government with a request that the necessary passes be", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212825, "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": 134, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "119\n\nissued for the passage of our party through Yunnan to Kokang in Burma. The suggestion was added that it might at the same time be possible to give some assistance to the Chinese guerillas, reports of whose existence in western Yunnan had come to our ears. On looking back I think this suggestion was a mistake, because the guerillas were Lung Yun's men and the Central government might be unwilling to encourage them.\n\nWhile awaiting the passes I remained in Kun-ming, where I found old friends and made many new ones. Our bungalow on the lake side became a popular resort, particularly on Sundays, when many Chinese, American, and British comrades would come out to drink tea on the lawn and to enjoy the lovely sunny weather. On the hill at the back several old and picturesque temples provided objectives for an afternoon stroll. One of the temples, carved out of the rock face overhanging the precipitous mountain side, was approached along a ledge, also cut out of the rock, an approach to inspire qualms in any but the strongest-headed visitors. At week ends wealthy Chinese from Kun-ming would flock to these temples, where the priests kept special guest rooms for those who wished to stay. Earlier on, when Kun-ming had been subjected to occasional bombing raids, the rooms were at quite a premium.\n\nWe had some good friends among the American officers, many of the more senior of whom were regular soldiers with long years of service in the Philippines and other tropical places. One in particular who some years before had met the officers of my regiment, the Sherwood Foresters, when they went over from their station in the West Indies to visit Panama, at a later date provided us with very considerable assistance. If it was part of American high policy not to encourage the presence of British troops in certain areas of the Far East, the attitude was certainly not reflected in the manner of the American officers towards us. They invariably treated us with the greatest cordiality: with their large establishments and regular system of supply they were often in a position to assist us, especially over transport* and many are the good turns for which we have to thank them. I am sure this camaraderie of the field is the best possible antidote, and a very effective antidote, to the mischievous propaganda put out by our common enemies in the attempt to create discord between America and Britain.\n\n* The American Army had an excellent and well-managed hospital where they treated British patients just like their own.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212826, "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": 135, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "120\n\nI was also most fortunate in my Chinese friends, many of whom strongly disapproved of the discreditable state into which Chinese administration had fallen. Unchecked hoarding and profiteering were the order of the day and on these the black market flourished exceedingly. Providing you had the money you could buy almost anything in the Kun-ming shops. Inflation mounted steadily and so far as one could see no serious efforts were made to control it. Many officials kept several wives and lived in great luxury; they had profited from the colossal fortunes made over the transportation of supplies on the Burma road. The sight of all this was sufficient to shake one's faith in the future progress of China.\n\nThere was also an extensive black market in money. The official rate of exchange for the Indian rupee was six Chinese dollars to one rupee; but in the black market you could get forty, then fifty, sixty, and so on upwards. British officers drew as much of their pay as they required in Chinese dollars at the fixed rate later by special arrangement with the Ministry of Finance increased by 50%, that is nine dollars to the rupee - but at these rates Kun-ming prices in terms of dollars were beyond their reach. They could not afford to go out, and had difficulty in returning hospitality. The Americans were better off because they received their pay in U.S. dollars, which they disposed of in the black market.\n\nThere was no difficulty about the provision of food; local supplies, so far as we were concerned, were adequate. The drink problem was more difficult; supplies had to come over the 'Hump' and a bottle of whisky was a very rare thing. The French Catholic fathers made a beverage, called Anis, not unlike Absinth in taste, and like Absinth it turned a cloudy white colour when mixed with water; it had a kick like a mule. Anis was rather expensive though, and the more enterprising members of the community took to distilling their own ‘gin'. The machine consisted of a two-gallon petrol tin, placed over a charcoal fire: from the top of the tin a copper tube - probably salvaged from a dismantled lorry - led through a five-gallon kerosene tin filled with cold water, where the vapours from the still passed through coils in the pipe, condensed, and dripped into the gin bottle. The stock from which the liquor was distilled would be either one of the fiercer forms of Chinese wine or the commercial alcohol manufactured for use in driving vehicles: either product tasted horrible and left the most distressing hangover, but it did make a party go.\n\nPage 135\n\nPage 136", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212827, "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": 136, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "121\n\nWe were in the meantime collecting personnel and stores for Kokang. The trip in the 15 cwt. lorry in and out of Kun-ming each day required a gallon and a half of petrol; we could only replace our small stock by purchases in the black market, at a cost of around £2 per gallon. Opportunely we found accommodation in the city; for myself I shared a house with the officer who was stationed in Kun-ming to distribute the supplies received by the R.A.F. 'plane which flew over the Hump once a week.\n\nThese few supplies had to be stretched to meet the needs of all the British establishments in China, the Embassy, the various Consulates, the British Military Mission in that far-away place, their Headquarters in Chungking, and various odd parties, such as the one to which I was attached. The R.A.F. officer in question was Australian; J.K. was one of the most unselfish persons I have ever met, was most helpful to all the different parties he had to try to please, and had an extraordinary talent for making friends, a talent of which I unblushingly took advantage. He had not been long in Kun-ming before he had more friends amongst the Chinese and Americans than any other British officer in the place.\n\nMeanwhile time continued to pass; a couple of months flew by, the end of the rains approached in Burma, and the British tried to make their plans. Then suddenly one morning I received information from the Headquarters of the Chinese Expeditionary Force that a mob of Kokang rebels, dissatisfied with the Myosa, had attacked him. He managed to escape with a broken leg, but his fourth son and a number of his followers were killed; he succeeded in making his way to Tetang in China, where he took refuge at the headquarters of the Chinese general commanding the division in that area. The report added that the Chinese had instructed the Myosa's brother, who happened to be at Tetang at the time, to proceed to Kokang to re-establish order, and sometime later we received news that Chinese troops had captured the ring-leaders of the rebels and executed them. It was all very sudden.\n\nAt the end of October we at last received the long-awaited reply from the Chinese government. It was a refusal to issue passes on the grounds that the present time was not considered suitable for the despatch of a small party of British officers to the Sino-Burmese border. Soon after I returned to India and new plans were prepared. In the absence of Chinese co-operation, it was proposed to drop a party by parachute into Kokang, and to obviate the necessity of maintaining them entirely by ...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212831, "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": 140, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "125\n\nto hold the local headman responsible for the collection of the number required; they were paid for at fixed military rates. Throughout Yunnan commerce in peace time moves by pack saddle. The Yunnan mule is a large strong animal, at one time much in demand for work in Burma; but now the wear and tear of war had created a shortage. We had to wait some days at Paoshan before the necessary number of beasts was produced, and then we only got off because I had carried introductions to some of the local gentry, who willingly came to our assistance.\n\nWe took seven days to reach Shunning, over a series of mountains; the mule track went up and up and up, and down and down and down; it seldom ran level and we seldom covered more than ten miles by the map in a day. In actual ground covered the distance was often double. We arrived at Shunning in time for the Chinese New Year. We had to wait over for the festival, a day on which no one will work, and the general commanding the Army very kindly invited us to a feast prepared for his American allies. Here again we stayed at the American mess and were made most comfortable. From Shunning to Tetang we took five days; mules became scarcer and on several stages bullocks were brought in from the fields to carry our wireless sets and equipment. Pack bullocks move more slowly than mules, but get there eventually. Our chief trouble was in trying to get off sufficiently early in the morning. On arrival at the destination for the day, the headman would be warned how many beasts we would need the next day, and he would promise to have them ready for an early start at 7 o'clock. But there was often difficulty in collecting the requisite number and it might not be till long after midday before we could move off. It was wearing on our patience.\n\nIt was on this stretch that I received further confirmation of the sort of trouble we might expect. At one deserted village, where we stopped for the night, we were joined by a stranger who appeared friendly enough. He was later heard haranguing the Chinese members of our party in Cantonese which he thought we did not understand, asking them why they worked for the foreign British, telling them it was unpatriotic to do so, and threatening them with dire consequences.\n\nI cannot tell the whole of our difficulties, only sufficient to make the story clear; but that much I believe should be told. It is only fair to the British public, particularly at a time when the most important conferences are to be held concerning arrangements for the future peace of the world, to know how their compatriots fare in foreign countries, and how", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212838, "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": 147, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "The mule track wound along the mountain side. Looking backwards, or forwards, you could sometimes see the green waters of the Salween glistening in the sun far below. At one point, the place was pointed out to me where Chu Ko Liang had built a fort on a knoll commanding both track and river. He was the able counsellor of Liu Pei, who in the time of the Three Kingdoms mounted the throne of Shu (Szechuan) in the second century of our era. Liu Pei stood 7 ft 5 in high; 'He could see behind his back, his ears reached to his shoulders, and his hands to his knees. He possessed the invaluable power of creating a good first impression and was able to keep his countenance under the most trying circumstances.' He sent Chu Ko Liang on an expedition to the south to subdue the border tribes. Chu Ko Liang is said to have penetrated to Burma: 'He made use of the famous device of \"wooden oxen and running horses\" as a means of transport. What the device was nobody now knows.' (From A Chinese Biographical Dictionary by H.A. Giles.) Legend relates that it was Chu Ko Liang who first thought to keep down the numbers of the wild Wa tribesmen by teaching them to bury a human head in each field at the planting of the spring crop; the plan worked all right until the Wa discovered that a Chinese head was equally effective in propitiating the gods, after which they looked beyond the tribal limits for the supply of heads.\n\nSmall side streams ran into the Salween, and each time we crossed one of these the path dropped several thousand feet, almost to Salween level: it would then rise steeply again up the mountain. Down there the hollows were very hot and steamy; the vegetation tropical and thick; higher up it was cool in the shade and many great trees spread their branches over the mountain slopes. We saw few large wild animals: the commonest I believe is the bear. The inhabitants say there are three kinds of bear; the pig bear, the dog bear, and the cow bear. I saw one pig bear in captivity; it had a thick black coat, little pig eyes, and must have weighed about 300 lbs. Tiger, elephant, panther, wild pig, wolves, sambur and barking deer also exist; the lovely Amherst and Stone pheasants, bamboo partridge, jungle fowl, hare, duck, snipe and quail. But we had no time for any of these; later, when our numbers had increased, one of our Gurkha wireless operators used to go out sometimes to shoot for the pot.\n\nNews of our arrival had gone ahead. As we moved along the headmen came out to welcome us; they prepared food for us and were disappointed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212839, "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": 148, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "133\n\nif we did not stay. They were not merely glad to see us because we were British; they hoped we would be able to arrange reimbursement to them for the cost of feeding the Chinese troops. At Nancha I had been most embarrassed by my large escort, which even after the subtraction of the men who were sent to accompany Stan on his reconnaissance, still numbered twenty; they ate at the headman's table and, when I offered to pay, the situation became difficult because it set a precedent inconvenient to the Chinese. Percy refused to allow me to pay, and I had to get around it by making a gift to the headman of some packets of needles that I had brought from India. Needles were very scarce and correspondingly valuable, and these particular packets had got wet when a truculent bullock had kicked off my box into a river, the day before we reached Nancha.\n\nAt the moment the Chinese troops in Kokang did not number many. The battalion had long since been withdrawn from the south, where the Japanese had established a bridgehead across the Salween at Kunlong. Of the fifteen other ferries in Kokang, six faced north across to Chinese territory. Over there the Chinese maintained guerilla forces behind the Japanese lines, and they had small guards on this side at the ferries, perhaps a hundred men in all. These troops sometimes brought in their own rice, of which Kokang was short, but they relied on the headmen to produce the rest of their supplies, cooking oil, vegetables, salt, and pork. In Kokang they fed better than in China, a small advantage which no one could begrudge them in view of the terrible hardships the Chinese troops had to endure, but it came hard on the Kokang villages. I was glad to learn that nominal prices had been fixed by the Chinese, after our arrival, though at much below current market costs, and that at any rate sometimes these were actually paid. The Chinese also called for free transport from the villages, and at Nancha the headman frequently had to produce plain clothes, taken off the backs of the all too scantily clothed people, for the use of Chinese troops crossing the river to join the guerillas on the far side. There, as in Eastern China, most of the guerillas were disguised as local inhabitants. There was nothing I could do about all this, except to suggest to the headmen that they carefully keep any receipts issued to them by the Chinese officers for supplies taken.\n\nIn Burma before the war paper rupees had largely displaced silver coins; but in these conservative border districts paper was not welcome, and silver coins were preferred. Of course, the paper money of the Burma", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212840, "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": 149, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "134\n\ngovernment, after the withdrawal of the British, became useless: the Japanese issued a new rupee paper note of their own, and compelled the people in the areas occupied by them to accept it. In Kokang the only money now acceptable was silver rupees. We had brought some in with us, and further substantial sums were dropped to us by air: it created a problem over the border in China, where the currency situation was so desperate. Our rupees were used to pay for any services or supplies we received from the local population, and they doubtless quickly found their way to the border, where a heavy demand for silver existed owing to the continuous fall in value of the Chinese currency and where, consequently, a rupee would fetch over a hundred dollars. Curiously, Chinese half-dollar silver pieces were still current though not common on the Chinese side of the border, perhaps the only district in China where silver coins still existed, as the Chinese government had gone off the silver standard years before, and withdrawn all silver coins; the silver half-dollar was naturally worth far more than the paper dollar.\n\nOne headman asked me if I could not rescue his son from China. It was a sordid story, the details of which only reached me by degrees, but it is a story which should be told.\n\nLopez was the son of a Filipino father and a Burmese mother. He had spent most of his life in Burma, but claimed American citizenship. The Americans, working from the side of India, were anxious to obtain intelligence about conditions in eastern Burma, and so they trained Lopez, gave him a commission, borrowed some Indian wireless operators from the British, obtained for him a Chinese pass, and sent him with a party into Kokang. They sent him very secretly, a precaution which was not unwise in view of the speed at which news travels on the border; but they overlooked the necessity of informing the American officers with the Chinese Expeditionary Force.\n\nLopez arrived in Kokang in the autumn of 1934, set up his wireless, and began to collect information, a work at which he would have achieved considerable success. I found he had left a very favourable impression on the local population; some of the men who were subsequently to do the most useful work for us had first been engaged by him. The attack on the Myosa upset his arrangements; Lopez knew too much about this, and perhaps spoke indiscreetly; anyhow the Chinese decided to get rid of him. Although he had a Chinese pass, the Chinese went to the American officers attached to the C.E.F., and reported the presence of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212843, "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": 152, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "137\n\njackass stood tethered near the herdman's hut, on a knoll from which he could proudly survey his young.\n\nAt Lunghtang Jack rejoined us; he had followed the Salween and inspected all the ferries, except those around Kunlong, where the Japanese had established their bridgehead. During the past two years they had on several occasions raided from Kunlong as far north as Tawnio, putting the villages to fire. Kokang south of Tawnio was practically deserted and the mule tracks overgrown; there were no Chinese troops, but the Japanese were watched by standing patrols of the Kokang Defence Force.\n\nThe Salween at this season was low; in long stretches the current ran slow and the river could be crossed; the ferries were marked on the map at places, where tracks led down to the water. The width of the river, of course, varied; in the rapids where the water rushed through it might be no more than 100 feet, elsewhere generally nearer 300 feet. There were no boats; the method of crossing was to cut down a number of bamboos, lash them together, and paddle across. At the northern ferries small parties of Chinese troops watched on our side; the Japanese could be seen on the far side; but after the river left China to turn south, there were no more Chinese troops, and the ferries were watched by unarmed village levies, obviously ineffectively. The Japanese used the same system on their side, and at one ferry Jack had been able to shout over and hold a brief conversation with the two Kachin watchers on the far bank. At certain of the northern ferries shots were frequently exchanged between the Chinese troops, assisted by men of the K.D.F., and the enemy; and sometimes the Japanese would roll a gun up and lob some shells over; at other times it would be a trench mortar. On certain sections of the muletrack it was unwise to move by daylight.\n\nI sent Jack back to Hsintang where we had picked up some useful contacts, mostly thanks to Lopez' earlier work. Opposite Hsintang the Kachin tribes appeared ready to help, and we hoped we would be able to get people through onto the Burma road to watch Japanese movements, and so to facilitate Wingate's operations; if we could at the same time destroy some Japanese dumps so much the better.\n\nWhile at Hsintang I had been visited by one of the staff officers of the Nth division. I had with some difficulty persuaded him to allow our agents to cross the Salween at the ferry, which led most directly to the friendly Kachins and where the Japanese watch was not strict. We had", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212848, "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": 157, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "142\n\nfires and flying away again unable to find them. Inevitably there were some accidents and losses.\n\n―\n\n--\n\nRarely half a dozen 'planes would make a sortie the same night; we would then be busy for days collecting the heavy containers they would weigh up to three hundred pounds and carrying them back to camp. We received reinforcements; officers with long experience in the East; British wireless operators; Chin, Kachin, and Burmese assistants. Our money and our mail also came this way; Bren guns, Stens, Italian carbines, clothing, food and occasionally drink. Sometime later we were visited by two American officers attached to the Nth division; they spent the day with us. We discovered they had a partiality for Bourbon whisky, a thing most difficult to find in Calcutta. However, we thought we would plan a little surprise for them; we asked our friends in Calcutta whether they could not find a couple of bottles and include them in the next sortie. The sortie was made in due course, several containers crashed, and when we anxiously looked over the lists of contents, we sadly found that the precious bottles had \"pranged\" as Stan put it in his airforce jargon.\n\nThe problem of cutting a way through the jungle was ever present in Burma. We decided we would equip one man out of every two with a cutting implement for the purpose. There were many opinions about which implement was the best; each officer had his own idea. We left it to our 'furnishers' to supply what they had, and I have never seen such a collection of deadly looking hacking weapons as the variety sent. It included dahs, the light Burmese single-handed sword, with a blade about two feet long and in my opinion not quite heavy enough for the job; kukris, a choice for the expert; the East African panga, which I like best, but then perhaps I am prejudiced it reminded me of my days with the King's African Rifles during the last war; a short two-edged stabbing sword, obviously borrowed straight from the Roman Legion; and some quite unrecognisable kinds, probably designed by enthusiastic cranks.\n\nThe Italian carbines had been captured in Africa and were believed useful for our type of work; they only weighed four pounds, were short and handy but they had a very high muzzle velocity and kicked like an anti-tank rifle, without the rubber padding with which that rifle is fitted. They had fixed sights; on the little thirty yards range, which Stan had built in a fold of the mountain, we found they threw at least a foot off the bull; but they appeared to be fairly accurate at somewhere around", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212852, "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": 161, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "146\n\nanother. At about this time too I received a signal from Jack, who was doing most useful work across the Salween, that despite our previous agreement the Chinese were refusing to allow his agents to cross, unless they held a pass issued by the Headquarters of the Nth Division at Tetang. That meant a week's delay in each instance, and also it involved making public the names of our agents — the Chinese are not noted for security. So now I made a signal to our Headquarters, and the next I heard was that the Chinese had withdrawn their troops entirely from the ferries in question.\n\nJack himself crossed the river with a small party; but he found he could not proceed far. The Japanese kept a tab on all movement; at uncertain times their men would pass through villages, check the inhabitants and their pack animals. Any discrepancies had to be explained. Moreover, the Kachins were terrified lest the Chinese troops should cross over into their territory. It seemed that in 1942 when the armies retreated from Burma, there were a number of incidents between Chinese troops and Kachins, questions of women, taking food, pack animals, and all those difficulties which do arise on a retreat. The Chinese troops had left a bad reputation. The Kachins had killed some of them and they now feared, should the Chinese return, that they would take vengeance. The situation was difficult and we were unable to develop our plans.\n\nIn April we were joined by an American officer and his radio operator; from the first we had suggested that an American officer should join our party, and we were delighted when he arrived. He went off to join Jack across the Salween for a while. His operator stayed with us and was a great asset to our group. He had led a most interesting life in the States 'following the horses.' We learnt much about American race tracks, American girls, and other things. He would keep the campfire party at night amused for hours on end. At about this time too we ran short of \"imported\" food; things like butter, jam, sugar and tea. During the sorties that month our people had forgotten to include any in the containers, a lapse most unpopular at our end and the subject of lengthy and uncomplimentary comment, after the fashion of soldiers. But our racing expert now produced some American B ration, a large tin of butter, and another of jam, some cheese, some incredibly white caster sugar, such as we had not seen in months, and even a tin of pickles. It was all most welcome.\n\nAs will be imagined we were much dependent on the working of our", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213317, "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-1994", "page_number": 139, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "120\n\nThe First China War was the culmination of many years of irksome restraint. The British, as did other nations, objected strongly to being treated and listed with Burma, Vietnam and Korea as tribute bearers. The immediate cause was the destruction of all the opium in Canton brought in by foreigners and in 1840 the Chinese fleet attacked a British warship, followed by, amongst other incidents, Canton being bombarded by the British, and the war was on. Palmerston was Prime Minister in Britain during this, the First China War, now possibly better known as the first of the two Opium Wars. It began with a desultory naval engagement and little further happened until Major General Sir Hugh Gough arrived from Madras in March of 1841. The British plan was, first, to capture Chusan island off the coast of Chekiang to use as a pawn in the demand for Chinese agreements to British demands. This proved to be a futile gesture and during 1841 and 1842 British forces, with the continued aim of pressuring the Chinese into legitimising foreign trade within China, proceeded to attack several ports one after the other up the China coast, creeping ever further north towards the capital of Peking, causing the Chinese greater apprehension about the future. The campaign eventually ended with the imminent attack on Nanking, the former capital situated on the Yangtze in central China, avoided last minute by the agreement by the Chinese finally to the terms of a treaty signed in August 1842. One of the attacks on the China coast was on the then city of Chapu, which was to be followed up with an attack on Hangchou.\n\nChapu had a tolerable harbour, with a great rise and fall of tide, so much so that the smaller junks were left high and dry at low water. Together with its suburbs the town, perhaps five miles in circuit built in a square and intersected by numerous canals, lay about half a mile from the coast. The Reverend Gutzlaff in his third voyage up the China coast in January 1833 arrived in Chapu and described the surrounding countryside as the Chinese Arcadia with nothing able to exceed its beautiful and picturesque appearance. He further described the canals, neat roads, plantations and conspicuous buildings, adding that the whole country (of China) from the Yellow River south was flat until one came to the high lands which formed the harbour of Chapu city. The sea, he added, was receding from the land and flats had formed along the shore, visible at low water and constituting a barrier to the whole coast. Gutzlaff found nowhere so much openness and kindness, the (residents') intelligent questions respecting Britain were endless with them never seeming to be satiated with (British) company.\n\nI", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214840, "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-1999", "page_number": 255, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "222 \n\nA Bold Approach to War \n\nI have referred to the indomitable spirit that animated the British troops and sailors of the War. This was something one cannot fail to notice in the various accounts of the War. As in the First Burma War, there was a boldness that must have taken the Chinese aback whenever it was demonstrated. Being practically universal, one minor example may serve to illustrate the rest. It comes from J.D. Vaughan, later a magistrate in the Straits Settlements, who had served as a midshipman on the Honourable East India Company's steam frigate Tenasserim in 1842, and is recounted here largely in his own words.46 \n\nA few days after the capture of the Yangtse city of Chin-kiang-foo, his captain took two of the ship's boats with twenty or thirty men each, with a brass three-pounder at the bow, and went to a town on a canal flowing into the great river. The writer was in one of these boats. The ship's Chinese carpenter, a Southern Chinese picked up at Singapore, could write but could not speak the Mandarin language of the area. Armed with a slate, and a truly astonishing degree of sang-froid, he made the captain's wishes to purchase provisions known to a large throng of citizens and soldiers who had assembled on the banks. Negotiating with a mandarin, they got all that they wanted, and during their brief stay were treated with the greatest civility and kindness. “A table and chairs were brought, and the elders of the city had a most interesting conversation with us through the invaluable carpenter. It was a curious sight to see the skipper sitting as cool as a cucumber smoking his cigar surrounded by our foes.\" \n\n“Few men,” Vaughan says, “would have ventured so fearlessly into the very clutches of an armed foe within a few miles of a captured city with war raging all around; and strange to say we came away un-harmed and not an angry face was to be seen amongst the crowds of men who flocked out of the gate of the town to see us.” \n\nMany other instances can be found in the books on the War, and indeed it was the norm. This verve derived from military and naval discipline and tradition, and from the leadership shown by, and expected of, British officers of the day. Only when that leadership failed, as in the contemporary disasters at Kabul in the First Afghan War, when a British army was annihilated through hesitation and mismanagement, \n\nPage 255\n\nPage 256", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214844, "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-1999", "page_number": 259, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "226\n\nconcerning the Opium Question and have come to the conclusion that we have no right to date the present eruption to that cause, as we have been insulted, our Trade interfered with, and British subjects have been maltreated long before Opium was mentioned and we have only been too tardy in seeking redress.” Letter of August 21st 1840 from Chusan, from “An Artillery Officer in China, 1840-1842”, Blackwood's, 1964, p. 80.\n\n\"The Cree Journals, The Voyages of Edward H. Cree, Surgeon R.N., as Related in his Private Journals, 1837-1856 Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Levien. (Exeter, Webb & Bower, 1981), p. 117.\n\n12\n\nAs, e.g. in Bingham, op.cit., Vol.I, p. 187: \"Captain Elliot assured the Chinese, by proclamations in their language, that no harm was intended to the peaceable inhabitants by the present expedition; that it was caused by Lin's bad treatment of the English; and that the force would only act against the mandarins, officers, and soldiers of the government.\"\n\n13 Bingham, Vol.II, p.171, and Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (Hutchinson of London, 1975), p.129.\n\n14 Beeching, p.149. They had done the same in Lower Burma in 1824-26 (George Bruce, The Burma Wars 1824-1886 (London, Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1973) pp.33-35.\n\n15 See Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos and Mark R. Sheridan (Eds), The Laws of War, Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994), chapter 6, \"The Age of Napoleon”, in which Gunther Rothenberg wrote (p.97) that \"Professional soldiers were well aware of the laws and customs of war between civilized states, and by and large observed them,” and that despite atrocities and violations, their \"basic existence and validity” were never challenged.\n\n16 The most notable example being the firing of a salute of minute guns by the flagship, HMS Blenheim, when Admiral Kuan's body was recovered by his family after the battle of the Bogue in January 1841: see Bingham, Vol.II, p. 151, and Beeching, p. 128.\n\n18\n\nBeeching, pp. 147, 151. Wyndham Baker in Blackwood's p.79. By way of comment he added, “The", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214956, "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": 52, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "7\n\nwas still the way of the strong. Since ancient times successive empires have risen and fallen. China, too, had an imperialist past, when the Han Empire (206BC-221AD) extended its rule from Burma in the south to Korea in the north. Britain was the last to enter the stage, after the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch, forging perhaps the largest empire since the Roman Empire 2,000 years before. In the spirit of the new age, Britain professed an obligation to assist the indigenous colonial peoples in economic development and prepare them afterwards for self-government within the framework of the British Empire. This was the foundation of the 'Imperialism' which dominated her colonial policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This mission was sometimes regarded as at best illusory and at worst hypocritical. However, there is little doubt that the spirit of commercial enterprise was the leading motive of the British colonial policy, and it was the British pursuit of trade in the East, which brought China and Britain into confrontation. Predictably, this encounter of two nations, both proud and arrogant, proved disastrous.\n\nBritish attempt to establish contact with China began early. A Captain Weddell approached Canton in 1637, was refused entry but forced a passage through the Humen Forts (Bogue Forts). After a skirmish with the Chinese war junks, in which it was claimed Weddell had the upper hand, he was finally forced to withdraw. It was an ominous start to what Britain hoped would be a peaceful penetration. No further attempts were made for some 150 years, though in the meantime the English East India Company had managed to secure, in 1664, a trading base in Macao, and, by the turn of the century, in Guangzhou. Slowly, and in spite of many difficulties, foreign trade with China had assumed a regular character by the early 18th century. The main difficulty has already been mentioned: while British traders were eager to trade and in particular secure a steady supply of much needed tea from China, the latter desired no trading intercourse with the West. Emperor Qianlong's oft-quoted announcement stated: \"The Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders, there is therefore no need to import manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our products.' The Emperor spoke for himself and his government but hardly for the common man, to whom trading and material profits mattered. While requiring little from the West, Chinese were eager to sell tea - a ‘wholesome beverage' prepared almost exclusively for the British people. The question has been often", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214957, "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": 53, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "8 \n\nposed as to whether the Chinese as a whole were \"anti-commercial\" or whether it was only the government. Greenberg believes that \"trade in the long run mattered little to the Chinese economy.\"2 A further factor contributing to distrust of foreigners and the consequent restriction in contacts and trade was fear of European expansionist policy apparent to the Chinese in Tibet, the East Indies, the Philippines, Burma, and Nepal. \n\nBy the 1830s British demand for tea had become enormous; tea worth twenty million pounds sterling was imported into Britain annually. It was paid for from huge profits made on the sale of smuggled opium. Many foreign firms in Guangzhou, other than British, had engaged in the lucrative trade, with two notable exceptions,13 Britain accounting for more than 80% of the trade. Dissatisfied with the capricious nature of its trade in Guangzhou, Britain made three high-level attempts to form full diplomatic relations with Beijing, sending embassies under Macartney in 1793, Amherst in 1816, and Napier in 1834; all failed. The last two reached no further than Guangzhou before being unceremoniously sent back. But it may be of interest to deal in some length with Macartney's Mission because it seemed to succeed; that it failed was the most significant disaster in relations between the two nations, eventually leading to war. \n\nAfter a long journey, Macartney's Embassy embarked on Chinese boats to proceed up Baihe (Peiho) River on the 9th of August 1793. The following day they reached Tianjin (Tientsin) where they met the Emperor's envoy at a formal ceremony, which, however, lasted a mere 20 minutes. After staying in Beijing for some two weeks, they set out for Chengde (Jehol) where, on the 30th of September, they met Emperor Qianlong (1736-1795). Lord Macartney was graciously permitted to dispense with kowtow; it was agreed that the salutation was to be made on the right knee. According to Macartney, the Emperor was polite, and the conversation, conducted through interpreters, was lively and interesting. Moreover, the various scientific instruments, which were brought as gifts, were examined with obvious interest. The Embassy was told that they should depart on the 7th of October. Three days' grace was promised but immediately withdrawn, ostensibly because the Emperor was concerned that an early onset of cold weather would inconvenience the Ambassador. To reach their ships at Zhoushan (Chusan) Island, the Embassy had to travel across China, partly overland and partly by rivers - a journey that took nearly two months. It has", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215272, "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-2001", "page_number": 49, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "Carl Crow, 1883-1945\n\nMy friends, the Chinese. London: Hamish Hamilton. 1938.\n\nFitzgerald, C. P., 1902-\n\nCommunism takes China: how the revolution went Red. London: BPC, c1971.\n\nFranck, Harry Alverson\n\nRoving through Southern China. New York: Century, c1925.\n\nGeil, William Edgar\n\nA Yankee on the Yangtze: being a narrative of a journey from Shanghai through the Central Kingdom to Burma. New York: Eaton & Mains, 1904.\n\nGottschang, Thomas R.\n\nSwallows and settlers: the great migration from north China to Manchuria. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, c2000.\n\nGray, John Henry\n\nChina: a history of the laws, manners, and customs of the people. London: Macmillan, c1878. 2 vols.\n\nHobart, Alice Tisdale, 1882-1967\n\nOil for the lamps of China. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, c1934.\n\nHo, Pui-yin.\n\nDian di hua dang nian: Xiang-gang gong shui yi bai wu shi nian. Xiang-gang: Shang wu yin shu guan (Xiang-gang) you xian gong si, 2001.\n\nHo, Pui-yin\n\nWater for a barren rock: 150 years of water supply in Hong Kong; [English translator, Lui Yuen Chung]. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, c2001.\n\nHoney, W.B. (William Bowyer)\n\nThe ceramic art of China and other countries of the Far East. London: Faber, c1945.\n\nxlvi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215673, "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-2001", "page_number": 450, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "402\n\nBy July 15, the 24th Division was forced back on Taejon, sixty miles below Osan, where it initially took position along the Kum River above the town. Clumps of South Korean troops by then were strung out west and east of the division to help delay the North Koreans.\n\nWhile pushing the 24th Division below Taejon, the main North Korean force split, one division moving south to the coast, then turning east along the lower coastline. The remainder of the force continued southeast beyond Taejon toward Taegu. Southward advances by the secondary attack forces in the central and eastern sectors matched the main thrust, all clearly aimed to converge on Pusan. North Korean supply lines grew long in the advance, and less and less tenable under heavy United Nations Command (UNC) air attacks. The U.S. Far Eastern Air Force meanwhile achieved air superiority, indeed air supremacy, and UNC warships wiped out North Korean naval craft.\n\nAlarmed by the rapid loss of ground, Walker ordered a stand along a 140-mile line arching from the Korea Strait to the Sea of Japan west and north of Pusan. His U.S. divisions occupied the western arc, basing their position on the Naktong River. South Korean forces, reorganized by American military advisers into two corps headquarters and five divisions, defended the northern segment. A long line and few troops kept positions thin in this **Pusan Perimeter**. This line was, essentially, the front on August 12, the day that Mr. Morrison was killed.\n\nMr. Morrison's movements in Korea before his death are unknown. Seoul had fallen several days before his arrival, so he would have been forced to arrive in the south of the country, perhaps at Taegu. One assumes he spent the next five weeks, or so, behind the retreating UNC frontline.\n\n\"Morrison, a Daily Telegraph correspondent, and a great friend of mine, Uni Nair (sic), acting as a UN observer, were all killed together. I have always been convinced that Nair probably got them all into trouble. He was notably fearless. While with the Indian army in Italy during WW2, as a PR officer, he thoroughly enjoyed taking visitors into particularly dangerous sectors where their jeep attracted hostile fire. Towards the end of the war, in Burma, he volunteered without training to jump with paratroops in the drop on the outskirts of Rangoon.\n\n'Nair was fond of palm reading. My own, that I would reach a ripe old age, turned out pretty true. But if we asked Uni what sort of future he read in his own palm he always said, after a pause, “A short life and a merry one.”\" (Russell Spurr -- personal communication with the author)\n\nPage 450\n\nPage 451", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215802, "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-2002", "page_number": 101, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "34\n\nBETWEEN THE NINE DRAGONS AND A DIVINE WIND: HOW HONG KONG'S WEATHER MIGHT HAVE AFFECTED AN ALLIED INVASION TO RETAKE THE TERRITORY*\n\nCHOHONG CHO\n\nSynopsis\n\nIn the War in the Pacific during World War II, the question of whether or not to engage Japan directly in China was a major one for Allied planners. If the Japanese weren't enough of a problem, an age-old factor - the weather - certainly would have provided the Allies with additional concerns. The Pacific and Asia are home to some of the most extreme weather in the world.\n\nHong Kong, a possible target in any Allied campaign in China, played host to some of this extreme weather. What this study attempts to do is to consider how Hong Kong's adverse weather conditions could have affected an Allied operation to recapture it from the Japanese.\n\nBackground\n\nAfter Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in December 1941 and Great Britain was expelled from the Pacific, only the U.S. was left to face Japan in this theatre. The U.S. itself was in bad shape, as most of its Pacific Fleet had been mauled at Pearl Harbor. On the Asian mainland, Japan was still busying herself with China and Britain. A stalemate had developed with the former, while the latter was being pushed out of Burma into India.\n\nHowever, the U.S. Navy's (USN) aircraft carriers were not caught in the Pearl Harbor debacle, and during much of 1942, they bore the brunt of the action against the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the Pacific. In a series of three engagements with the IJN (at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal), with inferior numbers accompanied by\n\n*The author would like to thank Mr. Ko Tim-keung for bringing a draft of this article to the attention of the Hon. Editor, and Professor Elfed Roberts for his comments on an early version of the draft.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215804, "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-2002", "page_number": 103, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "36\n\nafter Britain lost Hong Kong, the closest Allied power to the territory was its original owner China. Then there was Hong Kong's status as a port. Any mainland port that touched the Pacific attracted the attention of the USN, because it was in its interest that China continued to keep the bulk of the Japanese Army occupied on the continent while the U.S. seized Japan's possessions in the Pacific. Hence, Allied commanders like Admiral Ernest King, the USN's highest-ranking officer and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), thought that the U.S. had a major responsibility to help keep China in the war,\n\nIn 1943, China was tying down 20 per cent of the Japanese Army. No major fighting had occurred there for a while, but the Allies knew that this relative calm might not last. The fear that Japan would resume her efforts to knock China out of the war was real, and Allied planners wanted to prevent this by keeping the Chinese Army (of the Nationalist government) battle-worthy. To do this, they had to establish and maintain secure lines of communication (LoC) into China. As Japan had already occupied China's ports and the lone road into China from Burma (the Burma Road), the sole means of supplying China was through a risky, costly, and feeble air route over the Himalayas (the Hump).\n\nThe best method of supplying China was to recapture a port on the China Coast and establishing LoC to the interior of China. Initially, the Chinese Army was allotted the bulk of this task - if it could be strengthened by deliveries over the Hump and (if the Allies could retake it) the Burma Road. But by 1943, supplies over the Hump remained minuscule, the Burma Road was not reopened, and the Chinese (Nationalists, Communists, and third-party elements) preferred to fight among themselves rather than against the Japanese. With the Allied drives in the Pacific gathering momentum, the main responsibility for a campaign to recapture a port on the China Coast eventually fell to the U.S.\n\nHong Kong and Shanghai have long been the two best ports on the China Coast, with each possessing excellent harbour facilities. But Hong Kong rated ahead of Shanghai as the initial port to be opened up in China because of the strong Japanese presence around Shanghai. In the Hong Kong-Canton area during 1943, the Japanese still occupied only a beachhead. As long as Hong Kong remained a beachhead, and the Chinese forces ringing it maintained a measure of resolve, Japanese", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215811, "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-2002", "page_number": 110, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "43\n\nnot be so kind to either side, though. Most days in Hong Kong during these six months would be too hot, too humid, or both. In fact, it was possible for every day in July and August (62 straight days) to experience temperatures exceeding 80°F (27°C). On some days, the temperature neared the 100°F (38°C) mark. Combine this with a punishing humidity (almost 90 per cent relative humidity from April to August), and the result is a formula for misery.\n\nGround operations may be affected because of the painful effects high temperatures and humidity could have on infantry during the heat of battle. Dehydration and heat stroke, just two of the maladies associated with high temperatures and humidity, don't bear the same negative connotation as malaria, but both were just as effective at putting soldiers out of action. The Allies had already experienced these hazards in the Pacific and Burma, both of which boasted even higher temperatures and humidity than Hong Kong. In many of these campaigns, the conditions brought about by the temperature and humidity, like disease, were even more effective than the Japanese in causing Allied casualties.\n\nOn the logistical front, temperature and humidity also affect machinery, of which the Allies had plenty. The tools of war are always operated more intensely than peacetime machinery, and hence are always in need of maintenance. While it is usually more durable than peacetime machinery, military hardware is also more complex. In addition, due to its constant employment, military hardware inevitably breaks down and undergoes attrition, capture, and destruction. The desire of the Allies to maintain the strength and condition of their war machines at optimum levels was part of the reason why their support personnel well outnumbered fighting personnel, especially in the American ranks.\n\nHaving to service the hardware in a hot and humid environment like Hong Kong would be quite an ordeal for maintenance personnel. Moisture from the humidity accelerates the depreciation of equipment. High temperatures, combined with the high temperatures already generated by machinery being brought in during the heat of battle, only further complicate the maintenance problem. If the machinery cannot be serviced in a relatively cool place like a hangar or a shady spot, then the personnel may have to wait until night time or early in the morning, which would consume valuable time. Due to the wholesale clearing", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215822, "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-2002", "page_number": 121, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "54\n\nremained an integral part of Allied strategy to defeat Japan. Even if her expected contribution to Allied victory over Japan had been downgraded and a squadron of B-29s based on the mainland was not as promising as a combat-ready Chinese Army, the politics of basing such a new and promising weapon on Chinese soil were thought to be enough to boost Chinese morale.53\n\nThe issue is in doubt\n\nBy the end of 1943, Allied planners had not settled on a decision to drop Hong Kong from the list of future objectives, nor did they elevate its status to that of a territory whose possession was beyond debate. In short, if a campaign in China was likely, a port on the China Coast would need to be opened up, and Hong Kong was a leading candidate for such a port. The development of the war in 1944-1945 would determine Hong Kong's importance.\n\nAs the USN's Central Pacific offensive gathered momentum in early 1944, the adjacent Southwest Pacific offensive under General Douglas MacArthur also stepped up its pace so as not to be left behind. The competing dual advances sped up the Allied timetable, and brought the Allies to within striking distance of Japan by summer 1944.\n\nIn China, it was a different story. Chinese forces here had not faced a major Japanese attack since 1938. When the Japanese attempted to link their possessions in the south (including Hong Kong) with the large portion of China they held north of the Yangtze River with a major offensive in the summer, the Chinese forces standing in the way largely disintegrated without offering much resistance. By early 1945, the Hong Kong beachhead had linked up with the rest of Japanese-held China. By now, the prospect of recapturing Hong Kong from the sea, while still not entirely infeasible, was made harder due to the potential ease with which the Japanese could reinforce Hong Kong from the interior of China. Intelligence reports indicated that the Japanese probably intended to wage a last-ditch defence of Hong Kong like they were already doing in the Pacific.54\n\nJ\n\nThe Japanese eventually overextended themselves in China, while China belatedly began to receive supplies in some quantity once the road link from Burma was reopened and the air link over the Hump", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215826, "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-2002", "page_number": 125, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "58\n\n1.\n\n1 Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: the U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991), p.14.\n\n2 Miller, p.21-22, 24.\n\n3 Miller, p.33-36.\n\n(1) Steven T. Ross (ed.), American War Plans, 1919-1941, vol.2 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1992), p.125-126. (2) Miller, p.4-5, 31-32.\n\n• Ernest J. King & Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King, A Naval Record (New York: WW Norton & Co., Inc., 1952), p.432. The JCS was the military committee that directed the war on the American side.\n\n6 Charles F. Romanus & Riley Sunderland, Stilwell's Command Problems, 1956 of U.S. Army in World War II: the China-Burma-India Theater, (pt. Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1976), p.10.\n\n7 Christopher M. Bell, \"Our Most Exposed Outpost: Hong Kong and British Far Eastern Strategy, 1921-1941,\" The Journal of Military History, 60 (January 1996), p.65.\n\n• Colonel Lindsay T. Ride, \"Memorandum on the Liberation of Prisoners-of-War, Hong Kong,\" 30 Sep 43, p.11-13; Series 2/33, BAAG (British Army Aid Group) Correspondence Concerning Operations, September 1942-November 1943; Personal Papers of Sir Lindsay Tasman Ride (microform); Canberra, ACT: Australian War Memorial, 2001 (hereinafter known as the Ride Papers).\n\n* Unless otherwise noted, information for this section was collected from Weather Information Branch, HQ, USAAF, R&A Report #71087, \"Climate of Hong Kong (China),\" October 1943; Intelligence Reports (\"Regular Series\"), 1941-1945; Research and Analysis Branch Division; Records of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), RG226; National Archives (NA), Washington, DC.\n\n10 Later, it was reported that an all-weather road ran from Hong Kong to Canton, and the Japanese had improved other roads nearby to the same capacity. See \"G-2 Estimates of the Following Places: Haiphong-Liuchow Peninsula-Hainan Island-Hong Kong-Swatow-Amoy-Foochow-Santuao-Wenchow-Hangchow Bay Region-Laoyao-Chingtao-and the Tip of the Shantung Peninsula to Include Wei Hai Wei,\" 17 Feb 45, p.5; Ch.7-Intelligence, Correspondence, 1945, Folder", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215829, "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-2002", "page_number": 128, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "61\n\n28\n\nChic Publishers, 1996), p.12-14. (3) Heywood, p.17:\n\nTyphoon winds that approach Hong Kong from the southeast blow on Victoria Harbour from the north, so Kowloon's mountains can serve as a partial barrier. See Donald Alan Mantner & Samson Brand, An Evaluation of Hong Kong Harbour as a Typhoon Haven (Monterey, CA: Environmental Prediction Research Facility, Naval Postgraduate School, 1973), p.53.\n\n29 Navy Department, \"Advanced Base: Hong Kong,\" p.14-15. However, Tolo Harbour could do little more than serve as a secondary anchorage because shore facilities in Tai Po were limited.\n\n30\n\n31\n\n32\n\n(1) Heywood, p.7-8. (2) Adamson & Kosco, p.12. Although described by many sources as a \"tidal wave,\" the wave would be more appropriately described as a storm surge because it is not caused by the moon.\n\nHKRO, A Statistical Survey of Typhoons and Tropical Depressions in the Western Pacific and China Sea Area From 1884 to 1947 (Hong Kong: Government Printers, 1951), p.3 (hereafter referred to as HKRO, Statistical Survey). See also P.C. Chin's Tropical Cyclone Climatology for the China Seas and Western Pacific From 1884 to 1970, Vol. I: Basic Data (Hong Kong: Government Printers, 1972) for maps of typhoon tracks for each year.\n\n33\n\nThe evasion option became more popular after the war, probably because of better typhoon location and tracking methods. See Mantner & Brand, p.78-79, 88. The authors cited British and American dissatisfaction with Hong Kong as a \"safe haven\" for ships during a typhoon.\n\n34 HKRO, Statistical Survey, p.9.\n\n35\n\nRomanus & Sunderland, Stilwell's Mission to China, 1953 of U.S. Army in World War II: the China-Burma-India Theater (rpt. Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1984), p.12-13.\n\nCPS 83, \"Appreciation and Plan for the Defeat of Japan,” 8 Aug 43, Map F; CCS 381 Japan (8-25-42), sec.6; Geographic File, 1942-45; Records of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, RG 218; NA, Washington, DC. The map shows that Hong Kong lay within the minimum area required for the air bombardment of Japan.\n\n* United States Army Air Force, B-29 Erection and Maintenance Manual (Dayton,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215832, "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-2002", "page_number": 131, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "64\n\n53 Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: the American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), p.489.\n\n54 (1) South China Weekly Situation Report No.4, 30 Mar 45; Series 1/1; War Diary, January-April 1945; also includes South China Weekly Situation Reports Nos.1-23, 9 Mar-23 Oct 45; Ride Papers. (2) South China Weekly Situation Report No.14, 8 Jun 45 (rest of details the same as above).\n\n55 Romanus & Sunderland, Time Runs Out in CBI, 1959 of U.S. Army in World War II: The China-Burma-India Theater (rpt. Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1976), p.332-334.\n\n56 Adamson & Kosco, p.149-150, 190.\n\n57 Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas Report, Serial 0395 of 11 February 1946; Entry 351; World War II Action and Operational Reports; RG38; NA, Washington, DC,\n\n58 Alderson, p.57.\n\n59 Adamson & Kosco, p.52-53, 185-187. Interestingly, the carriers in question, the USS Hornet (CV-12) and USS Bennington (CV-20), had survived previous Japanese attacks (including Kamikazes) without suffering anything worse than strafing, but they couldn't escape the typhoon.\n\n60 CPS107/1, p.15.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215933, "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-2002", "page_number": 232, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "166\n\noff from distant airfields and alerted possible targets. Previously the British had depended on runners and letters delivered by junk: the advantages of tapping on to the Chinese system were obvious.\n\nChiang was enthusiastic, and eager to talk. British policy seemed engineered towards appeasing the Japanese. Protecting trade and British economic interests were paramount, and the fate of China and its people were seen only in the light of that primary concern. In the deafening silence of British efforts to help the Chinese, Boxer's visit, and the recent reopening of the Burma Road, must have seemed like a breakthrough in British attitudes. Boxer sensed that Chiang was 'apparently envisaging a great deal wider form of liaison than we actually had in mind.' Later, British organisations were to claim that it was Chinese hostility and the Americans who stymied their efforts in China. There is plenty to negate this assumption. Dai Li, a shrewd judge of character and not a man to suffer fools, undoubtedly had had Boxer closely observed, and would have smoothed the way for his introduction to Chiang Kai Shek. The warmth of Boxer's reception shows the Chinese were not implacably opposed to the British. Indeed, far from being anti-western per se, General Dai gave enthusiastic support later to Americans such as Captain Miles, and indeed some British SOE related agencies, who were prepared to work with the Chinese on Chinese terms.\n\nThe wireless sets were duly sent to China and installed by a Cantonese speaking SOE officer, Major Hector Chauvin, who had been attached to Boxer in December 1939 for this purpose. Chauvin travelled extensively in China setting up the stations and meeting the Chinese personnel involved. This network was a prototype. It was the first serious intelligence system in the Hong Kong region. Most importantly, the arrangement was based on trust: the Chinese had full operational control. Although the Chinese might have a different agenda to the British, it was an implicit acknowledgement that, in China, the Chinese were paramount, and that Chinese could and did run a most efficient system. The arrangement worked: The evening before the Japanese attacked Kai Tak, Phyllis Harrop, a civilian police adviser, was at a dinner party with British intelligence personnel. At 10:30 hours, they were interrupted by a sudden telephone call, advising all staff to return immediately to headquarters. Major L left immediately and Captain Bush half an hour later. Bush was an expert on extremist secret", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]