[ { "id": 211519, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1988", "page_number": 236, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "212\n\nagricultural calendar, this falls in September rather than July as in Yunnan. Needham was able to find no references from the north of China to hot air balloons, and this local custom in the New Territories may well be yet one more case of the New Territories villagers sharing with the South Chinese minority tribes a traditional practice not known to the Chinese north of the Kwangtung-Fukien mountains.\n\nP. H. Hase\n\n+\n\nNOTES\n\nJ. Needham Science and Civilization in China Vol. 4 Part 2, 1965, pp. 595-599\n\nI have not been able to spot any references to hot air balloons in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which contains most of what is told about Chuko Liang. The germ of the connection may be the night signal of seven lamps\" which Chuko Liang used at Ch'ishan (Chapter 103, Romance of the Three Kingdoms).\n\nDetail in this Note is taken from interviews with Mr. CHÔI Kam-chuen, retired village representative of Tai Wai, Sha Tin, and other Sha Tin and Tuen Mun villagers, and particularly with Mr. LEE, village representative of Wo Hang, Sha Tau Kok, and other Wo Hang villagers. My particular thanks are due to Mr. LEE Man-yip of Wo Hang.\n\n+ On the importance of those practices, which required the co-operation of village youths, see the author's \"Observations at a Village Funeral\" in From Village to City ed D. Faure, J. Hayes, A. Birch, Hong Kong 1984, pp. 129-163, espec. pp. 129-137, and also D. Faure The Structure of Chinese Rural Society, Hong Kong, p. 96.\n\nNeedham op. cit. The Yunnan hot air balloons are quoted by Needham from J. Goullart, The Forgotten Kingdom 1955, p. 178. The Yunnan balloons were fired by bundles of splintered pine twigs, and were able to fly for only a few minutes. The Yunnan balloons. like those in the New Territories, were made of paper pasted over hoops of split bamboo: presumably the hoop was a rim-hoop.\n\nA SILVER BRACELET WITH\n\nAN ANCIENT GREEK COIN FOUND IN WEWAK, EAST SEPIK PROVINCE,\n\nPAPUA NEW GUINEA\n\nA silver bracelet was found in the sand on a raised beach in Wewak, at a depth of approximately 0.5 m in disturbed ground.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211631, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 46, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "21\n\nto be regarded as such by mankind and to be revered only as the representation of that power. However, over the centuries, he has developed into a god in his own right, depicted as a gilded image of an emperor sitting on a throne, and is accepted by the masses as the ruler of the Heavenly bureaucracy.\n\nIn T'aishan in Shantung province it was claimed that the Jade Emperor in mortal life had been merely a learned doctor of medicine who had lived during the 12th century AD at the Sung court in Kaifeng. He attended the emperor Hui Tsung during a serious illness and saved his life with a miraculous cure. He was known as Chang Yu-huang, but, on his death, he, like many a hermit, was deified by imperial decree.\n\nBritish representatives met the imperial representative, Li Hung-chang in 1876 in the temple (Yuh Huang T'ing) dedicated to the Jade Emperor to the west of Yent'ai (Cheefoo) in Shantung province to arrange the Chefoo Convention. Another incident involving the British in North China and connected with the Jade Emperor concerned Sir Meyrick Hewlett of the China Consular Service at the turn of the century during the clearing up after the siege of the British Embassy during the Boxer Rebellion. He found in the house of Sir Ernest Satow, HM Ambassador in Peking, a tablet with a background of sky-blue, framed in rich gold and inscribed with the four characters in gold — 'Huang T'ien Shang Ti'. Prince Ch'ing identified it as an item from the Temple of Heaven which had been missing for more than a year. When Sir Ernest asked how to restore it to its rightful place, the Prince begged the Ambassador not to send it round to his palace as should it be placed in the entrance he could neither leave nor enter his home without kowtowing twenty-seven times before it. Another more enlightened official helped out by bearing it off at dead of night in a Peking cart to the vaults of a European bank where it awaited a favourable day for restoring it to the Temple of Heaven. Some thirty-five years later, Sir Meyrick, paying his farewell visit to Peking, visited the Temple of Heaven and asked the attendants whether he could see the tablet, kept with the other tablets sacred to the emperors of the Ch'ing dynasty in a small temple opposite the Altar of Heaven. They replied that this was quite impossible, since even in post-imperial Kuomintang days no-one was allowed to see it. Sir Meyrick related the story of its recovery, upon which the attendants agreed to show him the tablet together with the tablets to the 28 Major Constellations, to Thunder and Lightning, and to the other forces of nature, but said that the tablets to the emperors were all lost after their", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211660, "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": 75, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "50\n\neach bearing a different surname. Depending upon which source you accept the maximum number of individual surnamed Pestilence Wang Yeh would appear to be a mere 106 or 132 out of the 360.\n\nThere are at least five or six different legends describing the origins of these spirits which vary enormously both in general and in detail with the most popular story heard repeatedly in Taiwan and South-East Asia being of 360 musicians deified by an emperor of China. Cautionary stories about the threat to the populace from the 360 Plague Gods were common throughout China but other than in Fukienese communities they were not referred to as Wang Yeh. In some versions the spirits of the musicians spread out all over China and in our major legend five particular spirits, deemed special protectors of the area, ended up in the Changchou and Ch'uanchou area of Fukien.\n\nThe different legends, in general, claimed that the group of Pestilence Wang Yeh were 'scholars killed by Ch'in Shih Huang Ti, the unifier of China in 210 BC, who ordered the burning of books and the burial of Confucian scholars'; 'T’ang dynasty literati who died as a result of the folly of the emperor T'ang Ming Huang (685-762AD)'; 'The 360 Ming literati who refused to serve the usurping foreign dynasty, the Ch'ing and hanged themselves, (mid-seventeenth century AD)'; 'The five scholars who killed themselves to save villagers from an infected well'; or, finally, are 'spirits of the man-in-the-street who died of plague and became Plague gods'.\n\nA few temple keepers claim that the Pestilence Wang Yeh are subordinate to the Lord of Mount T'ai and of the Underworld (T’aishan Ta Ti 泰山大帝).\n\nThe following are a number of the legends in greater detail. The first relates that during the reign of T'ang T'ai Tsung (627-649 AD) five scholars who had been unsuccessful at the imperial civil service examinations had stayed on in the capital living on what they could earn playing music. The emperor summoned them to the palace to play for him and had at the same time the Taoist 'pope' Chang T'ien Shih (Chang the Heavenly Master) in audience. The emperor wishing to test the 'pope's' magical powers ordered the musicians to play in the cellar whilst he told the ‘pope' that there were five demons in the basement. The 'pope' using his secret arts killed all five. The emperor was both appalled and ashamed of what he had caused and deified all five.\n\nPage 75\n\nPage 76", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 } ]