[
    {
        "id": 212219,
        "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": 161,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "138\n\nmight be more useful outside. The Japanese had not yet occupied all the coast; foreign ships were still sailing to the unoccupied ports. I slipped out to Ningpo, intending to remain a few days while watching to see which way the cat jumped: but instead of attacking Hongkong, the Japanese landed at Chinhai, at the mouth of the Ningpo river, and I was thus cut off. After a fortnight they withdrew, leaving guard ships to watch the approaches. In the meantime the Chinese had mined the Ningpo river to deny entry to Japanese ships.\n\nI was shut in at Ningpo for three months during the heat of the summer. It was my first contact for two years with unoccupied China. With the restrictions imposed, first by the impediments arising from the Japanese war with China, and in the second place by the shortage of shipping and exports consequent on the war with Germany in Europe, British trade in the interior of China was at a standstill. The large British firms found it commercially unprofitable to keep their staff in many of the remaining treaty ports of free China, and withdrew them to Shanghai and Hongkong. British opinion thus, on the one hand, tended to lose touch with conditions in free China, while, on the other, was increasingly exposed to impression by the Japanese, who swarmed so actively in the occupied ports. The British were no more at fault than the Americans or the French, but for the Americans the balance was to some extent redressed by their larger and more vocal upcountry missionary organisation; as British interests out-numbered those of the other powers, so did the Chinese tend to concentrate criticism on them for continued failure to realise that China was fighting the battle of the democracies.\n\nA particularly unfortunate failure was the continued indifference shewn to the Chinese Government at Chungking. While it was still in Nanking, with branch divisions in Shanghai, foreign firms had extensive contacts with all the various departments, but when the Government was driven first to Hankow, and then to Chungking, no attempt was made to follow and nurse those contacts. The Chinese Government in its extremity would have welcomed any display of sympathy and was affronted by this neglect, but the large firms continued to treat their business in the Capital at the level of the small and remote treaty port, which Chungking had been. One consequence, for instance, occurred in 1943, when the two leading British banks belatedly decided to open branches in Chungking. The Chinese kept them waiting six months on the doorstep.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213318,
        "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": 140,
        "title": "RAS-1994",
        "content_text": "121\n\nWhen Gutzlaff had first landed at Chapu an armed force of Chinese was drawn up along the shore. The Chinese soldiers had matchlocks and burning matches ready for a charge, and a Tatar general had placed himself in a temple to superintend the operation; however, wrote Gutzlaff, \"being accustomed to the fire of Chinese batteries which seldom do hurt, and knowing their matchlocks cannot hit, we passed through their line of defence in peace\". The soldiers retreated and crowds of people in the rear being very dense the camp was overrun and tents fell to the ground. After this nothing disagreeable happened. On one excursion Gutzlaff went to a temple on a high hill overlooking the populous region, \"with its abomination of idolatry.\"\n\nToday little remains of old Chapu. The harbour, still used by fishing boats, is overlooked by a broken wall pierced for cannon, with three old cannon still mounted but on modern concrete bases, two being breech loaders and one a comparatively old muzzle loader. There is no sign now of the old city walls, nor of the old Tatar Quarter. It is a sleepy rural town on a former main road now left more or less isolated by the modern highway between Hangchou and Shanghai, by-passing Chapu by some fifteen miles.\n\nThe British Expeditionary Force began the 1842 campaigning season by evacuating Ningpo and Chinghai in early May to raise sufficient troops for the attack on Chapu. The force left Ningpo on 7 May for Chapu where some six thousand Chinese Green Standard troops and some seventeen hundred Manchu soldiers held the beaches and the adjacent heights and were waiting for the British to land and attack. It took the wooden-sided troop transports nine days under sail to cover the sixty miles from Chinhai to Chapu. Theoretically Chapu was strongly fortified but, as had happened before, the Chinese proved unprepared for anything but frontal attack.\n\nThe British Order of Battle consisted of the Force Headquarters under Lieutenant General Sir Hugh Gough, a fleet of seven ships of war, four steamers and troop transports, a naval brigade of some two hundred and fifty men, and four regiments.\n\nThe plan called for three columns, with the Left Column under Lieutenant Colonel Morris, consisting of the 18th Royal Irish under Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas R. Tomlinson (consisting of 492 all ranks),",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214835,
        "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": 250,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "217\n\n \nwar, did his best to maintain control of his forces and to restrain the troops. Indeed, the more I read about Gough and his conduct, the more I admire the way in which he sought to conduct his operations. A few indications of his undoubted humanity may be given here:\n\n \nAt Amoy, Sir Hugh had published an Order of the Day, that \"private property was to be held inviolable, and that which in England obtains the name of robbery deserves no better name in China.” Camp followers who did try their hand at looting in Amoy were condemned to death on the spot.\" Such condign punishment is confirmed by an account from the Chinese side. The poet Chu Shih-yun of Chinkiang area mentions that the British executed two sepoys and put up a placard warning against rape and looting.22 Sir Hugh was equally solicitous in smaller matters. After the capture of Chenhai, he had stopped sailors who were hacking off Chinese prisoners' pigtails with their jack knives.23 In a more serious intervention, and with the Admiral in full support, he sharply opposed Sir Henry Pottinger's wish to plunder Ningpo “as a reprisal for the maltreatment there of British prisoners.”24\n\n \nSir Hugh's behaviour at Ningpo must indeed be regarded as exemplary. Anxious to save the place from the looting from which Amoy had suffered (from the Chinese rabble as much if not more than from his own force) as soon as the city was occupied he had called together some of the principal inhabitants and enlisted their cooperation in organizing a corps of Chinese police to protect private property. He was especially insistent that the troops should take good care of the buildings in which they were given sleeping quarters. \"When the Royal Irish and a company of the Westmorelands were stationed in a temple, he gave orders that they must not use the painted and gilded central hall, where examinations were held, for fear it might be spoilt.\"\n\n \n925\n\n \nUnfortunately, Gough's hopes for the city were dashed. Following the unsuccessful Chinese counter-attack on Ningpo, Chinese looters had taken advantage of the confused situation to loot the city with disastrous results. Sir Hugh wrote home, \"When I look at this place, I am sick of war.”26\n\n \nBrigadier Colin Campbell\n\n \nOther senior British officers also had scruples and set high standards",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]