[ { "id": 215594, "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": 371, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "321\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nA TALE OF SOUR GRAPES: MESSRS. LITTLE AND MESNY AND\n\nTHE FIRST STEAMSHIP THROUGH THE YANGZI GORGES\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nIn 1898 Archibald Little was the first man to take a steam-vessel up through the dangerous Yangzi Gorges amidst great acclaim. This was a red-rag to William Mesny who, in 1905 in his Shanghai periodical Mesny's Chinese Miscellany, furiously wrote that had he been listened to in 1875, a steamboat could have completed the journey up the Gorges within a year or so of that date.\n\nThe 3,200-mile long river, referred to by westerners as the Yangzi is known to the Chinese as Changjiang, Long River, or Da Jiang, the Great River. The foreigner name, Yangzi, is a misnomer from the Chinese reference to the first stretch from the Yellow Sea, approximately a day or so sail up from Shanghai to Yangzhou, hence Yang.\n\nThe River can be divided into four sections. The first stretch from the sea to Wuhan [Hankou and Wuchang], some 600 miles upstream, is navigable for blue water vessels during the summer and small draught steamers at all times of the year. It may come as a surprise to read of the emergency run in September of 1931 of the British aircraft carrier, H.M.S. Hermes to Hankou during major floods. The Chairman of the Nationalist Flood Relief Commission, T.V. Soong, requested the British C-in-C for assistance using RAF reconnaissance aircraft from H.M.S. Hermes to assist the Chinese in flood survey patrol work.\n\nThe second stretch upstream from Wuhan to Yichang is always navigable to small draught vessels and is a very boring run passing, as it does, through a flat plain with many dykes.\n\nThe third stretch from Yichang to Chongqing is fast flowing downstream through the narrow and dangerous succession of Gorges, so popular with foreign tourists. The great variations in water level", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215595, "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": 372, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "322\n\nracing through the Gorges make this section difficult and dangerous both at low and high water. Chongqing, the chief commercial port of western China and an important distribution centre, was opened to foreign trade by an Additional Article [1890] to the Chefoo Agreement of 1876. This stretch also includes the River down to Chongqing from its junction with the Min River at Yibin [Suifu].\n\nThe fourth and final stretch, the Upper Yangzi of 1,600 miles, is torrential almost from its source in Eastern Tibet far to the west, down to Yibin. It has several major tributaries.\n\nWe, however, are interested in the Gorges. They have long been regarded by Chinese junkmen and especially foreigners who had travelled through them as passengers on river junks, as one of the most difficult stretches of river navigation on earth, with a current in places running at 13 knots.\n\nOur story concerns two British expatriates in China who, as far as we know, never met as they were of different social circles. One is Archibald Little, a British Shanghai merchant, married to a British lady and William Mesny, a struggling entrepreneur also in Shanghai but married to a Chinese. Paul King wrote that 'One of the foreign tea-tasters who each year visited Kiukiang [Jiujiang] was Archibald Little, who was never very successful in business but found himself in Yichang in the uphill work of establishing as a fact that the rapids in the upper reaches of the Yangtze could be negotiated by steam craft. In my [King] time the Navy was represented in Yichang by H.M.S. Kinsha - the famous pioneer merchant steamer on the Upper Yangtze owned and operated by the late Archibald Little.'\n\nThe first steamer to ascend the upper waters of the Great River, the Yangzi, through the Gorges above Yichang and as far as Chongqing during the low water season in the month of March 1898 was the 9-ton steam launch, Leechuen [Li Chuan], the property of Mr. Archibald Little who travelled aboard the steamer with his wife.\n\nArchibald John Little was born in London in 1838, and arrived in China in 1859 where he remained, apart from short visits back to Britain, until 1907 when he returned there and died the following year. He was a merchant, traveller and writer and is as well known to some as the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215596, "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": 373, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "323\n\nhusband of Mrs. Archibald Little who was a traveller and writer in her own right and who in 1895 founded the Heavenly Foot Society for the suppression of the cruel practice of binding and spoiling the natural feet of Chinese girls.\n\nThe story now goes back thirteen years. In 1885 Little planned to set up a company to build a couple of steamers after his own design to sail up to Chongqing to open up the vast and fertile province of Sichuan. This led him first to spend six months in one of the ordinary boats of the river learning all he could about the rapids, swirls, currents, depth and other details of the upper waters of the river.\n\nHe went back to London where he soon formed a company, and an experimental steamer of five hundred tons burden was put on the stocks in Glasgow from designs drawn by Mr. J McGregor, the chairman of the company, conforming to the designs furnished by Archibald Little. The steamer was completed during the summer of 1887, and shipped in sections to Shanghai, where she was put together by one of the local ship-builders and launched towards the end of 1887.\n\nShe was christened the Kuling, and was about five hundred tons burden, one hundred and seventy-five feet long and twenty-eight broad. She was eight feet deep, perfectly flat-bottomed and drew only two feet four inches of water empty, a mere trifle over four feet with a full cargo, and was especially adapted for navigating rocky and dangerous rapids. The boilers and engines were amidships. She was driven by two sets of compound engines, with a stroke of five feet, and worked with a pressure of one hundred and sixty pounds of steam. She had two stern wheels and a balanced rudder astern of the wheels.\n\nThe Kuling reached Yichang at the end of February 1889 and all was ready for the passage through the Gorges, when Mr Gregory, the British consul, backed by the Chinese authorities, refused to allow the steamer to proceed, as no permit had been received from either the Zongli Yamen [Chinese Department of Foreign Affairs], or Sir John Walsham, the British Minister at Peking.\n\nThe rest of the story was so characteristic of Chinese procrastination and delay. To put it simply and bluntly, the British Minister refused to coerce the Chinese in any way, and so the Kuling was eventually sold and the scheme abandoned.\n\nThe matter of the Upper Yangzi navigation remained in abeyance until the Chinese defeat by the Japanese in the war of 1895 when the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215597, "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": 374, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "324\n\nJapanese were able to demand the formal opening of Chongqing to steamers, and a clause to this effect was embodied in the Treaty of Shiminoseki. By this treaty, under the favoured nation clause, the Chongqing and the Upper Yangzi became open to the world and Little immediately applied to the then British Minister, Sir Claude Macdonald [of the later Boxer Siege fame], who encouraged Little to proceed and promised energetic support. Little ordered a twin-screw steamer to be built in Shanghai, fifty-five feet long and ten feet beam. It steamed at nine knots, and though he would have preferred a larger and more powerful vessel he had to cut his coat according to his cloth. This was the Leechuen.\n\nHe left Yichang on 15th February 1898 for the 500-mile voyage through the Gorges, ascending some 500 feet during the journey to Chongqing. The story, told by Archibald Little in his Through the Yangtse Gorges,2 describes the most frightening moment when at dusk in the Scissors Gorge, making about six knots they bumped over a sharp rock that cut through the inch planking, broke two hardwood frames and sent water spouting up over the saloon floor. Fortunately they soon spotted a steep patch of sand on to which they ran the boat. Then, overnight, they stuffed cotton, white lead and tallow into the cracks; nailed blankets down with planks all over and by dawn had stopped the leak sufficiently to be able to get under way again. The rock had only newly fallen from the cliff above and had been unknown to the pilot. They reached Chongqing eleven days up from Yichang and the only photograph I have seen of the Leechuen during her epic journey is a very fuzzy snap of high cliffs with the Leechuen amidstream, a not so large speck, her billowing smoke being almost twice her size.3\n\nTwo British gunboats, H.M.S. Woodcock and H.M.S. Woodlark, made the same journey fifteen months later in May 1899, and then, in June, the first merchant steamer, Pioneer, followed them up to Chongqing.\n\nWe now turn to William Mesny. In 1878 and 1879 he travelled across south-west and central China calling on the most powerful and influential officials and gentry, advising them to adopt modern means for developing the riches of the country and bettering their conditions.* Mesny was a Jerseyman who spent most of his life, from first setting foot in China in 1861 until his death in Hankou in 1919 endeavouring to make his fortune. He was never backward in relating how he had the ears of many of the most influential Chinese of the day and although", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215598, "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": 375, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "بلد\n\n325\n\nthey listened to his plans to modernise China and how he could raise the capital to assist them succeed in doing so, they always went their own ways, often adapting his plans but - as he stressed - without his guiding hand they were never the success they could have been had he been permitted to supervise them.\n\nIn 1905 he described how back in 1879 he had travelled to Sichuan from Guiyang where he had been trying to persuade the Guizhou Provincial Governor, Chen Yuying, to develop the resources of the province by means of a railway from Guiyang to Yongxian in Guangxi province, connecting that city with Canton by a line of steamers on the Yun and West Rivers. He then spent over six months in Chongqing, again offering to supply funds and plans for building suitable steamers to navigate the upper waters of the Yangzi, through the Gorges as far as Chongqing and beyond to Yibin. He added that he was able to speak with authority on the navigation of the upper Yangzi by steamers, \"but no one would listen to me, and even intelligent foreigners, when consulted on the subject, declared I was a visionary and an imaginator of many impractical plans. Some ten days later in a subsequent issue of his Miscellany he wrote 'Whilst here in Shanghai in November 1875, I offered to superintend the construction of a suitable steam-boat for navigation on the upper Yangzi, as far up as Yibin and Chengdu, but the wise Britishers of those days declared that was an impossibility, because British naval officers had studied the subject and declared it to be impossible. I proved to be a good quarter of a century ahead of the progressive age.' Steam-boats now navigate the Upper Yangzi for all that, though they are not as useful as they might have been, had they been devised and constructed under the guidance of a mastermind!\n\n3\n\nPaul King : In the Chinese Customs Service: Heath and Cranton Ltd : London : 1924.\n\nArchibald John Little : Through the Yang-tse Gorges or Trade and Travel in Western China: Sampson Low, Marston & Co.: London : 1898 [Third and Revised Edition].\n\nFacing p. 288 of Little's book, Through the Yang-tse Gorges or Trade and Travel in Western China.\n\nWilliam Mesny: Mesny's Chinese Miscellany : Shanghai : 1st January\n\nPage 375\n\nPage 376", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215931, "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": 230, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "164 \n\nlaconically states that, even on what was actually his honeymoon visit, Boxer had not lost his 'powers of observation.' \n\nIn accordance with the policy of withdrawing resources to Singapore, supposedly an impregnable fortress, the FECB was downscaled and most of its men and resources moved. Boxer was promoted to Major, with a small staff, which included his close friend and best man, Alf Bennett. Ironically, this gave him greater flexibility to use his own initiative. \n\n4 \n\nUnable to make much headway with London, Boxer flew to Chongqing to see the British Ambassador, Sir Alexander Clarke-Kerr. Boxer then made contacts with key figures in the Chinese military. He was received by none other than General Dai Li, head of the formidable Juntong or Bureau of Statistics and Military Intelligence. After the Generalissimo himself, to whom his loyalty was almost feudal, General Dai was perhaps the most powerful man in China. An extremely shrewd strategic thinker, he was in many ways the power behind the throne. His organisation, fiercely secretive and ruthless, has been described as a sort of Chinese Gestapo, prepared to use any means, including murder, to achieve its aims. Dai was fanatically devoted to Chiang Kai Shek, and shaped the Juntong to be a dreaded political as well as military machine, spying on all perceived enemies of the state, Communists and fellow Guomindang as well as Japanese. The Juntong organisation was highly effective, operating through cells united by family and social bonds, whose members were expected to subsume all private needs to the pursuance of state aims, however lethal. It has been demonstrated that General Dai and his followers modelled themselves on folk heroes from Chinese history who operated through secret societies and who believed that extreme action such as assassination, was justified in the interests of the common good. Dai was known to be anti-western, for he believed that western countries with their imperialist policies were the cause of China's humiliation, and were exploiting its weakness for their own aims. Many assumed that Dai's anti-British stance was on the personal embarrassment of having been mysteriously arrested in Hong Kong, thus conveniently sidestepping questions raised by decades of opium and gunboats. Dai also believed that any western country operating in China should function under Chinese control, an idea anathema to westerners used to extraterritoriality and getting their own terms. Boxer, however, found Dai co-operative and willing to ...\n\nbased", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215938, "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": 237, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "171\n\nCommunists and the China coast for Major Egerton Mott of the SOE. * Holmes referred to guerrillas who would be known to Kendall. He was convinced that the expansion of the Communists into British territory in the New Territories 'was planned in some detail before the Japanese attack on the Colony,' so working with this group required uncommon discretion and diplomacy on the part of any Britisher trying to win their support. Holmes, working with Kendall before the war and with the guerrillas later, would have been unusually well informed. He identified the Communist leader in the Hong Kong area as Tsoi Kwok Leung, a man ‘formerly connected with minor Chinese industrial enterprises in Hong Kong and Amoy and...consumptive.'\n\nSome form of SOE organisation was clearly in place in China, covertly, awaiting the Japanese attack before becoming fully activated. Col Chauvin had been removed from Hong Kong on 18th December, on the very day that the Japanese landed on Hong Kong Island, and sent to the British Military Mission in Chongqing. As the battle raged around them, Kendall, Talan and McEwan were stood by for special orders. Col. Harry Owen Hughes who had ostensibly been seconded to liaise with Chinese Armies in the 7 War zone, moved back to the Hong Kong area to await the arrival of something important. This was the arrival, in deep secrecy, of perhaps the most important escape party to ever leave occupied Hong Kong.\n\n[\n\nAt the very moment that Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese, a car was hurrying towards Aberdeen harbour. Inside sat Admiral Chan Chak, the Chinese Nationalist government's chief representative in Hong Kong, and a number of his KMT assistants. The group was led by DM MacDougall, an official seconded to Hong Kong from London to work on political affairs. He had been assigned to look after the Admiral personally, and maintained twenty-four-hour contact with the Admiral's party during the hostilities. They were to rendezvous with five boats of the 2nd Motor Boat Flotilla, who had been held back in battle. Reaching the pier an hour after the surrender, they found the boats gone. The only functioning vessel they could find was a fifteen-foot launch but the party piled in, knowing that the Japanese would be on them at any moment. Hardly had they gone 500 yards when they were fired on by Japanese occupying a post on Brick Hill, opposite, on the southern side of Hong Kong Island. The boat's engine disintegrated under the heavy fire, killing several men and wounding others, including", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215943, "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": 242, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "176\n\n22nd December, in the midst of some of the most savage fighting on Hong Kong Island, the single largest atrocity involving civilians of the entire battle period occurred. Much has been made of atrocities that affected Europeans, but this incident is worth analysing because it gives us hints on what the Japanese knew about Hong Kong. Ma Tso Yuen recounted how, while his family were having dinner, they heard shots and found that their building, No 42 Blue Pool Road, was surrounded by Japanese. The inhabitants of the building and its neighbour, No 44, were systematically rounded up and herded together. Through a door, Ma saw a neighbour being beaten for resisting. The women were separated, many raped, and then killed. The men were taken down near the nullah and bayoneted, with Japanese stabbing the bodies to make sure all were dead. Ma survived, although he suffered nine separate wounds, because he lay hidden. When the danger was over, he realised he was surrounded by the bodies of 30 men, including that of his own son. **The number of men, women and children killed in other parts of the building is unknown; the buildings were small, low-rise apartments, but crowded: in one flat, some fourteen people were sheltering. Phyllis Harrop, through her KMT contacts, estimated that at least forty persons in her building alone were killed. No other atrocity against civilians was as systematic, organised, or as savage as this. Normal battle mayhem was not the motive. Kempeitai agents travelled with battle units, even though they were not part of the normal military structure. Under cover of fighting, they could settle other opposition. Blue Pool Road was targeted because it was where KMT officials and agents lived with their families. It was no random massacre. Among the dead included men from the Ministry of Communications and the Central Trust, a front organisation for the KMT, whose offices had been searched by the British and whose members had been arrested and sometimes deported. Ma himself had been an employee of the Central Trust.\n\nThe relationship between the KMT, the colonial government, and individuals involved in undercover work might bear further investigation. Phyllis Harrop mentions in her private diary that 'at the request of Chinese members of the Dai Li organisation who had been left behind in the colony, (she) was asked to go to Chongqing with the complete details of the guerrillas' arms and ammunition, which was buried in various homes and gardens in the island, to deliver information and arrange for instruction to be given to the men remaining in Hong Kong to carry on their work. My escape was engineered by the Chinese.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215944, "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": 243, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "177\n\n3 xii\n\nThe whole plan was discussed with RAC North, Secretary for Chinese Affairs and JA Fraser, Defence Secretary who agreed. When Harrop went to Chongqing the first person she contacted was her old friend from pre-war, Madame Soong Ching Ling.\n\nMadame Soong was the widow of Dr Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic and a former Hong Kong resident himself, and graduate of the Hong Kong Medical School which predated Hong Kong University. When Chiang Kai Shek and his extreme rightist faction won the power struggle for control of the National Government, Madame Soong moved to Hong Kong where she and other supporters of the left wing principles Sun had espoused were able to operate with more latitude. She headed an organisation known as the China Defence League which raised funds in support of the anti-Japanese war effort in China, and had connections with many left wing liberal groups, both within China and among the western intelligentsia in Hong Kong and China. This organisation was effectively a form of interface between the KMT Old Guard and more progressive groups. Agnes Smedley, Rewi Alley, Anna Louise Strong and other westerners with strong contacts with the Communist Party under Mao Ze Dong mixed in the same circles as Madame Soong and her supporters, which included Sun Fo, Dr Sun's son by a previous marriage. Sun Fo himself, though he lived in Hong Kong, frequently travelled to Moscow, ostensibly for 'medical treatment,' often staying for long periods. The league did humanitarian work, organising aid for the millions of refugees in Guangdong and in Hong Kong. Percy Chen, son of Dr Eugene Chen, Dr Sun's Foreign minister and close friend worked closely with this aspect of the League's activities. Chen was a socialist and would later declare for the Communist Party. Significantly, FW Kendall had worked with the league in organising programmes to cope with refugees. He himself was something of a refugee, having lost his livelihood in the same Japanese push in Guangdong. Contacts between this left faction of the Guomindang and British people in Hong Kong of a progressive frame of mind were also significant. Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, known as 'Red Hilda' not only for the colour of her hair, but for her politics, was part of this group, rather than a member of the conventional, highly stratified world of colonial society. Her husband may have been a member of the government administration but she did not subscribe to colonial or establishment values. Kendall also worked with Selwyn-Clarke, as did his Chinese wife, who was to be one of the Selwyn", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215948, "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": 247, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "181\n\nSignificantly, this party was the only escape group without a regular military officer in their midst, and to have a Chinese to organise their escape and travel with them. All three Europeans were academics, without experience of up-to-date, modern military thinking. Moreover, given the nature of colonial society, they were used to being treated with deference. It would not have occurred to them to question why the Chinese along their escape route had been so helpful, or why they were met by Europeans in this very remote area, still bandit country, where few ventured, who were not only expecting them, but 'who were quite conversant with the route back to Kowloon and were assistants to FW Kendall, another member of the same organisation whose address... was c/o Col Chauvin, British Embassy, Chung King.'\n\nLt DF Davies, formerly a Lecturer in Physics, solemnly advised that he understood 'Col LT Ride of our party was to attempt some sort of underground railroad back to the Camp...(and) if they could be persuaded and/or allowed to carry out this work, I would suggest that the Cloak and Dagger Group be approached.' Since the Cloak and Dagger Boys they met were Z Force, this was in fact one of the jobs they had long been trained for.\n\nThe trip from Hong Kong had been stressful, not least because a commanding officer had told Ride in no uncertain terms before departure that he should be court-martialled on arrival in Chongqing for deserting his troops. From Lt Davies' report, we know that the group had talked with Z Force members about their organisation. Grimsdale was later to refer to Ride blaming Kendall as a 'complete failure' for delaying his departure from Kukong, then a safe town with Chinese Army presence. Ride himself makes no mention, describing the men later as mere escapees with the Chan Chak group.\n\nWhile still in Kukong, after meeting MacEwan and Talan, the group met Col Chauvin and Dr Wan Wan Yik Shin, a doctor who had served both in the Chinese Army and in the British RAMC. It was at this stage that Ride appears to have outlined his proposals to set up an elaborate escape and evasion organisation. By the time he arrived in Chongqing a few days later, he had formulated an elaborate proposal. Operational details were sketchy, to be left to others to sort out, naming Dr Wan and General Yu Mo Han, commander of Chinese forces in the area. On one point he was unequivocally adamant: that 'the section should be under the command of Lt Col Ride.' It was an absolutely essential prerequisite that the British authorities provide him with a letter confirming his", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]