[
    {
        "id": 212705,
        "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": 14,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "We are fortunate to have such an able person to look after our finances and I would like to place on record the Society's appreciation for all the work he does. Membership as a whole continues to fluctuate, with many leaving and new members joining and we hope in the long run they will at least be equal if not more for the latter than the former. Last year I reported to you that there were 533 local members (492 in Hong Kong Island, 65 in Kowloon, and 39 in the New Territories) and around 80 overseas members. This year our efficient Assistant Secretary, Mrs. Sharon Bruce tells me that there are 593 local members (241 single, 176 joint, 104 life, 8 student members, 4 institute) and around 102 overseas members. There has therefore on the surface been a decline in local members, but I am reliably informed that this is due to the stronger weeding out of those who have not paid their subscription rather than any other reason. However we do always welcome new members and in these days of uncertainty it is important that we keep up the good publicity we have and obtain new members. For $300 per annum membership is a bargain, particularly when you bear in mind it includes the journal.\n\nBefore leaving the subject of membership, however, I would like to report to you that the Governor of Hong Kong, Mr. Chris Patten has graciously agreed to become the Society's patron and thereby continue a tradition of the Society ever since it was re-established in 1959. We naturally hope that when life is calmer for him he will be able to attend one of our functions in an informal way.\n\nAnd how are we kept together and informed? This is by the newsletter which is very competently produced by Mrs. Anita Wilson and we owe her and Mrs. Sharon Bruce who helps to distribute it a great vote of thanks.\n\nYou will notice in this report that I have referred to several aspects of the Society's past, but I would not like you to think that we do not give some thought to the future, something as Gladstone said we cannot fight against. There are some wonderful metaphors going around in Hong Kong at present such as the second stove, the second kitchen, but I believe we are more interested in the through train, or perhaps I should say a stable kitchen. This Society will I hope be able in its own small way contribute to a stable yet enterprising kitchen; but in order to do this we will need the support of all members, and to continue to stimulate an active interest in Hong Kong's history and heritage (a task as Professor\n\nxii",
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    {
        "id": 212930,
        "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": 239,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "224\n\nP'i) mentioned in the main text. Anne Birrell's Chinese Mythology achieves such distinction that we can easily forgive its minor shortcomings. The book is a delight to read and a joy to give to others. I only hope that her editors see fit to issue a paperback version soon. My own hardbound copy is already rather dog-eared.\n\nMICHAEL NYLAN\n\nNOTE\n\nFor example, the apocrypha to the Documents give an amusing explanation of the white fish omen that appeared at the end of the Shang dynasty\n\nFrank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong, Harper Collins, 624 + xv pp. Appendices, notes, appendix, maps.\n\nThis review has been excerpted from The New York Review of Books (7 April, 1994) by kind permission of the reviewer, Dr Jonathan Mirsky, who is East Asia Editor of The Times.\n\nThe entire history of Hong Kong, as Frank Welsh shows in his magnificent, much needed, and compendious history of the colony, is filled with misunderstandings and cultural collisions. One hundred and fifty years of muddle and injured pride are what permits Peking's leaders to call Chris Patten, whom they perceive as the point-man for an international conspiracy to overthrow the entire Communist system in China, 'a whore.'\n\nWelsh, a former Hong Kong banker, starts his dense but wittily written history in the early nineteenth century, and just manages to include the accession of Mr Patten in 1992. He refers to Hong Kong as 'that natural child of Victorian Britain and Ch'ing China... a source of embarrassment and annoyance to its progenitors since it first appeared on the international scene in 1842.' More than an annoyance: for the Chinese, Hong Kong has been a perpetual symbol of national humiliation. There are many instances of mutual disregard, which Welsh understandably enjoys and quotes copiously. In 1831, James Matheson, one of the founders of the 'noble house' of Jardine Matheson, the trading firm whose history",
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    {
        "id": 212931,
        "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": 240,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "225\n\nparallels Hong Kong's, petitioned the British government to acquire 'an insular possession near the coast of China... beyond the reach of future despotism and oppression,' Matheson, who did not have Hong Kong specifically in mind, thought of British merchants as 'princes of the earth,' and despised the Chinese, ‘a people characterized by marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit and obstinacy... [in] possession of a vast portion of the most desirable parts of the earth.'\n\nChinese officials were no less culture-bound: Commissioner Lin Zexu, the Emperor's man in Canton, confronted the British just before the 1839-1840 Opium War by burning 2,613,879 pounds of British opium, 'surely the largest drug haul ever collected,' says Welsh. The British had been smuggling opium into China, hoping to balance off the large amounts of money they were spending for tea and other products exported home to Britain. Lin Zexu advised punishing the British traders by withholding exports to them of rhubarb and tea, without which they could not exist. Because 'their legs were too tightly bound to permit them to box or wrestle,' British soldiers, he said, were not suited to fighting on shore. Unfortunately for the Chinese, their confiscation of opium was followed by attacks by British gunboats on their port cities. They were forced to open Shanghai and other coastal cities to the British and cede Hong Kong to them.\n\nNot until Chris Patten was appointed governor in 1992 did Hong Kong become a high British priority. While publicly demanding that the garrison lay down their lives for it, says Welsh, Churchill privately considered the colony not worth defending against the Japanese. During World War II, the Foreign Office regarded Hong Kong as 'something of a thorn in the side' - a view some of its diplomats still hold — and wanted to return it to China; the Americans wanted this too. In 1946, the first postwar governor, Sir Mark Young, drafted a plan for a 'Municipal Council' constituted on a fully representative basis, but this was consistently turned down. Later, the colonial secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, commented, \"The electorate of Britain didn't care a brass farthing about Hong Kong.' Welsh says this remains true, but he also reminds us that, in 1992, Chris Patten was proposing a more democratically elected Legislative Council not for the British voters but for the people of Hong Kong. As Welsh suggests, in 1946 China would have been in no position to object. But Hong Kong has since become more valuable than anyone could have dreamed in 1946.\n\nPage 240\n\nPage 241",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214199,
        "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-1998",
        "page_number": 57,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "(d) You cannot applaud with one hand.\n\n(e) One's house is best protected by a wasted garden outside and an ugly wife inside.\n\n(f) A one-foot kick (a jack-of-all-trades).\n\nFor many of these Chinese sayings (like [(a)], 'Melons and pears,' above), as Shakespeare so aptly wrote, 'Brevity is the soul of wit'.\n\nAlthough not always easy for foreigners to comprehend, Chinese humour is in some ways similar to western humour in that it includes satire, farce, punning and sudden juxtaposition. But there are of course differences. A one-liner that Nury Vittachi sometimes uses when he entertains a group of Westerners goes like this: 'If a man speaks in a forest where there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?' But when he switches audiences, for Asians he says it sometimes works better if you say, 'If a woman says something in a forest where there is no man to hear her, is she still wrong?' Vittachi was sometimes described by Hong Kong's last British Governor, Chris Patten, as ‘the funniest man in Hong Kong.'\n\nMuch of the difference would appear to be due to social conditioning. The author agrees with Vittachi that jokes based on word-play or societal conventions only work where the language or society allows them to work even if there are also deeper differences. Vittachi also says that he uses a lot of irony when Westerners are present but little, together with sarcasm or sardonic humour, when the audience is largely Asian. Westerners also, quite naturally if the language is English, guess punchlines much faster allowing them to be abandoned entirely in some cases.\n\nA sample opening of the comedy he uses is:\n\n\"Thanks for inviting me to this Women's group. It's not the most mis-directed I've received. Last week I got some junk mail from a sports shoe chain store. The letter began \"Dear Basketball Player ... (Westerners chuckle).... I'm 5 feet 4 inches tall (Asians chuckle).....\" This may be, because they are more familiar with the concept of stand-up comedy.",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214203,
        "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-1998",
        "page_number": 61,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "24\n\n'Eat or don't eat!' \n\nJohn Moloney, the British comedian, found that playing to a Chinese (partly westernised) audience in Hong Kong required less of a cultural leap than when he took his act to Beijing (Syrett, 1995:4). The itinerant comedian, in fact, soon learns to steer clear of anything remotely embarrassing or linguistically complicated and to resort to the 'language of action.' This is universal and capable of bringing about smiles and even belly laughs.\n\nWhile all people, no matter the culture, are said to cry at similar incidents, people in London, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Beijing, or wherever, may not always laugh at the same jokes. In the same way, people in the West and people in China may not always see insults in the same light. For example, Jimmy Lai, the owner of Apple Daily, in the run-up to the 1997 Handover in Hong Kong, called a senior China official a 'turtle's egg,' meaning more or less 'unnatural birth.' Although not too unpleasant, it caused a furore. Yet, as an American Old-China Hand commented to the author, 'Who would get worked up over name-calling like that?'\n\nThe last British Governor, Chris Patten, took it as a joke when he was described in catch-phrases by the Beijing Government as 'a serpent' and being 'disgraced in history for a millennium.' In fact, Patten quoted with relish his sobriquet of 'Whore of the East.' Most Britons also saw such 'insults' in much the same light as Patten, and as being faintly despicable, with the rhetoric unworthy of 5,000 years of continuous civilisation (Waters, 1995:168).\n\nIn the same way that Chinese and Westerners may see insults differently, so they often see humour differently. A Hong Kong Chinese, of Shanghainese stock, said to the author, 'I'll tell you a typical English joke which the average Chinese cannot really appreciate.\n\n'A publican and a customer were talking in a bar (E) when in came another man. He walked up the wall, walked upside down across the ceiling, and then down the wall the other side. He ordered a pint of beer, which he promptly quaffed. He then walked up the wall, across the ceiling, down the wall the other side, and out of the pub door. \"That's",
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