[
    {
        "id": 209987,
        "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-1983",
        "page_number": 246,
        "title": "RAS-1983",
        "content_text": "224\n\nbest titles there? To this last question the answer is certainly \"No\". Either I did not happen to pick up the best book on a particular subject when I was in search of a quotation or, and this was often the case, the best book turned out not to be very quotable. Some authors' styles do not lend themselves to excerpting, not because they are bad but because they are more cumulative than 'dashing'. I think it was Somerset Maugham who described one of his characters as the kind of man you wouldn't mind being marooned for years with but couldn't stand the prospect of one afternoon with. Quotable authors have to scintillate a little, but it doesn't mean that their whole books are good, and vice versa.\n\nNo, the list is also not a representative sample. Too much has been written on too many China topics to hope for that. So the answer to my first question must presumably be \"Not very good\". It is at best an \"interesting\" and \"fun\" list. Partly to redress it I appended a short list of 'Suggestions for Further Reading' to Ancestral Images Again. I could not presume to attempt a definitive list of the most important books on Chinese culture, and discerning readers will doubtless have spotted already that I have made little effort to cover the large realm of capital-C Culture, but let me add here some other important and useful books which I think ought to be on a general list:\n\nBodde, Derk and Morris, Clarence, Law in Imperial China, Harvard University Press, 1967.\n\nBuchanan, K. The Transformation of the Chinese Earth, London, 1970.\n\nBuck, Pearl S, The Good Earth, London, 1931.\n\nChang, K. C., (ed.), Food in Chinese Culture, New Haven, 1977.\n\nEndacott, G. B. and Birch, Alan, Hong Kong Eclipse, Hong Kong, 1978.\n\nFreedman, Maurice, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung, London, 1966.\n\nHawkes, David, The Story of the Stone, Penguin Books, 1973+ (series still in progress).",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212105,
        "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": 47,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "24\n\n30\n\nSir George Thomas Staunton, a member of the 1793-94 Macartney Embassy, whose translation of Ch'ing Law was the first published in Britain, had been at pains to emphasize this: Ta Tsing Leu Lee, Being the Fundamental Laws... of the Penal Code of China (London, Cadell and Davies, 1801), p. 185. For its application in practice see the cases translated with commentary in Derk Bodde and Clarence Morris, Law in Imperial China, Exemplified by 190 Ch'ing Dynasty Cases (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967).21 Cited in Corinne K. Hoexter, From Canton to California, The Epic of Chinese Immigration (New York, Four Winds Press, 1976), p. 136.\n\n11 Dr. William Lockhart of the London Missionary Society, writing in 1861, cites the case of the old scholar who so greatly assisted Dr. W.H. Medhurst with his translations and researches. See his The Medical Missionary in China (London, Hurst and Blackett. 2nd edition, 1861), pp. 21-22. \"He was a living concordance of the entire range of Chinese literature. He could find any passage without hesitation, repeat page after page of most of the works, and could easily take up any citation which had been begun in his hearing, and finish it without hesitation. This is not an uncommon thing amongst the educated Chinese, but this man possessed the faculty in a remarkable degree\".\n\n23 Arthur Evans Moule, The Chinese People, A Handbook on China (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1941), p. 262. See also his New China and Old, Personal Recollections and Observations of Thirty Years (London, Seeley and Co., 1891), p. 271.24 Some of the literary material to be found in villages of the Hong Kong region is described in Dr. Patrick Hase's most useful paper. \"Research Materials for Village Studies\", Chapter 4 of Alan Birch, Y.C. Jao and Elizabeth Sinn (eds.) Research Materials for Hong Kong Studies (Hong Kong. Centre of Asian Studies. University of Hong Kong, 1984), pp. 31-46, especially between pp. 32-37.\n\n25\n\n—\n\nBy great good fortune, some of their libraries have survived and are in safe keeping. One of them came from Hoi Pa Village, Tsuen Wan, and had belonged to the builder of the traditional village house there which is now a listed monument. He lived between 1865 and 1937, and after his return from Jamaica engaged in educational pursuits in a literary club and at the Luen Fong School in Hoi Pa Kwan Mun Hau. When what had survived of his library was presented to the Urban Services Department in 1982, it consisted of some 200 books of various kinds, as well as manuscript essays and poems, including some of the famed \"eight-legged essays\" written in preparation for the imperial examination; all providing valuable documentation for the educational, social and intellectual activities of their period. South China Morning Post, 26 May 1982. See also the Chinese press of that date.\n\n16 What Francis C.M. Wei calls the operation of the principle of retributive justice\" featured prominently in Chinese stories. See his The Spirit of Chinese Culture (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947), p. 151. See also Yao Chin-nung, \"The Theme and Structure of the Yuan Drama\", in Tien Hsia Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4 (November 1935), p. 392.27 The Tsuen Wan experience is echoed in the fine description of what it meant to be a village boy in late 19th century Kwangtung, contained in the memoirs of a successful Hawaiian Chinese, born in a village near Macau in 1865. In them, he describes what one might call the \"extra-curricular\" part of education. This included the telling of traditional stories by the family elders and by itinerant minstrels and story-tellers, and through the plays performed by visiting opera troupes, as well as in literary pastimes: Chung Kun Ai, My Seventy Nine Years in Hawaii (1879-1958) (Hong Kong, Cosmorama Pictorial Publisher, 1960), pp. 6, 26-29.\n\n28 Francis C.M. Wei, The Spirit of Chinese Culture (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947) p. 149.\n\n24\n\nFor the former, see the chapter \"Symbol and Tradition\" between pp. 50-75 of Ronald",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216346,
        "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-2003",
        "page_number": 105,
        "title": "RAS-2003",
        "content_text": "54 \n\nChina Coast Pidgin English in JHKBRAS, Vol.35, pp.113-141. See also note 75 below.\n\n56 Morse, International Relations, Period of Conflict, p.75.\n\n57 cited in Parkinson, op.cit., p.341.\n\n58 See pp.179-180 of my The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911: Institutions and Leadership in Town and Countryside. Hampden, Conn., 1977.\n\n59 Chinese text at No.28 in Vol. 1 of the three volume set of Hong Kong's Historical Inscriptions published by the Hong Kong Urban Council in 1986.\n\n60 Inscribed tablet dated 11th lunar month of the 6th year of Daoguang (1826) at the \"New Temple\" near the Barrier gate at Macau, which refers back to an earlier tablet on the subject dated in early Jiaqing.\n\n61 China No.4 (1864) Commercial Reports from Her Majesty's Consuls in China for 1862, p.62.\n\n62 Ibid, p.39.\n\n63 Ibid., p.67.\n\n64 See Bodde, Derk, and Morris, Clarence (1967). Law in Imperial China, Exemplified by 190 Ch'ing Dynasty Cases. University of Pennsylvania Press.\n\n65 Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company, op.cit., Vol.III, pp.263-9\n\n66 Ibid., Vol.IV, pp.281-3.\n\n67 The journal kept during his imprisonment was later published. See 'Edited by a Barrister', Journals kept by Mr. Gully and Capt. Denham during a captivity in China in the Year 1842. London, Chapman and Hall, 1844. This episode, and the much worse one involving the nearly 300 passengers and crew of a military transport from India, the Nerbudda, are also mentioned by Ouchterlony, pp. 499-509).\n\n68 Journals, op.cit., pp. 3-4.\n\n69 Gutzlaff, Sketch of Chinese History, op.cit., p.42.\n\nPage 105\n\nPage 106",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390",
        "rank": 0
    }
]