[
    {
        "id": 204607,
        "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-1963",
        "page_number": 88,
        "title": "RAS-1963",
        "content_text": "BRITISH LEGATION AT PEKING\n\n77\n\nQueen. While we were waiting for our examiner, a sudden desire seized Gordon to show his loyalty, after the custom of the country; so he dropped down in front of the portrait, and solemnly knocked his head nine times on the floor, kotowing in proper form. He seemed much inspirited by it, and had a feeling that he was now in some way under the special tutelage of Her Majesty, and could be trusted to floor the paper.\n\nThe impression given by Wilkinson's account is that student life in Peking at that period held much that was enjoyable.\n\nHowever, there was plenty of work for them to do on being sent to their posts. As one observer wrote in 1900 \"Our Legation ... is a bigger establishment than that of any other country, owing to the fact that the British Consular Corps in China has exceptionally large requirements. In the Legation the Student Interpreters, who subsequently become Consular Assistants and Consuls, learn the language of their adopted country and to some extent their future political, judicial and commercial work. After two years at Peking they move on to a Treaty Port and begin to put theory into practice. There are often as many as twenty of them in Peking at a time, besides an efficient staff of older men who act as the Chinese Secretaries.”21\n\nMeanwhile trouble was imminent and another visitor at this same period mentions the marines. Describing the Legation Quarter he wrote: \"The familiar redcoats of British marines drilling on the lawn lent perhaps an extra touch of homeliness to the well-kept grounds. For in view of possible troubles, most of the foreign legations were provided last winter [1895- Ed.] with a special guard drawn from the fleets in the Gulf of Tchih-li. They have since been for the greater part withdrawn. ... As if to heighten the contrast, the Chinese authorities had also assigned to each legation a special guard of their own braves who were encamped along Legation Street.\n\nIn 1900 the marines were to lend a more than homely touch to the scene inside the Legation. By mid-May of that year the anti-foreign massacres inspired by the Boxers had alarmed the Europeans, who were coming into Peking for protection.\n\n20 Ibid., 266-7.\n\n21 Clive Bingham, A Year in China 1899-1900 (London, 1901), 47-8.\n\n22 Valentine Chirol, The Far Eastern Question (London, 1896), 42-3.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214847,
        "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": 262,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "229\n\nHong Kong, 1842-1843,\" in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch, Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 14 (1974), pp.78 and 82.\n\n37\n\nHolt, p.142.\n\n38 Milne, p. 125.\n\n41\n\n43\n\nOuchterlony, p.225.\n\nAccording to Bingham (Vol.I, pp. 184-9), the provincial authorities issued a notification on 27 June 1840 with a carefully spelled out scale of rewards and inducements. A later proclamation by the three imperial commissioners, with greatly increased rewards, is translated in his Vol. II, at pp.404-7. Deceits and kidnapping were apparently the norm in oriental wars. In describing and condemning them, the writers were but echoing the similar complaints made by their brother officers during the First Burmese War in 1824-26, when such actions were also encountered there. See Bruce, op.cit pp.54.\n\nBingham, Vol.I, pp.286-291, adding an account of Captain P. Anstruther's imprisonment with the survivors at Ningpo (pp.292-7).\n\nBingham, Vol.II, pp. 181-3: \"When Ning-po was subsequently captured, it appeared that poor Mr. Stead had been conveyed there alive, when the brutal Chinese general had him secured to a stake, and then practised his bowmen by firing at him as a target; his body being subjected to the same brutality after life was extinct\". Davis, likely to be more authoritative, has a different but equally horrendous version. Upon Yukien's direction, \"the prisoner was tied to a stake in the middle of the public place [at Ningpo], deliberately flayed alive, and then cut in pieces\": China, During the War and Since the Peace (London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 2 vols., 1852), Vol I, p.170.\n\n4 Beeching, pp.121-2 and 136-7.\n\n44\n\nBingham, Vol.I, pp.212-217.\n\n45\n\nBingham, Vol.I, pp. 194-5.\n\nJ.D. Vaughan, The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements (Oxford in Asia Paperbacks, 1970, reprint of the original edition by the Mission Press, Singapore, 1879), pp.90-1 and see also p.36.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]