[ { "id": 204351, "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-1961", "page_number": 119, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n115\n\nCHINESE BURIAL CUSTOMS IN HONG KONG *\n\nB. D. WILSON, M.A.\n\nBefore 1949, burial customs in China were largely geared to the traditions of a predominantly agricultural country. Except in the New Territories, however, Hong Kong was not in a position to follow the same rural traditions of burial procedure and therefore was forced to evolve a pattern more or less of its own. The postwar change of Government in China has led to even further changes in local burial customs.\n\nFor non-Christian Chinese in Hong Kong the focus of burial practices is the veneration of family ancestors. In its extreme form this can be taken to mean the belief that if surviving relatives and descendants pay sufficient respect to their dead, the dead in their turn will exercise a benevolent influence over the lives and prosperity of their family.\n\nThe deceased is considered to be in a better position to watch over his earthly descendants if buried close to his native place, where it is also, of course, easier for his family to pay their respects to him. This has led to the practice of conveying the deceased back to the place in China whence he came and interring him in a traditional burial ground. It is well known that, no matter where they die, the bodies of overseas Chinese have, where possible, usually been conveyed back to their homes for burial; when they could afford to do so, relatives have followed this same principle where death occurred in Hong Kong. Coffins and remains of Chinese who died in various parts of the world, e.g. Borneo, the Philippines, Indonesia, the U.S.A., have been shipped to China via Hong Kong which in prewar and immediately postwar days enjoyed a certain pre-eminence as a transit centre for the onward movement of human remains.\n\nThe trans-shipment was not always immediate. Circumstances often imposed some delay. To meet the difficulties of holding the coffin temporarily, the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals in prewar days set up in Hong Kong a coffin repository in Sandy Bay where remains could be stored on payment of a monthly fee. This repository served its original purpose well till 1949 when difficulties arose in the way of transferring bodies into China. At present, there is virtually no movement of coffins into China, with the result that the repository has gradually accumulated\n\n* The writer wishes to make it clear that, in putting forward this article, he has simply recorded information which has come to his notice incidentally in connection with other duties. He is neither an anthropologist nor a trained research worker, but simply an amateur with an interest.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204352, "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-1961", "page_number": 120, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch \n\nORASHKB and author \n\n116 \n\nVol. 1 (1961) \n\nISSN 1991-7295 \n\nnearly 10,000 coffins, urns and containers. The accommodation ranges from single rooms, where one or more coffins rest on trestles, to larger rooms holding hundreds of coffins, together with exhumed remains in a variety of receptacles, e.g. earthenware urns, rattan baskets, wooden boxes and even second-hand tin containers. In some cases, all trace of the relatives of the deceased has been lost and it is proposed to re-inter such remains in a special Tung Wah plot at the Sandy Ridge Cemetery, to which further reference will presently be made.\n\nA clear pattern is now emerging, whereby Hong Kong has almost ceased to be a transit centre for the conveyance of deceased Chinese to their native place. The next best alternative, both for overseas dead and Chinese residents of Hong Kong itself, is to bury in Hong Kong instead, though that is not to imply that local cemeteries are doing a brisk business in snapping up overseas trade.\n\nIn examining the details of current burial procedure, a distinction must be drawn between the urban areas and the New Territories. In the congested urban areas, where land is needed for development and health measures assume greater importance, there is not the same freedom in choice of burial grounds. Relatives must decide whether to bury the dead in a private cemetery, with higher fees, or in a public cemetery, with lower fees and compulsory exhumation of remains after a period of years.\n\nTaking the urban areas first, let us trace the events of a typical funeral. Unlike the earlier traditional habits of mainland China, where preparations for burial were largely carried out by members of the family, the current practice in Hong Kong is for the relatives, on death occurring in their midst, at once to call in an undertaker or someone from a funeral parlour. The undertaker provides a coffin, encoffins the body and conveys it thus to a cemetery for burial, but he is debarred by law from bringing dead bodies on to his own business premises. A funeral parlour on the other hand has wider scope. Its staff will enter the home of the deceased and remove the body to the parlour, either in a basket-woven container coloured silver, blue or yellow, or on a plain canvas stretcher. The advantage of using a funeral parlour instead of an undertaker lies in the fact that, with the body actually held temporarily on the premises of the parlour, it is possible there to carry out funeral rites which would be otherwise inconvenient where an undertaker conveyed the encoffined body direct from the home to the cemetery.\n\nChinese in Hong Kong dislike holding a dead body overnight in the private home. They much prefer its immediate removal after death. Neighbours too are far from happy at the thought of death in the near vicinity, nor in earlier days used they to be\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204353, "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-1961", "page_number": 121, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n117\n\nin favour of allowing the body to be removed in a coffin past their particular floor in a two or three-storeyed tenement building. Chinese coffins usually consist lengthwise of four sections of tree trunk and are therefore bulky, irrespective of whether the coffin is cheap or one of the expensive polished varieties. Manoeuvring these coffins up and down narrow tenement staircases, with inevitable banging against walls, might be likened to death tapping at the door: a harbinger of bad luck.\n\nTo meet this problem of removal from upper floors in the urban areas, it used to be the custom up till five or six years ago to construct a bamboo staging outside the building, so that the coffin could be taken out of the window and be brought down the staging to the hearse in the roadway. The custom has now almost entirely disappeared for a number of reasons, largely economic: new buildings have grown too high for stagings to reach most upper storeys; the cost of long bamboo from China has risen enormously as a result of its use for scaffolding in the current building boom; the practice of glassing-in verandahs and balconies has made windows too small for coffins to fit through; traffic congestion in the streets makes the authorities chary of allowing even more obstruction in the form of these stagings on roads and pavements. To take their place as a means of removing the body from the private premises, basket-woven containers or stretchers have come to be used, and they are far less expensive.\n\nIf an undertaker is engaged, he will prepare the body in the deceased's home, encoffin and remove it either direct to the cemetery or to a Government cemetery depot in Hong Kong or Kowloon, where it can be held overnight pending Government conveyance to a public cemetery. A farewell pavilion at each depot provides free facilities for the relatives to hold services of any denomination or to perform other last rites.\n\nIf a funeral parlour is engaged, the body is conveyed in the basket-woven container or stretcher to the parlour for preparation, encoffining and almost invariably a service. In a few cases, embalming is carried out but this is a refinement that seems to hold no particular significance, since burial takes place normally within the forty-eight hours allowed by law for the body to remain on the premises. In parts of China, it apparently used to be the custom to delay burial for periods of up to seven weeks. But the more tropical climate of Hong Kong and the ever-present risk of disease has made it necessary to insist on a forty-eight hours limit in funeral parlours.\n\nWhen encoffined in a funeral parlour, the body is placed in a farewell room where it is customary for the immediate relatives to maintain a vigil (overnight, if necessary) until the time comes for conveyance to a cemetery or crematorium. During the vigil and funeral, the close relatives (i.e. widow and widower, sons and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204356, "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-1961", "page_number": 124, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nORASHKB and author\n\n120\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\nIn the New Territories, there are at present no funeral parlours and few undertakers. As in the agricultural interior of China, practical responsibility still falls mainly on the kinsmen of the deceased. The customary burial of villagers is in two stages: initial coffin burial, and subsequent exhumation and re-interment of remains. Having encoffined the body, the relatives normally sustain the vigil directly outside the home under a temporary shelter. Burial then takes place in a traditional village area, but no monument is erected beyond a small unshaped stone at the head of the grave. After five years or more, the body is exhumed. The bones will be cleaned by the family and be placed either in a funerary urn (kam t'aàp) or in a formal masonry grave (shaan fan) shaped like a horseshoe. In the funerary urn, the bones will be arranged in a manner as if the deceased were sitting in the Buddhist lotus posture.\n\nThe siting of funerary urns and horseshoe graves is of particular importance. Relatives will go to great lengths to ensure that the jung shui of the site is propitious. In other words, they wish to ensure that the benevolent influence of the site will protect the deceased, as a member of the family, so that he in turn will look kindly upon his relatives. The site is usually high up, commanding a view of water, and on a ridge or spur which represents, for instance, a dragon, snake, shrimp or crab in its formation. Standing with one's back to a horseshoe grave, one sees a half circle within a radius of ten yards, which is normally regarded as sacrosanct. Disturbance of the ground is regarded with strong disfavour. Traditionally, the left arm of the panorama in front should consist of a long ridge (containing a \"green dragon”) and the right arm of a shorter ridge (containing a \"white tiger\"). In a horseshoe grave, the exhumed remains are buried in a jar in the centre, just in front of a stone plaque (pei shek) that records the name of the deceased, the date of his death, and other details. Important graves of recorded ancestors or founders of a clan are often flanked by a small shrine (haû tỏ) on either side and sometimes another behind, at a distance of ten to twenty feet from the main grave. The object of the shrines is to persuade the earth god to look after the grave.\n\nWhether the exhumed remains are to be placed in a funerary urn or in a horseshoe grave seems to be governed by the sex and general standing of the deceased in the clan, or even by the financial state of the relatives at the time of exhumation. The remains are normally fit for exhumation after a minimum of five years of burial, but, even so, exhumation should not strictly take place unless there has been no pregnancy amongst the deceased's close female relatives in the immediately preceding nine months. This requirement, which would tend to impose some hardship", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204357, "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-1961", "page_number": 125, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n121\n\non the male relatives, can be got round by omitting pregnant wives from the ceremony. There is also a belief that exhumation should not take place during the years on which fall the 51st, 61st, 71st and other such birthdays of the male head of the family.\n\nIn Chinese public cemeteries, the same principle of exhumation is practised. At the end of each year, the particular coffin section where burials have been taking place is closed and left untouched for five years. At the end of that time, an official notice of intention to clear graves is published, giving relatives six months in which to exhume remains privately and re-inter them in the urn section. Any remains not exhumed privately on the expiry of the period of notice are then exhumed by Government and the remains re-interred in an urn section. The cleared coffin section is then eventually used again for coffin burials.\n\nApplying equally to urban and New Territories burials are the two important grave worshipping festivals of Ching Ming (105 days after the winter solstice, i.e. either 5th or 6th of April) and Chung Yeung (9th day of the 9th moon, i.e. in October). The first is the more important. The second was originally not a grave-worshipping festival at all, but an occasion for climbing to the top of a mountain to avoid evil spirits. Since so many graves are situated on hills, the practice of combining the hill climb with an opportunity of worshipping at graves has been developed.\n\nStrict Cantonese belief also requires that, at ch'un she (#1), which falls annually about two weeks before the Ching Ming festival, relatives should pay their respects to persons who have died within the past year. This ceremony usually takes place at home and its participants are restricted to older persons.\n\nAt the Ching Ming and Chung Yeung festivals, it is customary for whole families to make an outing to their relatives' graves. There, offerings of pork, fruit and flowers are presented; incense and candles burnt; prayers offered; crackers let off. Minor repairs to the graves may be carried out and undergrowth cut back. Coffin graves in the New Territories may be marked with lime at the end and all types of graves usually have a piece of red paper and another piece of white paper underneath the red, tucked under a stone beside them. Exhumations will often be carried out at the Ching Ming festival. At the Tung Wah coffin repository, caskets of remains are opened and the bones spread out to air on sheets of paper.\n\nChinese believe that the spirit of a person leaves the body on death. In Hong Kong the general belief is that it descends into hell where the judge decides on the basis of the earthly merits of the deceased whether it may be allowed to return to earth by reincarnation as a child or, if very evil, as an animal. The main fear of the dead consists rather of the belief that to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204358, "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-1961", "page_number": 126, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\n122\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\ntouch the dead is to run the risk of becoming infected by an aura of ill-luck (sz yan fung) whereby all the misfortunes of the deceased will be transmitted.\n\nAmongst fishermen fear of the dead and of ill-luck is particularly pronounced. At Tai O on the north-western end of Lantau, fisherfolk on their death bed may be taken from their boats to die in a special house maintained for the purpose near the cemetery.\n\nDuring funeral processions in both the urban areas and the New Territories it is the practice to scatter different types of paper, representing money, along the route to the burial ground, particularly at cross-roads where traditionally malevolent spirits tend to congregate. It is hoped that in the confusion caused by the evil spirits grabbing the money the spirit of the deceased will be able to pass unscathed. The remainder of the paper money thrown out at points other than cross-roads is for the use of the spirit of the deceased in making his way back to his home three days after death (saam ch'iu ooi wan). In many homes, a corner in a hall or passage may be reserved for a tablet and memorial, to house the spirit on its return to the home. This return of the spirit may at first sight be difficult to reconcile with the belief that the spirit descends into hell. The answer is that according to Chinese belief each dead person has a number of spirits. The descent of one of these spirits into hell is often assisted at the burial by the scattering and burning of specially printed hell bank notes (meng t'ung chí paî), together with paper effigies of clothes, suit-cases, motor cars, steam ships, aeroplanes, etc., often of most elaborate and detailed construction.\n\nThe impact of crowded living conditions, economy and improved public health have had their gradual effect in changing the pattern of Hong Kong burial custom. Except for paupers, by far the greater proportion of Chinese dead from the urban areas (numbering some 10,000) are now buried in the public cemetery at Wo Hop Shek, near Fan Ling in the New Territories. Coffins may be conveyed by rail from Kowloon daily as a service included within the burial fees that are $5 or $15 according to size of coffin. Only some 20% of the coffins are carried to the cemetery by private hearses at the expense of the relatives. Of the balance brought by rail, not more than half are attended by relatives. It is obviously not possible in a public cemetery to site graves in accordance with individual interpretations of good fung shui. The fact that each coffin is simply allotted the next vacant space in the burial terrace is readily accepted, although it must be admitted that the majority of terraces are well up the hillside with a commanding view of distance and water. Similarly, when the routine six months' notice of intention to exhume remains from the coffin sections is given, it is unusual for relatives", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204440, "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-1962", "page_number": 72, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "CHINA'S 35 MILLION NON-CHINESE\n\n61\n\ntype shifting-cultivation of mountain slopes. Food supplies were restricted and commissary problems for military or administrative organizations here were large. The inducements to Han conquest were small, whereas the costs of conquest and military occupation were relatively large. The Han were in the main content to set up or permit local chieftains to operate with little interference except when Han interests were too much affected or when uprisings against Han oppression required pacification. The system of local rule described by the term \"T'u-ssu\" institution evolved into a system of petty hereditary kings holding commissions or warrants from the imperial government, or the central government in republican times, to rule their areas. In general, these areas have today become the nuclei of the so-called \"autonomous regions\" or \"autonomous districts\" of the Chinese Communists. However, there is much less autonomy in these areas than in the pre-Communist period.\n\n44\n\nL\n\nR\n\nWhat are some of the ethnic characteristics that set off one group from another among the chief non-Han peoples discussed in the preceding paragraphs? The Miao and Yao both share the semi-nomadic fire-field type of mountain agriculture except where their Sinicization has caused them to become entirely sedentary in the Han type of farming. Both engage in hunting, gathering and some lumbering to supplement their livelihood. The Miao are more likely than the Yao to do some herding of goats or cattle on the poor grasses of south China. Their crops are upland (dry-land) rice, maize, wheat and buckwheat.\n\nIn social organization, neither Yao nor Miao have strong tribal organizations traditionally, and there are no ruling classes. Both are patriarchal systems, with the Miao having a strong ancestral cult. Both share the dog and tiger cult. Among the Yao, at the end of the year there are ceremonies with masked participants for driving out evil spirits from the home and settlement localities. The Miao may or may not bury their dead in coffins, the Yao generally do. Freedom in sex and love between girls and boys prevails until their marriage, which is of their own choosing rather than through middlemen or marriage arrangers. Marriage among the Yao takes place after the first child is born. Among\n\n* Yu Yi-tse, Chung-kuo t'u-ssu chih-tu (China's T'u-ssu system), Chung-king, 1944,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204938, "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-1965", "page_number": 46, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "THE POPULATION OF CHINA \n\n39 \n\nshe is bound by every tie of duty to encourage and to patronize a concubine through whom his name may be preserved, and provision made that when he leaves the world honours will be done to his manes. One of the most popular of Chinese writers says, \"There are in the world wives who, never having borne boys nor nourished girls, even when the husband has reached the age of forty, prohibit his bringing home a concubine or entertaining a handmaid for the purpose of continuing his posterity\n\nthey look upon such a person with jealous hatred and malignant ill-will. Alas! do you not know how fleet is time! Stretch as you may your months and your years, they fly like arrows; and when your husband's animal spirits and vigorous blood shall be exhausted, then indeed he can never beget children, and you, his wife, will have stopped the ancestral sacrifices, and you will have cut off his generation; then repentance, though you may exhibit it in a hundred ways, will indeed come too late; his mortal body will die; his property, which you, husband and wife, have sought to keep together, will not descend to his children, but be fought for by multitudes of kindred and relations; and you will have injured not one person, - not your husband only, -- but even yourself; for who shall take charge of your coffin and your tomb? who shall bury you or offer sacrifices? Alas! your orphaned spirit shall pass nights in tears. It is sorrowful to think of. There are some wives who do control their jealousies, and allow their husbands to take concubines to themselves; but they do so (ungenerously) as if they were drinking vinegar, and eating acids; they beat Betty by way of scolding Belinda* - there is no peace in the inner house. But I beseech you to act as a prudent and virtuous woman. If you have no children, provide with openness and honesty a concubine† for your husband. If she bear him children, to you he will owe that the arteries and veins of his ancestral line are continued; his children will honour you as their mother, and will not this comfort you? Give not way to the malignant jealousy of a wicked woman! not a bitterness which you yourself must swallow.\"‡\n\n* Prepare Chang for Lee, i.e., they punish the concubine's servants to be revenged on the concubine.\n\n† Genesis, xxx 1-13.\n\nFrom the Perfect Collection of Household Gems.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205365, "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-1967", "page_number": 127, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "120\n\nREV. MR. KRONE\n\nabout. By this hospitality to the dead they hope to avert the evils which the spirits of unburied corpses are believed to occasion. There is also a home for aged men, one or two hamlets for lepers, and a cluster of houses for the blind. In the \"Samon-che\" district record, it is laid down that 200 persons shall be admitted and provided for in these several institutions; and the amount of funds to be expended, and the fields and houses from which the charitable revenues are to be derived, are minutely detailed. But it is well known that the poor and destitute derive little or no benefit from these sources, except the shelter against the wind and rain afforded them by the dilapidated tenements which are provided for them, and in which they may, without annoyance or maltreatment, consume the food which they have been able to procure by begging throughout the day.\n\nLepers are not allowed to enter any village; when they arrive in its neighbourhood they have to stand on a hill, or some other conspicuous place, and call to the villagers, who thereupon come out and supply them with rice, tea, or whatever they may desire. But it sometimes happens that the villagers are rather deaf to the cry of the lepers, and then these unfortunates, who are very revengeful and consequently much feared, enter the village, defile the wells and water tanks, and use every means in their power to communicate the disease to their uncharitable countrymen.\n\nThe blind have a separate establishment allotted to them by the people of Sai-heong. During the day they go about begging, and in their refuge they have no one to care for them, except some homeless strangers with whom they share their daily alms. If one of them happens to die, the others go about collecting money for a coffin, and the necessary expenses of the interment. Whilst I was living at Sai-heong, one of these blind beggars came to me to beg my contribution towards the purchase of a coffin for one of his comrades who had died; the coffins being cheap, I gave him 200 cash. The next day another blind man came to me, and told me that his companion had also died, and requested my assistance; I gave him a similar donation, and the rest of them having learnt this, a third one came two days after the last, and even a fourth made his appearance. Being advised by the people of Sai-heong that the only way to put a stop to this deplorable mortality among the poor blind, was to refuse any pecuniary aid for their interment, I ceased giving this alms, and the deaths immediately ceased also.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206015, "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-1970", "page_number": 95, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "90 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nwith this menace. North-bound ships also carried several dead Chinese in their coffins, and spare coffins to accommodate any who might die on their way home. These latter were not buried at sea, but were invariably carried on to China for interment in their ancestral village, \n\nNot every Chinese who emigrated to the 'Nanyang' became a wealthy 'towkay', but most overseas Chinese communities were by Chinese standards prosperous, and all retained their liking for traditional Chinese foods and delicacies. This resulted in a substantial south-bound trade in such things as Swatow cabbages and oranges, live and preserved fish, lychees, Chinese wine, and preserved eggs; all of which paid high freight either to the shipping company or to some member of the crew. \n\nAmoy and Swatow had always been the major ports for emigration to South-east Asia, and they retained this importance until emigration came to an end shortly after the outbreak of the Pacific War; while Hong Kong was always the base for most of the ships engaged in the emigrant trade. The China Navigation Company was the coast company most concerned with the emigrant trades to the south during this century, although the three principal coast companies — China Navigation, Indo-China Steam Navigation, and China Merchants Steam Navigation Companies — were all equally concerned with the deck passenger trades on the coast and on the Yangtse. \n\nL \n\nFor most of the inter-war years the China Navigation Company operated weekly services from Amoy and Swatow to Bangkok and Singapore respectively, with four ships on each service. They had also one ship on a fortnightly service between Amoy and Manila, and four ships on a weekly service between Shanghai and Haiphong, with calls at the intermediate ports of Amoy, Swatow, Hong Kong, and Canton. In this latter trade cargo and deck passengers were equally important. The Bangkok trade had previously been operated by a German company, Nordeutscher Lloyd, which had bought out an earlier British concern, the Scottish Oriental Company, in 1899. Butterfield and Swire had been agents for both companies in south China, and when the German company in turn sold out during the early years of this century, Butterfield and Swire inherited this increasingly valuable", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207854, "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-1976", "page_number": 242, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963\n\n227\n\nhis wife to bury him in the crucial spot when he came to die, which in good time she did, wrapping him in a mat because she was too poor to pay for a coffin. Time passed and her son grew up to become a great scholar. Summoned by the Emperor to Peking he made the long journey north. On the way the boat he was travelling in got into difficulty but was saved by a god in a nearby temple. The people with whom the young scholar was travelling honoured the god for his help, but he refused to do so, going so far in arrogance as to strike the god on the head with his fan. Eventually he reached the capital and after a while returned home in triumph. He then showed himself so overbearing, especially in his behaviour towards his maternal uncle, that his mother rebuked him, reminding him that his father had died a humble death and had been buried in a mat. The scholar agreed to rebury his father in a fitting manner, but when he came to search for the body it was not to be found. While men were fruitlessly hunting for it round the spot indicated by the widow, the god whom the scholar had insulted appeared in the guise of a stranger and advised him to throw lime into the duck-pond, whereupon the body would appear. The scholar took the advice. The body rose at once to the surface but along with it came nine dead fish, only one of which had its eyes open.\n\nNine bright possibilities, that is to say, had been stored away in the fung shui; one of them had been realised in the success of the scholar — and that was now at an end; the others were ruined. (When I recounted this story to a Chinese friend in Singapore he capped it with one in which a passing scholar, on being told of the enormous success of a family which had stolen another family's fung shui and acted cruelly towards its members, sat down by the stolen grave and lamented. If such people could prosper by the principles of Earth, where were the principles of Heaven? He had hardly spoken when lightning smashed the tomb and put an end to the fortunes of the wicked family.)\n\n61. I have already referred to the tomb of Sun Yat-sen's mother in Pak Fa Lam. I was taken to see it by a part-time geomancer. (He looks like an old-fashioned scholar. In his youth he was a graduate student at a famous American university and held some official post in Canton until the arrival of the Japanese. He now teaches in Hong Kong). His analysis of the site was briefly as follows. The high peak at the rear is excellent; it stands for authority and power. The front aspect is also very good; there is", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207898, "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-1976", "page_number": 286, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n271 \n\nwere properly cared for. For the poor, coffins were provided and a place of burial found. Thus through the years a number of free cemeteries were administered by Tung Wah. The Hospital itself was built on a site of an old cemetery and the bodies which were unearthed in the preparation of the site were reinterred in another spot, the care of which became a responsibility of the Hospital.\n\nIn the case of death of large numbers in disasters such as fire, typhoon, or explosion, the Hospital provided a place for the remains of the victims, erected an appropriate memorial, and saw that religious rites were conducted to appease the spirits. In these activities they were assuming some of the functions of the U Lan Procession Committee which was first organized in 1857, being composed of representatives of four districts: Chung Wan (Central), Sheung Wan (Lower Bazaar); Tai Ping Shan and Sai Ying Poon. Later Ha Wan (Wanchai) was also represented. The major responsibility of this committee was to arrange for the annual religious ceremonies to propitiate the spirits of the dead, particularly those who had died violently.*\n\nAnother aspect of Tung Wah's concern not only for the sick but also for the dead and their mourners are the Pavilions where farewell observances for funerals can be held. One such is on Pokfulam Road just above the Hong Kong University sports field.\n\nThe Committee assumed responsibility for the transmission of the remains of Chinese who had died overseas. These were shipped to Hong Kong usually by such overseas Chinese institutions as the \"Six Companies\" in San Francisco. Tung Wah in turn would arrange for their transmission to the home place of the deceased for burial. They also performed the same service for those who died in Hong Kong and whose survivors wished them to be buried in China. At times it was customary for the overseas community to wait until there had occurred a sufficient number of deaths to warrant a mass removal of the bodies from their temporary resting place in a local cemetery for transhipment to the authorities at Tung Wah. The Committee would insert notices in the local Chinese press when a shipment of remains was received to notify relatives of the arrival with a request that arrangements should be made for their final disposal.\n\n* See also p. 219, and reference, for the U Lan Procession Committee.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209304, "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-1981", "page_number": 207, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n193 \n\ncorpse was laid out. Where possible, the death should take place in a room where the ancestral tablets of the deceased's father were; in some areas, if this could not be arranged, the corpse would be carried there later, but not elsewhere. The ritual rules governing these acts were everywhere very detailed, but differed from place to place.\n\n \nThe corpse was then laid out on a mat on the floor in a room prepared in accordance with the customs of that area, facing the door, which was left open; the immediately bereaved relatives were obliged to keep watch night and day beside the deceased, and to welcome well-wishers as they came to pay their respects.\n\n \nIn the morning of the day chosen as propitious for the encoffining — usually the third or fourth after the death — the bereaved family would put on mourning which had been made for them by the village women. In every village, mourning was worn in four or five different grades, depending on the closeness of relationship with the deceased, although the mourning considered proper to each grade differed in detail from area to area. The coffin was then carried through the village by the young men of the village and placed, covered with a blanket or cloth, in a matshed on suitable open land outside, with a table with offerings in front. The bereaved family would continue to keep watch beside the coffin, snatching sleep when and how they could. The villagers would come again to pay respects; anyone who did so would be invited to eat of the funeral food provided by the bereaved family but cooked on communal stoves nearby by the elders of the village. If the death took place outside the village, the coffin could not be brought back into the village: in such cases, the matshed would be built far out in the fields.\n\n \nDuring the evening and night of this or the next day, elaborate and lengthy rituals would be mounted by Taoist priests, with all those in mourning attending. These rituals were designed to secure the safe passage of the deceased through the hells of punishment, and his protection from the attacks of ill-disposed ghosts. During these same evenings, rituals to purify the family and the funeral site and to control any nearby malicious spirits in preparation for the actual burial were conducted. When the Taoist rites were completed, usually at about two in the morning, the bereaved family would prepare to sleep on the ground around the coffin.\n\n \nThe following morning, the bereaved family would wait by the coffin to welcome well-wishers as they appeared again to pay their respects, and when everyone was present, a complex series of rituals took", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209823, "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": 82, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "60\n\n(f) Finally, in entering business or commerce, a man will frequently assume yet another name, “pit tsz” (筆子), for purposes of business only.\n\n(g) Apart from the milk name, proper name and school name, a girl will at marriage assume her husband's clan name in front of her own, e.g. HO Fung Ling (何鳳玲), on marrying TANG Man Lin (鄧文連), becomes TANG HO Fung Ling (鄧何鳳玲).\n\n(h) The reluctance of married women to reveal their full maiden name often leads them to leave off their final name and instead to add the suffix \"shi” (氏).\n\nNOTES\n\n1 The notes were later amended and in this amended form were put on a file (Ref1/477/54) which is now in the Public Records Office. The notes as given here represent the original form, with footnotes, introduction and minor amendments by the author (Hon. Ed.).\n\n* Wills, of whatever sort, were, whatever the legal position, very rare among New Territories villagers. I remember only one, of a wealthy Cantonese landowner.\n\n* I met such a case in Tai Po where the wife, fortunately, did not contest the husband's claim that she was not a virgin.\n\n* I must have come across up to half a dozen cases of sam p'o tsai, including two or three disputes where the girl refused to marry her intended groom. The groom's family did not attempt to force marriage, but were concerned about a formal separation. The groom's family had of course for some time received the free use of the girl's services as a household worker, and so could not validly demand compensation from the girl's natural parents. A sam p'o tsai is quite different to a mui tsai who was to all intents and purposes a slave girl. (Mui tsai were banned in Hong Kong before World War II.)\n\n* Up till the 1950's, huet chong graves were normally left untouched for 5 years, this being the period needed for bodies to decompose completely. But, from the 1950's onwards, bodies took longer to decompose, and 7 years is now the standard time. I know this, because from 1958-60 I was in the Urban Services Department in charge of disposal of the dead. I was also in the Urban Services Department from 1968-71, when again I was connected with this aspect. In those days, the coffin section at Wo Hop Shek cemetery used to be cleared every 5 years, but there were so many unfit graves that this period was extended to 7 years. The need for the longer period arose apparently from the wider use of antibiotics and other drugs which seem to have the effect of preserving bodies and which were then coming into much greater use.\n\nSee in general on Burial Customs the author's Chinese Burial Customs in Hong Kong, journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume 1, 1960, pp 115-124.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210560, "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-1985", "page_number": 167, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "148\n\nJOHN KARL EVANS\n\nSociety (London, 1952), 175.\n\n34 Fustel de Coulanges (1874), 26-27; Cumont (1922), 3; and Toynbee (1971), 35.\n\n35 J. Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese, 2 (New York, 1865), 401–402.\n\n36 Ahern (1973), 146, 217-244, and 247.\n\n37 Feuchtwang (1974), 107, points out that in the Taiwanese village that he calls Mountainstreet, an odd number of incense sticks are burnt for gods and ghosts, and an even number for the ancestral spirits. Still, deification has been possible; Wang Sung-Hsing, \"Taiwanese Architecture and the Supernatural”, in Rel. & Rit., 190-191, cites the striking example of a Japanese police officer named Seijiro Morikawa, who was formally deified after death in recognition of the services which he had performed for the villagers in his district.\n\n38 For these and additional details, see Ahern (1973), 221-228; and R.L. Janelli and D.Y. Janelli, Ancestor Worship and Korean Society (Stanford, 1982), 178. In the village of Taitou, which Yang (1945) investigated, the coffin of the deceased was usually kept at home for one to three months, although in some wealthy households this transitional period might be prolonged for as much as a year (p. 87). Here, with the exception of mock paper money, which was offered periodically, the many paper articles were transferred to the spirit world at the end of the funeral procession itself (p. 89).\n\n39 Thus Hsiao-tung Fei, Peasant Life in China: a Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley (London, 1939) 30; Hsu (1967), 76; Jordan (1972), 32-33; Ahern (1973), 149; and Wolf (1974), 177.\n\n40 Hsu expresses the same view in his Clan, Caste and Club (Princeton, 1963), 45-46, but here extends it from West Town to \"every part of China.\n\n41 Wolf (1974), 160; cf. inter alia, R.F. Johnston, Lion and Dragon in Northern China (New York, 1910), 286-287; Fei, Peasant Life, 78; M. Freedman, \"Ancestor Worship: Two Facets of the Chinese Case\", in M. Freedman (ed.), Social Organization, Essays Presented to Raymond Firth (Chicago, 1967), 92-93; and Jordan (1972), 97.\n\n42 Wolf (1974), 164-167.\n\n43 Ahern (1973), 199-201.\n\n44 R.L. and D.Y. Janelli, Ancestor Worship and Korean Society, 192, and 195, argue that a wife is much more likely openly to attribute malevolent behavior to the spirit of one of her parents-in-law than her husband, who will be exceedingly reluctant to condemn the mother or father who nurtured him. They go on logically to suggest that \"the lower the rate of uxorilocal marriage, the sharper the difference between men's and women's reluctance to acknowledge ancestral hostility.\" This may account in part for the profound disagreement between the findings of Hsu and Ahern, for as we shall see below, the rate of uxorilocal marriage in the northern Taipei basin, where Ch'i-nan is situated, has approached 15 per cent, while it was closer to 40 per cent in West Town during the period of Hsu's residence.\n\n45 Cf. Jordan (1972), 32-34; Ahern (1973), 248; and especially Feuchtwang (1974), 117. This was no less true of the p'o in the Han period; see Loewe, Chinese Ideas of Life and Death, 26-27.\n\n46 Hsu (1967), 75-76, and 103.\n\ni", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211387, "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-1988", "page_number": 103, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "79\n\nand traced it to a stone cave. There he found Pooi To lying dead. His old torn coat was beneath him, but round his head and feet a lot of water-lilies were growing. Much grieved, Lei left the cave, and the next morning he came back with a coffin. He found the water-lilies all dead, but Pooi To still there, so he buried him and went home sadly. Several days later a traveller from the North visited Lei and mentioned that he had seen Pooi To walking with his rice basket towards a place called P'aang Sheng (b). Lei was astonished and could not believe it, and argument followed, and to prove he was right Lei took the traveller to where Pooi To had been buried. With much effort Lei dug up the coffin, and opened it. All that was inside was a pair of old shoes.\n\nWhen Pooi To arrived at Paang Sheng a very poor scholar named Wong Yan (Milk) entertained him in his house. Wong was ashamed of his poverty and being only able to give his guest corn to eat, but Pooi To said, \"This is the best food in the world\". After staying with him about six months Pooi To said to Wong one day, \"I have need of thirty-six rice baskets. Get them at once for me\". Wong was much distressed and answered, \"I have only got ten and I am so poor I cannot afford to buy more, what can I do?\" Pooi To comforted him, and said, \"There is no need to buy, look about your house\". Wong did what he was told, and in all sorts of corners rice baskets appeared, until he found to his amazement that he had collected thirty-six in his yard. Most of them were dirty and broken, but Pooi To told him to go round and count them again carefully, after which they all appeared quite new. Then Pooi To wrapped each basket up separately and when that was done, he told Wong to open them again. Each basket was full of coins. Wong did not keep all the money himself, but gave generously to others in need.\n\nPooi To stayed with Wong for a year, and then quite suddenly he said one day, \"I must go\". Wong hastened to cook a farewell meal, but, even before it was ready, Pooi To had disappeared as mysteriously as he had come.\n\nAbout a month later Pooi To appeared in a place called Ng Kwan (B) a prefecture in the east of China. Pooi To walked by the sea shore and met an old fisherman, and begged a fish from him. The fisherman refused, but after Pooi To had continued to worry him for some time, he picked up a very stale and putrifying fish, and threw it", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211437, "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-1988", "page_number": 153, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "129\n\nwhen she became very ill, she married the girl to Uncle, thinking that she could be a companion for Mother, who at that time was 14. Aunt Jong's version was that Lum Gin had wanted to marry my Mother, but Grandmother would not consent to it. Regardless of the reason, her two nephews became angry and left without repaying their indenture and the family relationship was severed. Lum Gin later married and settled in Hecia where he had a small country store, but the strain continued. In 1901, Uncle married Wong Fung. On 16 March 1903, my Mother, then not quite 16 years old, was married to my Father.\n\nFarm life was rough. The adults had to work hard and diligently, but rice farming did not prove profitable. There seemed to be constant worries if it was not the unpredictable weather, it was the depressed price of rice. To add to the family's problems, Grandmother's illness became more serious. A herbalist tried unsuccessfully to 'burst' a growth in her abdomen which he had diagnosed as a 'turtle'. There was much bleeding and intense pain. She probably was suffering from cancer. It was during her terminal days that I fell off the porch of the farm house onto broken glass, and sustained a cut on the top of my head, a scar I bear to this day. Grandmother died on 5 December 1907. Although I was only two at that time, one incident during the wake stands out in my memory, Mother and Aunt sitting on the floor in front of the bier, joss sticks smoking and flickering candles burning, as Uncle poured wine into tiny cups and ordered us four girls to empty the cups and kowtow before the coffin. Because we giggled during the ceremony, Uncle gave each of us a hard rap on the head with his knuckle. Grandmother was buried on the farm. Her remains were exhumed about 10 years later, stored temporarily at our Broad Road home until they were taken to China by Cousin Gum Chin for final burial.\n\nIt was not until my paternal Grandfather Chan, who was a partner in the Iwilei Rice Mill, offered to mill the grain and sell the rice in California at a better price, that Grandfather Jong was able to realize a profit. With savings of about 1,000 dollars, he returned to Shekki in 1909 when he was 55 years old. I remember being with Mother to see him off at the pier, which was located opposite the Oahu Railroad Depot not far from our Iwilei home, and observing tears in her eyes as we stood beside the s. s. Manchuria. The next year Grandfather married a widow with a young daughter, who was later to become the wife of Pong Fai,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212575, "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-1991", "page_number": 129, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "109\n\nbasket-like container. A pail of water sprinkled with fresh pomelo leaves is sometimes left on the spot where death occurred and a pair of new trousers (these pun with ‘rich' in Chinese) with a blue sash may be draped over the pail. As a more down-to-earth disinfectant, sulphur is burned.\n\nIn 1840s Hong Kong, the dying were often abandoned on hillsides, in open spaces or matsheds, although the Government tried to track down offenders.\"2 Later an I ts'z (#), a public ‘ancestral hall', was constructed. In places like Cheung Chau Island a 'death house' (something like the hospice of today), established in 1878, still stands where the very ill were taken.\" There was another at Tai O. A similar building now in ruins, built by the Kai Fong (neighbourhood welfare association), existed on Peng Chau Island where the destitute could die in peace.\" This was temple-like in appearance with three rooms, one for the sick, one for the dying and one for the caretaker. It also contained an image of the Lord of Purgatory, a Buddha who saves souls. Avoidance of death was not necessarily because of callousness.\" Many Chinese fear spirits of the dying or the dead will possess the living. This was why, of those that took their own lives, many preferred violent, bloody suicides, involving pain on the doorstep of their tormentors, so the unfortunate had the right to haunt the oppressors.\n\n16\n\nThe Tung Wah Hospital was established in 1870, ostensibly to replace the above I Ts'z. It also provided free burials for paupers. Originally sited at Kennedy Town, it moved in 1899 to Sandy Bay where the present 'coffin home', on a 100,000 square foot site, provides transshipment sometimes from overseas to China and storage of bones, bodies in coffins or ashes in urns. The remains of the Tung Wah Director, who was instrumental in building the present home, have rested there since 1906. There is capacity for the bones of about 900 persons. Only about 200 remain at present. Some relatives spread bones of relatives out on sheets of paper to air. Some remains await an auspicious day to be interred. Many emigrants now take ashes of loved ones with them overseas so they can be properly tended.\n\nUp to the 1950s, when people did pass away at home in urban Hong Kong, bamboo ramps were frequently erected so coffins could be brought direct, head first ('head should face heaven, feet should face earth': in England it is feet first), from upper floor balconies or windows to the ground.\" With narrow stairways and corridors, and coffins larger than in the West, knocking and scraping walls were considered harbingers of 'death tapping at doors'. With the construction of multi-storey", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212578, "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-1991", "page_number": 132, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "112\n\n20\n\nA one-inch diameter, ancient bronze-coin, costing $60, with a 1/4-inch square hole in the centre (a pearl or jade object is sometimes used instead), had been placed in the mouth of the corpse. This practice can be traced back to Liangzhu culture in ancient China 3,900 to 4,900 years ago. The purpose of this talisman is to deter evil, to prevent body spirits escaping before purification and to safeguard the corpse against rapid decay.\n\nIt was expected that the dead person's spirit would come to the funeral parlour. There were two bowls of peanut oil with a wick made from dried seaweed in the farewell room, 'to lead her on her way'. A packet of cooked rice and a pair of chopsticks lay on the floor to placate fierce dogs which she would meet three weeks after death on the road to heaven. Possessions she treasured, such as special clothes, a cassette of Chinese songs and her handbag with knickknacks, including magnifying glass, cigarettes, lipstick, compact and a piece of jade, were placed in the coffin. Coffin jade, which has been reclaimed after many years of burial, is valued for 'protective' properties. For practical reasons keys and a notebook, which contained telephone numbers, were not placed in the casket. Nor were spectacles. Cremation would splinter them and they could injure the corpse although there seems to be a contradiction here with the magnifying glass.\n\nAlso at the back of the hall, on the left of the altar, was a stove around which relatives and close friends, including children, folded 'gold' and 'silver ingots' out of tin-foil. These imitation bars, together with pieces of paper resembling bank notes (a tale has it that a little boy once found one and went to the bank to try to cash it), were burned continuously until midnight. Money is needed by the dead, among other purposes, to bribe officials to obtain good positions in the after-world. Five Buddhist nuns with shaved heads and colourful robes chanted prayers. One had a series of initiation, incense stick burn marks on her scalp.22\n\n21\n\nChinese children take part in funerals, and, with the extended family, it is important they 'farewell the dead'. This appears in no way traumatic. With English funerals children tend not to participate. Certainly with the author's generation (pre-World War II) death was a taboo subject for the young.\n\nA Chinese saying has it:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212579, "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-1991", "page_number": 133, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "113\n\nBe born in Soochow; Live in Hangchow; \n\nEat in Kwangchow; \n\nDie in Liuchow, \n\nThe first is noted for beautiful women, the second magnificent scenery, the third tastiest cuisine, and the last durable timber for making coffins.\n\nIn 1988 coffins ranged from about $2,500, for a humble pine ‘box', to $300,000 for one smelling of eucalyptus. The coffin in this study cost $7,200. Coffins, known in slang as 'four half boards' (*), come, basically, in either Chinese or western styles. Timber for western coffins, say teak or rosewood, is often imported from Malaysia. For Chinese coffins, boards can be roughly hewn, up to four or five inches thick, retaining the curved outside of the tree trunk and hollowed out on the inside. Good quality China fir (**) from Luchow, in Kwangsi Province, can last, buried, for up to 100 years as demonstrated by old buildings in Hong Kong with their China Fir, piled, foundations. There are a number of coffin shops, some watched over by Ts'oi Shan the God of Wealth, at the western end of Hollywood Road. Many coffins with their white or yellow cloth linings are imported from China.\n\n23\n\nBy comparison, a British coffin is normally made of English oak (elm was used for cheaper coffins before World War II) with boards one-inch thick.24 This is usually rendered watertight with pitch or mastic and lined with a bed of sawdust, white drapery and a pillow stuffed with fine wood shavings.\n\nBecause of space, in present day Hong Kong it is not practicable for the elderly to have coffins made in advance and stored in an ancestral hall or at home, as was the custom in old China. They were revarnished every year. But if a person is too interested and 'finds the smell of coffins more appealing than the smell of cooked rice' (聞見棺材香過飯) the gods may come after him. (Similar words are occasionally uttered as a curse.) Some believe a small piece of coffin wood, if boiled and the water drunk, will keep away ghosts.\n\nContinuously, from three o'clock the day before to the actual funeral ceremony in this study, relatives and friends visited the hall to give face to the family and the departed. It is a greater offence not to attend a person's funeral than not to attend his wedding. The author recalls", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212598, "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-1991", "page_number": 152, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "132\n\nNOTES\n\nThis paper is based largely on the author's own experiences while attending and being involved with Chinese funerals over a period of four decades.\n\n2. B.D. Wilson, 'Chinese Burial Customs in Hong Kong', Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 1 (1960-1), pp. 115-123.\n\nMartin K. Whyte, 'Death in the People's Republic of China', Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Eds. James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, University of California Press (1988), pp. 289-316, (p. 313); Laurence G. Thompson, Chinese Religion, An Introduction, Fourth Edition, The Religious Life of Man Series (1979), pp. 50-54.\n\nPatrick Hase, 'Traditional funerals', Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 21 (1981), pp. 192-6; Patrick Hase, 'Observations at a Village Funeral', From Village in the City: Studies in the Traditional Roots of Hong Kong Society, Ed. Davis Faure et al., Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong (1984), pp. 129-163; Hugh Baker, 'Burial, Geomancy and Ancestor Worship', Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch, Aspects of Social Organization in the New Territories, Week-end Symposium, 9th-10th May 1964, pp. 36-39.\n\n5. VR Burkhardt, 'Funerals, Requiem Masses and the Path to Purgatory', Chinese Creeds and Customs (1982), pp. 96-110.\n\nEvelyn S. Rawski, \"The Imperial Way of Death: Ming and Ching Emperors and Death Ritual\", Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, op. cit., pp. 228-253 (p. 238).\n\n7. T.C. Lai, Husein Rofe, and Philip Mao, Things Chinese, ed. T.C. Lai (1971), p. 70.\n\n9. Ibid., p. 71.\n\nJohn Z. Bowers, 'Surgery Past and Present', Medicine and Public Health in the People's Republic of China, ed. Joseph R. Quinn (1973), pp. 53-62.\n\n10. Linda Chih-ling Koo, Nourishment of Life: Health in Chinese Society (1982), p. 7, and discussion between Dr. Koo and the author, 18 June 1992.\n\n11. Hugh Baker, 'Soul', More Ancestral Images, A Second Hong Kong Album (1980), pp. 5-8.\n\n12. Elizabeth Sinn, Power and Charity: The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital (1989).\n\n13. James Hayes, The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911, Institutions and Leadership in Towns and Countryside (1977), pp. 67-8.\n\n14. James Hayes, The Rural Committees of Hong Kong - Studies and Themes (1983), p. 45.\n\n15. Frena Bloomfield, The Book of Chinese Beliefs (1983), pp. 100, 101, and 112.\n\n16. The author has visited this 'Coffin Home' on various occasions.\n\n18. Harold Ingrams, Hong Kong (1952), plate vi; James L. Watson, 'Funeral Specialists in Cantonese Society: Pollution, Performance and Social Hierarchy', Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, op. cit., p. 109.\n\n19. James Hayes, 'Sandal Wood Mills at Tsun Wan', Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 16 (1976), pp. 283-3.\n\n20. Gems of Langzhu Culture, exhibition at Hong Kong Museum of History, 11 April to 9 August 1992.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212599, "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-1991", "page_number": 153, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "133\n\n21\n\nHugh Baker, 'Hell Bank Notes', Ancestral Images, A Hong Kong Album (1979), pp 105-108\n\n✰\n\n21\n\nHugh Baker, 'Nuns', More Ancestral Images, op. cit (1980), pp 13-16\n\nTin Sau Ho Coffin Shop, Hollywood Road, visited by author 20th July 1992\n\nThe Art of Death 1500 to 1800, exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum early 1992\n\n24\n\n09 Hugh Baker, 'Marsh', Ancestral Images Again, A Third Hong Kong Album (1981), pp 109-112; Frena Bloomfield, 'The Chinese Almanac', The Occult World of Hong Kong (1980), pp. 100-2, and 'The Chinese Almanac', The Peninsula Group Magazine 13 (Hong Kong, April 1978), pp 66-71.\n\n26 Hugh Baker, 'Mourning', Hong Kong Images. People and Animals (1990), pp. 121-3\n\n21 T.C. Lai, op. cit. pp 152-3\n\n28 Ingrams, loc. cit\n\n29 Carl T. Smith, 'The Emergence of a Chinese Elite', Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol 11 (1971), pp 74-115 (p 98).\n\n30 S.M. Bard, Study of Military Graves and Monuments Hong Kong Cemetery (1991), pp. 16 (B), 26 and 27\n\n32\n\n33\n\nJ. Dyer Ball, Things Chinese (first published 1903), p 166\n\nDiscussion between author and David Shu Tat-koon, feng shui master, 7 August 1992\n\nHugh Baker, 'Burial', Ancestral Images, op. cit. (1979), pp 17-20\n\n34 Hong Kong Government Urban Services Department / Urban Council Annual Reports\n\n3 Hugh Baker, 'Exhumation', Ancestral Images, op. cit (1979), pp 110-104\n\nJJ Hugh Baker, 'Exhumation', Ancestral Images, op. cit (1979), pp 110-104\n\n37\n\nFrena Bloomfield, 'Fung Shui: Chinese Earth Magic', The Occult World of Hong Kong (1980), pp. 103-114; and Ernest J. Eitel, Feng Shui (Singapore, 1984).\n\n38 Discussion between author and David Shu Tat-koon concerning his own theories, 7 August 1992\n\n39\n\nIn other cases the author has been told of dead people's spirits returning home three, seven, ten or other periods after death\n\n40 All dead persons except infants and wandering strangers are entitled to a spirit tablet\n\n41\n\nVisit by Hong Kong Branch, Royal Asiatic Society, to Sang Woo Loong Art Advertising Model Work Company, 28 Western Street, 10 December 1988, second visit by author to same establishment 20 July 1992.\n\n42\n\n43\n\nHugh Baker, 'Earth God', Ancestral Images, op. cit. (1979), pp 1-4\n\nHugh Baker, 'Mourning', Ancestral Images Again, op. cit (1981), pp 101-104. Laurence G. Thompson, op. cit. pp 54 and 55.\n\n44 Leung Chor-on, 'Blessings Are Not For All', The Hong Kong Anthropologist, no 5 (April 1992), pp. 26-28 (p. 27)\n\n45 Rubie S. Watson, 'Remembering the Dead: Graves and Politics in Southeastern China', eds James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, op. cit., pp. 203-227", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212691, "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-1991", "page_number": 245, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "Plate 11. Coffins, today usually made in China where labour is cheaper, stacked upright in a shop in Hollywood Road. Disposal of the dead is not considered a salubrious occupation. Some believe: 'If a person finds the \"smell\" of coffins more attractive than the smell of cooked rice the gods may come after him'. (Photograph courtesy of Kit Hayward)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212874, "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": 183, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "168\n\ngeneration. However, retained on the new tablet were the names of the elder brothers of the deceased who had been responsible for the initial burial at this site and also, it would seem, much of the wording of the original record. The inscription reads:\n\nThe deceased was the fourth son of Ancestor Kau-yuen. He died early. Afterwards [we] his three elder brothers [only the names of two are given] took up the bones [from a coffin burial] and on an auspicious day in an autumn month in Chien Lung 4th or ping-san year [1736: but in fact the ping-san year is the 1st year of Chien Lung's long reign] buried them above the cross roads at Pak Kung Au on Tai Mo Shan (the geomantic details follow].\n\nDuring his life, the deceased was polite and ceremonious, he managed his family frugally and industriously, and he was straightforward and upright in his dealings with others. We his brothers and descendants flourish [on account of his exemplary conduct and character]. We had hoped that he would have a long life, but his virtue is ever fragrant and he is deserving of his descendant's offerings for ever. For ten thousand years his memory will not be forgotten.\n\nConfucian hyperbole, one might ask? Perhaps it was, though I have not come across too much of the kind in the local grave tablets. Certainly, the memory of this good man must have remained alive in the Chung family for generations after his death and burial in 1738; for it was nearly 150 years after that the repair commemorated by this tablet took place. There was probably another factor at work here, since it was believed that the graves of good people would have a beneficial effect on the fortunes of the family for generations to come. Clearly, it was considered that the good influences from this grave were not yet spent.\n\nAncestral Graves and Lineage Prosperity\n\nOne cannot stress too strongly this particular aspect of ancestral burial, and the great importance attached to ancestral graves by descendants for this reason. One short letter sent to the District Office in 1975 by two village representatives of the same village and lineage (Yeungs of Yeung Uk, Tsuen Wan) states outright the strong connection traced between ancestral graves in good locations and the continuing flourishing of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214010, "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-1997", "page_number": 79, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "45\n\nas a Buddhist monk. The problem of identifying which members of the family are portrayed by images on altars has been complicated by temple keepers having their own personal views of the exact identity of each deity on their altars. At least four of Yang Yeh's other sons are individually revered on altars, with the complete family, usually seven sons, revered in at least four temples, though in two of these there are eight sons, together with Yang Yeh's two young daughters and several of his sons' wives.\n\nLegends recounted by tea-house story-tellers claimed that General Yang Yeh defeated the Mongols near Heng Shan in Shansi early in the Sung dynasty becoming one of the most powerful supporters of the Sung. Later he, together with his heroic sons, tried to save the emperor from the invading hordes, and with his wife chose to die rather than surrender. All but two of their sons died with them. The Fifth and Sixth made their separate ways home after many adventures. After falling in battle fighting the enemies of the Sung, Yang Yeh was awarded the title of The Marshal who Protected the Sung, Sung-pao Yüan-shuai*. His body was recaptured from the enemy, so legend relates, by a valorous captain who had used a secret weapon to defeat them. He caused fire to flow from a pot thereby scorching the hillside and then, having exhumed the general's corpse, he returned to the capital at Kaifeng where it was buried in state. A temple keeper in Kowloon Tsai in Hong Kong claimed that General Yang Yeh was killed by the Tatars who hung his body on a gate tower where, daily, Mongol soldiers fired arrows at it to cause pain to his soul.\n\nA popular opera describes how the Commander-in-Chief of the Sung forces, General Yang Yeh, was encircled by the Tatars and seeing no other way out defied capture by knocking out his own brains on a stone monument dedicated to the loyal Su Wu, the unyielding plenipotentiary of the Han dynasty. The Tatars recovered his remains and honouring his bravery built a mausoleum in the Hung-yang cave, but covertly buried his remains in a secret place elsewhere to avoid the Sung forces taking the corpse back to be buried in the family grave. Meng Liang, a junior officer serving with the Yangs [and possibly now represented by the image of the unidentified deity on the temple altar beside the main altar bearing the images of the Seven, near Taichung] bravely recovered the corpse from the false coffin which, as the Tatars had feared, then was buried back home. However, Yang Yeh's spirit", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214462, "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": 320, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "287\n\nWard was buried on his old drill-field near the Temple of Confucius just within the walls of the city of Sungkiang [Songjiang: pinyin], the prefectural capital of the area now dominated by Shanghai, and the city around which much of his military service with the Ever Victorious Army took place. Harry Franck2 visited the site in 1923 and wrote that “the Chinese built a temple of remembrance over his grave, similar to those built by Chinese for their famous men over the centuries, though unlike the majority with their gleaming yellow roof tiles his was a pathetic little gray-walled enclosure, covered with ordinary tiles, in an open space inside the West Gate, littered here and there with graves and unburied coffins. It was not imposing yet it was several times more so than the tomb the adventurer would probably have had in Massachusetts. Though the temple was but a single-room building, it had an altar with the spirit tablet of Ward, and all the other features of a Chinese temple, and now and again Chinese still come to burn incense and bow down before their hero of Taiping days. A conspicuous tablet in red and black tells those who know their Chinese that:\n\nAn illustrious man from beyond the seas, he came 6000 li to accomplish great deeds and acquire immortal fame by shedding his noble blood. Because of him Sungkiang will be a happy land for a thousand autumns”.\n\nFranck tells us that the temple was not badly kept, as things went in China. There were some trees and flowers in season, inside the compound, and the whole place has been recently repaired and repainted. Rice-straw and cabbages were drying on everything but the altar itself, and the woman caretaker had gone to market to \"buy things\" leaving her small son locked inside. The only foreign hint about the place was an unfinished stone recently set up by the \"Frederick Ward Post of the American Legion\" of Shanghai. He added that the most touching feature of the whole memorial was the mound of earth, like a common Chinese grave, behind the temple, but within the enclosure, under which Ward's big mastiff was buried. After his master's death, the story goes, the dog refused to take food and went wandering about looking for him until it died of starvation.\n\nSo, having seen an early photograph of the official temple,3 altar and tablet dedicated to Ward in Sungkiang some dozen or so years previously, I was determined to see for myself whether it still existed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215610, "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": 387, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "337\n\nThe paper began as a collection of notes squirreled from all sorts of sources, and as other information arose it grew almost on its own. For example, when I was in New Zealand for some months teaching at the University of Canterbury in 2001, a postgraduate student popped a just-published newspaper article on my desk about a shipload of Chinese coffins that had foundered on its way to China in 1902. Maori villagers had buried some beached remains with due respect.\n\nThe house where I'd lived in Dunedin for ten years had been close to a big cemetery, but I'd lived there in ignorance of the fact that there were Chinese graves there. By 2001 I had met Les Wong, a Kiwi Chinese who has made it his business to restore those graves and other Chinese graves in cemeteries close to the old gold-mining centres of Central Otago. Dunedin's Dr James Ng, who came to Otago as a child from Guangdong Province, sent me in late 2001 a copy of an autobiographical article which vividly brought to life the familial links (and breaks in links between 1949 and 1979) between Chinese family members in New Zealand and their home villages in Guangdong. I have appreciated the encouragement of both Les and James.\n\nTeather, E.K. (2001). The case of the disorderly graves: contemporary deathscapes in Guangzhou, Journal of Social and Cultural Geography 2(2): 185-202.\n\nThis paper describes three agendas that are shaping contemporary deathscapes in Guangzhou: the modernist planning agenda, the market economy, and the Chinese Communist Party ideology and resistance to it. It develops the concept of deathscapes into deathspace, \"a symbolic system that represents a stage in the ongoing process of conflict and compromise involving the traditional and the modern, the personal and political, and the sacred and the secular'.\n\nPreparing for this research was quite a challenge and I can't imagine how I ever thought I'd find out what I wanted to know. An introduction from James Hayes led to my meeting Dr. May Bo Chan, from the Department of History at Zhongshan University. This department generously hosted my second week in Guangzhou and invited me to give a seminar. Existing links between Hong Kong Baptist University and Zhongshan University were invaluable.\n\nAn enormous stroke of luck was finding a superb and energetic", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216039, "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": 338, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "272\n\nAlthough not part of the Zhenjiang story a Daoist cult centre on Mao Shan, a mountain some fifty miles to the south, was visited annually by a stream of pilgrims in the Spring, a great many of whom passed through the convenient port of Zhenjiang. The Daoist Mao Shan school was arguably the most powerful Daoist sect during the Tang and maintained its great prestige down to at least 1949. The Mao Shan Daopai as it is known, is renowned for its seances and medium trances, and according to Mao Shan sect priests was founded in the fourth century AD with the Mao Shan sect priests considering themselves to be the highest ranking of all Daoist orders.15 The sect originally appears to have been meditative and only later did it fall into line with other sects.\n\nIn 1917 two images were observed by Otterwill in Zhenjiang, in procession, Yan Gong and Jiang Gong #, both patron deities of river boatmen. Both deities were popular on altars in and around Nanchang, Anjing and along the Yangzi. Also popular in central China, C. B. Day records that Yan Gong in Zhejiang province was one of the Five Daoist deities who presided over a period of danger, a member of the Celestial Board of Health 瘟部五帝.\n\nThere have been but few references in western writings to the legend and role of Yan Gong, a Patron of Sailors. According to Doré, \"he was regarded in Central China as the protector of sailors and the god of the tides [Chao Shen].\" This, presumably, means the patron deity of sailors in the rivers and estuaries of the Yangzi basin. However, Yang Laoda is the usual patron of boatmen on the Yangzi. Werner1 provides a more detailed description of Yan Gong, the god of sailors, adding a little to Doré. He notes that Yan Gong had a temple built in his honour near Shanghai during the reign of the first emperor of the period of the Three Kingdoms [ca. AD 240] and that he was the deified hero in that temple who protected Shanghai from rebel attacks during the reign of Ming Shi Cong [ca. 1540]. Other legends claim that he was born during the Song in Jiangxi, that he was one of the four major deities of Jiangxi province, and was a censor famous for his integrity. Or that he was again a native of Jiangxi but born during the Yuan, and drowned during a storm when returning home. He was buried but was seen by the inhabitants of his native district on the same day. When his coffin was brought to Nanchang and opened it was found to be empty, a miracle which led to a temple being built in his honour. Sailors have", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216053, "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": 352, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "286\n\nParker might pitch it into the nearest ditch as far as he cared, but it was as much as his place was worth for him to touch it. The Municipal Council issued notices and offered compensation, and meanwhile every day during their walks and rides they had to go round the obstructive eyesore. The Daotai had second thoughts and issued a proclamation saying that he had expostulated with Parker and in his reverent affection for human bones told him that he would have to wait for the agnatic descendants to come forward. This put Parker in a very uncomfortable position and he determined to go the Daotai one better. He therefore issued a proclamation explaining that no one had greater affection for human bones than he but pointed out that the coffin ran the risk of desecration, and that even distant members of the family were authorised to take it away at once. He then gave a broad hint to the Municipal Council that if distant members of the family turned up at dead of night with pick and shovel, no questions would be asked. It blew hard that evening and the air was filled with sleet. When he went out for his early walk the coffin had disappeared. The dealers in donkey-skins had taken four municipal policemen, dug a hole in the next field and then, after transferring the coffin, had slunk away. Nothing happened!\n\nParker explained how Chinese and Tartar soldiers made a nuisance of themselves not only trouble making but also simply by strolling through the foreign settlement in order to steal a look at foreign devils. When he was Consul there, certain Europeans used to connive at gaming-houses, and take shares in native theatres; not to mention pawnshops, drinking houses and other places ever less orthodox, all flourishing under the sacred nose of Her Majesty's Consul. He found Zhenjiang a very rowdy place both from a foreign and native point of view. Consequently the municipal police had plenty of work. One strolling warrior was arrested for \"committing a nuisance\" and promptly punched the policeman's head. He was at last overpowered by others, and temporarily lodged in the consular gaol, the keeper of which was a one-eyed old soldier named Joshua Nunn, who boasted several medals, and had served his country bravely and well in the wars. Some more Chinese soldiers soon gathered round, and began to threaten a rescue, and even burn down the Consulate. Parker gave orders to plucky old Nunn to lock the man up in his strongest cell whilst he sent a pencil message round by the tingchai to each of three sturdy Britishers: \"Please step round with your gun: I expect a row\". In less than five minutes they were there, and with Parker sat before the entrance with their guns.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]