[
    {
        "id": 206104,
        "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": 184,
        "title": "RAS-1970",
        "content_text": "HONG KONG BEFORE THE BRITISH\n\n179\n\nSao, and her confederate, Cheung Pao Tsai, who equipped a fleet of foreign-style ships and held off an attack of government ships for a week in Tung Ch'ung harbour. Another is about a pirate called Wang whose treasure remains hidden in an inaccessible cliff in the most westerly of the Lema or Tam Kon Shan group of islands.\n\nA final word must be said about the Hakkas. Their advent has certainly been the most important modern development in the history of the population. Many families who arrived just after the evacuation are now indistinguishable from the Punti since they talk and dress like them. The later arrivals have, however a distinctive dress and several different sub-dialects of the language. They tend more and more to encroach on the land of the Punti. Hong Kong Island, which was originally owned by the Tang clan, was found by the British almost entirely inhabited by Hakkas, who paid no rent and as far as is known received themselves the compensation for some of the land. Lantao Island which has been recently depopulated owing to malaria is gradually being filled up with Hakka squatters. The only part of our region which seems immune from their encroachment is the belt of fertile land chiefly owned by the Tang clan in which the history of the Chinese population of our region apparently began.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212583,
        "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": 137,
        "title": "RAS-1991",
        "content_text": "|17\n\nstorey, basically domestic, accommodation in crowded, busy Kowloon, The eldest daughter, in the front seat of the car, carried the enlarged photograph of Mother in her 'spirit shrine' (jing tong), made from coloured paper stretched over a bamboo frame. A short ceremony was held at 'Pine Shade Hall' with two Buddhist nuns in attendance. Pine is an emblem of longevity.\" It frightens away evil, such as ghouls that prey on corpses.\n\nLater, a meal with three tables (about 12 people to a standard Chinese round table) was provided at a nearby restaurant. A place was filled at intervals. It was the first time relatives had eaten meat for two days.\n\nIt is bad luck to return to the funeral parlour on the same day (to retrieve something left behind, say) and it is not propitious to go straight home. One should 'leave' the bad luck elsewhere. All close relatives, however, were given a piece of bright red cloth, about eight inches square, cut from the shroud. This they still keep as souvenirs.\n\n28\n\nBecause of congestion long funeral corteges with pedestrians, some in good spirits, and close relatives and professional mourners weeping unashamedly, are no longer allowed. Up to the late 1960s when these were still common, an elaborately carved, nine-foot high funeral chair with a portrait of the deceased would lead the procession followed by the hearse.29 Large bamboo and wicker frames covered with silver and blue papers and flowers, with characters reading, for example, ‘Funeral of Wong Family', and describing the dead person's outstanding characteristics, would also be shouldered by coolies or transported on tricycles. The names of the three genial Gods of Happiness, Wealth and Longevity, Fuk, Luk and Shau, would also sometimes be displayed as would names of donors. Chinese bands, some engaged by friends to proffer condolences, played western hymns: like Abide with Me, or pop tunes such as Polly-wolly Doodle all the Day. Paper scatterers left trails for souls to find their way back home.\n\n28\n\nThe cortege of Kwok Acheong, who died in 1880, was supposed to have taken one hour and 13 minutes to pass. The author recalls a quarter-mile long cortege in 1956, with 16 separate bands and musicians' uniforms ranging from white-waiter-style, to Salvation Army blue, to Confederate grey. The procession completed one circuit of Happy Valley before stopping at the then Colonial Cemetery gate. On such occasions newspapers recorded, \"The funeral passed the Monument at such a time.\"",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213557,
        "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-1995",
        "page_number": 153,
        "title": "RAS-1995",
        "content_text": "122\n\nFirst, the extracts in the Sing-Song are clearly artificial productions written as a literary joke. Given what we understand of the way Pidgin developed and how it was used, there is little chance that texts of the sort published by Leland would have circulated other than as an after-dinner entertainment among Western-educated people with a knowledge of Pidgin. We know from the writings of W.C. Hunter that this sort of entertainment did, in fact, take place.\n\nWe are not saying here that Pidgin-English Sing-Song is a hoax. Leland never claims that the texts are authentic, only that they have been judged plausible by western scholars of Chinese. The style and expressions used in the texts contain a variety of American slang and minstrelsy terms, and the overall internal evidence is, to my mind, that Leland wrote most of the texts himself.\n\nLeland was never a long-time resident of the Far East, I must therefore digress slightly to explain how he could perform the feat of writing a small book of prose and verse in a language which he could only have known slightly. It also gives me an excuse to introduce you to a colourful and talented character,\n\nCharles Godfrey Leland was born in Philadelphia on 15 August 1824. He was a voracious reader by the age of nine and studied at college in New Jersey from 1841 to 1845. Then he went to Germany via Italy and spent two years at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich.\n\nKnown as the \"Gentle Giant\", he had a gargantuan appetite for food, drink and tobacco. In 1848, he moved to the Sorbonne, and manned the barricades in the Paris Commune. Returning to Philadelphia, he studied law, then turned to journalism, authorship, politics and exploration of the Western US. He joined the Confederate cause and fought in the Civil War. He was an acknowledged master of literary journalism and in 1866, he became editor of the Philadelphia press.\n\nFrom 1869 to 1879, he stayed in London and became closely associated with the humanist thinker Walter Besant. Leland took a close interest in education in the industrial arts, as well as taking up research on Gypsies and the Romany language. He was a talented linguist and was particularly interested in slang and jargon",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216071,
        "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": 370,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "304\n\nMason's book is fairly thick and contains numerous anecdotes about life on the China coast which in the main have no particular relevance to his later criminal escapade. He explained that he had had no experience of criminal matters and therefore made many mistakes which, with hindsight, he should never have made. He referred also to the American consul in Zhenjiang, General Alexander C. Jones, Mason's oldest and most intimate friend in the port, a southerner who had commanded cavalry on the losing side of the Civil War, and then later, in Hong Kong, Mason assumed the role, in disguise, of an American sailor who had been beached in Hong Kong. He made a great point in his book of how Sir Robert Hart had favoured him as a good employee of the Customs Service, and that looking back he was able to see that Hart had been at pains to try to warn him off doing anything stupid. The tenor of the tale was that Hart and others, including the US consul and the British Consuls in Zhenjiang, had known that Mason was up to something, even, perhaps, what he really had intended to do. Mason ends with no apologies or even any thought of the stupidity of his acts. Out of context, his book would be a \"cracking good yarn\" but taken at face value, it depicts Mason having Walter Mitty fantasies.\n\nHart's letters39 to his London representative reveal that Mason was a 4th Assistant B in Chinchiang [Zhenjiang] in 1887. By mid-1891, in a short sentence within one of his letters, not in any way connected with Mason, Hart refers to the Gelao Hui, whom he did not see as particularly hostile to either foreigners or Christianity but were anti-dynastic and whose activities were incipient rebellion. In the October of the same year, he first mentions the Mason affair and comments on the immense harm it had done to the Service. He attached a draft telegram in which he called Mason ‘a foreign conspirator who had bought arms, seized at Shanghai, with his own money, and whether he himself [Mason] was amateur detective, conspirator, dupe or lunatic remained to be seen, as also whether his disclosures, plot confederates, etc., exist elsewhere than in his own diseased imagination'. There is no indication in any of Hart's published letters that he was aware of Mason's plans, despite, as we learn later, all had already been revealed to the local Customs Commissioner in Zhenjiang.\n\nIn Mason's Confessions, he tells of his attempt to resign from the Customs and of Hart's reply which explained that according to the regulations, this was not possible. He added half-way down his letter to",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]