[
    {
        "id": 210746,
        "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-1986",
        "page_number": 97,
        "title": "RAS-1986",
        "content_text": "80\n\nCHAN WING HOI\n\nwere a fishing family who moved in from Naam Tau. The Chan family started the village.\n\nThe jung-lei (chairman)* Mr. Wong Man Gwong, a 59-year-old former seaman, provided more information on local history. It was his great-great-grandfather who first came here. The original population consisted of about 60 fishing households. The Hoklo and Chiu Chau newcomers were already there when he was small. The present site of the golf club was occupied by paddy fields. One village, known as Seung Wai, was relocated to present Shek O to make way for the golf club. Mr. Wong pointed out the place when we passed it in a procession in the festival, which was just outside the golf club enclosure. Traces of walls could still be seen, and Mr. Wong remembered going back there to worship the Daai Wong Ye Earth God when he was small. At the time the golf club was built the foreigners were powerful and met with little resistance when they took away the land from the villages.\n\nA 39-year-old Mr. Lam, an indigenous villager, told me about the occupations of the original Shek O people. At the beginning, the inhabitants made their living in vegetable gardening and fishing. In more recent times the men worked as seamen. Very few people travelled to the West to work in restaurants, and such emigration started only in the last ten years or so. Most people of his own generation worked in the city. Many of the retired seamen came back and worked as waiters at the Shek O Country Club. He was a seaman himself, a radio officer.\n\nA 56-year-old Mr. Lau, the owner of the restaurant where I had a vegetarian dinner, provided additional information about the changes that had taken place in local life. The indigenous people fished with stake-nets (jang-paang). He believed that the golf club was built in the 1930s. It was already there when he was born. But some of the facilities, at least the swimming pool, were still being built when he was small. He remembered that at the age of 7, he was scolded when he jumped on a pile of sand that was prepared for the construction of the swimming pool. Most of the Chinese newcomers at Shek O arrived after the Japanese Occupation. They were Hoklo fishermen who came in their boats. It took only one night to reach Shek O from Hoi Luk Fung when the wind was in...",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212606,
        "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": 160,
        "title": "RAS-1991",
        "content_text": "140\n\ninhabitants got to know us better; they accepted our lack of dinner jackets, our effect on the drink stock at the Club, our — regrettable — neglect of the traffic signals, and our other little mannerisms, and treated us right royally.\n\nThere were two seasons in Maymyo, the second and briefer one, lasting several weeks, towards the end of the rains in October. The Club, a long rambling creeper-covered building, became gay with visitors. It looked out over a pleasance, cleared from the jungle, and spreading a mile towards the reservoir dam, built by Turkish prisoners in the last war. It goes without saying that a race course and golf links were laid out over the meadowland, very pleasant to behold. But here we were next door to India. The plumbing in the gentlemen's cloak room, consisted of a row of rusty and battered enamel utensils, set out at more or less even intervals on a long low shelf. Without the door, a shadow hovered, poised to dash in the moment he heard the rattle of a utensil returned to the board. No Americans visited Maymyo while I was there. It would have been interesting to hear their first reactions to these Arcadian simplicities.\n\nAfter all Burma was a rich enough country; it was not any lack of money that left it a Victorian remnant. Amongst the Burmese there is no caste, nor is there any desire to work. The house servants everywhere are Indians, of whom there were over a million in the country. Of the annual increase of 5,000,000 in India, a substantial proportion must be of the sweeper caste. Amidst a population with so abnormal a rate of procreation, the border line between a sufficiency and famine is a fine one, easily crossed; and any modernisation of sanitary installations would create serious unemployment: thus in India the vested interest in caste puts the brake, not only on plumbing, but on all progress; and Burma, until recently had been the backwater of India.\n\nI spent six months in Burma, but had little opportunity to learn much of the country. I saw very little of the Burmese, and never met one of those attractive country maids, who wait by the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking out to sea. Of the seventeen million inhabitants, only ten million are Burmans; besides the Indians, there are 300,000 Chinese, and the remainder are tribesmen from the hills.\n\nThe history of Burma is a bloody one; the country had seldom for long been united. The Chinese under Kublai Khan, the Mongol,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212866,
        "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": 175,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "160\n\npublished weekly under the editorship of Ezra, was in English. Others were in Russian and German.\n\nSchools\n\nYoungsters from the Sephardic community were educated at the Public School in the International Settlement. The fee was too hefty for most of the Ashkenazi boys. As a result, the Kadoorie family endowed the School for Hebrew Boys where there was a respectable scholarship program.\n\nB'nai B'rith\n\nAn article entitled 'Shanghai Fortunes' in the National Jewish Monthly (June 1930) revealed that B'nai B'rith, considered the foremost secular Jewish organization in the world, but by the Sephardic community as particularly Ashkenazi, had trouble getting started in Shanghai. The Shanghai lodge was established officially in 1928, but, 'the circumstances of Jewish life in Shanghai are such that the organization of a B'nai B'rith Lodge was fraught with the most unusual difficulties. National divisions are sharp, particularly between the older Jewish families of the city and the more recently arrived Ashkenzim.\n\nEventually the Shanghai Lodge of B'nai B'rith went on stream when leading citizens of the Sephardic community, notably the Kadoorie, lent their support. It sponsored such activities as the Jewish Boy Scouts and the Jewish Girl Guides. On Seder Night, hospitality was extended to all Jews. At a Hanuka tea, 500 children were present.\n\nClubs\n\n17\n\nThe Jewish Club opened in 1919 or 1920 in a colonial style building at the corner of Great Western and Tifeng Road. The cost for the building was $250,000. The entrance fee was $25 and the monthly subscription was $7. There was an auditorium of 80 by 40 feet for lectures, and a billiard room 'that was rarely neglected.' Meanwhile, Jews joined major clubs such as the Shanghai Club, the French Club, the American Club, and the Country Golf Club. They were also active in horse racing.\n\nAs the reader can see, a great deal of work remains to be done in order to obtain a more complete portrait of the Jewish community in Shanghai.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216099,
        "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": 398,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "332\n\nSir Robert had a wonderful funeral procession with 16 bands. In those days popular tunes at Chinese funerals were; Abide with me, Polly Wolly Doodle all the Day, and Yes, we have no Bananas! They were good, rousing tunes and most Chinese did not understand the words anyway. Bamboo ramps were a common sight in the 1950s to bring coffins and corpses down to street level. Ramps disappeared with traffic congestion and with the introduction of high-rise buildings, about 1960. Major Chinese festivals occur in the calendar when there are marked changes of seasons. People are then likely to feel \"under the weather.\" When the body is at a low ebb a sick person is more likely to die. In 1956, it was said that Sir Robert had “passed over\" Ching Ming and should be able to carry on at least to Dragon Boat Festival. However, it was not to be.\n\nIn March 1955 I had managed to obtain a government quarter at 56 Conduit Road. At the time it resembled a quiet country lane, gay with flowers, where you could occasionally hear barking deer calling from Victoria Peak. A few people were still carried up to Mid-Levels by sedan chairs which, until the end of the fifties, were parked at the bottom of Wyndham Street.\n\nI engaged a Chinese amah to whom I paid $130 a month. She spoke Pidgin English and talked of \"going topside” when she meant going upstairs. Indeed some of us old Hong Kong hands still use pidgin expressions. I, for example, still talk of a makee-learn, for someone learning a job, and I say small chow when I mean canapés which are provided at receptions. A Chinese colleague complained that, at $130, I was overpaying my amah. He gave his $70 a month. He also said that his amah had no time off. If she had anything important to do she would request a few hours off work. Several people had gold teeth in those days and the saying was that one should have enough gold in one's mouth to pay for one's funeral. The present-day, gold-coloured building, at Admiralty, is nicknamed the \"Amah's Tooth.\"\n\nWhen I first lived in Conduit Road there were a number of quite palatial mansions standing in their own grounds, often with tennis courts, in the Mid-levels. One example was the house on the site, at No.41, on which I live today. The old building was demolished in the mid-1960s. From 1951 to '61 it was occupied by the Foreign Correspondents' Club (FCC). The film, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, based on Han",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]