[
    {
        "id": 205419,
        "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": 181,
        "title": "RAS-1967",
        "content_text": "174\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nthe facts now available and his deftness in finding the right key to unlock the often unsuspected treasure contained in the traditional material, have enabled him to give us the main plot.\n\nFor the complete story we must wait, says Freedman. A satisfactory study of the lineage must rest on a study of China as a whole and for this we await the method: the great synthesis between sinology of history and the social sciences. We await too, in this connection, the day when China will again be open to scholarship (and we await the published results also of the many studies which have been conducted in recent years in the New Territories by students of the social sciences and which are relevant to the problems of this book and to other topics on Chinese society).\n\nBut there is something we could still do while awaiting such events. The author says that in an ideal world somebody would be paid to gather in or copy all that remains now—for not only paper perishes but inscribed stones and boards are removed and lost. When information to be culled from these sources is combined with data from British documents and the memories of old men (also being rapidly lost to us) there will be an opportunity to say something illuminating about this corner of southeastern China in the last years of the Ch'ing dynasty.\n\nIn talking of scholarship and China opening up again, Maurice Freedman ends on what he calls himself, a messianic note: the day will come. One would like to be equally messianic about the preservation and collection of our New Territories records. But perhaps one may at least hope the day will come for this too, and before it is too late.\n\nHong Kong, 1967,\n\nMARJORIE TOPLEY\n\nTAIWAN FEASTS AND CUSTOMS. A hand-book of the principal feasts and customs of the lunar calendar on Taiwan. Michael R. Saso, S. J., the Chabanel Language Institute, Hsinchu, Taiwan (Formosa), 1966, pp. iv, 93.\n\nWe by no means know all there is to know of the popular religion of China. Even if things were different: if we could go there to gather the necessary material, and if indeed popular",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205637,
        "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-1968",
        "page_number": 179,
        "title": "RAS-1968",
        "content_text": "174\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\na factory or in petty trade, or some form of out-work, for example making plastic flowers, extremely popular since about 1960. It also affects the future of young members of the boat community since children, once living on the land, can attend school regularly.\n\nLand people have long regarded the boat people as near barbarians and have myths about their \"un-Chinese\" activities, but Miss Ward argues movement ashore will change their status generally, and in the long run the cumulative effects of all the developments connected with economic change will be to integrate the fishing folk completely into the rest of the Chinese population. Miss Ward's main work has been with the Cantonese speaking fishing folk. One might wonder, however, whether the rate of integration will be the same for the \"Hoklo,\" speaking a different dialect. Land-dwelling speakers of this dialect have still a long way to go to full integration in Hong Kong.\n\nHong Kong, 1968.\n\nMARJORIE TOPLEY\n\nTHE AWAKENING OF CHINA 1793 - 1949: Roger Pelissier (edited and translated by Martin Kieffer) London, Secker and Warburg, 1967, pp 532. 63/-\n\nThis book, part of a series entitled \"History in the Making\", is really a collection of short extracts, few of them more than several pages culled from numerous Western works. English, American and, usefully, (the compiler being of that nationality) French sources form the bulk of the publications from which the selection is made. The extracts are linked by a connecting narrative to form a continuous sequence of historical experience extending from the Macartney Embassy in 1793-94 to the débâcle of 1948 - 49 when the Chinese Communists took over control of all China.\n\nWhilst the narrative is, in places, open to question, this publication deserves to be widely known and read. This is partly because the books from which the extracts are taken are, in most cases, long out of print and sometimes difficult to obtain; but mainly because it provides a superb sweep of modern Chinese history, carefully assembled. The richness of the material is remarkable and the authors are compelling partly, one suspects, because of the vital nature of what lay before their eyes. The writers are",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206628,
        "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-1972",
        "page_number": 176,
        "title": "RAS-1972",
        "content_text": "170\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\ncombination of an historical hero, with considerable legend surrounding him, and a mythical being who is very popular in Chinese folklore; thus creating a complicated and fabulous story. The second, Fa Chu Kung, was in all probability a historical being, the actuality of his origins lost in time, who now appears as a legendary being. The third, Cheng Ho, is a comparatively recent and well-documented historical being, deified by popular appeal, with little myth or legend added to his story.\n\nTwo of the three are popular Taoist spirits or gods (†‡) and believed to be beneficent whereas the third, T'ai Sui, is a feared Taoist god.\n\nThe detail of the development of each cult, the recognition features of each deity, the frequency of sightings and the identities of other deities co-located with the main deity described below are based on sightings and conversations in some two and a half thousand temples, and six god-carvers' shops located in Hong Kong and Macau, Taiwan, the Philippines and in most parts of South East Asia; and also from notes culled from many books, mostly written by Christian missionaries who so often vented their spleen on the subject of heathen idols.\n\nOne final prefatory note is necessary at this point, a short description of a novel which is one of the main sources of myth and legend about the gods.\n\nThe novel, the Feng Shen Yen I (#Ħ✯A), The Deification of the Gods*, written in about the fifteenth century about the supernatural, describes the historical struggle between the last king of the Shang Dynasty, King Chou (*†£) and the victor, the first king of the subsequent Chou Dynasty, King Wu (1). The capital of the Shang Dynasty was the ancient city of Anyang, where King Chou, infamous for his tyranny, cruelty and excesses is said to have reigned for thirty-three years, 1154-1121 B.C. King Chou was destroyed with the Shang Dynasty in the flames of his palace at the Deer Terrace after a crushing defeat by a rebellious army under Hsi P'o (‡) on the banks of the Yellow River. Hsi P'o founded the Chou Dynasty and is remembered as King Wu (1). This defeat of the Shang and the inception of the Chou is variously\n\n* See (in translation) Lu Hsun, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1959, pp. 220-224, where the title is rendered Canonization of the Gods.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h",
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    },
    {
        "id": 206682,
        "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-1972",
        "page_number": 230,
        "title": "RAS-1972",
        "content_text": "224\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nis made to view the movements which have often been politically militant, first against the background of Chinese society, imperial power and foreign penetration, then the Republican cause, and finally in what is perhaps the most original and interesting section of the book, the period 1919-1949: 'the Chinese Revolution'. There are no Chinese characters in the text but a short character index is appended after an equally short bibliography and a slightly longer list of references.\n\nThis book seems to be mainly oriented to the general reader who is unfamiliar with the subject, and in as far as this is so the author may be excused for his almost entire use of secondary materials; even the official documents are largely culled from other published sources. But since he also states that one of his major concerns is to ‘illuminate certain aspects of the life of Chinese secret societies and the part they played in China's political upheavals', it does call for more considered criticism.\n\nOne does not, of course, blame the author for not reaching definite conclusions. As he says, the 'sixty or so original documents' are certainly not enough to provide an answer to such questions as how one might define a Chinese secret society in modern times (or for that matter, I would say, traditional times). Historical research is only just beginning. But I would take issue with him on what I consider to be a fundamental weakness in his analysis: the mixing of structurally and functionally, as well as ideologically, different categories. Here, in fact, the Chinese use of terminology is itself often misleading, for the same term might be applied indiscriminately to different orders of groupings: all organizations which have in common secrecy, religion, and militant, anti-establishment aims. The groups themselves, moreover, sometimes use the terms hui ('society') and tao ('religion') or men ('door' or 'sect') interchangeably, and even more confusing, dissimilar types of groups appear to have sometimes combined in order to pursue some particular aim of the moment. But enough has been written in the last decade to show that two distinctly different kinds of groupings emerged in China, and certain major differences may sometimes be discerned in fact from the earlier literature.\n\nGroups such as, for example, the Pure Tea Sect (Ch'ing-ch'a-hui), the Way of Fundamental Unity (Yi-kuan-tao), the Eight Diagrams, the Observance Society, 'Vegetarians' (in fact a qualification for",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h",
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    },
    {
        "id": 206954,
        "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-1974",
        "page_number": 25,
        "title": "RAS-1974",
        "content_text": "THE PAPER CHASE\n\n19\n\nadministrative reasons, to be kept for specified periods of time or until the completion of certain actions.\n\nIn many departments of government records of this kind may represent as much as 50% of their total holdings at any one time, and where their volume is great, as it often is, the problem arises of how to keep them readily available at the same time as minimising the cost of their storage.\n\nComputerisation, microphotography and other techniques have been used increasingly over the last twenty or thirty years to help meet this problem, and with considerable success; but over quite a wide range of record classes the application of these bulk reduction and information storage and retrieval processes has been found to be uneconomical or impracticable due to the form or physical condition of the records themselves or because of the relatively short periods during which some intermediate records need to be retained.\n\nFor the time being, then, there is no escape from the need to store and control large bodies of records by conventional means.\n\nOne of the expedients employed increasingly in developed countries over the last few decades, as I have said, is that of centralised storage. Records reaching the \"intermediate\" stage of their existence are relinquished by their creating departments to a central repository which operates as a division of the government's Archive office. These central repositories, or \"intermediate record centres\" as they are termed, are usually located in low-cost areas and operate in some measure as extensions of the departments' own registries. The transferred records are maintained in very much the same manner as they are in the departments and are regularly culled and finally disposed of in accordance with schedules developed and administered by the archival authority in consultation with the departments concerned. Official reference to the records in the meantime is facilitated by a courier service.\n\nThe main advantages of the system are that it minimises storage costs, rids offices of seldom-used records and facilitates the regular and systematic destruction of valueless papers; and since records are kept in a more orderly condition in intermediate record centres than they generally are in departments it leads to more rapid retrieval of information. An efficient record centre should be able to produce any paper demanded of it within ten minutes.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077",
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    },
    {
        "id": 207762,
        "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": 150,
        "title": "RAS-1976",
        "content_text": "OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE OF A ROAD TRANSPORT SYSTEM IN WEST CHINA 1942 - 46\n\nW. A. REYNOLDS*\n\nIntroduction\n\nThe purpose of this paper is to give an account of the transport work of the Friends Ambulance Unit, China Convoy in West China during the four years 1942-45. This transport operation was only part of the work undertaken from 1941 to 1951 in medical, transport and rehabilitation work in China. The data on which the paper is based has been culled from records at Friends House, London and personal records. There are other (and possibly fuller) records in the archives of the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, but it has not so far been practical to consult these. It is possible that when this is done a more detailed study can be undertaken.\n\nThe record here presented is not only of historical interest. It is intended to show what resources are required and what can be achieved in operating road transport in arduous conditions with little services or spares available from outside the organization and a minimum of imported fuel. This may be of value in planning and comparing transport systems in underdeveloped countries.\n\nBackground\n\nThe Friends Ambulance Unit had its origins in World War 1 when it was set up to provide alternative service to Quakers and others who, for reasons of conscience, refused to bear arms. It was re-established in 1939 for the same purpose and its members served as unpaid volunteers in various capacities in Finland and Norway, Egypt, Greece, with the Free French in Syria, in Ethiopia, India, France, as well as in China. After the war the work in Europe merged into relief and reconstruction and was largely taken over by the Friends Relief Service. A full account of the work is given in Davies. (Ref 1)\n\nThe FAU China Convoy was thus part of a larger organization but had distinguishing characteristics. Much of the financial support...\n\nMr. Reynolds is head of Department, Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Hong Kong,\n\nPage 150\n\nPage 151",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q",
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    },
    {
        "id": 209982,
        "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": 241,
        "title": "RAS-1983",
        "content_text": "219\n\nIt was beautiful out there, amid real pine-woods. Near the bungalow was a small monastery and the monks in their wisdom did not allow any wood-cutting on their property. The bungalow was clean and well kept by the caretaker. Chun was his name so far as I remember, a sinister-looking rogue with a squint, who rarely smiled. Perhaps it was the loneliness which made him morose and surly. He had no wife, at least, not officially, and the pay was so small that he could barely live on it, for it was expected that he would make a good deal of extra money from visitors. He brightened up when I ordered supper and told him I was staying for the night.\n\nThere were two big rooms, plainly but comfortably furnished, and the kitchen and scullery were outside. A number of good books were on the shelves and I found a lot of old visitors' books, some dating back to the early 'eighties. I had no idea the bungalow was so old, and I became so immersed in the books that I forgot everything else, until Chun came in with the supper.\n\nIt was October and getting chilly at night, so I told him to get a fire going in the big round stove, as I wanted to have a long, cosy browse afterwards.\n\nChun was becoming quite amiable, and started a long story in pidgin about a bewitched boar, a big fearsome brute, which no one could kill. I knew how superstitious the Chinese were and took the whole story with a pinch of salt, until he took out one of the visitors' books and showed me an account of a shoot written by a Mr. Currie, an old-timer no longer in the port. Chun must have memorised the place for he knew no written English, and it was clear that Mr. Currie—or \"Cullee\", as he called him—was Chun's great hero, and when Currie roamed the hills after pig that was the Golden Age for Chun. He got more and more excited: \"That time, Master, plenty man come shootee shootee pig. Every week four five piecee man come. My catchee plenty cumsha (tips). My velly solly Mista Cullee have go homeside.\"\n\nAfter he had cleared away the supper things I settled down with the visitors' book. There were some excellent accounts of pig-shoots by Currie and his companions, ranging over several years, and with all the usual ups and downs, failures and successes. It was clear that they were written by a man who loved the sport.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v",
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    },
    {
        "id": 211541,
        "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": 258,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "234\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nDian H. Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast 1790-1810 (Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. viii, 243.\n\nIn 1813, there appeared in English a translation by the European scholar Neumann of a Chinese work on pirates: more specifically, on that particularly large group which infested the China Sea from 1807-1810. Dian Murray takes a look at them over a longer period of twenty years, to give us the first modern work on the subject. She uses a wide range of sources in Chinese and Western languages, the subject of a useful bibliographic essay towards the end of the book.\n\nAt their peak, the pirate bands numbered between 50,000 and 70,000 men and women, organized into a confederation of six fleets and 20,000 junks: surely a horrifying prospect for officials and villagers and townpeople alike, not to mention other seafarers. And so it proved. The author gives many examples of defeats inflicted on Ch'ing officers, and the killings, abductions and sackings to which the inhabitants of many places were subjected over the period of greatest piratical activity. Chapters 6 and 7 (pp. 99-136) contain many examples of the kind, in colourful detail often culled from county gazetteers. In the end, the pirate menace was removed by a combination of greater force and foreign aid, together with application of the well-known expedient of buying over the leaders with money and titles, which resulted in the surrender of the last fleet, leaving the way open for the Ch'ing navy to overcome the remaining smaller groups piecemeal (Chapter 8).\n\nOther chapters deal with the milieu in which the pirate menace originated: the (Cantonese) \"Water World\" as Professor Murray entitles it (Chapter 1), the Sino-Vietnamese piracy of the late 18th century whose leaders were enlisted by the rival claimants to the Vietnamese throne (Chapters 2 and 3), the \"Professionalization of Piracy\", which gives an account of organization, leadership, recruitment and life at sea (Chapter 4), whilst another chapter is devoted to the manner in which piratical operations were conducted, including information on ships and weapons (Chapter 5).\n\nA \"Conclusion\" surveys the era and the pirate phenomenon under",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q",
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    {
        "id": 212672,
        "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": 226,
        "title": "RAS-1991",
        "content_text": "207\n\nan original commission with the final decision on the book's coverage and titling.\n\nA further sign of inadequate editing is the absence of any indication of the sources of these images of the past. Beyond stating on the inside rear of the cover that the photographs were \"carefully culled from press archives of the time” (my italics), a rather inexact and fairly unhelpful statement, the book itself is totally without any list or acknowledgement of sources. For a work which is sub-titled “A History in Documentary Photographs\" and is part of an interesting series which up to the time of this book's publication had issued volumes dealing with Russia, Africa, and the Ottoman Empire around the same period.\n\nand one clearly intended to be a historical record this major omission is surprising as well as disappointing. It is to be hoped that the other books in the series are more useful in this regard.\n\n―\n\nChina, A Photohistory 1937-1987 Introduction by Jonathan D. Spence, Edited with Commentaries by W.J.F. Jenner (London, Thames and Hudson, 1988).\n\nIt is a relief to turn to this very elegant and thoroughly scholarly book so carefully compiled and edited by William Jenner and so compassionately and accurately introduced by Jonathan Spence. No need to worry about sources, or to find fault with the introduction, summaries and captions to the photographs. It is altogether a more thoughtful production which makes one realize what a great opportunity was missed with the other, whose images are equally striking and evocative but are not properly supported by the accompanying text.\n\nThe 153 photographs reproduced here are by persons from or connected with the well-known Magnum international photographers' cooperative. Jonathan Spence's fine Introduction sets the scene for them and explains how \"surprisingly large portions of the Chinese story are still not available in any visual form' in the West, through not having been covered by Western photographers. For instance, little is available from 1949 to 1956, when from that year until mid 1958 Hiroshi Hamaya took pictures and Marc Riboud \"produced a stream of photographs during his travels in China at this time\".\n\nThere is not space to do justice to all the facets of this collection, nor to the quality of Spence's commentary. However, his comments on",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j",
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    {
        "id": 212754,
        "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": 63,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "48\n\nIn the end he must have been disappointed at his inability to make and keep a fortune and to have public recognition. He must have felt rejected by the world to which he would have liked to have belonged, an outcast having married a Chinese during an era when it was considered beneath one's dignity to do so, and then having to live with the 'stigma' for the rest of his life of having 'gone native'.\n\nAs with most westerners in China, ending up frustrated at being unable to bridge the gap between themselves and the Chinese, Mesny appears to have resigned himself in his later years to being a westerner who, though still claiming to understand and being able to communicate with them, was one of 'us' and not of 'them', despite the opinion of other Shanghai westerners to the contrary.\n\nLet it not be forgotten that he had fought his way up from poverty and a lack of education to being the writer, editor, and publisher of a magazine which appears to have held its own for several years in a community which would have been comparatively discriminating. Despite being self-educated, he appears to have entertained high hopes of achieving popular esteem through his 'academic' and other achievements. He attempted to write for the edification of others and produced his Miscellany which, though only marginally out of the ordinary, does have some value for its detail of the late Taiping era; the organisation of the Chinese Imperial Army of the day, in particular the provincial forces under Chinese rather than Manchu generals; his contacts with Chinese officialdom and his knowledge of obscure facts about China. Many of the latter, however, were culled from other western sources, and he appears not to have translated much, if anything, from Chinese material.\n\nMesny must have been a difficult man to live with. He was self-made, with a great pride in his achievements offset by his egotism, self-absorption, and his apparent need to denigrate others. He was dependent on his wits, and perhaps his charm, to improvise an alternative existence.\n\nHis obituary appeared in two separate Shanghai English language papers some ten days after his death. Both cover three columns, most of which are taken up with an autobiographical account of his life written shortly before his death. They provide additional biographical detail but fail to answer the many questions which naturally spring to mind.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
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    {
        "id": 212756,
        "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": 65,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "50\n\nHis experience when assaulted by Chinese soldiers in Wu-chang during his holiday outing.\n\n10 Mesny's Chinese Miscellany: Volume 2: 10 September 1896: page 449\n\nIn 1992 Miss Lucie Mesny in Jersey explained that as a child she had never encountered any elderly lady, a member of family, called Lydia, who had been only two years younger than William Mesny and therefore would have been only in her mid-sixties when Miss Lucie was a child, if of course Lydia had still been alive\n\n12 Mesny was referring to what had been a very recent incident when the Germans had sent a few hundred soldiers to I-chou in Shantung province 'to bring the local populace to their senses.'\n\n13\n\nPresumably the good Doctor Dudgeon was John Dudgeon, who lived in Tientsin towards the end of the nineteenth century, the author of Chinese Arts of Healing, a series in the Chinese Recorder in 1869/70; The Great Medical College at Peking (in the Chinese Recorder February 1870); The Disgusting Nature of Chinese Medicines (also in the Chinese Recorder in March 1870); The Worship of the Moon (Chinese Recorder in Mar/Apr 1882), \"The Beverages of the Chinese: and finally Kung-fu or Taoist Medical Gymnastics (Tientsin: 1895).\n\n14\n\nIt is strange that Mesny should have been unaware of the legend of the powerful and ubiquitous Northern Emperor, 玄天上帝 a deity whose aides are a turtle and snake, frequently portrayed wrapped around each other at the feet of the image of the deity in Taoist and folk religion temples, and referred to as Generals.\n\n15 Yun-yü, the Clouds and Rain, is a common euphemism for sexual intercourse\n\n16\n\nThis was recorded in his Miscellanies in 1896 as Tsung-ping: translated as 'Regional Commander', rank 2a in the Chinese military forces of the Green Standards [lu-ying], subordinate to the Provincial Military Commander and Province Governors. [Hucker C.O., A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China: Stanford University Press: 1985]\n\n11 Colquhoun A R: China in Transformation: Harper and Bros: New York and London. 1898 (and other books)\n\nScidmore E R. China - The Long-lived Empire: MacMillan & Co. London: 1900\n\nAppendix A\n\nMesny's Chinese Miscellany\n\nEach weekly issue of the Miscellany, edited and printed in Shanghai during 1896, 1899 and 1905, with a run of one thousand copies, began with Notes on China and Chinese Subjects later renamed Anglo-Chinese Notes, an arbitrary, catholic and unstructured collection of items ranging from natural subjects such as the names in English and Chinese of trees, plants etc with a short description presumably culled from a major tome on the subject, to historical and mythological items, geographical descriptions mostly in western China, and a long section",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
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        "id": 212757,
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        "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": 66,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "51\n\non the Chinese military, its organisation, terminology and weapons almost certainly from his own experience. The second section is a two-page on-going essay on the need for China to modernise, for the construction of railways, the establishment of a foreign-style economy, etc. and finally, an on-going school boyish adventure describing his life on the Yangtze, commanding Chinese troops or as a prisoner of the Taipings. The whole was sub-titled A Text Book of Notes on China and the Chinese.\n\nMesny appears to have written and published this weekly magazine single-handed both from his memory, and notes written years beforehand stored against the day, together with material culled from other people's works. It ran for twenty-six weekly issues at a time, which were later bound into a total of four volumes. The individual issues were sold by subscription.\n\nVolume I: This ran from 26 September 1895 to 19 March 1896. His address, at this stage, was given as Club Chambers, 2 The Bund, Shanghai, with the printing of his Miscellanies at the China Gazette with offices at the same address.\n\nVolume II continued on from 26 March 1896 and ceased on 17 September 1896 when financial problems brought publication to an end.\n\nAfter a gap of some two and a half years Issue I of Volume III was published on Saturday 25 March 1899 with a firm promise of one year of publication. It ended, however, on Saturday 7 October of the same year with issue 26, and a regret that the Editor cannot commence Volume IV yet. The quality of the paper of Volume III was very poor indeed and has faded to a dull brown. The office had moved to Szechuan Road in Shanghai. Volume III was more literate than the previous two, suggesting perhaps that Mesny had employed a sub-editor. The format too had changed with Volume III. It was more professional and included some Peking court news, two pages of Commercial Notes and extracts from Reuter's telegrams. In a notice in issue 3 of Volume III Mesny explains that the Miscellany is 'a novel journalistic enterprise... which fills a gap. Its peculiar and unique features appeal to the intelligence of all discerning foreign residents in China as well as the intelligent readers of all nationalities in all parts of the World.' In August of 1899, some eight weeks before apologising to subscribers that he could not commence Volume IV yet, he doubled his subscription price. He was",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212761,
        "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": 70,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "55\n\non him. Mesny had taken every opportunity to praise Tso and, in good Chinese fashion, looked upon him as his 'protector' or 'patron'.\n\nIn a comparatively brief single-page highlights-only curriculum vitae printed in the Miscellany in 1905, Mesny would appear to have been careful in his choice of words. He used the phrase 'Volunteered for service' not only when he went to Kueichou in 1868, about which he later wrote at length, but also in connexion with 'Manchuria' and 'Peking', the former during the Sino-Japanese War and the latter at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, neither of which has been mentioned elsewhere in the Miscellany. This suggests that he was not taken up on his offers of service, especially as his name does not appear in any of the standard writings on the Boxer era in north China and he does not describe or offer any anecdotes on the subject in his Miscellany.\n\nHis Miscellanies contain a large number of items culled from other works such as Mayer's Chinese Reader's Manual written in Peking in 1874 where Mayers was a Chinese Secretary to HM Legation, and published in Shanghai the same year by the American Presbyterian Mission Press. At one point Mesny claimed that W F Mayers was a friend of his; but reading between the lines one is tempted to see Mesny meeting Mayers over dinner at the Legation in Peking where polite conversation would lead to a discussion on the failure of the Chinese to help build a railway, with Mesny offering advice and suggestions and Mayers, again politely, concurring. This would appear to have been seen by Mesny as Mayers accepting Mesny's ideas and entrusting him with various tasks. Mayers in all probability forgot all about the conversation, but not so Mesny who repeated himself several times in his Miscellanies, explaining how he had offered advice and had been waiting for a follow up from Mayers which never arrived. It is a matter for speculation how often this type of conversation took place, with other parties forgetting, either with or without intent, their talks with Mesny.\n\nMesny periodically advanced oracular statements which in later years would be referred to as 'China-watching'. In 1899 he made several predictions about the 'inadequacies' of the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty and forecast that the end was 'very' nigh with a new reformed China ahead. He also predicted that the Russians for all their implied power would be unable to retain Manchuria against the Japanese who also, Mesny thought, might join up with China making a powerful empire under the Mikado as ruler of the Greater China and Japan. These predictions",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212764,
        "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": 73,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "58\n\n[8] Notes on Official Rank and Degrees [in China]\n\n[9] Notes on Ranks and Duties of Customs Officials [A subject on which Mesny would be an authority in his own right]\n\n[10] Notes on Manners and Customs of the Chinese\n\n[11] Notes on the Cycles of Cathay for nearly 5,000 years\n\n[12] Notes on the Chinese Army and Navy\n\n[13] Law of the Ch'ing dynasty\n\nMany of the items on Chinese lore printed in 1905 were individually dated 1895 and had obviously been prepared at the time Mesny was producing Volumes 1 and 2.\n\nDuring the publication of the four volumes he described a large number of items such as the towns and cities of various provinces, one by one, with their longitude and latitude, ancient name, distance from Peking in 'li', their allotment of literary and military undergraduates every three years, and their produce. These must have been culled from a Chinese official source either direct or, perhaps, second hand, just as he must have culled a fair number of small items from other publications. He explains that he kept notes during his travels against the day when he would write it all up but regrettably he lost a number of his notes first in Tai-yuan in 1881 and again in Chungking in 1885. There is always the question of how reliable his memories of 30 - 40 years earlier were, and how much they were coloured by later events and changes in his own thinking.\n\nHe wrote several book crits under Editorial Notes in the final volume, books which obviously had attracted him personally such as the one in February 1905 on the book Les Chinois, Peints par Eux-memes by the Chinese General, Tcheng Ki-tong.' He explains that Tcheng was the Attache of the Chinese Legation in Paris and a first rate French scholar. However, Mesny doubted whether the General had the ability to write such a book unassisted by a Frenchman of considerable literary attainments. The book was in its tenth edition; it was,' wrote Mesny, 'well written, and gave a very good account of China or the Chinese as they were in Fukien, although many of the manners and customs",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212799,
        "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": 108,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "93\n\nthe first anti-foot binding societies in China.\n\nLovatt, W N\n\nEx-Royal Artillery serving in Honan Road in Shanghai. He, with Massagorra, taught Mesny the skills of guns and gunnery in 1864. He later became a Commissioner of Customs in Korea.\n\nMason, Charles H. A. W.\n\nA young Imperial Customs Assistant who was the main figure in the 'Mason case'. He joined the Customs in 1887 and after an involved plot was arrested for smuggling arms into China with the intention of providing foreign weapons for the Ko-lao Hui, a secret society whose aim was to overthrow the Imperial government.\n\nMassagorra, W\n\nFormerly Royal Navy and subsequently mate on one of the large lorchas plying the Yangtze: he, with Lovatt, taught Mesny gunnery.\n\nMayers, W F\n\nChinese Secretary at the British Legation in Peking in the mid-1870s. His best known work was the Chinese Reader's Manual. [Mesny culled a large number of items from Mayer's Manual and included them in his Miscellanies]\n\nRichard, Timothy\n\nBaptist missionary in Shantung and Shansi provinces. He met Mesny in Taiyuan Fu where Richard was superintending a branch of the English Baptist Mission. Richard was renowned for his humanitarian work during the great famine in Shansi in 1877-1878.\n\nSu Chin-wang\n\n[Shan-ch'i ## or Shan Ai-t’ang #E#: born ca 1865]\n\nThe Manchu Prince with whom Mesny had breakfast in Peking in 1892 when Su had not yet inherited his title and was then simply the captain of the Emperor's Bodyguard. A black and white photograph",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 213173,
        "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-1993",
        "page_number": 241,
        "title": "RAS-1993",
        "content_text": "223\n\nthe suburbs, blending, to be sure, with the rambunctious commoners' culture, but far more subdued. Not what Seidensticker loved about old Tokyo, but fascinating none the less. The changes are particularly sharp after the war, after the second destruction in this century of the inner low city in the bombings of March 1945, and the Allied Occupation.\n\nThe books, however, do not pretend to be political histories, although they give mention to politics when they touch on the fabric of the city. Instead they record the changes in the lives of the people. The department store girls, for example, who were encouraged by management to wear Western-style under-garments after eight of them fell from high ropes during their escape from a fire in one store, clad in kimono, they tried to protect their modesty and unclothed nether regions with one hand, but the other hand was not strong enough to bear the burden. This incident, while hardly a formative one in the city, is one of many incidents which Seidensticker has culled from a myriad of sources to portray the rapid changes which typify Tokyo. He gently blends the sum of them into a textured picture, one which will provide readers with a feeling for the city even if they have never seen it. If readers have seen it (and many readers of this publication will have), the picture will make greater sense of a city that can seem to be a confusing mélange of exits from subway stations. And if some readers have been fortunate enough to have lived there, the book will provide a depth of meaning to corners of their former home that are familiar, yet unknown.\n\nThese books are a joy and a boon. Already ten years old (the first volume; the second appeared just five years ago), they will stand the test of time and are a welcome addition to the library of anyone seeking to keep informed about East Asia, its cities, and its culture.\n\nTHOMAS STANLEY",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215988,
        "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": 287,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "221\n\nresearch and cross-cultural studies on an international scale. There is much of lasting value which has been gained here. For the light of this story is full of mottled shades, helping to expose the cultural complexities of the second generation of missionaries and indigenous Christians among Protestants in China as well as highlighting the work of one of their most creative and unexpected indigenous missionaries. Furthermore, it reveals a purposefully hidden event in the very early era of the post-Opium War treaty situation which has been all but forgotten. Now there is even more evidence to consider, far more than has previously been available, to indicate how and why the interacting forces of foreign military, local mandarin, Hong Kong missionary and Chinese local populations struggled through this very murky period in modern Chinese history.\n\nNOTES\n\n1. Further details about Legge's missionary-scholar career can be culled from my two-volume work entitled Striving for \"The Whole Duty of Man”: James Legge and the Scottish Protestant Encounter with China (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang), forthcoming in May or June 2003. Images of some of the other deaths surrounding Legge's later life while a professor in Chinese language and literature at Oxford can be culled from Norman J. Girardot's The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). An earlier version of this paper was read at the International Conference on James Legge held in the University of Aberdeen in April 1997.\n\n2. See George Legge, Lectures on Theology, Science, and Revelation, eds. James Legge and John Legge, with introduction by James Legge (London: 1863).\n\n3. In the five-volume set of William Canton's A History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: John Murray, 1904-1910), only two pages are devoted to recounting the basic elements of Ch'ea's Christian life and martyrdom, all being completely dependent on previous published sources in English. While a full chapter is devoted to Ch'ea in Helen Edith Legge's James Legge: Missionary and Scholar (London: Religious Tract Society, 1905), her account suffers from a lack of chronological consistency, some misrepresentation of facts, and a lack of understanding of the broader circumstances influencing the events leading to his murder.\n\n4. An immense amount of literature in the general area of Protestant missionary studies, for example, and two monumental works on Legge's two distinct careers as a missionary for the London Missionary Society in Hong Kong and as the first professor of Chinese language and literature at Corpus Christi College in Oxford (by Pfister and Girardot respectively), have highlighted these matters. For those interested in the more general trends of missionary studies",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]