[ { "id": 204711, "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-1964", "page_number": 14, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "provide that persons who have rendered distinguished service towards the attainment of the objects of the Society may be admitted by the Council to be Honorary members. In recognition of the great and distinguished service to the Society of Sir Robert Black and of Mr. Cranmer-Byng, the Council resolved with unanimous acclamation to admit both of them as Honorary Members of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and I am sure that you will endorse the Council's action and join in expressing our gratitude to both these distinguished members and in wishing them health, happiness and prosperity. In conclusion I wish to record Sir Robert Black's letter of February 28th in reply to a letter which I sent to him on behalf of the Council and Society,\n\nI am most appreciative of the Resolution of the Council of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society which you have reported to me in your letter dated the 26th. I feel very honoured to have been admitted to be the first Honorary Member of the Hong Kong Branch of the Society, and I should like to take this opportunity of expressing my appreciation for the courtesy of yourself and the members of the Council in so admitting me. I am very touched at the gesture and very happy at the prospect of a continuing association with a body which, under your personal guidance and stimulus, has been restored to life and is now established firmly as an important activity in the cultural life of the community in Hong Kong. In thanking you for the honour you have extended to my wife and myself, I should like at the same time to extend my best wishes to you, to the members of the Council and to all members of the Hong Kong Branch of the Society for continuing success and enhanced prestige in the future.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205638, "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": 180, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n175\n\nequally varied. Priests and missionaries; diplomats, consuls, officials and their wives; businessmen; journalists; soldiers and sailors among the foreigners; emperors, Ching officials and literati, Kuomintang and Communist leaders among the Chinese. Chairman Mao has his place (pp 306-308).\n\nIt is easy to choose items to illustrate the striking nature of much of the contents, and to dwell on how well they illuminate the scene. One might mention inter alia the Rev. Timothy Richard's account of a journey made during the dreadful Shansi famine of 1876 (pp 179-181) and of his encounter with a man in a Shantung village who persisted in repeating the official version that England was a revolted tributary (p 182); the description of the filth of Canton's canals and thoroughfares in 1910 (pp 233-234); a French resident of Peking's comments on the passage through his neighbourhood of a tatterdemalion body of troops from the warlord period (pp 286-287) and the striking eye-witness account of one of the outflanking hill marches of the Red Army against Japanese troops (pp 448-489). The cover given to the thirty year period 1917-49 between pp 261-504 half the volume is justified by the material available to the compiler. The chapter of extracts on Red China 1935-45 (pp 413-456), is particularly good. In the midst of such riches it is pointless to recite choice items from one's own reading that might have gone into the work; though no doubt, like this reviewer, readers will be able to suggest alternatives here and there, such is the tremendous outpouring of works on experiences in China up till 1949.\n\n—\n\nThis reviewer recommends the book to a wide range of readers, specialist and general alike; there is something for all in its 500 pages. Its main contribution is to expose the starkness of China's experience and convey some of the misery occasioned for the common people by both natural and man-made disasters over the period. Thereby the essential background to a better understanding of Mao's China and, indeed, of the desperate self-strengthening movement behind the Cultural Revolution is provided in its true perspective and deeper meaning.\n\nHong Kong, 1968.\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nPage 180\n\nPage 181", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205880, "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-1969", "page_number": 186, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "180\n\nTHE LIBRARY\n\nMost of the periodicals have been received in exchange for our own journal, and form a valuable portion of the collection, many of the titles not being easily accessible elsewhere in Hong Kong. Exchange agreements were made with the following three additional institutions: Monumenta Serica Institute, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and Instituto do Luis Camões, Macao.\n\nThe following is a list of titles added to the Library of the Hong Kong Branch since the publication of the previous list in volume VIII of the Journal. Items marked* are kept at the University Library, and the remainder at the British Council.\n\nALISJAHBANA, S. Takdir.\n\nA41\n\nIndonesia: social and cultural revolution. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford U. P., 1966.\n\nC517\n\nCH'EN, Yüan (†)\n\nWestern and central Asians in China under the Mongols; their transformation into Chinese (R$). Los Angeles, Monumenta Serica, 1966.\n\nCHINA. Laws, Statutes, etc.\n\nC531\n\nTa Tsing leu lee (#1); being the fundamental laws and a selection from the supplementary statutes of the penal code of China ... Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1966.\n\nCOLLIS, Maurice.\n\nC71\n\nWayfoong: the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. A study of East Asia's transformation, political, financial and economic, during the last hundred years. London, Faber, 1965.\n\nDOOLITTLE, Justus.\n\nD69\n\nSocial life of the Chinese; with some account of their religious, governmental, educational, and business customs and opinions with special but not exclusive reference to Fuhchau. Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1966.\n\nEITEL, Ernest J.\n\nE36e\n\nEurope in China: the history of Hongkong from the beginning to the year 1882. Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1968.\n\n*FERREIRA, José dos Santos.\n\nF38\n\nMacau să assi, Macau, Tipografia da Missao do Padroado, 1967.\n\nGILES, Herbert A.\n\nG47g\n\nGems of Chinese literature. 2d ed., rev. and greatly enl.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205925, "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": 5, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "CONTENTS\n\nEDITORIAL\n\nPRESIDENT'S REPORT FOR 1969\n\nHON. TREASURER'S REPORT FOR 1969\n\nTHE LIBRARY 1969-70\n\nARTICLES CONTRIBUTED :\n\n1 - More on the Yung-Lo Ta-Tien-L. CARRINGTON GOODRICH\n\n11 - Lord Elgin and the Taipings-STEPHEN UHALLEY, Jr.\n\n17 - Hong Kong Cadets, 1862-1941-H. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\n24 - Aspects of Hong Kong Marine Fauna-LAMARR B. TROTT\n\n36 - A Hong Kong Butterfly-COLONEL V. R. BURKHARDT\n\n57 - Chinatown in Hong Kong: The Beginnings of Taipingshan-DAFYDD EMRYS EVANS\n\n63 - Chinese Emigration and the Deck Passenger Trade-A. D. BLUE\n\n69 - Removing Some Barriers to Comprehension: A New Look at Cantonese Expletives-K. M. A. BARNETT\n\n79 - A British Maritime Chart of 1780 Showing Hong Kong—HENRY D. TALBOT\n\n94 - ARTICLE REPRINTED: Hong Kong before the British-S. F. BALFOUR\n\n128 - NOTES AND QUERIES: The J.O.P. Bland Papers-J. L. CRANMER-BYNG\n\n180 - Visit to Old Shau Kei Wan-24th May, 1969-JAMES HAYES\n\n183 - Hemp-JAMES HAYES\n\n188 - Coach Tour of Eastern Hong Kong Island—18th October, 1969-JAMES HAYES\n\n190 - The San On Map of Mgr. Volontieri―JAMES HAYES\n\n193 - A Casualty of the Cultural Revolution-JAMES HAYES\n\n196 - Pile Houses at Tai O, Lantau Island, Hong Kong-10th January, 1937-W. SCHOFIELD\n\n201 - BOOK REVIEWS\n\n216 - LIST OF MEMBERS", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206123, "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": 203, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "196\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nBut in a local and a directly utilitarian point of view, the author is encouraged to believe that his work should not be placed as a candle under a bushel. This wealthy and most important Colony stands in the midst of the Sun-on District, and it seems to betoken a feeling in rear of the age, that the topography of the immediate neighbourhood should be a matter of perfect indifference. To the naturalist, the traveller, the sportsman, and the Missionary, the information should be acceptable, to say nothing of its political value. Besides, for police purposes in dealing with the all prevailing evil of piracy, when the subtlety of the Mandarin is considered, the author cannot doubt the value of his work to the British authorities.\n\nHe therefore calls attention to his Map, and solicits the favor of subscriptions to enable him to publish it.\n\nREVD. S. VOLONTIERI, Mission, Apost.\n\nHongkong, 10 May, 1866.\n\nA CASUALTY OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION\n\nBefore the New Territories were leased to Britain in 1898 the villagers on the British side of what became the new border area at the market village of Sha Tau Kok were accustomed to worship in the Man Mo temple (X) there. After 1898 this temple was located on the Chinese side of the Border, but this apparently made little difference to the religious practice of local people thereafter, even after the Communist take-over in 1949.\n\nOne of the images in the temple was that of Tin Hau (A), the Queen of Heaven who is a popular goddess among boat people and villagers near the seashore in the Hong Kong area. The people of three Hakka villages on the British side of Sha Tau Kok, namely Tan Shui Hang, Tong To and Sha Tsui which in 1961 had a total population of around 1,000 persons, were particularly accustomed to visiting the Man Mo temple to worship Tin Hau. When the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution developed in China in 1966 Red Guards singled out temples for particular attention, and it seems that iconoclastic activities also", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206204, "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-1971", "page_number": 21, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "15\n\nDRAGE, C.\n\nTaikoo London, Constable, 1970.\n\nEGERTON, H. E.\n\nSir Stamford Raffles. London, Unwin, 1900.\n\nFITZGERALD, C. P.\n\nA concise history of East Asia, London, Heinemann, 1966.\n\nHEMMINGSEN, A. M., and GUILDAL, J. A.\n\nObservations on birds in northeastern China, especially the migration at Pei-tai-ho Beach. Hong Kong, Vetch & Lee, 1969.\n\nLAING, E. J.\n\nChinese paintings in Chinese publications, 1956-1968: annotated bibliography and an index to the paintings. Ann Arbor, 1969 (Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, no. 6)\n\nLAL, K.\n\nMiracle of Konark, New York, Castle Books, 1968.\n\nLAU, S. M. Joseph\n\nTs'au Yüan. Hong Kong University Press, 1970.\n\nLI, Chi, and JOHNSON, D.\n\nTwo studies in Chinese literature. Ann Arbor, 1968. (Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, no. 3)\n\nMURPHEY, R.\n\nThe treaty ports and China's modernization: what went wrong? Ann Arbor, 1970. (Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, no. 7)\n\nOKSENBERG, M., and others.\n\nThe cultural revolution, 1967, in review. Ann Arbor, 1968. (Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, no. 2)\n\nRUTT, R.\n\nKorean works and days: notes from the diary of a country priest. Seoul, R. A. S., Korea Branch, 1964.\n\nSPEISER, W.\n\nChina: spirit and society. London, Methuen, 1960. (Art of the world, 4)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206469, "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": 17, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "Gifts from the University of Hong Kong Centre of Asian Studies:\n\nTOPLEY, M.\n\nA conference on religion and ritual in Chinese society. 1971. TOPLEY, M.\n\nTowards the comparative study of Asian medical systems: Burg Wartenstein symposium no. 53. 1971.\n\nWONG, Shiu-hon.\n\n粵劇關漢卿硏究 (A study of the Cantonese opera Kuan Han-ching), 1970.\n\nGifts from the University of Hong Kong Library:\n\nCHEN, Cheng.\n\nLand reform in Taiwan. 1961.\n\nLETHBRIDGE, H. J.\n\nChina's urban communes. 1961.\n\nUNION RESEARCH INSTITUTE.\n\nCommunist China, 1960. 1962. 2 vols.\n\nExchanges from the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies:\n\nCHENG, C. Y.\n\nThe economy of communist China, 1949-1969. 1971. MAEDA, R. J.\n\nTwo twelfth century texts on Chinese painting. 1970.\n\nSINGER, M.\n\nEducated youth and the cultural revolution in China. 1971.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206874, "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-1973", "page_number": 151, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n145\n\nning among other matters the subjugation of the non-Chinese tribes of the interior.*\n\nAt the age of 71 he was appointed Vice-President of the Board of Civil Affairs in Nanking and later Vice-President of the Censorate. He died in great poverty in 1587 aged 74, his friends defraying the cost of his burial.\n\nIn November 1965 the editor of the Shanghai Wen Wei Pao, Yao Wen-yuan, who was also a left-inclined literary and theatre critic, published an article in which he criticised an historical drama \"The dismissal of Hai Jui\" written by the then Deputy Mayor of Peking, Wu Han. Yao's article was the opening volley in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which created such turmoil in China and purged so many of the senior communist cadres including Wu Han himself. Yao rose quickly and by 1969 was sixth in the leadership of the Chinese People's Republic only to slip to a lower position at the 10th Party Congress in August 1973. Yao, still a member of the Politbureau, is reported to be the son-in-law of Chairman Mao and a close associate of the radical Madame Mao.\n\nWu Han's historical play which cost him so dearly was criticised by Yao as an analogy of Mao's treatment of his \"loyal minister” Peng Te-huai, the Minister of National Defence purged by Mao in 1959. P'eng had been very outspoken in his opposition to two of the things closest to Mao's heart, the Great Leap Forward and the establishment of the People's Communes.\n\nHai Jui is well known to many Chinese as the minister who steadfastly opposed corruption. A legend told to me in Singapore by an elderly Buddhist nun recounted how Hai Jui as a very young junior official had been posted to the Swatow region (Ch'aochow) where a group of tyrannical landowners together with the local magistrate's police runners were terrorizing the people. The legend then told of Hai Jui's fight, first against his local superiors in support of the poor, later against the Prime Minister and finally against the Emperor himself. Hai Jui was forced to commit suicide, she said, to compel the Emperor to take notice of the problems of the masses and for this he was deified by the subsequent Emperor and is now one of the patrons of the Ch'aochow people.\n\nSee, in part, Herbert A. Giles, A Chinese Biographical Dictionary (London and Shanghai, Bernard Quaritch and Kelly and Walsh, 1898) pp. 242-243. Also W. F. Mayers, The Chinese Reader's Manual (Shanghai, American Presbyterian Mission Press, and London, Trübner and Co., 1874) pp. 45-46. Ed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208093, "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-1977", "page_number": 132, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "116\n\nGREGORY E. GULDIN\n\nisolation of China. In the immediate post-1949 years little contact (aside from intermittent remittances channeled through Hong Kong) between Southern Fujianese and their mostly male kinsmen in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia was possible, causing great human and economic hardship. When China relaxed her emigration policy following the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, however, thousands upon thousands of Fujianese women and children began arriving (illegally) in Hong Kong with the intent not of going to the Philippines or elsewhere to join their overseas husbands and fathers but merely to rendezvous with them in Hong Kong. Weeks and months, if not a year or two, though were often necessary to make the arrangements to bypass or overcome Filipino travel restrictions. For many Fujianese their \"temporary\" stay in Hong Kong turned first indefinite and then permanent as they both adjusted to Hong Kong life and sought ethnic comfort in the Fujianese community.\n\nSai Ying Poon, the early destination of nearly all these Fujianese, could not accommodate all these newcomers into its crumbling and dilapidated housing. As the immigrative stream swelled in the early 1960s, Sai Ying Poon rents soared and more and more Fujianese began to settle directly in North Point which, we may recall, was at that time experiencing a housing boom and a drop in rents. North Point's attractions to these Fujianese also included a population who could speak Mandarin, the Chinese lingua franca, as well as a middle-class ambience which accorded well with the orientations of many of the more bourgeois, wealthier and overseas-related Fujianese.\n\nAlthough Fujianese emigration to Hong Kong slowed to a trickle during the Cultural Revolution in China (1965-1969), North Point continued to attract residents from Sai Ying Poon and by the end of the decade had far surpassed it as the center of Southern Fujianese life in Hong Kong. The resumption of legal emigration from Fujian in 1972 has helped spur the growth of satellite Fujianese communities in nearby Quarry Bay and across the harbor in Hung Hom, To Kwa Wan and Kwun Tong but the hub of the Fujianese settlement in Hong Kong has remained in North Point.\n\nLittle Fujian as Sub-Neighborhood\n\nThe postwar expansion of North Point has thus been quite swift, with the peak population increase corresponding roughly to the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208099, "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-1977", "page_number": 138, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "122\n\nGREGORY E. GULDIN\n\nof Fujianese attending the Yueh Fei temple gradually rose until today perhaps 70-80% of the worshippers there are Fujianese. Even so, the temple is not a Fujianese temple; both the people who run the temple and the deity itself are Guangdongese.\n\nThis arrangement was less than satisfactory to the Fujianese. Since Fujianese and Guangdongese ritual practices and religious concepts are not always isomorphic, arguments over what food was properly offered to Guan Yin (Kuan Yin) or what was expected of a medium, etc., frequently erupted. Such disputes, complicated by the language barrier, made many Fujianese feel uncomfortable about worshipping in a \"barbarian\"-run temple.\n\nTen years ago this situation began to change as the Cultural Revolution in China increased attacks on the old religious organizations back in Fujian. Temple personnel such as Buddhist monks and nuns began to arrive legally and illegally in Hong Kong and served to staff a new type of temple, a form particularly suited to Hong Kong's crowded situation. Apartments were rented to serve as temples in many of the apartment buildings which contained a heavy Fujianese population. North Point branches of Sai Ying Poon temples were likewise also begun in this manner.\n\nEach apartment-temple is dedicated to a particular god; sometimes it is a pan-Chinese spirit such as Guan Yin but it can also be a specifically local one such as Sheng Gung of Fujian Province's Nan An county. Sheng Gung's original temple is now in disrepair back in Nan An but the god's statue and objects were brought to Hong Kong a few years back. Hong Kong may thus have the only Sheng Gung temple left functioning in the world.\n\n\"I have visited this little Temple, or joss-house, and have discussed its history with one of the local Kaifong, Mr. Lo Ho Ching, of 129 Electric Road, Ground Floor.\n\n\"The little Temple is dedicated to the God of Warriors, Ngok Fei, and has been in existence about 40 years. According to Mr. Lo it was built by the late Kwok Shut Ting, Compradore of the Asiatic Petroleum Company (A.P.C.), at the time when the A.P.C.'s installation at North Point was built. At present the little Temple is looked after by an old woman appointed by the Kaifong.\n\n\"The little Temple is a picturesque little structure, half embedded in a large boulder and covered by a tree. The Kaifong and I too would be reluctant to see it removed, but if it has to be removed I do not think the Kaifong will object provided that an alternative site for it can be found in the vicinity and if it is re-erected by Government at the time when the new Police Station at Bay View is built.\"\n\nThis information was provided by the Hon. Editor of this Journal.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208380, "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-1978", "page_number": 104, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "88\n\nEUGENE COOPER\n\nit were triggered initially by a lockout at a plastic flowers factory in Kowloon and fanned by some arbitrary police action taken against demonstrating workers and students. Anti-colonial demonstrations occurred and anti-British sentiment ran high, fueled by stepped up anti-imperialist propaganda radiating from the mainland then in the midst of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. While most carved wood furniture factory and shop proprietors were unlikely targets for anti-imperialist attack, the Woodwork Carvers' Union seems to have taken advantage of the widespread unrest to extract a wage increase from the Merchants' Association at the time.\n\nOne school of thought (with its locus in the Far Eastern Economic Review) maintains that the Peking government was dissatisfied with its compatriots' handling of the 1967 disturbances and called a halt thereafter to revolutionary activity in the Crown Colony. While these claims are difficult to substantiate with any certainty, it is widely admitted in the Hong Kong pro-communist community that Peking was desirous of a stable situation in post-1967 Hong Kong so that it could actively pursue, from its viewpoint, more pressing diplomatic questions like its entry into the United Nations and the liberation of Taiwan.\n\n\"Hong Kong is a historical problem that will be solved at the appropriate time\" goes the refrain. The Hong Kong \"problem\" does not have the status of a \"principle contradiction\" for the People's Republic. Hong Kong continues to remain valuable to the Communist government in terms of the significant amounts of foreign exchange which China earns by marketing its products in and through the port, and also as a place in which trade and diplomatic contacts are still pursued. While such functions may decline as China continues to open up diplomatically and economically, they are still a factor in Hong Kong's historical viability as a colony.\n\nIn any event, in the post-1967 period, industrial peace in Hong Kong was the common desire of the British colonial government and the communist government in Peking. This led to the assumption on the part of the communist Federation of Trade Unions of some rather odd poses in the local adaptation of Mao Tse-tung thought to the Hong Kong scene.\n\nThis was particularly so in so far as the implementation of Mao's thought has entailed a disciplined adherence to a policy of delayed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209154, "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": 57, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "RELIGIOUS RESPONSE TO MODERNIZATION IN TAIWAN: THE CASE OF I-KUAN TAO†\n\nHUBERT SEIWERT*\n\nIntroduction: Modernization and religious change in Taiwan\n\nSince the middle of the last century China has been a theatre of far-reaching political, economic, social and cultural changes. The most obvious manifestation of these changes has been the revolution of 1911, sealing the end of a monarchy which had endured for more than two thousand years. But the defeat of the Manchu dynasty marked the closing of an epoch not only politically: the revolution of 1911 was also a decisive turning point in the cultural development of China. The traditional culture which so long was the pride of every Chinese scholar underwent an almost complete reevaluation. To the revolutionary intellectuals of the first decades of the twentieth century this traditional culture was the ideological expression of the overthrown feudal system. The construction of a new society should, therefore, not be a mere change of political institutions but had to comprise the formation of a new intellectual culture as well.\n\nThe central target of this cultural-revolutionary movement was Confucianism, which was regarded as the ideological foundation of the old social system. At the same time this movement also had distinct anti-religious tendencies aimed not only at the religious components of Confucianism but at all kinds of religion, traditional Chinese as well as foreign. Religion and superstition were inconsistent with the scientific worldview which had been imported to China from Europe and America.\n\nThe critical attitude of the Chinese intellectuals towards religion was certainly one of the factors which contributed to the decline of traditional Chinese religion in the twentieth century. But there were other reasons, too. On the popular level, the arguments of the intellectuals were probably of no great significance for the religious behaviour of the common people. More important were the changes\n\n*Universität Hannover\n\n† Parts of this article were read at the XIVth Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions, August 1980 at Winnipeg, Manitoba.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209472, "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-1982", "page_number": 129, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "return to what might be called the amateur ideal. One was supposed to be both \"red\" and \"expert,” but the emphasis was on being \"red.\" Local Party secretaries were given extensive powers to intervene in almost every phase of production and administration, not to mention the judicial process. The extent of this intervention tended to vary in degree of intensity during the following years, and for a while before the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution a certain degree of professionalism returned to the managerial and scientific research fields, but not to the law.\n\nPerhaps the most significant aspect of the Anti-Rightist Movement was not so much the immediate suffering of many intellectuals and the suppression of professionalism in various fields but was rather the greatly increased emphasis on class struggle. Class struggle is an essential ingredient of Marxism, and Mao's first important work as a Marxist was an analysis of the various classes in Chinese society. It was this analysis that brought him to an understanding of the Chinese peasant's potential for revolution. During the early years of the People's Republic the major class enemies were landlords and bureaucratic capitalists who were a relatively small and fairly well-defined group. After the Anti-Rightist Movement the major class enemy became the so-called bourgeois rightists, a label which could be applied to anyone, but which was in fact especially applied to intellectuals suspected of disagreeing with the current policies of the Party leadership. The expanded use of this label paved the way for the bloody violence and repression of the Cultural Revolution. Bourgeois rightists were no longer considered to be merely backward elements in the society but were vilified as counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people, a sub-human category, beyond redemption, which deserved to be destroyed in any way possible and without mercy. The humanistic idealism which had been such a part of the revolution in its earlier stages, and indeed, led many people at first to support the Cultural Revolution itself, gave way to fanaticism and factional violence.\n\nDuring the Cultural Revolution the police, procuratorate, and courts became early centres of attack by Mao's Red Guards. Although the police and courts continued to function in most places throughout the Cultural Revolution, their top personnel", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209473, "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-1982", "page_number": 130, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "108\n\nW. ALLYN RICKETT\n\nwere usually removed and their activities closely controlled by whatever leftist faction happened to be in control at the moment. At this time, the procuratorate was eliminated, as had been the Ministry of Justice in 1959. One of the most important developments during this period was the expansion in the cities of so-called non-criminal sanctions, generally ranging from warnings to three years reform through labour, imposed by local mediation or residents' committees in conjunction with the local police station. The mediation of neighbourhood disputes and the handling of petty local crime and anti-social behaviour by properly supervised local institutions has been, in principle, one of the more constructive developments in China since the Revolution. However, during the Cultural Revolution a vast expansion of informal and arbitrary punishment, including beatings and long-term imprisonment or deportation to the countryside, was instituted by Red Guard and other leftist groups operating in such places as schools, factories, government organizations. These leftist groups merely charged their victims with being \"rightists\" and then proceeded to take any suppressive action that seemed desirable to them.\n\nViolence and factionalism reached such proportions that in September 1967 the Army was ordered to restore order, but major outbreaks continued to occur throughout 1968 and into 1969. In April 1969 the Ninth Party Congress was held, this marking the official end of the Cultural Revolution, and though some semblance of stability began to emerge thereafter, tension throughout the society continued, especially as many purged Party officials were returned to office and the split between Mao and Lin Biao intensified. During the early 1970s, the Party machinery was restored and under the leadership of Zhou En-lai the country seemed to be entering a new period of stability. However, even after the death of Lin Biao, the leadership remained divided, with the Cultural Revolution forces now being represented by what was later to be called the Gang of Four. It was not until January 1975 that the NPC met to pass a new Constitution designed to formalize the changes in China's political and social life over the past twenty years. According to the new Constitution, the People's Republic was no longer a \"people's democratic state,\" but a \"socialist state of the dictatorship of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209474, "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-1982", "page_number": 131, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "109\n\nproletariat,\" under the leadership of the CCP. It confirmed many of the changes which had taken place in China's legal system since 1958, including the elimination of the procuratorate and Ministry of Justice as well as such individual rights as that of the accused to a defense and an open trial.\n\nHowever, the 1975 Constitution was to have a short life. 1976 was one of the most traumatic years in modern Chinese history. Zhou Enlai died in January and an intense struggle erupted between his supporters and the Gang of Four. Mao himself died in September, in October the Gang of Four headed by Mao's wife Jiang Qing was arrested, and China entered a whole new era with the re-emergence and rise to power of Zhou's chosen successor, Deng Xiaoping, beginning in the summer of 1977.\n\nIn March 1978 a third Constitution was adopted which restored many of the provisions dealing with the legal system contained in the 1954 Constitution, including the Ministry of Justice, procuratorate, the use of people's assessors, and the right to defense and open trial. Article 47 also stipulates that “No citizen may be arrested except by decision of the people's courts or with the sanction of the people's procuratorate.\" Far more important than the Constitution itself were the various steps taken by the new leadership to rectify the excesses of the past, and a series of new laws designed to provide a stable base for a rational legal system.\n\nAccording to published reports, some 110,000 persons who had been detained as “rightists\" were released in June 1978, and by the end of June 1980 people's courts at various levels had reviewed over 1.13 million criminal convictions meted out during the Cultural Revolution and redressed over 251,000 of them.10 In early 1979, political and civil rights were restored to landlords and rich peasants and their descendants as long as they supported socialism. Also, in July 1979, the NPC adopted seven major laws including a Criminal Code, a Criminal Code of Procedure, an Organic Law of People's Courts, and an Organic Law of People's Procuratorates, which took effect in January 1980. By the end of 1980, there were over twenty law departments and institutes producing personnel to meet the needs of the new system. A system of people's lawyers was reinstituted in 1979 and legal", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209478, "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-1982", "page_number": 135, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "113\n\nof informal, so-called non-criminal sanctions which could be imposed by other bodies than the courts. In November 1979, the Standing Committee of the NPC adopted a resolution to revive the August 1957 \"Decision of the State Council of the PRC Relating to Problems of Rehabilitation Through Labour,\" which permitted administrative agencies to confine a wide range of offenders including vagrants, hooligans, persons committing minor crimes, and counter-revolutionaries and antisocial reactionaries who have committed minor offenses to forced labour without trial for a period of up to four years.14 To administer this programme Rehabilitation Through Labour Committees have been established at the local level consisting now of representatives from local bureaus of public security, labour, and civil affairs.15 The reason for reviving this Decision was ostensibly to provide local people with a weapon to combat the rapid increase in crime (largely involving young people) which occurred after the Cultural Revolution, but numerous reports indicate that the programme is also being used to suppress 1) dissidents without their being able to claim any of the rights prescribed for an accused in the Criminal Code of Procedure and 2) young people who are unwilling to accept the mores and life style of the older generation.16\n\nThere are also frequent newspaper reports which indicate that cadres are continuing to behave in the old pattern irrespective of what the law may say, detaining people illegally, setting up clandestine tribunals, arbitrarily interrogating people and even tying them up and marching them around to be struggled against, extorting confessions by torture, illegally searching people's homes and humiliating them. Lawyers, in spite of their status as state workers, are frequently treated as traitors, no better than the offenders themselves, when they try to defend their clients. To what extent these practices prevail or go unpunished is difficult to tell, but police brutality and judicial arrogance do not die easily in any society, not to mention one which in the past has provided ideological justification for such behaviour.\n\nGiven the long history of China's disregard for civil rights and the persistence of Anti-rightist ideology as well as the practical problems involved in re-educating cadres and enforcing the\n\nPage 114\n\nPage 135\n\nPage 136", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209479, "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-1982", "page_number": 136, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "114\n\nW. ALLYN RICKETT\n\nnew laws, can it be said that that there is any more hope now than existed in 1956 that the paper guarantees of the new legal system will prevail? I think there is. This optimism rests primarily on some major changes taking place in the society and in the thinking of the top leadership in the Communist Party. Unlike the earlier reforms, which in respect of the 1954 Constitution were more formal than real and pushed primarily by a small group of profession-oriented intellectuals, the new reforms come from the top and are based on the disastrous experience of the Cultural Revolution. Most of China's present leadership personally suffered from the arbitrary abuse of power at that time and have come to realize the need for a stable legal system. Furthermore, post-Gang of Four China is no longer the China of the past. The prestige of the Party has diminished greatly, the general population is no longer as malleable as it was in the past, and, perhaps most important of all, the rapid modernization and internationalization of the economy require a stable legal system.\n\nIndicative of some of the change taking place in China is the new Constitution adopted on December 4, 1982. In the 1975 and 1978 Constitutions, the Party is clearly recognized as having a special position of power. The 1978 Constitution begins by stating:\n\nThe People's Republic of China is a socialist state of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. (Article 1)\n\nThe Communist Party of China is the core of leadership of the whole Chinese people. The working class exercises leadership over the state through its vanguard the Communist Party of China.\n\nThe guiding ideology of the People's Republic of China is Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. (Article 2)\n\nAlthough Article 3 goes on to say that all power belongs to the people and is to be exercised through the National People's Congress and local people's congresses, in point of fact the first two articles clearly give that power to the Communist Party and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209480, "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-1982", "page_number": 137, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "115\n\nin practice the Party becomes the state. Furthermore, Article 56 states: \"Citizens must support the leadership of the Communist Party of China.\n\nTherefore any criticism of the Party or its role in the society could easily be interpreted as counter-revolutionary whatever the rest of the Constitution or other laws might say.17\n\nThe new Constitution returns to the 1954 model in that, except for the Preamble, the Communist Party is not even mentioned by name, no longer is the PRC a \"socialist state of the dictatorship of the proletariat,\" but a \"socialist state of the people's democratic dictatorship.\" The significance of this statement is that it is at least a theoretical recognition of the rights of other classes besides the proletariat and thus a weakening of the dictatorial power of the Communist Party. Moreover, Article 5 explicitly states that all parties must abide by the Constitution and the law. Another change which may prove to be of some significance is the more moderate tone taken toward class struggle. According to the Preamble: \"The exploiting classes as such have been eliminated in our country. However, class struggle will continue to exist within certain limits for a long time to come. The Chinese people must fight against those forces and elements, both at home and abroad, that are hostile to China's socialist system and try to undermine it.\"18 According to Peng Zhen, who gave the major report on the draft of the new Constitution to the members of the NPC, this means that \"class struggle is no longer the principle contradiction in Chinese society. This basic characteristic requires a substantial change in the focus of work of the state and its guiding principles.”19 One can only hope this means that at least the repression of the Anti-Rightist movement and factional violence of the Cultural Revolution are things of the past.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Under the empire the concept of individual rights was non-existent. From 1908 to 1947, China had some 12 constitutions either proposed or adopted, and even though all but one contained some formal listing of the rights of citizens, in each case these rights were carefully restricted by lists of duties and obligations or by the statement that such rights were to be enjoyed only in accordance with law. See Meredith P. Gilpatrick, \"The Status of Law and Lawmaking Procedure under the Kuomintang, 1925-46,\" The Far Eastern Quarterly, X.1 (Nov. 1950), 50.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209684, "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-1982", "page_number": 341, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n319\n\ndespite provision of a conversion table printed in very small characters.\n\nDespite these shortcomings, however, this is a useful handbook which will be of value in its field.\n\nP. H. HASE\n\nA Cadre School Life: Six Chapters Yang Jiang, trans. G. Barmé Joint Publishing Co. Hong Kong 1982, 91 pp.\n\nMadam Yang Jiang's \"Six Chapters on a Cadre School Life\", a book well received and translated into English, French, Japanese and other languages, is an epitome of life in the 'May 7 cadre schools' that could be found all over the country during the Cultural Revolution. This book provides food for thought for those free from any bias or prejudice, who will surely be enlightened after reading it. Like Madam Yang, I was an ordinary \"fighter\" of one of these schools. That experience should have made a greater impact on me as I had spent more time in a cadre school than she did. But for lack of literary talent and eloquence, I cannot vividly record this noteworthy episode of history in any way as well as she did.\n\nIn the Foreword he wrote for the book, Mr. Qian Zhongshu said he thought there might well have been a seventh chapter called \"Politics Chapter on Shame\". I, too, have the feeling that there is still so much more worth narrating. We, of course, cannot expect everyone to feel exactly the same because different people have different experiences and also because cadre schools were not entirely identical although they had much in common. So different people will have different things to narrate and appraisals will not be quite the same from the readers.\n\nSo far as I can remember, what struck me most was the damaging effect this period of history had on people of talent. If I were to add a chapter to this book, I would call it \"Transformation Chapter on Fei\". The word 'fei' is used mainly to denote 'waste' as in the term langfei'. It also has the meaning of 'tuition fee' as in 'xuefei'.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209686, "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-1982", "page_number": 343, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS \n\n321\n\n\"25 years of revolution and we've nothing to show for it, neither merits nor faults, we've only muddled through our years.\n\nOur forty years' learning has been a complete waste; no good in either polite letters or martial arts, we've squandered away our time.\"\n\nAs far as I recollect, what was most regrettable in my life was having to spend the prime of my life toiling for nothing. Since my childhood I've had no other liking but studying. But in the prime of my life I was sent down to do manual labour or have my ideology remoulded not just once, but many times. It would indeed be hard to figure out how much time was wasted in these and other activities such as doing manual work in a factory or in a people's commune, carrying out the \"four clean-ups\" movement etc. For me the experience was not altogether unrewarding. For one thing, it widened my horizon; for another, I built up a good physique. We may make up some of the material resources lost; nevertheless, it is not likely that we can ever make up for the loss of time, the waste of effort and talent.\n\nThe main reason why my country is so backward today in national economy, technology and other aspects is the shabby treatment given to the intellectuals who were made the targets of \"transformation\" during the Cultural Revolution. They were made to go through a complete change, do manual labour and remould their ideology. Those who were experts in a special field of study were branded as \"reactionaries\". The present Chinese leadership has now wakened up to reality and has made it known that the country will not run cadre schools any more as they are an unnecessary drain on the country's manpower and financial resources. Some Chinese leaders have referred to the 'payment of tuition fees' and used it to defend the foolish things that they did. Their reasoning is that one must pay to learn and so one ought to pay 'tuition fees' for having learned a bitter lesson from one's wrongdoings.\n\nWhat have we got for the huge fees we've paid?\n\nThe Central Committee's \"resolutions on certain historical questions of the Party since the founding of China” has summed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209687, "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-1982", "page_number": 344, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "322\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nup the experience of the 32 years since the founding of our People's Republic and has made an evaluation of the Cultural Revolution in particular. Regrettably, it has not said a word on the \"May 7 cadre schools\" that involved hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and their families.\n\nThe experience is still fresh in our minds. No doubt we can have fragments of this history written down in books like this (which are necessary and valuable). But if there were no objective work done by historians on the background and influence of cadre schools, then a void would be created for this 'earth-shaking' era of Chinese history. We've paid a high price for it. And it would be more and more difficult to fill up the void with the lapse of time.\n\nHow can we account for ourselves before the people if we pay our fees but leave behind nothing but a blank?\n\nI would like to give my humble opinions and offer some simple clues to those interested in this episode of history.\n\nMdm. Yang was sent down to a cadre school in July, 1970, about one year after I was so transferred.\n\nAs far back as 1968, the Cultural Revolution saw an end to the power struggle that was raging all over the country. Except Taiwan, all provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions replaced their Party committees with the newly-established \"revolutionary committees\". The Heilongjiang provincial revolutionary committee, which was set up as early as the beginning of 1967, had those cadres who had not been absorbed into the new organ of political power transferred to the Liuhe county to be engaged in the so-called \"struggle-criticism-transformation\" campaign following Mao Zedong's \"May 7 Directive\" of 1966, after which the cadre schools were named. Mao highly commended the practice and written instructions were circulated all over the country. In the summer of that year, a struggle to seize power broke out between two student groups in Qinghua University, Mao despatched troops and workers' propaganda teams to schools and later workers' teams were also ordered to be stationed in cultural and educational organisations throughout China. Mao called upon the educated class to receive \"re-education\" and also launched a campaign to \"purify the class ranks\", which was in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209716, "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-1982", "page_number": 373, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n351\n\nstudy of revolts, reforms and revolutions in the South East Asian region is of particular interest and relevance for the outside world. This is because the variety of its component races, religions and political systems, before and after the colonial period, are paralleled by the diversity of situations experienced in revolution, reform and revolt. They are as diverse in kind as the very varied social, cultural, economic, historical context will allow, whether in or outside the colonial period, whether the colonial power was French, British or Dutch, whether a communist party was present or not. They are also, they claim, made the more interesting through the variety of \"models,\" outside assistance and influences available to the leaders of its governments and insurgent movements alike.\n\nThe authors state that, out of the total of twelve articles, five study revolts, three reforms and four revolutions. Five of the nine new states are represented (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Singapore and Vietnam), with the former colonies of French Indo-china making up three quarters. Two articles concern events before 1914, three take place between 1914 and 1945 and four after the Second World War, and three span several of these periods. Neither the early period of colonial penetration nor the contemporary scene have been neglected, though by choice the authors have generally not gone back beyond 1850.\n\nGenerally speaking, the essays illustrate the theme of the Introduction, and they do cover a most diverse and interesting set of events. This is a stimulating collection of essays which will certainly be of value to serious students of South East Asia. Also, they bear out the authors' claim that they have a wider relevance than the region in which they are set.\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nChinese Festivals Joan Law and Barbara E. Ward, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 1982, 95pp, including Bibliography, Index. 85 Colour plates\n\nIt is surprising that no-one produced a book like this long ago. Of course, this superb volume is no less welcome for that. The book consists of a short introduction, followed by brief", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210667, "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": 18, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "IMMIGRANTS AND SOCIAL ETHOS: HONG KONG IN THE NINETEEN-EIGHTIES\n\nHELEN F. SIU*\n\nIntroduction\n\nSince the early 1980s, terms such as “mainland boy” (大陸仔), “green stamp alien” (綠印客), “Canton Boy” (廣東仔), “Ah Chan” (阿燦), have entered the daily vocabulary of the Hong Kong media.' These terms specifically address Chinese immigrants who came to Hong Kong in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Around 1949, 700,000 refugees fled to Hong Kong from China. Another wave came in the wake of the famine years in the late 1950s. A third group consisted of “sent-down” city youths who escaped the chaos of the Cultural Revolution from 1969 to 1974. The recent wave of immigrants was triggered by liberalization policies in China. In 1977, 31,000 arrived in Hong Kong legally and illegally. In 1978, another 95,000 came. Immigration reached its peak in 1979 when 178,000 crossed the border. Another 91,000 made their way into Hong Kong in 1980, not to count numerous others who would never be found in the crowd. By the time the Hong Kong Government passed emergency bills in 1980 to restrict the inflow of immigrants, one out of twelve Hong Kong residents had settled for fewer than three years. Considering that different waves of immigrants have made up the population of Hong Kong since the 1940s, and that their energies and resources are well recognized, it is intriguing to see recent immigrants being singled out as a distinct social category and heaped upon with negative images. According to a survey conducted by students in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, public sentiments towards recent immigrants were not couched in the most friendly terms. Eighty-five percent\n\n* Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Yale University.\n\nAuthor's note:\n\nI wrote this paper under very sad circumstances. Judy Strauch, a fellow student, colleague, friend, had organized a panel for the Regional China Seminar at UC Berkeley in 1985 on refugees in Hong Kong. Due to her untimely death, I was asked to present a paper in her place. I kept the topic Judy had chosen with the hope that this was what she would have liked written.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210668, "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": 19, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "2\n\nHELEN F. SIU\n\nof those interviewed felt that recent immigrants had slowed the planned delivery of government housing services and caused rent increases; 70 percent felt that recent immigrants competed with them for jobs and lowered wages; 70 percent agreed with the impression that the immigrants were the usual offenders in petty crimes, and 50 percent felt that they were responsible for violent crimes in recent years.\n\nCautioning against blaming the victim, scholars have tried to see if the weight of explanation for such negative public sentiments may be put upon the immigrants themselves.\" A scholar of social work in Hong Kong, Zhou Yongxin, asserts that among the earlier immigrants, 70 percent had some skills in various trades, many had industrial capital, and only 3.8 percent were of rural origin. However, 85 percent of the recent immigrants are between the ages of 15 and 30, predominantly male. Seventy-nine percent are of rural origin. A lack of data on the bulk of illegal immigrants makes it difficult to have a fair evaluation, but the legally settled ones do not give the impression that they are unattached elements floundering in an alien environment. Their sojourn is supported, however reluctantly, by networks of family and friends at the receiving end. Similar to the wave of youths who illegally migrated to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution, many have come on their own because they are frustrated with the political vicissitudes and the lack of social mobility in China; some are attracted by the modern materialist glamour suddenly exposed to them through the Hong Kong media. However, given their rural origin, recent immigrants may have less capital and fewer skills than the entrepreneurs from Shanghai or the craftsmen from Guangzhou who had migrated in the 1950s to cope with livelihood in urban Hong Kong. Therefore, compared to previous waves of immigrants, their \"preparedness\" for life in Hong Kong is mixed. The question remains: do they deserve the accusations that the sudden influx of these rural immigrants drastically disturb Hong Kong's social stability and heightens the tensions in an already over-crowded society?\n\nTo evaluate these public sentiments, I think it is important to look more closely at the host community itself. It takes two sides to create problems of adjustment. In fact, the immigrants' predica-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210773, "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": 124, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "107\n\ncertain conditions official policy may have tended to discourage it and local prejudice inhibited it (particularly since the prohibitions of minority languages and costumes during the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in violent confrontations between members of the same ethnic groups, as had occurred earlier during the 1930's), an aspiration to the Han economic condition and a desire for full participation in the workings of the Chinese state have proved constant features of minority history, which continue despite official policies which would seem to encourage localism, perhaps because Sinicisation is an inevitable process which neither official policies nor localism can effectively contain. At the same time and to present again the opposite picture, I was reassured by Miao cadres as to my fears for their loss of culture: ‘these things are very difficult to lose', they maintained, referring to their fengsu, or customs.\n\nGreater-group formation\n\nA second major trend evident in the development of the national minorities since Liberation has been the tendency towards greater-group formation and the fusion, rather than the fission, of smaller ethnic and cultural groups. This again has resulted partly from official policies of designating and classifying certain selected ethnic national minority groups, but owes more perhaps to the need to achieve some form of political consolidation in the face of greater centralisation of authority under the state after 1949. The classification of ethnic groups has long been a problem for Chinese ethnographers. Influenced by the example of Soviet ethnographers (Lemoine 1986), Chinese ethnographers have adopted the criteria of a common language, an area of habitation, a unique set of customs, attitudes and beliefs, and a traditional means of livelihood, as a means of classifying minzu, or national minorities, which as Hsieh (1986) points out, itself represents a uniquely different concept to the Western concepts of either ‘nationality' or ‘ethnic group'. In a seminal article written in 1980, Fei Hsiao-Tung outlined some of the problems relating to the classification of national minorities. Among the problematic instances he described were cases where opinions differed within a single national minority as to whether it was an autonomous ethnic group or part of another, or where class differences led to their refusal to identify", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210775, "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": 126, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "109\n\nfor the children of mixed marriages for such reasons. Thus the fusion of ethnic identities caused by an official policy of ethnic parsimony has resulted in confusions and uncertainties for members of (self-designated) smaller ethnic groups, and this in turn has resulted in the strengthening of an overall ethnic politicisation and polarisation.\n\nReligiosity\n\nSince 1978 and the ending of the Cultural Revolution there has been a very great revival of religiosity in China indeed (cf. Tapp 1986), and this has particularly affected many of the minority peoples for whom religion has become a means of expressing their newly politicised ethnicity. In the development of the minority nationalities, this has formed a third major theme. While down-playing the importance of neeb (shamanism), in Hmong villages in China, Hmong informants at the same time fervently denied that its origins might have been in Chinese Daoism, emphasising that 'it comes from the spirits of our ancestors'. Not only shamanism but the domestic propitiation of ancestral and household spirits persists in many Hmong villages, in what seems to be in direct proportion to their distance from areas of development. In some underdeveloped areas, however, where local attitudes have not seriously changed since the days of the Cultural Revolution, rituals are still performed secretly and at night for fear of party censure. Other ‘Miao' groups, such as the A Hmo or 'Flowery Miao', have demonstrated an astonishing revival of the Christianity first introduced to them at the turn of the century by a missionary named Samuel Pollard (Tapp 1982, 1985). One of the extraordinary features of this recent revival, which has divided communities of the A Hmo along Christian and non-Christian lines, in many cases involving conversions of the grand-children of original converts whose own children had already surrendered their beliefs in Christianity, and which has parallels in the great interest in Christian theology currently demonstrated among China's youth as a whole, is that for many of the A Hmo Christianity is not felt to be, indeed is denied to be, an alien creed, but rather one which has always been peculiarly their own. This would indeed appear to be in conformity with official Chinese policy on the 'indigenisation' of Christianity! Among the (mostly Tai-Lue) Dai", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210797, "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": 148, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "131\n\npeople applied themselves enthusiastically to the task, insufficient capital, the rigid application of ultra-Left policies such as the lop-sided emphasis on developing grain production which did not best utilize Hainan's tropical conditions, and poor technical support are all blamed for the slow progress in Hainan. During the Cultural Revolution in particular, the establishment of new plantations was discontinued, while large areas of mature coconut, rubber and coffee trees were felled to release land for grain production. Forests did not escape indiscriminate clearing: when liberated, there were 863,000 ha of tropical forest on Hainan, but by 1979 only 245,000 ha remained (Smil, 1983). Besides roads, one of the few benefits remaining from the ten turbulent years are the reservoirs and canal networks constructed to provide water for irrigation and generation of electricity.\n\nSome of these problems were caused by inadequate communication between the central government and the grass-roots level, while others are a direct result of ignorance of the biological potential of the tropical environment. The latter was undoubtedly aggravated by debasement of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. Further, following the withdrawal of Soviet experts and technical aid to China in 1960, the fostering by Mao of an isolationist policy from both Eastern and Western blocs meant that technical and economic development had to rely exclusively on Chinese talents and expertise. Given the dearth of experience with tropical agriculture amongst the Hainanese, overseas Chinese who had worked on plantations in Malaya, Indonesia and Thailand, but returned to Hainan in the 1950's and 60's, brought a great number of skills with them and deserve credit for much of the achievement made in planting tropical crops. Returning farmers brought with them seeds of crops never before grown in Hainan, and after some nursery testing, pepper, oil palm, new coconut varieties and traditional medicines were sown commercially, initially on overseas Chinese state farms.\n\nThe \"open door\" policy\n\nWith the ousting of the \"Gang of Four\", a resolution on Hainan's development was passed by the State Council in 1980 which placed primary stress on tropical agriculture and associated", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210974, "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-1987", "page_number": 36, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "11\n\nCHINA IN THE EYES OF THE FRENCH INTELLECTUALS\n\nJEAN CHESNEAUX\n\nThe following lecture, given originally in Canberra, was presented there as the \"Morrison Lecture\" for the year 1987, as a contribution to the memory of that remarkable person, G. Morrison, who crossed Australia on foot and China on foot at the end of the nineteenth century, so as to win the most influential position (at that time) of permanent correspondent in Peking for the London Times for a quarter of a century.\n\nIn Hong Kong, the name George Morrison, if not forgotten, is certainly less prominent than in Canberra, where the Morrison Lecture has been every year an important event for the last fifty years. May I consider these remarks on the lasting impact China has made for three centuries on French intellectuals, as a kind of unofficial “Victor Segalen Lecture\". Victor Segalen, an equally remarkable person, a traveller, a navy officer, an anthropologist, a poet, an archaeologist, visited Hong Kong several times in the early years of this century, between his travels in Eastern Polynesia and his archaeological expeditions in northern China.\n\nMay I add a personal footnote, before beginning the lecture. I am all the more happy to pay tribute to Victor Segalen, in the present circumstances, for it seems that, at least in France, very few persons have actually extended their intellectual work, cultural interests and actual movements, both to the South Pacific and to China. Being another such person, the name of Victor Segalen is for me a very appropriate reference.\n\n* This is the 1987 George Ernest Morrison Lecture delivered originally at the Australian National University, and, with slight amendment, to the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society on 27th February, 1987. It is reprinted with the permission of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. Professor Jean Chesneaux is a sinologist of international repute, and author of, among many books and articles, The Chinese Labour Movement, 1919-1927 (Stanford, 1968), Secret Societies in China in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1971), and China from the 1911 Revolution to Liberation (New York, 1977, with Francoise la Barbier and Marie-Claire Bergere).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210979, "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-1987", "page_number": 41, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "affectation is a well-known chapter of our eighteenth-century cultural history, and it is also a political paradox. For those aristocrats and nobility who had been indulging in Chinese art and Chinese festivities were to meet their fate in 1789 and 1793. They were to be crushed by a major revolution to which China had contributed through the intellectual battles waged by the Philosophes against the monarchy. And this was no longer a dinner party à la chinoise.\n\nA major intellectual and cultural encounter had definitely taken place between China and France. But was it France alone? The addiction to chinoiseries was equally popular with the English nobility and gentry. German Philosophes were as keen as their fellow Frenchmen to achieve genuine universality through China. Such was the message of Leibniz's 'Chinese latest news' (Novissima Sinica), an essay advocating the dispatch to Europe of Chinese Confucian missionaries so as to balance the impact of Christian missionaries to China. Yes, China was then valued as a model for the whole of Europe, to quote the title of a suggestive essay by Louis Maverick.\n\nNevertheless, there is something definitely French in the magnitude, in the style, in the rhetoric of France's encounter with China. France was more deeply committed to China than any other European country in the eighteenth century, and this reflects the specifically acute crisis of French society and the French political regime at that time: a crisis in which French intellectuals were most actively involved. The attraction of China, eccentric and artificial as it was, was part of the French ideological upheaval which contributed so decisively to the French Revolution.\n\nThe concern for China was also very French in its claim to achieve theoretical universalism, to think and to reason for the whole of humankind in the grand Cartesian tradition. From fashionable chinoiseries to high-level intellectual achievements, such as those of Voltaire, Diderot and Gournay, the whole thing was conducted with a typical French sense of sensationalism; it was a well-staged intellectual play lasting for almost a century, with the whole cultural elite in the cast. Other peoples simply act; the French always like to perform, and to find a public for it.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210985, "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-1987", "page_number": 47, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "22\n\nTwo completely different factors come into the picture, namely Gaullism and Italy.\n\nA hidden but deep correspondence had always existed between Gaullists and Maoists. Both emphasised the importance of historical roots and long-term perspectives, for France de toujours as well as for the Sons of the Han on their everlasting Yellow Earth. Both had refused to align their nuclear policies with the strategies of the superpowers. André Malraux's visit to China in the 1960s, both as a former activist in the 1926-27 revolution and as a prominent Gaullist intellectual, was a symbolic episode, much publicised in France. Had General de Gaulle not died suddenly in 1970, he most probably would have paid Mao Zedong the visit already arranged by his old companion Etienne Manach, then French Ambassador to Peking. It would have been an extraordinary performance, in both the grand French and Chinese traditions.\n\nItaly was also very influential. There has always been a special connection between Italy and China. Chinese intellectuals have always felt very much at home in Italy, and the active sympathy for Maoist China of such prominent Italian intellectuals as Malaparte, Alberto Moravia and Maria-Antonietta Macchiocchi certainly made an impact on Parisian literary circles. Altogether, many influential French intellectuals were in those years very keen on visiting China and however brief their visit publicising their sympathy for China. Be they Claude Roy, Etiemble, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva18 or many others, their individual approaches may have differed one from another, but they were all indulging in China as if their commitment to China was more important than China itself. They also affected a definitely revivalistic attitude, as if they were the new sinophiles in the grand eighteenth-century tradition.\n\nBy and large, Maoist China was very chic in French cultural life of the 1950s and 1960s. The theatres were packed full at every Peking Opera visit, the books of Han Suyin sold very well, Chinese exhibitions of art at the Grand Palais were a must, the veteran film-director Joris Ivens, Dutch by birth but settled in France, embarked on a 12-hour film on Yu Gong and People's China's achievements, and the well-established literary publishing series", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210991, "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-1987", "page_number": 53, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "28\n\nNOTES\n\nVirgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France, 1640-1740 (Paris, 1932).\n\n1 From Diderot's Encyclopédie. English translation from A. Reichwein, China and Europe, Intellectual and Artistic Contacts in the Eighteenth Century (Kegan Paul, Trench, Turbner & Co., London, 1925), p.92. Reichwein offers the best comprehensive treatment of China at the Age of Enlightenment, together with L. Maverick (see note 10).\n\n3 Pierre Poivre, Voyages d'un Philosophe (English translation by Reichwein, loc. cit.).\n\nFrançois Quesnay, Le Despotisme de la Chine (Paris, 1767). His friends had dubbed him 'the Confucius of Europe'.\n\n$ Lo Hui-min, The Tradition and Prototype of the China-watcher, 1976 G.E. Morrison lecture (Australian National University, Canberra, 1978), p. 9.\n\n7 Louis Lecomte, Nouveaux mémoires sur l'état présent de la Chine (Paris, 1969). Du Halde, Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l'Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie Chinoise (Paris, 1735).\n\n$ Hugh Honour, Chinoiseries, the Vision of Cathay (John Murray, London, 1961).\n\nIn 1951, at the Lycée de Chartres where I was teaching history, the bicentenary of Diderot's Encyclopedia was celebrated at the initiative of left-wing teachers who were keen to stress the connection between the Encyclopedia and French Revolutionary traditions. I gave a public lecture: 'China and the Encyclopedists', of which the present Morrison Lecture might be considered the direct descendant.\n\n10 Lewis A. Maverick, China, a Model for Europe (Paul Anderson Company, San Antonio, Texas, 1946).\n\n|| From Les Fleurs du Mal (my translation).\n\n12 Evariste Regis Huc, L'Empire chinois (Paris, 1854). For a more severe evaluation of Huc, see Simon Leys, The Burning Forest (New York, 1986), pp. 47-94 (\"Peregrinations and perplexities of Pere Huc').\n\n13 Eugene Simon, La Cité chinoise (Paris, 1885).\n\n14 Paul Claudel, Connaissance de l'Est (Mercure de France, Paris, 1908).\n\n15 The novel by Jules Verne, Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine (1879), is quite unique in its concern for the politics of nineteenth-century China. The hero, Kin Fo, is torn between his fascination with modern technology and his loyalty to his teacher Wong, who is an ex-Taiping leader. It is to my knowledge the only appearance of the Taiping rebellion in French literature.\n\n16 V. Hugo, Lettre au Capitaine Butler, Hauteville House, 25 November 1861 (my translation).\n\n17 Charles Bettelheim, Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organisation in China: Changes in Management and the Division of Labor, trans. by Alfred Ehrenfeld (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1974). See also China Since Mao, by Neil G. Burton and Charles Bettelheim (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1978).\n\n18 Claude Roy, Clés pour la Chine (Paris, 1954); Etiemble, Le Nouveau singe-pèlerin (Paris, 1957); Philippe Sollers, Tel quel (a literary magazine edited by...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211714, "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-1989", "page_number": 129, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "104\n\npromising. Following the steady growth in business in the 1950s, the industry experienced another boom decade as the market in south-east Asia recovered. The number of workers grew from 282 to 344 from 1960 to 1969. During the Cultural Revolution in China from 1968, joss sticks were classified as superstitious items and prohibited both in production and usage. Hong Kong thus lost the Chinese market. However, the acquisition of the overseas market was enough to push the business of the joss stick industry in Hong Kong to a climax. This is reflected in the export trade of Hong Kong at that time. In 1968, 22,693 kg of joss sticks were exported from Hong Kong, but the export volume rose to 1,457,625 kg in 1978, representing a 64.23% increase. This, together with the rising standard of living, effected a qualitative change within the industry. Prior to the 1960s, production was concentrated on lower-priced products, but from the 1970s onwards more expensive and higher grade commodities were produced.\n\nProduction\n\na) Bamboo Processing\n\nThe manufacture of joss sticks involves complex stages of processing and fabrication. First of all, bamboo is felled and chopped into canes of different lengths to form the core of the joss sticks. Then, incense powder is ground from incense logs cut down from a variety of glutinous or fragrant trees. These different kinds of incense powder are mixed according to one of the four methods by which incense powder is made compact and inflammable. After being laid in the sun to dry, the finished products are packaged and made ready for sale.\n\nThe end products of joss stick factories are classified into two main categories according to the presence or absence of a bamboo core and the shape of the finished products. Those products with bamboo cores are generally called joss stick (#✯, hsien-hsiang), whilst those without sticks are wound up and termed incense coils (, t'a-hsiang).\n\nThe bamboo from which the cores of the joss sticks come is varied. The most common type is called Pencil Tube Bamboo (#†, mao chu). This type of bamboo has the property of being highly inflammable and also smooth on its surface. The sources of this species are Chan-chiang, Fo-shan and Shao-hsing. However, these sticks are also highly susceptible to worms. In contrast, a certain type of bamboo from Thailand is more resistant to worms but is not so easily ignited. Perhaps the best type of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212106, "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-1990", "page_number": 48, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "G. Knapp, The Chinese House: Craft Symbol, and the Folk Tradition (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1990). Knapp does not cover the paintings and stucco work that were a marked feature of the Kwangtung architectural style. For examples of this fine traditional decorative work, see Rural Architecture in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, Government Information Services Department, 1979).\n\nIn the Hakka villages of the Tsuen Wan district, this \"animal\" was always a unicorn. In Cantonese villages the lion was usual. However, their purpose and motivation was clearly the same. Informants said there were differences in the dance performances of lions and unicorns; unicorns \"crept, bobbed and weaved\", whereas lions would \"stand up and prance\". The musical accompaniment, drums and gongs, was the same, and previously firecrackers had been an indispensable part of any performance by lions or unicorns.\n\nHugh Baker mentions that the Liaos of Sheung Shui were known throughout the New Territories for their unicorn dance team. See the interesting information given in his Sheung Shui, A Chinese Lineage Village (London, Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1968), p. 193.\n\nSee my \"Notes on Temples and Shrines on Hong Kong Island\" in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 27 (1987), p. 287.\n\nMonlin Chiang, Tides from the West (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1947), p. 9. John Francis Davis, The Chinese, A General Description of the Empire of China and its Inhabitants (London, Charles Knight, 1836) Vol. 2, pp. 29-30.\n\nFrom the memorial tablet to Mr. Chan Wing-on, Chairman of the Tsuen Wan Rural Committee and Chairman of the 18th Term, New Territories Heung Yee Kuk 1950-52, at the Wing On Pavilion, Fu Yung Shan, Tsuen Wan. Mr. Chan died on 15 October 1956; see Annual Departmental Reports, District Commissioner, New Territories, (1953-54 para. 56, and 1956-57 para. 119).\n\nFrom a “Short History of Yeung Uk Village\" (in Chinese), published at the time of the village resiting in 1965 and written by Yeung's eldest grandson, Mr Yeung Cho-ling. According to the commemorative tablet, the grave was repaired on a lucky day in the middle month of the autumn season in the 10th year of Kuang Hsu, that is in September-October 1884.\n\n1736; but in fact the ping-san year is the 1st year of Ch'ien Lung's long reign. There was probably another, less altruistic factor at work here too: since it was believed that the graves of good people have a beneficial effect on the fortunes of their family for generations to come. It is implicit in this case that the good influences of the grave were not yet spent.\n\nFor a more recent example from Tsing Yi Island, see my Rural Communities, op. cit., p. 143.\n\nContents more than values, I suggest? Wolfram Eberhard, Cantonese Ballads (Munich State Library Collection) (Taipei, The Orient Cultural Service, 1972), p.2.\n\nR. David Arkush, \"Orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Proverbs\" at pp. 310-335 of Kwang-Ching Liu (ed.) Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990).\n\nHelen Kwok and Mini Chan, Fossils From a Rural Past, A Study of Extant Cantonese Children's Songs (Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 1990), pp. 17, 29.\n\nLucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1971), successively pp.126, 94-95.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212108, "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-1990", "page_number": 50, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "27\n\nH. Studies on Jiao festivals in Mainland China & Taiwan\n\nOne of the most striking indicators of the revival of the traditional religious activities which were labeled as \"feudal superstition\" and prohibited in China after 1949 is the reappearance of the large scale Jiao festival in southern China. According to Dean, small scale religious activities were secretly practised by some small villages in Fujian during the Cultural Revolution. Large scale Jiao celebrations were seen in many parts of southern China only after 1980, the decade following the fall of the \"gang of four.\" Dean's study in Fujian is one of the pioneering studies of the revival of Jiao festivals in mainland China. In his paper Dean asked whether or not the revival of Jiao festivals will lead to the restoration of local tradition and eventually encourage local autonomy. This, according to Dean, \"only time will tell.\"\n\nRecords of Jiao festivals on the mainland are very limited but Jiao festivals in Taiwan have been widely studied since the 1960s. One of the earliest systematic studies is Liu Zhi-wan's ethnographical account of the 1963 Jiao festival in Song Shan, Taipei. Though severely criticized by Li, the study successfully drew the attention of many scholars to the study of such festivals. Besides descriptive ethnography, two approaches should be mentioned here. One looks at the Jiao festival from its religious and symbolic significance. Li Xian-zhang pointed out in 1968 that the Jiao in ancient China was a \"rite of transition.\" Saso suggested that the Jiao is a rite of cosmic renewal closely related to the theory of Yin and Yang. He wrote \"[Jiao] is to restore Yang, that is, life, light, and blessing, to its pristine state of growth, and to expel the forces of Yin, darkness, evil, and death.\" Saso's theory was adopted by many scholars to define the Jiao festival. For instance, Ward wrote that objectives of the Jiao festival are the wiping away of evil, the restoration of peace, and the renewal of life for the entire population and of a sizable group of villages.\n\nAnother approach studies the festival from its social aspects. It focuses on the organizing community's internal structure and its relationship with a larger society. Okada's studies on \"religious area\" were done in the 1930s. They argue that the religious area is an area in which people interact through common religious activities which focus on a temple or a religious object. A religious area is also a sphere of social life which may coincide with marketing or marriage areas. The festival is seen as a mechanism to consolidate or to re-confirm\n\n14", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212267, "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-1990", "page_number": 209, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "186\n\nany religious or intellectual opposition, seeking to hold up the purity of their truths by disdaining any claims to truth which arise from other ideological positions. Their statements are, therefore, at best suspect. Certainly, there are historical examples of missionaries who operated under cultural prejudices which clearly obstructed their understanding of China.\n\n14\n\nA case in point is the study of the translation of a Chinese Classic by David Collie (d. 1828) written by William Bysshe Stein in 1970. Stein, at the end of his study, leaves the impression that missionary translations, including Collie's, were incompetent, biased, and unsophisticated works. This evaluation came in part as a result of Stein's reading of Collie through the eyes of the American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, who had preferred the translation of Guillaume Pauthier, a non-missionary, which had appeared in 1840.\n\nCollie certainly included some very insensitive comments in his footnotes and, at times, made translation errors. However, Stein made his judgement on the basis of a casual reading of Collie, assuming both the wisdom of Thoreau's judgements against Collie and the superior quality of Pauthier's renditions. In fact, Collie's work was a vast improvement over those of his Protestant predecessors, Morrison and Marshman. Providing a more complete translation of The Four Books than either of his predecessors, Collie made far fewer attacks on Confucius and Confucianism than Stein suggests. Although his translation was at times uneven and even simply wrong, much of it was worthwhile, including the helpful translations of classical commentaries in the footnotes.\n\nHaving assumed the worst regarding Collie, Stein's presumption of Pauthier's superiority, supported almost solely by the inclinations of Thoreau, can be shown to be terribly misguided. Pauthier's style of translating included, at times, great verbosity and an extreme liberty with the text. His exegesis involved reading into the Confucian text the values of the French Revolution; this made the text more immediately appealing to his audiences, while being all the more distorted because of the freedoms taken in rendering the Confucian worldview.\n\nMore thorough scholars than Stein, however, also stand in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212307, "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-1990", "page_number": 249, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "226\n\nif the wife of Swire's Taipan, accompanied by two pipers, did fire Jardine's gun to salute the arrival of 1967. Although 1967 saw several months of 'Disturbances' (spillovers from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China), it was also Swire's centenary in the East and a nice gesture on Jardine's part to invite the Taipan's spouse of the rival firm to fire their cannon.\n\nOriginally, the company was a textile firm, founded by John Swire (1793-1847), in Liverpool in 1816. It was inherited by his two sons, John Samuel (1825-1898) and William Hodson (1830-1884), by which time the firm was involved in the import-export trade. An office was opened by Richard Shackleton Butterfield (a Lancashire mill owner) and John Samuel Swire in Shanghai in 1867, and in 1870 a trading and shipping branch was established in Hong Kong. Even until 1974 the company was still known as 'B&S' (Butterfield and Swire), Its Chinese name, Taikoo (**太古**), means great and ancient. The partnership did not last long. John S. Swire wrote:\n\n\"Mr Butterfield retired (in 1868) from our firm at my suggestion; he was grasping and bothered me.\n\nThe astute, disciplined, sarcastic, autocratic John Samuel Swire was proud of his Yorkshire origins. Common expressions of his were:\n\n**I told you so!**\n\n\"I write as I speak, to the point.\"\n\n\"I aim to be strong enough to be respected, if not beloved.\"\n\nIt was maintained by an American contemporary that he lived by and for business alone. He was addressed as 'The Senior' by his partners. Like many taipans, John Samuel Swire did not remain long in the East.\n\nHe was said to have been single-minded, forthright, ruthless and energetic, and drove himself and his staff, whom he discouraged from taking part in civic affairs. After his successes on the Yangtze he decided to expand into coastal trade. Here he used the same tactics\n\na vigorous attack that disheartened his rivals.\n\n―\n\nA residence had been constructed on the Peak for the B&S taipan and messes for the young 'gentlemen' officers of the firm by the late", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212325, "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-1990", "page_number": 267, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "244\n\nParsees. At one time, with a German Chairman and an American Deputy Chairman, the Board had no British members. The financial failure of Dent, in 1867, had the effect of freeing the Bank from dependence on any one enterprise and brought about more independent management control. Within months of setting up its headquarters in Hong Kong a branch was opened in London, and further branches were established in San Francisco (1875), New York (1880), Lyons (1881) and Hamburg (1889). By the 1880s The Hong Kong Bank had become banker to the Hong Kong Government, and to this day it is, in effect, the Central Bank of the Territory.\n\nWorld War I proved a difficult period, and its German directors resigned shortly after hostilities commenced. The Bank resumed its leading position in China and the Far East in the 1920s and 30s. Like the Chartered Bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank's branch in Shanghai operated without interruption all through the Cultural Revolution.\n\nToday 'Wardley' is the name of an investment company associated with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. In 1864, Wardley House (demolished in 1882 when its new bank building was completed) was the first premises of the Bank. William Henry Wardley was a staff member of Gibb Livingston. He started his own firm about 1850. Although the company was taken over by F.B. Johnson and James Bowman the name was retained. It stopped trading about 1861, before the Bank was established. But the name, Wardley, has been perpetuated.\n\nThe Mercantile Bank\n\nThe old Mercantile Bank can be traced back to October 1853, with the founding of the Mercantile Bank of Bombay. Within two months it had become the Mercantile Bank of India, London and China, a co-partnership of four Indian proprietors and four British. An office was opened in London almost immediately, and other offices, in 1854, in Madras, Colombo and Kandy. In 1855 branches started at Calcutta, Singapore, Canton, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Comparing these dates with the Chartered Bank, Mercantile got off to a quicker start, although both banks were established in the same year. Mercantile had a branch in Hong Kong, for example, four years before Chartered.\n\nSkipping a century, in 1958 the name was shortened to ‘Mercantile", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212326, "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-1990", "page_number": 268, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "245\n\nBank Limited', partly to remove the impression, prevalent at the time, that it was an Indian, and not a British, bank. In the same year, a share exchange took place with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation for the entire share capital of Mercantile.\n\nIn 1967 in Hong Kong, the 'Disturbances' (spill overs of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic) resulted in a flight of capital which reduced deposits in banks fortunately only temporarily. The following year, as a number of members served on both the London Committee of the Hong Kong Bank and Mercantile's counterpart, it was decided to disband the London Committee of 'Mercantile'. Finally, the full amalgamation of the Hong Kong Bank and Mercantile took place in 1982-3.\n\nInsurance\n\nIn the early days of trading in Canton insurance posed something of a problem for the small European community. Members formed a local underwriting syndicate (on the Calcutta pattern) to provide facilities for marine insurance. The Canton Insurance Office was established in 1804 (other records say 1805), and for the first 30 years of its existence it was managed alternately by Jardine's and Dent and Company, changing every three years. A great deal of trust appears to have existed between the Chinese hong merchants and the European traders, and a document shows that Chinqua, a Chinese businessman, promised to make good any loss suffered by a merchant in France, to whom he was shipping tea, without having to prove loss by the return of goods.\n\nThe Union Insurance Society of Canton was established in Canton in 1835, by a number of far-sighted British Merchants under the guidance of Dent and Company. After Dent's went into liquidation, in 1864, Union Insurance became a separate entity. It had already moved its headquarters to Hong Kong in 1842, which is still its home even though it has offices and representatives in many cities in the Far East and agencies throughout the world.\n\nIn 1861, Hong Kong had 73 merchant houses and 18 of these acted as agents for insurance companies. Jardine's has retained its early interest in insurance, and, in 1868, when the Hong Kong Insurance Company was formed, it became the agent. This, a century", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212426, "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-1990", "page_number": 368, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "345\n\nCollar, Hugh, CAPTIVE IN SHANGHAI: A STORY OF INTERNMENT IN WORLD WAR II, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990. xvi + 160 pp. Index. Hugh Collar, unofficial head of the British in Shanghai after the Sino-Japanese War became a part of World War II, wrote an account of the international community under Japanese internment. This is a rambling but often interesting account, edited by Pauline Woodroffe.\n\nAN\n\nLiu Binyan, CHINA'S CRISIS: ESSAYS FROM INTELLECTUAL IN EXILE, translated from the Chinese into English by Howard Goldblatt, Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 1990. xxv + 50 pp. Index. This volume comprises a series of five lectures given at Harvard in 1988-89 by one of China's most eminent dissidents. Liu, who had suffered for his intellectual principles during the 1950s as well as during the Cultural Revolution a decade later, was expelled from the Communist Party and was banned from publishing. There is a Foreword written by Professor Merle Goldman.\n\nMehrotra, Santosh K., INDIA AND THE SOVIET UNION: TRADE AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, Notes. Bibliography. Index. As the title indicates, this work is about the economic relationship between the Soviet Union and India (an industrialized planned economy and a developing market economy). The period covered is between 1955 and just before the book went to press.\n\nASIAN DEVELOPMENT OUTLOOK 1992, 1992. 313 pp. This study of economic development in the Asian countries containing a large amount of information with useful statistics, was published by the Asian Development Bank and Oxford University Press.\n\nDardess, John W, CONFUCIANISM AND AUTOCRACY: PROFESSIONAL ELITES IN THE FOUNDING OF THE MING DYNASTY, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. 358 pp. with 1 map. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. Professor Dardess argues that, far from being a 'socially indeterminate category', the body of elitist professional Confucian public servants consciously created a highly centralized state at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, leading to five hundred years of autocracy in China.\n\ndeBary, William Theodore, FIRST ASIAN CIVILIZATIONS: A", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212536, "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": 90, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "70\n\nhostile rhetoric, they provided no chance for their citizens to know the other country and its people. So, when Nixon made his initiatives to open relations with China, cultural exchanges did receive certain priority, at least as a gesture to break down the fence between the two countries. He lifted restrictions against wanting to travel to China. China, similarly extended to an American table tennis team an invitation to visit China, which was accepted and the trip was made.\n\nFollowing the Nixon visit, American interest in China soon mounted. American cultural groups began to arrive. Among these visitors, the most important was the Philadelphia Orchestra, the first major Western musical group to tour this country. The Philadelphia Orchestra performed in Beijing and Shanghai, staying in China for ten days from 12-23 September 1973.\n\nIn both cities the Philadelphia Orchestra was given a very courteous reception. The then powerful Politburo members in charge of ideology and cultural affairs, Jiang Qing and Yao Wenyuan, attended their performance in Beijing and chatted with leading members of the group afterwards. Meanwhile, the media gave friendly and sufficient coverage of the event. The media even allowed a musician to publish, in a leading newspaper, a review entitled \"friendly, enthusiastic and glorious\" in which he said that the Chinese people and Chinese art workers were very pleased to have the opportunity to enjoy the performance of this world-renowned American performing group and that China could learn from the American artists. He also expressed his hope for further development of friendship between Chinese and American artists and people.\n\nThe tour by the Philadelphia Orchestra took place against the background of the contemporary impoverished Chinese artists scene. Throughout the Cultural Revolution there had been a consistent tendency to eliminate foreign influence in arts and to produce a new \"proletarian\" culture for the Chinese people. As a result, many musicians, a large number of whom had been trained in the west, were either sent to prisons or to the May 7th Cadres' Schools to receive re-education. At the same time, the surviving musical organizations could hardly perform any symphonic music, due to the political environment and lack of qualified musicians. Under such circumstances the significance of the Philadelphia Orchestra's visit could only be political, not artistic.\n\nBy their use of the media and arts as the means for power struggle,\n\nPage 90\n\nPage 91", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212537, "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": 91, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "71\n\nthe Gang of Four gained considerable influence over policy between 1973 and 1975. Though granted extensive power, Deng Xiaoping was by then once again losing the favour of party chairman Mao Zedong who was very annoyed by Deng's systematic measures to reverse the Cultural Revolution. As the major administrator when both Mao and Zhou were seriously ill, Deng's position was also weakened by the slowness in normalizing Sino-American diplomatic relations.\n\nAt the same time, the American enthusiasm for close relationship with China had lost its initial impetus, largely because of the Watergate crisis and the consequent Presidential succession problems. With the inauguration of Gerald R. Ford in 1974, relations deteriorated rapidly and cultural exchanges, which had been mainly relegated to the exchange of sports delegations, decreased to their lowest level. During this time, the only Chinese performing group which might have visited the States to strengthen the delicate link established by the Philadelphia Orchestra, was cancelled due to the Ford Administration's ban on the inclusion in its programme of a Chinese song calling for the unification of Taiwan with the mainland. If the Philadelphia Orchestra's tour was perceived by the Chinese as more of a political event to celebrate a new relationship than merely a professional exchange in the arts, the cancellation of a delegation's tour of America was also interpreted, as an unequivocal signal of the Ford Administration's wish to alienate China.\n\nModernization and cultural openness\n\nHaving passed through these unsteady years, Sino-American cultural exchanges flourished. With the establishment of diplomatic relations on 1 January, 1979, cultural ties expanded in all areas. Student and scholarly exchanges were initiated. The two countries began to share scientific knowledge in energy, physics, and the study of earthquakes, and in other fields as well. Meanwhile, American presentation of artistic programmes in China increased to an unprecedented level.\n\nBehind these developments, there were profound changes in domestic politics as well as the international environment. By the end of 1978, Deng Xiaoping had decisively consolidated his leadership in the Party and begun to push the modernization programme forward according to his own blueprint. At the same time, China finally established diplomatic relations with the United States.\n\nThe first years of Deng Xiaoping's leadership expanded modernization", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212539, "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": 93, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "73\n\nIn China's foreign policy one goal has never changed - the quest for national prestige. The modernization programme, judged from the international perspective, is an expression of China's striving for prestige. In that context, to have her national flag saluted, the national anthem played, and China's name mentioned was something for China to pursue. For a long time, China had viewed international sports competitions as chances to enhance her prestige. Since 1979 high culture was incorporated into the Struggle to the End. To raise the level of Chinese artists to that end needs foreign expertise.\n\nThough Western art forms such as ballet had been introduced to the Chinese scene in the first decade of the Republic, China has long been suspicious of Western influence in China's cultural life. Before the Cultural Revolution, few Western cultural groups visited China. The Cultural Revolution not only continued that tendency of suspicion, but also cut Chinese artists totally off from foreign artists for a period long enough for them to fall behind in artistic achievements. To reverse that situation, China needed to use foreign co-operation in arts.\n\nOn the other hand, Chinese audiences had become very dissatisfied with the monochrome culture developed in the years of the Cultural Revolution. After the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese artists tried to enrich the cultural life of the people, but progress was slow due to many factors. This naturally led to a growing interest in cultural pluralism. The lack of high-quality indigenous cultural performers provided a rationale to invite Western arts groups to make up the deficiency.\n\nSince 1978, a few organizations have been deeply involved in hosting artists from Western countries, among which the most important is the China Performing Arts Agency (CPAA). In the period 1979-1981, the CPAA hosted 37 Western performing arts groups, nine of which were from the United States. Among the nine American groups it hosted in this period, seven fell in the category of non-governmental exchanges. As a state agency, its policy in regards to what programmes should be accepted was surprisingly liberal. All \"orthodox\" performing arts forms, such as classical music, ballet and operas, were considered acceptable by it as long as the group was qualified and, with few exceptions, able to cover its own costs, as the agency had a limited budget for hosting foreign groups, which went almost exclusively to official exchange programmes.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212541, "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": 95, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "75\n\nin 1978 mainly to carry out official exchange programmes. As for Sino-American relations, cultural exchanges never escaped the attention of top administrators. In the Shanghai Communique signed on 28 February, 1972, both parties expressed their intention to promote cultural exchanges, though the positions of the leaders of both countries at the time prevented them from making much progress along those lines. Following the establishment of diplomatic relations, a cultural agreement was soon signed on 31 January, 1979 and this agreement was consolidated by five implementing accords, covering exchanges in every year following 1979. Between 1979 and 1981, \"an expanded program of cultural exchanges brought major exhibits of Chinese art, archaeological finds, music and dance troupes... to the United States, and a reciprocal flow of U.S. films, symphony orchestras, and exhibits to the PRC.”\n\nAt the beginning of the normalization of the Sino-U.S. relationship, both governments emphasized the promotion of links in fields other than political, though political relations dominated their priority lists. It was, however, realized that cultural relations, among other links, would create multiple constituencies in each society with a vested interest in the future well-being of the overall relationship and that is what the two governments were vigorously pursuing.\n\nCultural development and political reassessment\n\nThe use of cultural exchanges as an instrument may or may not have been helpful in bilateral strategic and economic terms, but its influence on China's domestic policies was beyond the expectations of policy makers. As has been discussed, there was in China a notion that socialism was a superior social system. Under such a system the only thing that needed to be done was raising production and enhancing material accumulation. This notion prevailed before, during and immediately after the Cultural Revolution. Underlined by this notion, the task of cultural establishments, particularly those of art and literature, was destined for educating the masses as to government policies and mobilizing them to work hard in national construction. The cultural sector was not viewed as an independent voice for social progress and therefore was merely assimilated to politics. The fusion of art and politics, in the minds of the leaders at least, was perfectly underlined by the famous slogan \"literature and art serve political assimilation, the new assimilation of the arts to the pursuit of material modernization still dissatisfied many writers and artists. But this new assimilation did provide them with a", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212543, "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": 97, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "77\n\nincoming events did take the role of initiating a new trend in China.\n\nChina's domestic policy reassessments were mainly motivated by political considerations and were generally centred on political and theoretical matters. Accordingly, art and literature were less affected than policies by these reassessments. Nonetheless, the bearing of these reassessments on art and literature were enormous.\n\nIn 1977-1978 there appeared a literary genre called “scar literature” (“wounded literature”), under which a number of stories, plays and poems were published or staged. Among these works were \"Class Teacher\" (\"Ban zhuren”) and “Scar” (“Shanghen”), after which the genre was named. The themes of the works under this genre were almost exclusively focused on the wrongs done in the Cultural Revolution. The open, and sometimes forceful condemnations of past policies were pretty much the same as the practices in earlier campaigns to criticize Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, but the content showed that writers tried to analyse history from their own perspective. After the Third Plenum in December 1978, at which Deng Xiaoping called upon the intellectuals to “emancipate their minds” and to break into previously forbidden zones, more works under this genre were published.\n\nThe impact of political reassessment in the post-Mao era was strong though, the first reassessment affected the development of art and literature only marginally. With the pulling down of the Xidan \"Democracy Wall\" and the arrest of Wei Jingsheng, an activist in the demonstrations who advocated adoption of a Western system of democracy, there appeared a tendency to limit the scope of literary and artistic activities. In June 1979, an article \"Praise and Shame\" was published arguing that any writer who criticizes the dark side of socialism is shameful. This article ignited a nationwide criticism of “ultra-leftist tendencies in literary and artistic creation.” In the following few months, major newspapers and journals published articles to refute this stand, dubbing its supporters the \"whatever\" faction.\n\nThis development made high culture a victim of political campaigns.\n\n16\n\nThough \"scar literature\" was unaffected by the campaign started in the spring of 1979, it had become out-of-sale by the autumn of that year as the mood of the nation turned more to the present and the future rather than concentrating on the past. So this literary genre was replaced by a more controversial genre, \"exposure literature\", in which social", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212544, "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": 98, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "78\n\nproblems were blamed no longer on the Cultural Revolution activists and the Gang of Four, but also on those presently in power and those in power before the Cultural Revolution.\" With the emergence of **exposure literature**, artists and writers began to experiment with new forms. Wang Meng, for example, writing less on political issues and more on the emotions and relationships of everyday life, experimented with a variety of styles, including stream of consciousness. His short story, The Butterfly, in which he successfully used the technique of stream of consciousness, won him national recognition.\n\nThe If I Were Real episode turned out, however, rather differently. In terms of interaction between political developments and those of art and literature in the post-Mao era, probably no other single instance can provide as much insight as the play If I Were Real does. By comparing it with Wang Meng's experiments and with a later case, the Bitter Love episode, conclusions about how much artists and writers could push politically and artistically can be better tested.\n\nIf I Were Real was initially a play script depicting a young man who deceives officials in Shanghai, by pretending to be the son of a high military officer in Beijing. Because of his supposed good connections, the young man is granted all kinds of privileges, from theatre tickets to having a “friend”, who was actually himself transferred from a farm to Shanghai. When he is finally caught, he protests that he has done nothing wrong. He explains: “If I were really the son of some high party official, then whatever I have done would be considered legal.\" Thus the playscript went beyond criticism of the Gang of Four to criticize the current system.\n\n1920\n\nAs for the form, the experimental side of If I Were Real was shown in its actual staging. Audiences participated in the whole process at the beginning of the play. Pre-planned, the play begins later than the set time. When the audience grows impatient and asks why it has not started, one actress would appear in the name of the theatre manager to tell them that they cannot begin until some important “officials\" arrive. Then the audience would grow even more impatient and protest against the inequality of treatment. Then those \"officials\" would appear, among them is the \"son\", and soon some \"policemen\" follow up to arrest him and explain the story to the audience. Of course, all of the people involved are performers.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212545, "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": 99, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "79\n\nIf I Were Real involved two areas, literature and art and it broke into two previously \"forbidden zones\", criticizing the present leadership for tolerating corruption, and experimenting boldly with a new technique. As has been mentioned, writers who experimented with new techniques, even by borrowing Western ones, were given great leeway while the fate for the \"new content\" in literary and artistic reflections was quite different.\n\nBeginning in the autumn of 1980, the situation developed along the lines of tighter control following some speeches by some outspoken members of the Association of Writers and Artists at its Fourth Congress in October-November 19792 and the numerous stories, poems and investigative reports in the subsequent period. Fitfully in 1980, and repeatedly in 1981, literary works were charged with exaggerating the gloom, weariness, and cynicism within the population and spreading a feeling of utter hopelessness. Specifically, If I Were Real was criticized for inducing disillusionment with the system.\n\nIn the spring of 1981, the filmscript by Bai Hua, Bitter Love, was openly criticized by the Liberation Army Daily, signalling a new round of re-assessment of political development and this time culture was the target. Bitter Love was published in one of the most innovative literary journals, Shiyue (October), in September 1979. By 1981, it had been made into a movie which was shown to selected audiences but was not released to the general public. The filmscript was a sad story of an overseas Chinese painter who returned to China out of patriotism, only to be persecuted as a counter-revolutionary during the Cultural Revolution. At one point, his daughter raised the question “You have loved this country so much but does this motherland love you?'' Obviously, this question encouraged disloyalty to the party. After August 1981, the party newspapers fully joined in the attack. \"It became evident that the party leadership was increasingly concerned with the continuing disrespect for authority and growing Western influence.\"22\n\nAlthough this concern of disrespect for authority and growing Western influence subsided somewhat in 1982 and early 1983, it surfaced again in a campaign launched in the autumn of 1983 against “spiritual pollution\", which was attributed to increased contact with the West. Political leaders were particularly concerned with Western ideas that evoked questioning of the party and its policies. Unlike the Bitter Love episode, this campaign was ideological in character. When in the later", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212556, "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": 110, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "90\n\nThe CFEIC's policy of selecting films which show unflattering sides of American life is motivated by ideological reasons. It can be seen as an expression of the ideological antagonism China has maintained toward capitalist countries. Though the pitch of such antagonism has been lowered since 1978, its impact has not been wiped out completely. As films can reflect social life very closely, and as they are very popular among the Chinese population, the depiction of American life in American movies, once they reach the Chinese audiences, can largely determine what the people think the United States is like. A positive image of the United States in films can possibly contradict the image of capitalist societies which have been portrayed in China as inferior to socialist societies. Besides, motivations to balance the positive image the United States government created through other channels also played a role in such a policy.\n\nAside from political considerations, the state of the art of Chinese movie making also loomed large in choosing particular American movies. As the Cultural Revolution caused a serious setback in movie making, it was not possible to import foreign movies too much ahead of what the Chinese audiences could accept or the established conception of what movies should be. For example, a picture of two people kissing in an English movie which appeared on the back of the fifth issue of Popular Films in 1979 caused a six-month long debate in that magazine. Most of the people who were for it said that kissing was a natural expression of the love between the characters. Therefore, the magazine should not be blamed for printing that picture. Though it ended with an apparent victory by the more liberal-minded, the debate shows careful treatment of the importation of movies was by no means unnecessary. Out of the same considerations, movies with explicit sexual scenes are not imported.\n\n34\n\nThe last consideration influencing which movies are chosen for import is the popularity of the movies. As young people make up the major part of the movie audiences, efforts were made to meet their taste. In this case, First Blood is a good example. With its scenes of conflict in American society, and being free from sex scenes, (plus a temporary consideration, the negative image of the Vietnamese depicted), its violence would suit the young audiences, and therefore bring profits, also a consideration of increasing importance, though the CFEIC admitted it was a poor movie. Conversely, the film Miracle Worker, a much more highly regarded movie, without scenes of violence and much suspense, was not nearly as popular as First Blood. As a result, the CFEIC had", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212558, "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": 112, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "92\n\npolitics, but the very appearance of the artists and events before the citizens of the host country could not but inform those citizens that the United States and China were on good terms at that moment.\n\nAlthough political leaders gave higher priority to relations in other fields, what the average citizen could directly experience was undoubtedly the cultural exchanges. Though the average American might be indifferent to the talks about the strategic cooperation with China and the Chinese might feel the purchase of American aircraft by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) was rather remote from their life, both of them could enjoy sitting in a concert hall and listening to music by musicians from the other country. Furthermore, once citizens of one country accept the culture of another and once that culture becomes a part of their life, even a very small portion of their life, they would feel uncomfortable if that part of life disappeared. Therefore, pressure for the restoration of such cultural contacts might actually be considered, at least partially, as a guarantee of continuing good relationship.\n\nArts exchanges, particularly those conducted through people-to-people contacts, are one of the best ways for citizens of different countries to understand each other. The intensive exchanges in arts in the period of 1979 and 1981 succeeded enormously in making a strong, positive image of the United States in China and vice versa, and this image functioned in maintaining a substantial number of exchanges between the two countries in the succeeding years in which domestic and bilateral developments were much less favourable to a healthy relationship in culture. To a large degree, the contacts established through arts exchanges have served as a counterweight to the isolationist tendencies within Chinese society.\n\nNonetheless, the most immediate concern in discussing the consequences of arts exchanges with the United States is probably their impact on China's cultural life. In this connection, the incoming American arts groups fulfilled the Chinese expectations for high-level cultural events and diversity. Especially in the period between 1979 and 1981, which was not too far removed from the Cultural Revolution, the dramatic increase in American cultural presence on the Chinese scene posed a sharp contrast with the monochrome culture formed in the Cultural Revolution and maintained in the few years following its conclusion, and helped in expanding cultural pluralism in China.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212562, "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": 116, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "96\n\nThe interest of the Chinese in American culture was surprising. For example, between 1979 and 1986, 13 American plays were produced by Chinese theatres, including Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The production of Death of a Salesman was not, in fact, an American event because all the people involved directly in the staging were Chinese, except for Arthur Miller who directed the play, and it was a production of the Beijing People's Art Theatre. Nonetheless, it was seen as a symbol of Sino-American affinity and cooperation. The opening night performance in Beijing was attended by the American ambassador to China, and David Rockefeller, Jr. In the Chinese press, the production of the play was hailed as \"the most significant cultural event in China since the Cultural Revolution\".38 This interest in American cultural events in China actually upgraded the intensity of American cultural presence.\n\nOn the other hand, the American involvement in China's arts education was massive and intensive. In 1985, for instance, the number of Americans teaching in Chinese arts institutions roughly equaled the total of artists from all other countries serving in similar capacities. In sum, the eight years between 1979 and 1986 saw an influx of American culture nurtured by as well as resulting from the disproportionate interest of the Chinese in the United States and its culture.\n\nAt the beginning of the process of diplomatic normalization and in the two years following it, China's external relations were almost monopolized by developing the American linkage. The much-publicized visit of Deng Xiaoping to the United States, the signing of dozens of agreements between the two governments, the massive arrival of Chinese students on American campuses, the exchanges of delegations, and the encouragement of non-governmental contacts by the governments and so on, all helped make the impression on the Chinese that the United States was the best in everything and the American linkage was the only relationship to be valued. In the first two years following normalization, an average of 100 Chinese delegations visited the United States monthly.\" Furthermore, the use of arts exchanges to consolidate the general relationship and to win U.S. economic and technological cooperation made arts exchanges a handmaiden of politics.\n\nIn specific terms, when a major American cultural event took place in China, it was praised all around for political reasons, while the necessary objective evaluations of the quality and the artists involved were rarely or sometimes never provided. The flaws in the BSO's", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212565, "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": 119, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "NOTES\n\n99\n\nI\n\nExcept for those documented otherwise, all the figures presented in this paper are obtained through researches in published and unpublished sources, including those from Xinhua News Agency, year books, newspapers and magazines, personal interviews and so on.\n\n2 Records of CFEIC\n\n3 See Samuel S. Kim, ed. China and The World: Chinese Foreign Policy in the Post-Mao Era (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984) for a discussion of a number of cases reflecting this.\n\n4 John K. Fairbank, China Bound (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 338\n\n5 USIA: Its Work and Structure (USIA), p. 2\n\n6 Ying Hua, \"**Youhao, reqing, guangcai**\" (\"Friendly, Enthusiastic and Glorious\"), Guangming ribao (Guangming Daily), 19 September 1973, p. 4\n\n7 For further information on the definition, see Hu Qiaomu, \"Dangqian sixiang zhanxian de ruogan wenti\" (\"Some Issues of the Current Ideological Work\") in Jianchi sixiang jiben yuanze, fandui zichan jieji ziyouhua (Uphold the Four Fundamental Principles, Oppose Bourgeois Liberalization) (Beijing: Renmin Press, 1987), pp. 158-198\n\n8 In this respect, one may think that Chinese performing artists were like athletes in that they were more competition-oriented than performance-oriented. This was especially true of opera singers and ballet dancers. While quite a few of them, some of whom had the experience of being trained by foreign artists, won international competitions, there was seldom opera or ballet staged in China.\n\n9 Records of CPAA\n\n10 Personal interview with Wu Fenghua, 31 March 1987\n\n11 Records of CPAA\n\n12 Personal interview with Zhongyan, 14 March 1988\n\n13 Km, p. 115\n\n14 Tang Tsou, \"Political Change and Reform,\" in The Cultural Revolution and the Post-Mao Reforms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 223\n\n15 Ibid., p. 224\n\n16 Li Jian, \"Gede yu Quede\" (\"Praise and Shame\"), Hebei Wenyi (Hebei Literature and Art), June 1979\n\n17 Hebei ribao (Hebei Daily), 7 August 1979\n\n18 Guangming ribao (Guangming Daily), 20 July 1979\n\n19 Merle Goldman, \"Intellectual Dissent in the People's Republic of China,\" in Yu-ming Shaw, ed., Power and Politics in the People's Republic of China (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), p. 294\n\n20 Ibid.\n\n21 Liu Binyan, for example, said: \"when literature mirrors what is undesirable in life, the mirror itself is not to be blamed, instead, disagreeable things in real life should be spotted and wiped out.\" For more of his view, see Beijing Review, No. 52, 28 December 1979, p. 13.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212569, "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": 123, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "103\n\nShaw, Yu-ming, ed. Power and Policy in the PRC, Boulder: Westview Press, 1985.\n\nStaan, Richard F. ed. Public Diplomacy: USA versus USSR. Stanford, California: Hoover Institute Press, Stanford University, 1986.\n\nSu, Wenming, ed. China after Mao. Beijing: Beijing Review, 1984.\n\nTang Tsou. The Cultural Revolution and Post-Mao Reforms. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.\n\nThomas, John N. The Institute of Pacific Relations: American Scholars and American Politics. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974.\n\nUphold the Fundamental Principles, Oppose Bourgeois Liberalization. Beijing: Renmin Press, 1987.\n\nU.S.-China Arts Exchange Newsletter. (Irregular, Spring 1980) edited by the Center for U.S.-China Arts Exchange, New York).\n\nUSIA, USIA: Its Work and Structure.\n\nWang, Gungwu. China and the World since 1949: The Impact of Independence, Modernity and Revolution. New York: St. Martin's, 1977,\n\nYing, Hua. \"Youhao, reqing, guangcai.” (“Friendly, Enthusiastic and Glorious.”) Guangming Daily, 19 September 1973, p. 4.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212673, "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": 227, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "208\n\nthe photographs on the period between 1956 and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (Rihoud was again there in 1964 and 1965, and also Rene Rurri) may serve as an example that will encourage purchasing, or at any rate borrowing, this fine book. Of and about these in the context of their time, Professor Spence has commented as follows (pp. 12-13):\n\nThis was truly a time in which revolutionary changes were being attempted by China's leaders, and with the Communist party already close to twenty million people in numbers one would expect dramatic evidence of the new society, or at least of its emerging foundations.\n\nBut as we scan the photographs, we realize how hard such evidence is to capture. Without deep and intimate knowledge of the past realities, how can we truly gauge the depth, the nature or the meaning of the attempted change from the visual record? What we do get here, and often brilliantly or poignantly, is the sense of a country and a people with very little to rely on, where everything is scarce so everything is valued.\n\nThe word poverty seems the wrong one, in the context, for to China's leaders and surely to many of the people themselves after what they had gone through it was survival that was the first priority. Yet the paradox here was that the Great Leap Forward brought not survival but death to millions.\n\nAt other levels, the images speak to us of ordinary things, of children and their games, of the quiet affections of age, of eating as shared relaxation. They speak also, insistently, of organization, of people in lines, of people listed, people marched to orders, people drilled. This the state was proud of, this the state allowed to be filmed, along with the work, the heavy manual work, whether of intellectuals or peasants, backing endlessly at the heavy soil of China with mattocks and hoes, hauling barrows and sacks, pitting muscle against the land. So have farmers the world over laboured, but here the Chinese seem assembled in larger numbers than ever before, and their labour is in a context that is politically orchestrated.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212865, "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": 174, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "159\n\nfor instance, he organized the Shanghai Jewish Youth Association School, or the Kadoorie School, in Hongkew for refugee children. Horace Kadoorie is also active in youth affairs.\n\nReligious Life\n\nIn the 1920s there were two synagogues in Shanghai: Ohel Rachel and Beth Aharon.\n\nOhel Rachel was successor to Beth El, built by Sir Jacob Sassoon. The congregation Beth El had been in existence since 2 August, 1878, although they had used rented space for worship until 1917. Rabbi W Hirsch did not sign up for a second term reputedly because he did not like the wealthy. No other rabbi was appointed. The principal of the Shanghai Jewish School, Mendel Brown, served as rabbi unofficially.\n\n24\n\nIn 1900, a group which thought that Beth El was too relaxed about observation of orthodox traditions left Beth El and organized Sheerith Israel. The new congregation included some of the most illustrious names in Shanghai Abraham, A.E. Moses, and M.J. Isaac, for instance. It built the Beth Aharon Synagogue on Seymour Road, and which was later moved to Museum Road downtown, with funds contributed mostly by Hardoon. The synagogue included space for a Hebrew school (Talmud Torah) as well as a ritualarium (mikveh). 25\n\nA third congregation came into being when Shanghai was inundated by Jewish refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe during the late 1930s. This was Ohel Moshe in Hongkew, built in 1941, architecturally a twin of the Jewish synagogue in Hong Kong. It boasted a capacity for 1,000 worshippers at a time.\n\nThe Jewish cemetery built in 1862 on Mohawk Road was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution a century later.\n\nEducational, Social, and Charitable Institutions\n\nNewspapers\n\nA bibliography of the Jewish Press in China gives six Jewish publications in Shanghai. One of these newspapers, Israel's Messenger,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212867, "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": 176, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "161\n\nI have barely scratched the surface in this overview, but it gives the reader an idea of the vibrant state of the Jewish Community in Shanghai at its peak.\n\nJewish Vestiges in Shanghai in the 1980s\n\nThere were still some physical remains of the Jewish heritage in Shanghai visible during the 1980s.\n\nThe Cathay Hotel, also known as Sassoon House, at the junction of the Bund and Nanking Road, built by the Sassoon interests, still exists today (October 1991) as a hotel, but has been renamed the Peace Hotel. Its ballroom, venue of many elegant tea dances in the hotel's heyday, is now a restaurant serving Western food.\n\nThe Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Hongkew is now the isolation ward of the Shanghai Mental Hospital. A photograph taken in 1984 of the Beth Aharon Synagogue shows the dome of the house of worship intact but the Star of David covered by a coat of paint. The US government was asked to intercede to have this synagogue building preserved, but an article by Sam and Mona Kaplan in the Vancouver Bulletin reports that the building has been razed by a bulldozer.28\n\nThe Jewish Cemetery was demolished during the Cultural Revolution, but its chapel, as of September 1983, still stood, but as a tea house. Hardoon's Aili Garden became the Shanghai Agricultural Exhibition Hall. Kadoorie's Marble Hall has been transformed into the Children's Palace.\n\nNOTES\n\n2\n\nNew York Yeshiva University Press, 1976\n\nOn a recent trip to Shanghai in September 1991 Mr Bramsen found that his grandfather's home had been razed only the year before\n\nThere are still a number of former Jewish residents of Shanghai outside China, including Hong Kong. They are generous in sharing their memories, but they are advancing in years and more than a few of them are getting tired of being asked to recite the same things over and again. A PBS radio programme in Los Angeles featured a number of former residents of Shanghai recalling their life, but these were mostly German Jews who were there from the late 1930s to the early 1950s\n\nCarl T. Smith, Chinese Christians Elites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong Hong Kong, Oxford, New York Oxford University Press. 1985", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213269, "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-1994", "page_number": 91, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "71\n\nMost Chinese will, however, tell you that a dragon has sinews and veins which can be severed. Blood can be spilled. Thus, when the earth's flesh was pierced, blood, in the form of bright red, ochre-coloured earth, appeared during excavations for the construction of Hong Kong's underground railway in the 1970s. This could mean the time had come for workers to down tools. The evil that might follow had to be averted ritually. Taoist priests would then beat ceremonial gongs and offer prayers to pacify spirits of the earth where the dragon's peace was being destroyed. Exorcism in modern day Hong Kong is by no means uncommon (Raceday rites, 1987). Neither is exorcism uncommon in Christian churches. It is mentioned in the Bible.\n\nOne can compare certain Buddhist, Taoist or folk-religion ceremonies, which purify and bestow blessings, with walking through fields in Europe in springtime while conducting a Christian Rogation Service to ensure a good harvest.\n\nInterestingly, some Chinese came to the conclusion during the last century, that foreigners know far more about fung shui than they are prepared to admit. Otherwise, why would they have picked such a fine site (as it was then) for the Governor's residence? Why would they plant vegetation over the slopes of Victoria Peak in which dwells the resident dragon?\n\nReturning to the cutting edges of the Bank of China: a fung shui master is supposed to adhere to strict ethical standards and not do anything which could be construed as the 'black art'. He should not 'attack' a neighbour. However, in the New Territories, for example, a case where a successful family's fortune has suddenly waned has sometimes been traced to the desecration of an ancestor's grave. As a result, revenge against perpetrators was, in the past, not uncommon.\n\nA buried 'person' needs to 'breathe', and, whether he or she can do this properly or not, affects his or her descendants. Some believed Chiang Kai-Shek's rise to power depended on his mother's fine grave. This, the Communists are said to have dug up.\n\nThe People's Republic's 'Red Guards' went to considerable lengths during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) to destroy the 'Four Olds' (old customs, old habits, old culture, old thoughts). These included fung shui.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213323, "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-1994", "page_number": 145, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "126\n\nsite of the battery of old guns covering the harbour, was a small renovated folk religion temple. Finally one elderly man explained that a newly rebuilt temple stood some two miles up the coast overlooking the sea. It had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s. When eventually we found it we were lucky enough to be guided by another elderly man who we had encountered on the approach track. Before we had time to discuss anything whatsoever he asked who we were and on hearing that we were English he immediately volunteered the fact that the English had been to that spot before, to that very temple, which they had attacked. He added that the English 'general' had been killed during the battle and had been buried on the hillside and he pointed out roughly where the grave had been. He explained that it had been plainly visible until 1949 when the Communists had taken over and had had the hillside planted with young trees which had obliterated the grave.\n\nExtremely interesting though this piece of folk memory was, it did not tie in with the sketch map provided by an officer, Lieutenant Ouchterlony of the Madras Engineers, who was present in Chapu during the landings and the subsequent battle. The Left Column and the Right Column both had landed in the bay at the point where the present rebuilt temple stands, and therefore our informant was right to claim that the English had been there. However, whoever had been buried on the hillside at that spot was certainly not Colonel Tomlinson who fell at the joss house marked on Ouchterlony's map much nearer to Chapu. The site of the Joss house marked on the map, where Tomlinson fell, is within a very short distance from the harbour where the battery of old guns now stands and where the local inhabitants were quite certain that no temple had been there within living memory.\n\nThe fallibility of folk memory is well known and it is not too difficult to understand how over the century and a half since the battle took place the scene of the attack on the temple had been transferred to the other temple where a grave, presumably of a foreigner, was accepted as that of the British senior officer who fell that day.\n\nPlates and photographs accompanying this article will be published in a future edition of the Journal - Editor]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213973, "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": 42, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "7\n\n(f) their relationship with the departments of Government and with each other; and,\n\n(g) the degree of control which ought to be exercised by the central Government, having regard to the Letters Patent and Royal Instructions\n\nThe wording reflects close secretariat scrutiny of what some thought to be, if not dangerous, then courageous thinking; there should be care not to conflict with established institutions, there should be no derogation from the existing constitution, and the word 'selection' reassured those who feared politically partisan votes. Public criticism of this was immediately heard, upon reading the related press release, from some of the members of the Urban Council who were jealous for their own prerogatives. The Urban Council, little changed from the Sanitary Board created in Queen Victoria's reign, was mainly responsible for environmental public health, recreation & amenities, and provision of cultural services in Hong Kong Island, Kowloon & New Kowloon; it had 12 members appointed by the Governor, and 12 elected on a single limited but anomalously colony-wide franchise (embracing ratepayers and members of 23 qualifying categories of sane, non-bankrupt adults of 21 or over with three years' residence), with a small number of senior official members. It provided excellent services through the Urban Services Department (USD), but its freedom of speech on matters outside its purview gave it a mixed reputation in some powerful circles.\n\nThe membership of the working party consisted of administrative officers from the middle ranks, considered \"promising\" but not yet authoritative. They were a contract officer with much local government experience in eastern Nigeria and Uganda, an officer with happy experience in the USD and of the Urban Council; the most senior Chinese officer, who had served with the British Army Aid Group against the Japanese and now worked in the SCA; and two other expatriates with various past postings including the NTA. Like Dickinson, all continued to perform their current duties, and remained surprised that with his determination they covered so much ground of consultation and discussion and (under pressure from leave entitlements) reported as relatively promptly as they did; that was on 23 November 1966, by which time the Cultural Revolution was spilling", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213980, "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": 49, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "The report gave thought to the degree of control which ought to be exercised over these new 'creatures of statute' by the Central Government under the Letters Patent & Royal Instructions which were Hong Kong's constitution. Legco should provide by law for central:\n\n(a) right of access to all records, approval and inspection of project plans in certain fields, approval of by-laws, and issue of binding memoranda on such matters as financial procedures;\n\n(b) financial approval or disallowance of annual estimates and loans, and the setting of a rate where a council failed to strike a sufficient or any rate;\n\n(c) audit, including power of surcharge subject to Exco's confirmation; and\n\n(d) direction, removal of powers or dissolution of defaulting local authorities.\n\nOffice accommodation, distinct from any existing for current government purposes, should be provided in advance. Finally, the details of each separate proposal for a new local authority council should be the subject of an inquiry and wide local public consultation before the relevant instrument received approval. The enabling Ordinance should be supported by a large-scale information campaign, to dispel the current lack of awareness. The present Urban Council should co-operate in devising a phased programme for implementation.\n\nThe report was submitted just as the 1966-67 'troubles' were beginning to afflict the streets and resettlement estates of Hong Kong. Little Red Books and parcel bombs preoccupied the Governor and his security advisers, and the Colonial Secretariat which gave the report a lukewarm reception was happy to leave it in the pending trays and to slumber in the background, while other officers placed on special duties dealt with the emergency with panache and publicity hitherto quite unknown in the colony. Just as great post-war events across the border up to 1949 had given reason for Hong Kong's governing minds to forget about Young's municipal proposals, so in 1967 the Cultural Revolution seemed excuse enough to concentrate on civil stability and to forget local participation in the daily administration of public life.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213982, "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": 51, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "the Social Welfare Department), co-ordinated by regional generalist officers comparable with NT DOs, leading to advisory Regional Councils which might eventually become the main report's Local Authorities. They pointed up more outspokenly than the emollient main report the shortcomings of an out-of-touch government administering a non-English-speaking population that was only too open to misunderstandings and misconceptions (such as that taxes levied were drained off to the UK Treasury.) Interim steps should concentrate strongly on building up public confidence in the unaccustomed principles and practice of popular elected representation (the ‘political education' mentioned above.) The provisional system of regional advisory councils, coupled with departmental decentralisation and administrative co-ordination, should then lead to full local authorities in about six years. Meanwhile Tsuen Wan was indeed a unique opportunity for immediate action (the new towns to come of Tuen Mun, Sha Tin, Tai Po et al had yet to be envisaged.) These three semi-dissenters did not co-ordinate their Note with the other.\n\nDickinson has been described by one of his working party as “the least understood and worst treated member of the Cadet Service\" (the original title of Hong Kong's Administrative Branch of the HMOCS, which survived in common parlance long after the absorption into the Colonial Service of the pre-war Eastern Cadetships.) He chose to retire early for personal reasons. It is ironic that in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution overspill, when special duties officers in the defence branch of the secretariat, the SCA and the Information Services Department became so active in devising new ways to win hearts and minds, to keep in touch with the people and to encourage the use of Chinese language, so much of what had been adumbrated in the Working Party Report re-appeared; but because the new ideas now came from well-established senior sources, they became respectable and it was to be long before they offered electoral participation in executive decisions. The SCA became the Secretariat for Home Affairs; City District Officers were created in ten urban districts, and found much to do that had not been done before; City District Committees were established in 1972; a Tsuen Wan District Advisory Board was at last set up in 1977, followed by others; in 1980 a new pattern for district administration was at last suggested, with direct elections to District Boards. But in all these and still later developments that affect present history, there was no official backward recognition that the ground", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214017, "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": 85, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "51\n\nfeet above sea level with the col being barred by a massive stone gateway. This was the Pass of the Wild Geese HEP, said by the local Cultural Site custodian to be one of the Three Passes facing Central Asia defended by the Yang family, and the main defensive point on the former main road, with its old track still visible winding up from the Chinese side and down to the Mongolian plain.\n\nThe aged local custodian pointed out the location of the old temple and identified it as having been dedicated to Wu Lang. It was standing on the Chinese side of the gateway though all that remained of it, apart from the outline of the outer walls, were two tall marble flag-poles, several large inscribed tablets standing vertically on the backs of stone tortoises and a number of pieces of dressed stone and the entrance steps. A modern temple dedicated to Kuan Kung, the Patron both of Loyalty and of Shansi province, has been built on the northern side of the gateway, constructed since the Cultural Revolution. However, the old temple, according to the aged custodian and the local peasant back on the main road, had most certainly been dedicated to Yang Wu Lang whereas, according to a large coffee-table book on the temples and architecture of Shansi published by the Shansi provincial authorities, the old temple had been dedicated to Li Mu, with no mention whatsoever of Wu Lang.\n\nLi Mu, like Yang Yeh, was a soldier renowned for his valour in guarding the northern frontiers against incursions from Central Asia. Li Mu was a general of the state of Chao during the 3rd century BC who always maintained a defensive posture and, ridiculed for it by the enemy, the barbarian Hsiung Nu, a major warring race, he was removed by his Prince. His successor failed miserably; Li was recalled and after intense drilling of his forces Li decisively defeated the Hsiung Nu; he also routed the forces of the neighbouring state of Ch'in. Finally, the ruler of Ch'in [who later became the first emperor of China, Ch’in Shih Huang-ti] succeeded by means of bribes to induce the Prince of Ch'ao to dismiss his great general. Li refused to accept the order to stand down and was put to death. Three months later, in 229 BC, Ch'in declared war and carried off the Prince of Ch'ao, annexing his state.\n\nThe question here is, which is correct? Folk memory claiming that the temple was dedicated to the 10th century hero, Yang Wu Lang or the official publication which claimed that the temple had been", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214119, "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": 187, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "156\n\nwhich came out at the end of the last century (about Europeans living in the Colony), that (Spurr 1995: 48):\n\nThere was no real pleasure, nothing but a heavy and pompous extravagance, with no return on the large sums fooled away, an outstanding ignorance of all the surroundings, the Chinese, their language and their ways, or even of the very place itself.\n\nYet, having said that, today, as in the past, many Europeans do come to Hong Kong and, during their stay, they do learn something about local history, and Chinese customs and culture. This need will no doubt continue. In such cases the RAS can help.\n\nIn addition, a number of scholars visit Hong Kong or write to the RASHKB from overseas. Information has been requested on the pre-World War II Fox Hunt, held at Fanling in the New Territories, details regarding past Hong Kong personalities and wildlife sightings, to give but a few examples.\n\nHong Kong can be proud of its religious tolerance, with regard to temples, ancestral halls and the like, and, when the British took over the New Territories in 1898, on a 99-year lease, they promised that Ching dynasty laws would be retained and local customs respected (Endacott 1958: 38). Consequently, unlike many territories occupied by more oppressive colonial powers, in spite of the British and the Chinese keeping largely apart, an affinity of sorts developed between the two races. Governor Sir John Bowring, too, who chaired RASHKB meetings in the 1850s, disliked weaning the Chinese away from their own religious beliefs and practices (Spurr 1995: 51). A fair amount of local culture has been retained in spite of westernisation and the passage of time.\n\nThis retention of local culture in the Territory means that, if scholars want to study \"things Chinese\" which are closer to customs of the old China, and to visit locations where fewer changes have taken place, they are more likely to come to Hong Kong (or go to Taiwan). Here old customs and the modern can be seen side by side. This is less likely to be the case in the People's Republic where much has been disrupted by the influences of Communism over the past half century, including such events as the devastating Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214202, "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": 60, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "23\n\nYet mime performer, Philip Fok Tat-chiu, who worked for the Hong Kong Government before emigrating to Australia as recently as 1992, although a relative newcomer, seems to have made a success of his life 'Down Under.' The greats in the field of mime include Sid Caesar, the contemporary French master Marcel Marceau and, of course, Charlie Chaplin himself (Lee, 1999).\n\nAnother form of entertainment, Chinese 'cross-talking' (‘double voice' as it is known in Cantonese,) is much like American vaudeville. It needs one serious performer with a deadpan face and one comic to deliver the punchline. Acting out 'sketches,' like those performed by Ho Bo-man and Chou Chi-hung in Guangzhou, using every-day hilarious situations with rapid-fire exchange, amount very much to the art of language and repartee (Cheung, 1996:5). Slang is important. Jokes can be about portable telephones, which no self-respecting person-about-town can manage without, or about climbing up the beam of a torch (flashlight) in the dark. Isn't it slippery and dangerous? What happens when I switch the torch off?! Maybe the banter is stupid, but gags like these can serve a useful purpose. They can help motivate people,' says comedian Harry Wong of Metro Radio. 'Something useful can come out of such jokes.'\n\nAfter the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76) ended the 'Gang of Four' was a popular target for 'quick-fire twosome' acts in China, although many tried (and still try) to steer clear of politics. But unless one possesses an extremely good knowledge of Cantonese there is limited chance of a European understanding a great deal of this rapid-fire talk. In fact at a Chinese banquet, with one European and the remainder Chinese, when the conversation is in rapid-fire Cantonese interlaced with slang, if the gwailo appreciates six out of 10 jokes he or she is not doing at all badly.\n\nOf course there are jokes which people of most nationalities, if they can grasp the language, can laugh at. Like the chap in northern China who always ate at a government canteen.\n\n'All the time cabbage!' he nagged, 'cabbage, cabbage, cabbage! 'Can't you give us a choice?'\n\n'Of course you can have a choice,' came the chef's reply.\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214207, "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": 65, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "28\n\nso different Chinese ethnic sub-groups laugh at each other. In the early 1950s, when many Shanghainese came to Hong Kong from the Mainland, the sally going the rounds among the Cantonese was: First the Shanghainese travelled in a small car. Now they ride in a big car. For the Westerner who is slow on the uptake this means, when they first came to Hong Kong they drove a car. Later, they could not afford it so they travelled by bus.\n\nIn China too, at one stage there was a tendency, as in other societies years ago, to deride cripples and the mentally retarded (Sypher, 1956; 202). In England in the Middle Ages, a hunchback was expected to caper around and amuse others. Jews, the village idiot, and the 'Chinaman' with his pigtail were usually all good, certainly in the 19th century, for a giggle (Pan, 1990; 84). More recently, there was the case of the Duke of Edinburgh meeting some British students studying in China and the Duke saying to them: 'If you stay here too long you'll get \"slitty\" eyes.' Many people seemed to think it was an insensitive remark and in bad taste. A few however felt, no doubt like the Duke himself (and indeed a few Hong Kong Chinese), that it was all intended in good, clean fun.\n\nWe must not forget that a witch was burned alive in Sunderland, England, as late as 1722, which was an occasion of some merriment. Even today many children enjoy 'cruelty' in their humour, such as the slip on the banana skin or the bucket of water tipped on the head. The author recalls how a colleague, a Chinese teacher, was given the nickname of tsoh hau ue (left [sloping] mouth fish) (false halibut) in the 1950s. Although humour can conceal or even help to heal pain, there are people of all nationalities who delight in the misfortune of others, and, even today, a few get pleasure from stoning a hedgehog to death which is stuck in a hedge.\n\nFrequently one hears about oppressive authority in Chinese life and there are sometimes attempts to 'skewer' an incident, by the oppressed, with a good joke. Everyone loves to make the leaders look stupid.\n\nThere is the one about the three Chinese in a prison cell during the Cultural Revolution. The first said: 'I'm here because I supported Deng", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214208, "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": 66, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "29\n\nXiaoping.' The second said, 'I'm here because I opposed Deng Xiaoping.' The two turned to the third who piped up, 'I am Deng Xiaoping.' Deng was, of course, incarcerated for a spell during the Cultural Revolution.\n\nGenerations of Chinese have endured hard lives and they frequently surprise Westerners by laughing at things which are construed in the West as horrible and cruel (Bonavia, 1980:59). 'Blood and guts' at the cinema are examples, although a nervous giggle is perhaps a better description than an outright laugh. Use of this 'safety valve' not only rejuvenates the mind and body but also diffuses anger. Humour and laughter help relieve stress and tension and the immune functions which they bring into being can sometimes help one get out of a trying, embarrassing or difficult situation.\n\nYou will sometimes see a Chinese who has been jaywalking, and has had a close shave with a car, or someone who drops his camera, grinning, or even giving a mild laugh. This reaction provides an escape mechanism. A giggle can make the serious seem ‘unserious' and bring about counterproductive results. Vittachi, the Hong Kong comic, has pointed out to the author that it is by no means confined to Chinese. Other Asians, such as Vietnamese, use 'laughter' to express embarrassment. One not infrequently sees bafflement (or even anger) on the face of a Westerner who tells the Hanoi custom officer that his ticket has been stolen, only to see the officer break into a nervous giggle.\n\nIn fact, the practice is not even purely Asian. The author recalls during World War Two when even British conscripts learned to laugh at the 'horrific' in order to adjust to the situation. If you could go into battle singing the song, 'Hurrah for the Next Man to Die!' you were better able to shrug off death and less likely to go 'shell happy.' Humour acts as a kind of release and can be borne out of pain. Sigmund Freud wrote a dull paper entitled, 'Jokes and their relation to the unconscious,' in which he stated that humorous laughter was a kind of catharsis, a release of tension that returns the body and mind to a state of homeostasis or equilibrium after stress (Freud, 1960).\n\nThe fact that humour can be born out of pain gives rise to the saying: 'I have migraine at the moment and everything seems funny in a peculiar (mirthless) sort of way.'", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214216, "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": 74, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "37\n\n(15) Humour changes over time and many Chinese, for example Singaporeans, have become Westernised in various ways, including regarding their sense of humour.\n\nThe Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976), and its vicious aftermath, even though it was for many Chinese largely of their own making, had a profound effect on China physically,\n\npolitically and morally. But the Chinese have considerable capacity for survival boosted largely by their philosophy of life, acceptance of realism, and capabilities to surmount the vicissitudes of life with understanding, limitless grace and (it must be stressed) with considerable humour.\n\nNevertheless, where there are differences in senses of humour, the more a Westerner learns about and appreciates Chinese culture, or when a Chinese understands Western culture, the more he or she 'extends' his or her own sense of humour in an alien culture. More rigorously chronicled jokes and more well-researched material will assist this process.\n\nBut with time, improved travel facilities and communications, including radio, television, the Internet, other forms of the mass media and information technology, the world is becoming more of a global village. In spite of Hong Kong becoming in some respects more 'Chinese' since the 1997 Handover, from Britain to China (including more use being made of the Chinese language), the merging of western and Chinese cultures will continue. This will, in the end, result in differences being narrowed and Chinese and Westerners laughing more at each others' jokes. Laughter will then cross the Great Wall more easily.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214228, "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": 86, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "49\n\nYeung, Chris (1998a, March 22), 'Broadcaster stays open to debate,' Sunday Morning Post.\n\n(1998b, March 27), 'Civil servants fail to see joke,' South China Morning Post.\n\nZeldin, Theodore (1983), The French, Fontana Paperbacks\n\nNOTES\n\nDiscussion with Howard Young, Legislative Councillor Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the People's Republic of China, 1 February 1999.\n\n2 These appear to be mainly Mainland Chinese jokes with some added, in stages, from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some jokes appear to be 15 or so years behind the times. Many are not really funny. See Internet web page: http://www.sc.cninfo.net/index/new/yml.htm.\n\n3 Carol A. R. Andrews, Assistant Keeper, conducted a 'gallery talk,' April 1997, on Ancient Egyptian Humour.\n\n4 Mr Bean is played by Rowan Atkinson who was said, in 1998, to be Britain's highest paid actor: see South China Morning Post, 15 November 1998.\n\n5 Howard Young, who although himself a Hong Kong Chinese, tells western jokes as he finds Chinese jokes, to use his own words, 'boring;' interviewed by author on 1 February 1999.\n\n6 This is, in other words, the Lun Yu, one of the Chinese Classics which has been the essence of Confucianism for more than 2,500 years.\n\n7 Fok and the author worked together in the Hong Kong Education Department up to 1980.\n\n8 The 'Gang of Four,' which had been centred around Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution, was arrested in October 1976, less than a month after Mao's death. The 'Gang' consisted of Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, Yao Wengyuan, Zhang Chunqiao and the youthful Wang Hongwen.\n\n9 Chinese soldiers too exhausted to march on were taken to the nearest habitation,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214231, "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": 89, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "52\n\nSsu and the Pi-yun Ssu. They were first placed there some three hundred years ago, towards the end of the last fully Chinese dynasty, the Ming and before the overthrow of the Ming by the non-Chinese Manchus.\n\nThe Two Temples in the Western Hills\n\nThe old Kuan Yin Hall of the Ta Pei Ssu X, the fourth of the Eight Great Places in the Western Hills of Peking, is sealed off and not available to the general public. It contains a modern image of the major deity, the bodhisattva Kuan Yin with a Thousand Arms and a Thousand Eyes together with old but refurbished images of the Deva with their name in Sinicised Sanskrit but without providing any hint as to their origins and legends. The statues of the Deva were originally made during the Ming, ca. 1500 AD, and consist of clay reinforced with hemp. They are referred to in temple literature as the Group of 28 Great Immortals +. The image of the Thousand Arm and Thousand Eye Kuan Yin was replaced by the Japanese after the Second World War in an attempt to make amends for having taken the original and melted it down for the brass content during the War.\n\nThe Kuan Yin Hall in the Ta Pei Ssu contains in addition to the one bodhisattva, Kuan Yin, twenty-eight images, which can be categorised as follows: twenty-six deities with Sanskrit titles including the five T'ien-wang [Guardians] together with two Chinese folk religion deities. Of the twenty-six, five are deities specifically referred to separately in the Eight Classes of Supernatural Beings? [Deva, Mahoraga, Kinnara, Asura and Gandharva]\n\nIt is lamentable that the Kuan Yin Hall is closed to the public; however, fortunately, there is also a Hall of Bodhisattvas in the second temple, the Pi-yun Ssu #, some five kms. to the north of the Ta Pei Ssu, which is open to the general public and it too contains the Twenty-eight Deva; however, the images here have all been made within the past fifteen years, probably replacements for the original images destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and yet again without any signs to indicate that they are anything other than Chinese deities. The fact that all but three were originally Hindu deities brought to China by Buddhism is not explained in temple literature, though the monks un-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214317, "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": 175, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "139\n\nThree of the four lesser halls, though as large as the Jade Emperor Hall and Xu Hall or nearly so, are dedicated one to the Three Matrons of fertility and childcare; one hall to the wife of Xu, whose personal names were Heshi, known as the Palace of the Consort - Furen Gong - in which her image stands on the uppermost tier of three with the Lord of Time and his sixty minions, the Tai Sui, occupying the lower two tiers; a third hall to Guan Gong, the patron deity of loyalty and honour, and patron of soldiers; whilst the fourth hall, much smaller, is virtually empty apart from a single, small pottery image of a wealth god. This spread of cults within one temple is typical of the majority of the larger temples throughout Chinese communities.\n\nAll of the images within the temple complex are of comparatively recent manufacture, certainly since the early 1980s. The original images were destroyed during the years 1949-1976, during one or more of the political campaigns against superstition or social reform, mostly during the first days of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 when the temple was gutted. Some of the new images have been well made, artistically finished in paint on plaster and concrete. Others are crude, poorly finished and eyesores for posterity. The image of Xu, however, is one of the better ones and far from crude workmanship.\n\nThe grounds and halls on the day we were there in the Autumn of 1998 were seething with devotees, many of whom had travelled some distance to pay their respects to the deities. Long strings of firecrackers were being let off and amidst the deafening racket and the palls of smoke from these and burning offerings, the whole area was what Chinese know as re'nao, excitement and noise.\n\nAcross the road, however, in the comparatively small, enclosed and dilapidated garden, silence reigned and not a soul was to be seen. On the far side of the square artificial lake in the centre of the garden is a lengthy row of small, weathered and battered modern images, all unnamed, which on closer examination appeared to be many of the emperors of China since time immemorial. A Nine Dragon Spirit Screen stretches out behind them. Of greater interest were the half a dozen small rooms, similar to horse boxes with half-doors, which lined the rest of the far side, each containing a small tableau of life-size simple and gaudily painted plaster and cement figures. These were identified as episodic scenes from the life of Xu, ranging from his miraculous birth,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214357, "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": 215, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "180\n\nOne of the many deities canonised by Jiang at the Investiture was Tai Sui, the Ruler of the Year. In the Feng-shen Yanyi he is also known as Yin Jiao and under that title is usually represented on altars by one image. In southern Chinese communities, however, as Tai Sui he is more often portrayed by sixty separate images each representing a year of the sixty-year cycle of the Chinese calendar, and devotees wishing to seek his aid will place spirit money offerings under the image in the group representing the year of the devotee's birth. In a number of the smaller popular religion temples in Hong Kong and Macau several rows of Tai Sui images, depicting all sixty, line one of the sidewalls of the main hall. Although in a few temples each of the sixty images is carved with unique characteristics, in the majority they are merely sixty identical heads, each mounted on a frame concealed under a red cloth robe. Even when the deity is portrayed as a single image, normally he can easily be identified by the pile of spirit money placed under his image.\n\nSome months later, this time in central Shanxi province, we came across a former temple which had been converted into what can only be described as a \"waxworks\" museum of celestial and historical deities. The contents of the former temple had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, whilst the structure had recently, in 1995, been turned into a museum. It stands on the major highway between Taiyuan, the provincial capital, and Pingyao, to the south, but rather surprisingly no attempt seemed to have been made to advertise its presence to passing motorists. The halls had been labelled guiding visitors to Historical Heroes, The Eight Immortals, Mythological Worthies and the Underworld.\n\nThese two examples, and there are probably more, are local provincial or county initiatives to remind Chinese of their cultural, feudal heritage but without offering any opportunity for worship or reverence. Similar refurbishing has taken place of many of the old, larger Buddhist and Daoist monasteries in northern China but with a difference. These too are places where visitors can nowadays pass several hours of pleasurable 'tourism' but a number of them have also reverted to being working temples and monasteries with priests and rituals. The weekend visitors from the cities enjoy the scenery and ambience and in some temples offer up incense without let or hindrance to one or more of the major deities. Although to foreign visitors what we saw", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214364, "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": 222, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "188\n\ncults. Popular religion is an amalgam of Chinese peasant beliefs with shamanism and the use of magic. The reason for the interdict on popular religion, apart from the reference to it as \"purely superstition,\" would appear to be because it is not in any way an organised religion with a controlling malleable body and having to obey orders in a chain of control.\n\nIn the first flush of the Communist victory in 1949-1950 temples in a great many places were closed down, taken over and used for community purposes such as granaries, police and even local military barracks, schools or créches, or destroyed. The few that remained, having been allowed to lie unused and untouched, were mostly laid waste during the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976] when the young Red Guards saw it their duty to destroy all elements of old ways. Since the early 1980s more and more religious establishments within Mainland China have opened or, in the majority of places, re-opened. They have been refurbished and new statuary made to replace those destroyed during the early days of communist rule or during the Cultural Revolution.\n\nMany temples have now been renovated and restored to their old glory with statuary created by young artisans guided by the elderly whose memories of the iconographic detail has proved, on the whole, to be comparatively poor. As an example we can see in Kuan Hsien near Chengtu in Szechuan province, the former image of the major local deity, Li Ping, the official who designed and arranged the irrigation system which made the Chengtu plain the major agricultural region it is today. Previously he was portrayed as a standard scholar-official, sitting, dressed in robes and cap but without a unique characteristic. Today, however, he is depicted as a politicised middle-aged man, standing in a Stakhanovite pose typical of the nineteen fifties and sixties. This in no way inhibits devotees today from kneeling before and revering him.\n\nMany of the new images depict dynastic scholars, officials or women, with well formed and not unattractive heads and faces, and swathed in silken robes which conceal a basic frame constructed of slats of wood unlike pre-1949 images the bodies of which were made in the whole. The images of small children usually accompanying the image of maternity goddesses are almost without exception modern children's dolls without their clothes whereas during dynastic times the children were all equally well carved as the major deities. It is worth adding how truly hideous and garish some of the new edifices are.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214365, "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": 223, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "189\n\nIn late 1997 in northern Shansi province whilst touring round village temples as well as those on high mountains it was soon apparent that the Cultural Revolution had laid the majority of village temples low and left them in ruined dereliction. However, Buddhist temples far from the cities had been more fortunate and these still contained undamaged images albeit in a poor state of care. Many of the village temples were being used as squatter residences usually for a single elderly person, with the walls crumbling, the roofs matted with grass and weeds between the roofing tiles, doors and windows agley and hanging on one hinge, and in a few places the images of the old deities still lying on their backs on the floor where they had been flung thirty years earlier by the Red Guards, and awaiting rescue. Villagers were still interested in their temples but have not the funds to do anything about renovation, at least for yet a while. The elderly remembered the gods and the majority had small cheap images, on their household altars or paper icons pasted to their walls, mainly of Kuan Yin and Kuan Kung.\n\nOne temple stood out as a born-again Buddhist establishment, with an in-house priest and several ladies ranging from very old to a young woman in her late twenties who all cared for him and hung on his every word. They were punctilious with their greetings and their constant invocation of O-mi-t'o Fu, as well as with their gentle pressure on their foreign visitors to feel the sanctity of the place and, in particular, of their priest. The temple, a recently refurbished building of wood and tiles on the site of a former temple, had no feel of age nor did it in any way bring to mind its former self, the building which had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Sadly, it was a utilitarian construction with a few religious appendages, and similar in style to many an old village school with little if any of the sense of numinous felt in old temples.\n\nAlso during this visit to northern Shansi we came across the old temple which had been dedicated to Wu Lang. This was described in detail in Volume 37 in an article entitled the Yang family of Generals.\n\nMainland press reports during the years 1995-6 have frequently referred to provincial crackdowns on the construction of 'illegal' religious temples as well as the excessive building of tombs. Some regions, it was reported, had been seeking to promote tourism by engaging in superstitious activities on the pretext of respecting \"the traditional culture of the motherland.\" The People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the party, called for a complete ban on Chinese tourists paying homage at temples and monasteries, even though such practices have been tolerated", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214368, "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": 226, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "192\n\nfunded for the temple.\n\nA logical progression, though always thought impossible in Mainland China, has been the deification of the late Chairman Mao. In Taiwan we have seen images of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen on altars, revered as are the scores of historical worthies and heroes, but the thought that one day an image of Mao Tse-tung would grace the altar of a Chinese temple was so far fetched as to be ludicrous. None the less, Reuters printed a picture of a peasant in a rural temple in northern Shansi in early 1996 standing before a life-size image of Mao on the altar. Another sighting, of the small white bust of Mao on a household altar in a village on the banks of a river in the upper reaches of Yünnan province during the summer of 1997, was easily explained. The altar bore no other images and it was through this village and across the village's bridge, during the Long March, that the Chinese Red Army passed leaving behind a strong folk memory.\n\nMao, it must be remembered, was revered as a god in his lifetime, with cadres and Red Guards bowing before his image during the Cultural Revolution, and reporting the day's activities. And it has not been uncommon for taxi drivers in some of the major cities during the late 1980s and early 1990s to carry pictures of Mao suspended from their rear-view mirror as a protective amulet, though this has been more of a gimmick, but the idea of a statue of Mao on the altar in present day China is still astounding.\n\nWhat is less strange, perhaps, is the description of a Mao image being carried at the head of a religious procession in Fukien province, providing \"legality\" for this ritual procession of deities. Posters portraying the main Central political leaders were also borne aloft at the head of the procession.3\n\nNo doubt there have been zealous cadres carrying out the anti-feudal, iconoclastic purges following the party line and, recalling the clue provided in the report on Hupei, it would seem more than likely that the large number of illegal temples and shrines destroyed are in fact the small rural shrines dedicated to the Earth God which farmers have in their fields. By and large, it has been quite obvious that in general people will continue to go to temples to offer prayers and incense, and that temples and the deities will thrive, or possibly simply survive.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214463, "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": 321, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "288\n\n[illustration XX].\n\nThe cab driver from Shanghai who took us to Sungkiang had never heard of Ward and we therefore stopped the first old man we saw and asked whether he had ever heard of the American and if so, where had the temple been? Yes, he had heard of an American but knew no more. He recommended that we visited the local government Historical Department. On arrival we disturbed an elderly lady who was taking her mid-day siesta sprawled across her small upright desk. She shot to her feet and ushered us into the office of the Director/Curator who having heard what we were seeking called for a conference. We sat around a large table for a matter of minutes whilst the Director described the problem, - to find the temple dedicated to ‘Hua-de' - as Ward was described phonetically; whereupon he then announced that he knew where it used to be and that we should repair there straight away. He took the elderly lady on his moped and led our cab through the back streets and finally down a narrow tortuous lane until we came to a pair of large iron gates which we entered and found ourselves facing a modern church. We were led first into the offices nearby where it was explained that the priest was out but the young woman on his staff would show us their church. It proved to be a Roman Catholic church built in 1982 containing the statuary and altars one would expect. The decorated ceiling was pointed out as a speciality; meanwhile, a Dutch lady and her husband who were accompanying me were examining the electric fan covers, all beautifully embroidered with grinning cats! A typical Chinese touch. It was explained that the high altar stood over the grave of Ward and that the foundations of the four walls were the original foundations of Ward's temple, long destroyed even before the Cultural Revolution. So, we thought, that was that. But no, the young woman had a request to make. Would we as foreigners please visit their landlord who was causing them some trouble with his high rents, and try to persuade him to be more lenient. It then transpired that the landlord was the abbot of the local Buddhist monastery, which squares the circle. The grave of Ward, a Protestant, revered as a Chinese Confucian hero, with a temple in his honour, now lies under the altar of a Roman Catholic church, whilst the land itself is the property of the local Buddhist monastery in a Communist state.\n\nThe altar table in the temple raised by Chinese mandarins, bore his tablet, ritual candle sticks and incense pot, and was flanked by scrolls", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214507, "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": 365, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "334\n\ntherefore to the outside of the building, which is of neo-gothic design. Although built in the 1930s, long after Germany ceased to hold sway over Tsingtao, the cathedral was built largely with German money. However, before it was completed the money supply was drastically reduced by the incoming Nazi government. Hence the inside, had we been able to see it, would have shown such incongruous features as flat ceilings instead of the vaulted and beamed roof that the outside would suggest. Legend has it that during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, two over-zealous Red Guards climbed the towers with the intention of removing the crosses from the top, but they fell to their respective deaths before completing their mission. As the cathedral is in a very narrow street, it is not possible to get a good camera angle unless one walks somewhat away from the front, down to the street to the left, where a lively street-market gives interesting and contrasting foreground possibilities - the whole looking rather medieval. In fact, the street market is worth a visit in its own right, being very extensive and lively. A chopper seller (as used in Chinese cooking and violent crime) was being very vocal at the time we were there.\n\nHills and beaches - the east of the city\n\nWe had organised a picnic lunch from the hotel. Given that time was tight we did not want to spend an hour or so hidden away in a restaurant. Instead, we took our picnic lunch up Qingdaoshan Hill, formerly Bismarck Berg. Access to the hill was somewhat unusual, being through a small museum on Jing Shan Road. The museum was in fact closed, but our guide managed to navigate us through and out of the back door, whence up the hill. A look-out post at the top gives good panoramas of the city and out to sea. The picnic lunch was adequate, but Philip Bruce appeared to be very pleased that he had brought his tin of sardines from the Co-op in Worthing.\n\nFortified and refreshed, our next mission was to find any remains of the German cemetery. Its location was clear enough from the many old maps that we had between us, but the guide was not hopeful of finding anything of interest. And so it turned out, or almost. The cemetery is now Baihua Park, and is remarkable for a reason that cannot be much further removed from cemeteries. On entering the park we noticed a wedding couple, and another - and another. There must have been upwards of 30 or more newly married couples wandering around", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214515, "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": 373, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "342\n\noccupation, from 1889 to 1930. I found the exhibits and many photographs more appealing than some of the captions (memories of the \"years of pain\" etc).\n\nMost of the rest of the interesting parts of the island are to the left of the ferry pier. The first attraction is the Ching naval barracks, beautifully restored and now looking as splendid as it must have done when it was first built. It is reputed to be the best (or only) example of its kind in China. Looking rather familiar in its design - it is built around three consecutive courtyards stretching back from the main entrance - one would be forgiven for thinking it was in fact a large temple, with its colonnades and red painted columns. But the naval barracks it certainly was, even though it was relegated to be the naval canteen during the period of British occupation. The whole complex is now open to the public as a museum; exhibits include a number of guns and a large model of a battle between the Chinese and Japanese navies. This latter is rather a generous gesture, given that the entire western-built Chinese navy was destroyed by the Japanese in 1894/95. Resurgence is evident, however, as plastic construction kits of today's Chinese navy can be purchased throughout the museum.\n\nLeaving the waterfront after the Chinese barracks one finds a dusty road on which stand a number of houses, again in good repair and apparently used. Standing proudly by itself is the Masonic Hall, now emblazoned with a red star in place of the masons' square and compasses. In the museum there was for sale a fat (324 pages!) little book in Chinese all about the British occupation. I bought a copy for RMB 10, not so that I could read it, unfortunately, but because it contained three contemporary maps of the island in English. These showed that the other houses around might have included the Surgeon Commander's Residence, the Coal Contractor's Residence and the Accountant Clerk's Residence. Exact identification proved difficult as some of the roads and paths had moved from their original positions.\n\nMoving towards the west we found what must have been the cemetery, but it was clear that nobody was welcome to enter - the gates were well locked and the walls were high. Peering through the cracks did not reveal any remains of gravestones. Perhaps these had fallen victim to the enthusiasm of the Cultural Revolution, along with the two churches, of which there was no trace either.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214722, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 137, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "101\n\nThey have been banned ever since.\n\nOne Chinese woman complained to the Author that, in her family, heirlooms were always handed down from men to men -- never to women.\n\n15 Women still do not work in tunnels because men believe they bring bad luck.\n\n16 Only since 1994 have women been allowed to inherit land in the New Territories -- say from a parent - if the owner dies intestate.\n\n17\n\nE.g. during the ten-year Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214855, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1999", "page_number": 270, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "238 \n\nToday, globalisation is going full steam ahead. Who could have forecast in the 1960s, that most of the little compradors' shops on street corners, with their delicious kum wah hams hanging from ceilings, would be nudged out by mighty supermarkets?\n\nWho could have guessed that, with globalisation of palate, McDonald's would become 'haute cuisine' for young Chinese many of who are now overweight?\n\nOf course things were cheaper then and, at my Chinese wedding banquet on the Queen's Birthday in 1960, at the old Sun Ya restaurant on Nathan Road, the cost was an exorbitant HK$130 for each circular table of 12 guests. We tipped $10 a table. That was the going rate. On the afternoon of our wedding day my wife and I were invited to the garden party on the lawn at Government House. In those days people were proud to receive an invitation from His Excellency just as, more recently if they care to admit it, they are proud to receive an invite to the reception on China's National Day.\n\nBut wages for old one hundred names (the man in the street) were low and there was little in the way of social amenities. My Chinese amah was paid $160 a month with half a day off a week. She was lucky. Many received far less and no time off unless they specially requested it. People did not complain. They knew things were much worse in China where famine raged after the failure of the 'Great Leap Forward.' Hong Kong citizens queued up at the post office, in the early 1960s, to send food parcels to relatives on the Mainland. Later Hong Kong changed and, after the 'Star Ferry Riots' of 1966 and the protracted riots of 1967 (an overspill of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution), Hong Kong became richer and conditions for the man on a tram began to improve.\n\nCorruption was rampant in those early years before the setting up of the ICAC, although, in my over 26 years of government service working in education, I personally was never once solicited. It was more common in departments such as the Police, Public Works and New Territories Administration. The receiving of presents, however, had to be watched. After the riots, a watershed in many ways, Hong Kong became richer with, more recently, a higher GDP than that of Britain. A large Chinese middle-class formed.\n\nPage 270\n\nPage 271", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215084, "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-2000", "page_number": 180, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "Taiyue, is also known as \n\nTaisui Xingjun \n\nDangnian Taisui \n\nZhiping Taisui \n\nTaisui Ye \n\nTaisui Dijun \n\nAku A \n\nA \n\n值干大歲 \n\n大歲爺 \n\n大歲帝君 \n\nTaisui Yin Yuanshuai \n\nYin Jiao Jiangjun \n\nYin Tianjun \n\n人成殷元帥 \n\n殷天君 \n\nYin Gao \n\n殷過 \n\nZhimian Suiyun Taisui Shen Yin Jiao \n\n六十甲子本命神 \n\nTian Xian Liushi Yuanchen \n\nLiushi Jiazi Benming Shen \n\nDevotees often refer to the Taisui of their particular year as \n\nBenming Yuanchen \n\n本命元辰 \n\nDuring the Cultural Revolution in a Shanghai Temple of the City God, Red Guards were reported having forced a devotee, an elderly lady, to break up one of the sixty wooden images of Taisui with a hammer \n\nPage 180\n\nPage 181", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215116, "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-2000", "page_number": 212, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "169\n\nthe hills. In temples in and around Hsintien and Mucha Wang Gong is revered as the protective deity (with the pair being revered in a few places but still known as Wang Gong) with his [their] annual festival celebrated on the 10th day of the fourth lunar month, but largely without the great majority of devotees realizing the original identity of the deities. Wang Gong A is also referred to as Weng Gong and Huang Gong A, both of which are almost certainly erroneous titles due to mistaken homophones.\n\nIn and around Hangzhou they are known together as Er Da Ming Huang [The Two (Generals) of Tang emperor Ming Huang]. A fierce image of Zhang, with his mouth wide open used to stand on a minor altar in a small temple near Donghu, a city some sixty miles upstream from Hangzhou. Devotees there believed that pain could be cured merely by touching the abdomen of the image whilst throwing a few coppers into its mouth. Two large images of Zhang and Xu in an old temple some fifteen miles east of Hangzhou, destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, have been replaced with modern images with the image makers being guided by the elderly from memory. This temple stands out in the countryside with the nearest village some half a mile away and with the catchment area for contributions for the rebuilding extending some ten miles in all directions. The refurbished temple has yet [early 1994] to have the two dozen aides flanking the side of the main hall completed, though the images of their main deities and their consorts have been finished. They are regarded as the local protective deities.\n\nIn 1963 in Hong Kong, in a Chaozhou community squatter-shack temple on Lion Rock hillside above Kowloon [now long demolished], the two deities, represented on a framed paper icon on the main altar as two relaxed, seated mandarins in floral robes, were first identified as \"The Two Loyal Dukes\" or \"the Two Loyal Saintly Lords\". The two deities were later identified by several devotees as Wang Zhang Ek and Wang Xu Elf. The two mandarins, with long black beards, were identical and were prayed to as the patron deities and protectors of Chaozhou people.\n\nIn 1927 Goodrich in Beijing recorded seeing images of “two famous generals of the Tang dynasty, Zhang Xun and Xu Yuan” in the Dongyue Temple to the east of the city.13", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215127, "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-2000", "page_number": 223, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "180\n\nXu Yuan and Zhang Xun, two loyal Tang generals who fell in battle with the rebels. They are clan patrons and revered as protective spirits. A modern image of Zhang Xun on a rural altar near Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, has replaced the one destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215324, "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": 101, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "49\n\nSecond: deities only to be seen on Hainan island and not carried abroad by emigrants\n\nThird: major deities uniquely Hainanese\n\nFourth: secondary deities uniquely Hainanese\n\nFifth: deities shared with other ethnic Han Chinese groups\n\nSixth: Images on altars of aides to Hainanese deities\n\nSeventh: deified Hainanese locals in both Hainan and South-east Asia\n\nEighth: unidentified images in Hainanese temples believed by the temple custodian to be uniquely Hainanese.\n\n2: Uniquely Hainanese gods\n\nDeities not noted beyond the shores of Hainan island\n\nThese are the deities to be seen only on Hainan island and have not been carried abroad by Hainanese emigrants:\n\na] The Five Marquises, Wu Gong LA, were all exiled to Hainan, four by Qin Gui [1090-1155], the Prime Minister of the Southern Song who is best known as the Minister who ordered the execution of Yue Fei, the hero who became the patron of soldiers. All five are revered in a shrine in the southern suburbs of Haikou where Hainanese honour the memory of the 'five patriotic officials of the Tang and Song sent into exile' on their island. It was first built in 1617 and is dedicated to the Five: Li Deyu, Li Gang, Li Guang, Hu Chuan and Zhao Ding. Four of these officials, that is apart from Li Deyu, were exiled for their opposition to the traitor Qin Gui. Their images portray them today, reconstructed following their destruction during the Cultural Revolution, as almost identical standing officials, dressed in red robes and all with black beards.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215346, "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": 123, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "71\n\nobvious to any Chinese with an ounce of nous. Two years later he wrote a play, Hai Rui Dismissed, purporting to be about Hai Rui. This was seen as a covert attack on Mao Zedong's purge of Marshal Peng Dehuai who had openly blamed Mao for the 1959 famine. The purge of the Peking hierarchy led by Yao Wenyuan, a Communist political writer in 1965 [who was later one of the Gang of Four], is usually seen as the overture to the Cultural Revolution in China, Hai Rui being used as a symbol for Peng Dehuai, Mao's fallen rival.\n\nIn a Hainanese community temple dedicated to the Jade Emperor near Bukit Mertajam in northern Malaysia two images flanked the main deity, on his left hand his Fourth Daughter and on his right Luo Yanhua, about whom nothing more is known other than she is claimed to be a unique Hainanese deity. Her image has not been seen or recorded anywhere else, hand, and aide to the Fourth Daughter.\n\nAlthough Lishan Laomu is primarily a Chaozhou local folk religion cult goddess she is also worshipped widely in Hainanese temples where she is regarded as a Hainanese cult. Lishan Laomu is her more popular title rather than Lishan Shengmu, though considering the ambiguities in legend, title and the initial character, it is open to question whether we might have more than one deity here. Three different characters for Li, all homophones, have been noted. The first means black, the second pear, and the third black horse. The first is the more popular version in central Malaysia and Hong Kong. The second appears to be the character preferred by the Hainanese, and the third has only been encountered in Taiwanese temples. She was referred to in a Saigon Hainanese temple as either Yimei Niangniang 懿美娘娘 or Yide Niangniang 懿德娘娘.\n\nAn elderly lady temple keeper in Kowloon approached the deity and \"introduced\" me to Lishan Shengmu as ‘a foreigner who wished to disperse the mists of his ignorance.' She told me that Miss Fan, a Daoist nun, had been summoned by Tian Hou to Heaven to be trained to become an Immortal and is now a caring spirit known as Lishan Shengmu, the Saintly Mother [or Matron] Lishan.\n\nIn an interesting but typical misconception an odd title of a deity was noted in a temple in Lincoln Road in Singapore where the custodian who claimed to be Hainanese also claimed that all the deities were", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215353, "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": 130, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "78\n\nHainan island as well as within Hainanese communities in south-east Asia. Although their legends are unique to Hainanese they are similar in style and format to those told in other ethnic groups.\n\nSadly, most of the rural temples on Hainan island itself have little left of their original images following the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. It is fortunate that we do still have several Hainanese communities in south-east Asia where little has changed over the past century. However, intermarriage between Hainanese devotees and those of other Han ethnic groups has meant that to identify cults as uniquely Hainanese has become that much more difficult.\n\nNOTES\n\n1\n\n2\n\nPopular or folk religion is an amalgam of Buddhist, Daoist and local beliefs ignored by Confucianists, Buddhists and Daoists as well as by the majority of educated Chinese.\n\nHengwa is sometimes referred to as the Puxian sub-group.\n\nHokkien is the Fujian linguistic group word for Fujian people as well as their language. Minnan is the area of southern Fujian province from which many immigrants to Taiwan and South-east Asia originated and is a linguistic sub-group of Hokkien.\n\n4 Buddhist and Daoist images on such altars have not been included in this article, even though a number have been seen on folk religion altars in Hainanese temples, as they are all revered China-wide.\n\n5 Ma Zu is primarily the Fujian community title for Tian Hou.\n\n7\n\nBoth Third and Fourth are deities that have been noted on Hainan island and within Hainanese overseas communities.\n\nAn entirely different deity, the Saintly Matron of Wenzhou, Wenzhou Shengmu would appear not to be connected in any way with Wenzhou Houwang. Nor has she been noted on altars within the overseas southern Chinese communities. She has only been noted by William Mesny who saw an image of her in Zhejiang province in 1896 [doubtless connected with the local coastal city of Wenzhou], and suggested that as her surname appeared to have been Lin she may well be Tian Hou, the patron goddess of seafarers.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216042, "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": 341, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "275\n\ntitles of the god”. \n\nThe third hall contained Guan Yin, as the 'patron of offspring', with statues of the Buddhist trio Dicang Wang etc., about her. A special little shrine to the left contained the 'thousand-handed' Guan Yin. \n\nDoré added that a visit to a smoky grotto, reeking with the acrid odour of 'joss-sticks' rounds off the tour of the cult buildings. Here there were two ugly statuettes, Guan Yin and Yanguang Pusa, the Bodhisattva of Eyesight: strings of cash hung as ex-votos for the former. In the depths of the grotto, sticks of incense were burning night and day before the statue of one, Pei Toutuo, a Hunanese [so said the monks] who discovered gold in what was then called Fuyu Shan E. He was said to have built the temple with the proceeds of his mining and the temple name was then changed to Jin Shan, Gold Mountain. \n\nA square artificial lake enclosed by a stone balustrade is referred to as the First Spring under Heaven after the waters were declared to be the sweetest for brewing tea. Not surprisingly a tea house offering tea brewed with water from the spring is served to today's visitors. \n\nMy wife, eldest daughter and I visited the Jin Shan Temple during a cold spell one March in the mid-1990s and found to our disappointment that the images were all modern, replacing those destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. However, along the leading edge of the main altar we recognized some twenty or so small images of the Sinicised Vedic deities similar to those I wrote about in Vol. 38 of JHKBRAS. The fact that the great Qing emperor Qian Long had a particular love for the monastery at Jin Shan, referred to earlier, may explain why these Vedic images are also present on the altar in the Jin Shan Si, possibly copied from the images in the temples in Beijing's Western Hills, again connected with the early Qing. \n\nAnother highly visible pagoda, known as the Sengjia Ta, stands on top of the Dingshi Shan, just under a mile south from Zhenjiang's former southern gate. It was built on this site during the Ming having been moved from its former location during temple reconstruction.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216107, "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": 406, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "340\n\nand the 1967 Riots. The former were sparked by a five-cent increase on the lower deck of the Star Ferry. Nevertheless, the root cause was largely the community's displeasure with social conditions, shortage of schools, housing, and the like. It was reported that in 1966 in the district of Tsz Wan Shan, in Kowloon, with a population then of 70,000, there was not a single telephone. The Kai Fong Association requested that at least a few public phones be installed. Soldiers marched down Nathan Road with fixed bayonets during the 1966 Riots. The protracted 1967 riots were a spill-over from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Firecrackers were banned from then on. The military kept in the background during the 1967 Riots because of fear that China might react. The riots badly affected community stability and, in 1968, office space in Chung King Mansions, in Tsim Sha Tsui, was advertised at 60 cents a square foot.\n\nThe 1966 and 1967 riots were really a watershed. From then on, the government started to listen to the populace more. Social conditions improved, and Hong Kong started a process of de-colonisation. In 1972, government servants were instructed to use the word 'territory' rather than 'colony', other than in a historical context. The Colonial Cemetery became the Hong Kong Cemetery, and so on. A Hong Kong identity and a larger middle class began to form.\n\nIt is interesting to recall that the sparks which ignited the 1956, the 1966, and the 1967 riots all occurred in Kowloon. Hong Kong Island has generally been a more peaceful place. That was why, when I came to the colony in the mid-1950s and there was talk of building a cross-harbour tunnel or a bridge, some Hong Kong Island residents expressed fear, if this happened, of being 'swamped' by 'hordes' from Kowloon.\n\nCorruption\n\nCorruption had long been a serious concern in Hong Kong, and, as the Territory became richer, the problem became more serious. When a colleague of mine said there was a price for everything, our old boss soon shut him up. That was part of the trouble. Most Europeans did not appreciate the magnitude of the problem. I recall a Chinese girl telling me, in 1955, that her grandfather had been caught by a policeman smoking opium. The old man gave the copper $20, and the whole matter was conveniently forgotten about. Squeeze affected the Chinese", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216164, "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": 463, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "397\n\nThe result of the Confucian education is supposed to be the formation of a highly virtuous character....The chief energy of those who have taught it has been expended in the endeavour to give it practical effect on the individual, the family, and the nation.1\n\nIn regard to the depopulation at Shek Pik, it is curious how this was repeated at Tong Fuk, another old village four miles to the east, where the 198 persons recorded at the Colony Census of 1911 were survivors of the much larger population of some 700 persons claimed before the onset of disease sometime in the second half of the 19th century. Interviewed in 1971, the elders had been most emphatic about this, on the basis of information handed down by their fathers' generation... 'There was not a single empty or ruined house [before the epidemics struck],' or so they claimed. Later on, in the 1910s, when my oldest informants were then in their teens, the situation worsened again, with two persons dying every day. 'No sooner had we taken out one body for burial, than we had to start all over again.' As at Shek Pik, altered, meaning adverse, fung-shui was blamed for these disasters. 'For we Cantonese, fung-shui is vital,' stressed one of their number.\n\nThe caption to Plate 25, the rebuilt Tianhou Temple at Chiwan, Shenzhen, can be extended here. I omitted to mention the famous well, prominent in the foreground, with adjoining plaque,\n\nAs mentioned in the related text, the temple's long history and cultural importance had not saved it from destruction. By the end of the ten-year period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) only the foundations survived, and what remained of its historic buildings had been reduced in height and roofed over to provide barrack accommodation for a unit of the People's Liberation Army, still in occupation at the time of my first visit in 1983. The temple's fine stone and wood carvings had gone, along with the many donated fittings and repair tablets that would have been kept within its walls. However, one tradition had survived the decades of Communist ideology.\n\n'This was both the theory and the aim. However, Edkins concluded that despite the intention, 'it has not made them (the Chinese) a moral people. Many of the social virtues are extensively practised among them, but they exhibit to the observer a lamentable want of moral strength. Commercial integrity and speaking the truth are far less common among them than in Christian countries. The standard of principle among them is kept low by the habits of the people.'", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216311, "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-2003", "page_number": 70, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "19\n\nestablished to restore order within the temple's community of resident monks. In 1944 this committee restored the Da Xiong Bao Dian, and the next year, 1945, the Bao Ta. Once the Sino-Japanese War had ended, in 1946 life in the temple returned to a resemblance of its pre-war normalcy. However, the tranquility which existed within the temple for the next three years was suddenly disrupted when the Communist's captured Shanghai in May 1949 and proclaimed the People's Republic in October 1949. With all the disasters the temple had survived over the previous 900 years, the worst was yet to come.\n\nPeople's Republic, 1949-2003\n\nIn June 1949, one month after their capture of Shanghai, the new Communist government took over the temple, and on October 1, 1949, the day celebrating the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the Red flag of the P.R.C. was flown from the top of the pagoda. This unprecedented disrespect shown by the new regime to the temple by flying its flag from the pagoda was only the first in a series of incidents which illustrated the temple's now endangered status. The temple grounds were drastically reduced in size by at least two-thirds when their garden area was seized by the state and converted into Longhua Park in 1954. The temple's halls were temporarily appropriated by the government in January 1956 for a series of meetings held between local government officials and Chinese businessmen to explain and then celebrate the new policy of abolishing private enterprise in favor of a new system of joint private-state companies. The celebration involved a party for 2,000 people which undoubtedly included activities such as smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol which are contrary to the Buddhist faith. This temporary appropriation of the temple by the government for non-religious purposes was herald of worse things to come during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).\n\nIn the summer of 1966 Longhua Temple suffered a devastating series of events over a one month period which destroyed nearly all vestiges of its centuries old heritage. On August 24, 1966 a mob of more than 1,000 Red Guards (Hong Wei Bing) rushed into the temple and in one day destroyed all of the temple's Buddha statues, library of books, treasures, and art work. The next day, August 25, the Red Guards returned with the intention of destroying the Longhua Pagoda (Bao Ta), which we've seen had probably been built in the Northern Song", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216317, "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-2003", "page_number": 76, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "25\n\nYin. While Guanyin has compassionate mercy for those in need, it is Da Shi Zhi who possesses the power to actually carry out her acts of kindness. The San Sheng Dian houses by far the oldest of Longhua's three bronze bells, this one supposedly dating from 1132, which would also make it the oldest historic relic the temple possesses today. The hall itself dates from an 1884 reconstruction, when it was rebuilt to replace an earlier structure destroyed during the Taiping rebel attacks on Shanghai in 1860-1862. The hall was last restored in 1986.\n\nImmediately behind the San Sheng Dian is a walled garden with trees which unfortunately is closed to the public. Inside this walled garden is a fifth main hall, the Abbot's Quarters (Fang Zhang Shi), which is for the private use of the resident monks and their master, the Fang Zhang. It was the only hall which the monks maintained control of during the Cultural Revolution. Normally it is kept off limits to the public and cannot be visited. However, the author was able to steal a glimpse and found that the hall was furnished with rows of large armchairs, and lacked any large statues. Possibly it is a modern day form of the Meditation Hall (Chan Tang). At the far left end of the hall is a small office decorated with framed color photos of the temple's Buddhist leaders posing with Communist Party leaders such as Jiang Zemin.\n\nBehind the Abbot's Quarters is the sixth and final courtyard, and the sixth hall on the central axis, the newly built two-story Scripture Hall (Cang Jing Lou). This modern building holds most of the temple's few genuine relics, including a library of 7,000 Qing Dynasty volumes; a Ming Dynasty gold seal given to the temple in 1598 by the emperor Wanli (1573-1620); a Ming Dynasty gold-plated bronze Buddha statue; Tang Dynasty scriptures; and a copy of the Heart Sutra dating from the year 1098, the fifth year of the Zhe Zong reign (1085-1100) of Emperor Zhao Xu of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1126). Exactly how these relics survived the destruction of the Taiping Rebellion, the lengthy military occupation of the Min Guo era, and the Cultural Revolution is unclear. Possibly they were donated to the temple sometime later. Unfortunately the public is not welcomed to visit this sixth hall, and the relics are kept hidden from view, although photographs of them appear in a recent pamphlet sold at the temple's bookstore.\n\nHidden in a seldom visited corner of the temple grounds on the east side of the Fang Zhang Shi's walled garden is a smaller garden", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]