[
    {
        "id": 215961,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 260,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "194\n\npart in shaping the openness Ch'ea expressed once he had heard about the Christian message from these two Chinese colporteurs. Would he have rejected it if the speakers were Scottish missionaries? It is highly probable that he would have resisted such an obvious foreign intrusion. But as he began to read the Delegates' Version of the New Testament presented to him by A-Wye, Ch'ea read a Sacred Sutra (Shèngjīng23) very different from the texts read by Hóng Xiùquán (1814-1864) twenty years earlier. Previous translations had been prepared primarily by foreign missionaries, always in consultation with some \"native informants,\" but hardly proper persons qualified to act as \"expert consultants\" on translation problems. The Delegates' Version, on the contrary, was the result of a rigorous process of interaction between foreign missionaries and traditionally trained Chinese informants, among them the young scholar, Wáng Tāo.24 Among their translation goals was the concern to create a translation attractive in style to a relatively educated Chinese person, in essence, a Bible with a Ruist flavour. When Ch'ea read the Delegates' Version of the New Testament, he felt the influences of a Ruist mind shaping the ideas of the text in numerous obvious and more subtle ways. In addition, and this very much due to Legge's personal commitments regarding the so-called \"term question\" debates, Ch'ea read a Shèngjīng which referred to \"God\" as shàngdì, the classical term in the Ruist canonical texts of the Book of Historical Documents (Shūjīng or Shàngshū) and Book of Poetry (Shījīng) for the supreme \"Lord on High.\"26\n\n25\n\nNo precise record of the dialogue between A-Wye, the colporteur, and Ch'ea, the keeper of the Poklo temple to Master Kong, was ever made. What is relayed through a letter conjointly written by Legge and Chalmers in 1856 is the following. Since A-Wye and his colleague intended to leave Poklo very soon for other areas in eastern Guangdong, they presented Ch'ea with a copy of the Delegates' Version of the New Testament and then proceeded eastward, promising to return sometime later. Their discussion had apparently focused in part on passages describing Jesus' dialogue with the Jewish literatus, Nicodemus (John 3: 1ff) and the Samaritan woman (John 4), dealing with the question of",
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    {
        "id": 215962,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 261,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "195\n\n27\n\nbeing \"born again\" (P. chóngshēng) and the nature of true worship.\" After reading and pondering over the meaning of some New Testament passages, he became convinced that the \"worship of his ancestors was contrary to the word of God,\" probably another topic discussed at some length with the colporteurs. Consequently, he \"defaced the tablet\" for his family's ancestral spirits with a chisel, and committed himself to a God to be worshipped, as described in one of the above passages, “in spirit and truth.\" Through these undoubtedly painful steps in the initial process of intellectual conversion, primarily through his dialogue with A-Wye and reading the Delegates' Version of the New Testament, Ch'ea began walking in the shadowlands between major religious traditions.28\n\nWhen the pair of colporteurs returned to Poklo in early May and sought out Ch'ea to follow up their initial interview, they found a man already wanting to be \"more fully instructed and baptized.\" On this basis, the colporteurs apparently urged Ch’ëa to come with them to Hong Kong, bringing along evidences of his spiritual transition. Taking along \"in a napkin two small idols”, one having been in the Ch'ea family for three generations, Ch'ëa followed them to Hong Kong and met for the first time \"Pastors Li (Lǐ Yǎgè, James Legge) and Ho.\"\n\nwas a\n\nWhat kind of a person did Legge and Ho meet? Unlike an octogenarian Daoist priest who had visited Hong Kong in 1854 from one of the Daoist temples on Mount Lo-fou, a man who sought out Legge and returned instructed but not baptized, Ch’ëa \"plain-looking man, without much education\" but \"sincere in his profession and honest in the statements he made\" (\"as far as we are able to judge,” Legge carefully qualified in addition).29 After some discussion and six weeks of instruction, Legge confirmed for his English audience the normative evaluations typical of Christian religious conversion, stating that Ch'ea \"gave us, indeed, much reason to believe that he was born of the Spirit.\"30 What Legge and Chalmers did not tell at this time, and is only recalled much later as part of a small set of Reminiscences of Prof. Legge at Oxford, is the kind of religious insistence driving Ch'ea to Hong Kong.",
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    {
        "id": 215990,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 289,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "223\n\nstamp in Hong Kong in 1994. For those who have purchased a copy of this book, the author is willing to send a copy of this stamp. Those with philatelist interests who have not been able to obtain the book may also contact the author.\n\n7. See the numerous references to Wong Shing in Carl Smith's Chinese Christians, and Legge's reference to Wong's Christian character in 1859 to counter public doubts in Britain about the authenticity of the conversions of Chinese Christians (EMMC, April 1859, pp. 266-267). After Legge departed for the last time from Hong Kong for England in 1873, Wong Shing and Wáng Tāo purchased from the London Missionary Society the Anglo-Chinese Press through Legge's arrangements, and so initiated the first major Chinese language newspaper published by Chinese editors.\n\n8. Nothing previously was known about Luó Zhōngfán until research in Legge's personal library uncovered his work. It has been discussed in two essays by Lauren Pfister, \"Some New Dimensions in the Study of the Works of James Legge (1815-1897): Part II,\" Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 13 (1991), pp. 33-46, and in a more extensive manner in the essay, \"Discovering Monotheistic Metaphysics: The Exegetical Reflections of James Legge (1815-1897) and Lo Chung-fan (d. circa 1850)\" in Ng On-cho, Chow Kai-wing, and John B. Henderson, eds., Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts and Hermeneutics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 213-254. Wang Tāo passed through different jobs as an aid to Walter Medhurst in Bible translation during the Delegates' Committee meetings (1847-1852), later working with Legge on the Chinese Classics (1862-1873). In the period between 1868 and 1870 Wáng spent nearly two years with Legge and his family in Scotland collaborating on the Chinese Classics and learning much about English and European cultures. How much Wang's work actually influenced Legge's translations and interpretations of the Ruist canon has been discussed in detail in my article, “王韜與理雅各對新儒家憂患意識的回應”戟林啟彥,黃文江主編《王韜與近代世界》(香港:香港教育圖書公司,2000),頁117至147, an English version being published a year later as \"The Response of Wang Tao and James Legge to the Modern Ruist Melancholy\", History and Culture (Hong Kong) 2 (2001), pp. 1-20. Wang Tāo's writings on those European experiences and advocacy of institutional change in China catapulted him into the status of a well-known reformist figure in the 1870s and 1880s, making it possible for him to return to Shanghai as a leader in non-traditional education. His career was chequered by covert associations with the Taiping insurgents and habits which called his character into question in some circles. A substantial and earlier study of Wang's life has been written by Paul Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang Tao and Reform in late Ch'ing China (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974). It now is also available in a Chinese version, published by a mainland Chinese press.\n\n9. Numerous details about these people have been provided by Carl Smith in his Chinese Christians.\n\n10. A moving depiction of Liang's early role as the first Chinese evangelist and of some of his sufferings has been published in the first volume of the series of books by A. J. Broomhall entitled Hudson Taylor And China's Open Century",
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    {
        "id": 215993,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 292,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "226\n\nKangxi was an earlier Manchurian emperor who had followed the movements of Catholic missionaries with great interest, both impressed by some and later revolted by others. His imperial son and successor, the Yongzheng emperor (ruling from 1723-1736), castigated those following the \"Lord Of Heaven\" as heretics (viduan) in his commentary to the seventh maxim of his father. Legge translated and commented on Yongzheng's authoritative interpretations of the Sacred Edict in lectures presented at Oxford's Taylor Institute in 1877, and later published them in Hong Kong under the title \"Imperial Confucianism\" in the sinological journal, China Review 6:3-6 (1878), pp. 147-158, 223-235, 299-310, 363-374. A good discussion of the impact of the Sacred Edict as part of the educative dimension of the Qing dynasty's civil servants is provided in Victor H. Mair, \"Language and Ideology in the Written Popularizations of the Sacred Edict,” in David Johnson, et al., eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 325-359.\n\n20. See the description and reflections of a British journalist at the scene in China Mail #803 (July 5, 1860), pp. 106-107.\n\n21. His age was given in Legge's writings on Ch'ea. The fact that he had a son is verified through the records of the Chinese congregation of Union Church in Hong Kong, where a man named Che who joined the church in the late 1860s is identified as \"the son of the martyr.\" This information was gleaned from Carl Smith's archives.\n\n22. Following Lewis Rambo's lead, we will assume that conversion is a “dynamic, multifaceted process of transformation\" including, at the very least, elements of \"cultural, social, personal, and religious systems.\" See Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 6-7.\n\n23. This is one possible literal rendering of the translated title for the \"Bible\", the phrase also being used as a general reference term in traditional China for the Ruist canon. In contemporary China, that latter association is almost completely lost.\n\n24. One Chinese scholar believes that Wang's influence on Walter Medhurst's translation commitments in the Delegates' Committee were very extensive, but offers no precise historical documentation to support the claim. It is certainly sufficient to know that Wang was Medhurst's \"native informant,\" for the influences could not help but be there, especially when questions of style and phrasing more suitable to Ruist tastes were raised. See Lee Chi-fang, Wáng T'ao (1828-1897): his life, thought, scholarship, and literary achievement (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, 1992, printing 1973).\n\n25. This is very generally confirmed in I-Jin Loh's essay, \"Chinese Translations of the Bible\", published as part of An Encyclopedia Of Translation: Chinese-English, English-Chinese, eds. Chan Sin-Wai and David E. Pollard (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1995), pp. 54-69. Loh explicitly states, \"It is generally agreed that the literary style of this version [in both Old Testament and New Testament], which had the benefit of help from a Chinese scholar by the name of Wang Tao, was superior to the rival version [later prepared by American missionaries]\" (p. 57). The \"literary style\" was the form of literary conventions.",
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