[ { "id": 204475, "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-1962", "page_number": 107, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "96\n\n5\n\nJ. W. HAYES\n\nSee a tablet in the Chow-Wong School at Kam Tin.\n\n* Papers 1899 p. 188.\n\n* Papers 1899 p. 188.\n\n'Lockhart's figures, given in Appendixes 3 and 5 to his Report are not exact, and he has emphasised his sketchy estimate of the land population \"in default of any reliable statistics possessed by the Chinese Government\" and said he had been unable to obtain even an estimate of the boat people Papers 1899 pp. 187,189. Taking areas within my own detailed knowledge I have found that villages established long before 1898 have not been included in the returns or else have been linked with other villages without special mention, The population figures for the Islands, in particular, are not above suspicion and are probably greater than shown in Appendix 5.\n\n* Papers 1899 p. 189.\n\nPapers 1899 p. 189.\n\n10 Universal ownership was clearly shown by the land survey which followed the lease of 1898. This was carried out by surveyors and staff on loan from the Government of India, and was followed by a registration of titles which was enlivened by land courts which sat to determine possession in disputed cases. The survey sheets and the Crown Rent Rolls which form the schedules to them can be found in the District Offices of the New Territories Administration and they are a valuable record of land ownership and land classification at the time of the lease.\n\nAt Shek Pik and Fan Pui in 1958 out of sixty-six families four owned between 3-4 acres, nine between 2-3 acres, nineteen between 1-2 acres, fourteen owned between a half to one acre, twelve owned between a quarter to a half, and eight between 10 to 25 acres. Except a few late arrivals, therefore, every family owned land of its own. The position was much the same as in 1898.\n\nThe same was true of Wei Hai Wei, of which Johnston wrote Lion & Dragon, p. 148, \"Whatever the faults of the Chinese social system may be there is no doubt that in Wei Hai Wei it very largely accounts for the complete absence of pauperism (though no one is rich) for the orderliness of the people (nearly everyone has a stake in the land and has nothing to gain and everything to lose from disorder), for the uninterrupted succession of father and son in the homesteads, and for the long pedigrees attested by family graveyards and ancestral tablets\".\n\n11 See Johnston Lion and Dragon pp. 134-54. I have compared customary deeds of sale and mortgage from the New Territory between the years 1898 and 1958 with those cited by him and find that they invariably follow the same form (see especially Johnston pp. 144-145). These deeds are known as white deeds (as in Ching times) and had not been put through the formal process of registration in the District Office which would turn them into legal documents; or, as formerly in Ching days, in the Magistrate's yamen when they became red deeds (RI #). They were common until the Pacific war and even now are occasionally known to be drawn up in addition to the Memorial registering the conveyance in the Land Office. To select an example at random here is one from Shek Pik on Lantau Island dated the second year of the Republic (1913) which reads", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204633, "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-1963", "page_number": 114, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "CHEUNG CHAU\n\n101\n\n11 \"The whole of the island (Cheung Chau) was adjudged to belong to the WONG family and it is let out to various tenants on leases renewable every five years. All these leases were registered in 1906\". Administra-tive Report for 1909, District Officer, New Territories. But see also G. N. Orme's unfavourable opinion of the initial survey and Crown rent roll in Sessional Papers 1912, p. 46.\n\n12 For example, before its tax-lord rights were extinguished (along with others') by the Hong Kong Government after 1898 as \"not compatible with the principles of British administration\" (Orme, Sessional Papers 1912, p. 46), the LI Kau Yuen Tong of Sha Wan appears to have owned a considerable proportion of all the cultivated land on Lantau island under an imperial grant made in the Sung dynasty (see LO Hsiang-lin \"The Sung Wang T'ai and the location of the Travelling Courts by the sea-shore in the Last Days of the Sung\", Journal of Oriental Studies III No. 2 (July 1956) p. 217, note 29). Nineteenth Century land deeds from the village of Shek Pik show that much of the village land paid tax to the LI family, a burden which was passed on to the purchaser when a \"sale\" took place. It is not known whether this Tong owned land elsewhere in the present New Territories but its main estates lay elsewhere. It is curious how the WONG Wai Chak Tong maintained its tax-lord position whilst the LI family's was extinguished.\n\nIt is a pointer to the island's increasing prosperity, as well as to its favoured geographical situation, that when the Chinese Maritime Customs first began to operate in the Hong Kong region in 1887 they set up a post on Cheung Chau. This had previously been operated by the Canton authorities as part of the \"blockade\" system set up in 1868-71. See Stanley F. Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs (Belfast, William Mullan & Son, 1950) pp. 385-6, 584-6 and 708, and his earlier Hong Kong and the Chinese Customs (Shanghai 1930) which I have not yet seen. See also note 15. Old villagers on the Lantau coast opposite Cheung Chau can remember having to pass through the customs every time they came to the island to buy daily necessaries and sell their produce in the market.\n\nIt is not the place to discuss whether Cheung Chau's expansion was due to the rise of Hong Kong, or whether it was already in a flourishing condition by the time Hong Kong's expansion began in the 1840's, but available information points to a community which was already well-established and prosperous by the Hsien-feng period (1851-61), which would be rather early for Cheung Chau to owe its rise mainly to Hong Kong. The preamble to the tablet in the defence bureau mentions that \"our forefathers came and lived in Cheung Chau several hundred years ago\"; whilst the attention of pirates in the early years of Hsien-feng, also mentioned in the same tablet, seems more conclusive proof of the island's established prosperity than any other. A spate of repairs and expansion seems to have been going on apace in the T'ung-chih period (1862-75) when most of the island's temples were repaired, the CHU family ancestral hall enlarged, many old houses were built or reconstructed, and the public buildings erected which these tablets commemorate.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204915, "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-1965", "page_number": 23, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "18\n\nS. G. DAVIS\n\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\n1. Bard, S. M., Chiu, T. N., and So, C. L. \"Stone Ring at Loh Ah Tsai, Lamma Island, Hong Kong,\" Asian Perspectives, VIII.\n\n2. Ch'en Kung-che (1957). \"Archaeological Surveys and Excavations at Hong Kong,\" Kao Koo Hsueh Po, No. 4.\n\n3. Davis, S. G. (1952). The Geology of Hong Kong (Archaeology), Government Printers, Chapter XI, pp. 188-194.\n\n4. Davis, S. G. and Tregear, M. (1961). \"Man Kok Tsui. Archaeological Site, 30, Lantau Island, Hong Kong,\" Asian Perspectives, IV.\n\n5. Davis, S. G. (1962). \"Hong Kong University Team Archaeological Activities for Period 1958-61,\" Asian Perspectives, V, 53.\n\n6. Davis, S. G. (1964). \"Rock Carvings at Shek Pik, Lantau Island, Hong Kong,\" Asian Perspectives, VII, 19-21.\n\n7. Finn, D. J. (1933-1936). \"Archaeological Finds on Lamma Island, Hong Kong,\" The Hong Kong Naturalist, Reprinted 1958, Ricci Hall Publications, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.\n\n8. Heanley, C. M. (1928). \"Hong Kong Celts,\" Bull. Geol. Soc. of China, VII, 209-214.\n\n9. Heanley, C. M. and Shellshear, J. L. (1932). A Contribution to the Prehistory of Hong Kong and the New Territories.\n\n10. Heanley, C. M. (1935). \"Fields of Hong Kong,\" The Hong Kong Naturalist, VI, 233-239.\n\n11. Heanley, C. M. (1938). \"Letter to the Editor on Archaeological Finds in Hoifung,\" The Hong Kong Naturalist, IX.\n\n12. Laufer, B. (1909). Chinese Pottery of the Han Dynasty, American Museum of Natural History Publication, East Asiatic Committee.\n\n13. Laufer, B. (1914). Chinese Clay Figures, Part I, Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, Publication 154.\n\n14. Laufer, B. (1917). The Beginnings of Porcelain in China, Field Museum of Natural History, Publication 192, Anthropological Series, XV, No. 2.\n\n15. Lo, H. L. (1956). \"The Sung Wong Toi and the Location of the Travelling Courts by the Seashore in the Last Day of the Sung,\" Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, 185-217.\n\n16. Maglioni, R. (1938). \"Archaeological Finds in Hoifung District, China,\" The Hong Kong Naturalist, No. 8, 208-214.\n\n17. Maglioni, R. (1940). \"Archaeology: New Nomenclature,\" The Hong Kong Naturalist, X, No. 2, 130-133.\n\n18. Maglioni, R. (1940). \"Some Aspects of South China Archaeological Finds,\" Proceedings of the Third Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East, Singapore, 209-229.\n\n19. Maglioni, R. (1952). \"Archaeology in South China,\" Journal of East Asiatic Studies, No. 2, University of Manila, Philippine Islands, 1-20.\n\n20. Meanelly, E. (1962). \"Excavations at Man Kok Tsui on Lantau Island,\" Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 2, 103-108.\n\n21. Schofield, W. (1935). \"Implements of Palaeolithic Type in Hong Kong,\" The Hong Kong Naturalist, VI, Nos. 3-4, 272-275.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205970, "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": 50, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "J\n\nHONG KONG CADETS, 1862 - 1941\n\n45\n\nThe recruitment of cadets changed the nature of administration in early colonial Hong Kong. The cadets were professionals, unlike the earlier officials who were a mixed lot from variegated backgrounds. They spent their working lives—20 to 30 years on average—in one or other of the Eastern colonies, for some of course transferred from, or to, Hong Kong. Since their profession was administration, and the government of Hong Kong was mainly a matter in those days of running a municipality—between 1886 and 1939 only four new departments were established, the District Office New Territories after 1899, the Kowloon-Canton Railway in 1906, and air services and broadcasting in 1929—they soon introduced routines and procedures, organised the files, and set the administrative machine into grooves, along which it ran, on the whole, smoothly and uneventfully for many years. Several governors evinced surprise at the little work they were called upon to do, for ways of doing things had soon become fixed and immutable, and colonial officials were reluctant to change well-tried methods. Sir George Bowen, Governor 1883-1885, declared that the routine and absolutely necessary work of Hong Kong administration \"seemed to me from the first to be much lighter than that of any Crown Colony which I had previously governed\";40 and Sir Frederick Lugard, Governor 1907-1912, of the same opinion, was amused by the bland efficiency and meticulousness of his able Colonial Secretary, Francis May. In Lugard's day, as Margery Perham writes, the officials \"were certainly efficient; the place was small and administration was conducted according to a system which had been seventy years in the making\". Of course, before 1941, most of the problems dealt with by administrators in Hong Kong tended to be workaday ones, and dramatic solutions were hardly called for until the post-1945 period, when massive immigration changed the face of things.\n\nWith regard to administration, then, Sir Hercules Robinson's scheme had worked. It also produced results in another respect, interpretation. Eitel wrote in 1878: \"There are now very few departments where there is not someone who can read a Chinese petition for himself and efficiently check the oral interpretation of the native clerks acting as interpreter. The Coroner's Courts, the Registration Office, and Chinese Protectorate, even the Colonial Secretary's Office, are well provided with a sufficient check on...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205996, "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": 76, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "THE BEGINNINGS OF TAIPINGSHAN\n\n71\n\nwhich the European had no place and was not really expected to penetrate. Two Europeans (Richard Oswald and F. J. Porter) did apparently have lots there though how they came by them is not recorded, and the American Baptist Mission Board had a school house and small chapel.\n\nA third area was Tai Ping Shan where many Chinese lived in matsheds, but it is not known how many lived there in these early days.\n\nBut one inconvenient feature soon revealed itself as the demand for building land increased in the Colony on the establishment of regular government in the middle of 1843. The town was restricted in its possibilities of development to the east by the reservation of 'Government Hill' (the area on which the Government Offices now stand) for Government purposes only. Beyond Government Hill to the east lay the military cantonment and, since the main part of the town was now inevitably fixed where the present central district stands, the only possible direction which expansion could take, other, that is, than up the mountainside, was to the west. But, between Inland Lots 43 and 10 on the Queen's Road lay the Upper Bazaar, an uncomfortable fact which not only meant that there would be a large number of Chinese-type houses in the middle of the 'European' town (with their attendant rather greater risk of fire) but that their presence would interfere with the proper development of the area with drainage and streets and so on. In terms of extent, the Upper Bazaar was occupying almost 11 acres of valuable building land for which speculators would be willing to offer far higher Crown Rents than those which the then inhabitants were paying. So almost inevitably, the suggestion came to move the Upper Bazaar lot-holders away to another location.\n\nThe story of the removal of the Upper Bazaar is of interest on several counts: it is the first 'resumption' of land for public purposes in the history of Hong Kong, a process since employed on an ever increasing scale by the Government for the improvement and redevelopment of the environment. It provides us with an insight into government practices of the day and the cumbersome manner in which decisions could be taken and implemented, and also of the role of the Press at that time. Finally, it led to the establishment, as a matter of deliberate Government policy, of a", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206277, "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": 94, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "88\n\nCARL T. SMITH\n\none of the leading brokers and charterers of emigrant ships. In front of his lots he erected a wharf which he leased to the Hong Kong, Canton and Macao Steamboat Company after its organization in 1865. In 1860, he appeared in the Courts on the charge of piracy. In response to a request of the Mandarin of his home district in Hoi Ping for assistance in suppressing some Hakka bandits, Achoy had chartered the vessel Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy from Kwok Acheong, the P. and O. Company's compradore. Engaging some Europeans in the Colony he took them up to Hoi Ping where they attacked some Hakka villages. Achoy pleaded that he had not realized that this would be against British law and therefore threw himself upon the mercy of the court.19 He again assisted his home district in 1865 by supplying the local militia with western-made armaments. This earned him official recognition and a biographical notice in the Hoi Ping Gazetteer. In later years his constitution was affected by habitual opium smoking and he did not participate actively in public affairs. He died in 1871, leaving a large fortune.20 In 1857, the editor of The Friend of China described him as being \"no doubt the most creditable Chinese in the Colony\".\n\nTang Aluk, another contractor, though not as much of a community leader as Tam Achoy, was a generous benefactor of worthy projects. He was the largest contributor to the Chinese school book fund of 1859, contributing sixty dollars; Tam Achoy contributed fifty dollars and Kwok Acheong, the P. and O. compradore contributed twenty dollars; all other contributions ranged from ten dollars to fifty cents. The fact that Tang Aluk's name was that of \"Number Six\" indicates he was of humble origin. He began as a stone cutter. Most of them were Hakka, and it is probable that Aluk was of this group. In time he built up a successful contracting business. At his death in 1887 he left a large estate, much of which was in landed property. The administration of his estate involved many lawsuits among his heirs. A newspaper commentator observed that the estate was a gold mine for the legal profession as suits and appeals dragged through the courts for several decades after his death.2\n\nTHE MERCHANTS GROUP\n\n21\n\nHong Kong had difficulty in attracting merchants with capital. We have mentioned the abortive efforts of Chinam and several", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206324, "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": 141, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "THE DISTRICT WATCH COMMITTEE\n\n135\n\n4 The first census of the Island in 1841 gave a population of 5,650. In 1844 the population was given as 19,009. See Historical and Statistical Abstract of the Colony of Hong Kong, 1841-1931, Hong Kong, Noronha, 1932. The validity of the first census has been questioned by G. R. Sayer in his Hong Kong: Birth, Adolescence, and Coming of Age, London, Oxford University Press, 1937, p. 104.\n\n5 The China Review, vol. 1, 1872/73, p. 333.\n\n6 Ibid., p. 334.\n\n7 E. J. Eitel, Europe in China, The History of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Kelly and Walsh, 1895, p. 282. The Man Mo Temple stands at the western end of Hollywood Road. It was originally a shrine patronised mostly by fishermen before 1841. For a description of the temple see Charles J. H. Halcombe, The Mystic Flowery Land, London, Luzac and Co., 1896, ch. xxvii. The temple was run by a committee appointed by the Five Districts and the committee used to hold an annual ceremony at Mount Davis for the dead... in celebration of the gods of literature and war: see the Hongkong Government Gazette (henceforth cited as the Gazette), 12 February 1879, p. 52. The properties of the Man Mo Temple were transferred to the Tung Wah Hospital by the Man Mo Temple Ordinance, No. 10 of 1908. Before the committee of the Tung Wah Hospital was organized, the Man Mo Temple Committee appears to have been recognised as representing the opinions of respectable Chinese.\n\n9 J. W. Norton Kyshe, History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Noronha and Co., 1898, vol. 2, p. 86. See also the reports of the Registrar General for 1866 and 1867 in the Gazette.\n\n9 Ibid., p. 86.\n\n10 In 1867 the police force consisted of 89 Europeans, 377 Indians (chiefly Bombay sepoys) and 132 Chinese, many of whom were employed as marine police. See Eitel, op. cit., pp. 445-6.\n\nAs late as 1893 there were only two European policemen who could act as proper interpreters and only five who could speak some Chinese. See the Report of the Commission on the Po Leung Kuk, Hong Kong, Noronha and Co., 1893, p. 81.\n\n12 Correspondence on Hong Kong Gambling Houses, London, H.M.S.O., 1869, p. 21.\n\n13 Eitel, op. cit., p. 447.\n\n14 Gazette, 6 January 1872. The Police Commission set up by MacDonnell was not unanimous: broadly it agreed to recommend an Anglo-Chinese police force. The recruitment of Chinese police had been strongly advocated by Dr. Legge, as most likely to bring good understanding between the government and respectable Chinese', G. B. Endacott, History of Hong Kong, London, Oxford University Press, 1958, p. 160.\n\n13 Osbert Chadwick, Reports on the Sanitary Conditions of Hong Kong, London, H.M.S.O., 1882, p. 42.\n\n16 'Registration of Chinese Partners', Hong Kong Sessional Papers (henceforth cited as Sessional Papers), No. 43 of 1901, p. 22. The text reads: 'Head and District Watchmen employed to patrol the streets by day and by night, are to be recommended by the Chinese themselves, because they know whether they are trustworthy or not. If these men, however, should fail to maintain their good character and should be found to be unfit for the post by the Chinese residents of the district to which they belong, they should be dismissed at any time, in order that they may have something to fear'. The translation is clearly a bad one.\n\n17 In 1883, the Registrar General, Frederick Stewart, used the district watchmen to conduct an enquiry into all Hong Kong schools. In the 1897", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207048, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1974", "page_number": 119, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "The Hong Kong Region\n\n113\n\nfu. In the long entry on hills and streams, which covers three chuan (6-8), only one local feature is named: the Pui To or Castle Peak hill. There is another single entry, for Tuen Mun—the old name for the settlement at the foot of Castle Peak—in the chüan (10) dealing with customs and check points. Only one monastery, the Hai-kuang Ssu of Hsin-an city, is included in the chüan (14) dealing with Buddhist and Taoist temples: by comparison, 37 columns are given to those of Kuang-chou, Nan-hai and P’an-yu, and no doubt with good cause. Only when we come to the chüan dealing with residences (13) and tombs and graves (15) does Hsin-an attract a little more attention from the compilers.\n\nThe entries in chüan 13 and 15 identify those items that most interested scholars attracted to local history and show how Hsin-an has been notable for two widely different topics. It had been one of the areas that had sheltered the last two boy emperors of the Sung in their flight and final struggles against the victorious Mongol invaders of their empire: and it was a coastal district that had forever been plagued by pirates and bandits. These entries are typical items of Chinese historiography and relevant to the scholar official view of Hsin-an.\n\nOne item, in chuan 13, relates to the temporary stay of the Sung court and army in Kowloon in the winter months of 1278. A watchtower had been constructed as one of the measures taken to deal with the near-starvation conditions that afflicted the fugitive army. The tower was used as a vantage point from which to look over the encampment. Relief visits were made to any dwelling from which no kitchen smoke was seen to rise in the early morning. This is a graphic and unusual way of conveying an impression of impermanence and suffering. The second entry on the Sung is in chüan 15 which deals with noted graves and tombs. It relates to the grave of Lady Chin-fa, also in Kowloon. The brief statement is that the empress Chi-yuan lost her daughter by drowning, and that she ‘filled the body with gold' for burial at Kwun Fu Mountain.2\n\n1KTKKCY 13/5. Two Sung 'travelling courts' are also recorded for the Hsin-an district in this section. See also Lo 1956.\n\n2KTKKCY 15/2. Lo (1963) renders this as 'made a gilt statue', p. 67. The Government of Hong Kong established a Sung Wong Toi memorial park in Kowloon in 1960, and to mark the occasion the Chiu Clansmen's Association published a memorial volume edited by Jen Yu-wen entitled Sung Wang T'ai Chi-nien Chih which usefully brings together many old writings on this subject.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207068, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1974", "page_number": 139, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "THE HONG KONG REGION\n\n133\n\nHayes, J. W., 'Old Ways of Life in Kowloon: the Cheung Sha Wan Villages\" in Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. VIII, No. 1, January 1970: 154-188.\n\nHo, Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1959.\n\nHsieh, Kuo Ching, 'Removal of Coastal Population in Early Tsing Period', The Chinese Social and Political Science Review, XIII, 1929: 559-596.\n\nHummel, Arthur W. (Editor), Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period (1644-1912), Taipei, Ch'eng Wen Publishing Company, 1967. Reprint of the first edition, Washington, United States Government Printing Office, 2 vols., 1943.\n\nKrone, Rev. Mr., A Notice of the Sanon District. C.B.R.A.S. Transactions VI, 1859: 71-105. Reprinted in JHKBRAS 7, 1967: 104-137.\n\nLo, Hsiang-lin, 'The Sung Wang T'ai and the Location of the Travelling Courts by the Sea-shore in the Last Days of the Sung' in Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. III, No. 2, July 1956.\n\n-, (and others), Hong Kong and Its External Communications before 1842. Hong Kong, Institute of Chinese Culture, 1963. An English version, abbreviated, of the Chinese edition of 1959.\n\nMayers, W. F., Dennys, N. B. and King, C., The Treaty Ports of China and Japan. A Complete Guide to the Open Ports of these countries, together with Peking, Yedo, Hong Kong and Macao. London, Trübner & Co., Hong Kong, A. Shortrede & Co., 1867.\n\nMurphey, Rhoads, The Treaty Ports and China's Modernization: what went wrong? Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, No. 7, Ann Arbor, 1970.\n\nMontalto de Jesus, C. A., Historic Macao, International Traits in China Old and New. Macao, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, 1926.\n\nNeumann, C. F., Translations from the Chinese and Armenian with Notes: 1 History of the Pirates who infested the China Sea from 1807 to 1810, London, John Murray, 1831.\n\nNg, Peter Y. L., The 1819 Edition of the Hsin-an Hsien-chih, A Critical Examination with Translation and Notes. Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (1644-1842). Unpublished M. A. thesis, University of Hong Kong, 1961.\n\nNg, Ronald C. Y., 'The San On Map of Mgr. Volontieri. On the Centenary of the Copy in the R.G.S. Collection', London, Geographical Journal, Vol. 135, Part 2, June, 1969: 231-235. Reprinted in JHKBRAS 9, 1969: 141-148.\n\nOrme, G. N., Report on the New Territories for the Years 1899 to 1912. in Sessional Papers 1912.\n\nPerkins, Dwight H., Agricultural Development in China 1368-1968. Chicago, Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.\n\nPotter, Jack M., Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant, Social and Economic Change in a Hong Kong Village. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1968.\n\nSchofield, Walter, Personal Communications, 1958-1968.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207820, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1976", "page_number": 208, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963\n\nOther field workers, both British and American, are likely to follow them.\n\n4. My own work would have been impossible without the generous help of many officers of the New Territories Administration; I should like to thank them collectively, expressing my gratitude in particular to the District Officer Tai Po and his staff. I have also the pleasure of thanking many officers in other branches of the Government; among them my thanks go especially to Mr. K.M.A. Barnett, Mr. J.W. Hayes, Mr. K.W.J. Topley, and Mr. P.K.C. Tsui; I am in the debt of the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs, the Department of Co-operative Development and Fisheries, various officers of the Courts, and the Colonial Secretariat Library. To my host in Tai Po, Mr. Tsang For-piu, I am specially obliged. I should like also to thank my colleague Dr. Marjorie Topley for much guidance and several teachers at the University of Hong Kong whom I had the privilege of consulting.\n\n5. In what is to follow I shall discuss the general background to social research in the New Territories, report on some of the problems I have myself looked into, and suggest what further work could be done (and how it might be done) to promote the interests of both scholarship and administration.\n\n6. Until the advent of the Communist regime in China the New Territories did not interest social scientists. (It can also be argued that they were of little interest to anybody outside the New Territories Administration). Chinese scholars could not be expected to concern themselves with territory under British rule, while scholars from the West were far too preoccupied with China to consider the claims of a stretch of the Chinese countryside which, from their point of view, was no more than the railway route into Kwangtung. And of course it must be remembered that the number of social scientists working on Chinese themes was, before the Second World War, extremely small. Since 1949 the New Territories have come increasingly to be appreciated as a field for research: they have been politically accessible and have had the advantage of offering for study perhaps the best living example (however much affected by British rule and modern changes) of traditional Chinese country life. So far three anthropologists have completed field studies in the New Territories: Miss Barbara E. Ward, from London, who was primarily concerned with Tanka fishermen in the Sai Kung area (and who will probably be revisiting the New Territories this", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207844, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1976", "page_number": 232, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963\n\n217\n\nof the Village Representatives in their communities, and, taken together with other available information, would furnish a basis for assessing the kind of men who have come forward as leaders.\n\n44. But leadership cannot be studied simply by enumerating characteristics. The Village Representative operates within economic, legal, religious, political, and 'social' fields all of which need to be examined; and he is enmeshed in complex relationships with people both inside and outside his community. These are matters for detailed field studies and they can most conveniently be examined in the course of investigations concerned very broadly with the life of particular communities. And it is to be hoped that a large enough variety of communities will be studied for all major variations in leadership patterns to emerge.\n\n45. In the old days, as we have seen, there was much scope for the exercise of leadership in intervillage relations; the central government being remote, the responsibility for local affairs fell on gentry and elders. The field for the deployment of local governmental talents has now contracted, but it becomes all the more important to discover just what it is that extra-village politics entails. In the study of this theme the Rural Committees (and perhaps ultimately the Heung Yee Kuk) must take first place, but these are not the only wide associations to be looked into. Chambers of commerce, the associations for particular businesses, co-operative societies, sports clubs, and so on, are bodies within which certain men take the initiative, rally support, and—since we are dealing with a society in the full flood of change—direct group activities along new paths.\n\n46. I have touched on the role of the Village Representative in settling disputes. To understand the present legal situation in the New Territories it would be desirable to begin with an analysis of the relevant work of the District Officers and Rural Committees, and I suggest that it might be of interest to the District Officers to undertake a survey of the cases that have come before them in recent years, classifying them by their nature and describing the typical courses they have taken. This work could then be brought into relation with material on the cases heard in the various law courts to which New Territories people have recourse. Again, such field studies of communities as may be made by anthropologists would show how differences are settled at the local level or passed to outsiders for mediation or judgment. If a field study were made", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208438, "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": 162, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "146\n\nC. MARTIN WILBUR\n\nto such matters as the dates for village fairs, the mutual protection of crops, and the like.\n\nThe elders of the village are largely responsible for inter-village relations. One of their primary duties is to uphold the \"face\" of the village in its district. Many village improvements find their origin almost entirely in this desire to outshine neighboring villages in material ways. Temples which cannot be afforded and markets which are not needed are often constructed in a spirit of rivalry. Likewise \"face\" affords an impetus to scholarship, every village being extremely proud of its learned men, and their achievements. Indeed, in Phenix village the progress of the students of the village, even when they are away in middle school or college, is the solicitous concern of the whole group.1\n\nWhenever a member or group in a village becomes involved with another village or members of it, the matter is thought to be the concern of the village elders. Every contact is a potential conflict, and the responsibility for such disturbances will fall upon the heads of the leaders. For this reason, quarrels, law suits or sales of property which involve outsiders come under the supervision of the elders of both groups. This system has the advantage of decreasing the number of situations which would of necessity go to the magistral courts, lacking any other machinery for settlement.\n\nThe village elders are in some degree responsible for the behavior of members of their village even when these folk are in town, or in a neighboring village. If trouble arises during such an occasion, the offending member may be punished by the village court, while redress will be made through the agency of the respective village temples. In the same way, strangers in a village, if they happen to be ill-treated by the natives, may go to the temple and demand satisfaction. Thus it will be seen that in a wider range of relationships than the village itself, but still through the familistic, customary and traditional methods, government entirely divorced from the central system is maintained.\n\nII\n\nThe relations between the village and the central government are normally very slight. The two primary interests of the government\n\n1 Kulp, Daniel H.; Phenix Village, p. 125.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209623, "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": 280, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "258\n\nThe first British District Officer of the region had the following remarks:17\n\nEducation of any kind has always appealed powerfully to Chinese, and they are probably more ready than any other people to defer to the voice of learning. In every village appeal is made to the lettered man to settle points of dispute, and he receives the place of honour in all local gatherings. It must be admitted that this respect was formerly due not only to his intrinsic merits and his superior knowledge, but to the advantages that he possessed in being able to write and thus to draw up petitions in proper form and present the case of litigants to the courts. With the coming of British rule these advantages have largely disappeared except that it is still usual for a litigant or other petitioner to submit his petition in due form.\n\nThe completion of the railway from Lo Wu to Hung Hom in 1910 and its extension to Tsim Sha Tsui in 1916 brought Sheung Shui into direct connection with urban Hong Kong and Kowloon. Extension of the Tai Po Road into a ring road also connected the village with many of the main population centres in the New Territories and Kowloon. The 1921 census shows a small decrease of the population in the village from 1440 to 1400, but in the whole New Territories, there was an increase from 80,622 to 83,163.18 The village economy was still predominantly agrarian. Yet opportunities for taking other employment must have increased. The decrease in population must have been due to the numbers of people leaving the village for the cities, as oral recollections of the period do not include any memories of any decrease in the size of the clan overall. The increased contact with the outside world and new employment opportunities must have exercised considerable influence on the local popular literacy.\n\nAnother stimulant was to come from the educational policy of the Hong Kong government. The early laissez-faire policy began to give way to some degree of concern,\n\nAfter a survey\n\nmade by Sung Hok Pang of the conditions of rural schools in 1913, the government decided to give a subsidy varying from $5 to $10 per month each to fifty selected schools in the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209805, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1983", "page_number": 64, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "42\n\nattempt to see if the customs were general throughout the New Territories.1\n\nThe Communist army reached Canton in October 1949. Shortly before and after that date, floods of refugees poured into the New Territories, many of them later engaging in agriculture, mostly vegetable farming. Up until then, natives of the New Territories were primarily rice farmers, living in long-established villages with customs and practices that regulated their lives. The only land available for cultivation by refugees tended to be marginal land without water. The refugees dug wells, made new paths, leased land from New Territories natives, and erected shacks all over the place (before October 1949 there were virtually no temporary structures in the Tai Po district). The energy, initiative and desperate attempts by the refugees to earn a living in new communities where neighbours seldom knew each other resulted in their following a way of life without traditional rules of conduct. To some extent, this washed off on the traditional New Territories natives, aggravated by the movement from 1951 onwards of New Territories men to emigrate overseas and to the urban areas of Hong Kong and Kowloon. This movement tended to break down the old indigenous customs.\n\nIn 1953-55, in Yuen Long, I used to have regular discussions with certain village elders who were locally acknowledged as experts on traditional customs; they proved most co-operative when they appreciated my interest in the subject. I always cross-checked the information with other local informants, but had neither the opportunity nor the need at the time to cross-check further afield so as to ascertain how widespread the custom was or the extent to which it applied to both Punti and Hakka communities. It must be accepted therefore that, in the absence of further proof, these customs may not necessarily have been uniformly observed throughout the New Territories or elsewhere in Kwangtung.\n\nFrom September 1953 to early 1954, in addition to my work as District Officer, I was also Police Court Magistrate (in Ping Shan), Assistant Land Officer (holding Land Courts), and Small Debts Court Magistrate. These had always been the functions of the District Officers at Tai Po and Yuen Long. But, during my", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209806, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1983", "page_number": 65, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "43\n\ntime at Tai Po (1949-51), a separate District Officer (now Sir Donald Luddington) had undertaken the Court duties. My Court duties in Yuen Long provided yet another insight into local custom. For instance, if it were not for the several cases that arose in the Small Debts Court, I might never have understood the workings of money loan associations. The frequent Land Courts (often two a day in 1955) provided a wealth of information about agricultural leases, inheritance, graves, and fung shui,\n\nIn 1951, I served for a time in the former Secretariat for Chinese Affairs where my duties required me to spend part of every day attempting to resolve family disputes, mostly matrimonial. This provided much background material on the status of parties.\n\nIn those more settled days, when communications were difficult and New Territories villages lacked newspapers, radio and television, tradition tended to rule the conduct of villagers, just as rice cultivation ruled the village economy. Traditional customs no longer carry the same weight these days, and in some cases are all but forgotten. Rice cultivation continues in only a few remote corners of the New Territories. Its implements and associated equipment (such as ploughs, harrows, winnowing machines) are hardly recognised by the new generation which may have little idea of how their grandparents lived. Wealth in those days was equated with the number of rice fields owned, and rice depended on a plentiful supply of water. Hence the old Chinese saying \"Shui wai choi\" (**水為財**), meaning \"Water makes riches\". The English reply might be that, since then, much water has flowed under the bridge.\n\n2.\n\nSuccession\n\n(a) By Chinese custom there is no such thing as testamentary disposition of property. All a man's \"will\" can do is permit his widow(s) to remarry, and to moralize for the sons' edification. There may have been some doubt in the past whether by English law a New Territories domiciled person can make a valid will disposing of New Territories property otherwise than as custom would have directed anyhow. But this of course is no", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210156, "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-1984", "page_number": 127, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "106\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nNor did he mince his words. “You have disobeyed and neglected your instructions” he told Elliot. \"You seem to have considered that my instructions were waste paper which you might treat with entire disregard, and that you were at full liberty to deal with the interests of your country according to your own fancy.\" The Foreign Secretary accused Elliot of having settled with the Chinese for much less than he had been told to demand “without the full employment of that force which was sent to you expressly for the purpose of enabling you to use compulsion, if persuasion should fail”. He was not impressed by the cession of Hong Kong “a barren island with hardly a house on it” and clogged by conditions which made it doubtful if it was a cession in full sovereignty.\"\n\n196\n\nThis myth, for myth it was, has died hard. Indeed, I fear it is not yet dead. It has always been more striking to compare the glowing present with such an insignificant past, and this has been the case at all times in Hong Kong's later history. Over forty years after the British occupation of Hong Kong, Governor Sir G.F. Bowen, addressing the Legislative Council at the opening of the 1884-85 Session, stated that \"... the Island of Hong Kong... when annexed to the British Empire in 1843 (sic) was merely a barren rock, inhabited only by a few fishermen and pirates.” This view was expressed another forty years on by the American Consul-General, George E. Anderson, writing on the Hong Kong Consular District in an official publication of the American Department of Commerce. \"The island of Hong Kong consists of a broken ridge of lofty hills, the highest, Victoria Peak, being approximately 1,800 feet in height. There are few valleys of any extent and scarcely any ground for cultivation... In general, the hills and mountains are bare and the soil is poor.\" He added usefully, \"The island of Hong Kong, 28 square miles in extent, is about 11 miles long and from 2 to 5 miles broad; its circumference is 27 miles\".*\n\nIs this a justifiable description? Was Hong Kong ‘a barren island with hardly a house on it\"? Were its people, such as they were, \"a handful of fishermen and pirates\"? The answer is NO, on both counts. There were several villages of some size, as well as hamlets, and a few larger coastal villages which served as market towns for the villages and as home ports for a permanent boat population and visiting craft. The land people were settled, and as we shall", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211233, "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": 294, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "269\n\nfortunate to get back to the New Territories, to the Tsuen Wan District, in 1975 and I stayed there until 1982. This was the time of the most tremendous, fast-paced, redevelopment programme I ever wish to be involved in. At the same time, it produced good opportunities for collecting documentary material, if it existed, because (again) we were moving old villages out of the way of development.\n\nWhen I was in the Southern District in the late 1950's, I was rather down-hearted, despite what is now being said about the exciting and encouraging documentary side of the Oral History Project, at the absence of certain types of material, especially land deeds. There really were not a lot of land deeds around from the late Ch'ing period, and I found it was just the same in Tsuen Wan 20 years later; not because of those 20 years of ongoing development but because there really were not many available. The reason for this was that the British Administration, having surveyed the land and set up its land courts, naturally requested villagers to bring in their evidence of title to their holdings. Thereafter it did not seem to have given them back. I have met old villagers who have been very vehement on the subject, and have also come across a few hints in official documents that indicate that at some time between 1905 and, say, the end of the Second World War, these retained documents disappeared. It is conceivable they may still turn up one day. When and if they do, they will be the most magnificent source of information on the economic and social background of the New Territories when set beside other documents.\n\nThat was one thing I wanted to mention, and reaffirm, from my Tsuen Wan days.\n\nAnother point is that I have always been very interested in genealogies; in other words, family records. Again, and until fairly recently, the \"mythology\" of scholarship—and I call it that deliberately—was that it was only gentry families and very large clans which kept such records, that these were usually kept in the form of printed books, that manuscript ones were not found very frequently, and that small families and small clans did not have any.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212170, "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": 112, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "89\n\nCHINA ON THE BRINK OF WAR*\n\nNanking 1937\n\nP. H. MUNRO-FAURE\n\nIn 1937 my business took me to Nanking, to which the government of General Chiang Kai Shek had some time previously removed the capital. His government was now known as the \"Central\" government, not so much to distinguish it from other governments which might pretend to a share of control at the fringes, but rather to identify it with all China; for the character \"chung\", which in the past had been translated \"middle\", as in \"Middle Kingdom\", was used by the Chinese to represent their country. Thus historically the translation \"China\" government would have been more accurate than \"Central\" government.\n\nThis government in the ten short years from 1927 had achieved the most astonishing improvements. It had certainly not attained standards of nation-wide control, justice, individual freedom, fair taxation, or even public works, of the excellence taken for granted in the more advanced democracies of the west, but it had given ample proof of a capacity for progress.\n\nOne weakness in the Chinese administrative system had been the failure to separate the judicature from the executive. The magistrate who tried a case also prosecuted, and then carried out the sentence. The system, of course, gave rise to many abuses. But now a beginning was made with the establishment of independent courts, known as \"Modern\" courts, whose officials had purely judicial functions. These courts were still few in number, the judges were inexperienced, and because they were very poorly paid they were open to corruption; but it was a sound beginning.\n\nSimilarly the lack of a stable civil service had meant that whenever an official was changed, whether, for instance, the magistrate of a country district, or the Commissioner in charge of the former Concession at Kiu Kiang, or the Minister for War, the new man\n\n* This is the second extract of Col. P.H. Munro-Faure's Memoirs. See the Editor's Note at p 61, Vol. 29. [Editor]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213070, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1993", "page_number": 138, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "119\n\nhe was asked to come down from his cave to pray for rain. As he arrived the clouds opened and sufficient rain fell ending the lengthy drought. The grateful populace insisted that he should stay with them and many wanted to build him a house. However, he returned to his cave which he named Clearwater Cliff [Ch'ing-shui Yen] from the brook that flowed from a rock just outside his cave. Henceforth he was known as the Patriarch of Clearwater He died at the age of 65\n\nA third story, common to a number of deities, tells of Ch'en killing with his bare hands a large man-eating snake which lived in a cave on Ch'ing-shui cliff. He himself died in the struggle and turned black In another version he is said to have a black face following an incident in which a demon unsuccessfully tried to smoke Ch'ing-shui out of his cave, or in another variation the demons tried to cook him alive in his cave. He stepped out alive, arrested the demons and imprisoned them for ever in his cave He was later deified by the Jade Emperor Ch'ing-shui is also said to have been hermit in a cave called Ch'ing-shui in a cliff on the P'eng-lai mountain near Anhsi where, on his death, devotees built a shrine dedicated to him on the ridge above the cave.\n\nThe story told about his unusual nose has one or two variations but in general it relates how a robber cut off the nose from his main image in a fit of anger. It was picked up by one of the devotees who tried to reattach it but without warning, the nose disappeared After a short search someone noticed that it was now reattached. It is now said that whenever the deity is angered the nose disappears until his anger dissipates During the Franco-Chinese War [1884/1885] following the defeat of the French at Keelung in northern Taiwan, part of the invading force retreated to the old centre at Tamsui. The French troops were again repulsed by the Chinese under Sun Kai-hua who was assisted by local Chinese from the Manka district [now down-town Taipei] who brought along an image of their patron deity, Ch'ing-shui Tsu-shih. This led to a fifty year struggle in the law courts between the Chinese of Tamsui and those in the Manka as the Tamsui people had held on to the image refusing to return it. The Manka Chinese won in the end. The image is also known as the Drop-nose saint [Lo-pi Tsu-shih] after the nose on the image in the temple fell off every time something bad was said in his presence\n\nHe is famous for his extraordinary powers and is said to have been able to have conjured up rain during his lifetime whenever there was a", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213438, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 34, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "ARTICLES\n\nCHINESE CUSTOMARY LAW IN HONGKONG'S NEW TERRITORIES. SOME LEGAL PREMISES.\n\nEDWIN HAYDON\n\nLast year [1961—Editor] the legislation regulating the New Territories of Hong Kong was amended1 and jurisdiction was conferred on the Supreme Court of Hong Kong and on the District Courts subordinate to it.\n\n\"to hear and determine all questions and disputes at law or in equity in connexion with or in anywise arising out of or regarding any land in the New Territories.\"\n\nAt the same time the Land Officer was divested of his former powers to decide questions of land in the New Territories summarily,3 and District Officers were divested of the summary jurisdiction, which for many years4 they had exercised in Small Debts Courts, in actions or matters where the claim, debt or damages sought to be recovered did not exceed one thousand dollars. Since 1953 the District Courts had exercised a concurrent jurisdiction with the Small Debts Courts in such actions. The effect, therefore, of this amending legislation was to confer from henceforth exclusive jurisdiction in all proceedings arising in the New Territories on the courts of law staffed by the professional Judiciary.\n\nSection 17 of the New Territories Ordinance reads:\n\n\"In any proceedings in the Supreme Court or the District Court in relation to land in the New Territories, the court shall have power to recognize and enforce any Chinese custom or customary right affecting such land.\n\nSo much is clear in respect of land cases, but in respect of other proceedings which may involve Chinese custom or customary right one must search further back to the source from which the British Crown's rights in the New Territories spring.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213442, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 38, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "CHOK HUNG vs. LI FUI CHOI\n\n\"No enquiry has ever been made to ascertain what Chinese law is. It is an extraordinary fact that the Court of this Colony, in which the Chinese live and trade as freely as Englishmen and citizens of other countries, should do with regard to the Chinese what it would never dream of doing with regard to Frenchmen or Germans or Americans; and not only that, but that it should be entirely in ignorance of Chinese law on any subject which concerns the family life and family law of those who form the bulk of its inhabitants, which is so often before the Courts—its marriage law, and the rights of property it gives; its law applicable to children. We are in the dark as to the law of majority, as to the customary law of China generally, and above all as to its law of succession. The attitude of the Court has been to let the troublesome question wait until it is definitely raised by the parties. I myself have been guilty of this, though I have rebelled more than once or twice.\n\nPage 20\n\nDuring the last half century, there have been three such enquiries, of which the results have been published. I refer, of course, to the Report of the Committee appointed in 1948,1 Greenfield's article on marriage,2 and the report and recommendations on the same subject by the Attorney General and Secretary for Chinese Affairs in 1960.2 The latter two publications do not deal with any Chinese customary law of marriage particularly obtaining in the New Territories, but the first does deal with certain aspects of Chinese customary law peculiar to the New Territories.\n\nIf a search is made of the law reports, only two cases will be found where the particular Chinese customary law obtaining in the New Territories was considered. Prima facie, that is a remarkably small number for 57 years of law reporting, and it is worthwhile probing the reasons for this dearth of case law.\n\nFirstly, the Chinese much prefer to compose their disputes or to refer them to extra-judicial arbitration than to a court of law.**\n\nSecondly, in deference to this general desire of the litigants, the District Officers arranged for the bulk of the disputes which came before them, in their Small Debts Courts or when they sat as Assistant Land Officers to decide summary land cases, to be settled out of court, most", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213444, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 40, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "Kong and only occasionally refers to particular aspects of that law obtaining in the New Territories, and apart from the two reported cases, there is no published material dealing specifically with Chinese customary law of the New Territories which the courts may apply in cases arising from those territories.\n\nAlthough such law must be established by proof acceptable to the court, there is an apparent and an urgent need for a restatement of that law. Such a restatement would, it is submitted, be likely to be of assistance to the courts and to the legal profession. The material for such a restatement must naturally be accumulated over years, the most likely sources being the officers of the Administration and of the technical Departments, who are in daily contact with the inhabitants of the New Territories. In 1958 the District Commissioner stated-\n\nwe sadly miss the pre-war records. Successive District Officers in each district had, prior to 1941, built up what they called their \"Bible\" of knotty points of custom, obtained from independent witnesses who were alive in 1899 and were called not by either party to the dispute, but in accordance with Chinese practice by the Court itself.**\n\n(Although that loss may be held to the account of the Japanese, it does appear that nation has more than adequately repaid its debt to sinology by its scholars' researches into Chinese customary law.*4) During the last decade administrative and technical officers have again undertaken the task of collecting material on Chinese customs maintained in the New Territories and it is on the unpublished results of their labours that the ensuing restatement of Chinese customary law is based.\n\nThe Country and The People.\n\nThe area of the New Territories comprises 355 square miles of land and 673 square miles of sea. The leased territories extend in strict definition from Boundary Street in the middle of Kowloon to the Shum Chun River but the area of 7 square miles immediately to the north of Boundary Street is known as New Kowloon and is administered not as part of the New Territories but as an extension of the Urban Area, that is, the ceded territory of the Colony proper.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214402, "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": 260, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "226\n\n1\n\nNOTES\n\nUndated Minute made available by Mrs Margaret Leeds, formerly Research Officer with the Royal Hong Kong Police.\n\n2 Henry J. Lethbridge, \"The District Watch Committee: The Chinese Executive Council of Hong Kong?\", in Hong Kong: Stability and Change, (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1978).\n\n3 This paper is based on a chapter of the author's PhD thesis, Private Security and Government: A Hong Kong Perspective, 1841-1941, awarded by the University of Hong Kong in 1999. In the interests of space, most of the end notes contained in the thesis have been omitted from this paper.\n\n4\n\n5 Kaifongs were local Chinese welfare associations. As early as 1857 a sworn mutual aid association known as the U-lan-shing is claimed to have united the four smaller kaifongs of the Tai-ping-shan, Sai-ying-pun, Sheung-wan and Chung-wan districts. Henry J. Lethbridge, op. cit., pp. 105-106.\n\n6 China Mail, 8 February 1866; China Mail, 22 February 1866; J.W. Norton-Kyshe, The History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong, (Hong Kong, Vetch and Lee Ltd., 1971, first published 1898), 2, p. 86.\n\n7 Annual Report of the Registrar General for 1867, Blue Book 1867, p. 248, §20 - §21.\n\n8 The Baojia or Native Chinese Peace Officers scheme, which was introduced in 1844, was discontinued by 1861.\n\n9 Trevor Bennett and Richard Wright, Burglars on burglary: prevention and the offender, (Aldershot, Gower, 1984), pp. 50-53.\n\n10 Minute by Cecil C. Smith, 22 December 1871: CO129/156, pp. 117-118.\n\n11 Hongkong Government Gazette, 6 January 1872, p. 2. Henceforth HKGG.\n\n12 Report of the Police Commission, 27 June 1872: CO129/164, p. 290 (20, §60).\n\n13 Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore, (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 117; Under the heading 'Asian Counter-strategies against Municipal Sanitary", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216307, "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": 66, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "15\n\nHOW OLD IS SHANGHAI'S LONGHUA TEMPLE?\n\nERIC N. DANIELSON ·\n\nShanghai's Longhua Temple (Longhua Si) is a functioning Buddhist temple with a large resident monk population belonging to the Chan sect (Chan zong) of Mahayana Buddhism. It is by far the largest one in Shanghai, and probably counts among the largest in China. Located southwest of the Xujiahui shopping district, the main temple complex sits on the north side of Longhua Lu, while its seven-story pagoda stands by itself across the street on the south side. Although it has often been said by many authors that this is supposedly the only pagoda in Shanghai, that is true only if one has a very narrow definition of what Shanghai is. Within the Shanghai Municipality (Shanghai Shi) there are a total of 16 historic pagodas, the other 15 being of equal age and historical authenticity but located out in the surrounding counties of Songjiang, Qingpu, and Jiading.\n\nThe temple's long history\n\nLonghua Si undoubtedly has a long history, but the question is how long? The answer is debatable. In all likelihood, it is about 900 years old, rather than the 1800 years sometimes claimed for it. Very little evidence exists to support the often heard claims that the temple and pagoda were supposedly first built in 242 A.D. and 247 A.D. by Sun Quan, the King of Wu, during the Three Kingdoms (San Guo). Furthermore, maps of Shanghai's geological history contained in Zhou Zhen He's 1999 Shanghai Lishi Ditu Ji show that most of this area was underwater until the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Some sources also make vague claims that the temple was built by the Tang Dynasty Empress Wu Ze Tian sometime during her reign (690-705 A.D.), but later destroyed at some unspecified date during the rebellion of Huang Zhao (879-884 A.D.) against the Tang Xi Zong Emperor (873-888). The first specific year to appear in most accounts is a supposed rebuilding of a new temple on the same site as the earlier San Guo and Tang temples by the Wu Yue regional kingdom in 977 A.D. If these earlier versions of Longhua Temple did in fact exist, they were ephemeral and have left no lasting traces.\n\nSubstantial documented evidence of the temple's origins begins to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]