[ { "id": 207283, "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-1975", "page_number": 51, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CHINA'S ECONOMIC PLANNING AND CHANGING GEOGRAPHY\n\nCHIAO-MIN HSIEH*\n\nIn the past, every place in the world changed except China. But today there is nothing in China that does not change. In no other country has the past had so much effect on the country as in China, and now no other country has a regime so determined to obliterate that past. The most conservative nation in history has become the most radical one.\n\nDuring its 25 years' rule, the present regime has tried to change the agrarian society of China into an industrialized country and has exercised detailed economic planning. However, two major problems have to be solved before any economic planning can be put into practice. One is the water problem and the other is the problem of transportation. Both problems are closely related to China's geography.\n\nThe Water problem—For centuries, the Chinese have been busy in managing their rivers and have used all kinds of water control methods, including irrigation, drainage, diking, reclamation, and terracing. At the source of a river, the land is so arid that people need more water and irrigation is important. In the middle of its course, people must try to prevent flooding, so diking becomes their main job. In the lower part of the river, the principal task is to drain off the water. No other river in China has had more serious flood problem than the Yellow River.\n\nThe Yellow River is \"China's sorrow\". During the past 3000 years, dikes broke 1,500 times and the river course shifted 26 times. Both natural conditions and human failures were responsible. Among the natural factors were (1) lack of a straight course, (2) abrupt change of gradient where the river enters the North China plain, (3) loose texture of the loess and (4) concentration of rainfall\n\n* Dr. Chiao-min Hsieh is professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Pittsburgh. This year he is in receipt of the Senior Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States, and is serving as Visiting Professor in the Department of Geography & Geology at the University of Hong Kong, 1974-75.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207284, "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-1975", "page_number": 52, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "44\n\nCHIAO-MIN HSIEH\n\nin only two months. Human factors were (1) failure to provide vegetation cover, and (2) inadequate building of levees or dikes. Successive Chinese governments of different dynasties have considered plans for controlling the river but the only technique used was the building of dikes. There are about 1,200 miles of dikes.\n\nNow with the slogan of \"Turning China's sorrow into China's joy\", the communist regime, using modern techniques for building dams, has set up a comprehensive plan. The plan calls for the building of 46 dams. These dams have the multiple functions of flood prevention, irrigation, power generation, and navigation. During the first phase of the plan, two huge dams will be built; one in Sanmen gorge and the other in Linkia gorge. The Sanmen Gorge is 297 feet high and has a total electricity of 1,100,000 kilowatts—less than the Knibyshev or the Valgagrad power stations in the Soviet, or the Grand Conlee or the Boulder dam in the U.S.A., but more than Beauharmois station in Canada or the Bhakra in India. While the \"staircase\" plan is being carried out, it will be necessary at the same time to undertake extensive water and soil conservation in loess region, especially for the Sammen Gorge scheme. If soil erosion is not checked, the reservoir will be filled with silt in about 25 years and the whole effect of the dam will be lost. The intention is to make the water conservation and soil conservation work so effective that the reservoir will be good for 70 to 100 years.\n\nThe second water control project is the diversion of water from the Yangtze to the Yellow River, which was included in the second Five-year plan, from 1958 to 1962.\n\nThe water problem in China is due not to the total amount of water available, but to the lack of balance in the supply. This lack of balance is of two kinds. One is the uneven seasonal distribution of rainfall. For example, in northern China the rainfall is concentrated in July, August, and September. Hence in Spring droughts occur, and in Autumn floods. The solution to this kind of problem is to build reservoirs. The other problem is the lack of balance in water supply between regions. For example, the northwestern part of China includes 51 percent of the cultivated land of the country, but accounts for only 7 per cent of the surface flow; whereas south-eastern China includes only 33 per cent of the cultivated land, but accounts for 76 per cent of the surface flow. In order to balance the water supply between the northwest and southeast part of China,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207351, "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-1975", "page_number": 119, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "# EUROPEAN WORKING CLASS IN 19TH CENTURY\n\n111\n\nIt is exceedingly difficult to assess the cultural impact of working-class Europeans on the Chinese population; there were strong, but not completely impenetrable, barriers between the two; each despised the other, the underdog European particularly so. Although the latter usually lived in Chinese quarters of the town, spoke pidgin English or a little Cantonese, and often lived with a Chinese woman, this did not make him necessarily feel less British. He was, it can be inferred, as jingoistic as his counterpart in Liverpool or London, buoyed up at times by a sense of racial and national superiority. He did not belong to Chinese society and, it can be surmised, never wished to. He was more at ease with Portuguese and Eurasians; but his social contacts with them were often touchy, prickly, and patronising; for even the déclassé European knew he was a member of a dominant race.\n\nAt the end of the century, Taipan and pong-paân were residentially segregated. A writer concluded that ‘between those who reside at the summit (of the Peak) and those who live in the peninsula of Kowloon there is as wide a gulf as that which divided Dives and Lazarus'.39 This 'gulf' was more than an expression of traditional English class attitudes: the European working class in Hong Kong was an anomaly in a colonial setting, a curious transplant from a more settled society.\n\n## NOTES\n\n1 Sir James Cantlie, 'Hong Kong' in the British Empire Series, vol. i, 1906, p. 514.\n\n2 See, for example, 'Beachcombers and castaways' in H. E. Maude's Of Islands and Men: Studies in Pacific History, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. 134-177.\n\n3 China Mail, June 8, 1888.\n\n4 J. W. Norton-Kyshe, The History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 1898, vol. i, p. 279.\n\n5 For details about John Lee consult the Report of the Commission to Enquire into the Working of 'The Contagious Diseases Ordinance, 1867', Hong Kong, 1879.\n\n6 'Report on the Public Works Department', Hong Kong Sessional Papers 1902, p. 51.\n\n7 Lt. Col. G. J. Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China in 1860, London, 1862, p. 3.\n\n8 John Stuart Thomson, The Chinese, London (1909), p. 30.\n\n9 George Woodcock, The British in the Far East, London, 1969, p. 21.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208192, "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": 231, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\nTHE FUNG-SHUI OF KAM TIN\n\n215\n\n(A short explanatory introduction on the fung-shui of Kam Tin is here attached.\n\nThe ancestral hall of the Tang clan, Ching Lok Tso Tong (#), which is situated at Pak Wai Tsuen of Kam Tin, has its Fung-shui main branch near Tai Mo Shan (*). It curls its way through the valley of Kwun Yam Shan ( ). From Wang Toi Shan (#) rises the \"dragon\". Its uprising, so to speak, is very magnificent. The Dragon then starts to serpent up and down, passing through Chiu Keng (£) with more strength. Forging forward vigorously to the left, there comes the Kei Lun Shan (t) to protect it. On the right, a branch stretches out from Tai Mo Shan to Shek Wu Tong () and Ma On Kong (4), to pave its way forward. A short distance from Au Tau (1ƒƒ) see the circling round of all these ranges.\n\nIt is from this setting that the Dragon threads its way out, with various small and big ranges on all sides. Here, the Dragon once again finds its way via Kai Kung Shan (A) with Kwai Kok Shan (圭角山) on the right and Chat Sing Ngor (七星崗) on the left. The Dragon surges up and then down, turning left and right, like thousands of horses racing together, and when it comes to Tai Kong ( j ), the land slopes down gradually. Ngor Nar Lan (A) on the left leaves space for its soaring down and the Cheung Shan (✯ J.) on the right blocks any obstacles that would harm it. This range then dips into the water, passes through the grasslands and comes up to Gau Gan (i). Here it stretches out its wings to protect the Dragon to settle on the cave. The naturally formed reservoirs on both sides of Gau Gan (4) resemble the Food Store (4) and the Wealth Store (✯).\n\nThe place where the Dragon settles is the ancestral hall of Ching Lok Tso (##). The Dragon dives down into the water and the surface becomes peaceful. So now the Dragon is hiding here. With this setting, the place is bound to be very prosperous. To begin with, the green carpet of grass just in front of the hall means the outcome of a big \"esteemed clan\" (†) Furthermore, with all the water from nearby fields flowing towards the hall, and the streams from Tai Kong Po (which follow the Dragon and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210990, "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": 52, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "27\n\nOur eyes looking out to sea and our hair streaming in the wind\n\nWe shall sail henceforth for the Sea of Darkness Cheerful and lighthearted as a young traveller.\n\nWe were departing for China with our hair streaming in the wind, and here is the Sea of Darkness. The worldwide ecological environment is in mortal danger in soil and sea, forests and atmosphere. The Third World is facing insoluble indebtedness, suburban youth is threatened with mass dereliction, our uncontrolled agricultural surpluses are unable to cope with hundreds of millions of famine-stricken people. Such is the Sea of Darkness before us. Some people, in Baudelaire's own words, may nevertheless be sailing for Darkness of Chaos with the light heart of a young traveller, fascinated by the achievements of computers, space technologies, high-tech communications and the like. I have met such people and they do exist, in China itself as well as in the West. But others are more careful, more demanding, more realistic in the long run, and not only among French intellectuals.\n\nLong ago, the French Catholic radical thinker Pascal was, just like so many of us, fascinated by the unique position of China in world history. He wrote in his sundry notes, his Pensées:\n\nHistorie de Chine quoi éclaircir\n\n- \n\n+ \n\n+ \n\n+ \n\nIl y a de quoi aveugler et de\n\nMais la Chine obscurcit, dites-vous. Et je réponds: la Chine obscurcit mais il y a clarté à trouver. Cherchez-la\n\n20\n\nThere is in China enough to blind us and enough to illuminate us.\n\nBut China makes things obscure, wouldn't you say! And I reply: China makes things obscure, but there is light to be found. Seek it out!\n\nYes, there is light beyond the Sea of Darkness. I thank you.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212186, "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": 128, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "105\n\ntimed with their fuses set to burst just a few feet above water level. But the gunners evidently found the moving targets difficult to follow, because the aim grew wilder and eventually the shelling ceased. As the sun set in the west, the British ships came to anchor off the Three Hills, where I had my last pheasant shoot, while the American ships anchored in a group a few miles lower down.\n\nNext morning broke clear and sunny, one of those late autumn days in China, when there is not a ripple on the river, and the smoke hangs low in a thin pall over the country villages. Gun fire could be heard in the distance, both above and below the concentration of neutral vessels; and by-and-by the three American ships, escorted by the U.S.S. \"Panay\", got under way and steamed upriver. As she went by, the \"Panay\" stopped to pass back one of our wounded men, who had been kindly accommodated in her sick bay, and the Commander explained that he was taking his ships further up towards **Pidgeon Island** as the Japanese had been dropping some \"bricks\" in the river just below them. Not for the first, or the last, time in China, the Americans elected to play a lone hand.\n\nMeanwhile the refugees on the British vessels whiled away the time counting up the splinter holes in their ships, attending to the wounded, and in mutual visits for gossip over the events of the previous day. Every one thought it was all a mistake, although some concern was caused at about 10 o'clock, when a number of Japanese military landing craft were seen upriver pulling in to the north bank, on to which they ran a small gun which was openly trained at the ships. But the feeling of security was confirmed when the Japanese craft, one after the other, steamed out towards the British gunboats, circled round them, waved a salute or two, and then went on their way down river. There appeared to be no Chinese troops in the neighbourhood, and the Japanese sailed down the Yangtze unmolested, stopping to burn an occasional junk.\n\nIt was without an after-thought that we all sat down to lunch on that lovely Sunday morning on the Yangtze. We were anchored off the reed beds which grow round Rosina Beacon, and through the porthole I could see across the river the clumps out of which not so many months before we had driven our last pheasant. Imagine our astonishment and indignation when suddenly we heard the approaching noise of planes, the roar of power dives, and bombs", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212187, "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": 129, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "106\n\nburst all round us. There were three Japanese aircraft, whose pilots circled and dived repeatedly. The gunboats were caught by surprise and it was only on the third attack that they got their Lewis guns into action, thereby possibly disturbing the aim of the attacking planes, because again fortunately there were no direct hits.\n\nThe first bomb attack took place at 1.30 p.m. At about 2.30 p.m. three larger machines, in formation, approached at a height of 6000 feet. They were seen to drop a pattern of six heavy bombs, which fell near one of the Asiatic Petroleum Company's steamers, but once again did little damage, owing to what appeared to be poor lateral splintering qualities. This time the gunboats opened with both their \"pom-poms\" and their 3\" guns but without effect.\n\nThe Staff Captain together with the British Military Attaché and the British Consul, who had been in the \"Scarab\", had boarded one of the merchant ships the previous night to go 60 miles up the river to Wuhu to contact the Japanese troops, in the hope that they would be able to arrange to avoid further incidents. Following on these raids, signals were made to the Staff Captain at Wuhu enquiring whether it would not be better to move the ships. At that time we did not know that the U.S.S. \"Panay\" and the three Standard Oil ships had already been sunk, and we were still awaiting a reply from Wuhu, when a third attack was made at about 4 p.m. by three aircraft which made a succession of dives to 600 feet, but they received such a warm welcome from the gunboats that they missed their targets and soon made off.\n\nAll the British ships had Union Jacks painted across their decks: on my ship, for instance, the Jack was 25 feet wide. There could be no further illusion regarding the possibility that these attacks had been made by mistake. The continuous raiding, following on the shelling of the previous day, began to demoralize the Chinese crews, and the numerous Chinese refugees from the various British offices in Nanking, with whom the holds of the ships were packed. It became imperative to take action of some sort.\n\nThe \"Ewo\" hulk, lashed alongside the S.S. \"Whangpoo\", had had the worst of it. The pair of them offered the largest target at which it was natural for the Japanese pilots to aim. It was fortunate that the refugees had been taken out of the hulk after the first attack, because the thin plank walls of her deck house were now riddled", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212190, "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": 132, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "109\n\nand the civilians were advised to leave their ships and get into the British gunboats, because if the battery opened fire the gunboats had instructions to steam out of range and leave the merchant vessels to their fate. The attraction of this invitation was not evident to the Britons concerned and they preferred to stand by their ships and the Chinese crews and employees, for whom they felt responsible. Fortunately the guns did not follow the example set in Wuhu, where they had opened up at point-blank range on H.M.S. \"Bee\" carrying the Rear Admiral Commanding Yangtze Flotilla. Japanese planes flew over on a number of occasions, and even swooped in playful dives over the ships, but no bombs were dropped and it gradually became evident that the urgent protests addressed by the neutral powers to the Japanese government were taking effect.\n\nThe whole of that day and the next were spent between the ships and the reeds. Each time a Japanese plane appeared, the few people still remaining in the ships would emerge, cock an eye at the approaching aircraft, and make for the reeds at a speed regulated to the rate of approach. Stretches of reed had been cut by the local farmers and the stooks were still lying about. They provided a convenient cover into which to dive, and as the noise of the aircraft receded you could see an array of dishevelled heads pop out, to be followed in due course by the bodies to which they were attached.\n\nWhen it was quite evident the immediate danger was passed, sufficient hands were collected, with some difficulty, to raise steam, and the ships again anchored in mid-stream. Here we were joined by other British ships from Wuhu where they had had troubles of their own. The U.S.S. \"Oahu\" also steamed by, bearing the bodies of those who had been killed in the \"Panay\" bombing. Some days later, with Japanese permission, we moved down to Nanking, now in Japanese hands. From the deck of the ship the smoke of burning buildings could be seen rising beyond the city wall, but we had no information at the time of the extensive raping and mass murder, whose memory will make the Japanese army for ever infamous.\n\nI had hoped our ship would be allowed to remain anchored off Nanking until it was again safe to go ashore, when we could reoccupy the various properties we had vacated. The Rear Admiral, in H.M.S. \"Bee\", had preceded us and it was his idea that the British ships still off Nanking should remain there until other ships could come", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212221, "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": 163, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "140\n\nsometimes visited by H.M. ships, and further inland Snow Valley, high up in the mountains, was a popular resort for the more enterprising of Shanghai week-enders. Now the motor roads round Ningpo had all been destroyed by the Chinese lest the Japanese advance and make use of them. The roadhead was twenty miles away at Kikow, the Generalissimo's native village, where tourists used to leave their cars to make the ascent to Snow Valley.\n\nI had to get back to Shanghai somehow and decided the best way would be to make for Hongkong overland, a distance not far short of a thousand miles. You reached Kikow partly by boat and partly on foot, and I arrived one evening, to find I should have to wait a couple of days for a seat on the crowded bus service. The next morning I was strolling by myself along the village road when the alert sounded. This was such a common event that I took no notice, and almost before I realised what had happened two Japanese light bombers were circling over the village to locate their targets. The police hustled me into a nearby house, from the courtyard of which I watched the planes fly around and make shallow dives each time they placed a bomb, of which they dropped a dozen. Besides myself there were only women in the house, an old lady, a daughter, and a small child with their amah. They told me that only two houses away was the Generalissimo's ancestral home, at which it was probable that the Japanese were aiming. The daughter was very concerned that I should be standing in the courtyard with my sleeves rolled up displaying my wrist watch to the Japanese pilots. She feared it might attract their attention and asked me to take it off. In my halting Chinese I tried to explain to her that the pilots, who were flying about two thousand feet up, there was, of course, no defence of any kind\n\ncould neither see me nor my wrist watch, and each time the aircraft commenced to dive I signalled to the women to crouch down and comforted myself by the realisation that they were going for the other end of the village. The planes flew off after half an hour. When they were satisfied it was all over, the women collected the clothes they had been washing, and made their way, as if quite accustomed to it, across the road, down the steps to the mountain stream to resume their work. Fortunately no buildings caught fire on this occasion, and there was not much damage; the village was burnt out in another raid a week later.\n\n―\n\nNext day I started on my journey. Laboriously, on the overcrowded", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 } ]