[ { "id": 204937, "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": 45, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "38\n\nSIR JOHN BOWRING\n\nhaving been nursed and reared by tigers.\" \"Where should we have been,\" he asks, \"if our grandmothers and mothers had been drowned in their infancy?\" And he quotes two instances of the punishment of mothers who had destroyed their infants, one of whom had a blood-red serpent fastened to her thigh, and the other her four extremities turned into cow's feet.* Father Ripa mentions, that of abandoned children, the Jesuits baptized in Peking alone not less than three thousand yearly. I have seen ponds which are the habitual receptacle of female infants, whose bodies lie floating about on their surface.\n\nIt is by no means unusual to carry persons in a state of exhaustion a little distance from the cities, to give them a pot of rice, and to leave them to perish of starvation when the little store is exhausted. Life and death in China, beyond any other region, seem in a state of perpetual activity. The habits of the people, their traditions, the teachings of the sages all give a wonderful impulse to the procreative affections. A childless person is deemed an unhappy, not to say a degraded, man. The Chinese moralists set it down as a law, that if a wife give no children to her husband,\n\n*Doubt has been sometimes expressed as to the practice of Infanticide in China on any great scale; but abundance of evidence of the extent of the usage may be found in Chinese books. The following is a translation of a Decree of the Emperor Kanghi, entitled,-\n\n\"Edict prohibiting the drowning of children.\" \"When a mother mercilessly plunges beneath the water the tender offspring to which she has given birth, can it be said that it owes its life to her who thus takes away what it has just begun to enjoy? The poverty of the parents is the cause of this wrongdoing; they have difficulty in earning subsistence for themselves, still less can they pay nurses and undertake all the necessary expenses for their children; thus driven to despair, and unwilling to cause the death of two persons to preserve the life of one, it comes to pass that a mother to save her husband's life consents to destroy her children. Their natural tenderness suffers; but they at length determine to take this part, thinking themselves at liberty to dispose of the life of their children, in order to prolong their own. If they exposed these children in some unfrequented spot, their cries would move the hearts of the parents; what then do they? They cast the unfortunate babe into the current of a river, that they may at once lose sight of it, and in an instant deprive it of life. You have given me the name of Father of the People: though I cannot feel for these infants the tenderness of the parents to whom they owe their being, I cannot refrain from declaring to you, with the most painful feelings, that I absolutely forbid such homicides. The tiger, says one of our books, though it be a tiger, does not rend its own young; towards them it has a feeling breast, and continually cares for them. Poor as you may be, is it possible that you should become the murderers of your own children? is to shew yourselves more unnatural than the very beasts of prey.”— Lettres Edifiantes, vol. xix, pp. 101-2,\n\nIt\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213400, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1994", "page_number": 222, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "210\n\nPollard, Samuel (1864-1915), In Unknown China a Pioneer Missionary Among Tribes in Western China, Philadelphia Lippincott, 1921\n\nPoussielgue, Achille, Voyage en Chine et en Mongolie de M de Bourboulon, Ministre de France, et de Madame de Bourboulon, 1860-1861, Paris L Hachette, 1866\n\nPowell, Lyle Stephenson, A Surgeon in Wartime China, Lawrence (Kansas) University of Kansas Press, 1946\n\nPower, William James Tyrone, Recollections of a Three Years Residence in China, including Peregrinations in Spain, Morocco, Egypt, India, London R Bentley, 1853\n\nPritchard, Earl H, Anglo-Chinese Relations During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, 1929\n\nPurcell, Victor, The Boxer Uprising, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1963\n\nRabe, Valentin H, The Home Base of American China Missions, 1880-1920, Cambridge (Mass) Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1978\n\nRachewiltz, Igor de, Papal Envoys to the Great Khans, London. 1970\n\nRasmussen, Albert Henry, China Trader, London Constable, 1954\n\nReed, James, The Missionary Mind and American East Asia Policy 1911-1915, Cambridge (Mass) Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1983\n\nReid, Archibald, From Peking to Petersburg, London E Arnold, 1899\n\nReinsch, Paul S, An American Diplomat in China, Garden City (New York) Doubleday, 1922\n\nRennie, David Field, Peking and the Pekingese During the First Year of the British Embassy at Peking, London John Murray, 1865\n\nRicalton, James, China Through the Stereoscope, a Journey Through the Dragon Empire at the Time of the Boxer Uprising, London Underwood, 1901\n\nRipa, Matteo, Memoirs of Father Ripa, During Thirteen Years' Residence at the Court of Peking in the Service of the Emperor of China, with an Account of the Foundation of the College for the Education of Young Chinese at Naples, translated by Fortunato Prandi. New York Wiley and Putnam, 1846\n\nRoberts, Frances Markley, Western Travellers to China, Shanghai Kelly and Walsh, 1932\n\nRockhill, William Woodville, The Land of the Lamas, Notes of a Journey, London Longmans, 1891", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 } ]