[
    {
        "id": 205334,
        "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-1967",
        "page_number": 96,
        "title": "RAS-1967",
        "content_text": "THE CHINA COASTERS\n\n89\n\non the outside passage, low-powered ships would have done little more than hold their own against the monsoon.\n\nOn the present day ships trading from Hong Kong around Far Eastern and South Pacific waters many of the old China coast customs still survive. The 'sew-sew' women, for instance, are now peculiar to Hong Kong alone, but used to flourish in Shanghai and Singapore in the old days. In groups of two or three these women board every ship soon after its arrival in Hong Kong to darn the socks and repair the clothes of the officers, and every officer soon after his arrival on the coast has his regular 'sew-sew' woman. They are middle-aged women, severely dressed in black with shining black hair strained back tightly in buns, and invariably sporting a few gold teeth. Whichever 'sew-sew' woman an officer employs on his first visit to Hong Kong usually remains his 'sew-sew' woman for the rest of his time on the coast, and no rival will ever try to solicit his custom. The 'sew-sew' women are scrupulously honest, and are allowed the complete run of the accommodation. They go into their client's cabin unattended, and ransack his drawers and wardrobe looking for clothes to mend, and when these have been collected, retire to a sunny corner of the deck to carry out the repairs. When they return with the clothes later, payment is the subject of shrill but good-natured bargaining.\n\nA similar system still operates in Hong Kong with regard to barbers, tailors, shoemakers, compradores, and others. The compradore in this connection is a petty trader, who deals in a wide variety of goods, from toilet materials and patent medicines to dubious literature. Either he or the tailor will also carry out miscellaneous commissions for their clients, such as posting letters and parcels and so on. An older institution than any of the above, however, were the flower boat girls. Like the 'sew-sew' women they were more common in Hong Kong than in the other ports and were an inheritance from the old days at Canton and Macao. When I returned to the coast twelve years after the end of the Pacific War, and after an absence of almost twenty years, I was pleased to find the 'sew-sew' women, barbers, tailors, and shoemakers plying their trades as busily as ever. The flower boat girls, however, had disappeared from the scene.\n\nPearl Buck, in her biography of her missionary father, Fighting Angel, London, Pan Books, 1964, pp. 84-85, has this to say of river steamers",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 207401,
        "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": 169,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n161\n\ntroops, in my opinion, put up an excellent resistance from the static strong points which were the mainstay of the defence plan. They were pitted against a numerically superior and much more mobile enemy and no blame should be placed on them for the fact that our resistance was broken in under three weeks, nowhere near the ninety days originally judged to be desirable. These views imply no criticism of the defence plan for the circumstances of the Colony decided the plan. The defence was further prejudiced by the huge population of non-combatants in Kowloon and Victoria. Given the conditions under which our troops had to fight, I believe that our defeat could never have been avoided except by avoiding hostilities altogether. I believe we could have accepted any loss of face which a pre-war withdrawal, leaving only internal security forces, would have entailed. Having said that, however, the troops thereby released from Hong Kong would probably have been used in Singapore and almost certainly would not have changed the outcome there. One can only sympathise with the Governor and the G.O.C. and their staffs in their task of defending a Colony whose fate was sealed long before the fighting and they and the troops did their jobs well. The story unfolded slowly but inexorably after the style of a Greek tragedy.\n\n26 DECEMBER 1941–7 AUGUST 1942\n\nThe Japanese were slow to move in to take control of the hospital though they did concentrate our fighting troops at once and moved them to prisoner of war camps. For years I wondered why the hospital and indeed the whole of Hong Kong was spared the large scale rape, murder and looting which seemed to be the reward for Japanese troops upon the capture of large cities in China. The case of Nanking in December 1937 was the best known of these, when the city was given over to the victorious Japanese troops and for some weeks suffered on a huge scale.\n\nIt was not until I read the Official History of the War Against Japan that the probable explanation appeared in Volume 1. The Japanese attack on Hong Kong was made by the 38 Division reinforced by additional troops. The division had three regiments, the 228, 229 and 230 Infantry Regiments. The 228 regiment was transferred from Hong Kong to Davao on 18 January 1942 and thence to Amboina and Timor. The 229 regiment and one battalion",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
        "rank": 0
    }
]