[
    {
        "id": 214840,
        "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-1999",
        "page_number": 255,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "222 \n\nA Bold Approach to War \n\nI have referred to the indomitable spirit that animated the British troops and sailors of the War. This was something one cannot fail to notice in the various accounts of the War. As in the First Burma War, there was a boldness that must have taken the Chinese aback whenever it was demonstrated. Being practically universal, one minor example may serve to illustrate the rest. It comes from J.D. Vaughan, later a magistrate in the Straits Settlements, who had served as a midshipman on the Honourable East India Company's steam frigate Tenasserim in 1842, and is recounted here largely in his own words.46 \n\nA few days after the capture of the Yangtse city of Chin-kiang-foo, his captain took two of the ship's boats with twenty or thirty men each, with a brass three-pounder at the bow, and went to a town on a canal flowing into the great river. The writer was in one of these boats. The ship's Chinese carpenter, a Southern Chinese picked up at Singapore, could write but could not speak the Mandarin language of the area. Armed with a slate, and a truly astonishing degree of sang-froid, he made the captain's wishes to purchase provisions known to a large throng of citizens and soldiers who had assembled on the banks. Negotiating with a mandarin, they got all that they wanted, and during their brief stay were treated with the greatest civility and kindness. “A table and chairs were brought, and the elders of the city had a most interesting conversation with us through the invaluable carpenter. It was a curious sight to see the skipper sitting as cool as a cucumber smoking his cigar surrounded by our foes.\" \n\n“Few men,” Vaughan says, “would have ventured so fearlessly into the very clutches of an armed foe within a few miles of a captured city with war raging all around; and strange to say we came away un-harmed and not an angry face was to be seen amongst the crowds of men who flocked out of the gate of the town to see us.” \n\nMany other instances can be found in the books on the War, and indeed it was the norm. This verve derived from military and naval discipline and tradition, and from the leadership shown by, and expected of, British officers of the day. Only when that leadership failed, as in the contemporary disasters at Kabul in the First Afghan War, when a British army was annihilated through hesitation and mismanagement, \n\nPage 255\n\nPage 256",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216515,
        "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": 274,
        "title": "RAS-2003",
        "content_text": "226\n\nprints available from the first survey, some 85 photographs, with accompanying text, were included in Hong Kong: Going and Gone, published by the Branch in 1980. A reprint, using enhanced negatives from the first edition, is now being contemplated. The prints from Yaumatei helped identify locations of interest when a second photographic survey with the help of the Cathay Camera Club resulted in a later RAS publication, The Heart of the Metropolis: Yaumatei and its People which appeared in the late 1990s.\n\nIan's article on the new Hong Kong PRO (The Paper Chase Archives and the Public Records Office of Hong Kong) was published in Vol. 14 of the Journal (1974), and is both informative and entertaining. Another useful essay, Facilities for Research in the Public Records Office of Hong Kong (Alan Birch, Y.C. Jao and Elizabeth Sinn [eds.]) appeared between pages 153-192 of Research Materials for Hong Kong Studies, published by the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong in 1984. Ian also produced an interesting Note on Lieutenant T.B. Collinson, Royal Engineers (later Major-General) who served in Hong Kong in the 1840s and was responsible for the early mapping and accurate sketching of the area. Some of Collinson's letters had survived through the philatelic interest of their covers, and Ian had somehow spotted them, but I am unclear as to whether the Note was published, or where.\n\nA humorous man, dry and contained in the Australian way, Ian was quick to see the funny side of any situation, and was a good raconteur. He made full use of these attributes in his article on the PRO, when he described what he styled 'the classic delusions about us [archivists].' One was that he 'should look like a cross between Charles Darwin and Karl Marx in their old age, and that when not poring over old papers all day, he should be scouring cellars or attics for more documents, and 'making delighted chuckling sounds in my [his] throat like Ben Gunn discovering a cheese' when he lit upon a choice specimen. And I shall always recall his unbounded glee when he found (I think in the Far Eastern Economic Review, or else in a leading English daily) a reference to ‘a Sawn-off Damocles' instead of the famed 'Sword of'!\n\nIan was a skilful, extraordinarily patient worker in wood and metal, as well as a collector of Peking and also Afghan glass, the latter being Roman-like glass work found in the bazaars of Kabul (he had gone to Afghanistan in 1974 on a UNESCO consultancy).",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390",
        "rank": 0
    }
]