[ { "id": 209483, "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": 140, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "TWO CHINESE DOMESTIC MURDERS\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE*\n\nBoswell. \"You 'Johnson called the East-Indians barbarians. will except the Chinese, Sir?\" Johnson. \"No, Sir\". Boswell, \"Have they not arts?\" Johnson. \"They have pottery\". Boswell. \"What do you say to the written characters of their language?\". Johnson. \"Sir, they have not an alphabet, They have not been able to form what all other nations have formed\".\n\nBoswell's Life of Johnson\n\n1\n\nGeorge Orwell wrote a celebrated short essay on murder in which he argued that the great classic English murders were mostly domestic and concerned ordinary people. He went on to argue that the violence of external events, such as World War II, had made conventional murder seem unimportant.2 Orwell's essay was published in 1946. A latter-day criminologist is likely to argue that the abolition of the death penalty in 1965 has 'demeaned' murder as a fine art. Before 1965, a murder trial was often an awesome contest - the issue was a matter of life and death. Today a convicted murderer in Britain, or Hong Kong, is likely to experience, on the average, between 7 to 10 years of incarceration. The two cases discussed below, in which both principals were Chinese, raise a number of interesting legal and sociological questions, together with problems of cultural 'confusion'. In each case, the judge and jury had great difficulties in interpreting Chinese behaviour and in understanding the motivation for the crime.\n\nLock Ah Tam: the man who ran ‘amok'?\n\nLock Ah Tam was born in 1872 in Canton, the capital city of Kwangtung province. Kwangtung was then one of the major areas for Chinese emigration and a territory from which over half of China's seamen hailed. As a young man, he went to sea as a ship's steward. In 1895 he settled in Liverpool and stayed there for the rest of his life, marrying a Welsh girl. Before 1914,\n\n*Prof. Lethbridge is Professor of Sociology, University of Hong Kong.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209503, "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": 160, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "138\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nstatus of China in the world polity and of Chinese in general as citizens of the world).\n\n54\n\nNo one believes today that Chinese motivation needs a separate system of explanation, that the Chinese mind has its own eccentric circuitry. Freud, that Columbus of the Mind, revealed that in the unconscious · the deep, dark, oceanic under-world of the individual human beings are very much alike in their mechanisms. This great step forward in social perception has helped to bridge the gap between the races (still opposed of course by politics) and has made murder less incomprehensible, less inexplicable when committed by foreigners; and judges, counsel and juries (perhaps) less perplexed by the act.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965) 9.\n\n* 'Our great period in murder', Orwell writes, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been roughly 1850-1925. Orwell was writing in 1946, but with hindsight it is plausible to suggest the 'great period' could be extended to the eve of World War I.\n\n* See: Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labour Movement 1919-1927 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1968) 122.\n\n• See, in particular, Harold Z. Schriffrin, Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970). Also Nym Wales, The Chinese Labor Movement (New York: John Day, 1945), which contains the biographies of some revolutionary seamen.\n\n• Edward Marjoribanks, Famous Trials of Marshall Hall (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1950) 384. At his trial Lock was described as a 'Chinese shipping agent'.\n\n• Sir Henry Dickens in The Recollections of Sir Henry Dickens, K.C. (London: Heinemann, 1934) 244-245, writes: He was a good advocate but it cannot be truly said that he was a great one. He had not the gift of far-seeing discretion which is required in a great advocate. He was much too ready to talk at length when addressing a jury, without having previously weighed the possible consequences of what he said'. An old lag once called from the dock to Sir Henry (1849-1933). 'You ain't a patch on your father!', which greatly amused him.\n\nT\n\nSee Marjoribanks, op cit. Doris Lock did not die from her wounds until January 28, 1926. See The Times of January 29, 1926.\n\n* There is a full discussion of the origin of the M'Naghten Rules in Nigel Walker, Crime and Insanity in England, vol 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968).\n\n* Marjoribanks, op cit, 383. See also The Times February 4 and 8, 1926.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214226, "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": 84, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "47\n\nMeredith, George (1956), ‘An Essay on Comedy,’ Comedy, John Hopkins University Press.\n\nMinchin, James (1986) No Man is an Island, A Study of Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, Allen and Unwin.\n\nMuir, Frank (1990), The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose, From William Caxton to P.G. Wodehouse, a Conducted Tour, Oxford University Press.\n\nOrwell, George (1945), 'The Art of Donald McGill,' Collected Essays, Mercury Books No 17.\n\nPan, Lynn (1990), Sons of the Yellow Emperor: The Story of the Overseas Chinese, Secker and Warburg.\n\nThe Penguin Book of Modern Humour (1982), A personal anthology selected by Alan Coren, Penguin.\n\nPeters, Arnold (1998, September 25), 'Racist Remarks at Legco.' Hong Kong Standard.\n\n'Pharaoh's thigh-slapper' (c.1998), South China Morning Post, extracted from The Sunday Times (London), exact date not known.\n\nPopular Chinese Jokes (1994), ed. Tian Hengyu, Asiapac, Singapore.\n\nPotter, Stephen (1954), The Sense of Humour, Penguin.\n\nRosser, Nigel (1990, March 4), ‘Lucy Sheen, Actress,’ South China Morning Post magazine.\n\nSelected Jokes from Past Chinese Dynasties (1997) Sinolingua, Beijing, vols 1 to 4.\n\nSmith, Arthur H. (1988), Pearls of Wisdom from China, Graham Brash, Singapore, first published 1888.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214337, "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": 195, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "159\n\nhome and the work and pleasure of establishing common cause with fellow men and women in the whole of China could progress on a less awkward foundation.\n\n(0)\n\n(2)\n\n(3)\n\nNOTES\n\nIllustrations from the Illustrated London News are reproduced by permission of The British Library, shelfmark PP7611(42).\n\nThe following convention is used: when \"[]\" appears within a quotation, this represents that the present writer has either added letters or words missing in her copy of the original, or has supplied an explanatory comment.\n\nThe author is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University, and author of The Golden Needle: The Biography of Frederick Stewart (1836-1889), published by the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, 4 Renfrew Road, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, 1997. ISBN: 962-8027-08-5.\n\nEducated in the United Kingdom, she has previously taught English Literature at the University of Lagos, Nigeria (she was there during the Civil War), the University of Hong Kong, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has worked for Longman University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has worked for Longman Far East as an English-language editor, and she is an occasional freelance writer and journalist. She was briefly an Assistant Mistress at St Stephen's Girls' College, Hong Kong. Previous publications include articles, papers, presentations, and reviews on George Orwell, Leonard Woolf, Lafcadio Hearn, A. C. Swinburne, African Literature in English, New Zealand poetry, and numerous contributions on education in Hong Kong, with a particular focus on the creation of the Government education system under Frederick Stewart, the contributions of the first Anglican Bishop of Hong Kong, George Smith, language policy and standards from 1841 up to date, expatriate teachers, the learning of Chinese by non-Chinese, and the training and supply of translators in early Hong Kong. She has published a Bibliography of Hong Kong creative writing in English. Her entry on Frederick Stewart, commissioned by the New Dictionary of National Biography, has been accepted, and she has now been commissioned to write a revised entry on Bishop Smith, first Anglican Bishop of Victoria (who was the first Warden of St Paul's College, and based in Hong Kong).\n\nShe is married to Dr Verner Bickley, MBE, formerly Assistant Director of Education and founding Director of the Institute of Language in Education in Hong Kong (now absorbed into the Hong Kong Institute of Education).\n\nPage 195\n\nPage 196", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 } ]