[
    {
        "id": 206363,
        "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-1971",
        "page_number": 180,
        "title": "RAS-1971",
        "content_text": "164\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nforeign nationals offering their services and having them accepted, the Rules and Regulations published in 1899 provided (Section 8) that no person was eligible to become a member of the Corps unless, inter alia, he was a British subject. It is interesting that neither the 1920 Ordinance nor its Regulations continued this requirement. It reappeared in the 1933 Ordinance, but only to the extent that all officers had to be British subjects, nothing being said about the men. We have corroboration that there were members who were not British subjects in the 1930s because the Commandant's Report in the 1937 Year Book mentions that 31 Dutch and German members had resigned during the past twelve months because they \"were in danger of losing their national status should they continue to serve\"39\n\nIt is not certain who was the first Hong Kong Chinese to join the Volunteer Corps. As stated above, he would not have had to have been a British subject until 1893. After that date he would have had to have been one and, in addition to age and health requirements, would have also had to be proposed by two members of the particular unit of the Corps to which he sought admission and be approved of by the Commanding Officer of the Unit and of the Commandant of the Corps, with his name, and those of his proposers, posted for not less than five days before admission (Section 9 of the 1899 Regulations). It is unlikely that these rules were designed to keep out Chinese. Indeed the thought that they might join probably never entered the framers' heads. It was not likely that Chinese would have been interested anyway, unlike Europeans other than British subjects, some of whom may have looked back with regret on the free and easy days of early volunteering in the Colony. As it happened, Hong Kong Chinese had more chance of admission than foreigners, as Hong Kong birth provided British nationality; and by this time many sons of the educated, well-established Chinese business families of the Colony would have qualified for entry had they been sufficiently interested in what, after all, would have been a strange environment. The 1920 Ordinance made no stipulations on nationality, which probably explains why a faded picture of the Armoured Car Company in 1926, shown at the Centenary Exhibition in 1954, features the late Sir Man-\n\n39 Y.B., 1937, p. 6.\n\nPage 180\n\nPage 181",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213200,
        "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": 22,
        "title": "RAS-1994",
        "content_text": "ARTICLES\n\nTHE GERMAN SPEAKING COMMUNITY IN HONG KONG 1846-1918\n\nCARL T. SMITH\n\nIntroduction - Some Problems\n\nThe documents used for this study seldom indicate the language spoken by the person named in the document. The researcher must depend upon the spelling of the name as an indication of national origin. Such a method is fraught with difficulties and pitfalls.\n\nA document may identify a person as being from Switzerland, but were they German speaking? The family language of a Swiss may be German, French, Italian or Romanish. Someone in Hong Kong with a German sounding name may have come here from England, America or another country where his ancestor had settled. The person may no longer be German speaking, his family having adopted the language of their new community. One prominent Hong Kong family has a distinct German name. They are Eurasian and the family tradition is that their Caucasian progenitor in Hong Kong left Germany at the time of the 1848 Revolution in Germany and settled in England. He subsequently came to Hong Kong as a businessman and later returned to England but without his Eurasian family.\n\nAs the borders of the German states and subsequent nation changed through the years so did the nationality of the residents of these areas. The Chinese Repository published in the 1830s and 1840s lists foreign residents on the China coast. A few of these lists give the nationality of the persons listed. In 1845 the Hong Kong shopkeeper Frederick Funk is listed as French. The name sounds German. He may have been from Alsace or Lorraine where, according to political changes, the inhabitants would have been French or German nationals. The eastern border of Germany also fluctuated. In the 1850s and 1860s there was in Hong Kong a tavern keeper and auctioneer named Henry Winniberg - German sounding, but one record identified him as Polish. A number of Jews with German sounding names settled in Hong Kong, principally after the 1880s. The well-known restaurant family of London apparently came some years later.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213219,
        "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": 41,
        "title": "RAS-1994",
        "content_text": "20\n\nLane, Crawford Restaurant and for several years in the 1930s it was known as the Exchange Restaurant, but in 1935 the name reverted again to Cafe Wisseman (details of management, location and name are from notices of the Spirit Licensing Board published in the Hong Kong Government Gazette).\n\nAn incident took place at the Cafe in September 1914, just after war was declared, which placed three German nationals under suspicion. They were observed throwing down a copy of the China Mail and stamping on it because it contained a report that the British had compulsorily bought two battleships then being built for the Turkish Government (CO129/413, Information from Provost Marshall regarding Germans on list, 8 Oct. 1914).\n\nFirms\n\nI have tried to reconstruct the history of these firms from the records available in Hong Kong. The average reader may not be interested in the detailed account of change of partnership, location and other minutia, but as most of this material has not been published previously, I presume to do so now in the hope that there may be some who have an interest in the firms may learn more about them. The information and references may provide a starting place for those who might wish to write a fuller history of particular firms.\n\nThough Germany was not a colonial power in Asia, its merchants carried on an active trade there. Throughout the nineteenth century German firms became increasingly competitive with those of other western countries. In the opening decades of the century Canton was the centre for trade, but it declined in importance when the ports at Hong Kong and Shanghai developed.\n\nWhen war was declared between Britain and Germany in August 1914 citizens of enemy countries were placed under parole but in October new laws were enacted enabling the Hong Kong Government to place German nationals who held reserve status in the military to be interned. Representatives of German businesses in Hong Kong sent a letter dated 30 October to the American Consul General there asking him to submit it to the British authorities. The merchants appealed for a reversal of the orders on the grounds that they had contributed through the years to the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]