[
    {
        "id": 210982,
        "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-1987",
        "page_number": 44,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "19\n\naventure de jeunesse as had been the case of young René Leys, the intriguing adventurer, the mythomaniac hero of Segalen's best novel, the secret lover of China's last Empress.\n\nSegalen's novel may allow me to say one more word on his unusual cultural itinerary, which began in Polynesia where he was searching for old Polynesian myths and also for Gauguin's manuscripts, and which ended up in China with René Leys and his cryptic poems Stèles. China and the Pacific probably fascinated Segalen because of their mutual irreducibility. They utterly contrast one with the other, one in its historical as well as geographical compactness, the other in its marine immensity and its tiny, highly diversified societies. It is hardly surprising that so few Western intellectuals have combined an active interest in both. My own intellectual detours between Chinese studies and the problems of the Pacific have probably brought me closer to Segalen's rather unique position.\n\n15\n\nAll these lively but isolated figures have left us with highly valuable literary contributions. However, they expressed little interest in China's historical fate and political plight. They were concerned with China's essence. China for them, or most of them, was a kind of cultural and aesthetic curiosity. And I am not sure that Malraux does not fall into this category, whatever the political setting of his novels. The powerful voice of Victor Hugo, combining artistic concern and political involvement and condemning from his Guernsey exile the sack of the old Summer Palace in Peking in 1860, has remained distinctly isolated:\n\nSomewhere in a dark corner of the world, there was a marvel of the world and this marvel was named the Summer Palace... It was a kind of frightening unknown masterpiece of Asian civilisation on the horizon of European civilisation.\n\nAll the treasures of our cathedrals would not match this formidable Museum of the East.\n\nTwo bandits once entered the Summer Palace... One of the victors filled his pockets, whereas the other filled his treasure chests... In the face of history one",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216341,
        "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": 100,
        "title": "RAS-2003",
        "content_text": "49\n\nNOTES\n\nRomanization is always a problem with historical names, places and sources. For the two former, I have usually stuck with historical usage in English, whilst the sources are cited as in the originals. It should always be borne in mind that the predominant speech in and around the city of Canton was Cantonese.\n\nI am grateful to the Hong Kong Museum of History for help with illustrations, and to my friend R. Ian Dunn of Sydney for assistance in preparing them for reproduction here. The map used to indicate places comes from Peter Ward Fay's excellent book on the Opium War, published in 1975, and reissued in 1997 with a new Preface.\n\n1 This was replaced by the Treaty System introduced under the terms of the Treaty of Nanking [Nanjing] 1842, which ended the 'Opium War'.\n\n1\n\n4\n\n5\n\nLjungstedt, Anders (1836). An Historical Sketch of the Portuguese Settlements in China. Viking Hong Kong Publications, 1992, p.61. The full text of the revised edition of 1836. For a good modern account, see Porter, Jonathan (1996). Macau, The Imaginary City, Culture and Society, 1557 to the Present. Westview Press.\n\nDavis, John Francis. The Chinese, A General Description of China and its Inhabitants. New Edition in 3 vols (first edition 1836), London, C. Cox, 1851. Vol. I, p. 18.\n\nParkinson, C. Northcote, Trade in the Eastern Seas 1793-1813. London, Frank Cass, 1966 (first edition, 1937), p.57.\n\nThe Missionary Guide Book: or A Key to the Protestant Missionary Map of the World. London, MDCCCXLVI (1846), p.206.\n\nThese were large and impressive documents. One in the British Museum dated in 1836 measures 26.25 by 19.5 inches, as recorded by Chang, Hsin-pao (1964) in Commissioner Lin and the Opium War. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, p.7. I saw another in the Guernsey Museum in 1974.\n\nCollis, Maurice (first published 1946), Foreign Mud, The Opium Imbroglio at Canton in the 1830's and the Anglo-Chinese War (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1968, pp.45-62 for the official and unofficial systems of trading to China in the 1830s, at pp.58-60 especially for comparative figures. See in",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390",
        "rank": 0
    }
]