[
    {
        "id": 206080,
        "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-1970",
        "page_number": 160,
        "title": "RAS-1970",
        "content_text": "HONG KONG BEFORE THE BRITISH\n\n155\n\nnot a general practice, it was probably due to the easiness of running before the wind that the ships could become such large hulks. Unfortunately, we do not know who built them.\n\nBy the eighth century, the boats had become huge. \"Ladders several tens of feet high had to be used to get on board.\" The trade was organised. Foreign captains had to be registered with the Office of Trading Ships, which inspected manifests and collected export and import duties. These captains had legal powers to deal with offending passengers when at sea.\n\nIn 758, the Mohammedans had so much the upper hand in Canton that they yielded to the temptation of sacking and burning the city and making to sea with the loot. However, trade continued to flourish, the principal imports being, according to Soleyman, ivory, frankincense, ingots of copper, turtle shells, and rhinoceros horns (with which the Chinese used to make girdles), and the principal exports: silk and porcelain.\n\nThe foreign ships also carried as passengers Chinese Buddhists visiting the holy places in Java and India. In the biographies of sixty pilgrims composed by I Ching,12 37 of them took the sea route to India. Some of these went from the Tonkin delta region, but the majority started from Canton or returned thither. The compass was still unknown in those days, and the first mention of its use for navigation in Chinese literature occurs at the beginning of the 12th century.\n\nV. T'UN MUN\n\nIn the preceding sections, a picture has been given of the elements which made up the population of South China up to the end of the T'ang dynasty. We now come to our region — the peninsula South East of the Canton delta, and we must do our best to piece together such fragments of historical knowledge that we can find into a sequence which will indicate how its population developed and thrived.\n\nThe first historical reference to any place in the region occurs in a list of itineraries from China to the Persian Gulf collected\n\n11 Tang Kuo Shih Pu, by Li Chan.\n\n12 義淨,大唐西行求法高僧傳",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210781,
        "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-1986",
        "page_number": 132,
        "title": "RAS-1986",
        "content_text": "HAINAN ISLAND: \n\nA BRIEF HISTORICAL SKETCH \n\nD.L. MICHALK* \n\n115 \n\nIntroduction \n\nHainan Island forms the extreme southern limit of the People's Republic of China, save for the Paracel Reefs. Sometimes referred to as the Tail of the Dragon, Hainan lies between longitudes 108°30′ and 111° east and latitudes 18° and 20°31' north. It is separated from the mainland by the 25 km Qiongzhou Straits, and is part of Guangdong, accounting for 15 percent of the Province's area. Located in the South China Sea, Hainan is about 300 km east of Vietnam across the Gulf of Tonkin, some 500 km southwest of Hong Kong, and a similar distance from the provincial capital, Guangzhou. \n\nHainan is oval-shaped with the longest NE to SW axis measuring 309 km and the shorter NW to SE axis, 221 km. With an area of 34,077 km2 (Anon., 1982b), Hainan is about half the size of Tasmania and ranks as the world's twenty-sixth largest island. Although it accounts for less than 1 per cent of China's land area, its tropical climate, rich mineral and petroleum resources and strategic location make it an important, yet undeveloped region of China. \n\nHainan has always been regarded as a backwater by successive Chinese dynasties and a mystery to foreigners. Indeed, had it not been for a handful of inquisitive academics and devoted missionaries who \"found Hainan\" around the turn of the century, our knowledge of the island would have amounted to little more than folklore. Using these western sources, the aim of this paper is to provide a brief insight into the history of Hainan, particularly the role played by foreigners in its development. \n\n* Senior research agronomist, Agricultural Research and Veterinary Centre, New South Wales Department of Agriculture.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210796,
        "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-1986",
        "page_number": 147,
        "title": "RAS-1986",
        "content_text": "130\n\nD.L. MICHALK\n\nernment looked to Hainan to rapidly expand production of rubber, coffee and tropical fruit as these were in short supply and could only be grown in small quantities in parts of Yunnan Province. However, in spite of this encouragement and efforts by the Hainanese, only 20 per cent of the Island's arable land was under production in 1965 (Kirk, 1965).\n\nAlthough significant achievement was made in the agricultural sector, this was overshadowed by advances made in industry. Only a few, poorly equipped machine repair shops were operative at the time of Liberation, but by 1965 more than 20 farming and other machinery plants were producing 73 kinds of new products, 38 of which were in serial production (Kirk, 1965). Among the latter were peanut planters, water turbine pumps, threshers, husking mills, coconut processing machines and fluorescent lamps for deep-sea fishing. Processing factories including food canneries, sugar refineries, textile mills and rubber footwear plants not only increased in variety, but also in product quality and economic efficiency (Kirk, 1965).\n\nDuring this period, Hainan assumed greater military importance: first in response to the conflict involving French and American forces in Vietnam, and more recently to the Soviet-backed military and political takeover of Laos and Cambodia by Vietnam. This importance was further enhanced by the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war and the discovery of oil and natural gas by American and French joint-ventures in the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea. As a first line of defence, China maintains constant surveillance from the air supported by a formidable naval force of 300,000 stationed in Hainan and the Leizhou Peninsula plus strategically placed missile bases (Hollingworth, 1982). Initially, military personnel were engaged in road construction, installation of communication networks and improvement of defence positions, but in these more settled times, they have played a key role in the agricultural and industrial development of Hainan (China Daily, August 11, 1983).\n\nIn spite of these efforts, however, development of Hainan's resources proceeded too slowly to raise the living standard to keep pace with the national average (Wu and Zhi, 1981). While the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063",
        "rank": 0
    }
]