[ { "id": 204457, "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-1962", "page_number": 89, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "78\n\nJ. W. HAYES\n\nbeing made of blue or sun-dried bricks. The door posts and lintels are of dressed granite slabs with tiled roofs on rafters made of China fir. The floors are generally concreted, and frequently paved with red brick or with granite. Well built and handsomely decorated temples exist in all the important villages, and in many places large and expensively constructed buildings, in which the ancestral tablets are kept, were seen. As usual in China the streets are narrow and paved with large slabs of stone. Such drainage as exists is on the surface, underground drains never being used in Chinese villages.\n\nIn their surroundings and the generally peaceful life they led, everything conspired to make the people of the New Territory a conservative-minded and generally amenable body, and Lockhart said of them, \"Taken as a whole the inhabitants may be regarded as an industrious, frugal and well-behaved people\". It may be appropriate at this stage to mention who they were. He found 161 Punti or Cantonese villages with a population of some 64,000 persons and 255 Hakka villages, most of them smaller and more remote than the Cantonese ones, with a population of 36,000 people. He also mentions the boat people, of whose numbers he was unable to obtain an estimate. He does say, however, that they formed a class by themselves and were looked down upon by the land population.\n\nNeither Punti nor Hakka are native to the district or to the province. The former, says Lockhart, are supposed to have come from the provinces bordering on the south of the Yangtse river and made their way to South China during the early periods of Chinese history. They were firmly established in the south during the time of the Southern Sung dynasty (1127-1278) and, as he observes, it is a fact that most of the Punti inhabitants easily trace their descent from ancestors who were settled in the San On district in that period, or elsewhere in the Kwangtung province. The Hakka, or \"strangers\" as the term signifies, are, he says, supposed to be descended from the Mongols and to have reached the southern provinces when the Mongol dynasty was overthrown about the middle of the 14th century. They are regarded by the Punti as aliens, and speak a dialect quite distinct from the Cantonese. They are a hardy and frugal race and are generally found in the hill districts. As a rule, Cantonese and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204577, "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-1963", "page_number": 58, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "FLOWERS OF HONG KONG\n\n47\n\nGORDONIA AXILLARIS (ROXB.) DIETR.\n\nFamily: Theaceae ✯✯\n\nCommon names: Mountain tea-flower\n\nMountain or Wild Camellia\n\n山 茶 花\n\nThis hardy evergreen shrub or small tree with its many branches bears white camellia-like flowers, and is very common on the hillsides of Hong Kong and the New Territories. It is a tropical or subtropical plant and this species has been found in South China, Formosa and Indo-China.\n\nThe showy white flowers, 3-4 inches in diameter, bloom fully from October to March. The five spreading white petals are notched with slightly wavy margins, displaying a golden mass of anthers at the centre and held at the base by a green perule of bracts and sepals. The flowers, almost sessile, arise singly or in cluster of three, from the axils of the upper leaves. Each flower lasts for one day only, when the corolla together with the numerous stamens fused at the base, are shed from the trees. The perules persist, subtending the developing woody, oblong elliptical capsule, one inch long, green when young but becoming dark brown when mature, taking six months to ripen. Each dehisces loculicidally from the apex to nearly the base, into five narrow pointed valves, splitting away from the erect columella at the centre and liberating many small seeds, each apically winged and resembles the winged seeds of Pinus.\n\nThe plant was originally named, Camellia axillaris (Kor.) Roxb. but has been separated and transferred to the genus Gordonia by the distinctive characters of the capsule, the loculi-cidal dehiscence from the apex and the winged seeds.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205176, "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-1966", "page_number": 132, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "OLD BRITISH KOWLOON\n\n127\n\nbelow; another was the owner of a herbal medicine shop in Yau Ma Ti, and the other two came from Ho Man Tin. One of these was the village elder, and the other was a woman who was a keen Taoist and the wife of the richest man in the village.\n\nThe temple was the focal point of village life at this time and contributed much to relieve the boredom of hard work and ordinary routine for the cultivators, stone-cutters, shop-hands and their wives who were among its devotees. The highlight of the year was the celebrations at the time of the birthday of Kwun Yam, the patron goddess of the temple. This falls on the 19th day of the third lunar month. At this time the managers arranged for a variety of ceremonies and entertainments to take place. First, there was the annual chanting of religious books, called locally ta chiu (T). This was performed by Taoist priests known as nam mo lo (亮樣羅)12 and during this time it was customary for the villagers to follow a vegetarian diet. Having done their religious duty the elders made arrangements for entertaining both gods and men. They employed a troupe of actors to perform Cantonese opera for the traditional period of four days and five nights. My informants tell me that these shows took place every year when they were small, and indeed right up to 1926.\n\nRev. E. J. Hardy, who served as a military chaplain in Hong Kong for three and a half years at the turn of the century writes, with special reference to the villages of the Hong Kong region:33\n\n\"The great event of village life is the occasional visit of strolling players. In a very short time a temporary mat-shed theatre is put up on some barren spot on the outskirts of the village: around it cook-shops, tea-shops, gambling booths and the like, all made of bamboo, palm-leaves, and matting are erected. The place is like a fair. At mat-shed theatres the audience in the pit stand; above there are seats for subscribers and local magnates\".\n\nAnother feature of the celebrations on Kwun Yam's birthday was the firing of lucky rockets. It was usual to fire three rockets, and the assembled men and youths scrambled for the fragments of the rockets, which were believed to bring luck to the successful keepers. The first rocket was the most prized. This local entertainment could take place at various festivals. It is described for", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205177, "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-1966", "page_number": 133, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "128\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nanother occasion in the lunar year by Robert Morrison, the celebrated missionary, in his View of China (1817):34\n\n\"The 2nd moon, 2nd day is the general birth-day of these [tutelary spirits] when at all the public offices, and in various of the streets, plays are performed, and Crackers are let off in great numbers; also decorated rockets. The spectators struggle to obtain the fragments of the last, under the idea that he who obtains it will be fortunate\n\nThis was a rough sport and sometimes led to minor fights between men of different dialect groups. As Hardy observes, the proceedings on these occasions were invariably accompanied on the side by such delights as gambling stalls, opium divans and the like, and as such they were not welcomed by the police for whom they made extra work and trouble.35\n\nThese entertainments were paid for by opening subscription books which the managers took round the villages. The occasional deficit was usually met on application to a well-off village elder. Village people did not have to pay to see the show, but those who subscribed received a big lantern called tang lung36 and could take part in the feast customarily held at this time. I am told that it was not uncommon to set out a hundred tables on these occasions.\n\nThe temple organisation for this small group of villages could be found at other places in Old and New Kowloon.37 It is interesting to note that villagers were quite clear about which villages belonged to a particular group and which did not. For instance, when I asked one old person as to whether Kowloon Tong village people attended the entertainment at the Tai Shek Kwu Temple, she said immediately: 'It had nothing to do with them; they lived on the other side of the stream'. This indicates the existence of clearly recognised geographical boundaries for each temple group area; and the division of the peninsula into several groups each with its exclusive interests and responsibilities.\n\nI have mentioned Yau Ma Ti and its shop-keepers several times already.38 Partly because of its proximity and close economic connection with the Tai Shek Kwu group and partly for its own sake a word about the place is opportune, especially as there was a more developed type of local organisation in Kowloon's growing townships.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205185, "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-1966", "page_number": 141, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "OLD BRITISH KOWLOON\n\n135\n\n24 With regard to the quantities of firewood brought on foot into Kowloon from as far afield as Sha Tin, see Sessional Papers 1903 p. 209 which list 66,521 loads of firewood, each estimated at 70 piculs (approx. 93 lbs.) as being carried over the hills in 1902. The Sham Shui Po Kaifong, through operating the Mo Tai (A†4) temple's public weighing scales, got its revenue from the vegetable and livestock market there. Much of the produce sold there crossed the harbour to Hong Kong. (See the Registrar General's Report for 1907 in Sessional Papers 1908, p. 194. Other information supplied by elders). I am also informed by Mr. WAI Tau Shue (b. 1885) that in his youth the Kowloon Lok Sin Tong levied a small weighing charge on each load of firewood sold in the Kowloon City market. In each case the proceeds were supposed to swell public funds for charitable work. For social advancement see the career of WONG Lan-shang described in this article.\n\n25 The Third or Kowloon Police Magistrate was not appointed until 1925 (Colonial Estimates 1924-1926). For an example of police assistance in an emergency see the press reports of the two big fires at Hung Hom village on 11 and 16 December 1884 (Hong Kong Daily Press).\n\n26 See Report from the Hong Kong Land Commission of 1886-87 on the History of the Sale, Tenure and Use of the Crown Land of the Colony published in Sessional Papers 1887 pp. XXVI-XXVII.\n\n27 Between 1853 and 1862 the Hong Kong government paid village elders as tepos (18) in an endeavour to enlist their services in the public interest. See G. B. Endacott, Government and People in Hong Kong 1841-1962, Hong Kong; University of Hong Kong Press, 1964, pp. 37-38. The Colonial Estimates for the period, under Registrar General's department, show that payment was not extended to the elders of the Kowloon villages acquired in 1860.\n\n28 Eitel, p. 160.\n\n29 See, for instance, pp. 8 and 9 and note 40 of my typescript article \"Some villages in the North Western Part of the Kowloon Peninsula in 1898” presented to the International Conference on Asian History held at the University of Hong Kong, August 30-September 5, 1964. See also note 37 below.\n\n30 The temple was re-erected in Shantung Street Kowloon in 1927 on a site provided by Government which also gave a grant of $6,000 towards the reconstruction. The rest of the money required for the new building was supplied by the Kwong Wah (Tung Wah group) Hospital, to whom the management of the temple was entrusted.\n\n31 Shui Yuet Kung (KA) is an alternative name for a Kwan Yin temple. See S. Wells Williams, Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect, Canton; Office of the Chinese Repository, 1856, p. 650. See also E. T. C. Werner, A Dictionary of Chinese Mythology, New York; The Julian Press, 1961, pp. 225-227.\n\n32 See E. T. C. Werner, China of the Chinese, London; Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1920, pp. 196-197, and S. Wells Williams, Tonic Dictionary under p. 308 and p. 581 under A.\n\n33) E. J. Hardy, John Chinaman at Home, London; T. Fisher Unwin, 1905, p. 86. See also W. Stanton, The Chinese Drama, Hong Kong; Kelly & Walsh, 1899, pp. 5-6 for a brief description of the position in \"China and in the villages of Hong Kong\".\n\n34 Robert Morrison, A View of China for Philological Purposes. Macao; Hon. E. I. C. Press, 1817, p. 105.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205186, "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-1966", "page_number": 142, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "136\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\n35 The informants who assisted me with their recollections of the N.W. Kowloon villages in the article mentioned in note 29 above recalled that similar proceedings took place yearly at the Sham Tai Chi or Temple of the Third Prince on the beach at Law Uk, Cheung Sha Wan until it, too, was removed for redevelopment in the mid 1920s. Fights between the various participants, especially Hakkas with Hoklos, were quite common at festival times.\n\n36 See S. Wells Williams, Easy Lessons in Chinese, Macao; Chinese Repository Press, 1842, p. 127.\n\n37 This type of organisation is also common in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Indeed it was apparently found all over China: see Werner's China of the Chinese, pp. 163-165 for a good general description.\n\n38 In 1897 Yau Ma Tei had a population of 8051 (Sessional Papers 1897, p. 485) and by 1907 as much as 17,812 (Sessional Papers, p. 273). The name means Oil and Hemp Ground, though my informants tell me it has an older name Tai Shek Lat (私大石ᑟ) which may be translated as Row of Big Stones. \"Lat\" is a colloquial word.\n\n39 Hong Kong Government Gazette for 1877, p. 81.\n\n40 See Mr. Chadwick's Reports on the Sanitary Conditions of Hong Kong, Eastern No. 38, printed for the use of the Colonial Office in November 1882, pp. 42-43. Through a printer's error he calls Yau Ma Tei “Yan Ma Ti”.\n\nSee Sessional Papers 1899 p. 482 for another description of the adjoining area.\n\n41 No evidence of this particular type of activity survives from the Yau Ma Tei district. However a few examples can be cited from the Kowloon City area. Mr. W. Schofield has sent details of a tablet (1828) found pre-war beside a broken bridge near the former Kowloon City rifle range which records the names of officials, shops and passage boats contributing to the work; and a tablet dated December 1895/January 1896 recording the repair of \"Temple Road\" at Kowloon City is still in existence. A direction stone at the site gives left for Kowloon Tsai and Sham Shui Po and straight on for the Hau Wong Temple. The work was organised by sixteen directors (财事) who are listed on the tablet.\n\n42 For a description of one of these processions see Hardy, p. 280.\n\n43 The inscription above the main entrance also records reconstruction (equivalent of) November/December 1878.\n\n44 The tablet is dated the equivalent of November/December 1894.\n\n45 I am indebted to Messrs. Patrick Wong and Dicken Yang of the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs for part of this information.\n\n46 See, for instance, G. T. Lay's account of missionary visits to Hong Kong and Kowloon in 1839 between pp. 279-300 of his The Chinese as they are, London; William Ball & Co., 1841. Rev. George Smith's visits to Kowloon in 1844/45 are described in his A Narrative of an Exploratory Visit to Each of the Consular Cities of China and to the Islands of Hong Kong and Chusan, London, Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 2nd edition, 1847, pp. 72 seq.; and Rev. William Burns' visits from Hong Kong in 1848 are mentioned in James Johnston, pp. 71-74.\n\n47 Impressions of China and the Present Revolution: its Progress and Prospects, London; Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1855, p. 24.\n\n48 See James Johnston, p. 71.\n\n49 See The China Mission Hand Book, Shanghai; American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1896, pp. 272-280 for an account, with statistics of the Basel Mission's work in South China for 1893.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205202, "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-1966", "page_number": 158, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "152\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nThe only revision of these volumes since their publication in 1959 is the deletion of a postscript, which the author regards as premature at that time, on the communes.\n\nThe volume is attractively printed on good paper, with a sturdy binding. The paperback edition of these two works will be welcomed by the specialist who may have missed them in their first printing, and by the general reader who wishes a scholarly, jargon-free work on the impact on the family and village of the early years of Communist rule in China. Students will find here a model of sociological analysis, enhanced by the author's clarity of expression.\n\nUnited College\n\nThe Chinese University of Hong Kong.\n\nJAMES A. BEAUDRY\n\nA GUIDE TO THE ARCHIVES AND RECORDS OF PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN MISSIONS FROM THE BRITISH ISLES TO CHINA 1796 - 1914. Leslie R. Marchant. University of Western Australia Press, 1966. 134 pages. 35s.\n\nThis exceedingly handy and invaluable book has three main purposes. First, it provides a comprehensive guide to those Protestant missionary societies in the United Kingdom and Ireland which supported active mission work in China from 1796 until 1914. This in itself is a distinctive service, for these have never previously been listed together satisfactorily in a single publication.\n\nSecondly, the book gives a detailed list of the archives and records of the societies that have them. These collections are fully described in the entry of the particular societies having custody of them. In the case of transferred archives, the reader is referred from the donating or absorbed society to the appropriate present-time repository. This arrangement enables the researcher both to locate easily each society's records and to see the total list of holdings in each repository.\n\nThirdly, the book presents a “definitive list\" of the publications of each society. Again, this is a welcome service, for there has not previously been a complete index of missionary journals and periodicals published in the United Kingdom. This is useful for the researcher because certain gaps found in the archives can often be filled by these publications.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205204, "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-1966", "page_number": 160, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "154\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nsheer volume alone makes this dictionary unique and should tell the prospective user that he will likely find here many definitions which do not appear elsewhere or which would be found only after a time-consuming search of numerous other sources.\n\nThe arrangement is alphabetical in romanized Cantonese. With only minor modifications the romanization is the same as that used in Meyer and Wempe, The Student's Cantonese-English Dictionary, and in a number of textbooks on colloquial Cantonese ranging from Father O'Melia's First Year Cantonese to S. L. Wong's Cantonese Conversation Grammar (which latter text duplicates all the romanized material in the Barnett-Chao system as well). This makes a handy tie-in with training materials for the beginning student although there are some concomitant problems which I will mention below. Being in romanized form this book should be especially welcome to those who want to study the dialect without necessarily learning characters in the process. For those who need them, characters are available in the back of the book, and it is even possible to work from material in characters through the keys in the appendices which are cross-referenced to the romanized entries and definitions. However, according to the title the chief target is not the reader but the speaker, the person who hears an expression and wants to look it up in the quickest and most convenient way. In this form the dictionary fills a long need for a large reference work on the dialect in romanized form.\n\nThe title is, however, somewhat misleading since the book is obviously and admittedly designed for the reader as well as the speaker. This is seen principally in the fact that there was no attempt to stick exclusively to colloquial or conversational material. A great number of words and phrases from the classical and written language are included and many of these cannot be described as allusions or quotations commonly heard in the spoken language.\n\nAs might be expected from a book this size with such a large number of entries, each entry receives only a minimum of attention and the simplest possible definition usually suffices. There is little or nothing in the way of elaboration on the meanings and no examples of usage. This may occasionally leave the user with an additional research job and it certainly won't afford any feel for context in case the student wonders how to put an item back", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206032, "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": 112, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "A NEW LOOK AT CANTONESE EXPLETIVES\n\n107\n\nAnother peculiarity is the liking for a prefixed personal pronoun: MY THIS BOOK, YOUR THAT HOUSE, where English would have to turn it round into this \"book of mine\", or \"my book here\"; \"that house of yours\", or \"your house there\".\n\nAn exception to what I just said about \"parts of speech\" not being labelled by their form, should be mentioned here. The personal pointing-words in Cantonese all have the same tone low rising — and this tone, dictionary-wise the least favoured in the language, includes some of the most frequently used words: the verbs to exist43 and not to exist44, the number 5, the verbs sit45 & stand46, the adjectives heavy47 and near48 are examples which occur to me. There are nouns, too, of course, so that nothing like a \"rule\" emerges (like the rule about aspirates never having the \"low level\" tone and non-aspirates never having the \"low falling\" or \"low rising\"); nevertheless it is a circumstance worth mentioning.\n\nThe nouns, or thing-words, are very important and interesting. The first thing to note about them is that they do have genders, though these have nothing to do with masculine, feminine or neuter; but could be called congruence-classes. Some of the congruences are descriptive, but not all; some of the \"classes\" appear to be one-member clubs. A few nouns belong to more than one class, usually with a shade of meaning. I have often tried to make a comprehensive list of these, but the trouble with this list (as with the lists which others have made) is that it is literally unending. I'll explain why.\n\nTake a word like BAAR49; a verb meaning \"grasp, hold in the hand\" and still so used in many expressions; a natural extension was to a measure-word “handful”; this became a \"handy\" congruence-class indicator (classifier) since the word for hand SAO50 was unavailable, being of identical pronunciation with another congruence-class indicator SAO51 used for poems. So this BAAR without losing any of its original uses, came into the key 20 as the indispensable classifier for nearly all tools and utensils, from the fan and foot-rule to the broom, spade, hammer and sickle52 but not the writing-brush nor chopsticks.\n\n43 有\n\n44 無 45坐 46站 47 重\n\n48 將近 49 把 50手\n\n51 首\n\n52 Also the mouth when used for talking, i.e. as a weapon.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206130, "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": 210, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n203\n\nabout migration routes. It is perhaps just as well, therefore, to remember that there are many aspects of migration which can only be studied by visual observations, and Dr. Hemmingsen's studies remind us forcibly of this,\n\nIn general, the volume is well produced, although the numerous black and white photographs are not of high enough quality to be of much practical use.\n\npractical use. Because of its high standards of accuracy, this book will remain a necessary work of reference, in its rather limited field, for many years to come.\n\nHong Kong, 1970,\n\nM. A. WEBSTER\n\nHONG KONG STUDIES: A BIBLIOGRAPHY. Compiled by M. I. Berkowitz and Eddie K. K. Poon. Hong Kong, Department of Extramural Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1969, pp. xvi, 137. HK$10.\n\nBibliographies are indispensable adjuncts to research and to increasing knowledge but they are not generally subjects that appeal to the student looking for useful work to do. Most of us would rather use them than compile them, especially when their nature renders them so vulnerable to criticism, fair or otherwise: it is much easier to be destructive than constructive in reviewing bibliographies.\n\nI welcome this new bibliography since it provides a handy reference to a variety of items on Hong Kong affairs. Its usefulness is immediately apparent to this reviewer in that it has brought items to his attention of which he was not hitherto aware, though working for years on the Hong Kong background. It is more ambitious and ranges more widely, though less deeply, than the bibliography (28 pages in 1963) which until that year used to be included in the Hong Kong Government's Colony Annual Report, and its less useful successor, J. M. Braga's short (17 pages) Hong Kong book list, A Hong Kong Bibliography 1965 published by the Government Press. It also lists articles as well as books.\n\nHowever, this new bibliography is still in no way comprehensive: there is a good deal of material that could have been included. Because of this I feel that the title promises too much. It might, say, have been better to stick to post-war publications\n\nPage 210\n\nPage 211", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206536, "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-1972", "page_number": 84, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "78\n\nHENRY JAMES LETHBRIDGE\n\nmany Chinese in Weihaiwei, where he was held in great esteem, who will lament the passing of a kindly and sympathetic administrator and a warm-hearted friend,68\n\nLockhart's training in the Chinese classics, the staple educational fare for all Europeans in the nineteenth century who wished to master Chinese, drew him towards traditional and conservative forces in Chinese society. In Lockhart's time cadets studied, for example, the various publications of James Legge and were expected to understand, and to be able to translate from, Mencius and the Tso Chuan. Lockhart, like R.F. Johnston, did not reject in its entirety the old China that was being transformed slowly in his day. Thus, unlike some European missionaries and merchants, who looked forward eagerly to the breaking-up of China because they expected change would favour their respective interests, Lockhart did not want the China he knew and valued to be changed radically. He believed in a renovated China - a return of the Chinese to their antique virtues and a refurbishing of their institutions. He was not in sympathy with views held by members of the China Association,69 a London repository for Old China Hands such as T.H. Whitehead, and the clubmen of Shanghai and the Treaty Ports. On the other hand, as most of us are, he was a man of his time - a colonial official from a particular stratum of British society, who believed in his mission to govern, but to govern well, those territories of the Middle Kingdom taken over by the British in the nineteenth century.\n\nA vigorous man, physically and mentally, Lockhart was attracted by the challenges presented by the administration of newly acquired colonial territories. He enjoyed the power and position conferred by his official status. As Commissioner of Weihaiwei, Lockhart the Scot, was, it is not too absurd to argue, in the role of a Scottish chieftain, the overlord of a rude and hardy peasantry, related to his following through a web of personal relationships. He was a salaried official, but the term 'colonial official' tends to mask the fact that he succeeded in his various tasks not so much because of his rank but because of the enormous sympathy he had for Chinese, because he was a scholar who could establish easy social relationships with members of a very different race. And, to shift the analogy from Scotland, Lockhart's views on governing the Chinese were close to those held by the Confucian Mandarin to establish appropriate", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206598, "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-1972", "page_number": 146, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "140\n\nLINDA F. SULLIVAN\n\nand have traditionally been looked down upon by other groups. In the southern provinces, they have fought bitterly against the native Punti for ownership of land.17\n\nIn their building arts and plan arrangements, the Hakka houses or complexes have varied greatly from the homes of other Chinese. Their houses have a distinct character which in many ways reflects the hardy and fearless spirit of their inhabitants. Generally Hakka complexes are three or four storeys high with from ten to a hundred and twenty rooms. There are both horizontally and vertically rectangular storeyed houses with as many as three halls and two cross sections. It is the circular house, however, which is so markedly different from all other domestic architecture in China. Most of the houses built in this style were constructed during the Ch'ien Lung reign (1736-1796).18\n\nThe first example is a complex of rectangular houses.19 The complex is symmetrical on the right and left. One comes in from a gate on the southwest corner, turning so that upon entering the front courtyard one is heading toward the front door which faces south on the main axis.* After passing the front door there is a small gatehouse behind which there is a five-sided courtyard. After crossing the yard and climbing a few steps, one enters a large hall at the back of which there is a second courtyard. Further on there is a hall from which one has access to the ancestral hall which completes the main axis. Around the inside of the external wall are the kitchens and surrounding the central area are the animal sheds. On both sides of the central area there are stairs which lead to the upper floors. The second floor is for storage and the third and fourth are the living quarters. The windows are only on the top floor for which there may be many reasons. One is that the noise of the ground floor cannot penetrate the living quarters of the various families. Secondly it might be for protection and lookout purposes. It is known that the walls on both the left and right sides are thickened for defense. The appearance of this housing complex is very strong and stable and gives the impression of a fortress.\n\nThe circular type of Hakka house is shown in the next example.20 The plan of the complex is basically the same as the rectangular variety.† As one enters from the front door, one proceeds along a central axis from the gatehouse to the central courtyard which is\n\n* See also Fig. 2.\n\n† See also Fig. 3.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206694, "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-1972", "page_number": 242, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n236\n\nstudent can afford, or indeed wishes, to carry Cordier and his successors around, and yet needs a handy reference.\n\nHong Kong, September, 1972\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nMANDARIN PRONUNCIATION EXPLAINED WITH DIAGRAMS. Raymond Huang. Hong Kong. Hong Kong University Press.\n\nIt is truly unfortunate that the book under review fails to do what it was intended to do. The expressed goals are important, and students and teachers of Chinese do indeed need a pronunciation guide of the type proposed in the present volume. However, the book is marred by some basic mistakes which effectively destroy its credibility and negate its value as a guide for beginners.\n\nFrom the text and references one can deduce that the author is a trained phonetician and that his knowledge of English phonetics is very good. But it is also obvious that he did not give the same attention to Chinese. As a result his articulatory description of Chinese is full of errors, the Chinese-English contrasts are unreliable, and the overall product is more harmful than helpful.\n\nAs a minor example, in discussing Mandarin tones the author has confused the 5th tone as marked in Mathews' Dictionary (all of which are reflexes of entering tone forms in final -p, -t, and -k, still distinctive in some Mandarin dialects) with his own 5th tone which is the modern Mandarin unstressed, atonic form. Thus (p. xxvi) he marks the question particle ma as 5th tone in his system because it is often toneless, but he notes that the 5th tone does not occur in modern Peking Mandarin and seems to imply that this is why Mathews' Dictionary marks this character with 4th tone. Historically this particular form was not in the entering tone category and would never be marked 5th tone in Mathews. Huang's comments simply compound confusion on the matter.\n\nBut a much more flagrant error is his attempt to describe Mandarin initial stops and affricates as contrasting on a voiced-voiceless axis. Thus, the author tells us that the Wade-Giles initial consonant pairs p p', t t', k k', ch ch', ts ts' contrast in the same way as English p b, t d, k g, ch j and ts dz. If this were actually true, one of the major stumbling blocks would be removed from", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206779, "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-1973", "page_number": 56, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "50\n\nA. D. BLUE\n\nJardine should not pass up the river. In the outcome, the passengers for Canton continued their journey in a sailing boat, and the Jardine returned to Lintin.\n\nSome time later the Chinese repeated their demand that the Jardine must leave the country, and as her machinery needed repair, she left for Singapore under sail, and arrived there on 28th February 1836. After several ineffectual attempts to repair the engines and to sell her, the engines were removed and the Jardine was converted permanently to a sailing ship. As such she returned to China on 23rd September 1836, but was recognised at Lintin as the \"smoke ship\" which had been turned away some nine months before. Although now minus the offending engines and paddle wheels, the hoppo decreed that she must leave. Her later history is obscure, but she seems to have continued in Jardine, Matheson and Company's fleet as a schooner. In his British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800-1842, Michael Greenberg includes her in a list of the Company's ships on the China coast in 1840.\n\nIt was the operations of the steamships of the Royal Navy and of the East India Company in the First China War, 1840-1842, which proved the value and practicability of steamships in Chinese waters. By the end of the war there were 48 British warships on the coast, including hospital, troop, and supply ships. Fourteen of these were steamships, nine wooden and five iron, the best known being the Nemesis.\n\nThe Nemesis was a pioneer in several respects, and it was her exploits in the First China War which advertised the many advantages of steam over sail in coastal waters. She was the first iron steamship to round the Cape of Good Hope, and to operate in Chinese waters for any length of time. Her outward passage to China in 1840 was probably the longest and most perilous voyage undertaken by a steamship up to that time; and some of the problems posed by her iron construction were never fully solved in her time—compass errors and the effects of lightning, for instance. She was flat bottomed and of shallow draft, only drawing six feet when fully loaded. She had two movable sliding keels, one fore and one aft of the engine room, and was divided into seven watertight compartments. With her shallow draft (she could be made to draw as little as five feet when necessary) the Nemesis was especially handy for inshore work on the coast and rivers. She probably demoralised", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207352, "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-1975", "page_number": 120, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "112\n\n10 Ibid., p. 31.\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\n11 Fifty Years of Progress: The Jubilee of Hongkong as a British Crown Colony, Hong Kong, Daily Press Office, 1891, p. 43.\n\n12 J. S. Thomson, op. cit., p. 8.\n\n13 Ibid., p. 54.\n\n14 Allister Macmillan, ed., Seaports of the Far East, London, 1923, p. 340.\n\n15 Information about Bridget Montague is to be found in contemporary Hong Kong newspapers and the Report on the Contagious Diseases Ordinance (see note 5).\n\n16 Alfred Weatherhead, Life in Hong Kong: 1856-1859. Typescript in the Library of the University of Hong Kong.\n\n17 W. A. Hornaday, Two Years in the Jungle, London, 1885, p. 185.\n\n18 Capt. Gordon Casserly, The Land of the Boxers, London, 1903, p. 193.\n\n19 John Thomson, F.R.G.S., The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China, London, 1875, pp. 192-3.\n\n20 J. A. Turner, Kwang Tung or Five Years in South China, London (1894), pp. 108-9.\n\n21 See China Station 1859-1864: The Reminiscences of Walter White, London, National Maritime Museum, Maritime Monographs and Reports, No. 3, 1972.\n\n22 Ibid., p. 27.\n\n23 Major Henry Knollys, English Life in China, London, 1885, pp. 56-7.\n\n24 'Report of the Commission on Alcoholic Liquors', Hong Kong Sessional Papers 1898, p. 1.\n\n25 E. J. Eitel, \"Treatment of Paupers in Hong Kong', Hong Kong Government Gazette, 1880, p. 470.\n\n26 Ibid., p. 469.\n\n27 The Kowloon British School was opened in 1902; before that some girls were educated at convent schools in Macau.\n\n28 Marjorie Topley, 'The Role of Savings and Wealth among Hong Kong Chinese', in L. C. Jarvie, ed., Hong Kong: A Society in Transition, London, 1969, p. 193.\n\n29 J. Thomson, op. cit., pp. 203 and 208.\n\n30 L. N. Wheeler, The Foreigner in China, Chicago, 1881, p. 242.\n\n31 Rev. E. J. Hardy, John Chinaman at Home, London, n.d., p. 29.\n\n32 Leon Radzinowicz, Ideology and Crime, London, 1966, p. 38.\n\n33 Allister Macmillan, op. cit., p. 339.\n\n34 Op. cit., p. 151.\n\n35 Samuel Couling, The Encyclopaedia Sinica, Shanghai, 1917, p. 437.\n\n36 W. A. P. Martin, A Cycle of Cathay, New York, 1900, p. 24.\n\n37 L. C. Arlington, Through the Dragon's Eyes, London, 1931, p. 151.\n\n38 H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York, 1958, p. 186.\n\n39 Arnold Wright and H. A. Cartwright, Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports of China, London, 1908, p. 341.\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208039, "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-1977", "page_number": 78, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "62\n\nJ. T. KAMM\n\nThat is, the Tangs, as well as the other large landholding clans, first established rights over cultivation-value; their claims to ownership rested primarily on their identity as \"first-cultivators.\"23\n\nThe priority of cultivation-value is best revealed by a brief examination of tax assessment in Hsin-An. Land has traditionally been classified according to its production potential. At the time of British occupation, first class land (甲) yielded two crops of paddy annually, or one crop of sugarcane. Second class land (乙⺕) was capable of producing one crop of rice, or one crop of sugarcane. Third class land (丙) \"was generally devoted to the cultivation of peanuts, sweet potatoes, millet and other hardy crops.\"24 This classification scheme was recognized by the Hsin-An Magistrate in 1582, a mere nine years after the creation of the county. Different rates were fixed according to whether the land was considered to be first, second, or third class land.25\n\nThus, by the time of the great Hakka influx, little cultivatable land was available in the county. The landlords, who often lived miles away from their fields, were eager to take on tenants, and offered the migrants “reasonable rents.” Rent-value was assessed by a simple extension of the tax assessment value; i.e., rent-value was extracted from an already established cultivation-value.26\n\nOnce fixed, tax-rates and rent-rates seldom, if ever, changed. The tax-rates listed for the three classes of land in the Hsin-An Hsien-chih, which had been in force for decades prior to the publication of the gazetteer in 1819, were quoted in the petitions concerning the Tang holdings in Hong Kong, written in 1842. Similarly, there is strong evidence to suggest that landlords were generally powerless to impose greater rent-burdens, and, as we shall see, were occasionally forced to lighten the rent.27 Rent-values were often stated in all bills of sale between landlords.\n\nThe increasing alienation of rent-value from cultivation-value was reflected in the inability of landlords to locate their plots of land when called upon to present evidence to the Land Court. Furthermore, there were often significant disparities between the market-prices of the \"skin\" and the \"bones.\"28 Tenants were occasionally able to manipulate the system to their own advantage:\n\nFor generations, landowners have been content to collect their rents without ever having taken the trouble to enquire into the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208635, "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-1979", "page_number": 92, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "THE MARYKNOLL MISSION, HONG KONG 1941-46\n\n65\n\nup-country missioners had their personal trunks and camphor boxes, there was also confusion. Trunks and boxes had been broken open and those of their contents which had not been carried away were strewn all over the attic floor, in some places two feet deep. As for cleaning up, we really did not know where to begin, and after working all day, we had apparently made little progress. Fortunately, the city water was turned on again, for we needed plenty of that in places, as the floors in spots were covered with filth. Someone remarked that pigs would have been cleaner.\n\nPersonally, my chief concern was for my language notes, the work of over a year, and of which I had only one copy. However, upon returning to my room, there, in the midst of scattered effects, were the notes on my desk just where I had left them! I breathed a fervent prayer of thanksgiving. Only recently I had had my eyes re-examined and had gotten a new pair of glasses. These were missing, but I still had my old ones. And each one had his own particular tale of woe.\n\nThe thirty-first found us continuing our work of cleaning up. The outside of the house was just as much of a mess as the inside, the front and rear lawns being strewn with empty tins and bottles. Our Ford V-8 still stood on the front lawn and the Japanese had evidently tried to start it, but someone had previously subtracted an essential mechanism from the motor and their efforts were baffled. Around the house, too, were many reminders of the battle—soldiers' overcoats, steel helmets (in fact, in addition to the many strewn around on the ground there was a whole big unopened case of these near our garage); hand grenades, parts of machine gun outfits and debris of every description, much of which had been thrown out of our windows. On our south lawn there was also a number of shallow pits and some mounds. Whether the latter are graves or not we do not yet know, but we filled up the pits with debris and levelled off the mounds. Near our garage, too, was an immense pile of miscellaneous boards and strips of wood, these evidently having been brought from the wreckage of the Repulse Bay matsheds to Stanley for firewood, and as our kitchen range was out of the question, we having neither electricity nor fuel oil, this wood came in very handy.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208686, "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-1979", "page_number": 143, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "116\n\nREVS. J. SMITH AND WM. DOWNS\n\n26-Sunday. Another Gingles meal of a real slice of meat, fried sweet potatoes, spinach and rice, with some Philadelphia rice scrapple for breakfast. Our rations seem to be getting less and the rice poorer, and we have to spend quite a little time in picking the worms out of the rice and the weevils out of the flour. The Shanghai groups finally get away at 2:00 p.m.\n\n28--A softball league starts up, as the British are getting quite enthusiastic about the game, but they lose the first game to the Americans, now mostly Maryknollers. At present there are some six teams lined up; i.e., The Police, St. Stephen's, The College, the Indian Quarters, the Married Quarters, and the Americans. We have two grounds, one in the back of the American blocks on a large tennis court space, and the other down at the Indian quarters, and the games are played after supper.\n\n30-Father Tackney develops an ear infection, apparently from swimming, and Dr. Talbot is treating him. A Miss Rose died today.\n\n31-No softball, as the rain continues. Many of the British have not yet received their parcel of food, arrangements for which were begun some three months ago. Today we received as rations 9 pounds of meat, of which about 6 pounds were fat. The fat, of course, will come in handy for frying things, but the lean meat will not go far among 41 people.\n\nAUGUST\n\n1-The Hong Kong dollar was further devalued today at a rate of four to one military yen. Canteen prices further increased.\n\n2-Sunday. Mrs. Williamson, Catholic, dies. Monday, Father Hessler sang a High Mass for the repose of her soul. Mr. and Mrs. Nance, American missionaries, who did not want to be repatriated, and who live in our Block, next to the Sisters, announce the birth of a baby boy, Jonathan Goforth Nance, in Tweed Bay Hospital. They already have two small children. After some delay incident to moving our quarters, language classes start again, but only one hour a day, just to keep in trim.\n\n4- St. Dominic's Day. Good news—for some: the four Americans, Mr. Gingles, Dr. Molthen, Mr. Salmon and Miss Dorrer, are to leave Camp tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. Also some Britishers,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208815, "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-1979", "page_number": 272, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "ORDINARY LOCAL MEMBERS\n\nGIBBONS, Mr. J. P., Language Centre, University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG.\n\nGILL, Mr. Robin Clive, c/o Room 1519, Lee Gardens Hotel, Hysan Avenue, HONG KONG.\n\nGOLDSTEIN, Mr. Alan L., c/o Sea Land, P.O. Box 531, HONG KONG.\n\nGOUDEY, Mrs. Dorothy E., 9-A Bowen Road, Borrett Mansions, 11th Fl., HONG KONG.\n\nGOUDEY, Mr. John F., 9-A Bowen Road, Barrett Mansions, 11th Floor, HONG KONG.\n\nGRANT, Prof. Charles J., Dept. of Geography and Geology, University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG.\n\nGRAY, Mr. Peter H., c/o Maunsell Consultants Asia, 2 Tung Lo Wan Hill, Shatin, NEW TERRITORIES.\n\nGRIEVE, Mr. John H., Flat B.12, 17 Homantin Hill Road, KOWLOON.\n\nGRIFFITH, Mr. Rodney O., Flat 6001, 60 Cape Mansions, Mr. Davis Road, HONG KONG.\n\nGROSVENOR, Mrs. Larissa, 1203 May Tower, 7 May Road, HONG KONG.\n\nGROVES, Prof. Murray C., Dept. of Sociology, University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG.\n\nGUILLAUME, Baron P. de,\n\nGUTLON, Mrs. Audrey, 39 Conduit Road, Flat 202, HONG KONG.\n\nHAFFNER, Mr. Christopher, Spence Robinson Architects, Wing On Centre, 6/F, 111, Connaught Rd, C., HONG KONG.\n\nHAHN, Mr. Werner, 1401 World Trade Centre, HONG KONG.\n\nHAIGH, Mr. D. F., Australian Commission, Connaught Centre, 11/F, HONG KONG.\n\nHALL, Mr. Christopher H., Flat A2, 96 Repulse Bay Road, HONG KONG.\n\nHALLIDAY, Mr. Peter Ernest, Flat 507B, 19 Homantin Hill Road, HONG KONG.\n\nHARDY, Mr. S., 11 The Albany, Albany Road, HONG KONG\n\nHO, Miss Judy Chung-wa, Dept. of Fine Arts, University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG.\n\nHO, Dr. and Mrs. Hung Chiu, 11 Briar Avenue, HONG KONG.\n\nHOCHSTADTER, Dr. Walter, 4A Hampshire Road, 1st Floor, KOWLOON.\n\nHODGE, Prof. Peter, Dept. of Social Work, University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG.\n\nHODGES, Mr. Ronald, c/o Mott Hay and Anderson, 10/F Hang Lung Bank, 8 Hysan Avenue, HONG KONG.\n\nHODGES, Mrs. Sylvia, c/o Mott Hay and Anderson, c/o Banque Belge Pour L'Etranger S. A., 10/F Hang Lung Bank, P.O. Box 27, HONG KONG.\n\n8 Hysan Avenue, HONG KONG.\n\n245", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210379, "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-1984", "page_number": 350, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "329\n\nstudent who can find a generous sponsor for complementary studies of those rural areas which lie outside Dr. Hayes's purview: the other Peng Chau (in Mirs Bay or Dapeng-wan), Tap Mun, Sha Tau Kok, Tai Po, Yuen Long and their hinterlands. Even within Hong Kong's 400 square miles can be seen the kind of variations which Ouyang Hsiu described (in his preface to the Hsin Wu-tai Shih) as: it is a strength of Chinese society that such healthy variability can exist. Time is short, because when I was last there in 1982, the opening up of roads had already begun to erode village life, as it did in Tsuen Wan, Lantao and New Kowloon,\n\n+\n\n-\n\nDr. Hayes is a true Cadet, in the tradition of Cecil Clementi, Walter Schofield, Stephen Balfour and John Barrow, and his work puts even them in the shade. But oh! oh! that romanization! He says disarmingly in the Foreword \"I confess that romanization has been a problem.\" No shame in that: Chinese — whichever you wish of the 3,000 languages, all known as Chinese — does not lend itself to phonetic writing, and the Cadmean alphabet, while no doubt adequate for the Western Semitic language for which it was devised, was not really suited to Latin and is hopeless for English (though it does not do too badly for Finnish and Welsh) — how much less for Chinese? But of all the inadequate answers to this problem, why choose the obsolete Wade-Giles without its vital apostrophes and tone-numerals, too for what Western academics obstinately call “Mandarin”; and Meyer-Wempe for Cantonese? The latter, with omitted or misprinted diacritical marks, of which I found many (and have sent Dr. Hayes a list) is gibberish. Besides, being based on West River dialects, which differ considerably from the Upper Punyu which, after the eclipse of Sai Kwan wa from 1905 onward, became the standard speech of Canton, Hong Kong and overseas Cantonese (except those from the 5 districts known as Sze Yap), Meyer & Wempe's handy little dictionary has serious shortcomings. What a pity an updated Eitel never appeared!\n\nNothing will ever persuade me that Cantonese, Hakka and Hokkien place names should be written in letters indicating a pronunciation which no local would understand. (I suppose it must be a matter of politics, with which no scholar should soil his hands). Just you try getting a boat to “Shayuyung”! (The place is", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210894, "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": 245, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "228 \n\nCARL SMITH \n\nland on Hongkong Island when the British took it over. They petitioned the Kwangtung Government to present their claims on an official level to the British Government. The Chinese authorities, however, refused to intercede as their investigation showed the claimants had not paid taxes on the land for many years. \n\nThe authorities held that these findings had constituted a negation of the Tang family's rights to the land. This may have been a handy excuse for the Chinese officials to avoid another confrontation with the British soon after their humiliating defeat in the first Opium War. \n\nIn the 1860s the Tang claim to rights in British Kowloon was confirmed by the grant of some half a dozen farm lots. These, however, soon passed out of the possession of the Tang family. Some were sold but most were lost when the individual to whom they had been granted went into debt to a foreign contractor of Chinese labour, and his property was sold at Sheriff's sale. \n\nIn New Kowloon, particularly in the western portion, individual members and groups of the Tang family still owned land in the late 19th century. A certain portion, especially land which had been reclaimed, was still in the name of the five ancestors for whom a temple had been built at Tung Kun city. The association to support the temple was the Po Hing Tong. \n\nWhen suggestions were being aired that Britain might expand its borders, there was renewed interest in the holdings of the Po Hing Tong by certain prominent members of the Tang clan. The matter was managed by an individual of the Ping Shan branch of the family. He had passed the Kui Yan examination, equivalent to a modern master's degree, and had certain important connections. He used these in getting management of the Tang ancestral holdings. \n\nIt was charged that after he had the land in his control, he had mortgaged it to the Fuk Tin Company, in which he had an interest. The company itself, however, was largely controlled by Li Sing, Hongkong capitalist. Ho A-mei often represented the Li family, particularly in its dealing with foreigners. He, therefore, was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211013, "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": 75, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "50\n\ntended to concentrate on the areas of the curriculum considered most important, which certainly included the English language. An almost universal feature of the private tuition business was the relatively high level of fees. Indeed, private coaching (and cramming) had become something of a racket. It had certainly become so prevalent by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century that official notifications and advertisements for teaching posts in government schools regularly included, as a matter of course and as a form of inducement, the formula \"Private tuition is allowed by permission of the Director of Education.\" Mok's emphatic claim that his method could be, and should be, practised without recourse to a teacher was probably a very effective selling ploy which would have appealed to those who disliked paying high fees as well as those who suspected that neither the teaching ability nor the conscientiousness of private tutors was all that it should be.\n\nIn the preface Mok Man Cheung outlines briefly the nature of his \"unique\" pronunciation system, which, by utilizing the sounds normally associated by Cantonese with written Chinese characters so that they could mouth English words, would have appealed to the national pride of his fellow Chinese residents of Hong Kong. At the same time, however, he was prepared to compromise his Chinese-ness by arranging that “all Chinese characters given for pronunciation of English words are to be read from left to right\". This attempt simultaneously to attract support from many sections of Hong Kong society—the increasingly influential radical Chinese, unsympathetic to the Imperial Government but insistently proud of their Chinese culture, the more pragmatic Chinese businessmen, the westernized Chinese, and even the colonial establishment—was good commercial practice. The preface also helps to emphasize a distinction between Mok Man Cheung's \"higher valuations” and his “lower valuations”, in the sense that Gunnar Myrdal made of these concepts. According to the outward, open and rationalized “higher valuations” of Mok Man Cheung, Chinese readers and users of his book might find his inclusion of model letters \"handy in their everyday business and social relations with their European friends.\" From the fact that the book contains not a single sample of an informal, friendly letter to a European, one might infer that Mok Man Cheung's\n\n!\n\nPage 75\n\nPage 76", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212551, "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-1991", "page_number": 105, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "85\n\nNonetheless, a large portion of the participants in U.S.-China arts exchanges believe that, since the two countries are major players in international relations, mutual understanding of the other's culture was crucial in making the world a better place to live in. To the people in whose mind this theme loomed large, it was important to have a friendly relationship with China and exchanges in the arts were a handy way to achieve this goal.\n\nThe uniqueness of Chinese culture has also motivated some Americans who saw that exchanges could bring to American culture some diversity and therefore enrich it. The interest of Americans in Chinese culture was obvious, as can be seen by, for instance, the increasing number of Americans travelling to China each year.\n\nFinally, but by no means the least important factor in supporting arts exchanges with China by private sectors, there was a rejuvenation of the affinity which can be traced back to the 19th century \"special relationship\" between the United States and China which existed to the 1940s. To some, the special opportunity for the United States to transfer its culture and products to China on favourable terms re-emerged as a result of the drastically increased contacts between the two countries in the Carter years. \"Recognition of the People's Republic set long suppressed dreams of a return to China swirling in the minds of educators (the legatees of the missionary impulse) and businessmen.\" This helps to explain the involvement, rather intensive, of the RBF and the Henry Luce Foundation, which maintained close ties with China in the 1940s, and the United Board For Christian Higher Education, in China's arts education.\n\nAffinity and crisis\n\nThe highpoint of Sino-American arts relations was in 1970-1981. In his visit to the United States in January 1979, Deng Xiaoping personally signed a cultural agreement with President Carter in Washington D.C.. While in the United States, Deng extended to Seiji Ozawa, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, an invitation for the BSO to visit China. When the BSO arrived in Beijing in March 1979, Deng again paid his personal tribute to Sino-American arts exchanges by personally attending its performance and welcoming it as the first American performing art group to visit China since the elevation of relations to ambassadorial level.\n\nPage 105\n\nPage 106", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212612, "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-1991", "page_number": 166, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "146\n\nis made up\n\nfor the job with any material handy. It may be fired electrically or by a spring designed specially for the purpose. There are three main kinds of spring: the pressure-switch, which goes off if you press on it; for instance, if you walk on it, or a train goes over it: the pull-switch, which is generally attached to a trip wire: and the release-switch, which goes off when you take a weight off it. When you set the trap, a cap is fitted to the switch. The cap fires a length of instantaneous fuse - this is a third kind of fuse - and that sets the charge off. Setting traps and dismantling them is a battle of wits. If you use the same kind of trap too often the enemy will tumble to it and learn how to discover and dismantle it: so you have to keep on ringing the changes. If you start with a simple pressure switch trap under a loose floor board, you can improve on it by putting a release-switch trap under a loose floor board, you can improve on it by putting a release-switch, duly connected up, under the charge itself. Then when the enemy comes along, he spots your trap, carefully eases up the floor board, maybe detaches the pressure-switch from the charge and thinks he is safe; but when he stoops to pick up the charge, the release-switch is set off and the trap explodes. That is a very simple illustration. In the course of several years of warfare the refinements in booby-trapping have been developed to the nth degree.\n\nIt will be seen that traps can only be used in places which our side is preparing to vacate. They must be carefully tabulated so that they can be located and taken up should our troops return: also, special precautions have to be taken in a district where there are friendly natives, lest they suffer. In many ways the use of booby-trapping can be a two-edged weapon.\n\nAt the end of November in 1941 I was included amongst several officers detailed to proceed to Chungking. Britain was still neutral in the war between China and Japan, and so we were instructed to wear plain clothes. We set out after lunch one day to motor the hundred miles to Lashio, where we were comfortably accommodated in the American hostel operated by the C.N.A.C. Next day, December 1st, 1941, we boarded the aeroplane and touched down on the island airstrip in the Yangking at dusk.\n\nBefore leaving Burma I acquired two useful items of equipment, the one a felt hat, of the kind used by Australians and Gurkhas, a comfortable head-piece, which kept the sun out and also a certain amount of rain:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212629, "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-1991", "page_number": 183, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "163\n\nJapanese planes were reported to be patrolling the road. We rolled back the hood from the rear half of the lorry and posted two sentries, one looking forward and the other aft, to sound the alarm should any planes be seen. The stores made such a rattle that in the cab you could not hear a shout from the rear, and so a string was led forward and tied to my wrist where I sat next to the driver. Three sharp tugs meant: \"Plane in sight, stop and get out quick\". Our lorry was always full of odd people, besides our own party, as in those days of transportation shortage there would be a crowd of passengers, civilian and military, male and female, at all stopping places, hoping for a lift. The trouble was that their idea of when the lorry was fully loaded and ours seldom agreed, and they would continue to pile in with their bundles long after, in our opinion, the safety margin had been passed.\n\nThe thought of our cargo made my hair stand on end. We had broken every safety rule inscribed in the manuals of the Royal Ordnance Corps. In addition to four large drums of petrol, we had a ton of ammonal, several boxes each of primers and detonators, some Mills and 69 grenades, rolls of instantaneous and detonating fuse, and a number of odd boxes of other types of explosive, such as gelignite and 808; each of these materials should have been segregated, and here they were all higgledy-piggledy with a quantity of shovels, picks, axes, and other metal implements jangling in the steel body of our lorry, and only too liable to spark. Our casual passengers liked to smoke and in their delightfully inconsequential way could not understand why we should object. It was a situation that would have pleased the \"Mad Hatter\", and the climax came when after a particularly bad bump over a pot hole one of the petrol drums burst a seam. The alarm signal was given and I pulled up in quick time to learn that the trouble was not a hostile plane but to meet a reek of petrol that spread a mile and to see the whole of our cargo soaked in the precious fluid which poured away to the earth from a corner of the vehicle. It did not take me long to turn off the engine. The members of our party jumped out and seized any handy can or bucket to catch the jetting petrol; others threw out part of the cargo so that we could reach the drum, which we eventually succeeded in turning over with the burst seam on the upper side. Having escaped disaster thus far, I ordered the whole of the party well away from the truck till the cargo had dried out and the spilt petrol had evaporated.\n\nOn the fourth day a van full of American aviators passed us. They were some of General Doolittle's men, who had parachuted into China", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212746, "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-1992", "page_number": 55, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "40\n\nin\n\nwould have been 20 when her father left Shanghai. She presumably remained there until she married in 1917. We know that Marie, in her middle age in Jersey, never referred ever to her time in China nor to her mother. If the subject ever arose, even with close relatives in Jersey, she promptly changed the subject. The only time she ever let slip anything about life in China was when the Chinese silken slippers were produced and she told her second cousin once removed that when her father, William Mesny, returned from a distant and lengthy trek, he found that his Chinese wife had bound her (Marie's) feet in accordance with custom. He ordered them to be unbound at once and never to be bound again. Incidentally, he wrote in his Miscellany in 1896, when Marie would have been two, that “... women must cease to cramp their feet: crippled women cannot produce healthy and hardy children.”\n\nIn 1905, writing about Eurasians, when his son would be 20 and his daughter about 10, he wrote 'the only prospects of a future easy life for the Eurasians in Shanghai are to be trained for service in foreign houses; the boys as clerks and such like, the girls as mistresses at least, though of late a good many of them have been induced to demand marriage and have succeeded in obtaining it.' There was little future in China for people of mixed blood, especially in the twenties and thirties of this century, and none outside it. Mesny's daughter's extreme sensitivity about her mixed blood simply reflects the era in which she lived.\n\nMesny's Knowledge of Things Chinese\n\nThere is no doubt that Mesny's knowledge of Chinese life, customs, history, geography, etc. was extremely wide, bolstered, understandably, by works written by other foreigners, such as the Chinese Reader's Manual by W F Mayers, which is quoted from extensively. He went to some pains to explain that he saw as one of his responsibilities the importance of him educating both Chinese and foreigners in each other's cultures.\n\nMesny was not backward in expressing his views and opinions on all matters to do with China, be they economic, political, religious, social, or personal, occasionally echoing those of the few like-minded foreigners who professed that westerners, and in the case of Mesny, the British in particular, were well-intentioned in what they were doing in China but mistaken in their political and religious views, policies, and convictions.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212848, "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-1992", "page_number": 157, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "142\n\nfires and flying away again unable to find them. Inevitably there were some accidents and losses.\n\n―\n\n--\n\nRarely half a dozen 'planes would make a sortie the same night; we would then be busy for days collecting the heavy containers they would weigh up to three hundred pounds and carrying them back to camp. We received reinforcements; officers with long experience in the East; British wireless operators; Chin, Kachin, and Burmese assistants. Our money and our mail also came this way; Bren guns, Stens, Italian carbines, clothing, food and occasionally drink. Sometime later we were visited by two American officers attached to the Nth division; they spent the day with us. We discovered they had a partiality for Bourbon whisky, a thing most difficult to find in Calcutta. However, we thought we would plan a little surprise for them; we asked our friends in Calcutta whether they could not find a couple of bottles and include them in the next sortie. The sortie was made in due course, several containers crashed, and when we anxiously looked over the lists of contents, we sadly found that the precious bottles had \"pranged\" as Stan put it in his airforce jargon.\n\nThe problem of cutting a way through the jungle was ever present in Burma. We decided we would equip one man out of every two with a cutting implement for the purpose. There were many opinions about which implement was the best; each officer had his own idea. We left it to our 'furnishers' to supply what they had, and I have never seen such a collection of deadly looking hacking weapons as the variety sent. It included dahs, the light Burmese single-handed sword, with a blade about two feet long and in my opinion not quite heavy enough for the job; kukris, a choice for the expert; the East African panga, which I like best, but then perhaps I am prejudiced it reminded me of my days with the King's African Rifles during the last war; a short two-edged stabbing sword, obviously borrowed straight from the Roman Legion; and some quite unrecognisable kinds, probably designed by enthusiastic cranks.\n\nThe Italian carbines had been captured in Africa and were believed useful for our type of work; they only weighed four pounds, were short and handy but they had a very high muzzle velocity and kicked like an anti-tank rifle, without the rubber padding with which that rifle is fitted. They had fixed sights; on the little thirty yards range, which Stan had built in a fold of the mountain, we found they threw at least a foot off the bull; but they appeared to be fairly accurate at somewhere around", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213011, "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-1993", "page_number": 79, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "58\n\nAnother similar category of strategies is disclaimer, i.e., prospective excuses. Similar types of excuses could be found, for instance, tiredness of gymnasts (September 18th, 1986); inexperience of athletes (20 August, 1985); new gymnasts (21 August, 1985) etc. The strength of rivals (20 September, 1986; 15 July, 1987) and weakness of Chinese representatives (19 September, 1986) were also cited. A more popular form of disclaimer was the blame on the draw in events, such as the order of competition in gymnastics (23 July, 1984), the order of play in women's fencing (8 July, 1987). Softening of the tone for gold-winning targets was evident amidst the rise of Koreans in the medal standing (1 and 4 October, 1986).\n\nThe context of any information is vital when a reader interprets an article. The Chinese press also spent some efforts in creating favourable contexts for unfavourable contents. The men's gymnastics team total score, second place in team competition was put against a very good background of six perfect scores (31 July, 1984). Women fencers' loss was to be read in the light of China's share in the total fencing medals, equal to that of Korea (2 October, 1986). Previous successes or records were cited to buffer losses in the Games (women discuss, 15 July, 1987; soccer, 20 July, 1987). Sometimes, the press would play over the figures, for example, in the loss to the USA in women's volleyball tournament, the report stated that in terms of total marks gained in the match, the Chinese team should win the match (5 August, 1984); in the final medal standing, China was placed fourth, but the People's Daily mentioned the total golds gained to counter this relatively unfavourable position.\n\nA more forceful class of strategy, justification, could also be witnessed in the sample. The \"reasons\" were more or less the same as mentioned in the foregone paragraphs concerning other strategies, but only the tone and/or the voice were different. Strength of rivals (31 July, 1984); new and young players (13 August, 1984; 19 July, 1987) and so on were handy examples. More often, these would be added with the hard work of Chinese athletes, their improvement from their previous standards to make these \"reasons\" forceful (diving, 10 August, 1984; women gymnastics, 12 July, 1987; men's basketball, 17 July, 1987). A play of figures could be seen in 1984 when the rank of the Chinese delegation, being fourth, was justified by the her size, being eighth.\n\nMoreover, there were times when the press admitted the failures of Chinese athletes. Very often, they were factual accounts of the losses and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213811, "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-1996", "page_number": 163, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "135 o'clock we had our dinner on the deck. Such fun and such make shifts. Our stock of portable soup was very good however, and what with venison pasties and other items we got a very comfortable dinner, much to the amusement of the Chinese passengers, about 20, and the sailors. My servant came in very handy, as he was the only professional cook of the party. Our food was cooked in the Chinese way, in a little earthenware stove, and a camp canteen kettle. The deck all the while was at a very considerable slope, so that it was necessary to mind one's p's and q's, in order to avoid catastrophies. Then when we were done and cleared away, the Celestials came forward and took the deck and began their meal. Each passenger pays 30 cash (not quite three halfpence) for his meal of rice and fish and little nic nacs: and as they only eat two meals a day, you may imagine that there is not much profit to be got out of it. They did walk into the rice and no mistake.\n\nOne little boy I took a fancy to: he was a friend of the owner of the ship and his father a rich man at Sam-tsun the place we were going to. I had a long talk with him, and we read some of the Pilgrim's Progress. He had been to school 6 years, and literally knew nothing after all. The Chinese system of education is the greatest folly imaginable: No Chinaman, in less than ten years is supposed to be able to know the meanings of the characters. Many learn 5 years and only know the sounds.\n\nHowever this little fellow and I got on very well together. He was much amused with Stringer's dog, and asked dozens of questions about it. Then I offered to sell it for a dollar, but the youngster said it was no good only to eat,\" and therefore was too dear. So I joked him that he had not a dollar belonging to him, whereupon he produced a handful of dollars from his purse, and showed me a bundle of paper which he said had 7 dollars inside. He seemed to have perfect confidence in us that we would not try to rob him. It was hard to talk with him, through his dialect. It was like a Londoner and Yorkshireman. “Tea” he called \"Chay-yup\" and we call it \"Chah-eep.\" About four o'clock we entered the “Kup shui moon\" a channel opening into the \"Bogue” or as English people say \"Bocca Tigris\" or \"tiger's mouth.\"\n\nHere we passed the Canton steamer going to Hong Kong. The people stared to see Europeans on board a Chinese craft. Towards evening the breeze dropped off, and at sunset there was quite a calm.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214191, "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": 49, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "Laurel and Hardy, who first teamed up in 1927 and made over 100 films together which came out 'fresh' every time, are other examples of comedians whose humour travelled well. Hong Kong's own martial arts expert and stunt man, Jackie Chan, sometimes dubbed 'Hong Kong's favourite son,' has become successful, both in the Far East and Hollywood, by combining Chinese kung fu and bits of slapstick.\n\nAnother good example is Mr Bean who, because he doesn't say anything, has no difficulty in getting his humour ‘across the Great Wall' and into countries in Asia. It is interesting that, to most British audiences, Bean is funny, foolish and unenviable in every way. He is the last person they would wish to work with or be associated with (Cairnes, 1998). The Japanese and many Asians, however, see him rather differently. They see Bean as a pathetic, lonely figure who deserves pity and would be fun to have around. Yet even he does not appear funny to everyone.\n\nVisual, universal humour, such as the puppy licking the baby's ice-cream, has a much better chance of crossing frontiers, although the television series, America's funniest home movies, does not always receive the same reaction in countries outside the United States, and indeed not even by all Americans. As a group of Chinese and Britons discussing humour agreed: 'If you've seen one showing of America's funniest home movies you're seen them all.' In fact the reaction to these movies seems to be mixed. An American woman living in Hong Kong told the author that the humour was not subtle enough for her but her two children enjoyed these films. Other Americans, however, said they found them 'funny and relaxing'.\n\nAccording to American Brent Ambacher, who was raised in Hong Kong and works as a part-time comedian, more and more Westerners today expect more sophisticated, 'highbrow' (sometimes termed 'three-dimensional') humour. This more profound variety should, as it were, embrace a ‘moral lesson.' This may depend on the cultural background and the awareness and intentions of the artiste. It may, for example, concentrate on slamming pomposity, condemning underhanded politics or corruption, or some other topical subject. Today's audiences often expect a comedian who is more 'civic minded,' who will deliver his act in a philosophical way and will give them something of substance to evoke deep afterthought. All this as opposed to the shallow", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214193, "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": 51, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "cially as it involved the only 'foreign devil' present, thoroughly enjoyed it even though the joke has been repeated countless times throughout the ages. Many jokes, both in the East and the West, are of course repeated over and over again over a period of years. Although possibly rather feeble by today's standards, the author remembers a riddle being repeated to him when he was a child in England. The question was: 'When is a door not a door?' The answer was, 'When it's a jar (ajar)!' This was told countless times and seemed to have been passed down from generation to generation as many jokes in many countries are.\n\nIn the case of a Chinese example of an oft repeated joke there is the saying, Ah Yee Leng Tong (-). This really means \"gone to the Second Wife's to drink lovely soup.' Up to October 1971, Chinese men in Hong Kong could legally take concubines. The principal wife, generally, knew her position and was pretty secure, but the concubine, so it was said, needed to prepare tasty soup (and other things) to please her husband to make sure her position also was secure. There is a restaurant named Ah Yee Leng Tong in Causeway Bay, on Hong Kong Island, and whenever the name is mentioned it always raises a smile.\n\nHaving said that, however, Chinese tend not to laugh out loud so much as Westerners, but, in Hong Kong, said Reuben M, an American part-time comedian who has lived in the Territory for a number of years, even Westerners are inclined to be more subdued than people living in the West. Nevertheless, it was pointed out by the same comedian that, if Chinese don't like a show and they are bored, they can be a noisy, distracting audience.\n\nLaughter can certainly help break down barriers, including pricking bubbles of solemnity at meetings, and there are few occasions when some degree of hilarity does not serve a useful purpose. Certainly humour is an important key to the happiness and well-being of us all, irrespective of race, just as anger and depression have the opposite effect. Norman Cousins was stricken with a seemingly incurable disease. He decided to keep himself occupied with a diet of humour and, as he lay on his sick-bed, he watched old silent movies of Laurel and Hardy and read anything that would make him laugh (Cousins, 1979; 39). He recounts he made the joyous discovery that 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anaesthetic effect that gave him at least two hours of pain-free sleep. Gradually he began to recover. A good bout of laugh-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215026, "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-2000", "page_number": 122, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "78\n\nStaff Officer for the HQ mess. The Head Ganger was from Tsinan [Jinan] in Shantung, under him were I think four Gangers, and the Labourers were all from Northern China, my father said they were all tall men and physically very strong and hardy. While clearing munitions one of them had been very badly injured when he pulled the pin from a grenade out of curiosity, and to the amazement of the British was able to return to work after a few weeks. My father said that for minor ailments the Chinese practised acupuncture on each other using a needle stuck in a cork.\n\nThe unit my father joined moved backwards and forwards with the last German Offensive of the War, he had great trouble finding them initially, and after the Armistice seemed to work mainly in the area around Amiens remaking roads, clearing munitions, collecting corpses, destroying animal corpses, clearing wells, and digging ditches to restore the drainage to arable land. It was a priority that the local French farmers were able to plant their fields as soon as possible as the population who had been behind the German lines were close to starvation. The condition of some of the French children in these areas made a deep impression on my father and on the Chinese who seemed very fond of children and used to give them their rations.\n\nAlthough the Chinese were willing to work waist deep in water, they often refused to work when it was raining much to everyone's exasperation. One who insisted on working while holding an umbrella in one hand had it broken over his back by a Ganger. Punishment was either by fining or flogging. My father asked the Head Ganger which was better, and the Head Ganger assured him that since they were all there to make money flogging was better. The Labourers, said the Head Ganger, would resent a fine but a flogging would be nothing to them. My father said this was borne out by one of the Officers who refused to flog on principle being chased down a road by a crowd of angry Chinese. A flogging would be administered by a Ganger and would be watched by the other Labourers who stood laughing at the victim's stupidity at being caught. The man who was tied to a post, often had wet tea leaves poured over his head. Wherever the Chinese went there was a bonfire with tea brewing.\n\nOne of the Officers with the unit, a Mr. Ferguson, was robbed and murdered while off-duty by European labourers who had been paid off", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215083, "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-2000", "page_number": 179, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "136\n\nthe images with the temple keeper removing and burning them after fifteen or thirty days. The usual offerings to placate the deity consist of the three different cooked meats, fruit and tea (or wine) though before about 1955 it was not uncommon to see a candle burning in front of an image, placed there by a devotee whose year it represented. This was frowned upon by the Hong Kong authorities as a fire risk and the practice died out. Gray in Guangzhou [Canton] in the 1870s noted that under each image two or more small slabs of clay had been placed. These had been put there by votaries 'desirous to curry favour with the gods.' When there were too many for convenience they were removed by the person in charge of the shrine. Rev. Henry in Guangzhou in 1883 noted that the sixty small images, one to the presiding genius of each year in the cycle of sixty were raised on tiles with some bedecked with gaudy red coats, the gift of those devotees who had received special favours during their special years. Hardy (John Chinaman at Home) noted the sixty images in the same temple in Guangzhou, in a hall of the 'doctor' temple, before which the sick prayed for recovery before the spirit of his particular year, with people over sixty starting to count the years again from the beginning.\n\nA huge stove stood in the south-west corner of the Taisui temple dedicated to the planet Jupiter, within the enclosure of the Temple of Agriculture in Beijing, in which animals used for sacrifice were boiled or roasted. The sacrifice was performed on the penultimate day of the year or on a lucky day specially selected from the first ten days of the new year.\n\nImages of Taisui appear on the altars of some fifty-six temples in Hong Kong and on fourteen in Macau. Fifteen of these temples have the full groups of sixty images, the others have single images or small groups of two, three, four or six.\n\nTaisui Festival Dates\n\nTaisui is variously feted, nominally on the 7th of the first lunar month though more generally his festival is celebrated on what is called his anniversary on the 19th of the seventh lunar month. He was, however, officially sacrificed to in dynastic China in the Temple of Heaven in Beijing on the 28th day of the twelfth lunar month.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215630, "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-2001", "page_number": 407, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "358\n\ncollecting that the flow greatly increased. These discoveries coincided with a period of great wealth in Britain, so that many owners of gardens could and did aspire to these exotics. Remove rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias, peonies and magnolias alone from our great gardens and we would hardly recognise them, but almost all of these are relatively recent, and oriental, introductions.\n\nCornwall was chosen as a suitable home for many of these early exotics largely because of its mild and damp climate. Many of the plants were thought to be more tender than they have proved to be (camellias were initially grown almost exclusively in greenhouses, but the Japonicas are actually hardy), and as a result some have grown spectacularly better than they do in the wild, even out of hothouses. One has only to visit Heligan to see this: individual rhododendrons left in happy and unpruned seclusion for 70 years have grown to the size of small houses, with a diameter of up to 70 feet, and at Trewithen, Pieris formosa have reached 25 feet in height. At Caerhays, Rhododendron keysii (from Bhutan, 1851) produces its tiny red and yellow bell-like flowers for eight months of the year. When seed arrived from the collectors, its recipients often had no idea of the size of the eventual shrub or tree, so that planned planting was difficult and the original gardeners would be amazed to see the results now. It is hard to avoid statistics in these Cornish gardens: Tregrehan alone for instance has 15 trees which are regarded as the biggest and best specimens in the country (including the Handkerchief Tree from China, Davidia involucrata).\n\nMuch of Cornwall's spring tourism is the direct result of these largely Chinese, Himalayan and Japanese plant introductions, and many of the great gardens actually close in the summer, as their glory lies in their spring flowering magnolias, azaleas and rhododendrons.\n\nWe were guided first around Trewithen's gardens by Maggie herself. This garden, created largely in its present form between 1904 and 1960 by its owner George Johnstone, around an 18th century house, was set on its new path with the delivery of 100 rhododendron hybrids in 1905. It now houses a marvellous collection of magnolias, rhododendrons and camellias, amongst many others. Some of the planting around the Great Glade is from seed brought back by Kingdom Ward himself. We searched out the Magnolia wilsonii (introduced to Britain in 1920 after discovery by Ernest Wilson in 1906) with its", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215634, "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-2001", "page_number": 411, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "362\n\nwhich once made up Gondwanaland, with tree-ferns massing in the stream bed. It seems that the entire world is coming eventually to Cornwall.\n\nTom's in-depth knowledge of the flora of western China in particular was illuminating for us. He explained that whereas much emphasis is put in the protection of rainforests internationally, in fact small \"islands\" of temperate conditions and vegetation within the tropics, where unique species exist, are also vulnerable: a single fire, for instance, could break the growth cycle for trees. Collection of seed is of great importance, but Chinese taxonomy is underfunded (compared to botanical research for medical purposes) and collection for propagation abroad is illegal according to CITES. Another of his legacies to the future will be a naturalistically planted Far Eastern temperate woodland, with acers, viburnums, sorbus, gordonia, and the rare Taiwania.\n\nTom also delighted and surprised the group by being able to take us to see a specimen of the camellia named after HK Governor Alexander Grantham, and another of Camellia hongkongensis, plus a Hogplum (Choerospondias), which he said grows around reservoirs in Hong Kong. Full marks for being the only garden visited to have a direct Hong Kong connection, and to Tom for his thoughtfulness in pointing it out.\n\nAmong great gardens, that of Caerhays Castle is one of the greatest, particularly for oriental plants. The gardens are set spectacularly on a hillside cupped around the castle, with their back turned to the little beach and bay nearby and the sea winds, and are filled with some of the oldest specimens of rhododendrons, magnolias and camellias in England. The architect of the gardens was John Charles Williams, “one of the towering figures of the Edwardian age” (M. Campbell-Culver). By the time he died in 1939, he had the best collection of rhododendrons in the country, and he had been responsible for crossing for the first time the two most important types of camellia, C. japonica (from Japan) and C. saluenensis. The latter had been discovered by George Forrest in the early part of the 20th century in the Salween area of China, and Williams was an early recipient of seed. The resulting hybrids, C. x williamsii, are now some of the most highly regarded of all, being hardy, profusely flowering, and tidily shedding their dead blooms. (The original", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216026, "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-2002", "page_number": 325, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "259\n\ntowns and villages of the region visiting their Chinese agents, taking orders for tobacco and sugar and checking sales and receipts, used Zhenjiang as one of their bases. They were known as 'sugar and tobacco travellers'.\n\nAn extract from the Shanghai Mercury in 1887 described Zhenjiang and its surroundings in the not untypical purple prose of the newspaper hack of the day:\n\nFew ports in China would seem to be better situated for trade than Chinkiang, a few perhaps have been more disappointing. The first glimpse of the port is eminently reassuring, as the fine bund, at the time of the year bosomed [sic] in trees, the conspicuous houses topped by the British Consulate, and the goodly array of hulks connected by handy bridges with the shore make a picture surpassed in our picturesqueness by none. The hum of traffic and the cry of coolies permeates the air; the familiar aspect of the Sikh policeman appears at the corners of the British concession; the concession roads are wide and well kept, and, what is unfortunately unusual in China, the enterprise of the foreign residents has succeeded in acquiring a system of good riding roads penetrating the country in all directions as far as from four to six miles from the central point.\n\nAt the first opening of the port it was assumed that, with the suppression of the Taiping rebellion, its unrivalled position would make it the centre of a large and increasing trade. The Inspector-General nursed it, and proclaimed it the natural rival of Shanghai, British consuls prophesied a direct trade on its own account with Europe, even the native authorities for a time seemed to have come out of their shell and lent it aid and counsel. One Taot'ai', to his honour, be it said, laying aside the prejudices of his class, re-introduced the art of silk cultivation, and the mulberry trees planted by his assistance have originated almost the only industry which remains in the neighbourhood. In spite, however, of all this flourish, Chinkiang remains a comparatively poor port...the British concession is but a small spot, a few hundred yards square, and on it is concentrated the entire trade of the place, native as well as foreign.\n\nAlthough Zhenjiang in reality was but a minor treaty port it was well-known to western expatriates in China during the 19th century as\n\n•", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216072, "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-2002", "page_number": 371, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "305\n\nMason that 'You [Mason] have been left at Chinkiang not because you have been overlooked, but because you have shown a particular proficiency in acquiring the Nanking dialect, and I did not wish to interrupt these studies by transferring you to another province. It is also important for me to train certain men in the intricate business of Transit Passes40 peculiar to Chinkiang alone, and I have been pleased with your mastery of this branch of our work'.\n\nFor the next couple of months Mason's name crops up in some dozen or so of Hart's letters, usually towards the end of a letter on, what were to Hart, weightier matters. Such comments included 'The Yamen finds \"Mason Affair\" very handy: it can now return the Legation fire neatly after last summer's bombardment sustained for the riots, etc.\n\nMason was brought to trial in the British Supreme Court before the British Consul-General and the Shanghai Settlement's Chief Judge, N J Hannen, on 29 October 1891, charged simply with the illegal possession of dynamite to which he pleaded guilty. Although he had declared before and after the trial that he was a member of the Gelao Hui, had acted to further its plans to overthrow its government, and had personally brought the dynamite into China with unlawful intent, these facts were not mentioned at the trial nor did the Chinese government produce any evidence. The Chinese Legation in London later exerted pressure to demand that Mason, on his release from prison in Shanghai, be tried in Hong Kong on charges of crimes and conspiracy against the Chinese state. Mason was, however, not tried again.\n\nHart, at one point, refers to Mason's comrade Croskey who Mason himself mentioned in his \"Confessions\" as a spy, put there by the Customs Service to watch Mason and who, according to Mason, betrayed and ruined him. In practice Croskey had been promoted from the outdoor staff to the indoor, and then posted to Zhenjiang. Mason somewhat naively explained his plans and plots to Croskey shortly after they met, and Croskey informed his boss in Zhenjiang who in turn asked Croskey to learn more about Mason's plan. Croskey resigned from the Service in the November 'on Sir Robert Hart's recommendation'. Croskey, according to Hart, was a promising young American citizen, a grandson of the first Sir Thos. Bazley, a Manchester MP.41", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216241, "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-2002", "page_number": 540, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "474\n\ndirect or through the lives of those to whom she spoke, seem to indicate that part of the solution must lie in improving the quality and ethics of the bureaucracy at all levels. In a country where the officials and the Party still call all the shots, attempts to educate the people at large in \"good conduct\" will be abortive, as well as meaningless, without it. Paradoxically, there is the long Confucian (and quintessentially Chinese) tradition of good government and right behaviour to sustain the dual effort - still meaningful and understood, but not, in every age, or everywhere, attainable.\n\nHave I any criticisms? Not really. The photographs (mostly colour) illuminate the text, and there are next to no typos, but as a historian, I noted an oversight (p.78) in which Xiamen (formerly Amoy) and Guangzhou (Canton) are located together, and a paragraph in which (p.145) the essential legislation ending the Chinese institution of mui tsai (servant girls) in Hong Kong is given as the 1950s instead of the 1930s.\n\nTo conclude, we are much in Jane Hutcheon's debt for such a useful and pertinent survey of a great people and nation at this crucial stage of their transition to modernity. There is much to learn and ponder upon in this attractive book, which will serve as a handy benchmark for checking on 'New China's' course in the years immediately ahead. Its leaders, too, could benefit from the dedicated efforts of a skilled observer who, though critical, is always balanced, and is ever a true friend of their land and its people.\n\nJAMES HAYES,\n\nSYDNEY,\n\n2003\n\nPage 540\n\nPage 541", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]