[ { "id": 210564, "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-1985", "page_number": 171, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "152\n\nFOUND IN A PENNSYLVANIA ATTIC –\n\nLetters from China 1903-1906*\n\nWEI PEH T'I\n\nWhile cleaning out his mother's attic in Bala Cynwyd, Harry V. Ryder Jr.' found a bunch of letters that had been sent from Taiho. Bala Cynwyd is an affluent suburb of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania; Taiho a river town in the northwestern corner of the interior province of Anhui in China.\n\n2\n\nThe letters were dated between January 1903 and April 1906. They were written to Harry's maternal grandmother, Louese Hedges Strawbridge, by Edith Rowe, who was a classmate at a \"finishing school” in Philadelphia. Both Louese and Edith were Baptists. Edith's letters reflected the high standard of private school education in eastern United States at that time. Her command of written English was more than respectable. Scenes and events were vividly described; ideas eloquently expressed; and grammar and spelling impeccable. Except for one or two words, her handwriting can be read without any difficulty. Two of the letters contain charming line-drawings, an old-fashioned practice still favoured by young students in American schools today.\n\nLouese Strawbridge was the only child of Samuel and Ann Hedges, who had come originally from Ohio. Samuel Hedges had served as a colonel in the Union Army during the American Civil War. After the war he brought his wife to Philadelphia where he became a successful horse trader.3 Bala Cynwyd is near Devon, in the heart of the Pennsylvania horse country. After graduating from the Friends School, Louese went to a “finishing school\", then was married to George Strawbridge, scion of a family that had founded and operated the prestigious department store, Strawbridge and Clothier. Louese and George had four children. Catherine was born in 1896, Helen in 1900, Janet in 1903 and Benjamin in 1907. Except for Benjamin who died in\n\n* Lecture delivered to the Society on 6 October 1986. The author is grateful to Harry and Phyllis Ryder for making available the letters and for information on Harry's grandmother and her family.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210565, "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-1985", "page_number": 172, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "153\n\n1983, the others are alive and well in Philadelphia. Helen is the mother of Harry V. Ryder Jr., whose foray into the attic had led to the discovery of these letters from Edith Rowe.\n\nNothing is known about the Rowe family. Since they were able to send their daughter to a private school that involved payment of fees, the parents must have been at least comfortable. In her letters to Louese, Edith had not mentioned any brother or sister, but it was clear that she had carried on a regular correspondence with her mother. Edith's mother had enjoyed seeing the drawings that were scattered throughout her daughter's letters, much like travellers today sending home photographs they took.\n\nExplaining the reason for sending Louese the drawings, Edith wrote,\n\nIn lieu of a camera I tried to make these (drawings) pretty often in Mother's letters. They are very roughly done but they amuse Mother and so I venture to inflict them on my friends once in a while.*\n\n5\n\nVery little is known about Edith herself, except what can be gleaned from her letters. She had a teacher referred to in these letters as Miss Amy, and friends one of whom was named Florence. The fact that Edith had arrived in China in 1902 has been established by scanning missionary records. Louese was thirty-seven in 1909, therefore must have been born in or around 1872. As her classmate and contemporary, Edith must have been about the same age. This means that in 1902 Edith would be thirty. Being thirty and unmarried at that time probably had influenced her decision to become a missionary in China.\n\nAmerican women of Edith's educational and social background in 1900 were following the same kind of spirit of service that had led Jane Addams a decade or so earlier to found Hull House, a settlement house in the slums of Chicago. Whereas women at home were also championing such radical causes as the right to vote and abolition of alcoholic drinking, the more conservative ones, like Edith Rowe, were going abroad as", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210577, "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-1985", "page_number": 184, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "165 \n\nAs time went on and Edith became more acclimatized to living in interior China, she was able to see things in native terms. Whereas she was finding comfort in the violets grown from seeds she had brought from home in 1903, by 1905 she was able to think of seasonal changes in terms of local flowers. In the last letter to Louese, she wrote that \"it is already summer, the cherry blossoms are gone and peach blossoms all but done and we have a long time of heat to look forward to.\"\n\nPerhaps Edith was feeling better about China and the Chinese. She was feeling homesick less often. She was also finding her work more enjoyable because she was getting to know the women better. She wrote that \"much of the time I am so interested in my work that I do not have time to be lonely. I am enjoying my work so much lately, as I feel that I am getting into the heart of some of the women.\"\n\nEdith was also finding her work being appreciated. One visiting missionary, a Dr. Williams, who was a physician, had been to Taiho in 1905 and had been assisted by Edith in dispensing medication.\n\nDr. Williams made general the knowledge that I dispensed a few medicines when he was here and doing medical work. So my \"medical practice\" has doubled and redoubled till I feel myself in kind of a predicament, as I know absolutely nothing about some of their ailments. And they think I ought to know it all. But I haven't killed any yet and the majority seem to get well.52\n\nThe letter dated 5 April 1906 seemed to be the last from Edith to Louese. Harry Ryder searched, but could find no more.\n\nWhy did the letters stop?\n\nExcept for a few minor complaints about her health and fatigue now and then, there was no indication that Edith had suffered illness and had to return to Philadelphia. It is true that the letters were getting shorter. The first letters were eight pages of handwriting each, and the last three only four pages. On the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210578, "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-1985", "page_number": 185, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "166\n\nWEI PEH T'I\n\nother hand, Edith wrote three letters in 1905 — mostly because she had so much to complain about Mrs. Ferguson. Therefore, more likely than not, Edith had written after April 1906, but these letters had not been saved.\n\nWe do know that Louese had a new baby in 1907. With four children under ten years of age, even with a household of servants that Louese must have had, she would have found little time for letter writing. We also know that she became seriously ill shortly after the last child, her only son Benjamin, was born. The family today thinks that she had leukemia. At least it is thought to be a form of cancer. She was sick for a long time, and died in 1909, when she was only thirty-seven years old.\n\nNOTES\n\nHarry Ryder is serving as Commercial Counsellor at the United States Embassy in Kuwait. The Strawbridges were originally Quakers who had settled in Philadelphia, but the Ryders are Episcopalians.\n\n2 At first, the Ryder family had believed Edith to be a classmate of Louese at the Central Friends School. Correspondence with Clayton Faraday, Archivist of the school, however, reveals that Louese had been a member of the class of 1890, but there was no mention of her among the list of graduates. Edith Rowe is unknown at the school. Therefore, a conjecture must be made that they were most likely classmates at the \"finishing school\". Had they been academic scholars, they would probably have been sent to Bryn Mawr College. I am grateful to Mr. Faraday for his timely reply to my inquiry, making it possible to correct the error in my original presentation to the society.\n\n3 Colonel Hedges lived in an apartment attached to the Strawbridge house in Bala Cynwyd after his daughter's marriage. He survived both his wife and daughter. Harry Ryder remembers his great-grandfather, but never knew his grandmother.\n\n4 Rowe letter dated 1 October 1903.\n\n5 Protestant Missionary records. I am grateful to the Reverend Carl Smith for looking up this information. Hopefully there is more data on Edith in the archives of the China Inland Mission in London or Shanghai.\n\n6 Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility, American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 13ff\n\n7 Hunter, 29-30.\n\n8 Rowe letter dated 2 March 1905. As it turned out, one of Louese's grandchildren, Harry V. Ryder Jr., did join the Foreign Service, but it was the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210714, "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": 65, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "48\n\nSTEPHEN SELBY\n\noverseeing the design, laying and maintenance of a system of sewers, stormwater drains and nullahs on Hong Kong Island, in Kowloon and the New Territories. However, vacancies which he filled during the leave of other officers (which was usually on a half-pay commuted basis and lasted from six months to one year) brought him into contact with road-laying, marine and reclamation engineering works as well.\n\nSocially, H. T. Jackman was popular and well-liked in Hong Kong. He was keen on soccer and tennis and, as he got older, he took up golf. He was a member of the Hong Kong Club, Royal Hong Kong Golf Club and the Civil Service Cricket Club.\n\nFrom 1904 to 1905, Jackman was appointed sanitary surveyor under the Public Health and Buildings Ordinance of 1903 with the job of surveying built-up areas in Hong Kong and, where necessary, condemning and demolishing slum areas (mainly in Western) to allow for the construction of sewers and rebuilding of proper accommodation for the residents. It must have been a difficult task, for the provisions of the Ordinance were generally unpopular and corruption was rife among the staff tasked with its enforcement.\n\nIn 1908, Jackman accompanied A. J. Darby of the Crown Lands Office on secondment to China to carry out route surveying work (possibly for the Kowloon Canton Railway, for which surveys on the Hong Kong side were carried out in 1905. However, the railway was not built by the P.W.D.).\n\nMuch of the sanitary work required in Hong Kong at that time was for the provision of water supplies to residential areas. Jackman was closely involved in the enlargement of the Albany filter beds and increasing the capacity of water mains serving the Peak and Western (at that time the latter was the most densely populated area of the Colony). This involved drawing water from the Tytam reservoir via new mains along Caine Road and Bonham Road and the re-design of the Bonham Road water pumping station. He was also involved with the construction of rider-mains in Central and the construction of the Tytam secondary reservoir while the resident engineer was away on leave. In", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211960, "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-1989", "page_number": 375, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "350\n\nworld by first fixing them in the arms of a mounted paper horse rider known as gung-chou, who served as a messenger, and then burning the three (horse, rider, and memorial) together. The other form, known as bong, was posted in a rite on the main day of the festival on a wall, and remained there until the conclusion of the ritual.\n\nThe scripture chanting/Repentance session took place before the Three Pure Ones three times a day. The manual used was the common Jade Emperor's Repentance Scripture. The sessions were very short. The one I timed lasted only fifteen minutes. The other daily rite was the procession of offerings, which started at the Taoist altar with worship of the Three Pure Ones, then visited all the five faan posts, all the temporary altars and the Jau and Wong Temple, the guardian gods of the paang, and the yau-saan. The procession included flags and banners, and was preceded by a man holding a \"spirit summoning flag\". At each spot it stopped at, the priests briefly chanted and made offerings.\n\nThe other (and longer) rites involved a lot of chanting and singing, which, in many cases, nobody could hear clearly. The amplified music of the puppet theatre drowned out any other sound. The only exception was a scholar of religion from the Chinese University of Hong Kong who had the high priest carry a wireless microphone for him and who could therefore listen to the priests' words from a headphone radio and compare them with the manual. My descriptions of the Taoist rites, therefore, are often interpretations of what I saw and heard on the basis of past experience and manuals. 63\n\nE. The Participants List in the Taoist Rites\n\nOf the elements of the rites, the villagers probably knew most about the Memorials in their different forms. The women villagers in general knew less about the festival (or they pretended to). When I asked some elderly ladies at the ritual site what da-jiu was all about, they explained that it was heui-lok promised to Jau and Wong, to commemorate them. They suggested that I should ask elderly men instead. It was men who knew more about these things. The knowledge was handed down from one generation to another. But I overheard, during the opening rite, the same group of elderly ladies asking themselves how many priests were reading the Memorial (the one to be burnt). They observed that there was too much noise for them to hear the reading. They explained to me that the names of all the villagers (yan-hau) were being read. The priests\n\nPage 375\n\nPage 376", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 } ]