[
    {
        "id": 204394,
        "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": 26,
        "title": "RAS-1962",
        "content_text": "NESTORIAN CROSSES\n\n17\n\nHe himself was the son of a Christian mother and he had a Christian wife, both from the Kerait tribe in north-eastern Mongolia, whose king had been converted by Nestorian missionaries in A.D. 1007. The era of communication between the Mongol Khans and the Popes and Princes of Europe commenced. At the end of the 14th century Bagdad was sacked by Tamerlane, as also were Aleppo and Damascus. He savagely attacked the Syrian Christians many of whom fled to the inaccessible mountains of Kurdistan, where they have lingered to the present day.\n\nIt was the break-up of the ancient Syrian Church. About which Harnack writes:\n\nThe Syro-Persian Church deserves our unqualified sympathy. It was the only large Church which never enjoyed the official protection of the state. It maintained the traditions of Antiochene exegesis, it translated the works of Christian antiquity into Syriac with great assiduity... It also assimilated Greek philosophy and science which it transmitted to the Arabians. At the present day it is crushed, impoverished, and down-trodden, but it can face its downfall with the consciousness that it has not lived in vain, but upon the contrary that it has filled a real place in the history of civilization.\n\nClaudius Rich visited the remnants of this Church in the mountains north-east of Mosul in 1820, including the 4th century Convent of Rabban Hormuz in its rocky gorge, and left a graphic description of the austere life and primitive worship of the dusky monks pursuing their manual labour in the remote solitude.10\n\nHenry Layard made a more extended visit to the same region a few years after the great massacre of the Assyrian Christians in 1842 by a fanatical Turkish Bey, when the threat of a second attack was already impending. He saw the ruined homes and churches, and the bleached bones still lying at one of the worst scenes of massacre; and he attended the simple worship and sacrament of the people a few days before a second indiscriminate massacre took place. He described with approbation the 'unadorned and imageless walls', the 'simple and primitive rites', 'the hospitality and simple manners of the priests'\n\n* Adency, op. cit., p. 495.\n\nHarnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, Vol. 2, p. 150.\n\n10 C. R. Rich, Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, London, 1836.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206495,
        "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": 43,
        "title": "RAS-1972",
        "content_text": "RAJA JAMES BROOKE AND SARAWAK\n\n37\n\nFrance, and in 1859 he \"broke off\" relations with Britain, upon which the Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell commented,12\n\nTell Brooke that the people of Sarawak are welcome to any independence they can achieve and maintain but that a British subject cannot throw off his allegiance at pleasure.\n\nAnd Spencer St. John noted13 that \"the Raja's correspondence during this year with Her Majesty's Government was not pleasant, and ended, apparently, in complete estrangement”.\n\nOver the years Brooke had acquired a respectable following of supporters in Britain and Singapore, among whom were some influential figures such as Lord Grey, Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford, and the late Victorian philanthropist, Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, later Baroness Burdett-Coutts. His friends now took up his cause and lobbied Whitehall from the Prime Minister's office down.\n\nBritain refused to extend a colonial or protectorate status to Sarawak on practical political grounds. Henry Layard, an under-secretary in the Foreign Office, wrote that a protectorate was declined because of the \"inconvenience of such relations between this country and a foreign territory\", because Sarawak “would not be of sufficient value politically and commercially\", and because Brooke's title was not \"sufficiently clear\"14\n\nBrooke's friends persuaded the Government to have another look at Sarawak, and in 1861 Lord Elgin, who was about to depart as the new viceroy of India, was instructed to investigate the prospects and potential of Sarawak. He delegated the task to Colonel Cavenagh, Governor of the Straits Settlements. In due course Cavenagh and Elgin provided an optimistic assessment of Raja Brooke's state and suggested making Sarawak a lieutenant-governorship under Singapore. \"I am disposed to think\", wrote Lord Elgin,15\n\nthat the acquisition of Saigon by the French and the persistent endeavor of the Dutch authorities to cripple British trade... give enhanced importance to the preservation of the independence of Sarawak as a matter affecting British interests.'\n\n12 See correspondence between the Foreign Office and Raja Brooke between 26 November and 17 December 1859, FO12/35.\n\n13 Spencer St. John, Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, (Edinburgh, 1879) p. 327.\n\n14 Layard memorandum to Lord Elgin, 2 January 1862, FO12/35.\n\n15 Elgin to Russell, 8 January 1863, FO12/35.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h",
        "rank": 0
    }
]