[ { "id": 204645, "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": 126, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "NAVIGATION ON THE YANGTSE\n\n113\n\ntransport. It was so successful that by 1872 it had a fleet of 17 steamers, had established 9 depots on the river, and found it necessary to increase its capital from Tls. 1,000,000 to Tls. 2,000,000.\" During 1866 and 1867 the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company succeeded in obtaining almost a complete monopoly of the Yangtse river trade, at least in that part of it carried by foreign ships. In these two years the rival American company of Olyphant withdrew their two steamers, Jardine's transferred their two river steamers to the Hong Kong-Shanghai run, and the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company bought the steamers of Dent, Lindsay, and Heard. Their only remaining rivals were two steamers of the recently formed Union Steam Navigation Company, a Shanghai British company. These were not serious rivals to American supremacy, but in five years' time were to be sold to a new British company which was destined to challenge the American near monopoly on the river successfully.\n\nAlthough American steamers were supreme on the Yangtse at this time, and also prominent on some of the coast runs, British trading firms were still the most powerful foreign firms in the treaty ports as a whole, including the three newly opened ports on the Yangtse. British ships were also the most prominent in the foreign trade of China, including that from the Yangtse ports. In 1869, for instance, two British ocean steamers went up to Hankow at the height of the tea season and loaded direct for Europe, and were followed by six in 1870, and nine in 1871.* This, of course, was a serious challenge to the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company.\n\nCompany. Of the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company's 17 ships at this time only five had been built in America, six having been built in Britain, and six in Shanghai; while a good proportion of their captains and officers were British. This, together with the fact that Russell and Company always had a friendly alliance\n\n\"Of the original Tls. 1,000,000 capital about one third was contributed by members of Russell and Company, another third by foreign business men in Shanghai, of whom the majority were British, and the last third by Chinese business men, also in Shanghai.\n\n* Six of their steamers were on the Shanghai-Tientsin run, with calls at Chefoo, and two on the Shanghai-Ningpo run.\n\n? As the result of a triangular arrangement between the firms of Russell, Jardine and Dent, Jardine withdrew to the coast, and helped Dent financially, and Russell agreed not to increase their services on the coast.\n\n* One of these was Holt's Agamemnon and the other the Erl King. After this Holt's sent at least two ships to Hankow each season.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204648, "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": 129, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "NAVIGATION ON THE YANGTSE\n\n115\n\njourney by chair. He was the first Englishman to travel by this route, which it was hoped would develop into an important trade route from Upper Burma and West China.\n\nIn 1872 John Swire of London formed the China Navigation Company to trade on the Yangtse, and started by purchasing the two steamers of the Union Steam Navigation Company, following this up a year later with three ships of their own specially built on the Clyde. In this same year of 1873 the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company was formed, a Chinese company partly under government control and direction. This company purchased the steamers of the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company in 1877, and so became the owners of the largest river fleet. A few years later Jardine returned to the Yangtse with the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company, and by the early 1880's the greater part of the Yangtse trade was shared between these three companies: the China Navigation Company, the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, and the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company.\n\nThe formation of the China Navigation Company in 1872 was a logical development from that of the Blue Funnel Line by Alfred Holt in 1866. Alfred Holt and John Swire were close friends and business associates, and when the latter opened an eastern branch of his company in Shanghai he took over the agency of the Blue Funnel Line ships. One reason behind the formation of the China Navigation Company was to provide cargoes for the Blue Funnel ships to and from the Yangtse. Alfred Holt was unwilling to operate ships so far from his personal control, but was willing to support the Swire enterprise. The inauguration of the Blue Funnel Service to the Far East, the opening of a Far Eastern branch of John Swire and Company in Shanghai in the same year, and the formation of the China Navigation Company six years later, meant the introduction of a new and powerful combination to the China coast. Holt and Swire, in association with the Clyde shipbuilding family of Scott, were soon to play a very important part in the China trade, and in the shipping of the whole of the Far East. Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, Japan, and Australia, were all to come within their orbit before many years had passed.\n\nIn 1881 the various shipping interests of Jardine were merged into the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company, of which Jardine were made permanent managers. For a list of the main shipping companies plying on the Yangtze see Appendix on p. 130.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205514, "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-1968", "page_number": 56, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "THE HANKOW STEAMER TEA RACES\n\n51\n\nsay with any degree of accuracy, although probably one-third of this consumption would drive her about 12 knots an hour. On the principle that, while 100 horse-power would drive a steamship ten knots an hour, it would require 1,000 horse-power to propel her at the rate of twenty knots (all other conditions being in proportion), it will be seen that Mr. Macgregor's grounds and conditions for accelerated speed are not only reasonable but indispensable: the few last knots always the most expensive, and apparently almost prohibitive.\n\n\"Indeed, the present tendency seems to be towards a falling-off in the inclination to pay for such acceleration, so far as Tea freights are concerned: but time will show. Last year [1881] the slowing down of the three Glens was positive proof that the desire for fast passages had declined; and the projected telegraph to Hankow may possibly materially interfere with high freights for the future. In face of these facts, it appears clear that the large capacity of the Glenogle is a decided advantage. The Glenogle took Home this year 5,206 tons of Tea and 185 tons of miscellaneous cargo; and when she left London a few weeks ago she carried 4,022 tons of general merchandise to China; that is, she has taken into London and brought back to the East the largest cargoes that have been carried in one bottom since the opening of the China trade.\"\n\nJ\n\nEvents soon proved the soundness of the view taken by the China Mail's contributor.\n\n[Plates 1 and 2 illustrate this article].\n\nNOTES\n\nThe material has been obtained from articles in contemporary newspapers in the library of the Supreme Court, Hong Kong mainly the Hong Kong Telegraph and the China Mail, which also quoted from many other newspapers in the area. Grateful thanks are given to Messrs. Alfred Holt & Co. for their permission to use this material which was sent to them and formed the basis of an article in their House Magazine. The contemporary account has a vividness which is often lacking in the more formal history. Quotation is therefore used to give light to the story. No attempt is made to deal more than superficially with the events and there are gaps in the information provided.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205639, "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-1968", "page_number": 181, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "176\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nTHE SENIOR JOHN SAMUEL SWIRE 1825 - 98: MANAGEMENT IN FAR EASTERN SHIPPING TRADES, Sheila Marriner & F. E. Hyde; (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1967) pp. xiv, 206, appendices, illus. 42/-\n\nThis book is the latest product of the Liverpool School of Business History which, under Professor Hyde's direction, has published a number of converging and complementary studies of the Liverpool merchant and ship-owner. Although it is claimed for these studies that \"they are collectively an expression of ideas and techniques in the progression towards more sophisticated types of analysis in the handling (sic) of business records\", a common feature of all of them is the endorsement of Charles Wilson's credo: in the history of business, biography is a powerful element.\n\nWe come to this book, then, with the previous knowledge from these other Liverpool Studies that 'The Senior' was a tenacious, aggressive character, described by a business rival as \"a person who lived by and for business alone\"; with, as well, a considerable understanding of the part played by Messrs. Butterfield and Swire in the Far Eastern shipping trades and, in particular, of J. S. Swire's role as architect and protagonist of the Eastern Shipping Conferences. The commercial history of Butterfield and Swire, and to a lesser extent of Holt's Blue Funnel Line,* has already been examined from several angles which means that the reviewer of this present study has had to read three books instead of one! (The third one is K. C. Liu's study of the Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China (Harvard, 1962) and which drew, if indirectly, on the Butterfield and Swire records.) This effectively strikes the note of competition arising from the establishment and operation of the China Navigation Company.\n\nWhat we have new in this latest piece of research, principally, is the story of the 'Great and Ancient' (Taikoo) Sugar Refinery and, later, of the Taikoo Dockyard in Hong Kong. This project stemmed, as the authors make quite clear, as much from the conflict between Swire's and Jardine's - Swire swore to oppose the Princely House at all points—as from a calculation that it might further the shipping interests of the firm. Indeed, one of the most valuable sections for the historian of the China Coast trade is the\n\n* Blue Funnel: A History of Alfred Holt and Co. of Liverpool from 1865 to 1914, F. E. Hyde and J. R. Harris, Liverpool University Press, 1957.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206005, "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": 85, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "80\n\nA. D. BLUE\n\ndifficult problems to the governments concerned, and cruel, drastic, but ineffectual attempts were made to halt immigration. The massacres of thousands of Chinese in the Philippines in 1603, 1639, and again after the British occupation of 1763, are the most celebrated of many such occurrences, the last being caused by the Chinese having shown a marked preference for British rather than Spanish rule. In Indonesia the worst massacre took place at Batavia in 1740. Similar pogroms, but on a much smaller scale, continued in the Philippines down to 1820, and post-war Indonesia has shown a disquieting tendency to put the clock back two centuries in their treatment of their Chinese. But although victims of periodic bouts of xenophobia from the local peoples, in most countries of South-east Asia and at most times the Chinese were protected by the colonial governments which recognised the value of Chinese labour for their economies.\n\nBy the early decades of the 19th century the coolie trade between China and South-east Asia had attained substantial proportions -- although still nothing like so great as it was to become later -- and most of the trade was in the hands of Chinese junks of from 300 to 400 tons. Such craft could only sail before the wind and carried crews of up to ninety sailors, enough to man five European ships of the same size. They took anything from twenty to thirty days between south China and the Straits or Bangkok, and the coolies had a very uncomfortable time on the passage. No charts were carried, the only navigational instrument being a very rude compass, and they kept as close to land as possible. In the 1830s up to eighty such junks sailed to Bangkok every year, usually from Swatow, and by the mid 1840s, by which time European steamships were entering the trade, it was estimated that about 15,000 coolies were emigrating to Bangkok every year.\n\nA description of these old trading junks is given in S. Wells Williams, The Middle Kingdom (London, W. H. Allen & Co. revised edition, 1883) vol. 1, p. 753. It shows inter alia that the number of passengers carried on these junks to the Nanyang could be very great. ... \"The cabins look more like niches in a sepulchre than the accommodations for a live passenger. The crew lie upon deck most of the time, and are usually interested in the trade of the vessel or an adventure of their own. The great number of passengers which have been stowed in these vessels entailed a frightful loss of life when they were wrecked. In February, 1822, Capt. Pearl, of the English ship Indiana, coming through Gaspar Straits, fell in with the cargo and crew of a wrecked junk, and saved one hundred and ninety-eight persons (out of one thousand six hundred with whom she had left Amoy).\" Ed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206016, "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": 96, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "CHINESE EMIGRATION AND THE DECK PASSENGER TRADE\n\n91\n\ntrade for their own China Navigation Company. During most of the inter-war years a Norwegian company also operated a weekly service between Swatow and Bangkok in opposition to the China Navigation Company; but the latter's faster and more modern ships enjoyed the lion's share of this trade. The Singapore trade was an inheritance from the Blue Funnel Line, and came to the China Navigation through their close connection with the Holt family.\n\nFor several decades before the First World War much of the emigrant trade to Indonesia was in the hands of German companies, but when German overseas shipping was eliminated after the outbreak of war in 1914 this trade passed to Dutch companies, in particular the K.P.M. and the J.C.J.L. lines. Previous to 1890 a consortium of Dutch planters had employed coolie brokers in Singapore and Malaya for recruiting purposes, and Malaya was always something of a reservoir of Chinese labour for much of South-east Asia, especially for Indonesia and Siam. Entry into Malaya was easier than elsewhere, and there were more frequent and cheaper shipping services between south China and the Straits. It was always a comparatively simple matter for Chinese—authorised or unauthorised—to cross the short Malacca Straits into Indonesia or the ill-defined boundary between Malaya and Siam.\n\nThe Indo-China Steam Navigation Company was not nearly so deeply involved in the southern deck passenger trades as the China Navigation Company, but their Japan-Calcutta ships took part in the Straits trade on their way up and down the coast, and their Hong Kong-Sandakan ships had a near monopoly of the comparatively small trade to British North Borneo. Most coasters on the Hong Kong-Shanghai service called at Canton and carried deck passengers, but there was also a small fleet of specially designed river steamers employed between Hong Kong, Canton, and Macao, which provided daily and nightly services between the three ports, and thus an out and in connection for emigrants. The Canton river steamers were smaller editions of the Yangtse steamers, and their night departure from the Praya at Hong Kong, when they were a blaze of flamboyant and garish lights, was a spectacular sight before the Second World War. The six or seven hour passage between Hong Kong", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206872, "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": 149, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n143\n\nwith bamboo strips round the ankles, above the knees and round the belly. Their arms were then lashed out to the cross pieces, and lastly their heads were firmly secured to it by two or three turns of the bamboo strip across the eyes and in the mouth, this last acting as a very efficient \"gag\". The executioners who superintended the securing each of his own man and who seemed to have several assistants, apparently volunteers who enjoyed the job, now got their knives---broad-bladed about 10 inches long-and bared their arms to the elbow; their trousers were already confined by leggings and they had taken off their shoes. Each one, when all was ready, stepped back and took a critical look at his man; one of them gave an enquiring shout to the Mandarin at the gate, probably asking for orders to go on. The Mandarin gave an answering wave of the hand, and the most sickening brutal performance I can imagine commenced.\n\nI cannot give correctly in detail how it was all done; after the first few seconds I could only take occasional looks at what was going on. Even now, writing an account of it—24 hours after—gives me \"the shakes\". I don't think any of our party looked at it through—but between us all we saw it all and we compared notes afterwards.\n\nThe first executioner at work was the one who was \"doing\" the culprit furthest off from us—about 50 yards. The first two cuts were over each eye and temple—gashes which turned a great piece of flesh down—then one down each cheek, then one over each shoulder and upwards under each arm-pit, one in each upper arm and one in each fore-arm, and then he hacked off the right hand with one blow; then a great piece was cut out of each thigh and over each knee, and I think the privates were cut clean off; then the furthest off had his stomach slashed open and the executioner got hold of his entrails—this man had to receive a greater number of cuts than the other. So the other executioner, when he had finished his slashing and was waiting, drove his knife up to the hilt under the right breast bone of his victim, and in one of my looks I saw him holding the knife there, working it about, while an assistant held an ordinary palm leaf fan in front of the poor wretch's face, in order, I suppose, to hide his contortions, for he was not yet dead, as I could see by the working of his hands. Both victims were by this time smothered in blood and hanging to the crosses, only kept up by the lashings. The next and last thing I saw was the first man cut down from the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207294, "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": 62, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "54\n\nJ. L. CRANMER-BYNG\n\ninto the city; I therefore resolved to keep him in view if possible, but the moment we came near him he set off at full speed, and in spite of all the efforts we could make we soon lost sight of him.\n\nWe had now proceeded about half a mile in a long narrow street, the end of which I was much annoyed at finding branched into two others rather wider, one turning short to the left, the other inclining to the right; here I called a halt, as it was evident, if we took the wrong direction, all chance of success was at an end. I therefore called to my aid the petition addressed (as I before mentioned) \"To the Hoppo\", in large characters; and seeing at a shop door a good-humoured-looking fellow staring at the unusual appearance of such a number of strangers in the city, I ran up to him and showed him the back of the petition, which he instantly read, laughed heartily, and pointed out the right road.\n\nWe proceeded on as fast we could go, and, after advancing a short distance, we again got sight of the soldier, whom we discovered, with several others, in the act of shutting two very large folding gates, which appeared to be the entrance to a spacious outer court, in which was visible the front of one of the most magnificent buildings I had ever seen. This was a very critical moment, for I instantly imagined it must be the Hoppo's palace, and, if the gates were once closed against us, all our labour was lost. I therefore loudly called out, \"Hurrah to the gate!\" We in a body sprang forward and luckily reached it at the instant the gates were shut, but before they had time to get them bolted; with one consent we put our shoulders to them, and the gates flew open before us, throwing all those inside to the right and left. Our whole body immediately rushed in, and it was our turn then to assist the soldiers in shutting and bolting the gates to keep out a mob of Chinese who had gathered in the city and followed in our rear.\n\nNow we had time to breathe, look about us, and consider where we were. Nothing could be more splendid than the building which stood in front of us; it was covered with Chinese characters in gold, beautifully ornamented with carved work in the Chinese style, and painted in the most brilliant and gaudy colours.\n\nMr. Perry at once assured me we must have reached the Viceroy's palace, as he discovered that particular banner which was carried before the Hoppo when he visited the Company's factory. The guard, whom we seemed to have caught en deshabille, had", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207738, "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-1976", "page_number": 126, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "IN SEARCH OF THE CHINESE NAME FOR “LI SUN”\n\n111\n\nLo Hsiang-lin's book translated into English, Hong Kong and Western Cultures (Hong Kong, 1963) which gave this same official name for the interpreter of the Chinese Educational Mission,\n\nThus, it may well be concluded that Chan Laisun was the name given at his birth in Singapore and Tseng Heng-chung\n\nwas his official name in later years.\n\nIt is hoped that this article about the search for a Chinese name will stimulate a response from relatives and friends of Tseng Lan-sheng (Tseng Heng-chung) and bring forth corrections and additions to the story of an unusual person and family who lived during the early historical period of China and American cross-cultural exchanges.9\n\nNOTES\n\n1 See pp. 92-106 of JHKBRAS 16 (1976).\n\n2 William N. Armstrong, Around the World with a King (London: Heineman, 1909), pp. 92-93.\n\n3 Tin-Yuke Char, The Sandalwood Mountains: Readings and Stories of the Early Chinese in Hawaii (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1975), pp. 44-51.\n\n4 Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Holt, 1909), p. 183.\n\n5 容閎自傳:西學東漸記, 台北文海出版社 1973 重印,\n\n6 Carl T. Smith, \"A Register of Baptised Protestant Chinese, 1813 - 1842,\" Chung Chi Bulletin, December 1970, pp. 23-26; Smith, \"Idols on a School Hill: the American Board School for Chinese Boys in Singapore, 1835-1842,” Chung Chi Bulletin, December 1974, pp. 28-30.\n\n7 舒新城編: 近代中國留學史, 上海中華書局 1933.\n\n8 羅香林著: 香港與中西文化交流,\n\n9 Tsung-1 Dow, Chronological Biography of Li Hung-chang - 著: 李鴻章年, 香港友聯社, 1968 does not include King Kalakaua's visit in 1881 nor does it mention Chan Laisun (Tseng Heng-chung), although otherwise most comprehensive.\n\nMr. Char has since added the following extra note:\n\nIt would add great interest should Hamilton College be able to find Chan Laisun's family photograph of 1872. Also, some one in Hong Kong may be able to add to the family story of his son Spencer who married the daughter of the Rev. Ho Fuk-tong of Hong Kong. Probably Carl Smith has additional materials and will write the next article.\n\nThe October 1975 issue of Smithsonian carried a good article on Li Hung-chang's visit to New York in August 1896, accompanied by 18 aides and 2 servants, 300 pieces of luggage, a golden sedan chair, several cargoes of song-birds, 2 noisy parrots. He brought along his own chefs, bakers, valets, guards, footmen, secretaries, interpreters, and physician. His chief interpreter was then Lo Fing-luh, a skilled linguist in German and French as well as English. There was no mention of Chan Laisun as an interpreter or secretary. Perhaps by that time he had gone on to other work or may have died. In 1896 he would have been 67 years old (born 1829).\n\nEditor's note: Carl Smith's article extending the story of Chan Laisun and his family follows on.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208380, "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-1978", "page_number": 104, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "88\n\nEUGENE COOPER\n\nit were triggered initially by a lockout at a plastic flowers factory in Kowloon and fanned by some arbitrary police action taken against demonstrating workers and students. Anti-colonial demonstrations occurred and anti-British sentiment ran high, fueled by stepped up anti-imperialist propaganda radiating from the mainland then in the midst of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. While most carved wood furniture factory and shop proprietors were unlikely targets for anti-imperialist attack, the Woodwork Carvers' Union seems to have taken advantage of the widespread unrest to extract a wage increase from the Merchants' Association at the time.\n\nOne school of thought (with its locus in the Far Eastern Economic Review) maintains that the Peking government was dissatisfied with its compatriots' handling of the 1967 disturbances and called a halt thereafter to revolutionary activity in the Crown Colony. While these claims are difficult to substantiate with any certainty, it is widely admitted in the Hong Kong pro-communist community that Peking was desirous of a stable situation in post-1967 Hong Kong so that it could actively pursue, from its viewpoint, more pressing diplomatic questions like its entry into the United Nations and the liberation of Taiwan.\n\n\"Hong Kong is a historical problem that will be solved at the appropriate time\" goes the refrain. The Hong Kong \"problem\" does not have the status of a \"principle contradiction\" for the People's Republic. Hong Kong continues to remain valuable to the Communist government in terms of the significant amounts of foreign exchange which China earns by marketing its products in and through the port, and also as a place in which trade and diplomatic contacts are still pursued. While such functions may decline as China continues to open up diplomatically and economically, they are still a factor in Hong Kong's historical viability as a colony.\n\nIn any event, in the post-1967 period, industrial peace in Hong Kong was the common desire of the British colonial government and the communist government in Peking. This led to the assumption on the part of the communist Federation of Trade Unions of some rather odd poses in the local adaptation of Mao Tse-tung thought to the Hong Kong scene.\n\nThis was particularly so in so far as the implementation of Mao's thought has entailed a disciplined adherence to a policy of delayed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208399, "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-1978", "page_number": 123, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "SIIIWAN POTTERY EXPLORED\n\n107\n\nthe theme of \"restoring rivers and mountains\" to the point of becoming formula, but no one complained.\n\nMai further describes how the Guangdong opera actors practised the martial arts of the Shaolin branch (*) and finally put this art to use when in 1854 their leader, the actor Li Yunmao (***) also known as Wen Mao () led three armies of actors to join the Taiping effort against the Manchus. These armies were destroyed along with the rest of the Taiping army, and in the aftermath, the Qing court issued an order forbidding the performance of Guangdong opera and had the actors' Qiong Hua (hortensia flower) Association Hall (1446) in Fushan burned to the ground.\n\nA gilt wood carved altar in the Ancestral Temple in Fushan, and a Shiwan frieze depicting the story of the Yang Family Generals, preserve in their carvings the significance of these events and their broader implications for a community not under the domination of a foreign Manchu government, but also besieged with Caucasian foreigners pressing for trade and territorial rights.\n\nThe Qing dynasty gilt wood altar carving has double meaning. The carving depicts the story of Tang dynasty Li Yuanba fighting the dragon colt (*£#£#6). On a second level however, the horse represents the unruly foreigners, and Li Yuanba, having the same surname, represents Li Wenmao. Verifying this are two hidden plaques hung above the scene which can only be seen from a crouching position. One reads \"Great Ming Mountains and Rivers\" (11) and the other \"Qiong Hua Hall\" (44), with the middle character Hua (4) substituted as disguise for the similar sounding Hua (*) of the Hortensia Flower (Qiong Hua) Association. Furthermore, according to Mr. Zhang Tao (**), curator of the Ancestral Temple, the characters on these two wood plaques were originally covered with extra slabs of wood and were only discovered while renovation was being done to the temple between 1971 and 1972. (Plate 14).\n\nIn addition to this gilt wood altar scene, a beautiful ceramic frieze depicting the story of the Yang Family Generals, Song dynasty loyalists, is displayed in the rear courtyard of the Ancestral Temple. In addition to this anti-Manchu theme (the Yang family's loyalty to the native Song dynasty during the period of barbarian Yuan conquest, symbolising the loyalty of the Chinese people to the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209677, "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-1982", "page_number": 334, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "312\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nto a halt and where the physical past remains frozen or fossilized by political currents.\n\nALAN BIRCH\n\nFujiwara Iwaichi, F. Kikan: Japanese Army Intelligence Operations in S.E. Asia, 1983. Heinemann's Asia.\n\nProfessor H. J. Benda, authority on the Japanese occupation of the Indonesian archipelago, once remarked \"Japan's war-time aims were never as clearly defined as in South-east Asia”.\n\nRecognizing this significance of Japanese plans and preparations for the war waged against the imperialism of the West, Heinemann's have published a number of studies illuminating in depth several aspects of this important programme, notably Joyce Lebra's Japanese trained Armies in South-east Asia. It is she who writes the introduction to this present volume Lt. General Fujiwara's account of the operations of F. Kikan in Malaya in this critical area of World War II in the Far East. (Actually, this is a translation by the noted Japanese scholar Professor Akashi Yoji, biographer of Loi Tak, the notorious and typical middleman figure in these entanglements of the contending forces of imperialism).\n\nLebra claims for the author of this war-time account of the activities of this Japanese propaganda intelligence group stood for Fujiwara, Freedom and Friendship that he developed a vision of Japan's military role in Asia at its most idealistic, Seeing himself as the Japanese 'Lawrence of Arabia' he took the war-time propaganda slogan ‘Asia for the Asians' most seriously.\n\nFujiwara's relatively short-term, but significant, role in furthering the formation of the Indian National Army, which, of course, was to attempt the removal of the colonial bondage of the British rule of India and further to demonstrate the self-proclaimed role of Japan as the instrument of liberation, is therefore of more than passing interest to historians of that critical period in the shifting of political power in the East.\n\nFujiwara's part in this crusade, and particularly his relations with the least ambiguous of Indian nationalists, Chandra Bose,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209845, "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-1983", "page_number": 104, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "82\n\nat least for some sections of the language community, when it occurs in puns and other examples of wordplay. During a popular television show in the U.S. a chow dog which bites people but is quite timid is described as 'chicken chow mein'. The term wok has become so familiar that it has become a favourite item for puns.\n\nA fast food Chinese restaurant in Boston is called 'Wok In'. In San Francisco audiences watching a cooking programme are told to 'get wokking'. When someone had returned from a trip to Bangkok with some Thai silk ties, an expatriate colleague of ours was heard to make the following remark: 'Did the Thai tai tai tie your Thai tie? The noun lap sap from Cantonese laap saap ‘rubbish' is known to almost every English-speaker who has lived in Hong Kong for some time. Some people objected to the use of the word 'rubbish' as a verb in a slogan for the Clean Hong Kong Campaign launched by the Government recently: 'Don't rubbish your city' was felt to be bad English. The following letter to the editor of The South China Morning Post may be taken as evidence that lap sap and 'rubbish' are taken to be synonyms in the same language: 'To whoever gave us \"Don't rubbish your city”, a piece of advice. Don't lap-sap your language.' (South China Morning Post, 7/12/82).\n\nNOTES\n\n1 See M. Chan and H. Kwok, A Study of Lexical Borrowing from English in Hong Kong Chinese, Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1982.\n\n+\n\nThe study is in the form of a monograph entitled Chinese Loan Words in English with Special Reference to English in Hong Kong has been accepted for publication by the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, and will appear by early 1985. The monograph will include an appendix giving a list of 105 loan words with notes on pronunciation, meaning and etymology.\n\n* Oxford, 1962, p. 143.\n\n* For example, A.J. Bliss, A Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases, London, 1980, includes chopsticks, chopsuey, kowtow, kuomintang, sampan, tycoon.\n\nD. Carroll, Dictionary of Foreign Terms in the English Language, New York, 1973, has kowtow and sampan.\n\nA.H. Halt, Phrase and Word Origins, New York, revised 1961, has fairly lengthy explanations of pidgin terms and prevalent false etymologies, and includes references to chop chop, chow, kumquat, chau min.\n\nБ\n\nA.J. Bliss, op. cit.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209959, "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-1983", "page_number": 218, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "196\n\nthe vessel appointed to receive us, in the 10th month of the year Yeh-sze.\n\nLike Kong-heang my renown is small; like Lea-heang I have taught the classics, but profited little by the examples found in them. My attainments are slender, and I can only be compared to a ragged colt that has no real substance.\"\n\nIn view of Cree's mention of Charles Gutzlaff being on board the Vixen, and of the dearth of translators in Hong Kong at that time, it may be that the translation of the poem was made by Gutzlaff himself.\n\nNOTE\n\nThis is probably Liu Kai-yü (M), a native of Shun-Tien, Prefect of Canton (AHA) from 1843, or Liu Hsin (2), a native of Hsiang Fu, Honan, who succeeded him as Prefect of Canton in 1845 c.£. ƒƒƒ± (+M/2## Vol. 1), p. 405 (Note from Rev. C.T. Smith).\n\nRELICS OF HONG KONG AND CHINA IN BRITISH ARMY AND REGIMENTAL MUSEUMS\n\nP. BRUCE\n\nWhile in the United Kingdom in 1983 I visited a number of army museums in search of items related to China. There is, in fact, quite a lot to see, though the museums are scattered the length and breadth of the country and considerable travelling is involved. However, members of the society may like a brief note on what I was able to find and it would be interesting to hear of anything additional which is known of.\n\nI started at the Royal Marines Museum, at Southsea, Hampshire, which is, in effect, a part of Portsmouth. There is an interesting collection of China items here.\n\nThe oldest items are several assorted rifles and swords and an impressive Chinese cannon which looks as if it would have fired a shot about the size of a tennis ball. It is crafted to include a ferocious dragon's head at the muzzle from which the ball would roar forth. These were picked up in 1842.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210370, "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": 341, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "320 \n\nW.J. HOWARD \n\nmind was very much superior to the electric organ which we have at present. I would go so far as to say that the volume of the ancient pipe organ's music could be likened to a Niagara as compared with the new electric organ's trickling stream. I believe the humid weather conditions in Hong Kong forced the change over to the less pretentious electric model.\n\nDenman Fuller was a great favourite with the boys, particularly when the congregation was dispersing after the service. He would improvise his music as the boys were trooping out. One of our senior prefects, waxing poetical at the time, compared Denman's efforts to a dragon lurking in the uttermost depths of the ocean before soaring to the heights of the empyrean. His fortissimo notes would completely drown out all the jabberings of the boys. Abruptly he would come to a halt and the boys would find their feeble voices again before commencing their long walk from the Cathedral back to school.\n\nThere was a European gentleman who attended St John's Evensong every Sunday without fail. He was fond of seating himself close to the boys. This gentleman knew practically all the hymns, psalms and prayers by heart. He never opened the Book of Common Prayer or the Hymns Ancient and Modern. As soon as the choir started he would join in the singing without the aid of any book. In those days the psalms were sung according to the day of the month. It so happened that one particular Sunday was the 15th day of the month and psalm 78, with 73 verses, had to be sung in full. The learned gentleman sang verse after verse as usual by heart but unfortunately he was always one verse ahead of the choir. A mischievous boy by the name of Edward Charrington tried in vain to draw the gentleman's attention to his error. After he had sung his last verse he sat down and was shocked when the choir thundered \"So he fed them with a faithful and true heart; and ruled them prudently with all his power\", this being the last verse. He probably thought that the choir had repeated verse 73. Nevertheless his memory was prodigious and aroused the admiration of all the boys.\n\nThe Diocesan Boys' School produced at least four ministers of religion. Aside from Rev. George Zimmern, mentioned earlier, we", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210408, "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": 15, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "During the year, in two exchanges of letters with the Chairman of the Urban Council, I expressed our Council's concern about the unexpected halt to the proposed joint Museum of Science and History at Tsimshatsui East which was to have been built with the aid of a large Jockey Club donation. I also stated the Council's hope for a more modest permanent museum in lieu with, in the meantime, the preparation of a standing exhibition on Hong Kong history, something which has been lacking in the present museum in Kowloon Park since 1980 although present in its earlier premises at Star House. Appreciative replies were received together with the assurance that a modest extension to the existing premises has been approved pending the construction of the permanent Museum of History, and that the museum staff are preparing an outline thematic scheme for a permanent Hong Kong exhibition.\n\nConclusion\n\nI am thankful that, after two quite difficult years the Society's affairs now seem to be set again on an upward path. I feel confident that, commensurate with the reduced time now available to working council members an improved administrative base and the services of a capable and interested assistant secretary, will enable the Council to operate to the best advantage of the Society. We shall ensure that our promotion and publicity are sustained and that as has ever been the case - our programmes and supporting publication programme remain of interest and of good quality.\n\nHowever, it has not been possible to hold the seminar on our future organization which I mentioned in my last year's address. It has not only been the matter of finding time to organize this presentation and to secure qualified speakers. It seemed to me to be necessary, in the first instance, to place our affairs on a firmer footing, so that the confidence which this creates can be reflected in our deliberations on this important subject. I now hope that we can address this subject during the coming year.\n\nFinally, I wish to thank members of Council for their support and their interest throughout the year. In these difficult times I\n\nxiv\n\nPage 15\n\nPage 16", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210883, "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": 234, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "217\n\nWHEN A-MEI STRUCK SILVER IN LANTAO\n\nHo A-mei also maintained an interest in mining.\n\nAfter his return from Australia in 1868, his first position was at Canton with the Chinese Imperial Customs Service. It was not to his liking, for after six months, as he says, he \"threw it up in disgust.\" He then intended to return to New Zealand to see if he could not recoup the money he had paid out on the labourers he had introduced. While he was in Hongkong waiting for a ship, he was offered the position of clerk and interpreter in the office of the Registrar-General.\n\nHe philosophised about his acceptance of the offer. \"It is a little more remunerative than the one at Canton, but it may be designated the same ‘a mere living.' No doubt it is not exactly to my liking. Still, taking into consideration the untoward circumstances and hard trials which I had already experienced through the many stages of my life, I surmised a halt here would not be amiss, as it is a mere step of self-denial and of biding my time” for new opportunities.\n\nHe regarded Hongkong as a good listening post for “anything fresh that may be turned up at any time in the colonies in which I am more or less interested.”\n\n**\n\nThe only thing that turned up was the opportunity in 1870 and 1871 to despatch groups of emigrants to New Zealand. He did hear, however, that the Fiji islands might be an area seeking Chinese labour, and in a letter to Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1871, he suggested that “should any of your well-to-do companies desire to embark their surplus capital in speculating upon Chinese labour for that quarter, perhaps you will not fail in recommending me to the post of agency for the procuring of the labour.\"\n\nIn 1872, he resigned his post in the Hongkong Registrar-General's office. His activities as an emigrant agent placed him in a position open to a conflict of interests. There was also a rumour that he had been having some shady dealings with the Chinese Customs authorities.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211026, "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": 88, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "from the List of Common Jurors (in the Hong Kong Sessional Papers), where most recently it had been associated with his long-standing address at 267, Queen's Road East and with the occupation of Compradore for Holt's Wharf, the Hong Kong home of the Blue Funnel Line. An examination of his will and the certificate of probate shows that he died on Sunday, 30th December, 1917. On Tuesday, 1st January, 1918, the following brief news item appeared in the “Local and General” column of the South China Morning Post:43\n\nA well-known Chinese resident, Mr. Mok Man Cheung, compradore at Holt's Wharf, died at the week end. Mr. Mok passed away on Sunday morning at his residence, 267, Queen's Road East. He was an old QC44 student and very well known in the Colony. He was on the Committee of the Tung Wah Hospital, the Po Leung Kuk, the Hongkong Public Dispensary and many other prominent institutions.” He was only 53 years of age at the time of his death.\n\nQuestions which remain for consideration and which possibly taxed him at the time of his death concern the inaccuracies in the career summary which he permitted to be published in 1906. Why did he claim to be a pupil-teacher in 1884, when in fact he was already a fully-fledged assistant Chinese master? Why did he post-date his teaching career at the Central School? Why did he post-date and abbreviate his career at the Registrar General's Office? Why did he post-date his time at the Supreme Court? The simplest answer is to place the responsibility either on faulty copy-editing on the part of the editors of Who's Who in the Far East or upon faulty memory on his own part. These answers do not ring true, partly because the editors have received no similar criticisms relating to the numerous other entries, and partly because the errors are too consistent to be simply the result of an oversight. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a person in 1906, then aged 41, would forget the dates of employment only fifteen to seven years before. Another possibility, already mentioned, was that Mok Man Cheung felt that he gained face from association with the pupil teacher scheme, and that all consequent post-dating was caused by", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211679, "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": 94, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "69\n\nThe embarkation took place at midnight. It had begun to rain. There was no street lighting; the night was very dark and the gangway up to the hulk was slippery. These hulks were great steel pontoons, two hundred feet long, with a large deck house, in which were located the shipping company's office and some residential quarters. Wide stairs led down to the holds below, where the inward and outward cargoes were stored pending transfer elsewhere. To approach the ship you had to walk round outside the hulk along a gangway, about three feet wide, left between the deckhouse and the edge. To facilitate the movement of cargo no railings were put along this edge. I was carrying our younger child and I remember the feeling of horror when our other child, at a moment when the amah's attention was attracted elsewhere, toddled along to the edge to look over at the black tide rushing between the steel sides of the ship and hulk. My wife just in time snatched him back from the wet slippery edge.\n\nThe steamer was of the usual river design, like any small sea-going merchantman, but with more super-structure and a flatter bottom. There were not berths sufficient for all the refugees, who began to sort themselves out, some in the saloon and others in the smoking room. A wild alcoholic glow added to the sociability induced by the common dangers of the situation and I regret to say bets were taken whether one of the refugees, who was conspicuously expecting a baby, could last out till the ship reached Shanghai. When the Captain decided to start, husbands and bachelors were reluctantly persuaded to go ashore to return to their solitary and darkened houses.\n\nNext day the Consul decided to get in touch with the Chinese general who held the appointment of Garrison Commander at Kiu Kiang. This official was elusive but he eventually agreed to come to the Consulate for a conference. The safety of the foreigners in Kiu Kiang was really his responsibility and after some pressing he undertook to furnish protection. The British guards were consequently withdrawn from the Concession gates to the two hulks.\n\nDuring times of civil commotion respectable and well-to-do Chinese would bolt their doors or put up the shop shutters, as the case might be, and remain inside; but in any Chinese town there would also be an unruly element of loafers, pickpockets, thieves, and toughs, as indeed in any western city. Now was the opportunity for these hooligans. By midday the streets of the Concession were filled with a seething mob", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212182, "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-1990", "page_number": 124, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "101\n\nignorance. The cook, on the other hand, a tall northerner from Tientsin, would blanch at the first sound of the siren and bolt like a rabbit to his hole; and our little amah, a timid soul, would stand and weep in a corner. At one time we got quite worried about her, because whenever there was a raid her temperature went up; she, however, recovered her normal poise when she followed her \"missy\" to the quieter atmosphere of Wuhu.\n\nDuring all this period the Chinese commercial community watched the attitude of the foreign residents and judged of the progress of the war from what they read into their movements. The war had naturally resulted in a severe restriction of credit and we were all concerned with the collection of outstanding accounts. One foreign business man, who controlled a large upcountry organisation, maintained that his wife's continued residence in Nanking inspired his Chinese agents with such confidence that they continued to remit funds, so that he estimated her presence was worth several lakhs to the firms by whom he was employed. This is one aspect liable to be overlooked by Consuls, who order their nationals at short notice out of a place in the hope of avoiding international complications.\n\nWhether because they grew tired of the discomforts of a bucolic existence, or of the expense, or whether it was because they found that the part of the town in which they used to live had escaped the attention of the enemy bombers, it was a fact that many Chinese, who had left Nanking in August, returned in October, and many of the shops which had closed their doors reopened.\n\nThe question of provisions became easier again, and some enterprising compradores even replaced exhausted stocks by railway from Tsingtao, or by motor lorry from Shanghai, though to cover the risk of loss en route they found it necessary to raise their prices from two to three times. Butter was a problem, until we discovered that while the number of milk consumers had fallen off heavily the number of cows had remained static, and the surplus of cream thus available produced excellent fresh butter. The dairies in Nanking existed for the convenience of the foreigners as the Chinese themselves do not consume milk or milk products. In more recent years, however, Chinese have taken to tinned milk, particularly for infants, and by this indirect approach are to a small extent developing a taste for cow's milk.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212300, "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-1990", "page_number": 242, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "219\n\nHONG KONG HONGS WITH LONG HISTORIES\n\nAND BRITISH CONNECTIONS\n\n+++\n\nDAN WATERS*\n\nTrade the beneficent daughter of liberty and industry. The giver of human happiness! The creator of wealth. The supporter of social existence! Blessed commerce, the friend of the slave, the liberator of the oppressed\n\nJohn Holt\n\nmerchant and West African trader 7th January 1906\n\nIntroduction\n\nThis paper traces the histories of some of the present-day commercial, industrial and professional firms, that have British origins or connections, which were established in Hong Kong in the 19th century. Traditional Hong Kong romanisations of Cantonese names have been used. When currency is referred to, unless otherwise stated, it is Hong Kong dollars.\n\nA valuable start in researching the hongs (large business houses), has been made by Dr S.M. Bard (Bard, 1988) who prepared a paper for the Hong Kong Museum of History. Clearly, as Bard stresses, it is important not to forget Chinese merchants. Here too a useful beginning has been made by Professor Wong Siu-lun (Wong, 1988). The aim of the author of this article is, as Bard suggests, to continue the momentum.\n\nNow, one-and-a-half centuries after Hong Kong was established, is a good time to retrace steps, especially as the story of industry\n\n* The author is grateful to his friends, Dr. James Hayes, the Rev. Carl T. Smith and Dr. Elizabeth Sinn, for their encouragement, for recommending research material and for assistance in other ways. Thanks are also extended to the many companies covered in this paper, and to their members of staff who helped the author and without whom this study would not have been possible.\n\nThis paper was first presented at the 12th Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, at Hong Kong University, in June 1991.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213245, "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-1994", "page_number": 67, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "46\n\nHe was then described “as perhaps the oldest foreign resident of the colony” (Daily Advertiser 23 Apr. 1872). Shortly before his retirement John Henry Smith and Frederich Rapp were admitted as partners in the firm,\n\nJohn Henry (or Johan Heinrich as it is given in one record) Smith remained a partner until his death at Genoa, Italy in June 1890. He was on his way back to Germany after a visit to Hong Kong with his wife (DP 21 June 1890). His will, which had been written in Macao in 1873, states that he was formerly of Cappelen, Germany. In his will he left all business of ship chandler and auctioneer and commission agent at Macao in trust for his wife Lizzie Smith of New York\" (PRO Probate File No. 29 of 1891 [4/8201]). By the time of his death some seventeen years after writing his will he had disposed of his interests in Macao. They were taken over by A. Muller in January 1875 (Macau Boletim 2 January 1875)\n\nChristian Friedrich Rapp (or as he was usually known Fritz Rapp) was admitted a partner in the firm of Blackhead and Co. in 1871 and his interest ceased some six years later (DP 2 Oct. 1877). He then went into business on his own as auctioneer and commission agent with an office on Zetland Street (DP 16 October 1877). Mr. Rapp died in Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1895. His tombstone in the Old Residents' Section of the Colonial Cemetery at Happy Valley states he was born at Stade on 30 January 1841. In his will he appoints his wife Mei Ho (May) as guardian of his children: Kwai Tsun otherwise Gustave, King Tsun otherwise Hermann, Sham Tsun otherwise Fritz, Shui San married to Mr. Li, Shui Yee and Shui Sun. In a codicil written on 1 December 1894 he states his daughter Shui Sun is now called Johanna Rapp and that one of the executors he had named, Hemrich Hoppius, was ill and likely to die. In his place he appointed Heinrich Gartels (PRO Probate File No. 7 of 1895 [4/1008]).\n\nBlackhead and Co. in 1886 were agents for the Kerscheldt Ice Depot. The ice was manufactured at the Saki Distillery on the Shaukiwan Road (DP 1 April 1886). In the same year they announced plans to build a wharf adjoining their coal godowns, then in course of erection, at what became known as Blackhead's Point in Tsim Sha Tsui (DP 3 April 1886). The account of the firm's Jubilee published in the Daily Press 31 March 1905 stated the company was the largest of the coal merchants in Hong Kong. The coal godowns and wharf later passed into the hands of Butterfield and Swire and were known as Holt's Wharf. The site is now", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213816, "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": 168, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "140\n\nat the top was another of these tea houses and here we called a halt. I soon got into a chat with an old priest with his clean-shaven head. His temple, or rather hovel, was close there and he got his living by begging. He was stone blind. It was a mendicant Friar, and a wandering Friarð in argument. He freely acknowledged the absurdity of his creed. He is a Buddhist: and offered me on the spot to go with me and learn my creed if I would feed and clothe him. Then I jeered him about his idols, and why he did not get them to help him. The worst of them is, they all acknowledge the absurdity of it, but say it is their custom. Western Foreigners have customs and celestial's have customs, and all creeds are good alike: here the matter ends.\n\nWe again got on our route, and descended the valley. Mr Stringer and myself were so long with the old priest that we were far behind the rest of the party; but we were armed and therefore there was no danger. When we again reached the valley at the bottom, our road lay along a small stream for a few miles. The rest of the party were out of sight, and we went on alone, partly uncertain that we were going right. At last, however, the road suddenly opened into a deep valley on the right, and at last we saw the German Mission House, just under the brow of the hill, and our companions seated very comfortably on the balcony [Ed.: An illustration of the Lilong Station accompanies this article.] So we put our best leg foremost, and at last tired of walking and riding we got in about 5 o'clock. The house is not a very grand affair. But it just has served their purpose. There is only one other house near it for a long way. The situation is beautiful in the extreme, and as healthy as possible. They have a little ground in front, and on the sides of the hills are plantations of tea shrubs, though nothing very bright about them.\n\nThe missionary staff consists of Mr Winnes, who has been in China nearly 20 years, and a fine young German, named Eitel\". I was much struck with him. There is a nobleness and firmness in him which I greatly admire. In fact, there is something almost severe about his look. But the animation with which he speaks, and the natural energy of his character, together with his pleasing and gentlemanly deportment, lead you soon to see he is not an ordinary person. [Ed.: Photographs of Lechler, Winnes and Eitel accompany this article.]\n\nWe took a short walk on the hills, and then came home to dinner, which by the bye I enjoyed with a keen relish. Then we sat a while on", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214845, "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-1999", "page_number": 260, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "227\n\nChinese, except as regards the use of Opium, are exceedingly temperate in their habits and we cannot account for the immense distilleries which have been discovered here.\"\n\n19 Captain Sir Edward Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, performed in Her Majesty's Ship Sulphur, During the Years 1836-1842. Including details of the Naval Operations in China, From Dec. 1840, to Nov. 1841 (London 1843, Dawsons of Pall Mall reprint, 1970, Vol.II, p.152.\n\nWyndham Baker, p.156. Commenting, he had added, \"The British common soldier in fact is a strange compound, for they are very kind to their prisoners when once the excitement ceases.\"\n\n21 Beeching, p.136.\n\n22\n\n24 Beeching, p.152. Another British placard recorded by Chu warned that there was to be no more commandeering of goods without payment: ibid. However, despite good intentions, according to another Chinese diary, this time from Shanghai in 1842, rape and looting did occur there, and impressment of civilians for forced labour for such heavy work as shifting gun emplacements and gunpowder [ibid., p.149]. Wyndham Baker, when landing his guns before Chin Kiang Foo, refers to \"about 100 helpless natives to assist in carrying the shot boxes.\" Baker, in Blackwood's 1964, pp.161-2.\n\nBeeching, p.139.\n\nThe British Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, had agreed, minuting: “The worst proposal I have seen from Mr. Pottinger....It ought not to pass unnoticed\": Beeching, pp.139-140. But Pottinger deserves credit for preserving the famed Porcelain Pagoda at Nanking from British soldiers and sailors who, armed with chisels and hatchets, were intent on obtaining souvenirs by stripping tiles from the tower. \"Sir Henry Pottinger was very indignant at this gratuitous vandalism; a guard was stationed to keep off intruders, and no one was thenceforth allowed to visit the tower without a permit from the Admiral or Commander-in-Chief.\" Parkes wrote, \"Such an act as this is shameful and a disgrace to the British name.\" From Stanley Lane-Poole, Sir Harry Parkes in China (London, Methuen & Co., 1901), p.32. Alas, the Porcelain Pagoda was destroyed by the Taipings not long after, in 1856.\n\n25 Edgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China (London, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1964), p.139.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214846, "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-1999", "page_number": 261, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "228\n\n26 But war is war, as I have said. Captain Henry Keppel, RN, recently arrived at the war, went ashore at Woosung after its capture in June 1842. \"18 June 1842. Waterloo Day. General Sir Hugh Gough landed in my gig, when I witnessed the horrors of war. Mutilated carcasses of men and horses by hundreds. Houses burning, villages deserted, etc. Struck by the prevalent feeling so strong for destruction\". Sir Henry Keppel, A Sailor's Life under Four Sovereigns (London, 3 vols., 1899), Vol.I, p.\n\n27\n\nWyndham Baker wrote from Amoy, \"The troops in the city have picked up a considerable quantity of plunder and some quantity of silver, but of course it would not really do for officers to set them an example, though I have seen the most splendid and elegant satin dresses in possession of some of them.\" Blackwood's 1964, p.86.\n\nLaurence Shadwell, Life and Campaigns of Lord Clyde (London, 1881), p.120-1.\n\n29 Shadwell, p. 138.\n\n30 Shadwell, p.132. See also Sir John Francis Davis, Chinese Miscellanies: A Collection of Essays and Notes (London, John Murray, 1865), p.161n.\n\nBingham, Vol.II, p.86.\n\nBelcher, Vol II, pp.213-4. Sir Hugh Gough was particularly angry on this occasion. “You have placed me in a most critical situation,\" he wrote to Elliot, \"My men of all arms are dreadfully harassed, my communications with the rear constantly threatened and escorts attacked. My men must suffer dreadfully from the necessity of continued watchfulness; for however you may put confidence in the Chinese I do not, nor should be justified in relaxing in the least.” Cited in Holt, pp.128-9.\n\n33 Holt, p.112.\n\n34 Holt, p. 108. This step was apparently taken on the advice of the British interpreters to the expedition, who thought it was better to let the town be stripped and deserted than to coerce the civilian population.\n\n35 Ouchterlony, p.225.\n\n36 \"Oh for the Joys of England! Lt Orlando Bridgeman's Letters From China and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214847, "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-1999", "page_number": 262, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "229\n\nHong Kong, 1842-1843,\" in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch, Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 14 (1974), pp.78 and 82.\n\n37\n\nHolt, p.142.\n\n38 Milne, p. 125.\n\n41\n\n43\n\nOuchterlony, p.225.\n\nAccording to Bingham (Vol.I, pp. 184-9), the provincial authorities issued a notification on 27 June 1840 with a carefully spelled out scale of rewards and inducements. A later proclamation by the three imperial commissioners, with greatly increased rewards, is translated in his Vol. II, at pp.404-7. Deceits and kidnapping were apparently the norm in oriental wars. In describing and condemning them, the writers were but echoing the similar complaints made by their brother officers during the First Burmese War in 1824-26, when such actions were also encountered there. See Bruce, op.cit pp.54.\n\nBingham, Vol.I, pp.286-291, adding an account of Captain P. Anstruther's imprisonment with the survivors at Ningpo (pp.292-7).\n\nBingham, Vol.II, pp. 181-3: \"When Ning-po was subsequently captured, it appeared that poor Mr. Stead had been conveyed there alive, when the brutal Chinese general had him secured to a stake, and then practised his bowmen by firing at him as a target; his body being subjected to the same brutality after life was extinct\". Davis, likely to be more authoritative, has a different but equally horrendous version. Upon Yukien's direction, \"the prisoner was tied to a stake in the middle of the public place [at Ningpo], deliberately flayed alive, and then cut in pieces\": China, During the War and Since the Peace (London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 2 vols., 1852), Vol I, p.170.\n\n4 Beeching, pp.121-2 and 136-7.\n\n44\n\nBingham, Vol.I, pp.212-217.\n\n45\n\nBingham, Vol.I, pp. 194-5.\n\nJ.D. Vaughan, The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements (Oxford in Asia Paperbacks, 1970, reprint of the original edition by the Mission Press, Singapore, 1879), pp.90-1 and see also p.36.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214848, "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-1999", "page_number": 263, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "230\n\n47 United Service Journal 1841, pp.531-2. The latter could not always be guaranteed, as we have seen.\n\n48\n\nThe British navy was the major element in this technical superiority. These were still the days of sail, when its ships' commanders' chosen tactic in a fight was to force their enemy into submission. This was achieved by means of the broadside, the firing together of all guns on one side of a ship, resulting in \"the hull-and-gun-crew-smashing at which they excelled\" (Geoffrey Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770-1870, Fontana Paperbacks, 1982, p.146). In China, the same \"hull-smashing\" tactics were employed by the British navy against forts and city walls, with equally devastating effects. The inclusion in the expeditionary force of war steamers like the famous Nemesis, which could sail into any bay or anchorage regardless of wind and tide, meant that the British navy's supremacy was completely overwhelming.\n\n49\n\nSome examples may suffice. Upon coming from India, leaving only six men sick at Fort William, the 26th Regiment had numbered 28 officers and 902 other ranks. By the end of 1840, only 110 were fit for duty, having lost 240 by death and hundreds of others in hospital or too weak to go on parade. Yet this was the regiment, which, thanks to the healthy regime instituted in India by Colonel Oglander, had had a remarkable record of freedom from death and sickness. Holt, p. 112. Between 21 July 1842, upon its first landing at Chin-kiang-foo up to February 1844 - a period of little more than eighteen months - the unfortunate 98th Regiment had lost by death alone 432 out of 766 non-commissioned officers and men. Shadwell, p.123.\n\n50 Cree, pp. 117-8.\n\n51 Davis, ibid.\n\n52 \"The country round Chapoo beats anything we have yet seen, indeed I defy anything hardly to equal it in beauty, one immense valley as far as the eye could reach covered with the most luxuriant vegetation, with the people going on with their employment in the fields quite unconcerned.\" Blackwood's 1964, p.157.\n\n53 Holt, pp.152-3.\n\n54 Cited by Davis, Chinese Miscellanies, p. 179.\n\nBingham, Vols. 1, pp.3 and 277, and 11, p. 156", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214850, "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-1999", "page_number": 265, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "232\n\nRoutledge, New Edition, 1859)\n\nGeorge Henry Mason, The Costume of the Chinese (London, William Miller, 1804)\n\nLieutenant John Ouchterlony, The Chinese War: An Account of All the Operations of the British Forces from the Commencement to the Treaty of Nanking (London, Saunders and Otley, 1844)\n\n\"An Artillery Officer in China, 1840-1842,\" Blackwood's, 1964.\n\nThe Cree Journals, The Voyages of Edward H. Cree, Surgeon R. N., as Related in his Private Journals, 1837-1856 Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Levien. (Exeter, Webb & Bower, 1981)\n\nJack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (Hutchinson of London, 1975)\n\nCaptain Sir Edward Belcher, Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, performed in Her Majesty's Ship Sulphur, During the Years 1836-1842. Including details of the Naval Operations in China, From Dec. 1840, to Nov. 1841 (London 1843, Dawsons of Pall Mall reprint, 1970)\n\nStanley Lane-Poole, Sir Harry Parkes in China (London, Methuen & Co., 1901)\n\nEdgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China (London, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1964)\n\nSir Henry Keppel, A Sailor's Life under Four Sovereigns (London, 3 vols., 1899)\n\n1881)\n\nLaurence Shadwell, Life and Campaigns of Lord Clyde (London, 1881)\n\n\"Oh for the Joys of England! Lt Rolando Bridgman's Letters From China and Hong Kong, 1842-1843\", in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch, Royal Asiatic Society Vol.14 (1974)\n\nSir John Francis Davis, Chinese Miscellanies: A Collection of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215004, "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": 100, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "56\n\nSpecial envelopes were printed for use by the CLC with a central red band and black printing in English, French and Chinese. In France this mail was posted in special boxes and transported by despatch riders to and from Noyelles. Mail between CLC companies in France did not require stamps or special envelopes.\n\nThe Imperial War Museum also holds two notebooks, written in literary Chinese, which may have been compiled by a clerk or labourer in his leisure time. There are random jottings with notes on, amongst other topics, the ancient political system in China, moral precepts, quotations from Chinese poets, lists of 95 individuals' names and places of birth, and also three letters.\n\nThese letters reveal the feelings of an ordinary man, rural and urban labourers, and his feelings for others. The first letter is addressed to the Kaiser and is a petition to end the war. It was written by 'Spiritual Man Yuan Chun'.\n\nTo the Great Emperor of the German Empire.\n\nThe war in Europe is a matter that does not concern us, the Chinese people, and as Your Majesty knows the world is full of people with greater talents than we have.\n\nHowever, as the ancients have said, a model emperor would be a brave warrior and merciful; however, if one loves war for its own sake and treats human lives as blades of grass, you will invoke the anger of the gods.\n\nWe Chinese came to Europe as neutrals, our aim is to make a paltry living; however, the war made our journey to Europe somewhat less than peaceful.\n\nAn examination of the world situation now shows that within the universe we are all one family, and a virtuous ruler would seize this opportunity to put righteousness before profit, to follow the will of the gods and the wishes of men, to stop the evil of the world and together with other nations create a new world. A virtuous ruler's name will be remembered for ten thousand generations, so why not halt your troops and select", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215351, "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": 128, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "76\n\nwithin their memorial temples in Hainan. They may or may not be regarded as deities as details are not available, and may perhaps be simply ladies honoured for a specific reason.\n\nThe first is Huang Dao po [characters not available], who is said to have lived during the 14th century in Hainan and was proficient at cotton spinning. She travelled to central China where she taught the art of spinning to local women. There was [and may still be] a memorial temple to her in Qiongzhou in Hainan but once more, without any details.\n\nThe second is Taihua Furen\n\nA) who has only been noted\n\nonce. Her tablet has been seen on an altar in Hainan, and apart from it being the spirit of a human, who is again said to have lived during the 14th century, again nothing further is known.\n\nb] Liang Qinzhong, a Hainanese boy of seventeen, was struck and killed by lightning in a small kampong in Tanglin in Singapore in 1963. Shortly after it happened the ladies of the Hainanese community in the kampong in which Liang had lived attributed remarkable events to his spirit, and whenever they prayed before his tablet their wishes were fulfilled2. Quite quickly a cult developed and devotees came from all around. An attap hut shrine, dedicated to Shuiwei Shengniang, was altered to make way for a secondary altar on to which was placed the tablet dedicated to Liang Taiye, together with a portrait image of the youth. Above the image of Liang hung a sketch of him dressed in scholar's robes with a flash of lightning entering his breast. He was believed to have obtained power [ling] from the bolt, and continued to answer devotee's pleas to their satisfaction. One of the walls of the attap hut was hung with framed testimonials, many bearing a photograph of the person who had been helped by the deity. His festival was held annually on his birthday, the 12th of the seventh lunar month. This cult disappeared from Tanglin once the kampong had been demolished during the early seventies to make way for a new housing estate.\n\n8: Unidentified Images believed to be uniquely Hainanese\n\nThere have been a number of deities, noted either on lists of the gods within a temple or on the front face of their socle which remain unidentified. These include:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215626, "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": 403, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "354\n\nobtained on those occasions, he made a great noise outside, kicked, lost his temper and finally made use of some very nasty words which did not exactly come within the scope of his teaching. This sort of thing occurred several times, and on two or three occasions he passed the night in unpleasant quarters.\n\n'Then he adopted a very unwise plan. He laid a one-sided account of the affair before the military mandarin, and commenced to preach at the people in no unmeasured terms. As his practice was, he continued to stump the town, and soon began to experience a thorn in the flesh during his daily ministrations. He made no attempt to smooth down the growing dislike of the people towards him. The end of it was he was hustled and pelted; made a bolt for it, and reached home in a thoroughly exhausted condition.\n\n'After this he ventured no more among the people, but caused a bamboo scaffolding to be erected in front of his house, about sixteen to eighteen feet high, from which elevated position he continued his preaching. From this comparative place of safety he held forth vehemently against the ungodliness of the people, which soon brought matters to a climax.\n\n'Two or three children happening to die, our reverend missionary was accused of having killed them in some occult manner, for the purpose of stealing their eyes to convert into photographic chemicals. Many Chinese believe that photographic chemicals are made out of deceased children's eyes; if they are not, they say, how could a little water and white powder see to make such correct pictures, especially when they are shut up in the dark in a little black box.\n\n'The natives also complained that the bamboo structure interfered with their fung shui, so down it must come. Our friend rushed to save his property, but was immediately seized by the excited people. Others captured his wife and children; and his furniture and effects, together with the remains of the bamboo, were carried off by numbers of willing hands, only too glad to have found an opportunity of getting rid of him and his belongings. They and all their household gods were quietly deposited on the banks of the broad and rapid Yangtze, with the intimation that, if ever he attempted to show himself in the town again, it would be a dangerous and unwise thing, for he would be summarily", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215824, "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": 123, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "56\n\ntemporarily) of so many valuable amphibious vessels would have set back any invasion of Japan, or elsewhere.\"7\n\nIn addition, after Japan agreed to surrender in August 1945, several ships of the RN heading to Hong Kong to re-establish British rule over the territory were caught in a typhoon and suffered losses.58 In all four cases, together with the 1937 and 1946 typhoons that straddled the war, the Allies suffered substantial losses without being able to hit back - because there was nothing to hit! Hence, the Japanese got their \"divine winds,\" but none were able to save them from defeat,\n\n## Conclusion\n\nIt should be noted that neither of the two typhoons that consumed the Third Fleet nor the one that hit Okinawa right after the war were as powerful as the 1937 or 1946 typhoons that hit Hong Kong. Still, the typhoons were strong enough to rattle and even damage the largest and best-protected warships, including collapsing the forward flight decks of two aircraft carriers and slicing the bow off a heavy cruiser in the June 1945 incident. (The ships survived, but the cruiser and one of the carriers were knocked out of the war.)59 Support vessels, which are not as sturdy nor as fast as the biggest warships, would stand to suffer even more from a typhoon, as demonstrated by the October 1945 storm.\n\nFor the weather to prevail in a military campaign is one of the most cost-ineffective ways to lose the campaign. The enemy would have suffered few or no losses in return, which is damaging to morale. On the other side, however, if by a certain stage of the war the weather has become one's most formidable ally, then that is usually an indicator that he has shot his bolt, and has to depend on something outside of his control.\n\nThe weather factors examined range from seemingly trivial to potentially devastating. All, however, are capable of causing unnecessary losses if either side has paid insufficient heed to any of them. In land operations on terrain as mountainous as Hong Kong's, more weight is put on the ability of the foot soldier to achieve key objectives, because the help afforded by machinery would be relatively limited. But the foot soldier is usually more vulnerable to the elements than his supporting machinery. Certainly, machinery could be replaced,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216482, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2003", "page_number": 241, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "191\n\nalso want someone to translate his words to those government officials and village chiefs with whom he would have to negotiate his way up and down the river. He engaged a local small boat skipper as Nocador (coxswain); a Chaldean by the name of Judges who had served some time on board a line of Turkish steamers plying on the Tigris as bo'sun; and a steward who also doubled as interpreter. A further eleven hands were taken on to complete the crew and Plant was ready to set off on his journey of exploration up the Karun river. It was truly a journey of discovery as he had no maps or books on the river and had to rely on local knowledge provided by the Nocador. After a number of excitements along the narrow winding waterway, they stopped at the small village of Shalaliah that acted as a port to Shushter. Plant covered the last seven miles to Shuster on horseback to report the safe arrival of the Shushan to the Company's agent, one of several young Englishmen in the area serving the interests of the shipping company. As both foreigners and Christians, the company's agents lived a life of some difficulty and danger. Plant felt that his life aboard the Shushan was far more congenial.\n\nThus started the regular passenger and freight service that Plant was to run for some time. His relations with the many local officials with whom he came in contact were conducted with tact and skill - his private thoughts about them and his comments on their ways of life and business, he confined to his personal log book. The difficulties of piloting his craft up and down an uncharted river were considerable and required great resource and powers of improvisation. He found that his triple rudder could not cope with the narrow winding part of the river unless he went at full speed, which proved particularly exciting when navigating a series of blind bends. On another part of the river an unexpected eddy took him into some rocks at speed which sprung a line of rivets and opened up a section of the hull. Fortunately, the Shushan's watertight construction in sections kept it afloat but left him with the problem of making a repair - they were far from any dockyard facility. He provided the answer by lowering a weighted line through each empty rivet hole; fishing for the weight from the bank; attaching a bolt; hauling the bolt up through the rivet hole; and anchoring it with a nut which he tightened up to re-secure the sprung plate. This turned out to be a tedious, time-consuming but entirely successful means of making good a damaged hull that he later introduced to the shipmasters of the Yangtse. There were many more occasions when he was up the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216499, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2003", "page_number": 258, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "209\n\nthe original plaque, with the words as above, has been cleaned and is easy to read,\n\nA new, interesting information panel now also accompanies the exhibit. It reads as follows:\n\nSteam Ship Tyndareus\n\nIn 1916 the 25th (Garrison) Battalion, the Duke of Cambridge's Own (Middlesex Regiment) was ordered to proceed to Hong Kong from Aldershot. The Battalion was to be taken as far as Durban by S S Tyndareus, a 7058-tonne vessel with a crew of 108 owned by Alfred Holt and Company of Liverpool which was making her maiden voyage. Having sailed from Glasgow, the Tyndareus embarked the battalion, 1005 strong, and left Devonport on 22 December 1916.\n\nAt 6.55pm on February 1917, off Cape Agulhas, 173 Km south-east of Cape Town, the vessel struck a German mine which exploded creating an 84 square metre hole in the starboard side and bottom of the ship. The Tyndareus heaved over, began to ship water and started to go down by the head. No lives were lost in the explosion or the subsequent evacuation and the vessel managed to reach Simontown two days later.\n\nThe Tyndareus received partial repairs in South Africa, served through the Second World War and was not broken up until 1960. The Battalion had recovered sufficiently from its ordeal to form a guard of honour at the opening of the South African Parliament on 16 February, and after a further stop in Singapore the 25th reached Hong Kong on 1 April 1917. Here the Battalion's commanding Officer commissioned the erection of a memorial, sited on the Peak of Hong Kong Island, to commemorate the exemplary conduct displayed by his men when the ship was mined.\n\nAn inscribed metal plaque was later added to the rock which erroneously stated that it was erected in memory of the men who died in the accident - perhaps a confusion with the wreck of HM Troopship Birkenhead in 1852 which claimed 445 lives.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]