[
    {
        "id": 212276,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 218,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "\"New light on the population of the country? On the governmental system? On the administration of justice? What is the relation of the different provinces of the country to the Empire? of Tartars and the Chinese?” \n\n\"What is the actual idolatry of the people? Their actual morality?” “To what degree are they intellectually active? To what extent does education pervade their masses?** \n\n195 \n\nLegge concluded: “these are not exhaustively stated questions, but those which most readily present themselves to my mind”, \n\nThese commitments became the driving force for the rest of his life. No other Western scholar in modern history or before has ever studied the full breadth of Confucian classical literature and published translations or commentaries on all of these traditions.\" Although other scholars, (including missionary-scholars like Legge and those in consular positions), pursued studies in Buddhism and Taoism with great thoroughness, none published the kind of extensive translations of both Taoist philosophy and Taoist religious texts which Legge presented in his translations for The Sacred Books of China. With regard to Buddhism, Legge did not publish any extensive translations of Buddhist scriptures, but he remained informed of some of the current work in Chinese Buddhism by Western scholars, continuing even late in his Oxford years to read and assess Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scholarship in selected fields of Buddhist literature. The results of his work in Buddhism were made public in his book on The Religions of China and in a public essay presented at an Orientalist Congress in the 1880s.** \n\nThese sinological studies do not tell the whole story of Legge's approach to his Chinese audiences. During the 1850s Legge was tempted by another missiological approach. While he remained active in teaching and publicly discussing technical problems in biblical translations in the early fifties, a major change in his life occurred as a consequence of the death of his first wife in 1852. The indefatigable Legge redirected his energies towards the training of indigenous church leaders; among his trainees was the intelligent Hong Rengan (洪仁干), a relative of the Taiping Leader, Hong Xiuquan (洪秀全), and later made one of the Taiping kings in the final years of the rebellion. Legge was intent on making Christianity relevant to contemporary China.",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
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    {
        "id": 212277,
        "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": 219,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "196\n\n45\n\nIn order to achieve these aims, he translated from English a reader for younger students which at times was a conscious attempt to impress Chinese readers with the greatness of Western culture. In addition, in the mid-1850s he took over the editing of a monthly journal, written in Chinese for the propagation of news and cultural information from a Western perspective. This kind of approach, so common among many Western missionaries of various sorts, from the early Jesuits to the educators and medical doctors of the 20th century, Legge consciously rejected in 1856. In that year he decided as editor of the monthly journal that the enterprise was not helpful, so he not only stepped down as editor, but also stopped its publication. Furthermore, never again did he translate an educational reader of the sort mentioned above for Chinese students. In doing so, he was returning to the original educational ideals first expressed in his personal journal of 1847.\n\nWhat motivated Legge to return after 1856 to his original ideals after his experiments between 1852 and 1856 with a more didactic educational philosophy? Several factors seem to have been involved. One was a disenchantment with the government's militarism and the ugly stories tied to the commercial opium trade in which English capitalists were implicated. Although Legge remained a faithful British citizen, he was not unwilling to criticize policies which stood in opposition to ethical duty and moral integrity among his own countrymen. He was a faithful citizen, but not a blind patriot.\n\nAnother factor may well have been the growing apprehension among the missionary communities about the Taiping Rebellion and its distortion of Christian faith. Some had originally hailed it as a judgement of God on the Qing dynasty, with leaders who were favourable to the representatives of Christian religion. This hope was dashed when a German missionary in contact with Taiping leaders published an account of their doctrines, displaying them as an eclectic cult which adopted some teachings of Christianity, but distorted them by combining them with other religious teachings and the visionary messages of Hong Xiuquan.47 Legge could not distance himself from this issue, because his closest Chinese friend during this period was Hong Rengan, later to become the Shield King of the Taipings (太平天國) once he arrived in their capital of Tianjing (天京) (formerly and now Nanjing). The issue was constantly in the widower's mind not only because he felt close to Rengan, but also...\n\n4K",
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    {
        "id": 212417,
        "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": 359,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "336\n\nJonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, W.W Norton and Company: $29.95; cloth; 876 pages.\n\nJonathan D. Spence in \"The Search for Modern China” endeavours to facilitate an understanding of China. He says, quite rightly, that \"in trying to understand China today we need to know about China in the past\" (pp. xix-xx). That is why Spence begins his narrative in the late 16th century, when China was ruled by its last native dynasty on the eve of the Manchu conquest.\n\nInterestingly, the Yale historian explains that his book is not about modern China. Rather, it is about a centuries-long effort to create such a country, one which is both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new technologies, new ideas\" (p.xx).\n\nBy this definition, Spence says, China is not today and never has been a modern country.\n\nCertainly, China in the Qing dynasty was far from being **fairly sure of its own identity yet able to join others on equal terms**. As Spence points out, China did not even have a national flag in its 4,000 years of existence, until one was created in the nineteenth century, when it consciously began to acquire what it thought were the attributes of a modern nation.\n\nAs is to be expected, Spence finds numerous parallels in Chinese history. Thus, he likens General Claire Chennault's World War II \"Flying Tigers\" to the foreign mercenary Ever-Victorious Army formed to fight the Taiping rebels; he sees similarities between Great Leap Forward rhetoric and the vision of Hong Xiuquan, the Taiping Heavenly King, and he compares the Shanghai Communique of 1972 with the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689.\n\nThis does not mean, of course, that China is unchanging. During the Qing dynasty, for example, China spurned British requests for developing trade. Spence quotes the Qianlong emperor's message to George III of England:\n\n\"We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country's manufactures. Therefore, O king,",
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    },
    {
        "id": 216036,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 335,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "269\n\nthe time ripe for an insurrection..\n\nThe rebellion began among the Hakka people in the southern provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong and by 1853 was spreading north and west, led by Hong Xiuquan, a schoolmaster who had picked up a smattering of Christianity. Whilst suffering from an illness he experienced severe hallucinations and saw that his mission was to free the Chinese from Manchu rule. He also convinced himself and others that he was the younger brother of Christ and a son of God sent to save mankind. The Taiping rebels were known colloquially by the Chinese peasants as the Long-haired Rebels, Chang Mao, as they refused to shave the front of their head. [China's Manchu conquerors had ordered that all Chinese males would shave the front half of their head and wear the rest tied into a lengthy queue or 'pigtail'.] Hong Xiuquan's liberated territory was known as the Kingdom of Great Peace, Taiping Tianguo and by 1860 he had more than a quarter of China under his control. Much of the fighting between the Manchu Imperial forces and the Taiping rebel armies took place across Zhejiang province and down the Yangzi, especially around the Taiping capital at Nanjing. With Zhenjiang captured by the Taiping in April 1853 [a mere eleven years after the British had taken the city], their control of the southern bank of the Yangzi was virtually complete. Zhenjiang lay deserted during the Taiping era, being no more than a fort occupied by the Taiping rebels. The pagodas and temples were all destroyed with the usual Taiping iconoclastic fervour, and in many places their stones used as fortifications. The city, surrounded on three sides by a remarkable line of Taiping trenches some ten to eleven miles in length, was besieged several times by the Imperial forces. Each time they were driven off, with the city remaining in Taiping hands until compelled by a failure of supplies the rebels were forced to evacuate it early in 1857. Zhenjiang never fully recovered. The Taiping were finally defeated in 1864 when their capital at Nanjing finally fell to the Imperial forces - assisted by several foreign-led armies of Chinese and western mercenaries, one of which was the Ever-Victorious Army under General Gordon. Rasmussen in 1905 refers to the decayed trench system as 'Gordon's trenches', with some of his guns still to be found sunk deep into the soil of their old embrasures. He added that 'the only reminder now [1905] of the Taiping Rebellion was the thousands of graves covering the countryside, and the ghost-ridden walled city where the whole population had been put to the sword'. Thomas Adkins, the British Consul in Zhenjiang,",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
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    },
    {
        "id": 216079,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 378,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "312\n\n* Li Zee-min (1950) Chinese Potpourri. Hong Kong: Oriental Publishers [He relates a local Hong Kong legend about the arrival of the young emperor escorted by Lu in what is now Kowloon, fleeing ahead of the Mongols. Li claims that the headman of the Hakka walled village of Kowloon was Tan Gong who died during the last battle with the Mongol fleet when Lu, with the emperor in his arms, jumped overboard to their deaths].\n\nCouling, Samuel (1917) Encyclopaedia Sinica. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh\n\n11 Yu Dayu is recorded as being a native of Fujian who died in 1573 having made his name as the victor in the struggle to defeat the Japanese pirates along the coast of China and in particular that of Zhejiang.\n\n12 Yang Xiuqing as one of the leading lights of the Taiping Rebellion, to whose military genius much of the early success of the movement was due. He was known as the Taiping Eastern King [Prince], and professed to be the spokesman of God. After the capture of Nanjing by the Taipings he established his palace in the yamen of the former Viceroy and lived in great state. By 1856 he had begun a campaign of political and religious intrigue to usurp the position of leader and to overthrow Hong Xiuquan, the founder. His plans were uncovered and he, his family and thousands of his supporters were slain by Wei Changhui, the Taiping Northern King.\n\n13 extracted from the Transcription of the letters written from China to Milcote, Stratford on Avon by Thomas Adkins between 1855 and 1879 by courtesy of Theo Christophers of Dorridge, West Midlands : November 1999\n\n14 Hymes, Robert P. (1986) Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Kiangsi, in Northern and Southern Sung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press\n\n15 Although the name was known much earlier Mao Shan has always been the centre of a Daoist sect. [see Kita Aziya gakuho, a Japanese Journal, Vol. 2]\n\n16 Doré, Henri S.J. (1914) Recherches sur les Superstitions en China. Shanghai [Zikawei] : La Mission Catholique : Vol. XI\n\n17 Werner, E.T.C (1932) A Dictionary of Chinese Mythology. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
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]