[
    {
        "id": 205214,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1966",
        "page_number": 170,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "164\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nand transcribed in a variety of ways by native-speakers of Cantonese.\n\nThe origins of words such as amah are hidden in the obscure labyrinths of time but are still as fresh as a new-born babe. Such words contain the elements of English mammy, ma, French maman, Latin mater and so on, for they represent the infant mouth opening to bawl and sometimes the closing of the tiny lips over the mother's teat. Such words exist in all languages even as a rejecting, spitting series for the father: pater (in Latin), English daddy, Cantonese papa mimic the child's rejection of his father's milkless breasts.\n\nIt is unnecessary to derive Cantonese amah from an Arab source. Similar forms, demonstrably not of Semitic origin, occur in many languages; in those of the Iberian peninsula, ama may or may not be an Arabism. In India, it was one of the common Indo-Portuguese words for a children's nurse. It is this word which came to Canton either in the Portuguese lingua franca which preceded pidgin English as the jargon of the China coast or in pidgin English itself. The documents of the nineteenth century are rich in derivatives of this word and even today wash-amah and baby-amah are widely used expressions in Hong Kong. Chow-amah (wet-nurse) disappeared at the introduction of patent infant formulae.\n\nThe only problem is whether amah, which sounds as exotic in Cantonese as kowtowing once did in English, entered the dialect directly from a Portuguese dialect or was introduced by way of English. My understanding is that amah is seldom used by the Hong Kong Portuguese in the sense of servant and that the word, though Portuguese in origin, is an early English loan to Cantonese, the forerunner of pa-si (bus), mhodhang nreoezir (modern girl), bheazao (beer) and the hundred and one other loans found in the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong today.\n\nUntil more evidence is forthcoming, the derivation of sz tsai and sz tau will seem far-fetched. Nor is there enough proof to convince that fa wong is a calque (translation) of Urdu malik, even though the semantic extensions of wong and malik appear to coincide. I cannot tell which are the foreign words from which we are supposed to derive kwuntim, sz-naai and tai pan and have yet to be convinced that Cantonese natuk is in fact the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
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    },
    {
        "id": 210533,
        "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": 140,
        "title": "RAS-1985",
        "content_text": "8\n\n121\n\nprovincial community such as Lyons, we may take it for granted that in the second century A.D. the religious outlook of the populace ranged from open disbelief to a willingness to suffer, and even to die horribly, for one's convictions. Nor should this occasion surprise: even if we discount for the moment the matrix of cultural forces which condition religious sentiments, such as social status and educational attainment, it should be remembered that for more than six centuries Rome's rule stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the banks of the Euphrates, and that throughout this long period the Romans presided over populations of striking social and cultural dissimilarity. Rome subjugated the primitive tribes of Britain, the Iberian peninsula and the Danubian basin as well as the culturally sophisticated and highly urbanized inhabitants of Greece and the Near East. Diversity of belief is to be expected in such an environment, but for anyone who wishes to analyze the parts or the whole, it also poses difficulties that are all but insuperable.\n\nFirst, there is the question of evidence. In matters of religion, as in all else regarding classical antiquity, it is notoriously imperfect. We are handicapped above all by its capricious character. We know a great deal about some cults, but of others, almost nothing. Even in the case of well-documented cults, however, a caveat is necessary: the literary sources, upon which we are heavily dependent for information, not only vary widely in reliability but are also unevenly distributed. Too much of the evidence stems from Rome itself, but even here we know a great deal more about some periods than we do about others. Hence even when the source is trustworthy, too frequently it still remains unclear whether the particular passage that interests us reveals behaviour current only at this one point in space and time, or has a wider application.\n\nConfronted with such difficulties, it is hardly surprising that classical scholars have tended to shy away from ambitious syntheses in favor of the more modest task of tracing the spread of particular cults and elucidating their contents.12 To be sure, there have been exceptions, the most notable being Nock's seminal work on conversion;13 in scope it compares favorably with the global view of Chinese religion advocated by J.J.M de Groot, Marcel Granet, and C.K. Yang.14 It is, however, only a noteworthy exception: in the literature on",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 215419,
        "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": 196,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "145\n\nThe Façade of São Paulo, Macao\n\nThese novel trends in Jesuit architecture in India occurring at about the turn of the century may have reached their apogee in the church of their new college in Macao, opened to the public on Christmas day, 1603 (Figs. 1, 13).\n\nHowever, amongst other important differences with churches in India, here there is no Arch of Triumph as such; there is not even an entrance arch, but straightforward lintel-and-post doorways. Could the reason for its absence be that Portugal never did conquer Macao? This is an attractive conjecture, although a more likely explanation is that the architect or designer of the façade of St. Paul's was simply following St. Charles Borromeo's recommendations to architects concerning the façades of ecclesiastical buildings. In his influential Instructions of 1572, Charles Borromeo recommends the use of lintel and post for entrances of Christian churches instead of the arch, which he considered a pagan structure18. Be that as it may, the idea that the façade of Madre de Deus represents a symbolic arch of triumph of sorts, although one not based directly on an Arch of Triumph but on some other structure, should not be discarded altogether.\n\nApparently, seventeenth-century visitors, many of whom had seen the churches of the Jesuits in Goa, did not find the lack of arches too unusual. What they do imply in their chronicles is that this façade was something particularly surprising within the architecture of the Society of Jesus, not only in Asia but elsewhere. The way they reacted not only to the magnificent interior of the church but also to its façade is significant. In the case of the latter, were they looking at something not merely visually striking but also quite novel? As already surmised at the start of this paper, were they in fact looking at the first retable-façade in China?\n\nThis is not as improbable as it may seem. Today, once certain historical and art-historical associations are made, the surviving façade of the church recalls the outburst of altarpiece construction that took place in the Iberian Peninsula and its overseas colonies from the last decades of the sixteenth century.\n\nUntil the Portuguese revolt of 1640 and the restoration of the House",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
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    },
    {
        "id": 215424,
        "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": 201,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "150\n\nMontanha's transcripts, is the fact that the main altar of Madre de Deus, long lost after the 1835 fire (if not before), had statues of the four Jesuit saints in an order that echoed that of the façade. This third point implies that the design of the façade of Madre de Deus may have been conceived in relationship to that of the main retable inside. The religious and artistic interaction between a retable-façade and a main retable is a development known in some Latin American retable-façades at a later date, of which that of the Jesuit College in Tepozotlán, outside Mexico City, may be the most remarkable example.\n\nThe Architectural Structure of the Façade\n\nOne of the most remarkable features of this work's design is the use of projecting classical orders as main structural elements. However, it is not the use of the orders per se that relates this design to contemporary retables.\n\nFrom the point of view of architecture, what the use of the Ionic order for the first storey, the Corinthian order for the second and the Composite for the third and fourth reveals is a rather sophisticated knowledge of the canons of ancient Roman architecture (Fig. 16). This is perfectly compatible with contemporary architectural practice. At the time Renaissance and Mannerist theorists had made these canons accessible to architects throughout Europe in a number of illustrated publications.\n\nWhoever designed the façade of St. Paul's had evidently had a thorough grounding on these canons. How did he get such knowledge? Most likely from the sixteenth-century illustrated books by Serlio, Palladio or Vignola. Editions of their books circulated not only in Italy but also in the Iberian Peninsula. As the researches of Sylvie Deswarte show, knowledge of the Vitruvian orders had reached Lisbon, Portugal, quite likely around 1549 via Da Pintura Antigua by the Portuguese Francisco de Holanda. Holanda had underhandedly appropriated his main ideas from Serlio and published them in a luxurious edition as his own.22 In Spain, Francisco de Villalpando had already translated Books III and IV a few years before Holanda's book appeared, and his translation was known in Portugal.\n\nThese classical columns are important for my arguments because",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215432,
        "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": 209,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "158\n\nThe prolific use of symbols for the decoration of the façade and the mystical poetry thus created is typical of the way images were used in the decoration of carved wooden retables. It is a topic that could be elaborated at great length, although unfortunately it is not possible here.\n\nConclusion\n\nIn this talk I have endeavoured to elucidate my main contention concerning the façade of St. Paul's by pointing out the way certain of its principal features relate to retables, such as the uniquely decorative nature of its classical supports and the strongly Eucharistic connotations of its decoration.\n\nThis fact connects it to Spanish retable-façades, a kind of structure not typically Portuguese but also appearing in Portuguese architecture at this time. Moreover, two significant artistic developments in Jesuit architecture in Portuguese India could be said to prefigure the originality of the façade of St. Paul's. Firstly, there is some evidence of incipient retable-façades decorating a few of the churches of the Society of Jesus in India in which the Arch of Triumph is used as principal decorative motif. Although not possible here, Secondly, at the turn of the century the Jesuits in India were willing to admit the use of a more elaborate artistic idiom for the façades of their churches, in contrast to the plain styles preferred in the Iberian Peninsula during the latter half of the sixteenth century.\n\nHopefully my extended inquiry has provided convincing answers to the intriguing similarities I believe exist between the unusual features seen in the façade of St. Paul's and those more characteristic of a retable-façade, even if the façade discussed remains an elusive artistic work sui generis.\n\nNOTES\n\nGuillén-Nuñez, César, “The Relationship of the Façade of the Jesuit Collegiate Church of Madre de Deus, Macao, to Retable-Façades”, M.Phil. Thesis, University College London, 1997. Guillén-Nuñez, C., Macau (Images of Asia), Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 1984, pp. 52-3.\n\n2 Vid. Rafael Moreira, “As Formas Artísticas”, in História dos Portugueses no",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]