[ { "id": 208696, "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-1979", "page_number": 153, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "126\n\nREVS. J. SMITH AND WM. DOWNS\n\nevery foreign enemy building, whether public or private property, and those which have escaped confiscation have not escaped the looting by Chinese. Curiously enough, there was an almost total absence of English signs on streets and over buildings and stores, the Japanese having taken all these down, and in many instances, replacing them with Japanese signs. In the lobbies of office buildings all the tenants' names were in Chinese or Japanese, and it was often very difficult to find one's own family doctor, unless one happened to be familiar with his Chinese name. It seemed that everything reminiscent of the hated foreigner had to be effaced. Placarded all around the town, too, were flaming posters depicting the New Order in the Far East, showing smoking chimneys of busy factories, smiling Chinese gathering grain in the fields, and other indications of what Japan expected to do for the downtrodden Chinese. At various conspicuous places were also huge maps showing the conquests in East Asia of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. The streets were fairly clean, though here and there might be seen some piles of rubbish, and I understand that in the beginning, the Japanese kept in office some of the officials of the Sanitary Squad, that is, British officials. Just to show the effect of Japanese progress, now some of the streets in the downtown sector were actually being washed daily!\n\nHowever, along the side streets, one could find more sordid scenes--emaciated and dying beggars lying on the pavement, and others looking pretty thin and hungry. Before we left Hong Kong, most of these beggars had disappeared and I suppose it is not hard to imagine what became of them, for the Japanese are not very often moved to pity. There are many tales of cruelty inflicted on the Chinese, and one significant fact is that the huge Prison at Stanley is practically empty. It is said that often offenders against the laws were thrown off the bund into the sea; others were tied up and left standing in the broiling sun until they died, and some of us have seen the police dogs which the Japanese have trained to hunt down Chinese who cut wood on the mountain sides. A friend of mine was an actual eye-witness of a Chinese woman whose flesh was literally torn by these dogs and who ran screaming down the mountain. These brushwood gatherers are often shot at, too.\n\nThe Japanese have retained both the Indian and the Chinese police and they patrol this city and the roads. The Indian police", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212217, "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": 159, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "136\n\nAmerican films were flown over quickly from Hollywood, and pictures would often be released earlier in Shanghai than in London. When the newsreels of the war began to come along, they led to disturbances; the Germans got nasty and wanted to break things up. Cinema owners did not wish to see their cinemas wrecked and in the end the showing of newsreels was discontinued. Unfortunately, they also did not dare show pictures, like \"The Great Dictator\", which were critical of Fascist methods. The French were, however, determined to see \"The Confessions of a Nazi Spy\", an anti-Nazi picture which was doing much in the States to open the eyes of the population to the methods of the German 'Bund'. They stationed two armoured cars outside the cinema, while inside armed police, with drawn automatics, stood along the gangways. The picture had a very popular run for two weeks, without incident.\n\nSince the disturbances of 1927 the leading Treaty Powers had maintained garrisons at Shanghai. The Japanese forces were quartered in the section of the International Settlement north of the Soochow creek, where the majority of the Japanese population lived; the British, American, and Italian contingents guarded sectors of the perimeter south of the creek; and the French garrisoned their own Concession. There was a local understanding of live and let live, and even after the Italians came into the war, the Grenadiers of Savoy, decked out in patches of red on collar and sleeve, and the baggiest of plus-fours, continued to man their sector: but to avoid argument with Thomas Atkins and Jack Tar they were confined to their own particular taverns. Blood Alley remained an Anglo-Saxon preserve, where Johnnie Doughboy sometimes threw his weight about.\n\nIt was in January, 1940, that the Royal Navy stopped the Asama Maru, within a few hours steaming of the Japanese Coast, and removed 21 Germans from on board. The Japanese, of course, went up in the air at this alleged insult to the Imperial flag, and the British community in Shanghai questioned the expediency of the action. The incident was settled by negotiation, 9 of the captives being returned, and the Japanese undertaking not to convey in their ships military personnel of the belligerents. It is interesting to remember that, when the S.S. \"President Hoover\" ran aground on the East Coast of Formosa, in Japanese territorial water, closed to foreign shipping, the Japanese refused to allow the Americans to salvage her, but insisted on the work being done by Japanese firms. Soon after, the Asama", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212220, "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": 162, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "139\n\nI was in Ningpo when the announcement of the closing of the Burma road was received. It was a severe blow for the Chinese, but I think they appreciated the difficulties of Britain's position and that she had only been compelled by the force of circumstances to accede to the Japanese demand. Nothing could have exceeded the kindness and courtesy shown to me by the merchants and officials whom I met.\n\nNingpo was one of the first five treaty ports, opened to trade in 1842. Early promises had not been fulfilled, and the port, overshadowed by Shanghai, had remained small. Off the mouth of the Ningpo river on the largest island of the Chusan archipelago lay the walled city of Tinghai, occupied by British troops twice for a space of several years between 1840 and 1860. Tinghai at one time was designated, instead of Hongkong, as the place to be ceded to Britain for the repair of vessels. It looks a healthy enough place, built up the slopes of a high hill, yet the troops suffered much from sickness and the stones in the graveyard bear witness to the numbers buried there. The garrison imported some turkeys, to provide variety for the larder. The British troops have long since left, but the climate was favourable to turkeys, and now large flocks descended from the original birds are bred to supply the Christmas market in Shanghai.\n\nIn Ningpo, the graveyard contains the stone monument, first erected outside the East gate of the city, to commemorate the assistance given by Captain Roderick Dew, R.N., and Lieutenant Kenny of the French Navy and their respective ships' companies, in 1862, to the Imperial Chinese troops in expelling the Taiping rebels from the town. It was nearby that the American General Ward, Gordon's predecessor in command of the Ever Victorious army, was killed. But times change. To Dr. Sun Yat Sen and the Kuo Min Tang the Taiping rebels are the glorious forerunners of their own revolution, and it is doubtful whether General Gordon, or the British, are given any credit for having assisted the Imperial Government to quell the rebellion.\n\nThe country round the little Ningpo plain is very beautiful. In previous winters I used to shoot on the shallow lakes which lay amongst the hills to the west. Most sportsmen waited to go after the early morning and evening flights of duck, but I preferred to work along the edge of the hills with my dog for the occasional pheasant. They were not so numerous here as amongst the reedbeds of the Yangtze. Beyond the lakes, the deep waters of Nimrod Sound were", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214123, "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-1997", "page_number": 191, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "ARE THE TANKA PEOPLE DESCENDANTS OF MONGOL SOLDIERS?\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\n161\n\nI have not done any research into the origins of the Tanka people of the Pearl River Estuary and have always assumed from something I read many years ago that ethnically they were one of the many original minority groups of southern China.\n\nHowever, I have just come across a paragraph in 'Pulling Strings in China', a book written in the late twenties by W.F. Tyler, suggesting that the Tanka boat people were a mixture of Mongol soldiers and Chinese with whom they had intermarried. Tyler was an interesting character, an Englishman who had been not only a young officer serving with the Chinese Imperial Navy during the Yalu battle in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 but had gone on to be a Commissioner with the Chinese Maritime Customs.\n\nThe relative passage from the paragraph concerned claims that:\n\n*\n\nIn about 1370 the conquering Ming dynasty ordered that the soldiers of the previous Mongol garrisons - descendants of the famous hordes of Ghengis Khan - and their families should be slaughtered. At Canton there had been intermarriage and absorption in a century of Mongol rule, and enmity was dead, so there was reluctance to fulfil this drastic order: consequently it was reported to the capital that they had been driven into the river, and by inference, drowned. They were not drowned; they were allowed to live in boats and in piled shacks below high-water line. And so they lived and bred and grown for five hundred years or more, and it was no one's business to institute a change. These were the Tankas; fine-looking men and pretty girls”.\n\nHas any reader confirmation of Tyler's story?\n\nNOTE\n\nTyler, William Ferdinand Pulling Strings in China Constable London 1929", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215802, "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": 101, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "34\n\nBETWEEN THE NINE DRAGONS AND A DIVINE WIND: HOW HONG KONG'S WEATHER MIGHT HAVE AFFECTED AN ALLIED INVASION TO RETAKE THE TERRITORY*\n\nCHOHONG CHO\n\nSynopsis\n\nIn the War in the Pacific during World War II, the question of whether or not to engage Japan directly in China was a major one for Allied planners. If the Japanese weren't enough of a problem, an age-old factor - the weather - certainly would have provided the Allies with additional concerns. The Pacific and Asia are home to some of the most extreme weather in the world.\n\nHong Kong, a possible target in any Allied campaign in China, played host to some of this extreme weather. What this study attempts to do is to consider how Hong Kong's adverse weather conditions could have affected an Allied operation to recapture it from the Japanese.\n\nBackground\n\nAfter Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in December 1941 and Great Britain was expelled from the Pacific, only the U.S. was left to face Japan in this theatre. The U.S. itself was in bad shape, as most of its Pacific Fleet had been mauled at Pearl Harbor. On the Asian mainland, Japan was still busying herself with China and Britain. A stalemate had developed with the former, while the latter was being pushed out of Burma into India.\n\nHowever, the U.S. Navy's (USN) aircraft carriers were not caught in the Pearl Harbor debacle, and during much of 1942, they bore the brunt of the action against the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the Pacific. In a series of three engagements with the IJN (at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal), with inferior numbers accompanied by\n\n*The author would like to thank Mr. Ko Tim-keung for bringing a draft of this article to the attention of the Hon. Editor, and Professor Elfed Roberts for his comments on an early version of the draft.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216038, "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": 337, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "271\n\nother smaller temples, some well known, others hardly known at all. These include the conspicuous red-walled Dicang Wang Temple not far from the south-west corner of the city wall; the Doutian Miao and the Xiu Wang Miao, both referred to earlier. All were destroyed during the Taiping occupation, though many were rebuilt during subsequent years only to fall into disuse during the Japanese occupation as well as since 1949. The Jin Shan Temple and the Ganlu Temple today are the premier tourist sites in Zhenjiang, with the Dinghui monastery, though less easily accessible, being a good third.\n\nThere used to be an interesting group of memorial temples on the Ganlu headland [Consular Bluff], a favourite resort for native Chinese picnic parties. One of these shrines was dedicated to Zhu Xi, a Southern Song dynasty neo-Confucian philosopher, born in Anhui in AD 1130, and probably best remembered for his commentary on Confucian classics, with his 'Rituals for Family Life' being influential throughout China as the standard authority consulted by high and low alike. He was the Confucian scholar who, whilst prefect at Zhangzhou in Fujian in 1190, attacked Buddhist and Daoist practices and issued orders laying down punishments for those who disobeyed the rules. Despite this he wrote commentaries on the sacred books of Daoism. He retired in 1196 and after his death four years later was posthumously appointed Chief of the Imperial Tutors with the rank of Lord. He has long been deified, with a portrait installed in a temple in Jiangxi province at an early stage during the twelfth century to encourage sacrifices to him by local scholars and gentlemen.14 He was revered in Confucian temples from about 1250, and during the reign of Kang Xi he was elevated to a position just under the 'Ten Noted Men' [The Ten Disciples of Confucius].\n\n[1824-1890],\n\nAnother shrine was dedicated to Peng Yulin the Chinese admiral in charge of the Yangzi Fleet which operated with success against the Taiping rebels. Peng was remembered by foreigners for his incorruptibility as well as his inability to understand the westerners. During the short French war with China in 1884-5, when in Guangzhou as the Imperial Naval Commissioner sent to organise its defences he proposed sending emissaries to Singapore to poison any French officers who might have been enjoying British hospitality there. Beijing frowned on his plan and he was unable to see why. He was also violently opposed to the introduction of iron-clads into the Chinese navy.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216410, "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": 169, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "119\n\nbeen sighted from the air, she and numerous other ships were ordered to leave the port, HERMES being despatched to the south. Off Batticaloa at 0843 local time on 9th April 1942 she was sighted by a reconnaissance aircraft from the battleship HARUNA, one of the four battleships escorting the five aircraft carriers used by the Imperial Japanese Navy in their attacks on Ceylon carried out on 5th and 9th April. The C. in C., Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, immediately ordered an attack against her. Led by Lieut. Commander Egusa, who the previous December had led the divebombers at Pearl Harbor, 85 Aichi \"Val\" divebombers\n\nwere flown off all five carriers and at 1035, out of the sun, the 45 deemed sufficient by Egusa, commenced their bombing run against HERMES. 37 direct hits were achieved and the ship also suffered severely from the mining effect of near misses. By 1050 hours it was all over. The remaining 40 aircraft were used by Egusa to quickly sink other ships in the vicinity; the destroyer 'VAMPIRE', a corvette, and two oil tankers.\n\nBy all accounts she was a happy ship and \"old hands,\" a number of whom are still alive speak affectionately of her. A sad end to a distinguished career.\n\nDisplacement: 11,085 tons\n\nCrew: 700\n\nLength: 182.27 m\n\nBeam: 21.41 m\n\nDraught: 5.64 m\n\nPropulsion: Two steam turbines, 40,000 shp (30 MW)\n\nSpeed: 25 knots (46 km/h)\n\nArmament: Six 140 mm guns, three 102 mm AA guns and eight 12.7 mm AA guns. Six 20 mm guns were added in 1934.\n\nAircraft: Initially 15 (Fairey III and Flycatcher) then 12 (Fairey Swordfish II or Walrus).\n\n'The Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 41: 289.\n\n'Minesweeper of 710 tons. Operating with submarines as a sea going escort/tender.\n\n\"'PARTHIAN' class of 1930. 1,475 tons surface displacement. Lieut. Commander Bernard W. Galpin.\n\n5\"Our ship\" in the sense of being both British, and of being the female who is the subject of the article. To mariners each ship, even of an apparently similar class, has her own character and individuality. By no means are they inanimate objects.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]