[ { "id": 204251, "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-1961", "page_number": 19, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\n16\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\nChristian centuries of the new states of South-east Asia, formed under Indian influence in Indo-China, Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula.\n\nDuring the Middle Ages the navigation of the Southern Seas was in the hands of the Arabs. But after the rounding of the Cape, direct contact between Europe and the East by sea was restored. It was mainly by the sea-route that India, China, and South-east Asia became known to modern Europe. In this the Portuguese navigators played an all-important part. Passing over the rivalries of the Western nations we come to the days of the East India Company.\n\nIn India the Moghul empire had reached its height, fine examples of its art remaining in the Moghul architecture of Pakistan and North-west India, and Moghul miniature painting. But with the Moghul Moslem law had come to India, and it was soon recognized by the East India Company that the study of Moslem languages was necessary for the government of India. So Islamics now became part of the study of India as of Persia.\n\nIn 1783 Sir William Jones, a brilliant linguist who had mastered Persian and Arabic during his student days in England, was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Bengal. In 1784 he proposed the forming of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and became its first President. Becoming aware of the importance of Sanskrit, he became the founder of Sanskrit studies in the West. In accordance with Warren Hastings' decision in 1776 that Indians should be ruled by their own laws, he undertook the immense task of compiling a complete digest of Moslem and Hindu law, a task which he left unfinished at his death eleven years later.\n\nIt was from India that the Western study of Tibet commenced, initiated by Catholic missionaries, of whom the most eminent was Desideri who lived for many years in the great Sera monastery at Lhasa, and wrote the first comprehensive account of Tibet.\n\nMeantime the Jesuit missionaries had proceeded eastwards in the wake of the Portuguese to Malacca, Macau and Japan. It was from Macau that Matthew Ricci entered China in 1580 and in course of time reached Peking, where a beginning was made in the study of the Chinese Classics and Histories, which led to the first real knowledge of Chinese civilization in the West. It was now realized that the 'China' at the end of the sea-route was the same as Marco Polo's 'Cathay'.\n\nAt the beginning of the nineteenth century modern Sinology commenced with Robert Morrison at Canton, and continued with a number of able scholars, too numerous to mention here, of whom James Legge with his translation of the Chinese Classics into", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204279, "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-1961", "page_number": 47, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n43\n\nUntil the Tibetan form of government was abolished in 1959, it was possible to trace its ancestry back through thirteen centuries and to find there the seeds of institutions that one could see in operation with one's own eyes. The script and the language have changed very little in the course of these thirteen centuries. The script, which was borrowed from India in approximately 640 A.D., can still be seen in inscriptions of about a century later. Any literate Tibetan today can read those inscriptions and can understand them pretty well except for a few archaic words.\n\nBut I suppose the greatest example of conservatism and mystery in the eyes of the outside world is the supremacy of religion, as seen in the rule of the Dalai Lama. This, however, is a fairly recent development. Buddhism reached Tibet in the seventh century; as you know, it came both from China and India, but the Indian stream eventually proved the stronger. In less than two hundred years after its introduction, Buddhist monks were holding office as chief ministers of state. The kings, it is true, were laymen, but Buddhists were already powerful officials. Then there came a setback of two centuries, after which religion resumed its rise in importance. The great monasteries acquired larger and larger estates and more and more temporal influence. Indeed, for about seventy years, at the time of the Yuan dynasty, a religious leader was made viceroy of the country. This was never fully accepted by the lay princes and very soon there was a return of supreme power to secular hands. It was not until 1640 (a thousand years after Buddhist religion reached Tibet) that, with the help of the Mongol Khan in the Kokonor, the line of Dalai Lamas emerged as the actual rulers. Although their role as reformers of the church had begun two centuries earlier, other lines of incarnate Lamas in Tibet, which exercised great influence until they were suddenly swept away in 1640, could trace their ancestry to the early years of the twelfth century. That is why I have described the Dalai Lamas as relative newcomers.\n\nThe rule of the Dalai Lamas, after a first brilliant appearance in the hands of a figure known as the Great Fifth, faded out. There was a period of seventy years when the laymen resumed sway and there was even a lay king. Though religious power was restored in 1750, for a century Tibet was ruled not by Dalai Lamas but by monastic regents acting for minor Dalai Lamas who died at an early age four times in succession. The system of supreme personal rule by the Dalai Lama, both temporal and spiritual, was only firmly restored by the thirteenth incarnation—that is, the predecessor of the present Dalai Lama.\n\nSo you see there was nothing static about the Tibetan system, nor was it a simple one. There have been a whole series of adjustments and balances. The Dalai Lamas, for example, although they are in theory autocratic, are in fact the creation", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204281, "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-1961", "page_number": 49, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nORASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n45\n\nThe geographical isolation of the country resulted in a peculiarly isolated culture. Government, religion, social customs all developed in their own secluded world. In that world many qualities which we are apt to describe and look on as primitive were present and survived until very recent times; I mean characteristics like simplicity, honesty, confirmed religious devotion, obedience, leisure, contentment, and kindness.\n\nNowadays it is a fairly common contention in certain circles that a feudal upper stratum oppressed the Tibetan populace. But that ignores, for one thing, the fact that there was a very considerable body of yeoman farmers who held land directly under the Tibetan Government and worked it themselves with their own families and with the help of their friends, in the good old English system of exchanging services. There were of course bad landlords as there are everywhere; bad landlords included monks and laymen. But the difference between rich and poor in Tibet really was a very small one; it was not a money economy at all, and the difference, either social or economic, between a rich man and a poor man was in no way comparable to what you may see in many of the world's great cities. Income from exports was more than enough to buy all essentials from the outside world. There was a three-year reserve of grain, sometimes more. The people ate a good deal of meat and their standard of living was certainly higher than what I have seen in any Indian village.\n\nOne of the most obvious products of oppression is discontent, and no traveller in Tibet before 1950 that I can think of has described the Tibetans as anything but cheerful and contented. Heinrich Harrer, whose name and book, Seven Years in Tibet, you doubtless know, is probably the only Westerner who has actually worked as a landless Tibetan labourer. He did it not as a social experiment, but from the sheer necessity of keeping alive. He has told me, and I think he may have written it in his book, that his life as a labourer was easy and he was treated extremely well. He has also given evidence of the touching kindness of the Tibetans, particularly of the poor, but of the rich as well. Now it is quite true that the Tibetans have from time to time been described as inhospitable in their dealings with large explorers' parties; but that was due to fear of such parties as a spearhead of Western penetration. To anyone in want they have the most wonderful warm-hearted generosity. In so many ways, certainly in their character, they really provide an example for the Western world.\n\nThese were some of the valuable assets that were swept away in Tibet as it was. There is a great deal more that could be said about the very pleasant peculiarities of living in that country, about the exhilaration and the occasional difficulties of travel in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204618, "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": 99, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "86\n\nJ. L. CRANMER-BYNG\n\nin the north-east quarter of the city, well away from the new diplomatic quarter.2\n\nAll accommodation for foreign embassies was to be concentrated in one area outside the east wall of the city, and about one and a half miles from a newly constructed gate, just near to the old astronomical instruments which can still be seen on top of the east wall. Eventually, after negotiations, the new British Legation was allotted two large houses and two blocks of flats in this new diplomatic quarter. The last christening was performed in the Legation chapel, the books in the small library were taken off their shelves, the flag at the gate was hauled down, and everything was packed.3 Among the more colourful of the closing scenes in the life of the old British Legation should be mentioned the two Commonwealth cricket matches played in the Autumn of 1958 between the Moonrakers, captained by Mr. Duncan Wilson, the British Chargé d'Affaires, and the Woolgatherers captained by the Indian Ambassador, Mr. G. Parthasaratly. The rules governing this diplomatic cricket were many and local but the chief rule of all was that if anyone hit a ball into the grounds of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security next door his whole side was out.\n\nFinally, in September 1959, the staff moved to their new quarters and thus after nearly one hundred years of continuous occupation the existence of the old British Legation in Peking came to an end. From an historical and sentimental point of view its loss was sad. But from a realistic point of view which\n\n20 This was built on a site which had been granted to Russia as far back as the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689). As a result of fighting between Russian settlers on the frontier between Siberia and Manchuria about a hundred Russian prisoners were brought to Peking in the period 1683-5. They were formed into a company, given a place of residence in the northeast corner of Peking, close to the Lama Temple, and intermarried with Chinese and Manchus. They retained their Greek Orthodox faith and were allowed to have their own priests. See Michel N. Pavlovsky, Chinese-Russian Relations (New York, 1949) 145-164. It was to this place, known as the Pei-kuan (\"Northern Hostel\") that the members of the Russian ecclesiastical mission transferred in 1861.\n\n30 Unfortunately the imposing Royal Coat of Arms which dignified the gateway of the old Legation was too large to fit properly into the new Legation buildings. Mr. Michael Stewart, the Chargé d'Affaires at the time of the move, arranged with Sir Robert Black, the Governor of Hong Kong, that the Coat of Arms should be sent to Government House in Hong Kong. It is now fixed onto the wall at the far end of the long ballroom of Government House, which it dominates by the brilliance of its colours,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204971, "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-1965", "page_number": 79, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "70 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nmiddlemen in trade between the two countries. There was a flavour of irony in this, as the Portuguese were to prove as great pirates as the Japanese, Their most famous pirate was Mendes Pinto, who flourished in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and who seems to have been a combination of Sir Henry Morgan and Baron Munchausen. Pinto's exploits are characteristic of Portuguese history during those early centuries, displaying that amazing mixture of gallantry and greed, of religious zeal, bigotry, and cruelty. \n\nThe eastern seas had always been full of violence, and the arrival of the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century, and the Dutch a century later, increased that violence. The Dutch lacked the religious zeal of the Portuguese, but substituted an equally unattractive obsession with trade. Much of the European trade in the Far East at that time was based on piracy. The Dutch, for instance, were excluded from direct trade with China until 1729, and in their Japan trade in which Chinese silk was the most important commodity they obtained much of their silk by plundering Portuguese and Chinese ships. \n\n— \n\nThe persistence of piracy in Chinese waters for so long after regular trade had been established there by Europeans, was due to the peculiar conditions under which that trade developed. In India, and in the East Indies, European trade was succeeded by a steady increase in European power, although in both places there was a considerable time lag between establishing political power on land and the suppression of piracy at sea. \n\nBy the mid-nineteenth century, however, British and Dutch naval power had made Indian and East Indian waters comparatively safe for European commerce. The situation in China was very different, however, and piracy continued there for fully another century. Not until after the First China War of 1841-42 were there any centres of European power in China, and the few centres established then were separated from each other by hundreds of miles of Chinese territory. The situation was aggravated by the increasing anarchy and lawlessness which became endemic over much of coastal China from the early nineteenth century, as the authority and power of the Manchu Government declined. \n\nWhen the East India Company's monopoly of the China trade was abolished in 1833, and the trade thrown open to all comers,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205015, "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-1965", "page_number": 123, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "114\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nThe concerned with what happens outside their village life. \"politically effective people\" make up only a small fraction of the total. Among these there exists a certain disdain of “impatient condescension\" toward the majority of their countrymen. Oligarchies of the ruling classes are in control, and Mills seems to accept that oligarchies will continue to be the norm. The problem would seem to be the outlook for some sort of check upon the oligarchies, and yet still bring about stability and economic progress. Mills notes some hopeful signs of checks and balances developing. For example, a Supreme Court decision in Thailand in recent years went against the government and succeeded in criticizing it openly. Again, in the Philippines an aroused citizenry was able to force the ruling oligarchy to restrain its use of brute force in electoral campaigns, and to reduce to \"acceptable\" proportions its demands for graft.\n\nOne could hope in such a work as this for some pondering on the possibilities of the emerging of alternative leaders. Leaders perhaps of a potentially more capable bent than the present batch. The author touches on this in the case of the Philippines. But what of alternatives to Sukarno? What, by the way, has happened to Mohammed Hatta? And what of the outlook for the development of representative institutions in government? Mills does not go deep enough into this subject,\n\nHis analysis of strategic concepts from several points of view - American, Australian, Indian, Chinese - is valuable. But he avoids mention of the implications for the United States in the conscious Philippine tendency toward a pro-Asiatic orientation. Perhaps he does not feel that this will in the foreseeable future affect United States-Philippine relations. But he does not say so.\n\nMills has a realistic view of Chinese power and Communist activities. His chapters on the Chinese and on Communism are particularly revealing of the methods of infiltration. The \"technique of the inside job\" for some time has been the chief instrument of Chinese Communist imperialism.\n\nOn the economic side he enters in detail into all the familiar subjects: low living standards, low income levels, slowness of industrialization, the sluggishness of agrarian reform, lack of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205754, "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-1969", "page_number": 60, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "54 \n\nR. G. GROVES \n\nOn 2nd June Rev. Schaub wrote that the \"literati of Pan T'in had a meeting with the headmen of the six large market places in their neighbourhood.\" He continued, \"most of the collected elders of the various villages were very reluctantly promising some help, but after all they came to an agreement that they would send 500 men from each market place when the Indian troops should really come to Pan Tin.\"3 Meanwhile, the villagers of Pan T'in were constructing trenches between their village and Li Long. \n\nOn 5th June Rev. Schaub reported that fortification work was still in progress. He had heard that \"members of the rich and prosperous clan Tang in the city of Tung Kun ... are behind the scenes, that soldiers and weapons are coming up from there.\" Rev. Schaub continued, \"last Saturday a messenger came from one of our out-stations, 15 miles from here... to bring us the news that the various market places in that region had also a gathering to discuss their plans.\"74 \n\nRev. Schaub enclosed his own translation of a gentry placard posted in a nearby market town. It begins with a denunciation of the barbarians, and continues: \n\n44 \n\nTo fight the barbarians, I propose in a rough way: (1) to get the funds. It is the best plan that the six confederations (six market places) keep together. But the outlay for the soldiers should not be collected by an extraordinary field tax. It is also not right that the various confederations should pay the costs. Some of these places have a large population, and many fields... but for instance Thonglak (alias market of peace) could not do this. It is a small place and there is not a large population... We should use the usual field tax. Let first the six confederations come together to ask our Government for help \n\n**75 \n\nBy the end of June it was clear that the British did not intend an expedition against the villages of the interior. The occupation had, however, become involved in larger diplomatic issues between Britain and China. It dragged on throughout the summer until 13th September, when the last of the British forces withdrew behind the frontiers of the Colony. In the interim much of the Sham Chun valley was left without any form of Chinese government. On the day the British forces finally quitted the valley \n\nPage 60\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205965, "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": 45, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "40 \n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE \n\nRegistrar-General in 1864, a key post, Deane Superintendent of Police in 1867, and Tonnochy who held the offices of Sheriff, Coroner and Marshal of the Vice-Admiralty Court in 1865, became Assistant Harbour Master in 1867 and Superintendent of the Jail in 1875, a post he held until his death in 1882. Lister was soon sent to the Harbour Office and Russell, who also acted as Governor Sir Richard Macdonnell's private secretary, was sent to the Magistracy. James Legge, long resident in Hong Kong, was critical of the way in which the original scheme was modified by expediency and argued that \"there should have been no directing them away from their proper business of study until they had given proof of their actual interpretation in the supreme court”,22 Legge was right in principle; but although it was not the Government's intention to produce a supply of sinologues but rather administrators with a knowledge of Chinese, these early cadets did work hard at their Chinese, and one, Lister, supplied the China Review and Notes and Queries on China and Japan with many thoughtful comments on Chinese language and society. \n\nThe development of the cadet scheme can only be understood in relation to changes that occurred outside Hong Kong. The scheme was influenced - if not directly inspired by changes in public administration in India and the homeland. Open competition was first invented for India and the germ of the idea is to be found in Lord Macaulay's 1854 report on recruitment of the Indian Civil Service. In Great Britain appointments to the civil service until the year 1855 were made by nomination. In 1855 a stringent examination was introduced; and in 1870 the principle of open competition was adopted as a general rule. The year 1870 witnessed, then, the abolition of patronage and the admission of people into the civil service at prescribed ages and by means of competitive examinations; and a distinction was drawn, in terms of grades and hence of salary and prestige, between the routine and intellectual tasks of government. Competitive examinations meant, of course, that there was little chance of success into the higher grade except for candidates who had a successful university career, and, often, in addition, special preparation by a private tutor. These reforms influenced the recruitment of cadets into the Hong Kong Civil Service. \n\nIn 1869, as a result of the evolving climate of thought in English, a competitive examination by the Civil Service Commis-\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205966, "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": 46, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "HONG KONG CADETS, 1862 - 1941\n\n41\n\nsioners was introduced for the Straits Settlements, Hong Kong and Ceylon Civil Services; and in 1882, a combined examination was instituted, successful candidates being given a choice of colonies, so that the members of these three civil services were now to some extent regarded as interchangeable. In 1896 the examination was joined to that for the Home and Indian Civil Services; and the Federated Malay States, which had retained the nomination system, was also included. This arrangement lasted until 1932, when Sir Ralph Furse, who believed in the policy of selection by interview, finally succeeded in obtaining for his office control over the selection of candidates for Ceylon, Hong Kong and Malaya. However, university men continued to supply the vast majority of the eastern cadetships even after that date; and the Dominions Office and Colonial Office List for 1939 informs us that 'whilst a university degree is not an absolutely indispensable qualification the candidates selected for Administrative appointments in the last few years have nearly all been in possession of a University Degree, usually with honours. The few exceptions have been in cases where a candidate has had some special qualification'.23\n\nThe Hong Kong cadet scheme underwent several internal changes over time, although the principle of recruitment from England by competitive examination remained unchanged until 1932. The first three recruits, who pioneered the scheme, were given quarters in the Central School House during their probationary period and learned their Chinese, which was Cantonese, from teachers recruited locally by Government. In 1872, Sir Arthur Kennedy established a Board of Examiners, charged with the duty of examining Government officers drawing a Chinese teacher's allowance, and with issuing certificates of proficiency in colloquial Chinese to European and Indian police constables; but before that date cadets had been examined by an ad hoc committee. To save expense, Sir Arthur Kennedy, Governor 1872 - 1877, stopped the recruitment of cadets from England, and in 1875 even suggested dropping the scheme altogether; but this was not accepted by the Colonial Office. The Secretary of State arranged in 1875 for Eastern cadets to remain in England usually for a year and study Chinese at Oxford under Dr. James Legge though, as we have seen above, there were no candidates for Hong Kong at this particular time. This arrangement proved", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206001, "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": 81, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "76\n\nDAFYDD EMRYS EVANS\n\nof Hong Kong to exercise its powers in the district progressively decreased. But though it is commonly felt that Taipingshan was effectively governed by Triad societies and former T'ai Ping rebels, there is little evidence forthcoming. It is a curious fact, however, that for a period of some 40 years from the late 1840's there were remarkably few dealings in the whole of the land in Taipingshan registered in the Government Land Office. Under the Ordinance No. 3 of 1844, all transactions concerning land were required to be registered and, indeed, on the whole were registered for there were certain real benefits to be obtained. Why then are there no transactions concerning Taipingshan land registered?\n\nThe simplest answer suggests that there were no transactions to be registered but this is easily rejected for owners must have died, transferred their property, mortgaged it or sub-let it. Obviously these things must have been done yet, in the case of 44 lots, there were no registered dealings at all for a very long period, extending in most cases until the 1880's21. In the case of a further 18 lots22, there were no registered dealings over this period after about 1848. Two other significant features eventually came into Indian (mostly Muslim) hands and remained there, forming what must have been a noticeable Indian quarter23. One family, that of a man called Mahomet Arab, who first bought property in the area in the 1840's, retained it for nearly 100 years. The other feature is the movement of European ownership. In the 1840's, a number of Europeans did own lots in Taipingshan (and Europeans who could afford nothing else, such as discharged soldiers, did live there) but they sold up during and around that time24. However, it is also very noticeable that one European, Daniel Richard Caldwell, bought several lots in Taipingshan on several of which licensed brothels stood25. Caldwell's connections, even when in the employ of the Government, with the underworld were notorious and this Taipingshan property was retained by his family (his widow was Chinese) until the 1890's.\n\nBut, apart from the Indian quarter (which probably was left alone) and Caldwell's brothels (which probably paid 'cumshaw' or protection money anyway), Taipingshan became a Chinese town in which it seems little attention was paid to official requirements such as the registration of land transactions and much else. When in the 1880's, after the Land Commission's Report of 1886-1887, it was realised into what a parlous state the Land", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206018, "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": 98, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "CHINESE EMIGRATION AND THE DECK PASSENGER TRADE 93\n\nislands of Nauru and Ocean Island; and the other is the Pilgrim Trade from Malaya to the Red Sea Port of Jeddah. The passengers in this latter trade are mainly Malays, who travel in near-luxury conditions comparable with European tourist class. Food and accommodation are suited to Moslem tastes and prejudices, an Iman travels on the ship, and there is a mosque provided in the accommodation.\n\nLater Chinese emigration to South-east Asia was largely the result of the economies imposed on the region by the European colonial powers, and the agricultural and industrial development which these powers initiated. On achieving independence at various times after 1945 each country has attempted with varying degrees of success - to weaken the economic and political position of their Chinese populations, and in the early 1960s Indonesia even attempted their repatriation on a substantial scale. It is in this country that the Chinese have been subjected to the harshest and most cruel treatment, with thousands being killed in pogroms reminiscent of the worst years in Indonesia and the Philippines in the earlier period. It may be that the contribution of the overseas Chinese to the economic development of South-east Asia, has in these latter years at least been counter-balanced by the political instability caused by their presence, but for this they are not wholly to blame.\n\nNOTE\n\nAn account of the Ch'ing government's attitude towards the emigration of its subjects is given at pp. 26-29 of Victor Purcell's The Chinese in Southeast Asia (London, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1965).\n\nIn his well-known work, The Middle Kingdom (London, W. H. Allen & Co., revised edition, 1883) vol. 1, pp. 278-9 S. Wells Williams states that \"The obstacles put in the way of emigrating beyond sea, both in law and prejudice, operate to deter respectable persons from leaving their native land. Necessity has made the law a dead letter, and thousands annually leave their homes.\" He then quotes the following striking passage from W. H. Medhurst's China: Its State and Prospects (1838). \"Emigration is going on in spite of restrictions and disabilities, from a country where learning and civilization reign, and where all the dearest interests and prejudices of the emigrants are found, to lands like Burmah, Siam, Cambodia, Tibet, Manchuria, and the Indian Archipelago, where comparative ignorance and barbarity prevail, and where the extremes of a tropical or frozen region are to be exchanged for a mild and temperate climate.\"", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206248, "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-1971", "page_number": 65, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "LETTERS FROM CHINA 1835-36\n\n59\n\nup for three months and a half, reduced to a skeleton and with no strength left to stand the doctors' treatment. Ed.\n\n-\n\nO a sick-room\n\n+\n\nI\n\n+\n\nas\n\nis a dismal doleful prison. Such was mine for weeks at Macao-only two gruff Chinese Servants in the house with me, who skulked continually; and who, if my death had threatened then, would have fled the house, such being their only way of saving their own lives their monstrous Government (incredible as it may seem) would exact at least one of these same lives, if they were found beside a corpse!.... I am sadly grieved at my departure before receiving his [Herschel's] communication on Language and Orthography [for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China mentioned in his letter of 12th December 1835]; the opportunity of applying practically some of the truths and instructions to be expected, seemed a very happy one, and I fear will now be lost. There are numerous languages however in the Indian Archipelago, not one of which has yet a written character, but which from the astonishing zeal already displayed both by English and American missionaries, are likely to be acquired ere long, and in the preparation of Grammar for these, there will be a fine field for applying every orthographical hint that can be given.\n\n[December] 8th The \"Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge in China\" which I wrote you about, and which you have authorized my Subscribing £5 to, finds the work it has proposed to itself too heavy, I fear, for the one or two hands who are all that can engage in it. This is ten thousand pities particularly as its slow, and I may say unsatisfactory, progress, will dishearten many supporters. Its first work A Compendium of General History is now in the Press (at Singapore, for no Chinese printing is allowed, or practicable, in China itself), and will appear presently; at least so it is said. But whether any other work be in preparation or not, I cannot say. The missionaries who have the chief part of the labour to perform, as Chinese Scholars seem unfortunately to differ as to the style or dialect that ought to be used in the works, and also are not much agreed as to the manner in which these works are to convey knowledge. The dialect that is vulgar in one province, is classical (it seems) in another; and vice versa. There are difficulties of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206395, "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-1971", "page_number": 212, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "186\n\nREV. JAMES LEGGE\n\nOn the 2nd July of that year, I was walking out on Caine's Road in the afternoon with a friend, when we saw a steamer coming through Sulphur Channel. At first we thought it must be the mail, but it proved to be the Shannon, with Lord Elgin on board. As she steamed into the harbour, and she and the Admiral saluted each other, and the thunder of their guns reverberated along the sides of the mountain, which were then all fringed with mist, I said to my companion, \"There is the knell of the past of China. It can do nothing against these leviathans.\" And so it was. I need not try to tell you how Lord Elgin's measures were delayed in a manner that contributed much, through his prompt and magnanimous decision, to the preservation of our Indian empire. All this and his subsequent proceedings in China may be seen in brief in the memoir of his Life published during the present year. It is only when he is gone that the public at large have the means of knowing what a good and great man Lord Elgin was,—bold, prudent, far-seeing, conscientious. I hope all my hearers, if they have not already read, will soon take the opportunity to read, that memoir, and especially the chapters relating to his two missions to China.\n\nThe Government at home was equal to the exigencies of the occasion as well as Lord Elgin. Fresh troops were sent out. He went to Calcutta, but was back from it in September. The war at Canton was brought to an end by the capture of the city on the 29th of that month, and Yeh was taken prisoner a few days after. The surprise and disgust of the Chinese in general were great, because he did not seal his loyalty to the dragon throne by at once committing suicide.\n\nIn January, 1858, I made a visit to Canton, and had the satisfaction of walking all over it, and on a Sunday opened the first house, that was set apart in it to that purpose, for the preaching of the gospel. My sermon was followed by one from a relative of the T'ae-ping king, who came subsequently to be well known himself at Nanking as the Shield King. Poor man! He had been connected with the London Mission here for several years, and was the most genial and versatile Chinese I have ever known, and of whom I can never think but with esteem and regret. Had he taken my advice, he would have remained quietly in Hongkong as a preacher, and might have been living with his head on him to the present day.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206473, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1972", "page_number": 21, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "CHINESE MEDICINE\n\n15\n\nweakness, etc., may be too far fetched, but the basic idea of endocrinology exists. In recent years a great variety of glandular substance has been used in medicine. Of these the thyroid, pituitary, suprarenals, pancreas, liver and the placenta, have been found to be of therapeutic value. It is remarkable that many of them have been used and incorporated in Chinese pharmacopoeia for ages past.\n\nThe Ming dynasty is the most glorious in the history of the pharmacopoeia of China. The most important contribution is the Pen Tsao Kang Mu (†1), the National Pharmacopoeia of China, compiled by Li Shi-chen. This is one of the most popular works on Chinese medicine, and is considered a great classic. It consists of some 52 comprehensive volumes divided into the vegetable kingdom, the animal kingdom, the mineral kingdom and others, with a description of 1,892 kinds of different substances.\n\nIt contains many drugs which are common in both the East and the West. It took Li Shi-chen, the city magistrate, almost thirty years of hard work to complete this commendable piece of good work. This book is extremely rich in remedies, especially those of the vegetable origin, and offers a rich field for scientific research. Considerable attention has been directed to it by foreign writers, notably Du Halde who translated part of it into French in 1735 and Porter Smith in 1871.\n\nIn 1911, Stuart extensively revised Smith's work and published the Chinese Materia Medica, the vegetable kingdom. Works on the mineral kingdom and the avian kingdom were published by Bernard Read in recent years. An attempt was started by the Chinese Government to carry out scientific research on the drugs contained in the Chinese Materia Medica, but the war with Japan aborted the work.\n\nPerhaps, the earliest Chinese drug that has won its way abroad is China root, the so-called Chinese sarsaparilla, once reputed as a remedy for syphilis. Its fame spread as far as to India, Persia and Turkestan in the 16th century, and in Indian literature it was mentioned that syphilis came from Europe but China root could cure it. Eumenol, a liquid extract of tang kuei (†14), was introduced into Europe by the Germans in 1899, and is said to be effective in menstrual disorders.\n\nMacanin, a preparation from a Chinese seaweed, has been put on the market by the Japanese and vigorously advertised as a sub-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206497, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1972", "page_number": 45, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "RAJA JAMES BROOKE AND SARAWAK\n\n39\n\nthe \"local authorities\" rather than from the sovereign prince of Sarawak, as was usual. Thus the anomalous status of Sarawak in the view of some officials remained, and this technicality provided an opportunity for a subsequent permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Office to declare that Brooke had not been recognized as a reigning prince. Julian Pauncefote opined in 1877,19\n\nRaja Brooke has not forfeited his claims of British nationality by accepting the position of ruler of Sarawak and as a matter of constitutional law it is competent to Her Majesty to recognize him as a sovereign prince but no such recognition has yet taken place.\n\nJames Brooke died in 1868, happy at having received his country's recognition, and confident that it was merely a step toward the desired British protectorate. In this he was prophetic. Although a formal protectorate was not granted until 1888, Britain made it quite clear by a pronouncement late in 1868 that her paramount interests on the northwest coast of Borneo constituted it a British sphere.20\n\nRaja James Brooke was presented at court on two occasions, in 1847, and again in 1857. His nephew and successor, Charles Brooke, visited England in 1869 and asked to be received officially. He was told that he might write on his card and be presented as \"Mr. Brooke, Raja of Sarawak\". The second white raja was incensed and refused to appear until finally, in 1874, he was presented as \"His Highness, the Raja of Sarawak”, and granted a place just below the Indian maharajas in the order of precedence at Court.\n\nUntil 1888, Britain's empire building in Borneo was done largely by proxy, by Englishmen indeed, but by the agency of political structures and vehicles outside the direct control of Whitehall. That was the role of the Brooke raj, and later of the chartered company that ruled North Borneo, so far as they were a part of the British empire. One of Brooke's friends, John Abel Smith, M.P., was quite accurate when in 1866 he noted rather sourly,21\n\nThe English government is quite alive to the importance of Sarawak to British interests, but as long as Raja Brooke\n\n19 Pauncefote minute, 2 January 1877, FO12/43.\n\n20 FO to Hennessy, 2 December 1868, FO12/34A.\n\n21 Owen Rutter (ed) Rajah Brooke and Baroness Burdett-Coutts, London, 1935, p. 272.\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206514, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1972", "page_number": 62, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "56\n\nHENRY JAMES LETHBRIDGE\n\nIn 1878, after success in the competitive examination held by the Civil Service Commissioners in London, he was appointed a Hong Kong cadet by the Secretary of State for the Colonies. He had wished to join, like his friend E.D.H. Fraser,3 the Indian Civil Service but his address to the Civil Service Commissioners for service in India had been turned down. Lockhart was the eighth cadet officer appointed to Hong Kong after the introduction of Hong Kong cadetships by Sir Richard MacDonnell in 1861. Sir Richard had been concerned to recruit young men from Britain who would train to become interpreters, for there was a great need for such persons in the Hong Kong public service at that time. But Sir Richard's scheme was not, properly speaking, an innovation since it was closely modelled on the system devised in 1854 for supplying interpreters to the Consular Service in China. The practice in Hong Kong was for a successful cadet, who had to be between the age of 20 and 23 on the first day of his examination, to remain in Britain for one year after appointment, during which time he was required to begin learning Chinese and to attend a class for students at King's College, London, held by the Professor of Chinese at that institution. The cadet was also employed for some hours daily at the Colonial Office in the work of the Department. At the end of his year's study the cadet was examined in Chinese, and the confirmation of his appointment depended upon both his passing a satisfactory examination and on the performance of his duties in the Office. Lockhart appears to have had no difficulties in meeting these requirements.\n\nIt seems likely that the European public in Hong Kong first knew of Lockhart when they saw a notification from the Colonial Secretary, W.H. Marsh, in the Government Gazette of 1879 which simply stated: 'It is hereby notified that James Haldane Stewart Lockhart, Esq., has been appointed by Her Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies, to be a Cadet in the Hong Kong Civil Service, and that he reported his arrival in the Colony on Tuesday, the 18th November, 1879.' Lockhart had set out from England by P. and O. steamer some time in September 1879; and, as was the form, immediately reported his arrival in Hong Kong to the Colonial Secretary. At that date it was the custom for a newly arrived cadet from Britain to spend a few weeks in the Colony before proceeding to Canton. During his brief stay in the Colony, the cadet was quizzed by senior officials, instructed as to his future", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206775, "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": 52, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "46 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nsteamships in India operated on the Hoogly in the early 1820s, mainly as tug boats. \n\nThe first steamship in the Dutch East Indies was the Van der Capellen, a paddle steamer of 230 tons, designed to operate a coastal service in Java. The Van der Capellen was built by a consortium of British merchants in Sourabaya in 1825, and equipped with engines built by Fawcett and Company of Birmingham. \n\nDue to the close association between British India and Canton through the East India Company, it was not long before steamships were introduced on the Canton River. Although he did not live to see his scheme carried through, a Mr. T. J. Robarts of the Company's Canton staff is the pioneer of steam navigation in China. When on leave in London in 1821, just nine years after the Comet was launched on the Clyde, he suggested to the Court of Directors that a steam tug could be usefully employed on the Canton River. Because it was thought that the Chinese might object, his scheme was turned down, but Mr. Robarts decided to go ahead on his own. He ordered two 16 horse-power engines and a copper boiler from Henry Maudslay and Company of London, and a hull of oak frames; all of which arrived at Canton in 1822 and aroused great curiosity and admiration. Unfortunately, bad health caused Mr. Robarts to retire prematurely, and there was no one at Canton able, or willing to continue with his scheme. Everything was therefore sent to Calcutta, and arrived there in June 1822. \n\nThe parts were assembled at Kyd and Company's yard at Kidderpore, and the vessel, known as the Diana, was launched on 12th July 1823. However, the original oak hull was discarded in favour of a new hull built locally of teak. The name Diana was taken from the figurehead which had accompanied the original hull. The total cost of the Diana was 70,000 rupees, and the government declining to take any part in the enterprise--this was financed by a group of Indian agency houses. \n\nThe Diana ran successfully, but not profitably, on the Hoogly for a year, and was then sold to the government for use in the Burma War, 1824-1826. It was Captain Marryat, then the senior naval officer in India, who recommended her purchase to the government. The Diana took part in the first expedition to Rangoon, and proved so useful that she was retained on the Irawaddy for the whole of the war. She suffered at times from overloading, as not", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206776, "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": 53, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "EARLY STEAMSHIPS IN CHINA\n\n47\n\nonly did she carry troops, but often had a gun brig and several small boats in tow. Diana seemed to produce an effect on the Burmese analogous to that produced on the Mexicans by Cortes' horses. She continued in government service until she was broken up at Calcutta in 1835, and her engines installed in a new ship of the same name. The second Diana was also built at Calcutta, and was employed by the government as a cruiser against pirates in the Straits of Malacca,\n\nAlthough her origin was so closely connected with China, the first Diana never operated in Chinese waters. The first steamship to be seen in China was the Forbes, also built at Calcutta and launched in 1829. The Forbes was much larger than the Diana and cost 300,000 rupees. After she had been running on the Hoogly for several months, the Forbes was chartered by Jardine, Matheson and Company to tow their Jamesina, a barque of 362 tons which had formerly been H. M. S. Curlew, to China. At this time great importance was attached to getting the opium from India to China as quickly as possible in order to command the highest price, and no satisfactory passages had been made from Singapore to China against the north-east monsoon. The opium ships normally waited at Singapore until the monsoon was over before tackling the passage up the South China Sea, so that only one India-China voyage was possible in a season.\n\nThe Forbes-Jamesina convoy left Calcutta on 14th March 1830; the Forbes having 134 tons of coal on board, two-thirds English and the remainder Indian, while the Jamesina had another 52 tons of Indian coal for the Forbes, besides her main cargo of 840 chests of opium. Good weather was experienced on the passage to Singapore, where they arrived on the 27th, steaming for most of the time at 5-4 knots, and at the most favourable times reaching 7 knots. Four days were spent at Singapore, during which time the boiler was cleaned and bunkering carried out. The monsoon was still strong when they left on 31st, and speed fell first to 3-4 and later to 2-1 knots. By 12th April Forbes had only 12 days' coal left with over 500 miles to go and no sign of the monsoon easing. The Jamesina, therefore, was cast off and Forbes proceeded alone, reaching Lintin on 19th April, the first steamship to be seen in China. The Jamesina arrived two days later.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206988, "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-1974", "page_number": 59, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG\n\n53\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Sir William Des Voeux, My Colonial Service, 2 vols., London 1903. Sir Frederick Lugard, Governor of Hong Kong 1907-1912, also found that 'entertaining was an essential part of governing. Hong Kong Government House was used as a high-class hotel, restaurant and sports club by many of the hundreds of passengers who left their ships to write their names in the Governor's book...socially more exacting were the many distinguished foreigners and Eastern potentates-Chinese and Japanese princes, Indian Rajahs, the Governor of the neighbouring Portuguese Macao, foreign admirals who had to be visited in their warships and later entertained in turn at Government House; ambassadors en route to or from Tokyo or Peking, and many lesser functionaries.' See Margery Perham, Lugard, vol. 2, London, 1960, p. 289.\n\n2 My Colonial Service, vol. 2, p. 234. Sir William Des Voeux (1834-1909) was Governor of Hong Kong from 1887 to 1891, in which year he retired from the colonial service.\n\n3 14 November, 1888.\n\n4 15 November, 1888.\n\n5 16 November, 1888.\n\n6 22 November, 1888.\n\n7 William Van Driesche was the third generation of his family to serve the Morèses. The children used to call him Mr. Willie.\n\n8 There are several photographs of Morès in Donald Dresden, The Marquis de Morès: Emperor of the Bad Lands, Norman, Oklahoma, 1970, and in Charles Droulers, Le Marquis de Morès 1858-1896, Paris, 1932. Morès was six-feet tall, lithe, ramrod-straight, muscular, with a needle-pointed waxed black moustache. He looked every inch a d'Artagnan.\n\n9 Richard Manca, Duke of Vallombrosa, born 1834, married the daughter of the Duke Des Cars, conqueror of Algeria. He had three children, of whom Morès was the eldest.\n\n10 Op. cit., vol. 2, p. 234.\n\n11 Ibid., p. 235.\n\n12 Ibid., p. 235.\n\n13 The Hong Kong Daily Press, 24 November, 1888. The Governor was accompanied on his trip by his wife, young daughter, and James Russell, the Chief Justice. The Colonial Secretary, Frederick Stewart, administered the government in Des Voeux's absence.\n\n14 The China Mail (1845-1911) was edited by George Murray Bain from 1879 until 1908(?).\n\n15 It is not surprising that Des Voeux took a great interest in his betters since promotion in the colonial service in the nineteenth century depended to a large degree on knowing people in high places.\n\n16 No full-scale study of Mayréna has been published as yet; the best book is probably Jean Marquet, Un Aventurier du XIXe siècle: Marie Jer, roi des Sedangs, 1888-1890. Hanoi, 1927; but Maurice Soulié, Marie Jer, roi des Sédangs, 1888-1890, Paris 1927, is amusing though really une vie romancée. The most penetrating essay on Mayréna is that by Marcel Ner, 'Marie Ier, roi des Sedangs: essai sur la psychologie de l'aventure”, Extrême-Asie, Revue Indochinoise (Hanoi), no. 21, March 1928, pp. 397-407 and no. 22, April 1928, pp. 491-498. There are many references to Mayréna", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207338, "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": 106, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "98\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nand debtors from Australia, as well as mercenaries and American deserters. The luckless ones became in time indistinguishable from beachcombers, the poor whites of the Colony.\n\nAt a rough estimate, about a third of the total European population (excluding soldiers, sailors, and seamen) would have been classified as working or lower class by the resident European middle class of merchants and government officials, and were treated as such by those implacably class-conscious Britons. In Hong Kong, the 'two nations'—of rich and poor Europeans—were not driven into social amalgamation by the fear of a common fate as aliens on the shores of far-away Cathay. A government clerk, who lived in Hong Kong in the 1850s, complained that:\n\nthe exclusiveness, jealousy and pride of 'caste' that have been so long and so justly attributed to our English brethren and sisters in our Indian possessions attain more luxuriant growth in China. The little community, far from being a band of brothers, is split up into numerous petty cliques or sets, the members of which never think of associating with those out of their immediate circle... Even here (England) one sees a somewhat similar state of society in many of our small country towns, where everyone knows everybody, and the minutest details of your neighbours' daily lives, manners and conversation, are noted with watchful assiduity. Anyone who has had the happiness to spend some time in one of these rural paradises can form a pretty good notion of the state of matters in an English colony, only that things are much worse.16\n\nIn 1885, an American found the same conditions prevailing, though possibly in a more exaggerated form:\n\nTo an American, it seems extremely silly for wholesale merchants and their clerks to hold themselves, socially, above the retail merchants and their clerks, regardless of the amount of business they do, and their moral and intellectual standing... Distance from Britain, far from loosening ties that bound Britons into a rigid world of class distinctions, tended to tighten them.17 The effects of these divisions will be discussed in a later section.\n\nSOCIAL LIFE OF THE EUROPEAN LOWER CLASS.\n\nUntil the cession of the Kowloon peninsula in 1860, most lower-class Europeans lived in the city of Victoria, especially in the streets", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207395, "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": 163, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n155\n\nin my mind that the Colony could not hold out long against an attack. After France fell in June 1940 the outlook darkened further.\n\nAt this time I was a major of 22 years service but I held a lowly position in the Army List for my Corps, being near the bottom of a block of officers who had been commissioned during the First World War. I had prepared for a career in Surgery and I also had experience of administration. In theatres where the army was expanding, promotion for officers in my position was nearly certain but in Hong Kong there was no such possibility. For a time I hoped I might be posted elsewhere, and while I never thought it possible that I might get home the Middle East seemed just a possibility. The likeliest destination for me if I moved at all seemed to be Singapore where my friends told me of the huge increase of strength in the army there. I was never moved.\n\nI had no part in preparing the army's plans for increased hospital accommodation in Hong Kong in war. Some of the buildings it was sought to use were occupied by religious orders, some of which were Italian and I understood that Colonel John Simson, the Assistant Director of Medical Services, China Command found difficulty inspecting these and met a blank refusal to a request that we might be allowed to make a preliminary accumulation of medical stores in some of these buildings. The Hong Kong Government was, I believe, unwilling on grounds of policy to overrule the objections. The Indian Army Hospital which was in Kowloon and which accommodated some British patients as well, was on the outbreak of hostilities to close, cross the harbour and reopen on the Island of Hong Kong in the Chinese Hospital, Tung Wah East. With the frontier so close to the harbour this would obviously be a difficult operation and I was sorry for the A.D.M.S. who had to plan under these conditions.\n\nI have been able to obtain through the courtesy of Colonel R. H. Freeman and Brigadier John Lapper, a postwar aerial photograph of the Military Hospital buildings in Bowen Road, which I reproduce here (plate 17). The photograph shows that new buildings have been added since the war and does not show the hospital reservoir. The hospital was built in two wings each containing a ground floor and two storeys, and these wings were connected by a central block which held the administrative offices. To the north there was a magnificent view over the harbour to the mountains of the New Territories while in the rear of the building the ground rose", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207501, "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": 269, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n261\n\nI was straban while Ashton Rose was preparing a medical report on Sham Shui Po. At this time we were being asked by the British Military Administration to submit lists of our kit which had been taken by the Japanese but I imagine that this only added to the papers with which they had to deal at that time. The Colonial Secretary was installed in the French Mission at Battery Path and heads of government departments followed shortly afterwards. Commander Craven and Major Boxer left us for staff duties in Hong Kong and I arranged for two barbers to come and stay for a few days. Six of our Q.A. sisters arrived and another six came late at night accompanied by very necessary male escorts from Stanley. We were delighted to see them and put them all up and fed them but it was early morning before I got to bed.\n\nOn 27 August Saito came back and I pressed him again for our medical records and he excused himself by saying he had been so busy. The Indian hospital had 259 patients and 45 staff and I arranged an X-ray session for Indian patients including a number suffering from tuberculosis. Selwyn-Clarke sent us a gift of brandy and cigarettes, showing that though he did not use these comforts himself he would not deny them to others. Miss Dyson now back in her rightful position as Matron set about getting overalls for her sisters, a splendid boost to the morale not only of these ladies but of the patients and staff as well. Madame Lebon made these and our army promised payment.\n\n1\n\nWe finally closed our compradore's shop and agreed a business settlement with the compradore on the basis of him taking out cash plus goods to the total of $8831.06 yen. We had an excellent concert provided by Sham Shui Po, and some of the Hong Kong Volunteers, particularly those of mixed race, were slightly built and made up very attractively as girls. Members of the Indian camp and the Internee Camp at Ma Tau Wei attended and as usual in these days I was very late to bed. We found it necessary to control visiting hours in the hospital because of the very large numbers of people we had roaming about.\n\nOn 28 August we got smoke flares from our people for touching off by day to guide our aircraft when they were dropping supplies and the Japanese also sent in smoke cylinders for a like purpose. They also sent in 3 bottles of whisky, 4 of peppermint for the dispensary, 8 of brandy, 50 of port, 6 of gin and 20 of sherry. I at once arranged a general issue of 2 ounces of port per head, a meagre ration which I thought was wise at the time.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207562, "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": 330, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "322\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\ngreat blaze they saw was not being fed by the engine sheds and the numerous and extensive buildings of the Company there.\" (Daily Press, Dec. 17, 1884).\n\nAfter the fire, the area was laid out into regular lots and the government began disposing of them at public auction. It was at this time that the building sites were regularized and the streets were officially named. Fronting the Dock Company's property and the sea was Bulkely Street, with buildings only on the north side. Behind it was Market Street (now Wuhu Street). The Public Market built in 1886 occupied a block on the north side of this street in the centre of the laid out portion of the village. These were the two main streets running east and west. At the east end of the village was Hill Street, (now Tientsin Street) running north and south, next to the west was Dock Street, then Station Street leading up to the Police Station situated on a hill behind the village, then an unnamed street (now Marsh Street) and finally Temple Street leading up to the Kun Yam Temple nestled under the hill behind Market Street. Also behind Market Street both on the east and west side of the village were rows of small family houses.*\n\nIn the 1890's the area of Hung Hom near the present Chatham Road was being developed for industrial establishments. The area was known as West Hung Hom. At the turn of the century, there was at Hung Hom a match factory, a sugar candy factory, a glass factory, and a dozen or so boat building yards. There was also a Hotel and Tavern, owned by an Indian who left a will.\n\nVarious Hong Kong capitalists invested in Hung Hom lots. The partners of Lapraik and Company owned several blocks in front of the Market House. These were later sold to the Hong Kong Land Company. When new lots were laid out to the west in the 1890's, Ho Tung and later Lau Chu Pak, of the Yaumati Ferry Company, bought several of the blocks. Li Kwong also owned valuable lots at Yaumati.\n\n(b) Some local institutions: Schools\n\nA Government-subsidized village school was established under the direction of the local community, and several Christian schools were opened. The Church Missionary Society had lots at the east end of the village, the London Missionary Society in 1883 applied\n\n* Two maps showing Hung Hom in 1892 and 1901 are printed respectively at p. 321 and between pp. 322 and 323.\n\nPage 330\n\nPage 331", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207790, "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": 178, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA\n\n163\n\nValley. A tea committee was formed whose findings were favourable, and experimental tea gardens were opened at Jaipur in Upper Assam. By 1859 over 4,000 acres were under cultivation, and the industry was assured of a bright future. Ample British capital was available for expansion, the British public's appetite for tea seemed inexhaustible; but scarcity of labour was a serious handicap. Assam was thinly populated, and the planters were dependent on Bengalis, who took a long time to get acclimatised. The idea of importing Chinese labour by the overland route was suggested, as at this time Chinese labour was considered indispensable to economic development in the tropics, and the Indian government was sympathetic. There were several possible land routes between India and West China, some passing through Burma, and Article 9 of the 1862 Commercial Treaty between Britain and Burma allowed entry into British territory from the Burmese side. The tea planters, however, failed to recruit Chinese workers, and blamed their lack of success upon the difficulties and hardships of the overland routes. This led to pressure on the government to improve the major land routes, and to several expeditions across the debatable borderlands between India, Burma, and China.\n\nFrom the 1860s until near the end of the century, therefore, there was rivalry between British commercial circles in India and those in China, over access to West China. In addition to these two approaches, from India and from the Yangtze, there were others from the south; by the Mekong or Red River from Indo-China, and by the West River from Canton and Hong Kong. Anglo-French colonial rivalry was acute during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in the Far East. The French were keen to find and exploit a trade route to West China; and while Britain was investigating routes from Burma, the Yangtze, and the West River, France was investigating possible routes from the Mekong and Red Rivers.\n\nAs became widely known by the end of the century, and suspected by realists before then, West China and its borderlands comprise some of the most difficult regions of the world in which to build roads or railways, or in which to improve river navigation. There are high mountain ranges divided by deep valleys, densely forested in many places; and all the great rivers—the Yangtze, Irrawaddy, Mekong, Red River, and Salween—are seriously impeded by rapids", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207796, "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": 184, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA \n\n169 \n\nto Bhamo that the Irawaddy Flotilla Company doubled its service between Mandalay and Bhamo.* \n\nSimultaneously pressure in Britain from Chambers of Commerce persuaded the government to support the Indian government's plan to resume exploration of the Bhamo-Yunnan overland route, and to request co-operation from China through the British Minister at Peking. The King of Burma was also in favour of resuming trade relations with China, having been advised from Peking that China would like to resume \"the old relationship, and continue the practice of exchanging decennial missions\". \n\nLieutenant Colonel Horace A. Browne, a former Deputy Commissioner in Burma, was chosen as leader of the Burma party, which would go from Mandalay to Bhamo by steamer, and then overland into Yunnan by one of three possible routes. At the same time A.R. Margary of the China Consular Service would start from Hankow—then the limit of steam navigation on the Yangtze—and go by junk to Yochow at the entrance to the Tungting Lake, through the Lake and by the Yuan River to the border of Kweichow, from where he would complete his journey overland. Browne's party arrived at Bhamo on 15th January 1875, and were joined by Margary, who had left Hankow on 4th September 1874, two days later. The latter had had a comparatively uneventful journey, although at some places the population was decidedly hostile. At Yunnanfu, however, the officials were courteous and helpful. All through Yunnan Margary had passed ruined towns and villages, and seen the widespread destruction caused by the recent rebellion. \n\nOn 23rd January the combined party left Bhamo for Yunnan, accompanied by fifteen Sikh guards brought from India by Browne, and an escort of 150 soldiers provided by the King of Burma, who were to go as far as the border. At the last minute Browne decided to go by the Ponlyne instead of by the Sawaddy route, to avoid possible conflict with the Kachin tribesmen on the latter. A few \n\nThe Irawaddy Flotilla Company was formed in 1864 when Todd Findlay & Co. of Glasgow (who had a branch in Rangoon) bought four old river steamers and three 'flats' of the Indian government's Irawaddy Flotilla, which had given good service in the Anglo-Burmese Wars. Hopes of greatly increased trade between Burma and Yunnan were high, and there was keen competition to buy the Flotilla, including an offer from a French company, and one from Mackinnon & Mackenzie, who were then managing agents of the Calcutta and Burma Steam Navigation Company which later became the British India Steam Navigation Company.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207893, "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": 281, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "266\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\ncommunity. They resisted being sent to the temporary plague hospitals set up under the direction of European doctors. They feared that the bodies of dead relatives and friends would not be treated according to Chinese custom. The mood of the Chinese population became so hostile, almost breaking into open rebellion, that the Government finally permitted the Directors of Tung Wah Hospital to open a plague hospital in a recently built and as yet unoccupied pig and sheep depot in Kennedy Town. The attempt to force western medical treatment upon a Chinese population already aroused by the natural fear of the plague, further alienated the general population from any suggestion that western methods should be introduced into Tung Wah. The President of the Directors in that year was in the unenviable position of being also a member of the Sanitary Board whose duties it was to initiate and enforce measures to control the plague. His position with a foot in two camps provoked an attack upon his business premises while he was chairing a meeting at Tung Wah called to consider the protests of the Chinese community against the measures of the Government. Upon receiving the news of the attack, he hurriedly left the meeting, but his chair was no more outside the gates of the hospital than the hostile crowd which had gathered began stoning the chair bearers and rushed the chair turning it upside down with the unfortunate Chairman inside. He managed to crawl out and rush back within the safety of the Tung Wah gates. An Indian constable blew his whistle and a group of watchmen of the Hospital rushed out and the crowd dispersed. The incident reflects the strong feeling surging in the Chinese community against the measures taken by the Government in the plague crisis.\n\nThe Governor was not only recipient of hostility from the Chinese community but was also strongly criticised in the English press for the slowness with which Government undertook plague measures and for making concessions to the feelings of the Chinese regarding the treatment and care of plague victims. He may have been stung by these criticisms, for after the passing of the plague he took a very strong stand in demands made on Tung Wah to change its former policy of exclusive employment of doctors trained in traditional Chinese medicine.\n\nIn 1895 a Commission was appointed to inquire into whether the Hospital should be closed, or, if continued, what changes should be made. There was no question in official minds that it could", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208124, "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-1977", "page_number": 163, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "MEMORIES OF THE DISTRICT OFFICE SOUTH \n\n147 \n\nkept the raiders under fire from the slope behind, but they got away with their plunder, including some arms and ammunition. The Captain Superintendent of Police at the time, F. J. Badeley, a cadet officer, retired soon after, and the story went that the Governor, Sir Henry May, who came in July 1912 after about eight years as Colonial Secretary and two years in Fiji, took this opportunity to get rid of him because he was 'persona non grata' to him. (There were said to be several such in the Service). The Government took the hint given by the pirates and built a new police station on a much more commanding site well inland, surrounded by barbed wire.\n\nTalking of New Territory police station siting, the Tai O station was originally to have been built close to the village, but the local elders put up representations against it, and the presence of mosquitoes in the village may have provided an argument for its present siting beyond Shek Tsai Po. Silting of the harbour may also have influenced the Government. But I have heard that what influenced the villagers was the existence of gambling houses which yielded them a good profit, and they knew that with the police among them the hope of their gains would be gone. In 1925 they had their reward. A boatload of 60 pirates from the Delta landed at Po Chu Tam, marched along the creek-side road and plundered the village, murdering a woman and kidnapping two men. They got away without interference. Government promptly 'locked the stable door' by stationing an armed Indian police guard - later replaced by village scouts in a matshed close to the mouth of Po Chu Tam creek for several months, about 50 yards from the site of an old Chinese stone-built guard station dating from the era of Japanese piracy in South China. Apparently the Police knew nothing of the raid till all was over. I think all that happened was that the sergeant in charge was transferred to another station.\n\nWhen I first took charge of the District Office, the 'black gold' rush had been over for three years, the bottom having dropped out of the tungsten market with the coming of peace; but the lime-burning and sand-digging boom was in full swing because of the roadmaking and building then going on in Hong Kong and Kowloon. (These were times of anarchy in China). Thus I had to deal with one or two applications for land for limekilns. These kilns were thickest on Ping Chau; but Nei Kwu Chau and Tsing Yi also had kilns, and another was put up at Hang Hau. This distribution is due partly", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208130, "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-1977", "page_number": 169, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "MEMORIES OF THE DISTRICT OFFICE SOUTH \n\n153 \n\nOccasionally the D.O. was called on to do special jobs outside his district. One such job I did at the Land Officer's request in 1930 or 1931 was to enquire into the holdings in Stanley village, to discover who the various lot owners were; this meant a good deal of domiciliary visitation in searching for lot boundaries, and looking for owners who might turn out to be in Macao, Australia, or Panama, and were not infrequently in their graves. This was necessary because the Land Office had no demarcators, and the Land Officer knew law but not Chinese: and the village was to be replanned and modernised. I hope the right people got the compensation, whether in land or cash: I never heard anything over the arrangements.\n\nThe collection of revenue from the District, excluding lots held directly from the Government as Inland Lots granted through the Land Office, was always a most important duty of the District Officer. The Crown rent was collected both at the District Office and at various outstations, chiefly Tai O, Cheung Chau, Tsun Wan, and the small police quarters at Yung Shue Wan on Lamma. The outstation collections were done by a shroff accompanied by an Indian constable, and in the remotest places the Water Police gave their assistance. As a rule I believe the Water Police brought back the shroff and the money, though I think the ordinary ferry conveyed him to the scene of action. The collecting was done at the local police stations. It always began about the end of July, after the first rice crop, and went on at full blast till about October: defaulters were dealt with early the next year. Licence fees for forestry, squatters' fees, and pineapple plantation licence fees were usually paid before midsummer at the District Office.\n\nIn 1925, the year of the big Communist-inspired Nationalist general strike, the office shroff was transferred on promotion. His substitute was a young fellow fresh from the Treasury, who took advantage of the disturbance and the preoccupations of his superiors to embezzle part of the receipts, and finally absconded three months after the strike began. A former District Officer South remarked to me later that he had always been worried by the possibility of this kind of thing happening to him, and the almost total impossibility of keeping a tight check on shroffs when frequent absence from the office, sometimes all day, is part of the D.O's duty. Luckily his security just covered his defalcations: and another shroff in the same racket was caught out by me and part of his loot recovered.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208471, "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": 195, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "# WOODBLOCK PRINTING\n\n179\n\nthan eight thousand volumes together with the world's oldest wood-block printed book are now kept by the British Museum in London. In 1908 a Frenchman, Professor Paul Pelliot, took away two thousand five hundred more volumes. What remained in the library, around eight thousand volumes, were sent to Peking in 1911 and are now kept in the Peking Library.\n\nBuddhism came to China along the Old Silk Road first from Central Asia at the end of the last millennium BC and again in 67 AD when a mission sent to India by the Han Emperor Ming Ti (***) returned with two learned Indian scholars. Chinese pilgrims, notably Fa-hsien (3); §) 399-424 AD and Hsuan-tsang (✯✯) 625-645 AD, used the Old Silk Road. All went through Tun-huang,\n\nBy the time of the Tang Dynasty, 618-905 AD, woodblock printing had already developed to a high state of artistry. Buddhists made full use of the printing technique to popularize their religion. Buddhism was very prosperous at that time. There were more than five thousand temples in existence, and around three million people became monks or nuns. The temple authorities and their followers engaged in publishing Buddhist texts or sutras with great enthusiasm, as they believed that the more texts or sutras that could be published and circulated the more merit would be rewarded. Most of the sutras were printed with images and illustrations so that they could be better understood by those followers with only little education.\n\nIn the year 931 AD the government of Late Tang (k) set up a special printing section under the Education Department (§76) to engage scholars, carvers, and printers to make woodblocks to print all classical texts copied from the stone texts, the first official textbook printing in Chinese history. It took twenty-two years to accomplish the whole series, consisting of nine classical texts totalling one hundred and thirty volumes and finished in the year 953 AD, Late Chou (£§).\n\nThe great advance in wood engraving skill should be credited to Northern Sung Dynasty (a). In the period of the tenth or twelfth centuries, the production of both classical texts and illustrated novels, including imprints of stone and woodblock folk prints, increased in quantity and quality. Books of fiction printed in the Sung Dynasty 960-1179 AD were amply illustrated, with illustrations\n\nPage 195\n\nPage 196", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208693, "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": 150, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "THE MARYKNOLL MISSION, HONG KONG 1941-46\n\n123\n\nUpon inquiry, we were at first directed to the downtown branch, then to another branch station further out along Des Voeux Road; then still further west to Kennedy Town, only to find that since we lived at Pokfulam and just over the border of the Kennedy Town district, we had to apply at Aberdeen. Thus the intricacies of Japanese administration. At Aberdeen, Father Troesch secured our cards, and from then on was kept more than busy trying to keep us fed. As there were no deliveries, all food had to be carried by hand. Both Father Troesch and Brother Thaddeus did yeoman work along these lines. Food items rationed from Government stores were rice, flour, beans, oil and firewood, while meat, fish, vegetables and other foods could be purchased in the open market. Rationed food could also be purchased downtown, but at a higher price. During our stay at Bethany, our food was substantial though very simple and with little variation from day to day. Our meals were portioned and because of our lack of income and the uncertainty of the length of our stay in Hong Kong, we lived pretty frugally. We had meat once a day and fish once a day; a little ground corn for cereal at breakfast with two small pieces of bread, a banana and a cup of coffee. Our cook was very good, however, and he managed to give us very tasty meals with the limited facilities at his disposal.\n\nThe 18th of September was the anniversary of the Mukden Incident, and in anticipation of any trouble the Japanese intensified their patrol and search activities on the streets. For instance, on the trip by bus from Pokfulam to Hong Kong, a distance of two or three miles, we were obliged during those days to get off the bus at barriers erected at Queen Mary Hospital, Mount Davis and at the University in West Point. After the anniversary, however, the only barrier to be passed was that at Mount Davis, where all passengers had to get out of the bus and file past an Indian or a Chinese policeman who searched them, though not very thoroughly. As a matter of fact, we foreigners were not searched actually, but we had to dismount from the bus and pass through the barrier. Downtown in those early days of our freedom, we were called upon a few times to show our passes, but after that, we did not have to do so.\n\nOur early days at Bethany were spent quietly, we trying to re-orientate ourselves after our Camp experience, but somehow or other, it was difficult to get back to normalcy. There was still the\n\nPage 150\n\nPage 151", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208700, "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": 157, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "130\n\nREVS. J. SMITH AND WM. DOWNS\n\nIn the first raid, bombs fell on the Kowloon dock area, on Whitfield Barracks, on a Japanese army canteen on Nathan Road and a few in the streets of Kowloon. The second and midnight raid was on the lighting plant at North Point, but the bombs, fortunately for us, missed their target. On the third visit, a few bombs fell near the Kowloon shipbuilding yards. One unexploded bomb was said to have been found near the lighting plant, and it was marked \"Cleveland, Ohio.\"\n\nAs a consequence of these raids, the whole city was blacked out at night, all Japanese flags which had been so gaily flying from many buildings were hauled down, and for a month after, there were from two to a dozen Japanese planes in the air all day, flying at a great height looking for more visitors, no doubt.\n\nWith the advent of the month of November, we secured a Hakka teacher and our Language School was functioning, though not too briskly. Early in the month, Father Moore took to his bed with some ailment, which Dr. Samy diagnosed as a nervous stomach. Dr. Samy, by the way, is a neighbor of ours, and an Indian doctor, very prominent in Hong Kong. He has a very talented Chinese wife, and two daughters. He formerly lived near the Queen Mary Hospital, but the Japanese took over his home and, in exchange, gave him a house just below Bethany. Fathers Toomey and McKeirnan teach his children daily, and they often come to visit us. The doctor and his wife have been extremely kind to us and have offered to give us financial help if we find it necessary.\n\nWe mustered up enough courage again to approach the Foreign Office about permission to go to Kwangchauwan, but again came back a final \"NO!\" Since their release from the Camp, the Maryknoll Sisters have been living in Holy Spirit School on Caine Road, but now they are threatened with eviction, as some branch of the government wants the house for some purpose or other.\n\nDuring the month, Father Troesch secured permission to visit our House at Stanley, on pretext of getting some church goods which we needed. All together, we made five trips, two or three Fathers going each time, and each time bringing back a few suitcases full of odds and ends which we managed to salvage in the attic. A few of the extern Carmelite Sisters accompanied us, and they saved quite a number of things for us, which the Mother Superior kindly consented to keep in Carmel for us. Among the salvaged goods were", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208927, "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-1980", "page_number": 89, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "HONG KONG RIOTS OF OCTOBER 1884\n\n57\n\nWhat happened in Hong Kong in the fall of 1884 to make this study necessary? According to the local newspaper and official reports of the colonial administration, the boatmen engaged in the servicing of ships in Hong Kong harbor refused to provide their services to ships flying the French flag. When the boatmen were taken to court and fined for refusing to work, they claimed that they were being coerced by the Chinese authorities at Canton who threatened their relatives with harm if the boatmen did not boycott the French. France and China were engaged in an undeclared war, and the Cantonese authorities were using the Hong Kong Chinese to put pressure on the French—or so the boatmen were reported to have claimed in court.\n\nWhen at last the boatmen were prepared to return to work, they could hardly have been able to afford to remain out forever—they were prevented from doing so by local Chinese mobs. Attempts by the police to break up those mobs led to serious street violence in which at least one Chinese rioter was killed and a number of Sikh police injured. Troops had to be called out, and for several days, the situation was serious enough for the authorities in London to wonder if an Indian regiment might be needed to keep order in the Colony. Fortunately, the disturbances ended before this extra measure became necessary.\n\nAs matters turned out, though no troops were needed, the colonial administration felt that a new peace preservation ordinance was necessary. It was hurriedly passed and required the collection of all arms from the Chinese population. Large quantities were collected, and a number of people believed to be agitators were ordered banished from the Colony. The belief that one of those banished, seventy-year-old Yau Poot-in, had been sent to Hong Kong with three thousand dollars to stir up trouble against the French eventually led to official protests to the Imperial Government by the British Legation in Peking.3\n\nYet, in spite of its many implications, the incident is comparatively unknown. Its underlying causes, as well as the truth about its origins, remain obscure. Was it, as the colonial administrators and the press believed, merely the result of intimidation and agitation from Canton with the support of anti-foreign and criminal elements within the Colony? Or was it an example of the growing sense of nationalism among the Chinese, which is more clearly seen...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208939, "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-1980", "page_number": 101, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "SILK & SILVER: MACAU, MANILA TRADE\n\n69\n\nthe imprisonment of Tomé Pires, whom they had sent as ambassador to the Emperor, and to the closure of Canton until 1530 to all foreign commerce. Henceforth the Portuguese had to trade clandestinely around the Bay of Amoy and at Ningpo in Fukien in the various goods, notably pepper and sandalwood, for which no amount of imperial prohibitions could lessen the demand in China.\n\nThe commercial losses suffered by the Chinese as a result of their isolationism and the prohibition of their own navigation were gains for the Portuguese. As the American scholar George D. Winius has aptly put it, \"in the Atlantic the Portuguese were explorers; in the Indian Ocean they were conquerors and in the Far East they were businessmen\". Before long their trading activities in the China Sea had developed sufficiently to make inadequate the temporary shacks and tents in which they stored and displayed their wares in such places as Shang-ch'uan (Portuguese Sanchao or São João, where St. Francis Xavier died of fever in 1552), and they began to press the Chinese authorities for a trading centre of their own. In 1555 the Jesuit Father Belchior Nunes Barreto described Shang-ch'uan as a centre for trade with the Chinese where \"silk, porcelain, camphor, copper, alum and China-wood are bartered for many kinds of merchandise from this land\" (i.e. Japan).7 In the previous year Leonel de Sousa had secured permission for regular trade with China on payment of customs dues and in 1557 the Portuguese were allowed to establish themselves at Ao-men (Gate of the Bay), otherwise known as Amacon, Macau or the City of the Name of God in China.8\n\nThere was no written agreement with the Chinese for the establishment of Macau as a Portuguese enclave in China and, though the Portuguese continued to pay rent to the Chinese government till 1849, their sovereign rights in Macau were not fully conceded till 1887. But from the outset, Macau's extra-territoriality was admitted in practice because it suited both parties to the agreement - the Portuguese because it gave them a secure place in a highly profitable commercial network and the Chinese because, as later with Hong Kong, they could now enjoy most of the benefit of foreign trade without having to abandon their restrictions on foreigners entering or Chinese leaving China.\n\nA gate was erected across the isthmus joining Macau with the mainland - the Porta do Cêrco - upon which the Portuguese placed a grandiloquent inscription: \"Dread our greatness and respect...\"", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208940, "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-1980", "page_number": 102, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "70 \n\nJOHN VILLIERS \n\n\"pect our virtue\". Through this gate the Chinese passed the food and other supplies needed by the inhabitants, but at other times they sealed the gate with strips of paper, allowing into China only those few Portuguese officials with authorisation and sending to Macau only customs officers. \n\nThe Portuguese in Macau were first given some official recognition by the Chinese government in 1582 when the new Viceroy of Canton and Kwangsi summoned Macau's chief officials to his court. They came with 4,000 cruzados worth of presents—velvets, crystals, mirrors and so on—and were informed that foreigners could continue to inhabit Macau provided they remained subject to the laws of the Empire.10 \n\nBy 1585 the settlement had acquired full city status with its own municipal council (Senado da Câmara). The Senado was dominated by the casados, Portuguese who had retired from the service of the crown, married and settled permanently in Macau. These acted not only as agents for the Chinese traders but traded on their own account in pepper, cloves, sandalwood and other goods from the Indonesian islands and financed voyages to Manila and to Japan in the so-called Great Ship from Amacon. Macau was not under royal control and was not ruled by fidalgos sent out from Portugal or Goa, so that the interests of the Portuguese government were seldom, if ever, allowed to prevail. The Crown had to be content with a share in the profits from the annual voyages that it financed and the revenues from customs, duties and license fees levied on the merchants.11 \n\nThe overall command of the government of Macau was in the hands of the Captain-major of the Japan voyage, who would spend some months in Macau each year en route to Japan from Goa via Malacca—from one end of the Estado da India to the other. As the Portuguese Crown seldom got more than the commissions and port duties paid in Goa and Malacca, the Captain-major was able to amass a large fortune for himself. He was, however, only permitted to operate a single ship during his term of office so he would ensure that it was the largest ship available. This ship he would load at Goa with Gujerati cottons, chintzes and other Indian textiles, woollen and scarlet cloths, wine, glassware, crystal and Flemish clocks. He would sail with the monsoon in April or May to Malacca, where much of his cargo would be traded for Indonesian spices, camphor and sandalwood and hides from Siam. Thence he", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209646, "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": 303, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n281\n\ndisturbances were under control to rescind the proclamation invoking emergency powers as soon as the Chinese New Year celebrations were over. But conditions in the colony had not yet fully returned to normal and various wild rumours continued to be put into circulation, including the story that when May arrived the enlarged garrison would make an attack on China and annex further areas of Guangdong north of the New Territories. However, no-one was expecting any serious trouble on the morning of 4th July when the elite of the colony turned out to welcome the new governor.\n\nThe ship bringing Sir Henry May from Fiji arrived off Kowloon point early in the morning and at 10 a.m. Sir Henry crossed the harbour in the government launch to Blake Pier where he was greeted with a salute of 17 guns. He inspected the guard of honour and met the members of the Executive and Legislative Councils, all of whom were well-known to him. Among them was Sir Kai Ho Kai, the senior member of the Legislative Council, who had just received his knighthood, the first ever given to a Chinese in Hong Kong. Sir Kai had strong connections with the reform movement in China, but he had loyally supported the British administration in the measures taken to deal with violence in the colony, and the knighthood was his reward for this as well as for his long career of public service.\n\nThe next part of the ceremonial was the procession to the City Hall. Sir Henry and Lady May took their seats side by side in two sedan chairs, each carried by eight coolies. The chairs were escorted by eight Indian constables, four on the right of Sir Henry's chair marching two paces apart, and four on the left of Lady May's chair. Behind them was a European police sergeant, and he was followed by four more chairs carrying the four daughters of the new governor. The route to the City Hall was lined by soldiers stationed at intervals of three paces on either side of the road.\n\nAs the procession left Blake Pier and passed along Pedder Street towards Des Voeux Road a Chinese dressed in European clothes was seen to push his way through the crowd around the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209649, "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": 306, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "284\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nsympathy of all right-thinking Chinese who have not been slow to express their profound abhorrence of the action'. This was certainly true of the Chinese elite. A deputation of forty leading Chinese, including Legislative Councillors, the Director of the Tung Wah Hospital and members of the Committee of the Po Leung Kuk and the District Watchmen's Committee, waited on the Governor two days after the crime to testify to the loyalty of the community and their profound horror at the outrage.\n\nThere is little evidence to show how far such sentiments were widely shared by the rest of society. The only surviving Chinese newspaper made no comment and did not even carry a report of the incident.10 The police intercepted a letter from the landlady of the place where Li had been living in which she mentioned casually that her lodger had fired at the Governor 'and most unfortunately missed him'. At least one man saw a good omen in the affair; an Indian shopkeeper when told the news reportedly smiled and said, “Very good joss. That means there will be prosperity for Hong Kong.”\n\nAny deterrent effect of the sentence passed on Li did not last for long. Four months later the Hong Kong government made a further attempt to outlaw the use of coins minted in Canton by persuading the Tramway company to refuse to accept them. Agitators convinced the public that this was an insult to the new Republican government and a boycott of the tramway began in November, accompanied by widespread intimidation and violence directed against those using the trams and Europeans in general. In December the emergency powers under the Peace Preservation Ordinance were once again brought into force by proclamation.12\n\nOn\n\nLi Hon Hing only served six years of his life sentence.13 On 18 June 1918 Sir Henry May informed the Executive Council that he proposed to pardon the prisoner and order his release from prison. No reason is given in the Minutes of the Council for this act of clemency.19\n\nN. J. MINERS", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209655, "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": 312, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\ninclude all manufactured goods. In addition Yarn and Metals including Tin were to be admitted. All the other items of the Tariff were to be excluded in the mean time. Possibly none of these are of any great importance except cotton of which however the import into Pakhoi is between 20 and 30,000 piculs per annum. The larger portion of this is North China Cotton, and I was informed that one reason for the exclusion of cotton was that it was not of Foreign origin. This objection does not apply to Indian Cotton, but it is excluded along with the other. The objection also is inconsistent with the fact that Sugar from Hong Kong is allowed to enter under pass on the Yangtze.\n\nAlong with the proclamation above mentioned Export Passes for Sugar were declared procurable, but as the production is small this concession is worth little. The Viceroy has also authorized passes for Cassia but there is some hitch with the prefect of Yuelin or as it is called locally Watlam and the Chinese Customs Commissioner has proceeded to his prefecture to explain matters to him. Should he continue to hold out the Commissioner has to proceed to Kweilin where the Governor of Kwangsi has his seat of Government to put matters straight with him. You will thus see that in regard to cassia there is no certainty of an immediate issue of passes and all other items in the Tariff are excluded from the benefit of them.\n\nBy far the largest portion of the Exports from Pakhoi come from the prefecture of Leeiuchow in which Pakhoi itself is situated, and in regard to them Transit Passes are scarcely required as the various taxes as a rule do not exceed the half duty payable for a pass. Goods from Kwangsi however would be benefited by a pass. These are of no great importance except Cassia, Anniseed and Anniseed Oil. With passes business could be done. In addition there is Cassia Oil but the Duty of $9 is prohibitory, seeing the Duty by Junk is under $3. There would appear to be some mistake in the duty as the price of the Oil is only about", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209772, "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": 31, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "The Memorial is mentioned in the Report of the Antiquities Advisory Board, 1983 (published by the Antiquities and Monuments Office, Urban Services Department) as \"having been restored with a generous contribution from the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club and the agreement of the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals\" (p. 11 and plate 10 of the Report).\n\nexemplifies two major There is the Buddhist suffering, and the long-\n\n(d) The Tung Wah Eastern Hospital another institution built with private funds which motivating forces in local life. concern to relieve poverty and established Chinese tradition that the rich should participate in good works to assist the community and be seen to be doing so through a proliferation of photographs of donors, memorials, subscription lists and the like. This is evident (I think) to a far greater degree than in the West, where published subscription lists and a memorial stone or two are usually enough to record charitable contributions.\n\n(e) The Sir Ellis Kadoorie Government School-established in another location in the 1890s through the generosity of one of the Kadoorie family. These merchant princes of Hong Kong and Shanghai originated from Baghdad. Their zeal for community projects, and their conviction that wealth generated from the community should be ploughed back into it, came over strongly in the interesting film on the Kadoorie Agricultural Association's work here and in Nepal which we showed to our members at the British Council recently. The school was originally planned to be used mainly by Indian and Pakistani children, but it is now attended by Chinese also.\n\n(f) The Hong Kong Buddhist Association School this is one of a large number of schools operated by the Association, and also by individual Buddhist organisations. The Association was founded in 1932, revived in 1945 it was inactive during the Japanese", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210708, "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": 59, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "42 \n\nWALTER GREENWOOD \n\nsaying he expected a C.M.G. and this I believe dished his chances. In any case I submit that it is highly improper for a Government pensioner, who has been knighted, to publish such a statement and I think Sir Edward Ackroyd should be called upon for an explanation through the Colonial Office\". It may be that if Francis had not made his protest the Government would have had second thoughts. But as the China Mail observed it was not in his nature to allow the neglect to pass unnoticed. The handsome, paltry, historical silver inkstand was ordered to be returned to the Crown Agents to be sold for the benefit of the Colony.\n\nFrancis was prominent in public affairs in a number of respects in addition to those already mentioned. To take a few examples. He was on the committees formed to organise the celebration of the Queen's Golden and Diamond Jubilees. As to the former he favoured it being marked by a contribution to the British Indian and Colonial Institute, which had the support of the Royal Family, but in the end the committee decided on a statue which is now in Victoria Park. On the latter occasion he was awarded the Governor's Jubilee medal for his services. He was also on the Hong Kong Golden Jubilee committee. He attended a number of the protest meetings which were a feature of life in Hong Kong, and usually had something to say. His last public appointment was as Chairman of the Food Supply Commission in 1900. He had a number of business interests which, presumably, were not regarded as inconsistent with his status as a practising member of the Bar. The most interesting relate to Borneo and newspapers. In 1889 he paid an extended visit to Borneo and whilst there purchased the island of Balambangan. His main interest was in the prospects for growing tobacco. Whilst in Borneo he \"took the trouble to learn all about it” and of course lectured about it on his return. On the death of Fraser Smith in 1895 he acquired an interest in the Daily Telegraph which he retained until 1900. He was said to have directed the policy of the newspaper during that period. It was also said in an obituary that he was proprietor of the China Mail for a time.\n\nHe was a member of many clubs and societies. He was a founder member of the Jockey Club and secretary of its first rule committee. He took a prominent part in disputes between the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210897, "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": 248, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "231\n\nHowever, after it had been drafted and tentatively accepted by the representatives of both China and Great Britain, the British Home Government raised objections to the opium clause and wished to have it modified before the formal ratification of the agreement.\n\nSome of the difficulty had been caused because the British negotiators had not consulted British interests in India regarding the opium clause. Reference to India was important as the sale of opium was considered essential to the British Indian economy. If the export was curtailed or stopped, drastic readjustments, both in agriculture and in finance, would have had to be made.\n\nThe demand to adopt these hard measures, however, was increasingly heard by the British Government. It came under criticism both at home and abroad about its opium policy.\n\nIn 1881, the Viceroy of Chihli, Li Hung-chang, sent an unofficial representative to India to discuss the problem with the authorities there. He proposed that China buy up all the opium on the understanding that there would be a gradual reduction in its production over the years.\n\nThe plan would have also meant severe financial readjustments for China, as the taxes it derived from opium imports were a significant part of its revenue.\n\nViceroy Li presented a memorial to the Chinese emperor for the approval of the creation of an opium monopoly by the Chinese Government. In the memorial he presented the several advantages of the plan. He argued that it would enable the Chinese Government to levy whatever tax it wished on opium without any interference from foreign powers. With China controlling all opium imports, it could then begin a programme to control the production of opium within China.\n\nThe view of one newspaper editor was that the plan, if put into effect, would be a \"test of their (the Chinese) sincerity of the position they have taken since opium was first introduced to China; viz, that it is a poisonous and dangerous drug, seriously detrimental...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210898, "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": 249, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "232\n\nCARL SMITH\n\ntal to their people, and it will thus be in their power to cut off the supply altogether by a pecuniary sacrifice, far less than that voluntarily taken by England in the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies.\n\nA number of historians have regarded Li Hung-chang's attitude towards the opium problem as ambiguous. However that may be, he took a strong stand in a letter he addressed to the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade.\n\nHis statement was couched in a high moral tone.\n\n\"Opium is a subject of discussion of which England and China can never meet on common ground. China views the whole question from a moral standpoint; England from a fiscal. England would sustain a source of revenue in India, while China contends for the lives and prosperity of its people. The ruling motive of China is to repress opium by heavy taxation everywhere, whereas with England the manifest object is to make opium cheaper, and thus increase and stimulate the demand in China.”\n\nLi recognised that the crux of the issue was the importance of opium for the revenue of India, and thus indirectly of Britain. He contended that China did not tax opium because of the revenue it produced, but “the present import duty on opium was established, not from choice, but because China submitted to the adverse decision of arms. The war must be considered as China's standing protest against legalising such a revenue.\n\nA Shanghai paper did not believe the letter was composed by Viceroy Li. It stated: \"It bears the impression of foreign --- we had almost written missionary penmanship throughout.” It was perhaps the product of one of the Viceroy's advisers trained in a missionary school, such as Wu T’ing-fang (Ng Choy) or Chan Lai-sun. Whoever wrote it, it went out under Li's name and must have represented his opinions.\n\nThe letter became the subject of a question in Parliament to the Secretary of State for India as to whether the Indian Government was taking any steps to review Britain's position on the opium", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211066, "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": 127, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "102\n\nof this has yet been found although contemporary maps indicated at La Loma a \"Burial place of infidels.” Infidels comprised non-Catholics and included European Protestants, Chinese, and Indians. Incidentally, still living in Cainta, only a few miles away are the descendants of the Indian troops of the expedition who decided to stay after deserting or being left behind after their boat capsized, but their distinctive looks are, however, slowly disappearing. Sadly, after being governed by the East India Company for eighteen months, Manila had to be returned to the Spanish by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Speculation still exists amongst Filipino scholars about what the Philippines might have been if the British had remained in control — a British colony in the Far East, rich in natural resources, fifty years before the acquisition of Singapore and Malaya and eighty years before Hong Kong.\n\nTrade continued to prosper after the resumption of Spanish Authority, and, until 1821 the Philippines continued to be run from Mexico. Treaty ports and trading posts were established in several places including Sual in Pangasinan, on Luzon Island, in Iloilo on Panay and on Cebu and Protestant cemeteries were established in each town, where beforehand the burial of Protestants in consecrated ground was prohibited, (as was the importation of Protestant Bibles).\n\nWith the expansion of trade, a burial place for the four hundred to five hundred aliens from Europe and North America living in Manila, was becoming an urgent necessity.\n\nIn 1827 the first British Consul General was appointed and it was his successor, John William Perry Farren (sometimes referred to as Fearon) who in 1860 attempted to establish a Protestant Cemetery for the mostly but not exclusively British residents. Sadly, Farren became one of the cemetery's first residents within weeks of its establishment.\n\nOn May 27th, 1862, the Spanish Government by a \"Superior Decreto\" granted permission to construct the Cemetery, and on March 11th, 1864 a lease was signed between Farren and Don Jose Bonifacio Roxas, the Owner of Hacienda de San Pedro, of a parcel of land of 31,656 \"varas cuadradas\" (22,467.85 sq metres or", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211191, "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": 252, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "227\n\nThe chairman of the public meeting had attempted to avoid these difficulties. He sensed that the community was about to launch itself into a stormy sea if it decided too quickly on a project.\n\nHe suggested that they might like to have more time to consider the matter. If so, he said he would be quite willing to entertain a motion for the meeting to be postponed until there was sufficient time for mature reflection. Or, as an alternative, if there was no wish for another meeting, the official committee which was to be named could be instructed to ascertain the views and wishes of the whole community.\n\nThese suggestions were wise, and much discord would have been avoided if they had been heeded.\n\nFollowing the meeting, one writer listed all the schemes which had come to his notice. He had heard of \"the enlargement of the already too large City Hall, of the removal of the Clock Tower to another site, of transporting the Dent Fountain to Wongneichong (to be buried there, perhaps) and of its replacement by a statue of the Queen in front of the City Hall, the addition of a ballroom to Government House, of a statue of the Queen anywhere or everywhere, of a subscription to the Indian and Colonial Institute, of the balance of subscriptions for a fete and rejoicings being handed over to the local charities, of a high school for girls, a home for the Protection of Young Girls, and (most wonderful of all) of a Poor House.\"\n\nTo put his own stamp of foolishness on the affair, the writer said: \"It has likewise been breathed softly, but not yet openly proposed, that a Home for Decayed British Merchants who have subscribed regularly for charities for say twenty years back might be suitable, as it seems likely to be a necessary mode of celebrating the historical event of Her Majesty's jubilee.\"\n\nA few of the proposals are of special interest because they reflect some of the social problems of the period. Two of them were concerned about the needs of girls in Hongkong.\n\nThe proposal for a middle school for girls would satisfy an", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211341, "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-1988", "page_number": 57, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "33\n\n57\n\nBourboulon to Walewski, 6 September, 1858, CP, vol. 22, fol. 147, AE, and D'Abouville to Min. de la Marine, 27 November, 1858, BB4763, fol. 12, AN.\n\n5# Alcock to Bowring, 12 April, 1859, Accounts and Papers, LXIX 2714 (1860) and Alcock to Bowring, 6 April, FO881894, p. 4, incl. 2 number 1, PRO.\n\n50 Alcock to Bowring, 12 April, 1859, FO881894, Confidential Print, p. 1 in no incl.\n\n1 in no. 1 no folio # PRO.\n\nAlcock to Bowring, 12 April, 1859, Accounts and Papers, LXIX 2761 (1860) PRO.\n\nHuang Proclamation, trans. by Parkes, 6 April, 1859, BB4763, fol. 93-100, Armee.\n\n62 Proclamation of April 7, Accounts and Papers, LXIX 2714 (1860) p. 4, no. 1, PRO.\n\n6.3 Prospectus stating the conditions on which the British Government is willing to engage **Emmigrants** for her West Indian Possessions,\" 13 October, 1859, CCC, Canton, vol. 2, fol. 148, AE.\n\nLao to Allied Commission, 27 October, 1859, Accounts and Papers, LXIX 2714 (1860) fol. 16, PRO.\n\nD'Abouville to Min. de la Marine, 27 October, 1859, BB4763, fol. 288-91, AN.\n\n66 Bruce to Russell, 5 December, 1859, Confidential Prints, FO405: 6, fol. 31 in no. 7 PRO.\n\n47 Allied Commission Memorandum, 24 January, 1860, Accounts and Papers, LXIX 2714, (1860) fol. 30 and \"Rules under which houses for the Reception of Chinese Emmigrants. no date, [prob. November 1859] Accounts and Papers, LXIX 2714 (1860), encl. 12 on no. 6, vol. 18, PRO.\n\nL\n\n”\n\nStraubenzee & Hope to D'Abouville, 12 January, 1860, CCC, Canton, vol. 2, fol. 158-160, AE.\n\nStraubenzce to Sidney Herbert, 14 January, 1860, Accounts and Papers, LXIX 2714 (1860), PRO and D'Abouville, to Com. de Chef de Mers, 13 January, 1860, BB4763, fol. 344-45, AN.\n\n70 Charles de Mutrecy, Journal de la Campaigne de Chine 1859-60, vol. 1. (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1861) vol. 1, p. 225.\n\n71 Charner to Min. de la Marine, 13 November, 1861, CP, vol. 37, fol. 10, AE, and **Account of Evacuation of Canton on 21 October 1861**\" Accounts and Papers, LXII 2919, (1862), p. 3-4, PRO.\n\n72\n\nSteven A. Leibo, \"The Sino-European Educational Missions, 1875 to 1886,\" Asian Profiles [TBA].", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211523, "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-1988", "page_number": 240, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "216\n\nwelcomed Greeks as government servants, mercenaries and artisans. Among many mutual influences between the two cultures one of them was that the Eastern countries imitated Greek coinage and did so even before Alexander. For example, under the occupation of the Persians in Judaea, imitations of Attic coins were minted, adding on them the word “Yahud\" i.e. \"Jewish\". Our coin is a good instance of the use of Greek currency, either genuine or imitated.\n\nThere is evidence of relations between Greece and India, as early as the 10th century B.C., in the Epic of Ramayana, where we find the counterpart of the Greek Centaur, Kinnara of the Sanskrit, and in that of the Bharatas (Mahabaratas) in the similarity between Arjun and Karna and Achilles and Hector of the Illiad of Homer. In philosophy the cynicism of Diogenes of Sinope pervaded the system of the Pasupatas of India. And we find the name of the Indian hero Lakulisa borrowed from that of the Greek hero Heracles (semantically Laku means club; Lakulisa is the cognate of (H)erakle).\n\nThis present coin was found in Papua New Guinea. It must have been brought there by some one from Asia, i.e. India, Malay or other Asian countries. This, in fact, is not only possible but even probable because of the extent of the Greek connections with all these countries in ancient times.\n\nIt would be impossible to know who owned this bracelet with the coin. A probable owner would have been an Indonesian, as these neighbouring Malays used to organize frequent expeditions into New Guinea, looking for gold, paradise-bird feathers and slaves. In that case, we may be allowed to speculate that the coin could have been a significant symbol to the owner.\n\nThe Greek figure could have represented for him Iskandar i.e. Alexander the Great, the alleged ancestor of the Malay race. The word TAPA could have been taken for a Malay word denoting asceticism in the sense of body training, yoga, endurance, etc. On the other hand, the dolphin or porpoise, “lumba\" in Malay, is synonymous with, and a symbol of, play, competition, contest. So, if my speculation is correct, this object would have been a sportsman's token, an emblem of effort in sportsmanship, or ... a simple commercial ornament. In any event,\n\nPage 240\n\nPage 241", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211621, "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": 36, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "1} \n\nAmerican missionary, the Reverend Elijah Bridgman,1 merely noted the formal possession of the island in its journal of occurrences; it gave no precise date nor any details.24 Another reference in the same journal in a historical review of events in China was only marginally fuller.25 The Canton Press, published at this point from Macao, expressed itself slightly puzzled by the lack of information about the event: 'On Tuesday last, the 26th January, the Island of Hongkong, the new settlement ceded by the Chinese to the English, was taken possession of in the name of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. The English colours were hoisted, and saluted from the ships; we have not yet heard any further particulars of the ceremony.' Two weeks later the incident was mentioned again, but no further details were forthcoming.26 The Canton Register made no mention of the possession of Hong Kong except in the context of Elliot's treaty with Ch'i-shan; it seemed unimpressed by the terms and referred to 'the paltry island of Hong Kong'.\n\n› 28\n\nThe two groups with the most immediate interest in the acquisition of Hong Kong for the British were the merchants and missionaries. Unlike the troops, for whom the possession of the island was just one part of a long and arduous expedition in a foreign and unhealthy part of the world, the merchants and missionaries were already operating from the area and found Chinese restrictions on their movements irksome. And unlike the British government and its officials, the traders and propagators of salvation were most cognizant of the advantages that a piece of British territory in South China would afford them. They were not politically or ideologically committed to punishing China for the 'disrespect' it had shown to Britain. It is not known whether any missionaries attended the ceremony on 26 January, but some merchants who were late to have their fortunes inextricably bound up with the colony turned up to witness its official birth. According to a study of the Indian community of Hong Kong, at least four Indian merchants were present in Hong Kong at the flag-hoisting: Cawasjee Pallanjee, the representative of Cursetjee Bomanjee and Co. of Bombay; F. M. Talati; Albert Sassoon;29 and Rustomjee Dhunjee Shaw of P. F. Cama and Co. of Bombay. James Matheson of Jardine Matheson and Co.30 went from Macao to Hong Kong precisely in order to witness the hoisting of the British flag, and afterwards, as he wrote to William Jardine in a postscript to a letter of 30 January, he circumnavigated the island.32 Thus the future character of the colony can be gauged from the type of person with most to gain from its possession by the British.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212197, "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": 139, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "116\n\ncontrolling the rackets of the Shanghai underworld. With the advent of the Japanese they no longer felt safe there and so had taken refuge in Hongkong. The long-gowned men were their bodyguards. These were the gangster chiefs, well regarded by the Chinese government, who had been responsible for the communist purge ten years previously. You can imagine what sort of a strain the presence of such men placed on the vigilance of the Hongkong police.\n\nThe police, however, did trip up badly once. One day a well-dressed, good-looking Chinese gentleman landed from the Chungking passenger plane. He had no passport or credentials and refused to say who he was. So he was detained. He turned out to be Mr. Tai Li, the formidable head of Chiang Kai Shek's dreaded Gestapo. The detention, although very brief, involved a loss of face, and it took a special visit of the British Ambassador to China to Hongkong to smooth the affair over. It is said Mr. Tai Li has ever since used his influence in a direction unfavourable to Britain.\n\nHongkong carried imperial liabilities. It was less irresponsible than Shanghai: nor was it a place like Shanghai where Japanese bagmen flocked in the wake of their army as instruments of Japanese policy with the dual role on the one hand of beguiling the foreign businessman, and on the other of reaping a rich commercial harvest from the trade restrictions imposed by the army on all business which did not pass through Japanese channels. Hongkong knew it had nothing to expect from Japan. It guessed the defences and the garrison were both inadequate; two weak British battalions, one Indian battalion, four out-of-date aircraft, and a small assortment of guns. Yet small as they were, the armed forces looked to their defences. Workmen set to to build concrete pillboxes to cover the beaches, of which there were a large number; alternative sites were prepared for light anti-aircraft guns, roads were built to link weak points in the system, bomb shelters were tunnelled out of the hillsides, and the British civilians, enrolled as volunteers, went into military training. Others served as watchers of the fixed minefields laid off the island, and small naval vessels were set to patrol the adjacent waters outside the boom which floated ready to stretch across the harbour entrance.\n\nBut the Japanese had their spies everywhere. The excellent barber's shop on the ground floor of that English stronghold, the Hongkong", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212301, "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": 243, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "220\n\nand business in Hong Kong has been neglected. Nonetheless, over the past decade some hongs have commissioned researchers and authors to compile company histories. A number of these are listed in the bibliography.\n\nEarlier Days\n\nHistorically, overseas businessmen have been permitted only limited contact with locals in China. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Westerners were only authorised to reside in Canton during the trading season, from October to May. Emperors confined all foreign trade there, as far from Peking as possible, keeping 'unpleasant things at a distance.' Foreigners were forced to maintain their base in the Portuguese city of Macau (established 1557).\n\nThese restrictions caused great inconvenience to merchants. Captain Charles Elliot wrote, on April 6th 1839:\n\n\"There can be neither safety nor honour for either government until Her Majesty's flag flies on these coasts in a secure position.\"\n\nIt was considered necessary to have a colony with a fine harbour, where Europeans could live, work and trade in peace and security. The Union Jack was raised at Possession Point, on Hong Kong Island, on January 26, 1841.\n\nHong Kong was established specifically to facilitate trade. Not surprisingly, therefore, the authorities depended a great deal upon the support of business houses in the early days of the colony. Some of these early trading houses are still trading here today.\n\nBy the end of 1843 there were 12 large British firms in Hong Kong, ten British merchants trading on a smaller scale, and about six Indian companies. The following year there were said to be about 100 foreign firms doing business, half of which were British and about one-quarter Indian or Parsee. Russells, an American firm, had six partners and eight griffins (assistants). Dent and Company (British) five partners and eight assistants, and D. and M. Rustomjee (Parsee) fifteen partners. Jardine Matheson employed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212325, "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": 267, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "244\n\nParsees. At one time, with a German Chairman and an American Deputy Chairman, the Board had no British members. The financial failure of Dent, in 1867, had the effect of freeing the Bank from dependence on any one enterprise and brought about more independent management control. Within months of setting up its headquarters in Hong Kong a branch was opened in London, and further branches were established in San Francisco (1875), New York (1880), Lyons (1881) and Hamburg (1889). By the 1880s The Hong Kong Bank had become banker to the Hong Kong Government, and to this day it is, in effect, the Central Bank of the Territory.\n\nWorld War I proved a difficult period, and its German directors resigned shortly after hostilities commenced. The Bank resumed its leading position in China and the Far East in the 1920s and 30s. Like the Chartered Bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank's branch in Shanghai operated without interruption all through the Cultural Revolution.\n\nToday 'Wardley' is the name of an investment company associated with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. In 1864, Wardley House (demolished in 1882 when its new bank building was completed) was the first premises of the Bank. William Henry Wardley was a staff member of Gibb Livingston. He started his own firm about 1850. Although the company was taken over by F.B. Johnson and James Bowman the name was retained. It stopped trading about 1861, before the Bank was established. But the name, Wardley, has been perpetuated.\n\nThe Mercantile Bank\n\nThe old Mercantile Bank can be traced back to October 1853, with the founding of the Mercantile Bank of Bombay. Within two months it had become the Mercantile Bank of India, London and China, a co-partnership of four Indian proprietors and four British. An office was opened in London almost immediately, and other offices, in 1854, in Madras, Colombo and Kandy. In 1855 branches started at Calcutta, Singapore, Canton, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Comparing these dates with the Chartered Bank, Mercantile got off to a quicker start, although both banks were established in the same year. Mercantile had a branch in Hong Kong, for example, four years before Chartered.\n\nSkipping a century, in 1958 the name was shortened to ‘Mercantile", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212604, "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-1991", "page_number": 158, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "138\n\nI was anxious to reach Burma, and when I arrived at Rangoon in July found that I was one of the early swallows. The garrison still only consisted of two British battalions, and some battalions of the Burma rifles. In 1937, when Burma was separated from India, the army, which had been part of the Indian army, achieved a nominal emancipation from that tutelage; but in practice, from the general downwards, the majority of the officers came from India and the dogmas peculiar to the North West Frontier prevailed.\n\nI was sent up to Maymyo, in the Shan hills, to collect the wherewithal for an establishment, later to be known as the Bush Warfare School. Maymyo was the hill resort for Burma, the summer capital of the government, and the station of one of the two British battalions. This battalion kindly provided an orderly room sergeant, a stout fellow from Yorkshire, and between us we started to get things ready for the troops who were due to arrive shortly. I made my first acquaintance with the great brotherhood of the Indian Babu, the parasitic growth that sucks energy from administration in India. The Babu's great idea in life is to find a job for his brothers, of whom there are many, and to do so he must write more and more letters. A reply, which postpones decision, invites further correspondence. The more letters, the more filing; the more filing, the more indexing; the more indexing, the more work; the more jobs for brother, until one job has been expanded into six, and promotion is created: for first-brother can then claim to be exalted to the rank of head-clerk, to supervise the other six. The promotion not only brings an increase of pay, but also creates yet another vacancy for yet another brother in the position originally held by first-brother. It is a great game, not, however, convenient for warfare.\n\nI was later to meet the Indian Canteen Contractor, whose profits are so great; and the Indian Controller of Military Accounts, who also multiplies himself exceedingly, and travels round with a whole shelf-full of Army Regulations, without reference to which he cannot place one foot before the other. In India, even in the banks, every entry, receipt, payment, or other transaction is checked and counter-checked by three people, as a control on corruption, a control, to judge by all one hears, that is not superlatively successful. In this welter of procrastination time ceases to have value: amidst this accumulation of paper, decision is bogged down. It is a bureaucrat's paradise.\n\nIn Burma too I first came across the great game of discards. It was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212613, "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-1991", "page_number": 167, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "147\n\nconvenient to sit on if the ground were wet, and of a consistency not uncomfortable when used as a pillow: the other a rain cape, as issued to the Indian Army. These capes are cut amply so as to cover the whole of one's accoutrements. They are reasonably long, and as the material is stout, they are wind-proof, and help to retain warmth on a cold day. They are excellent to wrap up in before lying down to sleep. With these two items, one could face most things, even the discomforts of travel in war-torn China.\n\nTianmushan 1942-42\n\nThe officials of the Chungking government had been watching the Shanghai puppet show with close interest. I suppose, at the time of Munich, had one asked the average citizen of Czecho-Slovakia what he thought of the British, he would have replied that he thought they were pro-German. In the same way the Chinese in Chungking, influenced by the Shanghai spectacle, concluded that there was a strong pro-Japanese faction in Britain. That was very unfortunate, because it reinforced Chinese suspicion of British motives, a suspicion rooted in a fallacious interpretation of history and nourished by Kuo Min Tang teaching.\n\nBritain was at war with Germany for one and a half years, alone. Mr. Churchill, quite rightly, in those reports he presents from time to time to the House of Commons, reminds the world of it. China was at war with Japan for four and a half years, alone; and although from about the summer of 1941 the Japanese have concentrated their attention elsewhere, so that the war in China for long periods subsequently was only passive, and did not therefore involve active exertion at the level which throughout has been demanded of the British, yet we can fully appreciate Chinese feeling and the expectation that the extent of China's travail should be recognised.\n\nI was staying at Tennis Court Flats, the name given to a temporary wooden building erected on the Embassy tennis court to accommodate part of the staff, after the British Embassy had been damaged by bombing. I was having breakfast upstairs on the verandah when the first vague reports of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour arrived. As further reports came in from Hongkong and Manila the situation became clearer. In the evening I went for a stroll in the streets. The dense population of Chungking, packed between river and hill, had no facilities for sport, the idea of which indeed was unknown to the mass of the people.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212840, "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-1992", "page_number": 149, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "134\n\ngovernment, after the withdrawal of the British, became useless: the Japanese issued a new rupee paper note of their own, and compelled the people in the areas occupied by them to accept it. In Kokang the only money now acceptable was silver rupees. We had brought some in with us, and further substantial sums were dropped to us by air: it created a problem over the border in China, where the currency situation was so desperate. Our rupees were used to pay for any services or supplies we received from the local population, and they doubtless quickly found their way to the border, where a heavy demand for silver existed owing to the continuous fall in value of the Chinese currency and where, consequently, a rupee would fetch over a hundred dollars. Curiously, Chinese half-dollar silver pieces were still current though not common on the Chinese side of the border, perhaps the only district in China where silver coins still existed, as the Chinese government had gone off the silver standard years before, and withdrawn all silver coins; the silver half-dollar was naturally worth far more than the paper dollar.\n\nOne headman asked me if I could not rescue his son from China. It was a sordid story, the details of which only reached me by degrees, but it is a story which should be told.\n\nLopez was the son of a Filipino father and a Burmese mother. He had spent most of his life in Burma, but claimed American citizenship. The Americans, working from the side of India, were anxious to obtain intelligence about conditions in eastern Burma, and so they trained Lopez, gave him a commission, borrowed some Indian wireless operators from the British, obtained for him a Chinese pass, and sent him with a party into Kokang. They sent him very secretly, a precaution which was not unwise in view of the speed at which news travels on the border; but they overlooked the necessity of informing the American officers with the Chinese Expeditionary Force.\n\nLopez arrived in Kokang in the autumn of 1934, set up his wireless, and began to collect information, a work at which he would have achieved considerable success. I found he had left a very favourable impression on the local population; some of the men who were subsequently to do the most useful work for us had first been engaged by him. The attack on the Myosa upset his arrangements; Lopez knew too much about this, and perhaps spoke indiscreetly; anyhow the Chinese decided to get rid of him. Although he had a Chinese pass, the Chinese went to the American officers attached to the C.E.F., and reported the presence of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212850, "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-1992", "page_number": 159, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "144\n\nshortly after to have raised Tsai's house, so that at any rate part of his ill-gotten wealth probably fell into their hands. Tsai and the Chinese assistant commander were then taken and executed by the Chinese troops. We saw their graves at Sincheng. This had all happened some months before our arrival. While I was in Kokang at least one further store of money belonging to the Myosa was discovered and the bullion sent to Sincheng; for whose benefit, it was no part of my business to enquire.\n\nWhen the Chinese appointed the Puppet to the Myosa's position they also made him commander of the Defence Force and gave him a Chinese colonel as second-in-command. On arrival at Sincheng, as anticipated, I found the Chinese flag flying and Chinese officers, who never left the Puppet's side, behaved as if they had taken over the country. I hoped to persuade them of my friendly disposition and to enlist their co-operation. I was not successful; at a feast given by the Puppet the second-in-command got slightly drunk and openly twitted me with my alleged friendship for China, a lack of manners with which I had never before met among Chinese.\n\nAll through Kokang there are extensive poppy fields. The crop ripens in the spring. In Burma, following the Indian practice, opium was controlled by monopoly, and could only be smoked by licence. The Burmese themselves do not smoke opium, though they sometimes eat it; only persons of Chinese blood smoke. Supplies for the Burma monopoly used to come from Kokang; there was also smuggling across the border from Yunnan, where it was for long grown openly. By the efforts of the Chinese government the cultivation in Yunnan had been very largely suppressed — I myself never saw any growing in Yunnan but a great deal of opium was still smoked in Yunnan. There was no secrecy, for instance, about the opium dens in Kun-ming. So now the flow of traffic was reversed. Yunnan received its opium from Kokang and the Wa states, and the commerce in the drug must have produced large profits for those who took part in it.\n\nIn Kokang the Myosa had been the agent for the collection of the small annual house tax, of which he retained a percentage, remitting the bulk to the government. Now there was no government to which to remit, but the Puppet had heavily increased the rate of taxation, and collected it in opium. According to the reports of the village headmen he had so assessed the tax that nearly the whole of the annual opium crop went into his hands. It was a very heavy burden for the village people to bear,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213895, "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": 247, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "221\n\nThus, a new political language, clustered around the ideas of labour and trade unions soon overshadowed the existing political language, which was introduced in the late Qing and clustered around the ideas of merchants and chambers of commerce. To curb the political power of merchants, the Canton government dissolved all the existing merchant associations in Canton. The directorship of the Canton General Chamber of Commerce was abolished and the Canton government appointed their own supporters to the Chamber. Liao Zhongkai even went to the extreme of making legislation in 1925 to prohibit \"compradore merchants” from taking up government posts.\n\nPolitical regulations were changing fast during these years. Trade unions continued to expand and were politically active in Canton. This eventually led to the 1925 General Strike which in Hong Kong involved a total of 300,000 labourers. It was known as the greatest and largest strike which had ever occurred in China, and retrospectively, the Chinese Communist Party would time and time again herald its success.\n\nAs for the Cantonese merchants and the Communication Clique, they retreated from Canton to Hong Kong after 1924. I have tracked down a very beautiful piece of information from 1941 - on a Julao Hui (九老會), or the Nine Elders Club. The club was formed by the retired leaders of the regional Chambers of Commerce. These retreated Cantonese, despite their previous competition, joined together as a social club to celebrate the abundance of their offspring and their own longevity. These nine gentlemen enjoyed a total age amounting to 676 by 1941. On this occasion, Liang Shiyi sent them a couplet. It read:\n\nThe three of us in person congratulating the nine elders, altogether in one hall we celebrate our thousand years.\n\nAs far as this small circle is concerned, it sounds like a happy ending.\n\nBeyond this circle, all we can see is a Hong Kong society with its members, for a long period of time, showing little interest in the issue of constitutional reform, representative or self-government, as their Indian, African, or Malay counterparts did. Even during those noisy years after the Second World War while the issue of decolonization was very much talked about and the British Empire actually collapsed,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214376, "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-1998", "page_number": 234, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "200\n\nunderwent many changes both in scope and organization. However, one thing which remained constant throughout its life was its racial composition. It was always a Chinese force. As such, in the context of the colony's private security heritage, it is an important organization even though its numbers never exceeded 160. Not surprisingly, because of its traditional origins, it was also a gendered 'Force' and no District Watchwomen were ever employed even when, in 1949, women were permitted to join the Hong Kong Police.\n\nEarly Days\n\nThere is little doubt that in the 1860s the growing number of wealthy Chinese merchants residing in Hong Kong required the services of a security force since this was not provided by the Hong Kong Police. Lethbridge claimed that by the mid-1860s there were 'numerous private watchmen and street guards already employed by merchants, shopkeepers, householders and Kaifong. The need for these private security personnel was distressingly obvious. Members of the regular police force, which was composed mostly of European and Indian policemen with a few Chinese, were more concerned with the safety of the European dominated central business district of the city than with the protection of the occupants of the Chinese quarter. Language was another barrier since most of the non-Chinese police were unable to speak Cantonese, a situation which made effective communication with the local population an impossibility. However, even if the Hong Kong Government had possessed the funds, manpower and inclination to provide the Chinese quarter with sufficient policemen, it is debatable whether the Hong Kong Chinese merchants of the 1860s would have welcomed the attention of members of the predominately foreign Hong Kong Police. It is more likely that they would have resented men of an alien culture intruding into their business and private lives even if this resulted in a decrease in crime. The ideal solution to this local security problem was a 'police force' made up of Chinese men whom the merchants knew and could trust.\n\nAt the beginning of 1866 in the weeks before Chinese New Year, Hong Kong's English language newspapers reported rumours of unrest in Canton.3 There was also considerable alarm that an uprising would spread to the colony but this fear proved to be unfounded. Whether these rumours were 'massaged' to suggest a more serious state", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214378, "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-1998", "page_number": 236, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "202\n\nany real degree of authority in matters affecting their own security,7 the introduction of the new scheme met with considerable opposition from some Europeans. Smith noted that 'there is much diversity of opinion as to the desirability of employing Chinese at all as Police.' The comparatively restrained language used by Smith probably understates the intensity of the opposition. In addition to the 'jealousy,' Smith hinted that the question of the watchmen's remuneration was also a problem. He reported that 'After much discussion the community of the Five Districts to the West of the Parade Ground agreed to elect a certain number of their body to act as Watchmen, whose pay would be disbursed by themselves and collected from house to house by men specially appointed for the purpose.' The monthly pay of each of the five Chief Watchmen was $20 whilst each of the forty Watchmen received $8 per month. Uniform coats were to be provided from a special fund and the accounts could be inspected at the Registrar General's office. Not only was the Registrar General charged with ensuring that the financial side of the scheme was sound, he was also responsible for the Watchmen themselves even though their wages were paid by the Chinese community.\n\nThis was not the way that the Chinese merchants had envisaged running the scheme although it was better than having European or Indian policemen interfering with their everyday business arrangements in order to combat crime. However, because of their internal squabbling and the colonial administration's greater experience in shaping such matters to its advantage, the Chinese merchants had allowed themselves to be outmanoeuvred by Government officialdom. Smith stressed that he did not expect the Watchmen 'to take a very prominent part in apprehending criminals.' That was not the aim. It was expected that the strength of the scheme lay elsewhere and, ‘according to the recognized Chinese Custom, those who pay for their support expect them to keep the vagabonds and bad characters from congregating in their districts,' an example of what, in modern criminological terminology, is referred to as Displacement Theory. The Chinese merchants and householders funding the scheme were not particularly interested in curtailing crime throughout Hong Kong but merely wanted to ensure that it did not occur in their area.\n\nThe tone of Lister's 1868 report was more direct than that of his predecessor. Lister contended that, whilst it was true that a force composed of Chinese would 'never carry out some of the views of the European Community,' this was to be expected because", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214431, "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-1998", "page_number": 289, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "255\n\nLaya and to assist in the Korean War. In 1957 the Royal Artillery lost one of its major stations in the colony described as \"the last of the great Gunner bastions on the island,\" when 27 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment RA, which was stationed at Stanley Fort, was sent back to the United Kingdom for reorganisation. From then up to the handover to the Hong Kong Government in 1994, Stanley Fort was occupied by British infantry battalions on 2-year tours of duty. In 1997 it was handed over to the People's Liberation Army who are the present occupants.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Lord Stanley, Edward Henry, 15th Earl of Derby, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1845.\n\nREFERENCES\n\n\"Stanley, Hong Kong - The First Three Years\" by Lieut. G.P. Shearer, R.E., Royal Engineers' Journal, June 1938.\n\n\"British & Indian Armies on the China Coast 1795 - 1985\", by Alan Harfield, A&J Partnership, 1990.\n\n\"The Guns & Gunners of Hong Kong\", by Denis Rollo, The Gunners Roll of Hong Kong 1992.\n\n\"Eighteen Days\", by Col. D.R. Bennett, R.A.P.C., The Royal Army Pay Office, Hong Kong, 1976.\n\n\"Lyemun Barracks: 140 Years of Military History\", by Phillip Bruce, 1987.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214739, "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": 154, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "118\n\n(Liddell Hart 1999);\n\n\"I suggested, and he appeared to agree, that it would be better to risk its loss by holding it too lightly than to strengthen it so much as to make it, morally, a \"Verdun\" or \"Port Arthur\" with great danger to our prestige if lost.\"\n\n9\n\nSome veterans complained about the lack of sympathy of London with colonial subjects, as evidenced in Colonel Anthony Hewitt's comments in his foreword to the work of Ko and Wordie (Ko and Wordie, 1996). Hewitt's passing comment is mild compared with the criticism of military historians of the allied countries. Vincent (1981) and Ferguson (1980), Cameron (1991) and most Chinese authors such as Yip (1982); Yuen (1988) and Tse (1995) criticised the British Government for being totally unprepared for the invasion of the Colony. The critical views expressed in English works in this period were pertinent to post-war claims for compensation by ex-servicemen in Commonwealth countries. The prevailing Chinese position is that Hong Kong should and could have been defended. An odd view is Tse (1995) who argued that Japan made a strategic mistake by taking the Colony, as it would serve no useful military purpose.\n\nBell's archive research (Bell, 1996) established that Hong Kong was not treated as an outpost but \"an integral component of an offensive strategy” based on faith in the superiority of the Royal Navy and the certainty of Hong Kong's relief. However, Bell's offensive strategy view is hardly consistent with the absence of fighters or bombers in the Colony before the outbreak of the Battle.\n\n\"Britain did not have enough men, or enough guns, tanks, ships and aeroplanes for the war against Germany. So it was impossible to send sufficient men and supplies for the defence of Hong Kong. These included the men of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps. These men - English, Chinese, Eurasians, Portuguese and others - whose homes were in Hong Kong, prepared to defend the Colony from attack.” (Stokes, 1965, p.89)\n\nThough it is highly questionable whether the Scottish, Canadian and Indian soldiers in the \"others category\" mentioned by Stokes would regard Hong Kong as their permanent homes, Stokes' description is", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214954, "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": 50, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "of any mention of the opium habit by the Jesuit missionaries and other travellers in China prior to the 17th century. It may therefore be concluded, with some degree of certainty, that there was no general use of opium before the introduction of opium smoking. Spanish tobacco introduced into China about 1620, probably from Philippines, gave rise to the habit of smoking, and later in the century tobacco and opium were smoked as a mixture to enhance the effect of both. The Chinese, on the whole, chose to smoke opium without tobacco. Moreover, while the use of opium as a smoke has been confined to China - elsewhere it is applied in other ways - smoking per se was introduced by the westerners.\n\nThe Chinese recognized early the potential harm of opium smoking: an Imperial Edict of 1729 prohibited entirely the use of opium, except as a medicine. When the import of opium had increased dramatically, another Edict was issued in 1799 prohibiting use of the drug, its importation, and its cultivation at home. Thenceforth opium became contraband, but while the East India Company, which by that time had full control of the Indian opium, and the Hong merchants in Guangzhou (Canton) heeded the Imperial ban, almost all the foreign traders did not, and even 'the Emperor's representatives continued to sanction it.' The illegal opium trade grew enormously. After 1830, for maximum profit and safety, chests of opium were delivered in a fleet of fast, well-armed clippers. It should be noted that these “opium clippers\" also carried tea on the return journey: sometimes engaging in \"tea races” to deliver tea quickly before its flavour was impaired. Again, it may be noted that the growth of opium trade with China was linked with another growing addiction, to tea. Detailed discussion of the opium trade is outside the scope of this paper. However, one point must be emphasised: the often forgotten distinction between Britain and British traders, and indeed, other foreign merchants with regards to the opium traffic. The British government's attitude to the opium trade was, characteristically, one of laissez faire; it was neither encouraged nor discouraged, claiming it was essentially a Chinese problem.\n\nChinese-British Relations\n\nIt is perhaps not to be wondered at that the two great nations at the opposite ends of the globe, totally different in their ways and customs, failed to understand each other; indeed, never truly tried, and finally", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215279, "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": 56, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "could be nullified only by the use of the crown prerogative of disallowance. The Colonial Office was most reluctant to exercise this power except in extreme circumstances since it might cause the governor public embarrassment. There are only three cases to be found in the files before 1933 where the Colonial Office was consulted about a project and imposed its veto.\n\nThe progress of industrialisation in Hong Kong was completely different from all other British colonies where factories could be established only with the aid of protective tariffs and other government assistance and manufactured goods were sold only in the local market. Hong Kong island was originally occupied because it had the best deep-sea harbour between Shanghai and Indo-China. It served as a base for the British navy and a place where merchants could store their goods and transfer them from ocean-going vessels to smaller ships to trade at ports along the China coast and inland waterways. About 80 per cent of the goods passing through the harbour consisted of re-exports destined for South China from overseas or from North China, or exports from China being transhipped in Hong Kong. Since the principal reason for Hong Kong's existence was to be an entrepôt for trade with China, it has always been a free port with no customs duties on imports or exports. Industries were established early in the colony's history to provide for the needs of the port and to process primary products for local consumption and export to China. Shipbuilding and ship-repairing yards were established soon after Hong Kong island was occupied in 1841, followed by a rope-making factory in 1851, a flour mill in 1859, a sugar refinery in 1870, a distillery in 1871, tobacco and cigarettes in 1880, a cement factory in 1897, and a cotton spinning and weaving company in 1899.\n\nIn 1911 the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce carried out a survey of all European, American, and British Indian firms in the colony engaged in import, export, and manufacturing. The survey listed 38 trading companies which had also set up factories. The 1931 census found that about a quarter of the working population (112,133 out of 470,794) were employed in manufacturing industries. The 1930 Blue Book listed 3,164 factories and workshops under 102 categories ranging from 124 boat builders to 116 tin beaters and 14 weaving factories. Most of these establishments were very small, situated in the back streets and tenements of the urban area. In 1932 only 586 were registered under the new Factories and Workshops Ordinance, which regulated firms that employed at least 20 persons. It is difficult to quantify the size of the manufacturing sector in the absence of detailed statistics of local consumption, but it appears that domestic exports of manufactured goods in 1932 totalled at least HK$36 million (about £2,500,000).1 The main items exported were cement, refined sugar, preserved ginger, lard, knitted singlets and hosiery, and electric torches.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215280, "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": 57, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "and batteries, canvas and rubber footwear, rattan furniture, trunks, suitcases, umbrellas and rope. Almost all these exports went to China and the nearby states of the Philippines, Netherlands East Indies, Malaya, Siam, French Indo-China, Burma and India. The only significant exports to Britain were 268 tons of lard valued at £7,000 and £50,000 of preserved ginger.\n\nIn the 1930s exports to China were badly affected by a steep rise in import duties. Under the treaties imposed on China in the nineteenth century tariffs were limited to five per cent, but over the period 1926 to 1933 China achieved full tariff autonomy and soon raised its duties to gain additional revenue, and also to protect its own industries and substitute local manufactures for foreign imports. For example, the duty on rubber-soled shoes remained at five per cent until 1931 when it was raised to 17 per cent and then to 30 per cent in 1933. Similar protectionist moves were made by neighbouring countries in an attempt to combat the world depression of the 1930s. The Philippines raised its tariff on rubber shoes from 25 per cent to 100 per cent in 1933. This escalation in tariff barriers affected Hong Kong's trade and economic prosperity in two ways: the entrepôt trade through Hong Kong was reduced since China was deliberately seeking to curtail foreign imports; and Hong Kong's domestic exports of manufactured goods to China were also affected. A number of factories were forced to close having lost their markets in China. The value of imports and exports passing through the harbour dropped by 40 per cent between 1931 and 1934. Hong Kong's economy was saved from ruin by the amazing growth in its exports of manufactured goods to empire markets. This was an unintended consequence of the decisions taken at Ottawa to erect trade barriers to exclude Japanese exports.\n\nPage 17\n\nII\n\nWhen the colonies of European settlement had advanced to internal self-government it was no longer politically possible for Britain to exercise control over their trade and tariff policies. The dominions wished to protect their infant industries against imported manufactures, including imports from Britain. At imperial conferences the dominion premiers offered to grant a preferential rate of duty to British goods and asked that Britain should reciprocate by granting a tariff preference to empire produce over foreign goods. Britain refused this offer and remained committed to free trade. The dominions then acted unilaterally to make Britain a beneficiary of their tariff policies. Canada was the first to grant tariff preferences to Britain in 1897, followed by South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. In 1907 the preferences granted to Britain by Canada were extended to the West Indian colonies, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Ceylon and the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215281, "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": 58, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "6\n\nStraits Settlements, but not to Hong Kong. The governor protested to the Colonial Office at Hong Kong's exclusion in 1907, 1910 and 1912 but the Canadian government refused to include Hong Kong within its preferential tariff on the grounds that goods from China might be shipped through Hong Kong's open port and fraudulently obtain the benefit of Canada's preferential tariff.\" So Hong Kong's exports of cement and refined sugar were taxed at the highest rate and soon lost their market in Canada. In 1912 a trade agreement was negotiated between Canada and the West Indian colonies whereby Canadian exports were granted preferential tariffs in return for Canadian preferences on Caribbean cane sugar, cocoa beans and lime juice. The West Indian colonies negotiated this trade agreement directly with Canada and the secretary of state for the colonies raised no objection. These preferences were increased by a new trade agreement in 1920 and were generalised to benefit goods from all empire sources.20 The Colonial Office invited all colonies and protectorates to consider the practicability of introducing preferential rates of duty for goods of imperial origin. But most of the colonial empire was prevented by international treaties from imposing discriminatory tariffs. Northern Rhodesia, Kenya and Uganda, being part of the Congo Basin, were forbidden to discriminate by the Convention of St. Germain (1919); Nigeria and the Gold Coast by the Anglo-French treaty of 1898; and Tanganyika, Togoland, Cameroons and Palestine were mandated territories of the League of Nations which prohibited discrimination. By 1932 the only colonies which were free to adopt imperial preference but had not done so were Somaliland, Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, Hong Kong and certain islands in the Pacific.\" Canada and New Zealand were the only dominions which granted any preferences to the colonial empire before 1932. Australia, South Africa, Newfoundland, Southern Rhodesia and India granted none.\n\nThe world trade depression which began in 1929 convinced British politicians that the liberal principles of free trade which had been followed for the past 70 years must be abandoned. The National government elected in 1931 quickly passed the Import Duties Act which imposed a general duty of 10 per cent ad valorem on all imports. Section 5 of the act granted an entire exemption from the general duty to imports from all colonies, protectorates and mandated territories, provided that at least 25 per cent of the value was derived from materials grown or produced or from work done within a part of the empire.\" Imports from the dominions and India were exempted from duty only until November pending the outcome of an Imperial Economic Conference.\" A circular despatch was sent by the Colonial Office to all colonies and protectorates drawing attention to the great advantages extended to the colonies by the Import Duties Act and inviting them to give similar preferences to United Kingdom manufactures", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215283, "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": 60, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "preferences granted to British goods, to increase the margin of preference on a few specific items and to review the level of existing tariffs which protected dominion manufactures against British goods. The dominions approved tariff preferences on specified colonial goods, mostly tropical agricultural products, asphalt, rum and cigars. Each dominion offered a different list of concessions to the colonies and not all were equally generous. South Africa granted preferences only on raw coffee and asphalt. Canada gave little more than the preferences already embodied in the 1920 trade agreement with the West Indian colonies.\" New Zealand was the only dominion which agreed to grant preferences at the same rates as were accorded to Britain to all the colonies and protectorates. The agreements with the dominions provided that the preferences accorded to British goods might be extended to the colonies, protectorates and mandated territories ‘if His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom so request'. All these preferences were for British manufactured goods. The development of manufacturing industry in the colonies was not anticipated by the governments represented at Ottawa. If it had been foreseen it is probable that the dominion governments would have raised strong objections to admitting goods manufactured under oriental conditions to their markets under a tariff designed to benefit British manufacturers.28\n\nAfter the Ottawa conference a circular despatch was sent to all colonies and dependent territories setting out the tariff preferences which would be granted by the dominions to colonial exports of foodstuffs and raw materials.\" These preferences would give the dependencies a reasonable prospect of replacing foreign imports by imports from empire sources in the dominion markets concerned. In return the dependent territories were 'invited' to grant to the dominions the preferences which the colonial secretary had negotiated at Ottawa. Cunliffe-Lister made clear that it was a matter of the highest importance that the Ottawa settlement should be put into effect as an integral whole.\n\nI should feel that I had been guilty of a breach of faith if the legislature concerned refused to grant the preference in question, unless I could put to the dominion government concerned clear evidence that there were really substantial reasons for not granting the proposed preference. It would not be an adequate ground of objection to say that the desired preference might increase the local cost of living, so long as the increase was only moderate and did not cause hardship to a particularly poor class of the community.\n\nGovernors prepared the necessary legislation for introduction into the colonial legislatures, but a number warned the Colonial Office that they\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215524, "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": 301, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "251\n\nSituated on the South slope of Danger Flag Hill, Kowloon, on Military Reserve Land, midway between the Military and Association Rifle Rangers and about thirty yards to the North of the line joining the butts. The Cemetery measures fifty-feet square and its limits have been defined by wooden pickets.77\n\nThere was another Indian cemetery at Tai Shek Ku78 recorded in a government notice, which was ordered to be closed in 1927;79 however, the origin of this cemetery is not known.\n\nCemeteries in the Early 20th Century\n\nThe first two decades of the 20th century was a period of steady economic and administrative development in Hong Kong, in spite of the influx of Chinese as a result of unsettled condition following the 1911 Revolution in China. A long list of cemeteries was added during this period.\n\nIn 1903, the 'Sai Yu Shek Cemetery'80 (晒魚石墳場) was appointed 'to the North of Kowloon City and West of Nga Tsin, as a sufficient and proper place for a burial ground for Chinese living in the vicinity of Kowloon City.'81 In addition, there was also a Sai Yu Shek (Christian) Cemetery.82\n\nIn the same year (1903), it was also announced that the 'Po Kong Po Cemetery' (), 'situated to the North-east of Kowloon City and West of the Village of Sha Ti Un'83 () was to be closed. Again, no information examined has revealed the origin of this cemetery, although the cemetery is mentioned in a privately published memoir regarding the burial of a woman in 1896.84 As this burial predated the lease of the New Territories in 1898 and the fact that the cemetery was adjacent to several villages in the Kowloon City area, Po Kong Po Cemetery might have been an extension of some villagers' burial ground,85\n\nA year later, another Chinese Christian Cemetery was authorized ‘on the hillside about 200 feet to the North of Kowloon Walled City, measuring, on the North 208'9,' on the East 208'9' and on the West 208'9,' and defined by boundary stones.' This cemetery still exists today as the oldest surviving cemetery on the Kowloon Peninsula.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215664, "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": 441, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "393\n\nService and was posted to the British Consulate in Beijing. He was interned by the Japanese during World War II but was then exchanged for Japanese diplomatic staff and made his way to India. He spent the War serving in various capacities with the Indian Army. In 1940, he met the German photographer Hedda Hammer and they married in Beijing in 1946. Due to the increasing instability of the political situation in China, they left Beijing soon after. The Morrisons spent six months in Hong Kong before relocating to Sarawak, in the north-west of the island of Borneo, where Alastair was appointed to the British Colonial Service and later became a district officer. Throughout her 20-year residence in Sarawak, Hedda accompanied Alastair on all his official journeys and made numerous independent photographic tours. From 1960 to 1966 Hedda was employed by the Sarawak government to work part-time in the photographic section of the Information Office in Kuching. Her duties included taking photographs, establishing a photographic library and training government photographers. Hedda wrote two major books on Sarawak, Sarawak (1957) and Life in a Longhouse (1962).\n\nJennie Morrison, 1912, (Mitchell Library)\n\nIn 1967 the Morrisons settled in Canberra, Australia. Hedda died in Canberra in 1991, at the age of 82. Alastair lives in Hughes, Canberra. His Fair Land Sarawak: Some Recollections of an Expatriate Official (Ithaca, Cornell University) and The Road to Peking (Canberra, Highland Press, private distribution), both appeared in 1993.\n\nMr. Morrison's other brother, Colin Morrison was born in April 1917. He joined the Administrative Service in Hong Kong and was also a member of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, which held out valiantly for 17 days against the Japanese in December 1941.2 He was interned by the Japanese at the Shamshuipo camp for the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215713, "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": 12, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "FROM THE HON. EDITOR\n\nI have been receiving a relatively large amount of material over the last couple of years and Council has therefore authorised me to continue producing Journals which significantly exceed the '200 page' rule, in order that publication of accepted submissions is not overly delayed. At 532 pages, therefore, this Volume, No. 42 is another bumper effort.\n\nThere are 11 contributions in the ARTICLES section, which must be something of a record.\n\nAndrew Abraham has provided a most scholarly paper on the pros and cons of the transfer of the Straits Settlements from the jurisdiction of the Indian Government to the Colonial Office in 1867.\n\nContinuing our review of the Battle of Hong Kong during World War II, there are contributions from Chohong Choi and Anne Ozorio. The former rehearses Allied thinking on an invasion of Japanese-occupied Hong Kong and possibly the Chinese hinterland behind it, which area might then have been used as a base from which to bomb Japan. Chohong then discusses, somewhat novelly, the challenges to such an invasion from the weather. Anne Ozorio's paper shows that, contrary to popular belief, the British military were very much prepared for an attack on Hong Kong by the Japanese - in terms of continuing intelligence gathering and covert resistance during the occupation - and that they were very active in China until the end of hostilities.\n\nOur man in Bondi, former President, James Hayes, shares with us his experiences of Chinese ceremonial occasions and the considerable etiquette and pomp that go with them.\n\nLawrence Lai et al. reports on a survey of the World War II military installations on Devil's Peak, Hong Kong.\n\nI have reproduced a very pleasant piece from Eve Lam of TVB On HKBRAS which centres on the 40th Anniversary Celebration Conference held in December, 2000 at the University of Hong Kong.\n\nLauren Pfister's account of the life of Ch'ëa Kam-kwong (1800-\n\niii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215769, "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": 68, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "1\n\nARTICLES\n\nTHE TRANSFER OF THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS: A REVISIONIST APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF COLONIAL LAW AND ADMINISTRATION\n\nANDREW ABRAHAM\n\n[Hon. Ed. - The Straits Settlements was a former British crown colony on the Strait of Malacca, comprising four trade centres, Penang, Singapore, Malacca, and Labuan, established or taken over by the British East India Company. The British settlement at Penang was founded in 1786, at Singapore in 1819; Malacca, occupied by the British during the Napoleonic Wars, was transferred to the East India Company in 1824. The three territories were established as a crown colony in 1867. Labuan, which became part of Singapore Settlement in 1907, was constituted a fourth separate settlement in 1912.\n\nThe Straits colony, occupied by the Japanese during World War II, was broken up in 1946, when Singapore became a separate crown colony. Singapore attained full internal self-government in 1959, became a part of Malaysia in 1963, and became an independent republic in 1965. Labuan was incorporated in North Borneo (later Sabah) in 1946, which in turn became a part of Malaysia in 1963. Penang and Malacca were included in the Malayan Union in 1945, the Federation of Malaya in 1948, and Malaysia in 1963.]\n\nIntroduction\n\nThe Straits Settlements were transferred in 18671 to the Colonial Office's administration due to the dissatisfaction of the European merchants with the Indian government's rule. Their grievances were cited in a petition in 1857, the most contentious of which cover complaints of the East India Company's (EIC) attempts to introduce measures damaging to trade, problems with piracy and convicts, and failure of the Indian government to build up an influence in the Malay peninsula.\n\nHowever, a study of the history of the Straits Settlements shows evidence of a booming economy, many cases of intervention by the EIC in the affairs of the Malay states, and issues such as those concerning piracy, convicts and currency more or less resolved. Furthermore,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215770, "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": 69, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "Turnbull, an established historian, equivocally suggests that the transfer was based on an inaccurate and unbalanced feedback of the community's feelings:\n\nNo dissenting voice was raised in London and Calcutta, and the colonial office naturally had the impression that the demand for transfer was based on general dissatisfaction with rule from India, with the entire merchant body clamouring for change. In fact, it had required years of agitation on the part of Read, Woods and a small minority of enthusiasts in Singapore to arouse interest in the transfer, and apart from the brief period of panic in 1857 in when the petition was framed, the majority even of European merchants in Singapore were not actively in favour of the change, while the Asian merchants showed almost no interest in the movement.2\n\nIn spite of these conflicting points, I hold that the transfer was needed as the problems raised in the Straits merchants' petition were material and bona fide enough to necessitate the transfer of the administration from Calcutta to London. However, my essay attempts a revisionist's approach to the transfer controversy, questioning its necessity and examining its legal significance through an orchestration of the pot-pourri of relevant issues, in the hope that this methodology may help to provide a clearer awareness and legal understanding into this much taken for granted transfer, thus according it the new angle of attention it deserves.\n\nBackground history of the Straits Settlements3\n\nSingapore, Malacca and Penang were combined to form the Straits Settlements in 1826. The Straits Settlements became the fourth presidency of India, and remained an Indian dependency until 1867. The EIC obtained possession of Penang in 1786, as a base to protect the company's expanding China trade and a centre for the collection of Straits produce from the Malay peninsula and the eastern archipelago for shipment to China. When Singapore was founded in 1819, it was placed under the administration of Bencoolen (in Sumatra) where Raffles was lieutenant-governor. When he resigned and returned to England in 1823, Singapore was placed under the control of the Supreme Government of India. Singapore was ceded to the EIC in 1824 and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215773, "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": 72, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "5\n\nalso study how the English system of law was introduced into a largely Far Eastern society and the extent of its impact.\n\nThe nature of the Calcutta administration\n\nLackadaisical attitude\n\nOne of the most glaring problems in the Straits Settlements was the failure of the Indian authorities to establish an effective form of government. This was due to its distance and lack of accessibility which cultivated an indifferent or disinterested attitude on the part of the Indian officials.21 The Indian government was far more interested in its Indian territories than in its possessions in the Malay Peninsular.22 This led to the administrative problems in the Straits Settlements. Owing to this indifference, the men sent from India were young and inexperienced who knew nothing of the problems in the settlements but were only too eager to return to India to reap bigger rewards and promotion.23\n\nLack of representation in Legislative Council\n\nAs the administration of the Straits Settlements was highly centralised in India, the governor of the Straits Settlements had very little authority and merely supervised administration.24 All important matters had to be referred to India for a decision and the governor had no executive or legislative power.25 All the legislation for the Straits Settlements was planned by the Indian government. As the Straits Settlements had no official representation in India, it could not block any legislation that could prove detrimental to the Straits Settlements.26\n\nThus it can be established that the 'roots of the transfer movement lay in the constitutional rearrangement in the Straits Settlements of 1830 and the [Indian] Charter Act of 1833. The system of government was unsatisfactory both for the governor and the mercantile community.'27\n\nThe petition of 1857: A critical evaluation of the complaints raised\n\nThe Currency Act 185528\n\nThe Currency Act is an example cited by the Straits merchants in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215774, "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": 73, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "their petition. Even before 1826, the Spanish silver dollar and local copper cent had been used widely by the Straits merchants in their trade and commerce, (even though in theory, in 1835, the rupee was the currency of account for official purposes until 1867).\n\nThe directors of the EIC, considering only the Indian Empire's interests,29 established a uniform rupee currency throughout its territories, which of course included the Straits Settlements. In 1854, a bill was introduced to the Indian legislative council 'to improve the law relating to the copper currency in the Straits,' which provided for a copper currency based on fractions of the rupee.30 According to the Currency Act, the Indian pice was to be made legal tender instead of the copper cent and the rupee was to be enforced as legal tender.31\n\nThis Act was fiercely objected to by the Straits merchants, and in response to the opposition, the directors ordered the act to be repealed in 1857. Mr Ballie (Secretary of the Board of Control of the EIC) argues that 'it was very natural that the governor-general should desire to establish a uniform currency throughout the whole of the territories subject to his authority'32 and that after the complaints made at Singapore, this grievance was redressed, and that therefore the petitioners did not have a right to complain.**\n\nPage 36\n\n33\n\n35\n\nThe 1867 Act legalised a currency which was already assured,” and by the time the transfer to the Colonial Office took place, the currency issue was virtually resolved. However, as it was a problem that could have been prevented instead of cured, I would accord little credit to the Indian government's role in this issue.\n\nPiracy and western laws\n\nThis was another arguable \"problem\" that was cited in the petition, and used as an example of the Indian government's inefficiency. Piracy was widespread in the Straits until the mid-19th century, and was a threat to the property and commerce of the merchants. The pirates that predominated in the 1830s and 1840s were pirates of the Sulu archipelago, Illanun pirates from Mindanao and Dyaks from North Borneo. Complaints were that 'no systematic measures of protection have ever been adopted or carried out by the EIC, who have been content to leave the service to be performed by the Royal Navy.”37", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215775, "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": 74, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "However, in response to a petition by European merchants in 1835 to the EIC against piracy, some action on the part of the Indian government was taken, through the use of steam warships (for example, the Diana and HMS Wolf). These ships were effective in fighting piracy, and according to LA Mills, 'piracy in the Straits greatly decreased for several years... Conditions never became as serious as they were before 1836.'38\n\nHowever, Turnbull says that these measures only gave temporary relief and that, within a few years, the position deteriorated. Moreover, in the 1850s, a new breed of pirates began to haunt the merchants' commerce. They came from China, and the Chinese imperial government was too weak to suppress them. The main theatre of Chinese operations was the Gulf of Siam, although many vessels were captured near Singapore.40\n\nThe Indian government did not pay much attention to the problem as it was involved in the second Anglo-Burmese war at that time, and as Calcutta had passed no laws to detain suspicious vessels, there were no legal means to curb piracy. In 1857, the Indian legislative council had passed an inadequate law which permitted the right of search, but did not solve the problem of proving intent. No improvement was made to the naval force in the Straits Settlements in the last ten years of Indian rule, which consisted of only three gunboats (a 'lilliputian fleet'41).\n\nEventually the Chinese pirates were gradually eliminated from the Straits waters as a result of a series of treaties and agreements between China and other western powers (such as with Prussia 1861, Denmark 1863, the Netherlands 1863, Spain 1864, Belgium 1865, Italy 1866, and Austria-Hungary 186942), the contents of which included co-operative measures to wipe out piracy. The Hong Kong 'Ordinance for the suppression of piracy' was the first real blow delivered against Chinese piracy.4\n\nThe Indian government played a minimal role with regards to the combat of piracy in the Straits. The problem was brought under control through a list of other factors, including foreign treaties and ordinances, and hence, the merchants' complaints were not without reason, as little credit can be attributed to the Indian administration in this respect.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215776, "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": 75, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "The EIC and relations with the Malay states\n\nIn the merchants' own words, 'The Supreme Government of India had uniformly discouraged the local Government at Singapore from interfering with matters beyond the limits of the Island. The cultivation of friendly relations with Native States and Chiefs has been neglected.'44 In this section, I will examine the merchants' reasons for this complaint, and also assess the accuracy of their claim. Rupert Emerson, a historian, calls the period during the Indian government's administration of the Straits Settlements 'a half-century of inactivity.' This is arguably the truth but not the whole truth, because DGE Hall, another historian, tends to disagree with Emerson's assertion. He says that 'one only has to glance through the many volumes of records relating to the period to realise that even if there was little or no spectacular achievement there was plenty of activity.' 'Even if by inactivity is meant the pursuit of non-intervention policy in native affairs, the term is misleading.\n\nPage 48\n\nThe Calcutta administration, wherever possible, adhered to a policy of strict non-intervention in the affairs of the Malay States. This policy had its roots in Pitt's India Act of 1784,49 which stipulated that the EIC's aim was peace, not interference in local politics or extension of the company's territories.50 The main reason for this policy was to avoid any form of entanglement in the internal troubles or wars of the Peninsula which could incur unnecessary expenses for the EIC,51 As it was, the EIC had lost its monopoly over the China trade in 1833 and, with this, the Straits Settlements ceased to be a source of direct profits, and were maintained at an annual loss.52\n\nPage 51\n\nYet despite the law on non-intervention, there was evidence that in some cases concerning threats to British interests, whether commercial, political or involving prestige, local administrators often found it necessary to intervene. In such cases, the actions were often condoned by the Supreme Government. Thus, there was a violation of Pitt's India Act (which eventually did lead to the change in British policy of non-intervention to intervention in 1874),54\n\nPage 53\n\nThio summarises the politico-legal scenario thus:\n\n...when responsibility for the Straits was transferred from the Government of India to the Colonial Office in 1867, the British were already bound by treaties with four of the five states south of Kedah, two of whom they\n\nPage 75\n\nPage 76", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215778, "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": 77, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "10\n\nreporting to the Government of India if they took unfair trade measures).\n\nHowever, I am more inclined to take the view that the Calcutta government was not efficient in administering the Straits Settlements, in spite of the mitigating factors. Problems were still prevalent, albeit small or insignificant as Mills makes them out to be. In this regard, the Straits Settlements were better off being under the Colonial Office, and concluding thus, the \"problems\" were justified ones.\n\nAt this point, I wish to draw attention to the different systems of law existing simultaneously in the Straits Settlements. There were the Indian laws (passed by Calcutta, modelled on English law) which were either unsuitable to the Straits Settlements or did not cover \"illegality\" in many cases, as we have seen. Then there were the English laws which were more predominant after the transfer but even before 1867 were still the official laws to be applied insofar as the public sphere was concerned. Matters were a little more complicated in the private sphere, as in the case of the local laws under the Sultans, for example, pertaining to Malay customs and religion, discussion of which is beyond the intended scope of this essay.\n\nChinese secret societies—\n\nA wealth of material can be obtained on this issue which has been well-researched by many scholars. However, with regards to the petition and the transfer, all that need be said (despite the topic's complexity) is that the merchants had a legitimate cause for complaint because the Chinese secret societies were dangerous and caused problems; for example 'rivalries of hostile societies and clans gave rise to disturbances and outrages, often of a very grave nature.' This was a real problem, and not a questionable or hazy one, and the Indian government paid little attention to the situation.69\n\nAfter the transfer, measures were undertaken by the Colonial Office to deal with the problem. \"The Straits Settlements government was now empowered to legislate fully for the requirements of the Colony and to adopt a more determined policy towards secret societies,\" for example, Act XX of 1867 legalised the 1863 practice of apprehending headmen of belligerent societies to do duty as special constables during riots;71 1869 Ordinance XIX to provide for 'the suppression of dangerous", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215779, "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": 78, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "11\n\nsocieties;72 William Pickering was appointed as Chinese Interpreter in 1873, and as Chinese Protector in 1877. These examples also illustrate the gradual introduction of the English system of laws (an alien system) being drawn into and manipulated to serve the purposes of an Eastern society.\n\nHowever, although the problem was reduced, it still exists until the present day. Nevertheless, the Colonial Office did try to improve the situation; a beginning was made, and hence, it could be deduced that the transfer meant a positive step in this area. In this sense, the grounds of the petition were justified.\n\nFurther to the last paragraph of the preceding section, I note again that there were several systems of law regulating the society of the Straits Settlements. In addition to the laws passed by the Indian regime,74 there was also the intervention of the British Parliament from time to time;75 and there were the Chinese secret societies which had their own courts of justice, which provides an example of an alternative system for settling disputes. Thus, amidst radical change in the mainstream administration of justice, there was also continuity in the Chinese system, and it did not die out after the transfer, but instead became a subterranean practice which still continues to exist.\n\nIndian convicts\n\nThis was the last of the problems cited in the petition, and also another hazy issue. Although the merchants complained of the fact that the 'felons sent here [were] being those whose crimes are those of the deepest dye' and that many were sent to the Straits Settlements on a permanent basis, analysis shows that in actual fact the convicts were not as dangerous nor as disadvantageous as they were made out to be.\n\nThe convicts were a source of cheap labour, and hence economically viable. Furthermore, even though they were loosely guarded, very few ever tried to escape. There were occasional violent incidents but these were few and far between, and convicts rarely rebelled against authority. Many of them settled down in the Straits Settlements after serving their prison sentences, as no provision had been made on the Indian government's part, before 1859, to repatriate", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215780, "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": 79, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "them. These ex-convicts married local wives, and some even rose in prominence.82 The European merchants complained mainly about the high cost of keeping the convicts (for example, as early as 1841, they grumbled about the costly body of troops to be maintained in the Straits Settlements mainly because they were penal stations).83\n\nThere were some disturbing facts about the Indian convicts pertaining to the growth of Indian-type secret societies,85 and to the spread of criminal activities among present and ex-convicts. There are no statistics to prove how far these groups were involved in crime, but there were nevertheless a few notorious incidents.87\n\nOn the whole, the convict \"problem\" was not really a problem. The Indian government did make some attempts to improve the situation. However, this only took place after the petition of 1857 to the House of Commons. Thus, even though most defects of the system were remedied by the time of the transfer to the Colonial Office, little credit can be given to the Indian government in this issue. Taking into account the context in which the convict problem was cited in the 1857 petition,88 it is not difficult to sympathise with the European merchants,8991 and hence, this \"problem\" in my opinion, was a bona fide one.\n\n## Conclusion\n\nThe transfer was governed by a series of factors. The overall argument has been broached with a revisionist's method of assessment. However, the conclusion is nonetheless an orthodox one in that having clarified the \"problems,\" most would appear to have been bona fide and convincing enough to necessitate a liberation from the Indian government's rule. In this respect, the transfer was a necessary, and hence, a justified move. The act that was eventually passed by Parliament, to change the government of the Straits Settlements from the India Office to the Colonial Office, was the result of a complex variety of causes, which also explains how legal changes were brought about, not in isolation, but in the context of and in accordance with the Straits society's requirements. The regulations of the Straits Settlements were made subject to London's control, and this is a confirmation of the primacy of the English legal system in which was entrenched the rule of law in the Straits Settlements.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215781, "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": 80, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "NOTES\n\nAbbreviations:\n\nColonial Office - CO\n\nJIA - Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia\n\nJMBRAS - Journal of the Malayan Branch, Royal Asiatic Society\n\nJSEAH - Journal of Southeast Asian History\n\nSFP - Singapore Free Press\n\nSSR - Straits Settlements Records\n\nThe Government of the Straits Settlement Act, 1866. 29 & 30 Vicc 115 - An Act to provide for the Government of the Straits Settlements.\n\nTurnbull, The Straits Settlements 1826-67 Indian Presidency to Crown Colony. (1972) Oxford University Press, p 379\n\nAmong the various historians on Malayan history, Mary C Turnbull's comments on the Straits Settlements prior to the Transfer in 1867 are, by far, the most balanced and comprehensive, and her views on this area are invaluable. While the following facts were gathered from several historians' works, I have been influenced strongly by Turnbull's analysis. I have attempted to summarize in the following 3 sections Turnbull's views based closely on her Introduction to The Straits Settlements 1826-67 Indian Presidency to Crown Colony.\n\ncf. Treaty of 6 February 1819 (Johore 1819) (Treaties with Native States Part III)\n\nTreaty of Friendship and Alliance between the EIC and the Sultan of Johore in 1824, cf. Treaties with Native States p 16 Part III\n\ncf. Article 10 of the treaty\n\nTurnbull, The Straits Settlements 1826-67 Indian Presidency to Crown Colony, Introduction p 3", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215785, "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": 84, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "in the Straits, for example in negotiation for the settlement of Penang Island in 1786 where the Supreme Government remained steadfast in refusing to promise military aid to the Sultan of Kedah. Thus, in a Siamese invasion in 1821, the Penang Government did not offer military aid to the Sultan, but only political asylum and mediation. Indeed the whole history of Anglo-Siamese relations in the Malay Peninsular shows evidence that the non-intervention policy was adhered to as much as possible, (cf. Mills, supra, Chap 8 (Anglo-Siamese relations)) For the obvious political and economic reasons the British did not want to antagonise the Siamese (cf. Tarling, Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Malay World, 1760-1824) by interfering in the affairs of the Malay States (such as Kedah, Kelantan and Trengganu) which were within the Siamese sphere of influence.\n\nSevere censures were passed upon Captain Low for his treaty with Perak in 1826; and the treaty between James Low and Perak and Selangor in 1826, received strong criticism from the Supreme Government and resulted in Low's being suspended from his duties. (Tan DE, Supra, p 119) The Indian Government only relented when Governor Fullerton managed to convince it of the necessity of protecting British interests, a clear instance of the Indian Government's unwillingness to intervene in any of the Malay States. This was further proven when appeals of Perak and Trengannu for defensive purposes were likewise rejected. In the Naning War of 1831-2, Governor Ibbetson was told that the extension of territory was not desired. (Ibid. p 119)\n\nAn even more striking instance occurred in 1833, when the boundary between the Malacca Territory and the tiny state of Johol was debated over. Between the two lay a debatable piece of land which had formerly been claimed by both states, containing rich mines of tin and gold. Governor Ibbetson regarded the frontier delimitation as an excellent opportunity for showing that accessions of territory and encroachments upon their rights is the furthest from our views and intentions' (Mills, supra, p 177), thus resigning any claims that the British might have to it, and even included it within the area of Johol.\n\nThrough the above examples, I would say that the British were pursuing a policy of non-intervention in the Malay States between 1824-73. They upheld this policy whenever possible, though in some cases intervention was unavoidable. And it is significant that sometimes even in instances where British merchants' interests were threatened (for example in Negri Sembilan), the policy of non-intervention was still observed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215789, "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": 88, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "21\n\n* infra para. on Chinese secret societies and Indian convicts, for a more balanced understanding of the population behaviour at that time\n\n54 Indian Charter Act of 1833\n\n❝ the Charters of Justice, 1807, 1826, and 1855; Regina v Willians Esq., cf. Maxwell PB, 'The Law of England in Penang, Malacca and Singapore', JA, ns iii (1859) p 26 - 55\n\ncf. Thio Eunice, \"The Singapore Chinese Protectorate and Events and Conditions Leading to Its Establishment, 1823 - 1877' Journal of the South Seas Society xvi (1960); Tan DE, supra, Chap 6\n\n\"Hansard, 3rd series, vol cxlix, p 995\n\n*Thio, supra, p 47 - examples include gang robberies, collection of \"protection\" money from shopkeepers, or contributions in the nature of blackmail; Chiefs of secret societies were also known to hold their own Courts of Justice to settle disputes between members, even for serious crimes eg sometimes mutilated trunks of victims were found in the jungle or elsewhere, usually with the right or left hand chopped up into a certain number of parts and left hanging together by the skin\n\n*Thio, supra, p 51, 52 ; Buckley, supra, p 757 - in the petition, the European merchants had made suggestions to the Indian government on how to improve the situation but the EIC responded with indifference and 'sometimes without even the slightest acknowledgment of their having been made'\n\nThio, supra, p 52\n\n71 Thio, supra, p 53\n\n7\n\n74\n\nThio, supra, p 34\n\nThio, supra, p 77; Tan D E, supra, Chap 6 p 72, 73\n\n(for example, the Currency Act 1855)\n\n(for example, 1837 admiralty jurisdiction, 1848 insolvency jurisdiction, 1855 Charter of Justice etc.)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215790, "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": 89, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "22\n\n76 Gullick, Malaya, Chap 4 p 43\n\n77 the petition 1857 to House of Commons (cf. Buckley, supra, p 758); Hansard 3rd series, vol cxlix, p 988\n\nHansard, 3rd series, vol cxlix, p 990 - 991;\n\n-\n\nTurnbull, 'Convicts in the Straits Settlements, 1826-67', JMBRAS, xliii, no 1 (1970) p 88\n\nP 98 - McNair, the Superintendent of convicts in Singapore, remarked in his report for 1858/59 how well the convicts worked at brickmaking and roadbuilding, which made them 'still a positive advantage to this colony'\n\n7\n\nBlundell, in his Annual Report for 1858/59, pointed out that Singapore owed all its roads, canals and public works to convict labour\n\n79 Turnbull, Ibid, p 89 - Indian convicts were allowed a freedom that astonished outside visitors (for example, Lord Elgin in 1857 cf. Walrond T, Letters and Journals of James 8th Earl of Elgin, p 189) They often worked on roads and buildings without guards, sometimes they were employed as domestic servants or in government offices, and they could earn and keep wages\n\n80 Turnbull, Ibid, p 90 - those who did abscond were invariably given up by Chinese and Malays to claim the rewards on their heads\n\n81 Turnbull, Ibid, p 91 - In 1833, a European overseer was murdered by a convict; in 1852, there were two clashes between police and convicts in Penang; in 1853, a group of Sikh prisoners attacked their peons in Singapore\n\n82 Hansard, 3rd series, vol cxlix, p 991; for example a Ceylonese convict, Tickery Bandah, who was released in 1864, settled down in Malacca as a shopkeeper, writer and amateur lawyer. He even kept up a correspondence with the King of Siam (cf. Cameron, supra pg 376; Turnbull, supra (on convicts), p 91)\n\n83 Hansard, 3rd series, vol cxlix, p 988\n\n84 Turnbull, supra (on convicts), p 91\n\n85 Their origins are obscure.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215792, "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": 91, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "24\n\nTreaty of Holland (Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824), (Hertslet's Treaties Vol VIII) Pangkor Engagement of 1874 (Treaties with Native States Part II)\n\nBill:\n\nStraits Transfer Bill (House of Commons), 1866, V (Session 1 Feb - 10 Aug 1866)\n\nStatutes:\n\nAct 24th George III Cap 25 (1784)\n\nIndian Charter Act of 1833\n\nIndian Act No. XVII of 1855\n\nCharters of Justice (1807, 1826, 1855)\n\nThe Colonial Laws Validity Act, 1865, 28 & 29 Vic, Cap 63\n\nThe Government of the Straits Settlements Act, 1866, 29 & 30 Vic, Cap 115\n\nThe Courts (Colonial) Jurisdiction Act, 1874, 37 & 38 Vic, Cap 27\n\nThe Straits Settlements Offences Act, 1874, 37 & 38 Vic, Cap 38\n\nCase:\n\nRegina v Willians Esq (1858) (3 Ky 16)\n\nSecondary Sources:\n\nAllen, Richard H S, 1968, Malaysia, Prospect and Retrospect. The Impact and Aftermath of Colonial Rule, Oxford University Press\n\nAuber, P, 1826, An Analysis of the Constitution of the EIC and the Laws Passed by Parliament for the Government of Their Affairs at Home and Abroad, London\n\nBlythe, W L, 1969, The Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya, Kuala Lumpur\n\nBraddell, Roland St John, (1915) 1982, The Law of the Straits Settlements. A Commentary, Oxford University Press (Kuala Lumpur)\n\nBraddle, T, (1853) 'Notices of Singapore', JIA, vii, 1328\n\nBuckley, Charles Burton, (1902) 1984, An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, Oxford University Press", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216092, "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": 391, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "325\n\nPeninsula and Oriental Line had four passenger ships: the Chusan, the Carthage and the Corfu. I sailed on the Royal Mail Ship Canton. As a newly joined Hong Kong government servant I went on half pay as soon as I stepped on the boat. It took 31 days from Southampton to Hong Kong.\n\nIn first class one dressed every night for dinner, except the first night and nights in port. With a long voyage some passengers were like bears with sore ears. For others there were games like deck quoits, dancing, the ceremony of \"crossing the line\" and shipboard romances. Others were seasick. Regarding romance the pretext for \"Romeo\" at night was to take a girl up to the boat deck to show her the Southern Cross. One lady boasted: 'I was taken up twice on one night and both men pointed to the wrong constellation!'\n\nThere were sea birds and flying fish to watch out for, and some wonderful sunsets in the Indian Ocean. Just as the brilliant sun dipped below the horizon you could occasionally see a green flash. Looking over the ship's rail at night one could frequently see phosphorescent, microbial animal and plant life in the tropical waters. Sometimes one could see this when one flushed the toilet in the darkness of one's cabin.\n\nAt Port Said gilly gilly men (Egyptian magicians) were allowed on board to entertain passengers. Or you could go ashore, visit the Pyramids and elsewhere, and catch the ship at the other end of the Suez Canal (that was the way people travelled on the so-called overland route, before the Suez Canal was completed in 1869.)\n\nAden, with low taxes, was a good place for shopping. Or one could visit the museum there to look at a stuffed Manatee with its broad, flattened tail. Fond of sitting on rocks, these sea creatures were said to have provided the substance for seamen's tales about mermaids. Other customary ports of call for British passenger ships were Bombay, Colombo, Penang and Singapore. P. & O. ships were manned partly by lascar seamen with stewards from the Portuguese Goa. There was a splendid array of cuisine with China, Indian and Ceylon teas. The Indian curry cook could serve a different curry for every lunch of the 31-day voyage.\n\nSome Britons preferred to travel on foreign ships which were not", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216180, "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": 479, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "YET MORE ON TEA AND OPIUM\n\nMARTIN MERZ\n\n413\n\nNotes on tea\n\nIn his article on tea and opium Solomon Bard states that during his fateful embassy to China in the late 18th century Macartney 'was allowed to collect shoots of tea plant. These were later carefully transported to Bengal with samples of soil where they flourished and very likely gave rise to present Indian tea'. In his follow-up notes in Vol. 41 of the RAS Journal David Akers-Jones quotes a passage from Macartney's journal about the acquisition of tea plants with the express purpose of transporting them to Bengal 'where I have no doubt that by the spirit of patriotism of its Government an effective cultivation of this valuable shrub will be undertaken and pursued with success'. The plants were delivered to the East India Company's botanical gardens in Calcutta. Akers-Jones notes that some years later 'indigenous tea plants were discovered in Assam and it is tea from these which seems more like the tea we are now accustomed to drink. Whether there was any hybridisation between the two species I cannot say.'\n\nAlthough tea became hugely popular soon after it was introduced to England in the 17th century details about the tea plant and its manufacture into a beverage remained a mystery for over two hundred years. The price of tea rapidly came down from sixty shillings a pound in 1666 (Leiper p.21) to five shillings a pound in 1750 (Wild p.40), a trend which continued as imports increased dramatically as exorbitant taxes came down and more players entered the field. By 1888 tea imports reached over twenty million pounds a year, 'producing more revenue than the whole of India'. (Wild p.40) There was a desire to unravel the secret of tea and further reduce costs as the beverage evolved from a luxury item of the elite to become the national drink of England. But the merchants who purchased tea in Canton had no opportunity to visit tea plantations and learn about its manufacture; and they seemed to lack any curiosity as long as they could engage in their business. The trade continued as a black box transaction from which the finished product appeared.\n\nIn 1763 John Bell wrote, 'Both the green and bohea [black tea]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216182, "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": 481, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "415\n\nAnd even after the first Opium War in 1841 the secret of tea remained an enigma. As it became possible to travel in China the Royal Horticultural Society of London sent botanist Robert Fortune to procure 'the finest varieties of the Tea-plant, as well as native manufacturers and implements, for the Government Tea plantations in the Himalayas.' (Goodwin p.12) Goodwin describes the torturous process that resulted in the first Assam tea reaching London in 1839. (Goodwin p.148) It was not a huge success, mainly because no one in India knew how to process tea.\n\nFinally, in 1848 Fortune determined that green and black tea came from the same plant, the only difference being in their manufacture. The secret was in a process referred to as fermentation, which is entirely unrelated to fermentation of sugars and starches to make alcohol. It is actually manipulation of the leaves to promote the oxidation of the leaves. (Goodwin p.132/3)\n\nportable greenhouses\n\nEmploying the latest technology Fortune successfully transported tens of thousands of Chinese tea plants to India. (Kit p.61) Goodwin describes this success as a 'mummy's curse' because Chinese teas crossed with Indian teas to ‘become a shrubby Frankenstein's monster, popping up all over the place and spoiling the planters' rest' (Goodwin p.121). Despite this unfortunate genetic engineering disaster by the 1880's Indian teas overtook Chinese teas in the ever-expanding British market. (Goodwin p.221) Initially Chinese teas were blended with Assam tea but ultimately Assam teas held their own. The massive outbound migrations of Fujianese on tea clippers were a direct result of the collapse of the tea industry in China, as the world markets became less dependent on Chinese tea. Hopefully the current intellectual property issues and trade imbalances between China and the USA will be resolved more amicably than those of the 19th century.\n\nWhile Chinese were reluctant to divulge details of the tea manufacturing process there were other sources of information. Lu Yu's Tea Classic of the Tang Dynasty describes the growing and manufacturing process in enough detail for practical purposes. Even if the book was not available in China it was in Japan where it formed the foundation of the tea ceremony. Japan, too, had a thriving tea industry. It is surprising the resourceful tea hunters did not try there.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]