[ { "id": 206138, "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": 218, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n211\n\nto a local princess. Fifteen years later he hears that his mother and several members of his family are guarding the Chinese border very close to where he is. When the play starts, he is longing to see his own people again, and his wife, the princess, makes him admit the reason for his sadness to her and also his identity. She agrees to help him to get out of the barbarian camp on condition that he comes back the next day. The most dramatic moment of the play is the brief encounter between Ssu Lang and his mother and his first Chinese wife. However, he keeps his word and returns.\n\nThe second play is a farce. The philosopher Chuang Tzu tests his wife. He pretends to be dead and reappears under the form of a young handsome scholar. He seduces his wife and even persuades her to break open the coffin in which her husband lies to remove his heart to make a medicine for him. However, when the wife opens the coffin, the philosopher reappears and confounds her. She commits suicide from shame.\n\nBesides the translations, the book also includes a general introduction to Chinese opera, some photographs of scenes from the two plays, detailed explanations of extracts from Ssu Lang visits his mother (the latter have been recorded on tape and are available from the publisher), a glossary of Chinese theatre terms and an index.\n\nBy choosing these two plays, the author has presented nearly all the different kinds of Chinese opera characters (only the painted faces are not represented). Both plays are very well known and often played; for example here in Hong Kong, by the Chun Chau Peking Opera School in Lai Chi Kok Amusement Park. Ssu Lang visits his mother was, moreover, played two months ago in the City Hall by a group of amateurs; and famous airs from this opera are as well known to the Chinese as are the famous airs of Verdi to Italians. The background explanation is an excellent summing-up of what must be known in order to enjoy a Chinese opera; and if one wants to know more, one can read the Chinese Classical Theatre by the same author. This earlier book speaks in generalities, but here A. C. Scott gives two precise examples and shows how the principles of Chinese operas work in a given play.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209015, "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": 177, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n4 See Chapter 73 of the Tang Hui Yiu.\n\n5 See Chapter 43 of the New History of Tang.\n\n6\n\n145\n\n7 See Chapter 124 of the Kwangtung Tung Chi, 1822 edition.\n\n8 See Chapter 11 of the San On Yuen Chi, 1819 edition.\n\n9 See Chapter 1 of Cheung Wai-wah's An Annotation of the Chapters on Ferrangi, Lushons, Hollanders and Italians in the Ming History.\n\n10 See Chapter 14 of the San On Yuen Chi, 1819 edition.\n\n11 See Chapter 32 of Yuet Tai Kee, Wan Li edition.\n\n12 See Chapter 11 of the San On Yuen Chi, 1819 edition.\n\n13 See Chapter 3 of the Sun On Yuen Chi, 1688 edition.\n\n14 See note 11.\n\n15 See Chapter 2 of the San On Yuen Chi, 1819 edition.\n\n16 See Chapter 175 of the Kwangtung Tung Chi, 1822 edition.\n\n17 See Chapter 13 of the Kwangtung To Shuet, Tung Chih edition, and Chapter 73 of the Kwangchow Fu Chi, 1879 edition.\n\n18 See Government Notification No. 287, Hong Kong Government Gazette, 8th July, 1899.\n\n19 See the 1981 \"List of Villages and Village Representatives of Tuen Mun District, New Territories,\" supplied by the Tuen Mun Rural Committee. Hong Kong, 1981.\n\nANTHONY K. K. SIU\n\nIS \"CHUN FA LOK\" THE OLD NAME OF TSING YI?\n\nThe map of the Kwangtung coast-line in the Ming work Yuet Tai Kei is a long and continuous one which occupies thirty-six pages. It shows the whole of the Kwangtung coast.\n\nOn page 21 of this long map, located at the middle of the page is Hong Kong Island. To the north of that island, there is another called Chun Fa Lok.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212217, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 159, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "136\n\nAmerican films were flown over quickly from Hollywood, and pictures would often be released earlier in Shanghai than in London. When the newsreels of the war began to come along, they led to disturbances; the Germans got nasty and wanted to break things up. Cinema owners did not wish to see their cinemas wrecked and in the end the showing of newsreels was discontinued. Unfortunately, they also did not dare show pictures, like \"The Great Dictator\", which were critical of Fascist methods. The French were, however, determined to see \"The Confessions of a Nazi Spy\", an anti-Nazi picture which was doing much in the States to open the eyes of the population to the methods of the German 'Bund'. They stationed two armoured cars outside the cinema, while inside armed police, with drawn automatics, stood along the gangways. The picture had a very popular run for two weeks, without incident.\n\nSince the disturbances of 1927 the leading Treaty Powers had maintained garrisons at Shanghai. The Japanese forces were quartered in the section of the International Settlement north of the Soochow creek, where the majority of the Japanese population lived; the British, American, and Italian contingents guarded sectors of the perimeter south of the creek; and the French garrisoned their own Concession. There was a local understanding of live and let live, and even after the Italians came into the war, the Grenadiers of Savoy, decked out in patches of red on collar and sleeve, and the baggiest of plus-fours, continued to man their sector: but to avoid argument with Thomas Atkins and Jack Tar they were confined to their own particular taverns. Blood Alley remained an Anglo-Saxon preserve, where Johnnie Doughboy sometimes threw his weight about.\n\nIt was in January, 1940, that the Royal Navy stopped the Asama Maru, within a few hours steaming of the Japanese Coast, and removed 21 Germans from on board. The Japanese, of course, went up in the air at this alleged insult to the Imperial flag, and the British community in Shanghai questioned the expediency of the action. The incident was settled by negotiation, 9 of the captives being returned, and the Japanese undertaking not to convey in their ships military personnel of the belligerents. It is interesting to remember that, when the S.S. \"President Hoover\" ran aground on the East Coast of Formosa, in Japanese territorial water, closed to foreign shipping, the Japanese refused to allow the Americans to salvage her, but insisted on the work being done by Japanese firms. Soon after, the Asama", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214219, "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": 77, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "40\n\nAppendix B\n\nHumour\n\nPresent Meaning\n\nSome believe the only nation that had the word 'humour' in its language, where the word was associated with the meaning of 'being funny,' were the English.\n\nThe French, for example, have such words as the equivalents of 'comedy,' 'wit' and 'buffoonery,' but their word, 'humeur,' means 'disposition' or 'mood.'\n\nSimilarly the Chinese characters for 'humour' are believed merely to imitate the sound of the English word. The term is said to have been introduced into the Chinese language in 1924 by the eminent Overseas Chinese scholar Lin Yutang.\n\nAlthough the Germans, the Italians and the French enjoyed upper-class wit and proletariat clowning, but, so it is claimed (Muir, 1990; XXIX), only the English took pleasure in the middle area: which included the recording of small significant human traits. Muir maintains in Humorous Prose that:\n\nWit is concerned with ideas,\n\nBuffoonery is concerned with deeds, and\n\nHumour is concerned with people\n\nAlthough it appears somewhat of an exaggeration, Sir William Temple, diplomat and essayist (1628-99), claimed the English (not the Scots, Irish or Welsh) gave the world humour (Muir, 1990; XXIX). It was, he believed, a product of the 'richness of the English soil.'\n\nThe human, stubborn behaviour of the English, so he said, needed a free society and a temperate climate before it could flourish.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215691, "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": 468, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "421\n\nbeing starved. The complainant was later severely beaten by the Japanese. This prisoner could well have been HKBRAS member the late KMA Barnett although the book does not say so.\n\nWhen I have talked to ex-POWs I have seldom heard mention of acts of kindness by Japanese guards. As an ex-POW Dr Solomon Bard, who is well known to many HKBRAS Members, holds views which many regard as exceptional. He maintains there was 'no unprovoked cruelty within his experience. There are also instances quoted, in Long Night's Journey into Day, where individual Japanese were considerate to prisoners. This was more likely if a prisoner spoke Japanese.\n\nTo counterbalance instances of kindness there was the case of the American prisoner who requested permission to urinate. Permission was refused. Eventually, in agony, he broke ranks and urinated nearby. Afterwards he was made to lick his urine off the wall.\n\nThere is no doubt that, by and large, prisoners were severely treated. We have to remember, however, there was a war on and, in many cases, Japanese guards were little better off than their prisoners. Generally, when the war turned against them, both Japanese service personnel and civilians readily tightened their belt the extra notch. Japanese soldiers were brutalised from the day they entered service. Life in the Hong Kong camps, however, was not as bad as being a prisoner in Manchuria (Unit 731 and others) where inmates were subjected to inhumane medical experiments. In some camps in German-occupied Europe there was state-sponsored genocide, among the Jews for example, the full details of which did not come to light until the end of the War [Hon. Editor - As an aside, I recently paid a visit to Auschwitz, an experience which will haunt me for the rest of my life].\n\nMost prisoners in Hong Kong could envisage the war continuing for several years more and, when the Allies started to fight back and for the Japanese the going became even tougher, Allied prisoners were under the impression they would eventually be killed off in batches. The atom bomb saved the day. Although I fought against the Germans and the Italians, and not the Japanese, I remember no one at the time shedding tears at the dropping of the bomb on Japan.\n\nAlthough bushido and chivalry are in some respects similar this is", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]