[ { "id": 207433, "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": 201, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n193\n\nviously prepared note addressed to her mother which was successfully picked up. Her mother and two of her sisters then got to work on the Kempeitai, the formidable and feared gendarmerie, sometimes called the 'thought police' and somehow secured her release. When Mrs. Selwyn-Clarke was eventually interned in 1943 the work went on and Helen Ho continued to bring supplies to our hospital until our release. We had the privilege of welcoming her in person in the Central British School in August 1945, and expressing our thanks to her for her work whose value it is almost impossible to overestimate. Miss Ho was awarded the O.B.E. and after the war qualified in England as an almoner, the medical social worker of today. My wife and I have maintained friendship with Helen and her family ever since and I have had the privilege of calling on the family in Hong Kong in 1964.\n\nSelwyn-Clarke was arrested by the gendarmerie on 2 May 1943, and his wife was interned in Stanley. A civil medical man had escaped from internment in Hong Kong in 1942 and this may have impaired Selwyn-Clarke's position with the Japanese to some extent. However this may be, conditions became very hard in 1942 for his subordinates who were still working to improve the health conditions generally. When some of these had been reduced to burning their own furniture for fuel and had been forbidden to draw funds from their banks a number sought permission to leave the Colony and seek a life in Chinese mainland villages. Selwyn-Clarke had power to sign recommendations for permission to leave in the case of those who had served directly under him before and during hostilities. He suspected that one man severely wounded during the fighting, in whose case he had very slightly stretched the facts in his certificate because of his deep sympathy with his plight, was detected and stopped by the Japanese on his way to China. He was intensively questioned and eventually broke down and gave the answers his questioners wanted, answers relating to Selwyn-Clarke's alleged spying activities which were quite untrue. Selwyn-Clarke was an upright man who would never break his word even to the Japanese occupiers and he told me subsequently that in the case of the certificate he gave to the man he suspects was immediately responsible for his arrest, this was the only occasion in his life that he had ever compromised on a matter of principle. This I accept. It shows the kind of man he was. Besides this incident which fired the train of events leading to his arrest he had of course", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207434, "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": 202, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "194\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nalways been under close surveillance as well by the gendarmerie. After his arrest in May, 1943, he was confined in the cells below the Supreme Court in conditions of the utmost squalor and was subjected to the intensive, unending, repetitive \"interrogation\" about his alleged spying activities which are lamentably so well known nowadays. One of the accusations was that in some way he was in touch with the British Embassy in Lisbon to which he was supposed to have reported information about Japanese activities. The charge was a capital one and the sentence of the trial court was death. To such a condition was he reduced that he told his captors to get on with the job and carry out the sentence. This they did not do, and he suspects that the deaths in prison of the Chief Manager of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in circumstances in which ill-treatment and starvation were suspected made even the Japanese gendarmerie reluctant to offer Selwyn-Clarke as a third victim. Sixteen months later he was tried again, also upon a capital charge but due to some dealings of oriental subtlety by some of his friends in the Colony the sentence this time was three years in prison. In December 1944 he was transferred from Stanley prison to Ma Tau Wei Internment camp near Kai Tak airport and there he says he was alright. In August 1945, when we welcomed him to our hospital in the Central British School he was still physically in poor shape and he suffered permanent disabilities. His spirit, however, if it had once been bent, had by then recovered and as soon as he could after the Japanese surrender he returned to his office in Hong Kong to reestablish medical and health control and order in the Colony.\n\nBefore closing this section which has been devoted to the problems of feeding patients and staff in the hospital I am glad to refer to the Red Cross organization in Hong Kong during the war. Mr. R. Zindel, a Swiss citizen and thus a neutral, was in charge. He made formal inspections of the hospital about every six months accompanied by the Japanese Commander of P.O.W. camps. I shall refer later to these visits, but it was quite evident to me that Mr. Zindel was confined within strict limits by the Japanese during his inspections. He must, I feel sure, have met the same difficulties in his work outside the hospital, but I record here with gratitude our indebtedness to his tenacity, skill and resource in getting to us so many of the food stores which made such a very great difference to our wellbeing. I had the pleasure of meeting him also in Hong Kong during my visit in 1964.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207451, "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": 219, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n211\n\nnews he had a switch to allow him to broadcast his musical records to patients during the permitted hours. Usually he was careful, but one day when I was visiting a ward I was startled to hear on the ward loud speaker a part of a British bulletin on events on the Russian front. A speeding messenger to his bunk got this stopped and the Japanese showed no awareness of what had happened.\n\nI have often asked myself why I ran this risk. While I was then, and remain now, pretty sure that our own Japanese authorities sought for their own sake if not for ours, to keep all disciplinary problems in the hospital within their own hands and not report any of these to the Kempeitai or gendarmerie they would hardly have dared to suppress evidence of wireless communication between us and the outside world. No explanation by us that this was a simple and harmless gathering of news would have been accepted. Inevitably we would have been accused of operating a transmitter to broadcast to our side information about Japanese military matters. I, as head of the hospital, would have suffered the fate which overtook certain British officer prisoners in Kowloon who had been in communication with mainland China and who were executed after suffering so much that it was reported that they were unable to walk to the place of execution. I knew the risks perfectly well and yet for a long time I did not stir.\n\nI think now that I did not realise that we were getting a broad picture of the way the war was developing from the local paper though the emphasis here of course was on Japanese successes. I suppose I always hoped for some news of special significance to us. Certainly the hospital looked forward to the news and I was unwilling at that time to do anything to interrupt the flow. And so our news bulletins from British sources continued to come in for a very long time.\n\nEventually a decision was forced from me when certain officer patients represented to me that if found out it would not be only me who would suffer. The whole hospital could easily be closed down and certainly the privileges we enjoyed would be withdrawn. This argument was presented to me formally and I recognised the force of it and ordered the dismantling and destruction of the wireless receiving set.\n\nI did not supervise this personally; it was certainly dismantled but it was whispered that it had been reassembled elsewhere in the hospital and that it continued to be operated. If this was so my ignorance of its existence would not have saved me had it been discovered, but the story may well have been one of the rumours on all subjects", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207470, "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": 238, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "230\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nlikely to follow neither I nor any of those present realised the straits to which the Japanese were being reduced by the Allied blockade.\n\nOn 1 April I had to give Saito a certificate in writing that no Japanese school children, soldiers or ordinary spectators had been allowed to come and look at us in the hospital, in fact that we had not been put on display for the curious to gape at. I had no difficulty in complying, for nothing of this kind had ever happened. My explicit clearance certificate was amended and returned by the Japanese and though their version was, I thought, less exculpatory than the original I was still able to sign it without reservation. On 20 June Watanabe told me that we must keep all our worn-out clothing including even the fandoshis and this was yet another indication of the deteriorating situation on the Japanese side.\n\nOn 1 July Saito brought a senior doctor to see our equipment in the operating theatres, the X-ray department, the laboratory, the physiotherapy and the ophthalmic departments, and they also looked at our disinfestor arrangements. A little later photographs of the operating rooms, the X-ray department and the laboratory were taken.\n\nOn 7 August Watanabe took away the remainder of the kit which Colonel Shackleton had left behind with us, seven boxes in all none being locked. On 10 September Saito again made a search and took more plain clothes. On 6 November a Japanese officer searched the operating theatres and X-ray department in the basement, knocking out some bricks in walls in the process. Directly after this search was completed Saito and Seino repeated the whole procedure.\n\nIn our small community I got news very quickly of any unusual happenings and one day late in the year I was told by our own people that two members of the gendarmerie, the Kempeitai, had arrived. I believe that they were identified by the Japanese guards and a notable stillness fell upon the hospital, guards and guarded alike. The former were clearly concerned to keep out of trouble while we knew enough about the reputation of the gendarmerie to keep quiet and avoid provocation. I was not summoned to accompany them nor were any of our local Japanese authorities but I observed two very powerfully built men whom it would have been unwise to provoke. They paid a few perfunctory visits to different parts of the hospital and then left. I never knew if this visit was any", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207471, "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": 239, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CAPTIVE SURGEON IN HONG KONG\n\n231\n\nmore than a casual call during an afternoon's stroll but I would never have expected such a call to have been made by chance and at the very least they probably wanted to see for themselves the conditions in which we were guarded. When they left the guards and ourselves resumed our normal behaviour, not unlike the chattering of birds, stilled while the hawk is overhead and resumed when the danger has passed.\n\nIt is not difficult now to attribute some at least of the searches which took place about this time to the prevailing mood of the Japanese in Hong Kong. Suspicion of foreigners had been fostered assiduously in Japan before the war and xenophobia flourished exceedingly when war began. The turn of the tide against the Axis powers I suppose did nothing to soften this feeling. In Hong Kong Dr. Selwyn-Clarke was arrested in May 1943 to face charges some of which sound grotesque, and I have given a short account of his subsequent experiences. In July 1943 the Japanese gendarmerie arrested a number of men in Sham Shui Po. Under torture the names of others who had sent and received messages from Waichow via Chinese drivers of ration lorries were extracted and Colonel L.A. Newnham late Middlesex Regiment, G.S.O.1 British Troops in Hong Kong, Captain D. Ford 2 Royal Scots and Flight-Lieutenant Gray, R.A.F., were implicated. These three officers were tried by Japanese Court martial in Stanley in December 1943 and shot the same month. They had endured interrogation, a word now thoroughly debased, for many months and their condition at the end was described as deplorable.\n\nAgainst the background of events outside which I have just described we were in a position of some privilege in Bowen Road, but it seems likely that there was some link between the two situations. It could easily be that the Japanese inspections of some of our medical and electrical equipment was carried out by men capable of detecting apparatus usable for radio communications. Some of the searches certainly seemed aimed at the detection of concealed radio apparatus. We were lucky that nothing on which suspicion could feed was discovered, but my scalp always crawled a little while the searches were in progress.\n\nWe had a number of visits from Japanese doctors who wanted to see our patients, principally at this time those partially blinded by the deficiency diseases. My diary records that we found one such doctor, a lieutenant-colonel, to be courteous to our patients.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207498, "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": 266, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "258\n\nDONALD C. BOWIE\n\nS.M.O. Sham Shui Po and Crawford would be in medical charge in the officers' camp. I asked Swyer to send us five members of the R.A.M.C. including one sanitary assistant. The day before I had received a letter from Miss Dyson, our Matron from Stanley Camp who wanted her sisters with her there to rejoin us and this gave us pleasure.\n\nDuring one of my absences from the hospital an incident had occurred over a flag. Someone had hoisted the Union flag on the hospital flag staff and Japanese troops with machine guns surrounded the hospital and for safety's sake we stopped all expeditions from the hospital for the time being. Saito had been observed by our people leaving the hospital with some trucks apparently filled with papers and documents and he had a drawn sword in his hand. On 20 August the Japanese again mounted an armed guard early in the afternoon. In the morning I had been told by Saito and Nomura that the Japanese were still in control and they arranged for Takami the supplies warrant officer to deal with us over food. I pressed him especially for milk and certain other urgently needed foods for medical purposes and required Saito to return to us all the records he had removed. He asked about the numbers we had in the hospital, a foolish but typical request because he must have known all about these already. Nomura told me that the gendarmerie must have been responsible for surrounding the hospital on the day before and we thought it wise not to fly the Union flag for a time. Colonel Field, as the senior officer in command of British troops visited us, and said he would send any food that he could and he approved of our action over the flag incident. He also agreed that following a request from Saito we should not make any large scale moves before he had seen Tokunaga. Saito asked me to give medical and other help to the Indian camp. I found this a queer request indicating a concern of which I had had no great evidence before and of course we were already doing all we could to help. Nomura and another Japanese, Sekiguchi, were busy on plans of our cemeteries and some of our people who had relatives in Stanley left to visit them.\n\nWe exchanged our older men and those who were crippled with patients from Sham Shui Po who needed active treatment, and then a further 14 people who had been in Japanese prisons were admitted including Major Boxer who was an old friend of ours from the early days. Half of the fourteen were civilians. Colonel Tokunaga", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208643, "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": 100, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "THE MARYKNOLL MISSION, HONG KONG 1941-46\n\n73\n\nand soon the Holy Sacrifice is being celebrated on four makeshift altars, each of us taking his turn. After Mass, Father Troesch manages to get a little fire going in our kitchen and soon we have a cup of coffee and a dish of oatmeal. We have already been informed that the Japanese authorities will give us rice, meat, vegetables, tea, salt, and sugar—all of which will be strictly rationed and that we may be allowed to purchase other foods, such as fish and vegetables from hawkers who will come into the Camp. We are to have two meals a day, from the Camp kitchen, now merely a large rice caldron set up on some cement blocks in an area-way on the ground floor of our Block. Our cooks in this general kitchen seem to be some stranded American sailors, whose captain scuttled his ship when the war began.\n\nAs we take stock of our surroundings, we find that there are already some two hundred Americans here, and more expected. Some of these who arrived early began, with typical American aggressiveness, to clean up the place, and when we arrived, our rooms were in a very presentable state. In the other Blocks, there are over a thousand British, and more arriving, in trucks and buses, with more or less baggage. We likewise find five Maryknoll Sisters in Block \"G\". These are the Holy Spirit School staff, who in the beginning of hostilities had been evacuated to the Queen Mary Hospital, where they also served as nurses. The Japanese have taken over the Queen Mary Hospital, also all the other British Hospitals in the Colony and the staffs are rapidly being brought to Stanley. Our sick, Father Bauer and the two Brothers, have also arrived in Camp, Father Bauer being not much improved. In the course of this afternoon, nine Canadian Immaculate Conception Sisters arrived, and were given quarters in one of the British Blocks. We suppose the Kowloon contingent of Maryknoll Sisters will soon appear as well, along with Father Feeney. We are saving a cot for him.\n\nImmediately upon our vacating the House, the Japanese Gendarmerie moved in, and at night, we can see a few lights in the building.\n\nJanuary 22nd—A call for able-bodied seamen on deck for manual labor; some to help in the kitchen, cutting wood and preparing food, others for carrying baggage of new arrivals, and others are set to work carrying cement blocks for the construction of a", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211688, "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": 103, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "78\n\nextensively damaged; and close range fighting never actually reached us. The Japanese (as we discovered later) never actually located the two field gun batteries though they could tell their approximate position. They also seemed to suspect that something was concealed in the woods running down the valley from the Peak to Pokfulam, so this area was fairly intensively searched. So there was a rain of trench mortar and field gun shells and of air bombs (both high explosive and incendiary) all round us, and sufficient direct hits on the block of flats itself as well as near misses to make things unpleasant.\n\nThe Japanese landed on the Island on December 18th-19th and we had hardly absorbed this unpleasant information when we learnt that they had already crossed the hills and were in Aberdeen and Repulse Bay, thus cutting the island in two. On the morning of Christmas Day the Police sent round an urgent warning that the situation on the Peak was critical and that everyone who could move should go down the hill. Mrs. Witham and her baby got a lift in what must have been the last car to get through but there was no room for my wife and myself, and as we could not walk we had to stay where we were. Our fellow evacuees struggled down to Pokfulam and the servants disappeared so we were left alone in the flat. Our situation was, however, not so bad as it sounds, as there was a Police post in the same block of flats and the Police were very helpful during the following days in getting food and water for us. Hongkong surrendered on Christmas afternoon and the fighting, so far as we saw it, ended with a heavy burst of fire about 5 p.m. from one of our own anti-aircraft guns posted on one of the adjacent islands which was in Japanese hands.\n\nThe troops in our neighbourhood gradually collected, firing off their ammunition, blowing up batteries and dumps and making bonfires of stores. There were so many stores that if we had been mobile my wife and I could have provisioned ourselves comfortably. Even as it was, we got some tins of biscuits, jam and other odds and ends which came in very useful during the next fortnight. The troops were marched off to internment next morning but it was not until late that evening that we saw our first Japanese, when a Gendarmerie post was established in a nearby building. There followed a very disagreeable period. Though the Japanese established Gendarmerie posts here and there they seemed to make no serious effort to patrol the Peak area effectively, and it was in consequence being very thoroughly looted by bands of Chinese. The Japanese themselves were also very troublesome. Though the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211689, "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": 104, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "79\n\nCommandant of the near-by Gendarmerie post promised us protection, he took no steps to implement his promise, and we had a number of invasions from parties of Japanese soldiers, on and off duty, sometimes searching for arms, sometimes frankly looting watches, jewellery and other small valuables. My wife had a polite but firm way of dealing with these intruders, and in the end they got nothing from us but some cigarettes.\n\nOn January 3rd Mr. Gimson (the Colonial Secretary) and Mr. Alabaster (the Attorney-General) came up the hill to find out what had happened to us. They told me that they had spoken to Mr. Yano (who had come back to Hongkong temporarily as Consul-General) and the Gendarmerie people about us and the other Embassy and Consular personnel who were in Hongkong (Mr. and Mrs. Martin, Mr. and Mrs. Rich, Evans, Herrett and Miss Howkins) and we were to be given special consideration. This was comforting but in the event did not mean very much as there was the usual confusion between the different Japanese authorities, none of whom seemed to pay the slightest attention to the others.\n\nThen on January 5th notices were posted up in different places instructing all enemy aliens to report at the Murray Parade Ground between 10 a.m. and noon for internment. The notice said they could take what luggage they could carry in their hands and that they must leave the rest of their property in charge of some responsible person. This notice only came to our knowledge on the Peak at 9 a.m. People didn't know what on earth to do. If they started off immediately, walking down the Peak, they could get to the Murray Parade Ground in time. But there were old people, babies and invalids. Most people thought it would be dangerous to disobey a peremptory order like that, and they struggled down the hill as best they could, taking a suitcase or pushing a pram and abandoning everything else to the looters.\n\nFor my wife and myself there was no problem as we couldn't walk, so we decided to stay and hope for the best, and a good number of others followed our example. As it happened, things turned out all right, as Sir Arthur Macgregor called later in the day to say that he had arranged with the Gendarmerie that the people still on the Peak might remain temporarily but must be ready to move at a minute's notice. However, the Police post had gone, we were in difficulties about food and water (we had eaten the last crust of three-weeks-old bread that morning), and we had had an unpleasant visit from a party of Japanese soldiers at 2 a.m. We were completely alone in the flat, other flats in the building had already been looted, and generally the situation was unpromising. So we asked Sir Atholl to try", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211690, "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": 105, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "80 \n\nand get permission for us to move into the War Memorial Nursing Home, where the British staff were still functioning under the wing of a Japanese Doctor-Colonel and a gendarmerie post. He was able to arrange this for us, and we were fetched in a car and installed in the Nursing Home next day, January 6th. Dr. Talbot, an ear specialist attached to the hospital, looked at my ear and said the postponed operation should be performed without delay as the earhole had become completely blocked with scar tissue and pus was accumulating dangerously inside. On January 10th I was sent down to Queen Mary Hospital for X-ray photos to be taken both of the ear and the knee. The Martins were still there, and this was the last time I saw them. The expedition was of great interest to me since it was the first time I had visited the town since the Japanese occupation. The streets were crowded with Chinese, most of them in mile long queues trying to get cooked rice from \"co-prosperity\" congee kitchens. All the shops were shut and barricaded but the pavements in Queen's Road and the central district generally were lined with hawkers selling bread ($4 a loaf) and other foodstuffs, and large quantities of looted articles; bedding, silverware, cutlery, etc: one could have got almost anything one wanted, and all this without any apparent interference from the Japanese.\n\nAs the X-rays confirmed Dr. Talbot's diagnosis I let him operate on January 13th. He found it necessary to do a radical mastoid operation and make me a new earhole. At the time we expected to be left in peace for a month or so as there were a number of severely wounded British soldiers in the Nursing Home and we thought the Japanese would not insist on them and us being moved until they were fit to be moved. Eight days later, however, they announced that they needed the hospital and that it would have to be evacuated next morning. The military patients were sent to the military hospital at Bowen Road, and the rest of us to Stanley. I was told I need not go to Stanley Camp unless I wished, and I was given my choice of two other hospitals but I said I must go where my doctor went; so I was put on a long chair which was put on a lorry, and with my wife and our few belongings and half a dozen lorry loads of doctors, sisters and patients we went off to Stanley. That was on January 22nd. The place was in a turmoil as lorry loads and boat loads of people were arriving from all the Chinese hotels in Hongkong and Kowloon where the Japanese had congregated them and they were all scrambling for billets. The British personnel from Queen Mary Hospital (from which they and all the British wounded had been moved the previous day) were busy trying to get a hospital organised in a block\n\nPage 105\n\nPage 106", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211695, "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": 110, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "85\n\nuse in soldiers' brothels. Stories regarding these events are in the highest degree contradictory.\n\nAs regards the post-occupation period, the main Japanese objective seemed to be to impress the Chinese population with the advantages which the Japanese regime was going to bring them but they were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem presented by the teeming Chinese population who, with the disappearance of the British food services, were on the edge of starvation. Though congee centres were opened, these were on a quite inadequate scale and it soon became obvious that the Japanese were going drastically to reduce the numbers of Chinese in the Colony, by the threat of starvation if necessary. Dr. Selwyn Clark told me, during my one excursion from the camp on April 22nd that his office was besieged from morning to night by the Chinese employees of the Hong Kong Government and by the relatives and dependents of Chinese volunteers all completely destitute. The Japanese would do nothing for them and he could do very little. The French hospital was full of malnutrition cases who were doomed to death as they could get neither appropriate food nor drugs. The Japanese had also forbidden the admission of any more civilian patients. Many Chinese actually died of starvation, and tens of thousands voluntarily returned to China. One large party of alleged destitutes and vagabonds (about 600) were brought to Stanley by motorbus and put in the prison. After a few days they were put aboard junks at Stanley and the junks went off somewhere. Within a very short time a number of bodies of men and women were washed up on shore where they were left to putrefy for several days. There were rumours of a “noyade”, but I think a more reasonable explanation is that the Japanese were deporting these people and that the more desperate committed suicide.\n\nI have already referred in these notes to the looting of the Peak area by Chinese. This looting was general all over Hong Kong and Kowloon except, I believe, in the Central District. In the space of a few hours Government rice stocks, hospitals and private houses would be picked clean. To a great extent the looting was done in the short interval between the withdrawal of the British forces from any point and the arrival of the Japanese but in many cases, as on the Peak where we were, the looting went on after the occupation and almost under the noses of the Japanese gendarmerie. There is hardly a house on the Peak, I am told, that has not been reduced to a mere shell, all woodwork including floors and staircases being removed and plumbing and electrical fittings,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212161, "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": 103, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "80\n\na large temple and a thriving cult. He was deified after a number of miracles were credited to his spirit. His legend has now grown to describe him as an anti-Japanese political hero, rather than the anti-social thug and robber he actually seems to have been. Locally it is said that he was a local layabout, who had worked first as a herdsman and later as a servant. He fell into bad company, was taught martial arts, was given to gratuitous violence and caused the Japanese military gendarmerie so much trouble that they offered a high reward for his capture. He does not appear to have supported any cause, and was a crude, bombastic swaggerer. Eventually he was killed. There are a number of versions of how he met his end, the most common being that he was killed by his own family at the age of 35 to avoid Japanese retribution. Another version claims that he was struck on the head with a shovel by his mistress acting as a paid agent of the Japanese. This is now either forgotten or ignored, and though it is popularly claimed that Liao nowadays is the patron deity of Taiwanese gangsters, he is not prayed to for any specific help, simply for general favours. The question this now raises is how many of the local heroes of greater antiquity than Liao were also local thugs with their wickedness lost in time and their prowess and valour exaggerated?\n\nCults of the Deified Spirits of Local Charismatic Heroes and Worthies\n\nA number of small, one hall temples in comparatively remote villages in Taiwan bear a single image. These represent a very local hero who was in some way involved in the anti-Ch'ing [Manchu] campaigns of the mid-seventeenth century. The most common legends claim that the hero in question was a general or admiral who had served under the great Ming general Koxinga. [Koxinga not only liberated Taiwan from the Dutch colonisers but also fought the Manchu invaders who had conquered the mainland overthrowing the Chinese Ming dynasty replacing it with the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty]. In practice many of these local heroes were no more than village headmen who led their trainbands of armed villagers to fight under Koxinga. Religion can give nationalism an emotional power and in Taiwan, first under the Japanese conqueror and, then under the threat of invasion from the Communist forces on the mainland, nationalism has been enhanced by the deification of local heroes who faced and defeated the Dutch invaders and later opposed the Manchu usurpers of the Chinese throne.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 } ]