[
    {
        "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",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214975,
        "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": 71,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "27\n\nTungtang):\n\nPapa gave in, and Rosalie [Suyin] and Tiza [her younger sister] went to the Catholic Chinese school; every morning there was half an hour of Bible story, and in this version St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary were Chinese, born in Shantung province.\n\nRosalie asked: “How can this be? The Western School says born in Judea, and the family were all Jews.\"\n\n\"That's what they say, but we here believe it is in Shantung,” replied the Chinese lay-sister who taught Catechism.\n\nRosalie was not happy, and talked to the other children about it, and three days later Mother Superior sent for her after school and told her to stop asking questions.\n\n“You must understand, my child, that the others don't know any better. They are Chinese.'\n\nThe devastating atmosphere of her childhood years made Han Suyin write a bitter paragraph in Chapter 11 (The End and the Beginning), taken from volume five, Phoenix Harvest. In this episode, she describes the family's difficult life in pre-revolutionary China:\n\nTheir [Han Suyin's parents'] decades together were of sorrow and pain and insecurity, of war and running away and making do; and seeing their children despised for being Eurasians. Only I had the courage (or the foolishness) to scream against the general contempt for Eurasians, \"But we are the future.\"\n\nIn her early teens, Han Suyin had the courage to think of a sky-high virtually impossible dream for a female Eurasian in pre-revolutionary China, namely of becoming a medical doctor. In order to at least partially finance these very costly studies, she first had to learn typing and shorthand writing, and then got a secretarial job with P.U.M.C. (Peking Union Medical College). At P.U.M.C., this child of barely fourteen was immediately confronted with inequality in payment for equal accomplishment, depending on the employee's racial status, white, Eurasian in various different proportions, or simply Chinese. In Chapter",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215078,
        "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": 174,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "131\n\nconnection with Chinese history when comparing the same with the Western system. There was also a slight derangement of time over the year, by one day only, with the intercalary moon being so arranged as to have only one solar period in it.\n\nAlthough the months were divided into two fifteen-day periods, markers for rituals, these periods had no particular relevance to the lives of the common man. What did have marked relevance for the majority of the population was the artificial division of the month into three ten-day periods, used mainly to mark rest days. However, as the seven-day week of the Judeo-Christians does not follow the natural laws by which events and phenomena operate, it was an alien concept to the majority of Chinese until 1911 when the western Gregorian calendar was introduced by the Republic.\n\nThe day was divided into twelve equal hours, each of 120 minutes - though the concept of such minuscule divisions as minutes within an hour used to be beyond the comprehension of the great majority of Chinese. Short periods of time used to be described as the length of time it took for a standard incense stick to burn down.22\n\nThese twelve Chinese hours were referred to using the twelve 'branches' or horary characters. These not only provided names for each of the twelve hours of the complete day but also, in combination with the ten celestial 'stems,' they gave titles for the years.\n\nMonths were referred to by twelve [or thirteen in intercalary years23] ordinary and literary names completely unconnected with the stems and branches.\n\nThe twelve hour day began with 11p.m. to 1 a.m., the hour of the rat and known by the first of the 'twelve branches' Zi; the second hour, 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. was the hour of the ox and known by the second 'branch', Chou. The remainder of the twelve branches' were Yin, the hour of the tiger; Mao, the hour of the hare; Chen, the hour of the dragon; Si, the hour of the snake; Wu, the hour of the horse; Wei, the hour of the sheep; Shen, the hour of the monkey; You, the hour of the cock; Xu, the hour of the dog; and finally, Hai, the hour of the pig.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215079,
        "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": 175,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "132\n\nThe cycle of years consists of sixty possible combinations of pairs of characters, a system used since remote antiquity. A second system used reign periods similar to that used in England until fairly recent times. In the sixty-year cycle, the Chinese have used individual characters, the ten stems [tiangan] and the twelve branches (dizhi), paired to provide sixty combinations; thus, the first of the stems, Jia, and the first of the branches, Zi, together form a combination for the first year of the sixty, Jia Zi, and each successive year has another pair designating it for the whole sexagenary cycle when the combination begins again.24 The 'branches' were originally used to designate successive days; however, since the Han, they have been used in combinations for successive years.\n\nAlso within that sixty-year repetitive cycle, each individual year, with the five sequences of twelve years, was known, not only by the combination of stem and branch but also, for simplicity, by the animal of the year. Thus, the year 2000 is the Gengchen year as well as being the year of the Dragon. 1988 was and 2012 will also be the year of the Dragon, but neither will be Gengchen years, as this only comes round once every sixty years. For example, the year 2000 was Gengchen, as was sixty years earlier in 1940 and will be again in 2060.\n\nThe Chinese years are also referred to cyclically by one of the twelve named animals. Thus, we have the years of the Rat, Ox, Tiger, Hare, etc., the change taking effect from the Lunar New Year, which can fall any time between late January and the middle of February on the Gregorian calendar.\n\nAlthough the months were divided into two fifteen-day periods, markers for rituals, these periods had no particular relevance to the lives of the common man. What did have marked relevance for the majority of the population was the artificial division of the month into three ten-day periods, used mainly to mark rest days. However, as the seven-day week of the Judeo-Christians does not follow the natural laws by which events and phenomena operate, so it was an alien concept to the majority of Chinese until 1911, when the western Gregorian calendar was introduced by the Republic.\n\nChinese used sun dials and water clocks from an early date, the latter dependent upon a constant and steady flow through control",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    }
]