[ { "id": 204464, "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-1962", "page_number": 96, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES\n\n85\n\nexamination by the District Magistrate at Nam Tau and by the Kwang Chau prefect at Canton, proceeded to the Viceroy's yamen in the same city where eventually a favoured few would manage to pass the first degree of sau choi. This in theory entitled the scholar to qualify for an official post. In practise there were many more sau choi than there were posts and a scholar had to pursue further study and pass other examinations before he stood a real chance of becoming an official. In every district there were sau choi who would never obtain posts. Many became local schoolmasters. Others by virtue of wealth and position became the local gentry who, by report, were sometimes a help to the magistrate and frequently a nuisance, both to him and to the litigant or criminal public. They sat on the local tribunals kuk and advised the magistrate on local affairs. Being literati like himself they had ready access to his yamen and to his ear. Sometimes they even outranked him. Elders, on the other hand, rarely sat on the kuk. Lockhart estimated that there were one hundred and fifty sau choi in the whole district.20 In 1898 the elders of important villages like Ha Tsuen and Ping Shan were literati. Several of them played a leading part in the planning of operations against the British take-over.27\n\n20\n\nSometimes the wealthier village elders enhanced their position by purchasing degrees. In the late Ch'ing period the sale of examination titles appears to have been considerable. Smith mentions it in his Village Life in China** and I have come across several such persons in villages in the Southern District of the New Territory. They were usually substantial villagers. Such a one was CHAN Tak-hang4 of Cheung Kwan O in Junk Bay who died in the seventeenth year of Kwong Shui (1892) at the age of sixty-four. According to his descendant, the present Village Representative, he was a man of substance who built a guest house in the village which is still standing to-day, gave money for the upkeep of the stone tracks which linked the villages of the area with Kowloon, and was well known locally. His portrait, painted at the age of fifty-seven, shows him in his borrowed finery as a kwok hok sang, for which he paid an unknown consideration to Government. A man such as this would obviously play a considerable part in the affairs of his immediate neighbourhood.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204964, "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": 72, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "65\n\nTHE SOUTHERN SUNG STONE-ENGRAVING\n\nAT NORTH FU-T’ANG\n\nJEN YU-WEN\n\nOn the southern tip of the small peninsula, North Fu-t'ang (Pak Fat-t'ang), on the eastern shore of Junk Bay, lies a stone-engraving dating from the Southern Sung Dynasty, one of the most famous historic relics in Hong Kong. The vernacular name for this place is Ta-miao (Tai-miu), or \"Big Temple,\" because a temple of T'ien-hou (T'in-hou), or \"Heavenly Queen,” is situated there. About half-way up the hill just behind this Temple, is located the large rock, five feet high, ten feet wide and five feet thick, hidden in the thick brush. On its flat surface facing the south, there are 108 Chinese characters engraved in nine vertical lines with twelve characters each. Each character is about four square inches in size. The entire surface covering the engraving is four feet two inches wide and three feet nine inches high. The engraving was done in the tenth year of the reign of Hsien-hsun (Ham Shun) of the Emperor Tu Chung of the Southern Sung Dynasty (A.D. 1274) — the date given at the end of the inscription. Just three years before this date, two of the Emperor's sons, who later successively succeeded him to the throne, were fleeing from the pursuit of the Mongols and had landed on the western shore of Kowloon Bay at the historic spot subsequently named Sung Wong Toi.\n\nThis stone-engraving is recorded in the Chia-ch'ing (Ka Hing) edition of the Gazetteer of Hsin-an (Sun-on) District, but details of the historic relic are not given in its description. The Genealogical Record of the Lin (Lum) clan of P'u-kang (P'u-kong) village in Kowloon, however, contains a narration concerning the place, the Temple and the stone-engraving which is very helpful for studying the history of this historic relic. Unfortunately, many of the characters on the stone as transcribed therein are not correct, leaving the readers still in the dark regarding the real meaning of the original text. As a matter of fact, a few engraved characters on the rock have been partially worn-out so badly that it renders some lines absolutely unintelligible.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205403, "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-1967", "page_number": 165, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "158 \n\nNOTES AND QUERIES \n\nTHE CHAN FAMILY OF TSEUNG KWAN O \n\nThe village of Tseung Kwan O (4) is situated in the Hang Hau sub-district of the New Territories. It stands at the head of the bay of the same name, which is the northern inlet of Junk Bay. The village is said to derive its name of \"a general's bay\" from its resemblance to a general's armour in a geomantic sense.\n\nThe village is a small one; two rows of houses of the single room type. It is surrounded by padi fields, which in front stretch down to the sea, and behind climb up the stream valley in many terraces to the Clear Water Bay Road and the village of Tseng Lan Shue (##). Although the village is but a short distance from Kowloon as the crow flies, it was, until recently, difficult to reach and thus remained largely unaffected by urban influences. Now, however, the bay has been made the home of the Colony's ship breaking industry and both shores are being reclaimed for steel rolling mills.\n\nThe village itself is compact and was perhaps originally walled. Because of this, the fact that it is situated at the mouth of the stream, and because it possesses a large area of fields, it is not surprising to find that the village is inhabited by Cantonese (or Punti) in an area where most of the other villages in the highlands are Hakka. It is also not surprising that this village was founded at an earlier date than the Hakka villages in the same district.2\n\nThe village includes a number of surnames, but the main clan is the Chan (陳). Although this clan does not now possess an official genealogy or tsuk po (族譜), having destroyed it during the Japanese occupation, they maintain records of their family for 26 generations, dating back to the Southern Sung dynasty (1127-1279), the first recorded ancestor being reputed, as is usual, to be a successful scholar and official. During the Sung, this branch moved from Kiangsi to Nam Tau, the district capital of the present Po On district. In their travels, they followed the route of many of the old Cantonese families of the New Territories area. The village itself was founded by the 16th generation at the beginning of the Ching dynasty (1644-1911), approximately the same date of foundation as the other large Cantonese villages of the Sai Kung district.4\n\nPage 165\n\nPage 166", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205404, "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-1967", "page_number": 166, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n159 \n\nThe clan possesses a small ancestral hall in the second row of houses, and here are housed the ancestral tablets of the most important ancestors. \n\nThese tablets usually have a sliding wooden slot at the back on which is given a short biography of the person commemorated, usually his birth and death, and sometimes a geomantic description of his grave site. From these records and the recollections of the present generation, information was obtained about two of the more distinguished clansmen of recent times. \n\nCHAN Jit-meng (M) alias Tak-hang (7) of the 20th generation, was born on the 2nd day of the 10th month in the year of the Tao Kwang (†) (i.e. 1828) and died on the 3rd day of the 12th month in the year of Kwang Hsü (**) (i.e. 1891). \n\nHe was a successful businessman who had a shop at Fat Shan (#) near Canton and a large cargo junk with which he traded to and from the Kowloon area. With the trading junk he brought a large amount of stone and building materials to the Tseung Kwan O area and is said to have been responsible for many public works: the village school, the pier at Hang Hau market (},□) nearby and the stone paved paths up the valley to Tseng Lan Shue and along the line of the present Clear Water Bay Road. \n\nHe also owned a shop called Yi Hing (M) just outside Kowloon City. He was a member of the Kowloon City Kaifong and one of the founder members of the Lok Sing Tong (#44) in 1879. This was an association of local gentry and leading villagers from the surrounding areas. \n\nIn later life, he bought the degree of Kwok Hok Shang (M *) in Canton, \n\nAccording to his ancestral tablet he had a wife NG (A) and a concubine WONG (£). \n\nCHAN Kwok-yan (RQ) alias Wai Tong (†) son of the above. This man's ancestral tablet does not show his dates of birth and death, but these are thought to be 1872-1933. As his father CHAN Jit-meng was a fairly rich man, he had a middle school education in Canton or Fat Shan. At some time in his career he met Sir Cecil Clementi (✯✯) the future Governor", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206424, "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": 241, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n215\n\nThe opium trade of Shanghai may have taken place \"on the busy Bund\", but not until after 1858. The authors apparently never have heard of Woosung and its hulks.\n\nThe authors, intent on opium, assert an oil painting of an island with a British flag on a pole on the shore is \"Lintin”. In the background, with top masts housed, are ships. It is painted and signed \"C. Cramer 1803\", obviously an European artist. Evidently the authors do not realize that opium trading in 1803 was conducted at Whampoa and only reached Lintin in 1821. They also err when they state Jardine Matheson & Co. “diverted their ships to Lintin Island and other independents followed suit”. In 1803 Jardine Matheson & Co. was not in existence. They maintain the ships in the background are \"Scandinavian flag-ships”. Of course there is no such thing as a Scandinavian flag, and a look at the poor photograph shows a white field and a dark cross on a flag, more indicative of the St. George ensign than either a Danish or Swedish flag with its dark field and light cross. You will find this Scandinavian error repeated 5 other times. To cap it all, one finds a British sailor rolling a barrel along the shore, surely an impossibility in 19th century China. Can the scene be somewhere in the Mediterranean where there are islands and mountains and British warships in 1803?\n\nThe authors manage to insert a most extraordinary amount of misinformation into their nautical writings. In plate 37, correct to a French \"bark”, not a “schooner\". The liner Empress of Japan is identified correctly in plate 44, but why date the picture \"circa 1880\" when the steamer begins service in 1891? The painting is on the \"stern\" of the Chinese Merchant Junk, plate 63, not the \"prow\", as the rudder shows clearly just below. For the English \"clipper\" dated 1866, substitute \"bark\". Evidently they know nothing of monsoons or they would revise \"the cumbersome East Indiamen which could only make two round sailings each season between India and China”. Of course the answer is one sailing per season. The numerous islands between Macao and the China Sea \"make a landfall at Macao\" almost prohibitively difficult.\n\nSome of the identifications of Port Scenes are ludicrous. Any person who locates \"the Praya Grande bordering the bay of the inner harbor” at Macao or \"the Governor's Palace at the northern", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206479, "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": 27, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "NINETEENTH CENTURY WATER-COLOURS OF CANTON\n\n21\n\nXIV Mahometan pagoda & Belfry from W. gate Canton March 12 58\n\nView over roof-tops from a terrace. Tree-capped pagoda in distance.\n\nXVII Macao April 58\n\nView of sea-front, with sampans in foreground.\n\nXX Peiho River July 3rd 58\n\nSmall British gun-boat, no. 83, in the river with military figures on the banks.\n\nXXV North of Formosa Id. July 30th 1858\n\nJunk in rough seas off mountainous coast.\n\nXXVI Pagoda Chimmo Bay N. of Amoy Augst 3rd 58\n\nFigures in small boat with mountains and pagoda in the background.\n\nXXVII Victoria Hong Kong Augt 14 58\n\nHong Kong harbour, town and peak from Stonecutters Island.\n\nXXVIII In Tartar Yamun August 58\n\nRed-coated soldier in front of a hall, with a pagoda in background.\n\nXXXI Canton Septr 58\n\nMagazine Hill 5 storied pagoda N. Gate\n\nChinese carrying a load outside gate of Canton, with walls and features of the town visible in the background.\n\nXXXIII Honan Temple Octr 5th 58 GAS\n\nMain hall of temple with Chinese walking about.\n\nXXXV Canton Octr 58 E. Wall\n\nWalls, with a pagoda in the distance.\n\nXLIII Novr 18, 58. Gates of Confucius Temple\n\nThe College From S, Wall Canton\n\nEntrance gates in foreground, with temple buildings behind.\n\nXLV Howqua's Garden Dec 21 58 GAS\n\nPavillion in lake, with trees and other buildings around.\n\nUnnumbered Faint pencil inscription: Tombs in Canton(?)\n\nTombs and coffins in front of a Chinese temple, with a view of water in the background.\n\nThe sketches show a certain amateur artistic ability. Some of them are of views which were very popular among book illustrators", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206990, "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": 61, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG\n\n55\n\nnot serve his full sentence because he was released on grounds of ill-health. But, as Des Voeux notes, the day after his release from Victoria Gaol he was seen avidly betting at the Happy Valley Race Course. He was, clearly a great card and popular with drinking circles in Hong Kong. The Telegraph was an evening newspaper. After Fraser-Smith's death, J. J. Francis became publisher and Chesney Duncan its editor.\n\n28 John Joseph Francis (1839-1901) was educated in Dublin and intended for the Catholic priesthood. But instead of entering the Church he enlisted in the Army, coming out to China in the Royal Artillery during the Second China War. He took his discharge in Hong Kong and commenced the study of law in the office of a Mr. Owens, solicitor. He was admitted to practise as an attorney in 1869 and entered into partnership with another solicitor and soon acquired a lucrative practice. Ambitious, he gained admission to Gray's Inn and was called to the Bar of the Supreme Court of Hong Kong in 1877. By 1888 he was the Colony's leading barrister. Francis was extremely touchy and truculent: in 1895 he returned to the Governor a silver inkstand, given to him in recognition of his work during the plague, on the grounds that the gift did not sufficiently acknowledge his services. He died of apoplexy at Yokohama's Grand Hotel in 1901. A fitting end: he was an apoplectic soul. Francis lived at 'Shirley House' in Bonham Road, a commodious residence with extensive grounds.\n\n29 A. Macmillan, Seaports of the Far East, London, 1923, p. 366.\n\n30 22 November, 1888. The Hong Kong Hotel, situated in Pedder Street, was originally managed by Parsees; in 1866 it came under European management and soon became a first-class hotel with all the facilities of a good West End hotel.\n\n31 7 January, 1889.\n\n32 Soulié states that Mayréna on his way to Hong Kong marooned Afong on Hainan Island but that the intrepid Chinese took passage on a junk and appeared in Hong Kong to haunt the King of the Sedangs.\n\n33 China Mail, 7 January, 1889.\n\n34 George Murray Bain (1842-1909) was born and educated at Montrose, Scotland. He joined the China Mail as a sub-editor and reporter (some say printer) in 1864. In 1875 he became sole proprietor of the China Mail and in 1879 took over the editorship of the paper himself. With N. B. Dennys he started the China Review in 1872. The China Mail was edited from Wyndham Street, a short distance away from the Hong Kong Telegraph on Pedder's Hill. Bain, unlike Fraser-Smith, appears to have been pious, temperate, and acutely respectable.\n\n35 Hong Kong Telegraph, 27 December, 1888.\n\n36 'Drey' was the name of a Sedang locality.\n\n37 China Mail, 24 January, 1889.\n\n38 Hong Kong Telegraph, 25 January, 1889.\n\n39 7 January, 1889.\n\n40 Sir Hugh Clifford, Heroes of Exile, London, 1906, pp. 69-70. Clifford states that it was the Hong Kong merchants 'who had paid his (Mayréna's) passage and had supplied his Majesty with a little ready money' and that they had been actuated partly by a desire to remunerate one from whom they had derived so much entertainment'. Sir Hugh Clifford (1866-1941), a colonial administrator, who served in Pahang from 1887 to 1899, was, apparently, in Hong Kong in late 1888; it is possible that he had taken local leave but I have been unable to confirm the fact.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207616, "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": 4, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "164\n\nDAVID FAURE\n\nHong Kong Island that had connections with Hang Hau and the Sai Kung islands. The city also needed fuel and building materials, and villagers in Sai Kung were soon carrying firewood into Kowloon City, sometimes selling it to the shops, but often to passers-by. Charcoal burning was also practised in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the practice died out in the early 1900's. Moreover, along the Sai Kung coastline and in several places in Junk Bay, lime kilns sprang up, producing lime from coral. The lime was used as plastering in city as well as village houses. A considerable brick-making industry also grew up in Pak Tam Chung, which at first produced red bricks for use in the city. Later, when this proved to be unprofitable the area concentrated on producing green bricks for building village houses. Even farming was affected. Towards the early 1900's, pig raising became an important source of cash income for the village household. The pigs were sold to butchers in Sai Kung and Hang Hau. Much of the meat was consumed locally, but a substantial amount must also have found its way into the city.8\n\nAs in other parts of the New Territories, some villagers in Sai Kung were recruited as seamen by foreign shipping companies. Foreign remittance came to be a regular source of income, and not a few returned with savings. There were those that did not go as far, who accepted work in Kowloon or Hong Kong.10 The extreme example of wealth derived from the city must be the business operations of Chan Ue Kwong of Ho Chung, Chan Wai T'ong of Tseung Kwan O, and Cheng Chiu Tsoh of Pak Kong. These three opened the I Hing General Store in Kowloon City, and became the richest men in their own villages. Some of this income was spent on land purchase and buildings, but Chan Ue Kwong became even wealthier as a money-lender in the village. Quite a few Sai Kung villagers who later entered business began as assistants in their shop. Chan Ue Kwong was well connected through his uncle with the officials in Kowloon City, and this must have helped his business.11\n\nSo far as we can tell, from the middle of the nineteenth century, economic development in Sai Kung proceeded unimpeded. After the New Territories was leased, land registration instituted by the Hong Kong Government further benefited the villagers.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208114, "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": 153, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "CHEUNG CHOW - \n\nLONG ISLAND\n\n137\n\nthe top sawyer in the neighbouring sawpit, and we pass towards that smithy beneath a banyan tree. The sinuous roots of the tree clutch the rock and strain like the arms of some vegetable octopus, and there just below the hanging threads of aerial roots is a tilt, and a furnace. The anvil is curious enough. There is one of the orthodox Chinese pattern but the other is a shell from some field-gun, goodness knows where it was found.\n\nNow we are in the main street at its more irregular Eastern end, interrupted here and there by sharp right-angled turns, and small shops begin to line the way. On our right a coffin maker plies his trade, and his workshop has a most attractive \"line\" of coffins on exhibition which seem to tempt that Chinese grandfather getting on in life, and thinking of providing for the future. Europeans unconsciously avert our eyes from the varnished glory of huge specimens that look like four tree trunks grown into one, but grand-father regards it with quiet pleasure. Some more blacksmith's shops, and a flight of irregular steps, and we are on the terrace of the temple of the Heavenly Queen, already referred to. This terrace overlooks the bay, and is put to practical use, not only as a point of vantage, but also to dry fish and sweet potatoes, and some strange ambiguous stuff. We can see a junk hauled up on the slip-way which was screened by the houses-hitherto. For all the clumsy upperworks her lines are clean and smooth below water, and her big lifting rudder and centre board appeal to the yachts-men. Those cannon in the bows are not for ornament only, for these seas swarm with pirate junks.\n\nJust now we will not stop to examine the dusty interior of this temple. Instead we descend into the street once more and continue our westward way. Near this place is a small hospital, a series of clean and pleasant courts and pavilions supported by the Kai Fong. This body is the real ruler of the town, elected by street committees and containing representatives of each of the four tribes. In the street a good-natured crowd drifts along. There is a brown-faced fisherman ashore for a stroll, and to buy cordage or food. He loiters before the chandlers shops, and discusses all topics before coming to the real question of the price of that double block and sheave hanging in the dim place under the ceiling. There are villagers carrying loads of vegetables to the pier, shuffling along with two great loads, one at each end of a bamboo resting on a great callous patch on their shoulders. Women are carrying water", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208117, "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": 156, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "140 \n\nW. J. HINTON \n\nnot so very different in their essence from those of greater cities. \"Aes alienis\" is much the same all the world over. \n\nFarther west a rope walk stretches back across several streets on the landward side, where they are twisting a mighty bamboo cable for the big junk being built in the Yard at the end of the bay. On the seaward side one of the long dark houses frames a picture of the bay and the ships seen through a verandah three rooms distant; within is the rich glow of lacquer chest. It is a picture for a Dutch master. For the most part the well-built doorways are closed by lacquered or painted doors or screens. We are in the West End; the crowd is thinner, but the dogs, pigs, fowls, and cats, if anything, more densely strew the scene. Through little lanes and alleys, we can see the Hoklo boats drawn up on the beach or riding a little from the land. Their owners are busy about them or putting out to fish with net and line in neighbouring bays. \n\nA dry nullah, and we are on a flight of steps leading to the terrace of the Pak Tai Temple. This terrace is a spacious place at times covered with a huge matshed theatre, which will house all the population that can leave home or junk for the show. Just now, it is occupied by children and by two parties of fishermen making fishing lines of some tough fibre on a primitive bamboo contrivance doubling and redoubling the thread. Under the groves, we see the eaves of another and smaller temple, and the tall wooden dyeing vats in which the nets are dyed blue and so made invisible to fishy eyes in the blue water. \n\nThe Pak Tai Temple must await another visit, for dusk has fallen, and bright lights are burning on the junks. There is no moon, but the stars are reflected in the still water. On the stern of every junk, the little cooking stoves glow, and family groups crouch round the rice bowl, half-illuminated by the glow, or brightly lit by a fishing flare where such extravagance can be afforded. Our yacht lies far out, and we hire a sampan, sitting side by side in the middle while the woman plies the \"ulch\" like a Venetian gondolier, crooning meantime to the baby on her back. Now we are among the junks, and the water lanes are full of small craft loaded with miscellaneous wares. A pedlar dips his paddle and cries his wares set out in a tray on his tiny dug-out. Sampans carry happy parties going ashore, or quiet ones coming off to their floating homes. There are no noisy parties of drunken sailors, but plenty of jollity and even a little horseplay here and there. Our boat moves", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208118, "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": 157, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "CHEUNG CHOW LONG ISLAND\n\n141\n\nslowly in the widening bay, pushing a dark ripple before her. A sampan with three powdered and giggling girls drifts by, and as it passes, one sings in high quavering falsetto the first verse of a love song; then the second is sung by her companions. A young man sitting in his boat in the deep shadow of a junk's high stern answers the call, singing the third verse of the song, and the two boats glide together, and disappear towards the shore. \"Another silly fish caught and ready to be landed!\" But here is our little yacht with the cabin lit up and the wrinkled mahogany face of our boat boy gravely smiling a welcome. We tumble aboard and form our own animated group about the rice bowl while he withdraws to the bow, and sits there silent, still, waiting for the night wind and the tide.\n\nThe Mooncake Festival\n\nThe historian of Long Island has not yet appeared. He must be a Chinese, for no European can be sure of understanding the real meaning of the institutions and customs of a Chinese community. But until that historian appears, and perhaps to induce him to come forth and correct the presumptuous foreigner, here is an eye witness's account of a spring feast at Cheung Chow written from memory and the notes of a careful observer, Mr. A. C. Franklin.* It must be understood that the latter is not to blame for any inaccuracies in the following account.\n\n+\n\nOn a day in May, looking from Hongkong towards the Island, through a good pair of glasses we see a new building towering above the houses and temples, and we decide to visit the island and investigate. The ferry starts from the immediate and unsavoury neighbourhood of a loading shoot for the town garbage. The ferries are crowded and frequent to-day, gaily flagged and decorated. Everyone on board is in holiday mood, laughing, eating, talking, and behaving rather like a good-tempered Bank Holiday crowd at home. There seem to be parties of visitors, teams of some kind, and there is an image in a chair on the lower deck. It is not being treated with any particular awe and reverence, indeed it seems more like a mascot than a holy thing.\n\nOnce out of the harbour we encounter nothing of special interest until we turn into Cheung Chow Bay. Here is a cheerful sight. The whole fleet is in and the bay is full. The heavy brown mat\n\nMr. Franklin followed the author as Registrar, University of Hong Kong, 1913-18. — Ed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208119, "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": 158, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "142 \n\nW. J. HINTON \n\nsails have been lowered and stowed, white awnings cover the decks, there is a gilded bamboo \"whip\" at the foremast of each junk and the bay is alive with small boats. Once past the police searchers, the crowd disperses into the town to buy food at the stalls which line the thoroughfares. Evidently this is fair day. All the shops are doing a roaring trade, and the streets are full of visitors from Hongkong, and even from Canton, and places a hundred miles away.\n\nPresently we notice that the crowd is drifting in one direction; going with it, we find ourselves off the main street. Passing the gates we enter a field covered with booths and resounding with the clash of cymbals and the shrill note of the pipe. Here is all the fun of the fair.\n\nA matshed has been erected, part theatre and part temple. At the far end a theatrical performance is now being given. The clang of cymbals marks the warlike gyrations of the actors, but now and then gives way to the shrill tones of the two-stringed violin in moments of pathos. And all the time the priests on either side of the open end of the theatre chant their services at two altars. A Chinese who is near me either cannot or will not tell me what gods are served at these altars. To me they seem to present an aspect of amicable rivalry.\n\nOn either side of the entrance, but without, stand two large conical frameworks of bamboo, stuck all over with small white rice cakes, and looking each like an ear of Indian corn. These are about twenty feet high. There are small replicas on portable platforms.\n\nWe leave the grounds and walk to the Pak Tai Temple where a procession is forming. It is one of several, for each village street provides a procession, and there is great emulation between the teams. The procession starts. At its head is a Dragon, at least it is a dragon for all practical ceremonial purposes though to the carnal eye it seems a large mask completely covering the head of a boy. He prances and sidles along, mopping and mowing most realistically, the formidable but apparently benevolent monster rolling his head and his eyes, and shaking his sinuous body; for which purpose a second lad under a red streamer of thin cloth goes through all the motions that can reasonably be expected of a Dragon's hind legs.\n\nThe beast is followed by bearers, carrying a platform covered with a canopy, and on the platform two small girls, powdered and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208283, "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": 7, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "186\n\nin the district.68\n\nDAVID FAURE\n\nOn its way to Kowloon, the Japanese army looted Ho Chung. Mr. Tse Ming recalled that the Japanese came in groups, and took away the villagers' food. This continued for about a week. Tseng Lan Shue and Pik Uk, the next stop on the route to Kowloon, probably suffered more than other villages in Sai Kung, for Japanese troops stayed there for more than twenty days. The troops disturbed the women, took most of the crop that had just been harvested, and burnt the doors and furniture in the village houses for firewood. It seems that only scattered units of the Japanese army went into the Hang Hau area. Mr. Leung Chiu Man of Hang Hau saw some fighting between British and Japanese troops but recalled that the Japanese did not greatly disturb the village.69\n\nThe bandits\n\nAfter the Japanese came the bandits. Mr. Chau T'in Shang's impression in Sai Kung Market was that the bandits came many times and took away all the residents' valuables. Mr. Cheng Ip of Pak Kong remembered that it was Tung Chi (winter solstice) when the bandits first came. They were armed with guns, and they forced the villagers to carry their grain to Kei Ling Ha where they departed by boat. Mrs. Ts'ui of Sai Kung Market, whose husband was a fish-monger, remembered that many bandits came, and soon she was required to deliver a fixed quantity of fish every month to them. She fled to Yim Tin Tsai for two weeks, and then went up to P'ing Shan on the Chinese side of the border for three months, before she dared return to farm on her own land at Pak Kong. Mr. Hoh King of Nam Shan had just returned from Kowloon, and learnt that his name was on a list drawn up by the bandits of people they wanted to hold for ransom. He left Sai Kung with the proprietor of Kwong Tak Lung, whom he knew well, for the villages near Sham Chun, and stayed there for a month before he returned to Nam Shan. Even then, he did not stay in the village, but lived for a while up on the hillside.70\n\nBandits were reported throughout Sai Kung District, from Clear Water Bay, Junk Bay, to Long Harbour, in both the poorer villages and the richer ones and the market towns. According", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209864, "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": 123, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "101\n\nThe\n\nThere are two similar settlements nearer the Police Station. boatpeople's huts are designed on the model of a sampan or junk, it would seem. Almost certainly the boatpeople are a sign of a non-Chinese element in the population. Several fires have happened, the last in 1930, since when galvanised iron has become popular as roofing, replacing the older roofing of woven palm leaf matting.\n\nTemple funds are often applied to small public works, and in such cases the District Officer gives dollar for dollar from his vote. Works such as repairing tracks, or steps to the water, or paving streets in Tai O often use this source of funding. The District Officer often holds court in the charge room of the Police Station, which is one of the coolest and healthiest in the Territory.\n\nA little to the south of Tai O is Yi O (“Second Heaven\"), which is a mere village, and a little further south again Tsin Yu Wan (\"Arrow Fish Bay\") which has a beautiful sandy beach with a temple, but is otherwise deserted.\n\n1.1\n\n0\n\nOn the extreme south-west tip of Lantau is Shek Sun (“Stone Bamboo-shoots\") on a typical dumb-bell isthmus of sand between two bays. The isthmus connects Lantau proper with the low granite hills forming Fan Lau point which is the end of British territory in this direction. On one hill is an ancient fort, thought to be Dutch; if so, it was probably built and occupied at the time of their attack on Macao in 1622. (The failure of this attack led to the Dutch occupying Taiwan in Formosa, thus drawing Chinese settlers there, who expelled them about fifty years later.) The fort may, however, in fact be Chinese. The name of this village probably comes from the way the boulders stick out of the hills above it, like low pillars.\n\nThere are some fields on the hill above Shek Sun enclosed by dry-stone walls: evidently these were once used for dry crops, but they are now abandoned. They were not pastures: animals are never enclosed when grazing.\n\nTurning to the south coast of Lantau, and moving eastwards from Fan Lau Point, you see in succession three valleys each with a group of villages, all of which are purely agricultural and fishing.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209871, "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": 130, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "108\n\nand more than half of them still live within two miles of these ancient sites, which speak of hundreds of years of settlement and progress, before the Han emperors conquered the coast with a fleet and army.\n\nLeaving aside the islands close to Hong Kong, which have little of interest, we next pass the Potoi group off Cape d'Aguilar (named after a Major-General who commanded the troops in Hong Kong in its early years). All are of granitic rocks seamed with dykes of dark green stone which decay more rapidly than the granite and so often form valleys, caves and hollows. All but Potoi itself are barren and deserted, except for the light on Waglan (Wang Lan \"Barrier Fence\"). About nine years ago, the Chinese second officer of a ship distinguished himself by steering straight on to the island, where the ship not unnaturally stopped. There was no discoverable reason for this exploit; it was not bad weather, though dark it was about 2 a.m. and the light showed clearly. A similar but more excusable disaster occurred in 1916 on the east end of the Lema's eight miles to the south on Tam Kon Shan (“Carrying Pole Mountain\"), when the Chiyo Maru, which was a big trans-Pacific liner, ran aground. I believe few or no lives were lost.\n\nnets.\n\nPotoi has a small but good harbour, very popular with boat people, and with a handsome temple. There are a few shops, and its economic centre is Stanley. The beach is used for drying. Once in 1930 an ingenious fellow tried to monopolize the beach by applying for a matshed site right in the middle of it. I saw the place, saw through his game, and turned him down. Up in the hills are three tiny hamlets, living on the scanty crops their fields produce, and probably selling to the boat people as well; their names mean \"Long Stone Ridge\", \"Cow Lake\", and \"Mountain Hut\" 27.\n\nTo the north, at the entrance to Junk Bay, known in Chinese as \"General's Haven\" (Tseung Kwan O), is an island called Fat or Fu Tau Chau (“Buddha's or Tiger's Head Island\"). It was the site of one of the \"Blockade of Hong Kong\" customs stations; the station is in ruins, although the island has a few inhabitants.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209873, "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": 132, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "110\n\nThe very latest is that some enterprising folk of these parts have committed a piracy on a junk there, and five or six of them are up before the District Officer, South, on a committal charge.\n\nAt the northern end of High Island is the interesting feature called the Dry Channel or Kon Mun. It is a fiord formed by the sunken mouth of the valley running northwest by Lan Nai Wan, which is connected on the west with the other channels. Into it has poured the whole of the silt from the upper valley: and as this point is precisely where the two tidal waves sweeping round High Island meet, the silt is heaped up there without any chance of it getting carried away. Nothing bigger than a small sampan can traverse it, and then only at high water.3\n\nLeaving this fascinating island group by the often stormy route past Conic Island and Fung Head, we reach the mouth of Taipo Harbour, with Kang Chau (a little rock built up of volcanic ash beds), Grass Island, with the fishing village of Tap Mun on it, and Port Island. This last island is uninhabited.\n\nThe islands in Taipo Harbour are mostly of sandstone and shale, but are otherwise of little interest. They are Harbour Island, Centre Island, and lastly, the island near Taipo station where the District Officer, North, lives, though since the causeway carrying the road was built, this is no longer an island.\n\nGoing out again round Bluff Head, we come to another island-studded stretch of sea. Three large and sixteen small islands occupy it, and it is a most beautiful piece of water. Double Island, the first you come to, is in two halves joined by a low, narrow neck: the Crescent Island, beside it, is uninhabited, but Kat (\"Lucky Harbour\") Island, not being very lofty, has a good deal of its surface under cultivation.\n\nThere is yet one more island, and this is in some ways the most curious of all. It lies away across Mirs Bay, two miles from the Chinese coast, from which it draws a good deal of its drinking water by means of waterboats. It is called, very appropriately, Pingchau (\"Flat Island\"). When I was there, I did not see any paddy whatever; all cultivation was dry, and often the fields were unterraced and sloping, quite different from other parts of the New Territory, yet the island is populous, in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209875, "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": 134, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "112\n\nHaven\".\n\nPui O at present often uses for its name characters meaning \"Shell Harbour\".\n\n1* Yi Long Wan (\"Second Wave Bay\").\n\n1 These villages used to stand just south of Discovery Bay but have since given way to the major housing project of that name.\n\n\" Tai Pak Island is now called Tai Lei (\"Great Profit\").\n\n19 Shau Chau is now called Sha Chau (\"Sand Isle\").\n\n\"Tongkwu is now called Lung Kwu Chau (\"Dragon Drum Island”). \"The Society for the Aid and Rehabilitation of Drug Addicts (SARDA) has had a treatment centre here since about 1960.\n\n31\n\n* Capital of San On District.\n\n** No villages now survive on Hei Ling Chau, which, after the closure of the leprosarium, is now occupied solely by the Correctional Services Department. The remaining villagers were resited to various places on Lantau in 1952-53.\n\n** Chau Kong is now called Sunshine Island (Chau Kung To), after an agricultural rehabilitation programme for refugee families launched there in the 1950s by Mr. Gus Borgeest (of Hong Kong) and others.\n\n\"Kau Yi Tsai is now called Siu Kau Yi Chau, with the same meaning.\n\n**A prewar periodical magazine containing many items of great interest, including Father D.J. Finn's contributions on local archaeology, 1933-36. These were reprinted, edited by Rev. T.F. Ryan S.J., by Ricci Hall, University of Hong Kong, 1958, entitled Archaeological Finds on Lamma Island (M) near Hong Kong.\n\n** Waglan at present uses for its name characters meaning \"Barrier to the Waves\".\n\n#T\n\nRespectively Cheung Shek Pai, Ngan Wu, and Shan Liu.\n\n\" Also known in English as Junk Island. At present the island is known in Chinese only as Fat Tau Chau (\"Buddha's Head Island\").\n\nNam Tong Island is now known as Tung Lung Chau (\"Eastern Dragon Island”).\n\n* This is the Tin Hau Temple (Tai Miu) on Joss House Bay.\n\nAfter partial excavation, it is now listed as an ancient monument under the care of the Urban Services Department.\n\n** Respectively Pak A, Leung Shuen Wan, and Pak Lap.\n\n** These inlets were drowned in the mid 1970s to form the High Island Reservoir.\n\n*Tolo Harbour.\n\nYuen Chau Tsai, see note 2 above.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210167, "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-1984", "page_number": 138, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "117\n\nmight, then, depend on the existence of a local junk trade. Such a trade existed east and west of the island, before and after British rule, and though it cannot be proved that they did act in this way, there were certainly fearful attacks outside the Lyemun Passage in the 1840s and after, with piratical craft from or operating out of Shau Kei Wan blamed among others.11 At the least, the town's shopkeepers probably victualled pirates and helped to sell or dispose of stolen goods.\n\n41\n\nAn experienced official wrote at a later time:\n\n\"Previous to 1866, Piracy in Colonial and neighbouring waters was of common occurrence, and Shau Kei Wan bore a very bad name as the centre where Junks fitted out for piratical purposes. Its close proximity to the Lyemun Pass enabled Masters of heavily manned and armed Junks to follow vessels that had been ascertained to have opium, or other valuable cargo, on board. These were too frequently come up with and attacked at night, stinkpots and arms of all descriptions being freely used.\" Governor MacDonell's \"notice was [then] attracted to the unenviable character Hong Kong bore as a Pirate resort.1,42\n\nThe demands of agriculture and shopkeeping, and the pleasures of occasional or indirect piracy apart, the main pursuits of Hong Kong at the time of its cession were the production and export of granite building slabs and the trade in fish, landed by fishing vessels at the coastal market villages, and there dried and salted, and then graded, warehoused and subsequently shipped out to major centres of population in the surrounding and adjacent parts of China. Quotations from contemporary sources confirm the position. Charles Gutzlaff, Prussian missionary and civil servant, holding at the time the appointment of Chinese Secretary to the Government of Hong Kong, wrote in 1846:\n\n\"The only produce of Hong Kong, for exportation, is granite, and, though a very contemptible article, still it employs many hands, a great number of boats, each about 70 to 100 tons, and some capital. There are seldom less than a hundred of the above craft which monthly leave this with a full cargo for the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210319, "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-1984", "page_number": 290, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "269\n\nMy notebook says “We had tea at all these villages all locally grown\". The list includes Tai Hang Hau, Sheung Sze Wan and Ha Yeung, but I visited others in the group without making special mention of tea. At Ha Yeung I was told that they had 100 trees of what they called shan cha (山茶) (“hill tea”), not wild but planted by themselves. Tai Po Tsai, one of the larger villages of the area, claimed to have 50 trees, but the largest village settlement, Mang Kung Uk, reported \"only a few tea bushes not many.\" However, the little island settlement of Fu Tau Chau in Junk Bay gave me hill tea to drink, from its own trees.\n\nFurther towards Sai Kung Market, I was given hill tea to drink at Nam Wai, and also at Pak Kong Au, though the village reported \"only 8 to 10 trees\". East of Sai Kung, people in the hamlet of Shan Liu said that “tea was formerly grown (i.e. cultivated) but only wild bushes are now harvested”. But it was at Nam A, east of Sha Kok Mei, that I learned most. \"A really nice, almost English village\", I wrote enthusiastically. \"We drank hill tea (excellent) from trees planted twenty years ago in the hills behind the village, but not many. It is best brewed in porcelain, they said. Their supply lasts six months in all, but is harvested four times a year - once in the winter months, once at Easter and twice in the summer. The best is the Easter crop.” Nothing was said, or asked, about preparation but each crop was kept in a drawer for two months. My note ends \"The cows like to eat it!”.\n\nOn Lantau, the villagers of Pa Mei, otherwise known as Shan Ha, said they collected hill tea from Tai Tung Shan Keuk (大東山腳), that is the north western slopes of Sunset Peak. On South Lantau the people of the Pui villages also went up to Tai Tung Shan to collect leaves from wild bushes there in the second to fourth moons. Previously there had been many trees, but hill fires had reduced their number. It was used as leung cha (涼茶) for cooling the system. At Tong Fuk my notes state, \"they gather tea leaves from bushes on the hill and use it a lot. The tea comes from the Fung Wong Shan peak behind the village, and the leaves used are plucked in the second and third moons.” Rather surprisingly, the villagers of Upper and Lower Keung Shan, though located on the mountain slopes of a sheltered valley with good tree cover, had never cultivated tea bushes, or at least not within living memory.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210455, "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-1985", "page_number": 62, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "43\n\nunease until, or unless, they had been identified as being known to at least one Kau Sai resident.\n\nA set of moorings on the western side of the bay was especially set aside for “quarantine\". This did not refer to physical sickness of any kind, but to risks of spiritual pollution. Any junk on which a death, a birth or a miscarriage had occurred anchored there (with its partner, if it worked in partnership) for a required number of days. During this period of ritual quarantine, which varied according to the seriousness of the pollution, no-one living on board any other junk would board the polluted ones and no member of the polluted junks' company would board any other.\n\nThe diagram depicts an “ideal” arrangement of straight ranks which was hardly ever achieved in practice. Wind, currents, fishing plans, shore jobs, threats of bad weather to come, might bring about alterations. But in a dead calm, if everyone was at home and in his proper place, both informants and observations agreed that the lay-out would conform to the diagram.\n\nAmongst other things the diagram indicates a tendency for agnatic kinsmen to moor near one another. It does not follow that all bearers of the same surname moored side by side. As later pages will show, the fishermen of Kau Sai did not maintain a lineage organization and their genealogical memories were shallow. Only those who recognised each other as close agnatic kin moored together. The few exceptions occurred when, as for example in the case of the Lo surname group, one recognised relative practised a different kind of fishing and was frequently absent from the anchorage.\n\nFor it is important to note that different types of fishing method required differing uses of the anchorage. Briefly, purse-seiners, who fished at night and needed space ashore to sun dry fish and nets by day, were normally present between sunrise and sunset every day, whereas liners and others who fished by day and had no such regular need for shore work used the anchorage mainly after dark and much less frequently.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210456, "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-1985", "page_number": 63, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "44\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\nThe relatively sporadic presence of the liners and others is made clear in Table I. It is also reflected in the more marginal position of the majority of their boat stations in the diagram.\n\nThe beach at Kau Sai, which is stony, shelves fairly abruptly down from low water mark. One of the attractions of the anchorage was the resulting possibility of mooring close in. The nearer lines were easily within shouting distance of the water front, and access between junk and shore was simple. Nearer or farther, however, made very little difference. Indeed, the strict dichotomy which land-dwellers tend automatically to make between land and water seemed not to exist in the same way for these Boat People. Here in their own bay they were equally at home ashore or afloat. It was true that going from, say, the shops to the junks required two different kinds of propulsion (one, walking, provided by the legs, the other, yu-loh, by the arms), but there was little practical difference between them. Every junk family owned a sampan, and every six-year-old could yu-loh with ease and skill. The water passage was thus but an extension, as it were, of the land passage. A fisherman went down to his boat in the anchorage in just the same spirit as a landsman going along to his house in the street. At this level of thinking the junk was just another dwelling place.\n\nFishing Methods\n\nYet most of these same junks were also instruments of the chase. Their role as fishing boats took them away from the anchorage almost every day and closely conditioned the types of social and cultural interaction possible for those who lived on them. The analysis of this aspect of life in Kau Sai is the subject matter for the following chapters, but a preliminary sketch of fishing methods is necessary for a description of the rhythms of daily living.\n\nThe main types of fishing practised from Kau Sai were purse-seining, long-lining, gill-netting, trapping and hand-lining. In 1950 purse-seining and long-lining were normally specialist activities, gill-netting was very rare. Some long-liners switched at times to trapping, and almost all fishermen engaged from time to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210469, "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-1985", "page_number": 76, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "57\n\nliving in Kau Sai. The special peculiarity of the Boat People, however, is their potentially extreme spatial mobility. Both in their own belief and in others' it is this that differentiates them most from people who live on land. Whether or not the belief is well-founded, any description of Kau Sai which omitted to discuss the rhythms of movement would be misleadingly incomplete.\n\nSo far I have been describing Kau Sai almost as if it had been an entity in itself. This was only very partially the case. In fact there was not one single aspect of living that was totally contained within the bay. Life in Kau Sai in the mid-twentieth century can only be understood with reference to a much wider topographical framework. I do not argue that this is an unusual state of affairs. On the contrary, it is implicit in the term 'village', at least as it is used in descriptions of peasant or modern societies, that the entity to which it refers is subordinate to some wider grouping. There are, however, questions of degree. Kau Sai was small and very little self-contained. Without mobility on the part of at least some members of its population it could not have existed. The facts of the situation therefore forced me to consider spatial movement in this case.\n\nDuring most of the daylight hours of almost every day the purse-seiners' junks were moored in the anchorage. The male members of their crews and their children were ashore in Kau Sai village. Sampans were constantly moving from junk to shore and back again as shore jobs were started and completed, purchases made and so on. These were mostly movements of men and children. Women often acted as ferrymen, but except for the occasional quick visit to the shops, or longer sojourns for washing clothes, fetching water, gathering fuel or taking part in such jobs as net and fish drying they seldom went ashore, though they did some visiting from junk to junk amongst themselves. With the evening meal came the retreat from the shore, and immediately afterwards the removal of the entire family (and its home) to the chosen fishing grounds for the night.\n\nEarly morning might see a direct return to the anchorage or (more frequently after mechanisation) a journey to the Fish", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210472, "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-1985", "page_number": 79, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "60\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\nusually returned to anchor at the festival anchorage (long-liners for the evening performances, purse-seiners for those in the afternoon), instead of going back to Kau Sai.\n\nThe other occasions for making offerings in Kau Sai's temple, like those for visiting a family's graves, were “private” affairs. That is, the rituals were performed by each family independently. There would be a homeward movement of all Kau Sai junks at these times, but there was neither coordination of ritual observances nor village-wide ritual significance. There were, however, two exceptions to this rule. The exorcism of the Hungry Ghosts, in the 7th month, and the General Thanksgiving, in the 12th, were communal occasions. For the former, ritual experts from Sai Kung were employed, their payment coming out of communal funds; but it was not necessary for all Kau Sai people to be present, and my records show no indication of particularly high attendances at the anchorage on these occasions. The General Thanksgiving (chow shan) was a different matter again. This was the only ceremony in the year at which sacrificial meat was shared out among the families, and everyone who counted himself a Kau Sai man came. None of these occasions drew outside visitors.\n\nSome of the celebrations connected with the life cycle and having, like the annual ceremonies, recreational and sociable as much as ritual aspects, took everyone from time to time to Sai Kung and Shaukiwan where the floating restaurants were. Not every boat family could afford a restaurant party for a new baby's \"coming out\", or a special birthday, but anyone who could afford it would try to hold one. Weddings in particular required that one's guests be feasted, and such parties and most of the ceremonials connected with them were always held on restaurant boats. Other occasional feasts would also be given there. For instance, the owner of a new junk usually received congratulatory gifts from his friends; in return, he would invite them to a dinner on one of the floating restaurants in Shaukiwan or, more usually, Sai Kung. Funerals, too, took place ashore. The proper accoutrements and officiants had to be brought from one or other of these two towns, but the actual burials were in quiet places on the coastal hills.\n\nI", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210485, "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-1985", "page_number": 92, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "73\n\nHand-liners\n\nThe hand-liners in Kau Sai were few in number and uniformly poor. Their boats, which had all been acquired second- or third-hand (or even older) were of the same general type as the blunt-nosed long-liners, and had a similar layout of holds and deck space. Three of them had no sails, their crews relying solely upon the 'yuloh' for propulsion. Hand-lining was often practised by purse-seiners and long-liners too, sometimes seriously for business, sometimes simply for the sport. Two fishermen in Kau Sai specialised in trapping fish, but not exclusively. One was also a specialist long-liner with a sharp-nosed boat, the other a hand-liner. Apart from the fact that from time to time their decks were piled high with home-made rattan traps they did not differ from those already described.\n\n\"House boats\"\n\nAlthough all the boats normally anchoring in Kau Sai were sea-worthy, a small number were in fact more or less permanently at their moorings. These were all old boats, capable of movement when required but only very occasionally used for fishing operations either because they were considered too frail or because their owners could not work them regularly. They included two small hand-lining type boats owned by men employed as hired hands on Kau Sai-based purse-seiners and housing their wives and children. (These two were actually often in Sai Kung where the women used them to bring in a small extra income as ferry sampans). There was also a pair of old purse-seiners belonging to two brothers who after several years' bad luck were in 1952 reduced to hand-lining and making-do with part-time employment and occasional partnerships with other purse-seiners. (By 1970 their luck had changed: one junk had been sold and a newer one bought second-hand in its place had been mechanised with the help of a loan from the F.M.O.). Two of the hand-liners were also in fact little more than family residences, their owners being incapacitated: the one by blindness, the other by the recent death of the only adult male. (By 1970 the blind man and his wife were dead and their tenth and only surviving child, having been in and out of gaol several times", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210510, "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-1985", "page_number": 117, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "98\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\ningly and quite quickly into almost as complete a retirement as his own eighty-year-old father. For the next six or seven years he continued to live on board the second junk of the pair and take part in fishing operations, but everybody now called Cheung Hei si lau even though his father and grandfather were both still alive. He was 34.\n\nLo Shing Chui took over command of his family's pair of purse-seiners at an even earlier age. His father, Lo Kwai Fat, amiable but not very intelligent and, like Ma Tai Tak who retired when his son was barely 20, unhappy in contacts with the outside world, was only too pleased to withdraw as soon as possible. His younger brother Kwai Ch'ing, still in his thirties, still lived and worked in the same firm, undivided, and it might have been expected that (as in another Kau Sai pair at the same period) he would take over the mastership. So indeed he might, had he not been of such subnormal intelligence that he was obviously incapable. In cases of real incapacity, I was told, mere seniority is always overridden.\n\nrather less regular\n\nOne final case will illustrate another situation. In 1953 the two brothers Shek Hung Toh and Shek Hei Toh (they denied any relationship with the other Shek family just described) were running a pair of purse-seiners together. The elder, Hung Toh, aged 35, was si tau of the firm; the younger, Hei Toh, 29, master of the second junk. Their father had recently died, and their mother, aged 51, lived on Hei Toh's boat. Also living with them, on Hung Toh's boat, was their deceased father's elder brother, Shek Lin Hei, aged 63. This man had no managerial status. He was, like Lo Kwai Ch'ing above, simply another member of the crew, but unlike Kwai Ch'ing he was in no way incapacitated except, a little, by his age. On enquiry, I was told that Lin Hei and his now deceased brother had formally divided their family some ten or so years before, during the Japanese occupation (when poverty forced a number of divisions that might not otherwise have taken place). Unlike his brother, who had prospered, Lin Hei had suffered a run of very bad luck culminating in an accident in which his wife and all his children were drowned. After this, his brother had invited him to come and live on his boat, although, the family being divided there", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210526, "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-1985", "page_number": 133, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "114\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\n22 All but one of Kau Sai's long-liners fall into the category Small long-liner. A small long-liner shoots his lines direct from his junk, which is on average about 30-35 feet in overall length. Bigger long-liners (classed as Medium or Large Long-liners) carry sampans for the shooting and hauling of lines. Baiting-up is always done on the mother ship. In 1950 the Large Long-liners based mainly on Shaukiwan were the aristocrats of the Hong Kong fishing fleets, wealthy men, employing large crews. Informants claimed that before the Japanese occupation two or three of these large boats had been based on Kau Sai anchorage. By 1970 shortages of labour had driven nearly all of them out of business. Kau Sai then boasted one Medium Long-liner.\n\nThe nylon line, which everywhere replaced the old ramie during the early 'sixties, was greatly appreciated for lightness, strength and quick drying, but it tangled easily and so made baiting-up an even more finicking job than before. 23 Note on this and role of F.M.O. (N.B.) and on numbers of pupils etc: 84 in 1970. [Note not written; for related information, see T.A. Acton, \"Education as a by-product of fish marketing,” JHKBRAS vol, 21 (1981) pp 120-143.]\n\n24 In 1969 a special typhoon shelter, with concrete break-waters, was constructed at Government expense at Yim Tin Tsai a well sheltered cove to the north of Kau Sai island.\n\n25 The Fish Marketing Organisation, a non-government trading organisation controlled by a Government Servant, the Director of Marketing, was established in 1945. The Director is empowered to control the landing, movement and wholesaling of all marine fish (except shellfish and marine fish 'alive and in water'). For further detail see Chapter V below. In 1950 controlled wholesale markets existed at Shaukiwan and Kennedy Town on Hong Kong Island, in Kowloon, and at Tai Po in the New Territories. The Kennedy Town market was transferred to Aberdeen in 1952 and the Kowloon market to Cheung Sha Wan in 1966. A fifth market was opened at Castle Peak in 1969. The Organisation also maintains collecting depots and/or other offices at Cheung Chau, Castle Peak, Tsun Wan, Sha Tau Kok and Sai Kung.\n\n26 A male recreation; women in 1950 always wore long hair, shampooing their own or each other's with... [note incomplete]\n\n27 On this and the whole question 'What is a real Kau Sai person? see below Chapters 5 and [p. 75]. [The following indicates how this question might have been answered: \"The non-kin groups to which he sees himself belonging are also few. First there is the village as a whole: Kau Sai. He may describe himself as a Kau Sai man, or refer, as he does very frequently, to 'our bay' as a membership unit. This includes all people for which Kau Sai bay is a permanent anchorage, or who have houses ashore there.\" \"Sociological self-awareness: some uses of the conscious models”, Man (1966), vol. 1, p. 203.]\n\n28 [G. William Skinner, \"Marketing and social structure in rural China, Part 1,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 63 (1964), pp. 21-50.]\n\n29 See also Ward 1967 and 1968. [Probably reference to articles cited in note 4.]\n\n30 One most important aspect of the territoriality of all the fishermen was their inescapable need for credit. See below pp.\n\n31 boon wan ge yan this expression which was used synonymously with \"Kau Sai\" was the more usual in colloquial speech.\n\n32 [The next paragraph in the manuscript summarizes the argument here: \"These", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210528, "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-1985", "page_number": 135, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "116\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\n50 Two of these men were already married and with several children; each was master of a second boat in a purse-seine pair. The third, aged only 20, was the very recently bereaved son of a man who had died in an accident. This boy later took a paid job ashore in Sai Kung. The father of the fourth (aged 24) was still living with him on his junk. This case is described further in the text below.\n\n51 [The manuscript at this point allows almost three blank pages after this phrase: \"The data for 1970, compiled for me by\". The blank pages are followed by this paragraph: \"One major difference between the figures for 1953 and 1970 is the disappearance from the latter of the two-boat firm of purse-seiners. Concomitant with this, there has been a general diminution in the number of purse-seiners and some raising of the age of boats' mastership. We have already seen how it is linked also with mechanisation and the move ashore.\"]\n\n52 For example, the 20-year-old master and his mother mentioned above, and the blind man with a sick wife and one ten-year-old son were both hand liners.\n\n53 Cp. above Table 1. The discrepancy between the figures there and in Table 3 is due to the fact that the ages of the crews of 2 small liners were not recorded. Both housed nuclear families with father as master.\n\n54 Barnett's hypothesis (above p. 101) was formed on the basis of the Census in 1960. If improved living standards among the Boat People date (as I believe they do) from the acceptance of mechanisation, they would only begin to become generally apparent from about that date onwards.\n\n55 The economic arguments for and against division in such circumstances could be very evenly balanced. With mechanisation, it might well pay a group of brothers to stay together and convert to medium long-lining. See Chapters 8 and 9. For family division in general, see Chapter below.\n\n56 So much so, and so well authenticated by magical signs, that it was difficult to find him a bride. See below Chapter 9.\n\n57 Cp. D. above. [A table, similar to Table 4, probably intended.]\n\n58 See my forthcoming study of the Boat People of Hong Kong. [Not written.]\n\n59 Above, pp. [105-6].\n\n60 Above, pp. [96-7].\n\n61 The most poignant incident during my stay in Kau Sai concerned a young Sai Kung-based fisherman who left his wife and two tiny children on board their small junk while he went off in a sampan to set fish traps. On his return about an hour later, the junk was empty. Presumably the toddler had fallen overboard, and the distraught mother trying to reach him had toppled in herself, taking the baby, who was slung upon her back, with her.\n\n62 m gon ching: this term can be used with either ritual or secular connotations.\n\n63 Women were said to suffer more often from sea-sickness.\n\n64 To staunch the flow, they used sheets of locally made absorbent paper (iso chi, lit: coarse paper; the adjective can have the same double meaning as in English). This was tucked between the legs and held in place by the close-fitting underpants which were worn by both sexes and sometimes also by a waist cord. The paper was cheap, easily available, bulky, uncomfortable, and almost impossible to dispose of privately at sea. Once convinced that, contrary to their...\n\nPage 135\n\nPage 136", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211134, "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": 195, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "170\n\nRobertson readily admitted that there had been cases of hardship, but in view of the large number of junks which entered and left Hongkong, he believed they were few and far between.\n\nIn his view, one of the main difficulties China faced in collecting its duties were the violations by junks which sailed from certain ports along the west coast of China which did not have customs stations.\n\nThe Chinese regulations required such vessels to proceed to the nearest Customs House that they might there pay the proper duties and get a receipt with a “Grand Chop.”\n\nInstead of complying with the regulations, many junks proceeded directly to Hongkong. Here their cargoes, for which they had paid no export or transit duties, could be sold or transhipped.\n\nThe perennial problem of smuggling demanded attention. In commenting on the Commission's contention that the junk trade of Hongkong had been injured by the blockade, Robertson remarked that, “unquestionably the contraband portion of it is likely to be so, but I am not aware that that affords a matter for regret; on the contrary if the Colony consulted their own interests instead of those of a number of Chinese who make the Colony the base for their operations and take no manner of interest in its prosperity except as far as affects themselves, they would see that the less smuggling there was the better and sounder would be the trade and the more respectable the class of Chinese traders who would resort to it.”\n\nIt was not only opium that was being smuggled into China. Hongkong also served as a base for illegal trade in salt, arms and ammunition, along with sulphur and saltpetre used as ingredients of explosives.\n\nThe foreign importation of arms had been prohibited as a measure to keep them out of the hands of bandits and pirates. It was hoped that a ban of traffic in arms would assist the Kwangtung authorities in controlling clan feuds and the ever present danger of open conflict between Punti and Hakka.\n\nPage 195\n\nPage 196", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211220, "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": 281, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "256\n\nI had been interested in social history in England and started to look for books about the New Territories, in particular on the Southern District, but soon found there was practically nothing. After a while, I realized that papers had been written but they were usually in journals that were not easy to get hold of in Hong Kong; and there was not very much anyway in English. I suppose that spurred me on to do more than I might have done. I was rather cross about it, I recall, because I gathered that many of the local settlements had been there for many centuries. The Shek Pik village alone was established in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, in the 15th century, and possibly before that.\n\nFaced with a challenge, I began to look around for materials that would tell me more about the district and its people. I soon noticed that the temples and some other buildings contained inscribed tablets, sometimes about the repair of the building and sometimes about law cases in the long ago when the District Magistrate, or the local people after asking the Magistrate, had stone tablets put there commemorating legal decisions. I collected copies of these inscriptions and other documentary material, like land deeds, family papers, account books and genealogies (a point to which I will return later in this talk). I interviewed persons in their homes, and they were nervous for reasons not connected with the impositions of research. Once some people were very fidgety, and I couldn't understand why. This was in a fishing village on the shores of Junk Bay. I looked down, and saw that I was sitting on what I hoped was an expended tin of explosives! They liked fishing with dynamite, and they still do. In fact, there was a letter from a lady from Tolo Harbour in the South China Morning Post only the other day asking 'how come they are still dynamiting?' This goes right back to 1904 and probably earlier, when the reports of the Alice Memorial Hospital contained reports about fishermen coming in with missing hands or legs.\n\nI persuaded other District Officers to get their staff to record these tablets, too, and built up a collection of inscriptions with other people's help of about 30 or 40 of them. However, I couldn't do anything with them. My Chinese was not good enough to handle that material. In any case, some of the tablets were defaced and some characters were hard to read or even missing. It required", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211245, "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": 306, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "281\n\nIt might often have been the case that they predated the land people of the neighbouring villages. Theirs was not a symbiotic relationship. Even when they lived together in the same locality, they kept apart; the villagers in their houses and the boat people on their little family boats just offshore in the same or an adjoining bay. Despite some interaction, the two communities were separate and individual, contributing nothing vital to the other nor sharing anything important.\n\nIt was in such circumstances that my friend's family had probably lived at Causeway Bay for generations before the establishment of British Hong Kong, fishing the local waters and living in some proximity to the land people of the two nearest local villages of So Kon Po and Wong Nai Chung.\n\nThe number of indigenous boat people in the Causeway Bay anchorage was apparently not large. In her own words, \"When I was young, not very many of the boats in the anchorage were native to the area.\" These families gained their livelihood, then as in 1970, by fishing not far from home going most frequently over to Junk Bay and by ferrying people to and from the cargo boats and cutters using the anchorage. Some took out guests for a quiet dinner on the water, an entertainment for which this area became quite famous. Taking people out in this way was described as sung-yan t'au-long. Others used their boats for marine hawking, going among the other craft with daily necessities in those days before refrigeration made their services largely redundant.\n\nIn the last years of the nineteenth century, as in 1970, their local marketing area was the Tang Lung Chau market. This was the name of that locality, and not of the little island off shore which the British named Kellett Island. It later became the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, joined by a causeway to the shore at Tang Lung Chau. To the boat people, the old lady said, Kellett Island was simply known as “Chau Chai\" or \"the little island”.\n\nThe local boat people's main market village was Shau Kei Wan, with which she seemed very familiar. She particularly mentioned the songs of the boat people there, of the kind known as haam-shui.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211525, "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": 242, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "218\n\nTai Sheung Lo Kwan, the notes add, is none other than Taoist Patriarch Lao Tzu.\n\nTHE HONGKONG MILLING COMPANY'S FAILURE*\n\nE. W. WRIGHT\n\nThe suicide of A. H. Rennie, manager of the Hongkong Milling Co., and the subsequent closing down of the big milling plant which Mr. Rennie founded, is still causing much discussion in Pacific coast milling circles. Late particulars of the tragedy and the causes which led up to it, seem to indicate quite clearly that the death of Rennie and the failure of the institution which he established have combined to postpone indefinitely the attempt to build up the milling business in China on anything more than a very moderate scale.\n\nWhether or not it is possible to manufacture flour at a profit at Hongkong, is still a matter of doubt with some Pacific coast millers. They do not regard the failure of Rennie as proof conclusive that the business cannot be conducted with a profit, for Rennie, while a remarkably good flour salesman, knew nothing about the details of manufacturing flour. His failure, however, has made Pacific coast millers sceptical about the future success of milling in China in competition with the product that is shipped across the Pacific.\n\nThe rise and fall of the milling project at Hongkong is so much a part of the remarkable career of Mr. Rennie, who promoted it, that its history can best be told by relating his.\n\nA. H. Rennie was a native of Canada, where he was born in 1857. He became the confidential adviser and secretary of Hon. John Norquay,\n\n* This very interesting account is reprinted from the Northwestern Miller of 24 June, 1908, published at Minneapolis. Rennie left his name in Rennie's Mill, Junk Bay, near Kowloon. The editor is grateful to Mr. W. J. Howard, a long-time member of the Society, for contributing this item to the Journal.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211533, "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": 250, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "226\n\nto this one, although the bamboo arm-rest was a bit of a luxury not always found! This latrine was probably built early this century. Sheung Wo Hang had 30 latrines to service its approximately 100 families at the time of the Block Crown Lease in 1905; the great majority of them were very close in style and construction to this one.\n\nNOTES\n\nP. H. Hase\n\n2 Journal Vol. 23, 1983, p. 241-246.\n\nMy thanks are due to Mr. M.Y. Lee, of Sheung Wo Hang village, for drawing the latrine to my attention, and for helping me to measure it.\n\nSee plan attached, and plate 11.\n\n4 See plate 12.\n\nA NOTE ON RICE HULLERS (RE)\n\nIn March 1972, I visited the New Territories' village of Ma Yau Tong, situated off the Po Lam road leading to Rennie's Mill in Junk Bay. I knew the village representative, Mr. Li Tak (...) from my days as\n\nDistrict Officer South, 1957-60. He was aged 79 in 1972.\n\nWith friends from Ngau Tau Kok old village in East Kowloon, who knew the Ma Yau Tong people, I looked carefully round the houses, paying special attention to old ones and their contents.\n\nLike most N.T. villages, Ma Yau Tong had been a rice-growing settlement, but in their case they had stopped planting some 10 to 15 years before my visit. I was interested in the farming tools and equipment, and made notes on a pair of rice hullers that we saw. However, we were only able to learn the details about one of them. The other was much older, and had been in the house longer than the old lady who lived there. As she had already lived in the village for 48 years, after marrying into one of the village families when she was 20 years old, it had obviously been made before about 1920. “About 100 years\", they guessed, but", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212186, "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": 128, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "105\n\ntimed with their fuses set to burst just a few feet above water level. But the gunners evidently found the moving targets difficult to follow, because the aim grew wilder and eventually the shelling ceased. As the sun set in the west, the British ships came to anchor off the Three Hills, where I had my last pheasant shoot, while the American ships anchored in a group a few miles lower down.\n\nNext morning broke clear and sunny, one of those late autumn days in China, when there is not a ripple on the river, and the smoke hangs low in a thin pall over the country villages. Gun fire could be heard in the distance, both above and below the concentration of neutral vessels; and by-and-by the three American ships, escorted by the U.S.S. \"Panay\", got under way and steamed upriver. As she went by, the \"Panay\" stopped to pass back one of our wounded men, who had been kindly accommodated in her sick bay, and the Commander explained that he was taking his ships further up towards **Pidgeon Island** as the Japanese had been dropping some \"bricks\" in the river just below them. Not for the first, or the last, time in China, the Americans elected to play a lone hand.\n\nMeanwhile the refugees on the British vessels whiled away the time counting up the splinter holes in their ships, attending to the wounded, and in mutual visits for gossip over the events of the previous day. Every one thought it was all a mistake, although some concern was caused at about 10 o'clock, when a number of Japanese military landing craft were seen upriver pulling in to the north bank, on to which they ran a small gun which was openly trained at the ships. But the feeling of security was confirmed when the Japanese craft, one after the other, steamed out towards the British gunboats, circled round them, waved a salute or two, and then went on their way down river. There appeared to be no Chinese troops in the neighbourhood, and the Japanese sailed down the Yangtze unmolested, stopping to burn an occasional junk.\n\nIt was without an after-thought that we all sat down to lunch on that lovely Sunday morning on the Yangtze. We were anchored off the reed beds which grow round Rosina Beacon, and through the porthole I could see across the river the clumps out of which not so many months before we had driven our last pheasant. Imagine our astonishment and indignation when suddenly we heard the approaching noise of planes, the roar of power dives, and bombs", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212222, "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": 164, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "141\n\nvehicles, with much kind assistance from my Chinese friends, I found my way, frequently changing buses, to Kinhwa, the large commercial town to which the capital of Chekiang had been removed after the fall of Hangchow. A stretch of the Kiangsi-Chekiang railway was still in operation, though the terminals at either end, Nanchang and Hangchow, were in Japanese hands. The railway carried me to Yintang, where I again took to the bus, and eventually made my way, via Kanshow, to Laolung, the roadhead above Hongkong, at the head of junk navigation on the East river. My progress was often delayed by air alarms, as in accordance with their usual practice, the Chinese would not allow vehicles to enter a town while the alarm was on, and you might spend half a day waiting in the country outside.\n\nOn the way I was struck by the enormous numbers of Chinese migrating from occupied to unoccupied parts. These mass migrations, which have been extended by each subsequent Japanese advance, cannot but have a great influence on conditions in China after the war. The people of the provinces are getting mixed up in a way which has not happened in China before. The effect should help to break down the exclusive provincial barriers which have handicapped unity in the past. Also, owing to the bombing, it was the habit, in many towns, to close down until about four in the afternoon. Everyone who could manage it would walk out into the countryside early in the morning, only to return late in the afternoon after any chance of bombing might be over. The shops would then open and remain open till late at night, and all the intercourse of the town would be...* ...good progress, but the boatman refused to travel at night; muttering about the danger of bandits, he tied up alongside a number of other junks - they always go into a huddle at night for safety - and proceeded to light his opium pipe. Next day we reached a town whence a launch service connected with Waichow. The launch only travelled at night to avoid the risk of being shot up by Japanese aircraft; so we reached Waichow early in the morning and breakfasted off the hot steamed rolls which are popular amongst the Cantonese.\n\nFrom Waichow the track led overland to Mirs Bay in Hongkong waters. For about half of the sixty miles, the recognised form of conveyance was on the carrier of a push-bike propelled by a muscular coolie. We distributed ourselves and our baggage over the necessary\n\n* 27 lines missing here...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212632, "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": 186, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "166\n\nto lend them cooking pots for their rice, or to provide the few vegetables that flavour the rice. They sometimes break into the houses and help themselves to what they need. It is a vicious circle difficult to control. Fortunately we could see a crack of light at the back of the building where we had last stayed and, when the occupants who were hiding inside heard who we were, they let us in; there was nothing too much they could do for our comfort.\n\nThey told us that a large bridge some miles ahead, over a side stream which flowed into the Tsien Tang, was down and that we should be unable to get across. This sounded bad and I ordered a very early start. When we got to the bridge we found that a freshet after the heavy rain had weakened the wooden piers, and when a lorry overloaded with troops had gone over on the previous day, it had fallen through. A whole span had collapsed; soldiers were wading in the water searching for corpses and laying them along the bank. The bridge was high, the banks steep; it was obviously impossible for our lorry to get through. We returned to the village and 'phoned Chin Ya with a request that they would send a relief lorry down to meet us on the far side. We then set about unloading the lorry and ferrying our stores across in a small boat. When we had emptied the lorry the driver was ordered to take it back to Hunan; he was a man who had been lent us for the trip. He just got through before the road was cut.\n\nOn the way through Yingtan and Shangjao we had passed many refugees; on old charcoal lorries, rickshaws, wheelbarrows, and even chairs, but mostly on foot, escaping from the advancing Japanese. We heard afterwards that the driver on the return trip found some refugees who were willing to pay heavily for the privilege of a lift on our lorry; he made a \"squeeze\" of $30,000. That is the sort of thing we were up against.\n\nIn the afternoon a 'phone call came through to say that the relief lorry had reached within twenty kilometres of us, but had found another bridge down and had been unable to come further. By good chance we heard of a large junk, hiding in the Tsien Tang not far off our bridge in the hope of avoiding being commandeered. It was full of refugees who were escaping upriver from the Japanese. When we asked whether they would give us and our stores a passage for the next twenty kilometres they readily agreed; our presence would provide a sort of protection. I was careful not to explain too clearly the dangerous nature of our cargo. The Tsien Tang junks are long, rather narrow flat-bottomed boats, curved", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212638, "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": 192, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "172\n\ndisplaced by the Japanese advance on Shangjao. He also engaged some of the workmen from the Co-op. I was concerned not to have all our eggs in one basket, because I feared that should our efforts be too successful the Japanese would come and bomb us or send fifth column plain-clothes men to liquidate us. So we placed his workshop in another village. For raw material Reginald had the pieces of steel rail cut with explosives from our derelict line when practising with the students. From these he made all sorts of things. His chief output was knives, with which we had to equip all our students for cutting fuse, and other work. He also made screw-drivers, pliers, wire-cutters, crow-bars, and earth augers. The latter were heavy instruments with nine-inch cutting surfaces, that we used to cut holes in the earth. You could lay quite a good mine at the bottom of a six-foot deep nine-inch wide earth auger hole.\n\nThe chief instrument for cratering was however the light camouflet set. This was a metal tube of 2\" diameter and 6 feet long, which was sunk into the earth by means of a hammer head that slid up and down inside. When driven in its full length one pulled the tube out and dropped in a small camouflet charge of 4 oz. of explosive; that blew a chamber of about a foot diameter at the bottom of the hole, sufficiently large to take a charge of 50 lbs. Ammonal was the best explosive for this type of cratering. We would pour the grey powder down the hole, gently ramming it with a wooden rammer, until the whole fifty pounds was well packed at the bottom, together with a primer from which a length of detonating fuse led out to the surface. We would then tamp the whole to earth level with mud, also gently rammed down, lash the detonator and safety fuse assembly to the detonating fuse and set the thing off. One could thus produce a crater up to thirty feet in diameter. This type of demolition, useful for mining at the back of bridge abutments and destroying them, took too much time and the instruments were too heavy and conspicuous to appeal much to our students.\n\nOur second course finished in October, by which time we were beginning to run short of explosives and other supplies. Although the Japanese withdrawal from Shangjao had reopened communication with the rest of China, the destruction by the Chinese of all the motor roads to deny their use to the enemy, had prevented any further supplies reaching us. The first to come through were borne by junk and by coolie escorted by Jim, the missionary who had escaped from Shanghai, and who now rejoined us to help in administration. He brought us news of outside events. We learnt that it had been decided to wind up the main", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212916, "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": 225, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "210\n\nthe day we would be off to the beach annex of the Chefoo Club where there were rowing boats and canoes. From nine in the morning till lunch time and all afternoon a crowd of us were in and out of the water, rowing out to the raft which was a converted junk with diving boards. I got so brown that summer that the mark of the swimming trunks was still visible at Christmas time!\n\nHolidays at Home\n\nA great part of school life was the holidays at home. Home at this time was in Tung Shan Terrace off Stubbs Road, when my father was building the Chinese Methodist Church in Wanchai—the triangular red brick building at the junction of Hennessy Road and Johnston Road.* This was home not in a flat but a three-story house, with a garden overlooking Happy Valley. At the back we had access to Bowen Road which was a safe place to play as there were no motor vehicles. Those holidays I remember chiefly for rambles up to Sir Cecil's Ride and a major hike over to Tytam from Wong Nei Chong Gap. And we went to a school pantomime at the Central British School (now King George V School) where the bad guy called himself “ZBW my middle name is trouble you\" ZBW being the embryo Radio Television Hong Kong. We had our first family car here, an Austin Seven with a folding roof and went for picnics to the beaches at Repulse Bay and Big Wave Bay, and at Stanley where a new prison was being built. Although it was winter in Hong Kong the climate was comfortable for us from the north and we had no hesitation in swimming.\n\n—\n\nOur journeys home in the winter holidays were considerable undertakings. Of course there was no air travel nor was rail travel possible. Instead we went by sea on the B. & S. ships of the China Navigation Line. These were coasters of about 7,000 tons which made their way up and down the China coast carrying cargoes of all sorts, a small number of passengers in cabins and a much larger number of deck passengers. Sometimes we were able to get a ship that went all the way from Chefoo to Hong Kong but often we had to get off in Shanghai and wait in the China Inland Mission hostel for a suitable connection. Some luckless schoolmaster had to accompany some twenty or so children more as far as Shanghai on these journeys. They were carefree days and I have wondered how we all survived. We would sit up on the taffrail undeterred by the possibility of toppling over into the sea. I remember getting into frightful trouble from practising throwing a penknife into the cabin bulkhead. In the ports we watched\n\n*Since demolished [Editor]\n\n—\n\nPage 225\n\nPage 226", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213137, "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-1993", "page_number": 205, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "Year \n\nEvent \n\nSource \n\n1919 \n\n8 serious cross-border armed robberies. The Customs Stations closed in 1918 re-opened (August). \n\nAR JLHG \n\n1920 \n\nRefugees flee to New Territories from communal fighting in border area. Assisted cross-border crimes increase. Sha Yue Chung Customs Station sacked by bandits. \n\nAR \n\n1921 \n\nIncrease in smuggling native tobacco from China. 4 piracies (including of the Sha Yue Chung Ferry). Further armed cross-border banditry. \n\nAR \n\n1922 \n\n2 piracies on the Sha Yue Chung Ferry. Fighting between pirate bands in Mirs Bay. \n\nAR \n\n1923 \n\nLarge increase in smuggling, due to disturbances in the border area. Serious cross-border armed raids, an execution in China as a result. \n\nAR \n\n1924 \n\nUnsettled conditions, due to continuous fighting between Sun and Chen Faction armies for control of district. Upsurge in cross-border crime, including 8 armed raids, some mounted by Chinese irregular soldiers. \n\nAR \n\n1925 \n\nBoycott causes considerable trouble in Sha Tau Kok. Huge crime wave of cross-border crime. \"Quite 90% of crimes committed in the New Territories could be traced to persons coming from over the border\". Sinkers enter and terrorise New Territories villages. British troops sent to Sha Tau Kok to restore order. Hoi Luk Fung Soviet rebellion affects Mirs Bay area. \n\nJLHG \n\n1926 \n\nConditions better, but disturbed conditions across the border lead to boom in New Territories because of the number of refugees seeking houses. Many matsheds erected for refugees. Heavier border policing needed. Mirs Bay fishermen unable to fish except close inshore because of \"disturbed conditions\". \n\nAR \n\n1927 \n\nConditions better, but still troubled near border. Attempted piracy of Tolo Harbour ferry junk. Heavier policing of Sha Tau Kok border area reduces cross-border crime. Border patrol constructed in New Territories. \n\nAR \n\n1928 \n\nIncrease in smuggling. Violence against recent refugee arrivals in New Territories. Chinese irregulars replaced by regulars and disciplined at Sha Tau Kok – Major piracy in Mirs Bay (\"Fean\" case). Hoi Luk Fung Soviet rebellion affects Mirs Bay area. \n\nASR \n\n1929 \n\nCustoms seek major increase in staff because of increased smuggling (every year until late 1910s). Much better conditions on border because of better policing on Chinese side of border. \n\nAR \n\n1930 \n\nIncrease in smuggling. Kai Miu Customs Station sacked by bandits. \n\nAR, JLHG \n\n1931 \n\nIncrease in smuggling, especially sugar. Sha Tau Customs Station sacked by bandits. 2 Battles with smugglers off entrance to Pearl River (\"Loser Maru\" case). Inadequate customs staff members leads to problems. \n\nAR JLHG \n\n1932 \n\nIncrease in smuggling, especially sugar and cloth. Smuggling on Railway a growing problem. Smuggling through Lok Ma Chau and Sheung Shui a growing problem. Smuggling on Shan Chun River a growing problem. Kai Chung Customs Station sacked by bandits. Gun battles with smugglers at Law Fong (twice), Chek Mei, Man Kam To. \n\nAR, JLHG \n\n187", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213584, "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-1995", "page_number": 180, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "150\n\n(Hase, P. pers. comm.). This tended to reinforce the fung shui layout of the village by protecting the primary and secondary fung shui woods. It is largely because woodfuel is rarely gathered from the hills any longer by villagers, due to the use of alternative fuels and because the reduced population can obtain its fuel needs, if necessary, from the abandoned fields, that such songs and prohibitions are being forgotten by the old women. This in turn has two effects. It allows fung shui woods to spread and colonize the hillsides, yet at the same time the precise working knowledge of fung shui is being lost.\n\nHowever, it appears that substantial amounts of woodfuel are still used in more remote coastal villages. When visiting Lai Chi Wo in December 1990, large amounts of fuelwood were seen cut and stacked, but whether this was solely for the use of the villagers is not known. Some of the coastal village restaurants, which cater for hikers and junk trips on a regular basis, such as at Sam A Tsuen, Plover Cove, use only firewood for cooking. At Ma Tsuek Leng near Sha Tau Kok in late 1993 there were large stacks of woodfuel, mostly cut branches, which the elderly people purchase from elsewhere, as it is cheaper than buying bottled gas.\n\nDuring the Japanese occupation, and the years immediately after, the pressure on the countryside for fuel was severe. Grass was shaved from the hills, scrub and remnant woods were cleared, even from remote areas, and inroads were made into fung shui woods, especially those of secondary importance. Such was the pressing demand for fuel that those trees and woods that can be seen on the US Airforce airphotos of 1945, taken prior to liberation, must only have survived purely because they were of such fung shui significance (Hase, pers. comm.).\n\nDaley (1975) gives an indication of the extent of this immediate post-war felling. \"Woodcutting extended further and further from the towns and gradually the hillsides as far as Mirs Bay and the western side of Lantao were stripped of trees. The prevention of all this cutting was an impossible task in the circumstances. Very few large trees survived this onslaught during the war years and just after. Perhaps the biggest was the pine felled at Ping Shan Chai, near Tai Po, in 1960. It measured almost 3ft in diameter at 4ft above ground, and 69ft in height. It was 159 years old.\"\n\nPage 180\n\nPage 181", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214060, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1997", "page_number": 128, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "95\n\nwith impounded water being conveyed through a 2.2km-long 2.5m-diameter tunnel, mainly in granite, and by a 5km-long conduit winding along the northern shore of the Island beneath Bowen Road to the first two slow sand filter beds above the city, and thence into the service reservoir located at a lower level. The distribution system involved laying, between 1890 and 1892, some 30 kilometres of 75-350mm-diameter cast-iron mains together with the installation of a system of fire hydrants. Major fung shui problems were encountered during the tunnelling works, rumour being that children were to be selected for burial alive to ensure success; fortunately no ritual sacrifice was needed!\n\nOn an uncontoured 1895 version of Collinson's plan (1845), there is an interesting feature clearly marked “overhead tram\" extending 2.3 kilometres between Quarry Bay and Quarry Gap. It seems likely that it would have been used to transport materials and, perhaps, workmen associated with the early Tai Tam reservoir works. As part of the Tai Tam scheme a further small high-level reservoir at Wong Nei Chong was completed in 1899. Around this time the Braemar reservoir (now Choi Sai Woo Park) and further smaller reservoirs near Quarry Bay were built, primarily to meet the needs of the large commercial Tai Koo sugar refinery and dockyard complex.\n\nWith the population already rising to about half a million, three further concrete dams within the Tai Tam valley, the largest Tai Tam Tuk being 50m high, and associated reservoirs were completed between 1904 and 1917. The upper (42m high) and reconstructed lower (20m high) concrete dams, the latter being previously a privately-owned dam built in 1890 for a paper works, impounding the Aberdeen reservoirs were later finished in 1931 and 1932 respectively, thus completing the last economical water storage development on the Island.\n\nAfter the turn of the century engineers were already looking to the New Territories to increase the supply of water for Kowloon, which had hitherto been dependent on two wells located to the north of Yau Mai Tei. As a result, the 35m-high concrete dam for the Kowloon reservoir was completed in 1910 and three further reservoirs in the vicinity were completed during the period 1925-1931 by which time the population was already approaching a million. A commercial reservoir was also built early this century to the south of Lung Wo Tsuen to provide water for Rennie's cotton factory at Junk Bay.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214772, "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": 187, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "151\n\nTwenty fifth. Move into Jubilee which is much more comfortable and on the waterfront. The six of us have three rooms and even a bathroom. What a relief after our squalid hut. Junior has planned to escape with several others. They hope to get to Mirs Bay in a junk and then fifty miles over land to Wai Chow which is still in Chinese hands.\n\nTwenty sixth. Junior gets up at five to contact the Chinese who is escaping and is going to arrange for the junk to pick the rest of the party up tomorrow.\n\nTwenty seventh. Junior up at five and contacts the junk but doesn't get away. Frank and I up at six and go down to the jetty which is now the only place one can buy food. We get seven lbs of sugar. It is pitch dark and we have to wade some distance to the junk. The Chinese are very cunning at avoiding sentries but several have been shot.\n\nTwenty eighth. GOC talks to all officers and NCO's about morale, which is very low, and warns us against disease. We are all staying up late tonight and are having a late meal to feed the escapists: Junior, Capt Scriven and Capt Hewitt, Whimpey is also due to go but one of their party backs out and upsets their plans, which is to swim to the mainland and then walk to Wai Chow. A perfect night with a bright moon and as still and quiet as a graveyard. We all sit up until two o'clock playing cards by the light of the moon. Finally they go and we get some sleep.\n\nUp to thirty first. Junior and Whimpey's escape don't come off due to the junk not turning up and Whimpeys raft collapsing. Many Chinese escape and some Europeans, many being captured and brought back. Japs machine all junks moving by day. Many cases of dysentry and typhoid.\n\nFeb first. Japs stop all food coming into the camp. Whimpey and Junior due to try again tonight. Four of us get up at two to wait for the trading junks. Several hundred in queue. Sampan arrives at four and we buy sugar, milk, and sardines. Whimpey goes just before midnight, it being very light. Shortly after, we hear rifle fire and we pray that he made it. Bullets fly past our verandah. Junior gets off at two am in one of the trading junks.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215136, "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": 232, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "189\n\nspeed test over a set distance. This is done, for example, for ships built on the Firth of Clyde, in Scotland (Sinclair, 2000). The late James A W Deacon, Superintendent of Lights in the Hong Kong Government Marine Department, told me they tried unsuccessfully to find a place for timing ships over a measured sea mile on the south side of Hong Kong Island. Eventually such a \"course\" was, it is understood, set up at Tseung Kwan O (Junk Bay), in the eastern New Territories. It seems unlikely that the two Obelisks at Tai Tam were ever used for timing ships because of their rather 'tucked away' positions. There is also no evidence of there ever having been a second pair of beacons in the vicinity.\n\nAre there other possible uses for the two Tai Tam Obelisks? I was informed firstly in the late 1970s by a master mariner and senior civil servant in the Government Marine Department, that a Royal Navy Officer, who had served in Hong Kong before World War Two, had told him that the two Obelisks had been used when submarines submerged during tests. This practice came into being (so it was said) because of the loss of HM Submarine Thetis, on 1 June 1939, on its maiden dive with the loss of 99 sailors and civilians. A diver who went down to try to effect a rescue was also lost. Only four occupants managed to escape from the submarine using the Davis Escape Apparatus. The Royal Navy Officer told the senior Marine Department Officer that submarines were sent to Tai Tam Bay, after repairs or refits in the old Royal Naval Dockyard. At Tai Tam they could dive to periscope depth, in line between the two Obelisks. Then, if anything were to go wrong, the submarine could be traced and the crew rescued hopefully relatively quickly. The now retired Marine Department member of staff acknowledges that he never had material in writing to support this statement but he believes the information was given to him in good faith.\n\nWhen this information was put to Guy Clarabutt, who served in Royal Navy submarines in Hong Kong before World War Two, he said he had never heard of such a practice (Sinclair, 2000). Neither could he remember the two Obelisks at Tai Tam (Waters, 2000). I spoke to a young British naval officer stationed at HMS Tamar, on Hong Kong Island, in 1995. He felt that such a practice was highly unlikely. In 1997, however, I raised the same question with Commodore PJ Melson CBE, Chief of Staff and Deputy to Commander British Forces. He, as", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215331, "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": 108, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "56\n\nhis bill. He described the lady who had ordered the materials and when he heard that it was the goddess herself he forwent his bill and donated the materials. The temple was built on the side of the hill above Wenchang town, called Shuiwei Po, which became the cult centre.\n\nMarginal variations of the story heard in Penang and Cambodia include the following: a number of fishermen aboard a junk threw out their net and drew in an enormously heavy but small log, requiring the joint effort of the whole crew. After their communal vow to have the log carved and having hauled in two large catches, they were so embarrassed at not being able to afford to have the log carved and to raise a shrine to house it they left it on the edge of the village where it was incorporated into the walls of a pigsty. Pigs however began sickening and dying, and only when Pan saw a glowing light over the pigsty did he recall the log and their promise. He burnt incense, asked forgiveness and all became tranquil and normal. People claimed to have seen an exquisitely beautiful young woman on the branch overhanging the pigsty and came to realize that it was the spirit of the log. They collected funds, had a temple built and the log carved into the shape of the woman they had seen on the branch. The temple became the cult centre for the Holy Mother who is also known as:\n\nPaihai Shen The Spirit who Controls the Seas.\n\nAccording to Wilmott10, Shuiwei Shengmu, the main deity in the Hainanese temple in Phnom-penh, changed her name to being simply Shengmu because the Cantonese connotation of the term 'Shuiwei' was associated with bad fortune in business11 and kept many people from frequenting the temple.\n\n4: Uniquely Hainanese Secondary Deities\n\n[though a few are also revered China-wide by Han Chinese]\n\na] The One Hundred and Eight Brothers-\n\nYibai lingba Xiongde 一百零八兄弟\n\nThe tablet to the 108 Brothers is exclusively revered on secondary altars in Hainanese temples in South-east Asia only. The Brothers are", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215606, "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": 383, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "333\n\nThis paper focuses on the material objects of cemeteries: grave forms and furnishings. We looked in some detail at a new private grave in Junk Bay Cemetery, at the grave in the Aberdeen Chinese Permanent Cemetery (CPC) of the founder of what is now a Hong Kong-based sub-lineage, at a columbarium niche in the CPC older columbarium in Cape Collinson Cemetery, at a symbolic grave, and finally at a charitable grave, the last two both in the Sandy Ridge Cemetery. We pointed out that in Chinese culture, death is regarded as polluting; and that landscapes of death are regarded as potentially powerful, and are avoided except at festivals or on other appropriate occasions.\n\nThe paper was written for the very specialised Journal of the American Association for Gravestone Studies. Americans have for decades been fascinated by gravestones. Is this because it's a settler society, much of whose history is told in its graveyards and cemeteries? If so, it's an interesting cultural contrast that there isn't the same public acknowledgement of the contribution that graveyards and cemeteries make to clarifying the identity of Hong Kong as a community as there is to the parallel contribution that the same type of spaces make regarding the identity of American communities. In both places, those who now reside in cemeteries and columbaria are, for the most part, immigrants. Note that one of the USA's most respected human geographers, Wilbur Zelinsky, has written a couple of well-quoted papers on American cemeteries.\n\nWhere Chinese grave forms are concerned, Eddie Chow made an unexpected find in a bookshop while preparing this paper: a book on the different types of grave shapes in southern China: Bin He, Jiang Zhe Han Zu Sung Zong Wen Hua (The Death and Burial Culture of the Han Nationality in Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Beijing, 1995. The scarcity of such material implies that the Chinese awe of death may well be hindering research into a field that is potentially of deep cultural significance in Chinese society.\n\nTeather, E.K. (2000). High rise homes for the ancestors: cremation in Hong Kong, Geographical Review 89(3): 409-430.\n\nThe decision in the late 1950s to encourage Hong Kong residents to consider cremation rather than coffin burial, and the gradual acceptance of the policy over the succeeding decades, is intriguing. Over ninety per cent of Hong Kongers are cremated now, if we include", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216093, "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": 392, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "326\n\nso \"starchy\" and where you did not have to dress for dinner. French ships called at Saigon and Jibuti and the voyage ended at Marseilles. Italian ships berthed at Genoa. Other passengers preferred freighters. These were more relaxed still and life was not so \"organised.” Not more than 12 passengers were allowed or there had to be a doctor on board. Whereas most airports look similar, with a freighter you called at interesting, out-of-the-way little ports, each with its own special smell. By freighter, the journey from Britain to Hong Kong could take up seven or eight weeks. Halcyon days indeed!\n\nHong Kong\n\nto\n\nWhen I arrived in Hong Kong World War Two had ended less than a decade before. Yet some Britons living here still believed there were two kinds of expatriates. There were those who had been “in the bag\" (prison camp) (where, in Stanley for example, some of my younger friends were born) and, secondly, those of us who came to Hong Kong after the War. The fact that some of us in the second group had seen more action than many of those who had been interned did not really count as far as old Hong Hands were concerned.\n\nThe camaraderie which develops when people face danger or privation together came to the fore when I received a ticket for parking in King's Road. When I later told my old boss he said, 'Pity: the case has gone too far now. If you'd told me earlier I could have got it quashed.\" My boss had a friend, a senior police officer, who had been in prison camp with him.\n\nIn 1954, Hong Kong's population was something like two-and-a-half million, compared with 600,000 at the end of the War. Immigrants were coming here from China in frantic attempts to evade communism. Accommodation was terribly overcrowded with people in some cases sleeping, on a shift basis, three to a bunk. With China all but cut off from the rest of the world we had lost our entrepôt trade and,\n\nwith backs to the wall, it was a case of export or starve. There was considerable unemployment.\n\nReligion was burgeoning although many were said to be 'rice Christians.' Namely, joining for the handouts. People knew life in Hong Kong was not perfect. But it was a jolly sight better than living", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]