[
    {
        "id": 208004,
        "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": 43,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "BRUNEI: A HISTORICAL RELIC\n\n27\n\nMalaya a \"new nationalism” has not yet emerged. It is in a sense \"bought off\" by the prosperity and good times made possible by the oil revenues.\n\nA recent account of Brunei in a well-known western journal began this way: 21\n\nThere are moments when visitors feel this sleepy state on Borneo island's northern shore is something dreamed-up in a Hollywood script conference.\n\nOur film opens in some place wild like the South China Sea coast. It's a place run by a sultan — you know, a chap with a turban and a name like Sir Omar Ali Saifuddin. He lives in this big box of a palace with a flock of cars and a bunch of hungry relatives.\n\nAnd get this, the country sits atop a huge pool of oil so nobody wants to work. In fact, most everyone just kinda mooch-es off the government, which sits back and collects millions from the oil company.\n\nThen we need something spectacular like a huge mosque with a gold-plated dome that's lit with coloured floodlights at night.\n\nExcept for the presence of the opulent gold-domed Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin mosque which now towers on the skyline Pigafetta of Magellan's crew would still recognize Brunei if he were able to sail up the river to the town today,22\n\nThe \"Water Village” (Kampong Ayer) has changed little in character. More than half the people in the capital live in houses built on piles above the water of the river, and it is said that some old women in the kampong have never set foot on land, having spent their whole lives in the river village. Today, however, Kampong Ayer is dominated by the mosque, constructed at the water's edge and opened in 1958. This dignified building, the pride of the present and the fulfilment of the hopes of the past, approached from water on one side and land on the other, seems to stand symbolically where tradition and progress meet. For although the water village changes little, on the landward side Brunei Town grows, encouraged by the easy wealth obtained from oil revenues and by the fervent desire, both patriotic and religious, to outdo its neighbours,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 208005,
        "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": 44,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "28\n\nLEIGH WRIGHT\n\nThe state of Brunei annual report for 1956 describes the water city, Kampong Ayer, this way,\n\nSet in a wide sweep of the river, this river town is in its way unique. At high tide under favourable conditions of light it takes on quite a remarkable beauty; viewed at close quarters it is even more remarkably ramshackle. The houses are grouped together in small villages, being connected by precarious plank walkways, and there the inhabitants carry on their multifarious activities in much the same way as if they were on land.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 See e.g. O. W. Wolters, Early Indonesian Commerce; a study of the origins of Srivijaya, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); and D. E. Brown, Brunei: the structure and history of a Bornean Malay sultanate, (Brunei: Brunei Museum, 1970).\n\nThese works have drawn upon the earlier studies of such scholars as W. P. Groeneveldt (1880) and Lien Sung (1919).\n\n2 See Brown, op. cit., Ch. XI.\n\n3 The fullest account of the Moro wars is in E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493 - 1898, (Cleveland, 1903 -09).\n\n4 Lord Stanley of Alderley (ed.), The first voyage round the world by Magellan, by Antonio Pigafetta, (London: Hakluyt Society, 1874).\n\n5 J. Hunt, \"Some particulars relative to the Sulo islands in the Archipelago of Felicia”, in Malayan Miscellany, I, (Bencoolen, 1820).\n\n6 James Horsburgh, Directions for sailing to and from the East Indies and China, (London, 1811), the navigational handbook for generations of British sea captains. This work drew heavily upon the surveys of eighteenth century seafarers such as Alexander Dalrymple (1774) and Thomas Forest (1780).\n\n7 S. B. St. John, Life in the forests of the Far East. (London, 1862), Vol. 2, pp. 248-49.\n\n8 British Parliamentary Papers, 1854-55, XXIX (253),\n\n9 Sarawak Gazette, 26 April, 1872.\n\n10 Henry Keppel, The expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido for the suppression of piracy, with extracts from the Journal of James Brooke, Esq. of Sarawak, (London, 1847),\n\n11 S. Baring-Gould and C. A. Bampfylde, A History of Sarawak under its two white rajahs, (London, 1909), pp. 82-83.\n\n12 Lennox Mills, British Malaya, 1824-67, (reprint: Kuala Lumpur, 1966), p. 248.\n\n13 British interests in Borneo are treated extensively in, L. R. Wright, The Origins of British Borneo, (Hong Kong, 1970).\n\n14 See L. R. Wright, \"The Foreign Office and North Borneo\", in Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. VII, No. 1, (January 1969).",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n",
        "rank": 0
    }
]