[ { "id": 208604, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1979", "page_number": 61, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "34 \n\nREVS. J. SMITH AND WM. DOWNS \n\ndoubt, the most momentous year of its short history. After months and months of suspense occasioned by the occupation of the mainland, the war struck Hong Kong. Everyone, of course, was hoping against hope that the catastrophe would not affect the British Crown Colony, but such was not to be, and its peace and quiet was rudely shattered by the Japanese guns and ships which began shelling the city. As a precautionary measure our Econome, Father John Troesch, wisely put in a goodly supply of food stuffs in expectation of a long siege, but as a matter of fact, we did not benefit from it, as future events proved.\n\nFrom this point we shall quote from detailed diaries written by Maryknollers stationed at Stanley, eye witnesses of much of the attack and occupation, Fathers Troesch, Feeney and Downs.\n\nThe month of December in Hong Kong was ushered in much the same manner as its companions of 1941, but its exit from the world was in striking contrast. We Maryknollers at Stanley rose to greet it, and at our breakfast table read the news of the day, news of the war in various sectors and rumors of war nearer at hand, but hope was uppermost in our hearts that the fair city of Hong Kong would not be embroiled in the world catastrophe. Due to the unsettled conditions in the Far East our 1941 group of new missioners had been delayed, and now that we had some news of their departure from the Coast, we were anxiously awaiting their arrival. One small group had already reached our shores, three of whom had left for their missions in Kongmoon; the fourth, a Hakkaite, Father Siebert, was waiting for an escort to his adopted land. This year the Hong Kong Language School was to move inland, and our plans, already formulated in our minds, were that as soon as we had definite word of the arrival of the new men, we would book passage on a plane leaving nightly from Hong Kong for Kukong. Because of the \"China Incident\" plane travel was the only means of transportation left with the interior of China, and we were all looking forward to our coming trip. The atmosphere, of course, was tense, and no one could hazard what was to happen, but hope was strong in our hearts that we could get to our inland missions before any storm broke.\n\nAmong our house guests at this time were Bishop O'Gara, C.P., and two of his priests, Fathers Benson, the Passionists' Procurator at Shanghai and Norris, C.P., who had come to meet their Bishop; and they joined us in felicitating Father Meyer on the celebration of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212204, "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": 146, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "cannibalisation. Until the Japanese advance, in the autumn of 1944, flowed over Hengyang you could see a harlequinade of locomotives there in various states of disintegration. Without these reserves, saved through the foresight of the railway personnel, the Chinese would have found it impossible to maintain the service between Kukong, Hengyang, Kweilin and the west as long as they did.\n\nThere was much activity in the airfields, the civil field over at Wuchang, and the military field near the Race Club behind Hankow. From the latter the Russians were operating light bombers, which would pass over in twos and threes on missions beyond Kiu Kiang; and Russian fighters laid in wait for Japanese raids. As I was riding down the Bund one day in a rickshaw - petrol was scarce and under control - a single Russian bomber flying overhead, for no apparent reason, blew up.\n\nThe foreign married women and children had long since left Hankow. The two faded cabaret dancing-halls prospered even more than usual. Artistes, who spoke Russian with a Harbin accent, so I am told, made lots of hay; but, as will happen when news and women both are short, it was chiefly at the clubs that the men foregathered. It was the fashion to go out to the Race Club of an evening. There on the lawn after sunset you would see the British, the Americans, and the French. Hitler had recently recalled the officers of von Falkenhausen's mission, so that the usual sprinkling of German officers was missing, but occasionally Russian air-force officers came to sit huddled in a group by themselves.\n\nI was able to book a berth on a ship of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company leaving for Kiu Kiang. It is an overnight journey. I do not propose to enlarge on the minor discomforts of travel in China. In the railway carriages, in the ships, and even in the cinemas, the bedbugs and fleas take a long rest during the winter from November to February. It was only June and so I was up on deck soon after dawn to watch the familiar banks go by. As we moved alongside the same old hulk I observed the Kiu Kiang Bund. It had grown shabbier. The process of degeneration, which appears to follow on the withdrawal of the foreigner, was evident. Flaking paint, dirty window panes, broken plaster, left their mark. The Chinese are not good at maintenance, whether it be of houses or machines.\n\nApart from Shanghai, Hankow, and Tientsin, where there were large\n\nIII", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212207, "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": 149, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "126\n\nwould be discussion of price, a discussion that might often wax hot; but as soon as a bargain was struck all would be smiles again and the parties would separate, each convinced that he had had the better of it. Now the new shops had glass fronts and counters inside between which the customer could walk. The goods were exposed to view and not tucked away in the back, and many of the conservative shop-keepers admitted that the new ways had their advantages; and that even the uncompensated sacrifice of 20 feet depth of shop front, with all the expense it involved in rebuilding, had possibly been worth while, as the widened street attracted more custom.\n\nI managed to borrow a lorry in Nanchang and, with some Chinese friends, took the road, which most of the way follows the Kan river, and headed south for Kukong in Kwangtung Province. The first night we stopped in a wayside temple. We were passing through country which had been devastated during the anti-communist campaigns of 1928 to 1933, before the communists made their famous long march to the North West. Many of the fields were still uncultivated and ruined farmsteads gave evidence of the depletion of the population.\n\nTemples in China are of many kinds. The Chinese are not religious; that is where they differ so from the Indians. The commonest type of temple is the ancestral hall, where the wooden tablets of the village ancestors are housed. The hall, as often as not, is removed a little from the village. It will consist of a first hall, through which you pass to a courtyard, with galleries down either side; beyond lies the second, or main, hall, where the small wooden tablets, each bearing the name in Chinese characters of an ancestor, are set out in rows, generation by generation, one beneath the other, below the single tablet of the founder of the line. The side and back walls may be of hollow brick, cheaply built and usually dilapidated; the curved tiled roofs, moss-grown and even bearing tufts of grass and small bushes, are supported by wooden pillars, sometimes lacquered red, with heavy carved transoms. All around festoons of cobwebs, traceries of dust, and perhaps the rotting heads of last year's Indian corn, stripped of the grain, adorn the broken remains of discarded agricultural implements, except in one corner, where a blackboard and some desks and benches may await the pupils of the local school, if one is lucky. Several benches put together make a better bed, on which to spread a bedroll, than the stone floor.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212209, "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": 151, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "128\n\nis an immense shortage of persons qualified to fill the professions; doctors, engineers, chemists, and even lawyers. In the interests of the future all students are automatically exempt from conscription; so are all those of whatever station in life who have escaped from Japanese occupied territory. There would be no inducement to escape otherwise. Under the circumstances we can appreciate the necessity for these exemptions. When recruits are required for the army, a quota is allocated to each district: the magistrate in turn calls for a levy from each village to fill his quota. Those with money or influence can buy off their sons; it is the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden who are taken. They are roped together, with a loop round the left forearm, so that they can still use the bamboo pole to carry a load, and marched off to the training centre. There many die, and others desert. Indeed, there is now a class of professional deserter. If recruiting is going on in a district, these men will turn up and offer to serve in the place of anyone who has the price. They collect their money, march off with the conscripts, and desert at the first opportunity, to repeat the performance elsewhere. There are means in China of tracing missing men back to their families, but amidst the confusion caused by years of war it is easy for the vagabond to give a false name and address.\n\nThere are so many millions of displaced, homeless, nameless people in China now; we should not be too critical of these methods. The wonder is that the Chinese government has been able to carry on at all under such immense difficulties. Instead of an insistence on saving face, and thus misleading world opinion, had there been a reasonable relaxation of the iron censorship in order that the world could learn of the prodigious efforts the Chinese have made, there would, I think, be a better understanding of, and greater sympathy for, China's problems.\n\nThe afternoon of the third day we rolled over the iron bridge that spans the North river, a tributary of the West river, into bomb-shattered Kukong. Here I waited for the train and was fortunate to find a carriage, which had been reserved for a party of British sailors from the crews of the gunboats at Hankow; they were being evacuated to Hongkong, and kindly made room for me in their compartment. The track near Canton had been broken during a recent raid. We had to alight there and make our way to the city as best we could; riding through in a rickshaw I had leisure to observe the extent of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215947, "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": 246, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "180\n\nthemselves and slip outside into town, claiming neutral or non-combatant status. Many Europeans were able to stay out of internment or leave if they could: Professor Gordon King escaped with sufficient materials to try and restart a medical school in Free China. There were even escapes from Stanley Internment Camp, including of women civilians. Within the Prisoner of War Camps, there were very strong feelings that, while individuals might choose to escape, it was the duty of senior officers to remain with their men at a time of crisis. Escapes were of extremely limited military or strategic value. Even men like Col Newnham, Major Boxer, Lt Bush (who was a MTB officer) and others, whose sensitive work gave them more reason than most to need to get away, remained as prisoners. It was no failure of courage to choose to remain behind and help others. Newnham was later executed [Hon. Ed. - I think I prefer the term murdered.] and both Boxer and Bush imprisoned. Senior officers in camp expressed grave offence at the tone of the messages sent into camp. Nonetheless, the need to escape is a human trait, and the right of an individual to decide whether he was more useful in or out of camp was acknowledged. At least four parties of European servicemen escaped from POW camps in the first few weeks of internment.\n\nPerhaps the most publicised escape occurred on 9th January 1942 when three university officials left Sham Shui Po camp. Lindsay Ride, a physiologist, said he had planned the escape very early on and realised he needed a Chinese to facilitate it. Fortunately in camp he found Francis Lee Yan Piu, a resourceful clerk who had worked for him as a clerk. Lee arranged for the three Europeans to get Chinese clothing and to cross into the New Territories, where they laid low during the day, planning to explain to any Chinese who found them that they were Germans, as they feared the Chinese might be hostile. How being German made a difference is unclear. To their surprise, when they did encounter Chinese, the Chinese were not only delighted to help but appeared to know exactly what to do. These were guerrillas who had previously been in contact with someone with British connections, for they knew just where to bring the strangers. When the party arrived in Shaukwan (Kukong) over the border in China, they were met by MacEwan and Talan, members of ‘a mysterious Hong Kong organisation known colloquially as the Cloak and Dagger Boys, who had received what appeared to be some sort of guerrilla training formerly in Hong Kong,’xxiii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215948, "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": 247, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "181\n\nSignificantly, this party was the only escape group without a regular military officer in their midst, and to have a Chinese to organise their escape and travel with them. All three Europeans were academics, without experience of up-to-date, modern military thinking. Moreover, given the nature of colonial society, they were used to being treated with deference. It would not have occurred to them to question why the Chinese along their escape route had been so helpful, or why they were met by Europeans in this very remote area, still bandit country, where few ventured, who were not only expecting them, but 'who were quite conversant with the route back to Kowloon and were assistants to FW Kendall, another member of the same organisation whose address... was c/o Col Chauvin, British Embassy, Chung King.'\n\nLt DF Davies, formerly a Lecturer in Physics, solemnly advised that he understood 'Col LT Ride of our party was to attempt some sort of underground railroad back to the Camp...(and) if they could be persuaded and/or allowed to carry out this work, I would suggest that the Cloak and Dagger Group be approached.' Since the Cloak and Dagger Boys they met were Z Force, this was in fact one of the jobs they had long been trained for.\n\nThe trip from Hong Kong had been stressful, not least because a commanding officer had told Ride in no uncertain terms before departure that he should be court-martialled on arrival in Chongqing for deserting his troops. From Lt Davies' report, we know that the group had talked with Z Force members about their organisation. Grimsdale was later to refer to Ride blaming Kendall as a 'complete failure' for delaying his departure from Kukong, then a safe town with Chinese Army presence. Ride himself makes no mention, describing the men later as mere escapees with the Chan Chak group.\n\nWhile still in Kukong, after meeting MacEwan and Talan, the group met Col Chauvin and Dr Wan Wan Yik Shin, a doctor who had served both in the Chinese Army and in the British RAMC. It was at this stage that Ride appears to have outlined his proposals to set up an elaborate escape and evasion organisation. By the time he arrived in Chongqing a few days later, he had formulated an elaborate proposal. Operational details were sketchy, to be left to others to sort out, naming Dr Wan and General Yu Mo Han, commander of Chinese forces in the area. On one point he was unequivocally adamant: that 'the section should be under the command of Lt Col Ride.' It was an absolutely essential prerequisite that the British authorities provide him with a letter confirming his", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]