[ { "id": 205791, "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-1969", "page_number": 97, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "KING MONGKUT AND THE KINGDOM OF SIAM\n\n91\n\nthe Throne and Buddhism are, today as much as in the nineteenth century, the foundation of society.\n\nIn the West we might think that life in a Buddhist monastery was poor training for kingship. Not so in Siam. Prince Mongkut came to know his people as no Palace-dwelling King could ever do. His colleagues in the monastery were peasants, artisans, sons of nobles and merchants. He walked the streets of Bangkok with his begging bowl and saw the homes of his people. Like other monks he travelled across the country from one Wat to another. His father, Rama II, only left the Palace once a year for the ceremonial presentation of robes to monks at the end of each rainy season and his brother maintained the same semi-divine remoteness.\n\nMongkut's interests were not limited to Buddhism whilst he was in the Order. His intelligence was singular. He had that rare quality in oriental princes — intellectual curiosity, an eagerness to inquire into things. Not far from Wat Bowaniwate there lived a Roman Catholic priest, no less than the able Frenchman, Bishop Pallegoix, from whom we learn a good deal about the Prince. The Bishop and the Abbot became friends and Mongkut invited Pallegoix to preach Christian sermons to his brother monks in the Wat. The sermons and discussions were impressive. Mongkut admired the Christian morals and achievements which the Bishop explained to his yellow-robed congregation, but the Abbot could make nothing of Christian doctrine. With immodest presumption he commented: \"What you teach people to do is admirable but what you teach them to believe is foolish.\"\n\nBishop Pallegoix learned Pali and a great deal about Buddhism from the royal Abbot and, in exchange, he taught Mongkut some Latin and French. This was the Prince's introduction to the thought of the Western world. He learned about Christianity and the customs of Europeans. He became interested in mathematics and science. Other Christians of a different sort had recently come to Bangkok. These were the American Presbyterian missionaries who brought with them the first printing press, a new kind of Christianity which, to Mongkut's astonishment, included married priests, for they brought their wives and, most precious of all, the English language. Their leader, the Rev. Dr. Beach Bradley, became Mongkut's English tutor. He found in the Abbot a most apt and diligent student who quite quickly acquired a good", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212268, "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": 210, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "opposition to missionaries. A recent case in point is the brilliant article by Andrew Nathan on the use of value judgements in cross-cultural studies. Arguing for \"evaluative universalism\" rather than \"cultural relativism\", Nathan uncovers a number of hidden biases in the last thirty years of American sinological studies. His \"evaluative universalism\" is informed by a relatively sensitive account of the nature of value judgements. Rather than support an uncritical absolutist stance, he argues that scholars must make explicit and reasoned value judgements of foreign cultures by employing the values they believe to be valid. In this way, the validity of the values can come under legitimate scrutiny, and the beliefs of the investigator in the validity of these values can be tested by norms of rational discourse.\n\nIn the process of elaborating his position, Nathan at least three times suggests generalized criticisms against missionaries. Implicit in these generalizations is the claim that missionaries are driven by zeal, and so are incompetent and biased judges of foreign cultures, not fairly stating the value judgements of the cultures they are proselytizing. Exactly these kind of general statements, especially when embedded in the text of a notable scholar, would discourage inquisitive souls from the hope of ever finding a missionary who would be something more than a cross-cultural misfit. But Legge was precisely such an exception.\n\nPragmatic Difficulties\n\nLargely as a consequence of some of the above mentioned misunderstandings, James Legge has been generally neglected and we should ask, \"Why?\"\n\nI would like to suggest here four pragmatic reasons for this oversight.\n\nFirst, the immensity of the scope of Legge's work is simply forbidding. The sum of all his efforts included translations of nine Confucian classics, descriptions and evaluations of four religious traditions (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Christianity), data involving materials from China, Japan, Korea, India and Europe (he was literate in Latin, French, German, Italian, English, biblical Greek and Hebrew as well as several Oriental languages). A proper\n\nPage 210\n\nPage 211", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212858, "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": 167, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "152\n\nGerman, Central and Eastern European Jews\n\nThe third wave of Jewish immigration into Shanghai, and incidentally the largest, was in the years following 1938, as a result of Nazi persecutions in Germany, Central and Eastern Europe. Since Shanghai was the only port that accepted people without visas, Jews who were not permitted to enter other countries came to Shanghai.\n\nThey travelled by water, on Italian liners via Africa. Since canal tolls had to be paid in pounds sterling, ship captains tended to take the long way by going around Africa, making the journey to Shanghai more than six weeks. Other refugees took the Siberian Railroad to Manchuria, then went from there to Japan. The Japanese consul at Vilna, apparently for humanitarian reasons, issued transit visas for those who possessed another, usually for some Latin American country. Or, for those who did not have any visa at all, the destination was to be Shanghai. As a result, a large number of Jews congregated at Kobe or Yokohama, waiting to travel to Shanghai by ship. Among this group were the faculty and student body of the Yeshiva from Poland. So, until the school moved to New York after 1945, the rabbis were trained in Shanghai.\n\nWhen the Sino-Japanese conflict merged into the global war following Pearl Harbour in December 1941, resulting in Japanese occupation of the International Settlement, the Jews in Shanghai were treated according to their nationalities. The large refugee community, either with 'non-enemy alien' status or stateless, manned the factories and operated cottage industries in their homes. In 1943, when special privileges enjoyed by foreigners in China came to an end as the unequal treaties of the 19th century were formally abrogated, the Jewish population in Shanghai was estimated to number 25,000.\n\nAs the war ended in 1945 the Jewish refugees left to settle in the United States, Canada, Australia or, after its establishment, Israel. Long-term Jewish residents left as well after 1949. By 1956, only 543 Jews remained in China, 231 of them in Shanghai, 402 of these Jews were classified as Soviet citizens by the Chinese government, and were therefore unable to obtain the necessary papers in order to emigrate without cooperation between the Chinese authorities and the Soviet consulate. R.D. Abraham, leader of the Jewish community at that time, learned through a BBC broadcast that David Marshall, the noted Jewish lawyer from Singapore, was being invited to visit China. He quickly", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215422, "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": 199, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "148\n\nkept in the archives of the Society of Jesus in Rome and elsewhere, indicate that they were understandably interested in the names of their martyrs, but much less so in those of their artists, no matter what names contemporary researchers may have been able to find. Nevertheless, the sculptures of Chinese lions and the reliefs of Japanese flora, which decorate the façade, show that under their wing these mainly anonymous Asian artists were at least free to express their native sensibilities.\n\nThe 1644 Annual Letter\n\nWhat cannot be established, except through a careful examination of the façade, is if these artists were under the influence of contemporary altarpieces. But again it should be recalled just how important the design of retables had become in the Iberian universe. Latin American Baroque and Rococo retable-façades clearly testify to the ascendancy of the features of retables over those of retable-façades.\" I would argue that a similar influence was already at work in the design of the façade of St. Paul's.\n\nThe Litterae Annua of 1644 for the Japan Province penned by António Ferreira, in the archives of the Historical Institute of the Society of Jesus, in Rome, is an exceptional document of exceptional relevance for this paper. It is already known to scholars from competent but slightly inaccurate eighteenth-century transcripts by Fr. José Montanha in the Archivo Histórico Ultramarino in Lisbon, and has been quoted since 1955 by Fr. Videira Pires and others. But the original manuscript has remained quietly filed and largely ignored in the Archives of the Society of Jesus in Rome. The original passage in the Annua that describes the façade as it reached completion in 1644, and which I would like to quote to the honourable audience and members of the Royal Asiatic Society in Hong Kong for the first time in public form my translation of the Portuguese text, reads as follows:\n\nAlms were given this year to crown the main façade of this Church, which is all of carved stone in a Roman manner. From top to bottom it has three orders of columns with their pedestals, six arched niches in good proportion; four of the ones which are half domes are on the first frieze amongst the orders of the second order of columns, each by itself next to the opening of the three windows of the choir: in them there are the half length figures of our Saints Ignatius, Xavier, Borja and Gonzaga,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215423, "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": 200, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "149\n\neach one in his niche, over stone bases with their names carved on them in the same order as we have them on the main altar, all in bronze with their foundry signs: hands and faces painted red; vestments gilded throughout the length of the body, with no other colour. On the second frieze and third storey with columns that rest on the middle window the Image of Our Lady of the Assumption, titular saint of the Church, has its niche, which image steps on a large gilded moon; over her head two Angels in the round of the same metal appear to be holding a closed crown, each one of which holds out his arm on the side where he is. Below these another pair seem to go through the air giving a hand in favour of Our Lady's ascent.\n\nThe third frieze, which runs underneath the last storey, gave place to the last niche. It has on its base the Image of the infant Jesus with a cross on the globe of the world on his hand and which does not differ from the others in anything, except that it is of lesser height than them. Inside the field of the pointed summit which makes a straight triangle - on which rests the stone pedestal on which is to be fixed the iron cross with rod arms that is the crown of the whole work, for which alms were given this year as I said above - from the middle of rays carved in the stone, a kind of image of a dove goes fourth, representing the Holy Spirit with its wings wide open, in gilded bronze and of significant size. Note: for all of this magnificent and sumptuous work expenses were met with alms ....' (italics mine).\n\nThere are several quite remarkable points here. Apart from their gilded garments, the first is that the faces and hands of the images of the Jesuit saints were painted red. That these bronzes were painted is highly unusual. If the faces and hands were actually painted red is perhaps arguable. But the gilded garments of the four bronzes could well have been intended to imitate the technique of gilding practised on carved statues since Late Gothic retables.\n\nBrightly painted images are known in medieval Spanish portals, an obsolete practice in the seventeenth century. It was, however, still in use in the case of some Latin American retable-façades, as the researches of Humberto Rodríguez-Camilloni on the façade of San Francisco, Lima, Peru, have disclosed.21\n\nWhat has equally remained unknown because it is missing in José", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215424, "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": 201, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "150\n\nMontanha's transcripts, is the fact that the main altar of Madre de Deus, long lost after the 1835 fire (if not before), had statues of the four Jesuit saints in an order that echoed that of the façade. This third point implies that the design of the façade of Madre de Deus may have been conceived in relationship to that of the main retable inside. The religious and artistic interaction between a retable-façade and a main retable is a development known in some Latin American retable-façades at a later date, of which that of the Jesuit College in Tepozotlán, outside Mexico City, may be the most remarkable example.\n\nThe Architectural Structure of the Façade\n\nOne of the most remarkable features of this work's design is the use of projecting classical orders as main structural elements. However, it is not the use of the orders per se that relates this design to contemporary retables.\n\nFrom the point of view of architecture, what the use of the Ionic order for the first storey, the Corinthian order for the second and the Composite for the third and fourth reveals is a rather sophisticated knowledge of the canons of ancient Roman architecture (Fig. 16). This is perfectly compatible with contemporary architectural practice. At the time Renaissance and Mannerist theorists had made these canons accessible to architects throughout Europe in a number of illustrated publications.\n\nWhoever designed the façade of St. Paul's had evidently had a thorough grounding on these canons. How did he get such knowledge? Most likely from the sixteenth-century illustrated books by Serlio, Palladio or Vignola. Editions of their books circulated not only in Italy but also in the Iberian Peninsula. As the researches of Sylvie Deswarte show, knowledge of the Vitruvian orders had reached Lisbon, Portugal, quite likely around 1549 via Da Pintura Antigua by the Portuguese Francisco de Holanda. Holanda had underhandedly appropriated his main ideas from Serlio and published them in a luxurious edition as his own.22 In Spain, Francisco de Villalpando had already translated Books III and IV a few years before Holanda's book appeared, and his translation was known in Portugal.\n\nThese classical columns are important for my arguments because", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215425, "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": 202, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "151\n\nthey stand free of the wall in a way that is not usual in the more orthodox building practices of architects, but which had many precedents in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Iberian altarpieces. They appear in the four storeys of the front as if they were delineating the nine vertical bays of a large post-Tridentine altarpiece (Fig. 17).\n\nAlthough both Hugo-Brunt, of the Department of Architecture of the University of Hong Kong, and Professor J. B. Bury have already noted that they are freestanding, their arguments for the façade follow a different line. As an architect, Hugo-Brunt was sensitive to the fact that much of the architectural elements of the façade were used in a highly unorthodox decorative way.23 But neither Hugo-Brunt nor J.B. Bury connect this feature to either retables or retable-façades.\n\nHowever, Professor George Kubler, of Harvard University, has noted that the theme of the projecting column with entablature, in which a continuum is formed in order to lead the eye upwards, is one that would later become a characteristic feature of Latin American retable-façades.14\n\nLikewise in the façade of St. Paul's each column supports the column directly above it in order to create a vertical ascent that leads the eye upwards.\n\nThe columns' bases, shafts and capitals were laboriously carved from three separate granite blocks, with practically all the shafts carved out of one piece. They could almost be the highly decorative wooden supports of an altarpiece, with no genuine functional purpose. Although the unorthodox employment of classical columns and other architectural features is characteristic of Italian Mannerism, this kind of decorative, juggling use of supports and pinnacles is much more typical of the artistic idiom of Mannerist altarpieces in Spain and Portugal.\n\nContemporary accounts are obviously right in praising the classical erudition shown by the designer of the façade. However, closer inspection reveals that not all details conform to orthodox classical canons. Some of the subsidiary sculptures adorning the façade are of Chinese or Japanese origin. At the extreme sides of the two upper attics, right next to obelisks, there are four Chinese lions emerging in front of squat corner obelisks or ornamental balls on pedestals (Fig 18). Another", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215435, "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": 212, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "161\n\nen España 1450-1600, Madrid, 1988, p. 58. Some of the more important writings on Latin American retable-façades, dealing also with those of the Jesuits, Dominicans and other religious orders, include, D. Angulo Iñiguez, E. Marco Dorta, M. J. Buschiazzo, Historia del Arte Hispano-Americano. II, pp. 427-38, 559-66, passim. J. A. Baird Jr., The Churches of Mexico, 1530-1810, University of California, 1962, pp. 22-3, 37-9, passim. A. Benavides, La Arquitectura en el Virreinato del Peru y en la Capitania General de Chile, Santiago, 1941, p. 54, passim. M. Collier, The Sagrario of Lorenzo Rodriguez, Yale University, 1973 (unpublished thesis). E. Harth-Terré, \"El Imafronte de la catedral de Lima”. Arquitecto Peruano, 1941.\n\n\"La obra de la Compañía de Jesus en la arquitectura virreinal peruana\", Mercurio Peruano, 1942. P. Kelemen, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America, New York, 1961, p. 123 passim. A. B. Louchheim, \"The church façades of Lorenzo Rodriguez: A focal point for the study of Mexican Churrigeresque architecture\", Inst. of Fine Arts, New York University, 1941 (unpublished M.A. thesis). G. Navarro, La iglesia de la Compañía de Quito, Madrid, 1930, R. C. Smith, A First History of Latin American Art, The 2nd volume, Washington, 1952, pp. 157-61. M. Toussaint, \"La catedra de Zacatecas y el arte del Virreinato\", Anales instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, Mexico, 1947.\n\n“La Catedral de Mexico y el Sagrario Metropolitano, Mexico, 1948, H. E. Wethey, Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru, Harvard University Press, 1949, pp. 53-6, 58-60, passim. B. Vargas-Lugo, La iglesia de Sta. Prisca de Taxco, Mexico, 1974.\n\n7\n\n$\n\nLate in the eighteenth century the fronts of Jesuit churches in Guanajuato, Tepotzotlan and elsewhere in Mexico display several of the most important retable-façades. M. Diaz, La Arquitectura de los jesuitas en Nueva España, Mexico, 1982, pp. 78-80. A. von Wuthenau, Tepotzotlan, Mexico, 1941.\n\nGran Enciclopedia Gallega, XXV, Santiago, 1974, pp. 138-9. Carmen Aznar, Summa Artis, XVII, pp. 106-8.\n\nSumma Artis, XVIII, pp. 96-7. F. Checa Goitia, Arquitectura Española del Siglo XVI, XI, Madrid, 1953, pp. 47-8.\n\nImportant carved retables were also produced in northern Europe during the fifteenth century, e.g., that of the Marienkirche, Lübeck, or that by an anonymous master of the School of Cologne, of c. 1434, in Frankfurt Cathedral. In Flemish altarpieces the theme is quite common. W. Kinkel, Der Dom zu Frankfurt am Main, München-Berlin, 1988, p. 18.\n\nPearson, M. N., The New Cambridge History of India: The Portuguese in India, Cambridge, 1987. New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 21, University of Chicago,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]