[ { "id": 210702, "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-1986", "page_number": 53, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "36\n\nWALTER GREENWOOD\n\nmember, being re-elected in 1891 and 1894, until his resignation in 1895. It was a substantial commitment, involving fortnightly meetings and reading papers in-between meetings. Considerations of space allow reference only to certain events in 1894 and 1895 for which Francis is best known. Suffice it to say that he appeared to try to dominate the proceedings of the Board but at the same time had an ambivalent attitude to it because he considered that it did not have sufficient powers and independence to make it an effective body. For example, in March 1894 he seconded a proposal that it be reconstructed on a popular basis but also argued that that was premature until its powers had been enlarged. Prior to the election in June 1891 the Daily Press said that he had rendered good service and that his keen and ever-ready criticism, sometimes perhaps degenerating into captiousness, had exercised a wholesome influence both on the Board and its officers. The China Mail in its obituary said that he was not an unqualified success and his performance as a member of the Board might have deprived him of support for a place on the Legislative Council.\n\nIn May 1894 plague struck Hong Kong, and a Permanent Committee of the Sanitary Board, comprising three members with Francis as Chairman, was set up to cope with the emergency. It met daily at his chambers at 4 p.m. Its actions were not universally popular. It was in conflict with the Government on occasion, and at one stage was said to be daggers drawn with the Governor. The business community complained that its activities had an adverse effect on commerce, and its relations with the Chinese community were not assisted by wild rumours such as that pregnant women were cut open and children's eyes were gouged out to make medicines for the treatment of the plague. There were recriminations as to whose fault had led to the outbreak and whether the right steps were taken to combat it. Francis bluntly laid the blame on gross mismanagement by the Public Works Department. Whatever the rights and wrongs of particular matters, there were many tributes to his work. The Governor in a dispatch to the Secretary of State, Lord Ripon, in June said that the Permanent Committee acted with extraordinary energy and efficiency and that the Government was indebted to him and others. The acting Attorney General paid tribute to his great assistance, at enormous sacrifice of time, and his wonderful and rapid grasp of any subject and great", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210709, "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-1986", "page_number": 60, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "43\n\nClub and Fraser Smith and represented the Club in legal proceedings. After one case Fraser Smith unsuccessfully proposed at an Annual Meeting that his fees be not paid, alleging that he had been actuated by prejudice in advising that there were grounds for expelling Fraser Smith from the Club. I have found no evidence that Francis ever rode or owned horses. However he did run on one occasion. That was in 1880 in the Veterans Flat Race during the Civilian Athletic Sports. He was unplaced off a twenty yard start. T.C. Hayllar won off thirty-five yards.\n\nHe was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the China Association and the Navy League, and in 1895 accepted the Presidency of the British Mercantile Marine Officers Association. He was also a member of the Gun Club and the Rifle Association. He joined various literary and debating societies. He supported Dr. Cantlie in the formation of the Odd Volumes Society in 1893 observing that he had been connected with many similar ventures during his thirty-three years of residence.\n\nHe was an inveterate lecturer, his subjects ranging from Jesuitism in 1872 through maritime and Asian affairs to the theory of British Advocacy in 1897. He was still lecturing in the year of his death. He was said to be an entertaining, clear and simple lecturer though the China Mail said that his chief fault as a public speaker was \"inartistic redundancy\".\n\nIn 1889 at a meeting of the Literary Society he expressed hope for an elected Legislative Council and objected to heads of departments being members of the Executive Council. In 1893 at the Odd Volumes Society on the subject \"What does Hong Kong want\" he gave the answer “public spirit”, and attacked incompetent officials and harmful legislation.\n\nIn 1899, again at the Odd Volumes Society, he disagreed with the view of an earlier speaker that the British Nation was more vulgar than others and deficient in imagination and gave his own view that the British were disliked by others because of their national self-complacency and arrogance which resulted from the accomplishment of great deeds.\n\nHe played chess and kept open house in his chambers for chess players at 4.30 p.m. on Wednesdays. In 1894 he was involved in a living chess tournament organised to raise funds for the Union Church and held in the grounds of the Hon J.J. Keswick at East Point. In 1897 he took part in the founding of the St. Cecilia Society established to cultivate a taste for music and was its President.\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211613, "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-1989", "page_number": 28, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "and a treadmill was in operation for punishment up until the early 1900s. Prisoners were escorted to Court, so it is believed, by a tunnel. Although the author went to Victoria Prison in the 1970s, on Justice of the Peace visits, he is unable to substantiate this.\n\nA few colonial-style buildings, such as the Helena May Institute (completed 1916) on Garden Road, and the old Supreme Court building (foundations laid 1903, completed 1912) in Central District, are still in use. The latter is now the Legislative Council Chambers, and has been described as \"Lutyens classical revival style adapted for the tropics\".\n\nIn spite of forceful protests by the Heritage Society which was wound up, despondently, in 1983 — and the Conservancy Association, the Repulse Bay Hotel, the previous Hong Kong Club building, and the old Kowloon Railway terminus (except for the tower2) have all succumbed to the wrecker's hammer. The average Hong Kong citizen, it seems, has limited interest in conservation. He or she believes that a building has an economic life span, and, after that, it should go. To be fair, the Government, advised by the Antiquities and Monuments Office and the Antiquities Advisory Board, has declared a number of structures, for instance the Stanley Police Station (1859)13 as Monuments under the Antiquities Ordinance. Other Monuments include the steps and gas lamps in Duddell Street, Central District; rock carvings and inscriptions; old villages, for example Sam Tung Uk in Tsuen Wan; and the District Office, North, building at Tai Po in the New Territories.\n\nThe Territory also possesses a variety of other old structures, such as the fort and battery at Tung Chung and the fort at Tung Lung. There are also ancestral halls and study halls, like Shut Hing Shue Shan, at Ping Shan, and Chou Wong Yi Kung Shue Yuen, in Kam Tin.\n\nAmong other declared historical Monuments are Wan Chai Post Office (1915)1* in Queen's Road East, Western Market in Sheung Wan, and the Pathological Institute,1 in Caine Lane. As of 1990, such Monuments totalled 43. One of the most famous of Hong Kong's old buildings was Murray House (circa 1843).1 It was demolished carefully in 1982, and the parts were labelled, numbered and stored. The intention is to re-erect it on another site.\n\nIn 1935, the then new 66-metre high Hong Kong Bank (the third bank on that site) was fully air-conditioned (the first large building in Hong Kong).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213879, "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-1996", "page_number": 231, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "205\n\ndifferent parts of China As the Manchu government was drumming up a \"commercial war\" between Chinese and foreign enterprises, overseas Chinese merchants were targeted by Beijing as a source of wealth for new industries.\n\nIn Hong Kong, the first groups of Hong Kong Chinese to respond to this reform were a group of newly returned migrants of Siyi and Xiangshan origins. They returned from America and Australia, where exclusion policies against Chinese immigrants had been implemented during the 1890s. Once settled in Hong Kong, they found themselves left outside the established leadership hierarchy in the colony (the Legislative Council-Tung Wah circle). They had to vest their interests in other institutions They looked northward and, immediately, they saw hope in China, where the late Qing reforms offered them ample chances for political and economic advancement. The Governor recalled with contempt the composition of the Siyi Chamber.\n\n[It is] composed of Californian and Australian coolies, artisans who though [they] could often talk fair English, could not write their names in any language\n\nThanks to this rhetoric of \"commercial war\", these overseas returned migrants penetrated into south China. They formed themselves into regional chambers of commerce and through which they raised capital for such large-scale investments as railways, public utilities and land reclamation in Guangdong. Among others, these enterprises included a Siyi Steamship Company, a Sunning (of Siyi) Railway Company and two companies, with respectively 500,000 and 580,000 silver taels in capital, for “port-building” against Portuguese Macao and British Hong Kong. With the approval of the Qing government, these two port-building companies initiated two large-scale port and market development schemes in Siyi and Xiangshan which were intended to recover benefits lost to Hong Kong and Macau. The channel that these merchants went through was the following, the chambers of commerce submitted petitions to the Commissioner of Industrial Promotion and thence to the Bureau of Commerce in Beijing\n\nConservative in design, this late Qing reform led to revolutionary consequences. Among these policies of centralization was Beijing's attempt to nationalize economic resources in the provinces. It was the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 } ]