[ { "id": 210786, "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": 137, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "120\n\nD.L. MICHALK\n\nTaxes levied on imports were just as crippling since the rates were fixed according to the size of the vessel that ferried the goods to Hainan, regardless of the value of the wares it carried. This meant that because the greatest profits were obtained from luxury goods such as expensive furniture, fine silks, silver vases and gold-en hairpins for the privileged rich, these imports took precedence over cargoes of livestock, cooking pots and bags of rice which returned negligible profits (Schafer, 1969). The lack of necessities of life led the poet Su Shih to lament in verse that a \"grain of rice was like a pearl”.\n\nEnticed by an abundance of rich cargoes, bands of pirates formed and pillaged, almost unchecked, shipping along the entire southern seaboard of China. The problem reached such epidemic proportions in the seventeenth century as to preclude safe navigation on the open sea between the east coast of Hainan and the mouth of the Pearl River (Mayers, 1872). The only secure trade route between the mainland and Hainan was to cross the narrow straits which separate the island from the Leichow Peninsula with strong military escort and thence, trek overland to the provincial capital, at quickest a journey taking one month. As a consequence, commerce virtually ceased and Hainan was immersed again in the poverty and deprivation for which it was noted in medieval times (Schafer, 1969).\n\nDenied their source of revenue, pirates turned their ravages landward, and repeatedly sacked towns and villages in the north and east of the island, in spite of the presence of Imperial garrisons (Mayers, 1872). Although the destruction in 1684 of the pirate kingdom in Taiwan restored safe navigation to the Guangdong coast, Hainan still remained a haven for buccaneers, and pillage continued almost unabated until the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was the combination of a growth in foreign shipping interests in China, the use of steam power in ships and the opening of a treaty port in Hainan, which led to the demise of piracy as a lucrative pastime in the South China Sea.\n\nAlthough the Chinese had previously established rudimentary navies such as the \"Sea-Patrolling Water Army\" (Hsun-hai shui-chun) to control piracy (K’iungchow fu chih, 1920 ed.), it was the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210795, "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": 146, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "129\n\nproclaimed in October, 1948, it was almost a year later that units of the People's Liberation Army from the Leichow Peninsula joined the 10,000 Communist guerillas already on Hainan in routing the KMT forces and liberating the \"Shore of Pearls\" (Fairfax-Cholmeley, 1963).\n\nDue to twenty-seven years of civil unrest and Japanese occupation, the island was in a terrible mess: there was no industry to speak of because post-war forays between the KMT and Communist guerillas destroyed many of the enterprises established by the Japanese. Communication and transport networks were in tatters with highways and ports in a state of dilapidation, while the railway link between Ba Suo and the southern port of Yulin was completely destroyed.\n\nThe situation on Hainan improved somewhat after Liberation. Like the mainland, mass land reclamation campaigns were the hallmark of the post-1949 regime in Hainan. Teams of land reclamation specialists dispatched to Hainan developed 120 state farms and 308 communes with the help of the local people and the 100,000 Chinese who returned from overseas to build the “New China”. Over a thirty year period, investment by the Central Government in agriculture and industry totalled 4.33 billion yuan (US$ 2 billion) for which the island has returned an abundance of iron ore, timber, salt, pepper, rubber and coffee (Wu and Zhi, 1981). Some 14,000 km of roads were built to link all but one remote commune (Chin, 1962), and the surviving sections of the Japanese railway grid were converted to standard gauge in the late 1950's (Anon., 1982a).\n\nOf the agricultural activities commenced, rice growing was emphasised in the hope that self-sufficiency in grain production could be quickly attained. By 1958, a total area of 190,000 ha was under paddy (Iskoldsky, 1958) which increased to 157,000 ha of early rice and 225,000 ha of late rice by 1965 (Kirk, 1965). The remainder of Hainan's arable land was used for production of sugar, rubber, coconut, sisal hemp, cotton, palm oil, jute and tropical fruit. Rubber trees occupied the largest area of cultivated land after rice with the estimated tree population of 4 million present in 1965 doubling since 1954 (Kirk, 1965). The new gov-\n\n--- ---", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210796, "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": 147, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "130\n\nD.L. MICHALK\n\nernment looked to Hainan to rapidly expand production of rubber, coffee and tropical fruit as these were in short supply and could only be grown in small quantities in parts of Yunnan Province. However, in spite of this encouragement and efforts by the Hainanese, only 20 per cent of the Island's arable land was under production in 1965 (Kirk, 1965).\n\nAlthough significant achievement was made in the agricultural sector, this was overshadowed by advances made in industry. Only a few, poorly equipped machine repair shops were operative at the time of Liberation, but by 1965 more than 20 farming and other machinery plants were producing 73 kinds of new products, 38 of which were in serial production (Kirk, 1965). Among the latter were peanut planters, water turbine pumps, threshers, husking mills, coconut processing machines and fluorescent lamps for deep-sea fishing. Processing factories including food canneries, sugar refineries, textile mills and rubber footwear plants not only increased in variety, but also in product quality and economic efficiency (Kirk, 1965).\n\nDuring this period, Hainan assumed greater military importance: first in response to the conflict involving French and American forces in Vietnam, and more recently to the Soviet-backed military and political takeover of Laos and Cambodia by Vietnam. This importance was further enhanced by the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war and the discovery of oil and natural gas by American and French joint-ventures in the Gulf of Tonkin and the South China Sea. As a first line of defence, China maintains constant surveillance from the air supported by a formidable naval force of 300,000 stationed in Hainan and the Leizhou Peninsula plus strategically placed missile bases (Hollingworth, 1982). Initially, military personnel were engaged in road construction, installation of communication networks and improvement of defence positions, but in these more settled times, they have played a key role in the agricultural and industrial development of Hainan (China Daily, August 11, 1983).\n\nIn spite of these efforts, however, development of Hainan's resources proceeded too slowly to raise the living standard to keep pace with the national average (Wu and Zhi, 1981). While the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215318, "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": 95, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "THE POPULAR RELIGION GODS\n\nTHE HAINANESE\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\n43\n\nIntroduction\n\nThis article is a study of the popular religion gods to be found on the altars of Chinese folk religion temples on the island of Hainan as well as in 'Hainanese temples' within the confines of former colonial territories in south-east Asia. I will be endeavouring to isolate the purely Han Chinese Hainanese deities from those of their surrounding neighbours, the non-Han minority peoples on Hainan itself as well as from emigrant Han Chinese communities in south-east Asia. The latter includes emigrants who speak the Han linguistic groups of Hakka, Hokkien (and its sub-groups including Minnan and Hengwa (Xinghua)), Cantonese (and two of its sub-groups) and Guangxi, as well as the smaller groups such as Chaozhou [Swatowese].\n\nThe tropical island of Hainan, literally \"South of the Ocean,\" lies off the south coast of China and was formerly part of Guangdong province. In 1988 it became a province in its own right. 150 miles in length and 100 in breadth, it is one sixth the size of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, half the size of Ceylon and four times the size of Cyprus, with its main port of Haikou and the provincial capital, Qiongzhou, both on its northern coast.\n\nSeparating the island of Hainan from the mainland is the Qiongzhou Straits, with the 170-mile-long Leizhou peninsula in Guangdong province leading into the mainland proper. The proximity of the Leizhou peninsula has led to a small number of the deities with a Guangxi base being incorporated into Hainanese legend and carried by emigrants to all parts of south-east Asia, often without the connection being realised. Devotees in distant parts have assumed that these deities were unique to Hainan, even to accepting place names within the legends as Hainanese when they were quite clearly from the Leizhou-Guangxi border region.\n\nHistorically, Hainan island was one of the later regions to be", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216031, "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": 330, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "264\n\nAbout two miles west of Zhenjiang railway station, on rising land, there was a temple called Xiu Wang Miao, the Temple of the Xiu Kings, dedicated to the memory of the Xiu dynasty of Nantang.\n\nLu Xiufu [AD 1238 - 1279] was a native of Zhenjiang, and a statesman and military commander during the latter years of the Southern Song. He had been appointed to the Court of Imperial Family Affairs, a form of Minister of Protocol, during the reign of Song Gong Zong [ca 1276]. He is remembered as a man of integrity and a devoted Minister who, when the Mongols were on the point of capturing Hangzhou, was sent in an attempt to reach an accommodation with them. This ended in failure. The Court was persuaded by Wen Tianxiang [one of the Three Loyal Generals of the Song] that the imperial heirs should be sent to the coast of south China, to Fuzhou and later to Quanzhou to ensure their safety. The emperor and his mother were captured by the Mongols and taken to Beijing, whilst Lu followed the Court in its retreat to the south. Lu met up with Zhang Shijie [the third of the Three Loyal Generals of the Song] in Wenzhou to rally support for the imperial cause, but had to flee on south to Fuzhou where they joined the forces of Wen Tianxiang. The senior heir was enthroned in Fuzhou as the Song Jing Yan emperor. At this point, following a reorganisation, Zhang and Lu became deputies to Chen Yizhong, the Commissioner of Military Affairs and Grand Counsellor. The new emperor was forced to flee further and further south pursued by the Mongol forces until he reached the area of present day Kowloon where Lu Xiufu rejoined the force from Chaozhou. The Mongol fleet having captured Guangzhou destroyed the forces of Zhang Shijie thus driving the Song Court out to sea. A typhoon struck the fleeing Song fleet and even though the ship carrying the young emperor was sunk he was rescued but died from shock and exposure near the Leizhou peninsula in mid-1278. Lu and Zhang stood firmly against any talk of surrender and ensured that the younger heir, a boy of six, was made emperor. Zhang became the Junior Guardian whilst Lu was Grand Counsellor. The next year the Mongol forces having been reinforced compelled the last of the Song forces to attempt to escape. Lu is said to have committed suicide but the official records do not reveal how the last of the Song, the boy of seven, died. The popular version claims that Lu, the hero from Zhenjiang, leapt into the sea with the boy in his arms.\n\nAn imperial hostelry, the Danyang Guan, was founded in Zhenjiang\n\nPage 330\n\nPage 331", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]