[ { "id": 204410, "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-1962", "page_number": 42, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "CURRENCY PROBLEMS\n\n33\n\ntooth-picks, ear-cleaners, silver dollars from many of the provincial mints and even Russian roubles. We melted the whole mass down, refined the metal losing seventy ounces in weight in the process and recast in ingots of a standard whose increased exchange rate more than compensated for the loss of weight. The child of sycee, the silver dollar, gradually superseded its parent in favour. As far as the memory serves me, the Mexican dollar was the first to come into common circulation on the China coast. Thus for many years the dollar currency in China was designated \"Mex\". The Ching dynasty minted their own dollars and maintained a standard around 71 to 74 tael cents to the dollar. But with the coming of the regional and provincial mints all this was changed and standards varied considerably. One of the earliest war-lord dollars was the Yuan Shih-kai's which maintained a high standard of purity. Deterioration led to confusion of exchange rates and one certain provincial dollar eventually found its level on the common market at half the value of other provincial dollars. Gradually the dollar became the common form of silver currency. One great advantage lay in the fact that the \"dud\" dollar was much more readily spotted than adulterated sycee. There may be some, who, like myself, have been amazed at the dexterity of the Chinese bank teller in detecting spurious dollars by the \"dullness\" of their tinkle.\n\n4\n\nIn the year 1929 I was back in Kansu distributing relief in severe famine areas. This was in the days before there was motor transport in the north-west of China and transport facilities had been decimated by the starvation deaths of man and beast. Added to which, difficulty was added to what transportation was possible by the roving bands of brigands roaming the country in search of food. All usual means of remitting money from the coast were suspended and the only way I could get funds was by issuing letters of credit on my brother in Tientsin. One leading war-lord offered me a remittance of fifty thousand taels of silver provided I would take delivery at his home village, located two and a half days' journey from the provincial capital. By a considerable effort I managed to assemble a caravan of some twenty pack animals. One pack mule will carry three thousand ounces of silver deadweight. With a heavily armed guard we took the trail over the mountains. On the second evening we came to the top of a mountain range and here we", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205334, "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-1967", "page_number": 96, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "THE CHINA COASTERS\n\n89\n\non the outside passage, low-powered ships would have done little more than hold their own against the monsoon.\n\nOn the present day ships trading from Hong Kong around Far Eastern and South Pacific waters many of the old China coast customs still survive. The 'sew-sew' women, for instance, are now peculiar to Hong Kong alone, but used to flourish in Shanghai and Singapore in the old days. In groups of two or three these women board every ship soon after its arrival in Hong Kong to darn the socks and repair the clothes of the officers, and every officer soon after his arrival on the coast has his regular 'sew-sew' woman. They are middle-aged women, severely dressed in black with shining black hair strained back tightly in buns, and invariably sporting a few gold teeth. Whichever 'sew-sew' woman an officer employs on his first visit to Hong Kong usually remains his 'sew-sew' woman for the rest of his time on the coast, and no rival will ever try to solicit his custom. The 'sew-sew' women are scrupulously honest, and are allowed the complete run of the accommodation. They go into their client's cabin unattended, and ransack his drawers and wardrobe looking for clothes to mend, and when these have been collected, retire to a sunny corner of the deck to carry out the repairs. When they return with the clothes later, payment is the subject of shrill but good-natured bargaining.\n\nA similar system still operates in Hong Kong with regard to barbers, tailors, shoemakers, compradores, and others. The compradore in this connection is a petty trader, who deals in a wide variety of goods, from toilet materials and patent medicines to dubious literature. Either he or the tailor will also carry out miscellaneous commissions for their clients, such as posting letters and parcels and so on. An older institution than any of the above, however, were the flower boat girls. Like the 'sew-sew' women they were more common in Hong Kong than in the other ports and were an inheritance from the old days at Canton and Macao. When I returned to the coast twelve years after the end of the Pacific War, and after an absence of almost twenty years, I was pleased to find the 'sew-sew' women, barbers, tailors, and shoemakers plying their trades as busily as ever. The flower boat girls, however, had disappeared from the scene.\n\nPearl Buck, in her biography of her missionary father, Fighting Angel, London, Pan Books, 1964, pp. 84-85, has this to say of river steamers", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209928, "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-1983", "page_number": 187, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "165\n\nour buyers and supervises the clerks who make arrangements for shipping and insurance. He is also responsible for the clerk who takes care of all export documentation.”\n\nThe existence of tight supervision came out during my conversations with executives. A sales representative of the parent company of Mill 18 told me:\n\n“You are seldom given real responsibility, especially in the signing of documents. All documents and letters in our factory have to be signed and approved by the Manager, though you may have drafted them. You cannot sign them for the company.”\n\nSuch a defensive strategy is obviously self-defeating. It will only complete a vicious circle of low morale on the part of the employees and mediocre performance for the company. A few of the more far-sighted spinners used patronage to foster loyalty in the subordinates. This method can be illustrated in the case of Mill 24, founded by the late Mr. Zhao [pseudonym]. I interviewed the manager who had worked in the company since 1946, just one year after his graduation from St. John’s University in Shanghai. The following was the reason for his long service:\n\nQ: Looking back on your career, what would you say is the most significant event/personality that had influenced you greatly?\n\nA: The late owner of our company, Mr. Zhao. He was the one who invited me to work for him. We knew each other in 1942 when he gave me a scholarship to study in the university. While I was studying, we met about once a month to discuss my progress.\n\nLater in the same interview, the manager said that he would have chosen to be a small owner if given the chance. The same mill adopted the unprecedented policy in the 1950s to open a secondary school of its own. Part of its aim was of course for manpower training. But it might also reflect Mr. Zhao’s attempt to make himself the benefactor of his future workers. But the effectiveness of this approach is limited. The patron-client relation can serve its purpose in the lifetime of the entrepreneur. But since the subordinate’s loyalty is to the person and not to the company,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212069, "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": 11, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "is due not only to a stronger weeding out of those who have not paid their subscriptions, and people leaving Hong Kong, but also to the fact that the Society has not in the last year or so pursued such an aggressive recruitment campaign, although 59 have joined the Society since last April. It is of course difficult to determine how many members a Society such as this should have. The downside is that financially we may not be as healthy as we hoped, but the upside is that there is more room for our popular excursions, and presumably there is less administration, although I am not sure Mrs. Sharon Bruce would agree. At any rate your council is keeping this aspect under surveillance, and I urge you to encourage your friends to become members at the very modest rate of $250 p.a.\n\nThere is, however, one aspect of our membership on which I have to report on which there has been no further progress: I refer to corporate membership. Last year letters sent to many leading companies in Hong Kong produced no positive response. For the benefit of those who are not aware of this may I reiterate that for the comparatively small sum of $10,000 p.a. it was intended to give certain privileges to corporate sponsors particularly in the area of acknowledgement our publications. Amongst the reasons for this move, apart from putting the Society on a firmer financial basis, was to bring to those corporations' attention the Society's achievements and interests and hopefully involve them more in the historical and academic side of Hong Kong. We shall continue to pursue this, and if any of you this evening are in a position to influence your corporations, I hope you will do so. The companies that we did approach have in fact given money to our parent Society in London, so we do feel we are on strong ground.\n\nPublications\n\nThe annual Journal is, as my predecessor said, “our major contribution to knowledge of the Hong Kong region and further afield.\" It is a very important part, if not the most important part, of our activities and it is paramount that we keep up the academic standards. All those who have received the 1988 Journal (the 1989 one will appear later this year) will, I am sure, agree that standards have been maintained and for this we have to thank Dr. Patrick Hase. It is no small feat to produce a Journal in one's spare time. The Journal is well known in many overseas academic institutions and has became an important\n\ni\n\nX", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213973, "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-1997", "page_number": 42, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "7\n\n(f) their relationship with the departments of Government and with each other; and,\n\n(g) the degree of control which ought to be exercised by the central Government, having regard to the Letters Patent and Royal Instructions\n\nThe wording reflects close secretariat scrutiny of what some thought to be, if not dangerous, then courageous thinking; there should be care not to conflict with established institutions, there should be no derogation from the existing constitution, and the word 'selection' reassured those who feared politically partisan votes. Public criticism of this was immediately heard, upon reading the related press release, from some of the members of the Urban Council who were jealous for their own prerogatives. The Urban Council, little changed from the Sanitary Board created in Queen Victoria's reign, was mainly responsible for environmental public health, recreation & amenities, and provision of cultural services in Hong Kong Island, Kowloon & New Kowloon; it had 12 members appointed by the Governor, and 12 elected on a single limited but anomalously colony-wide franchise (embracing ratepayers and members of 23 qualifying categories of sane, non-bankrupt adults of 21 or over with three years' residence), with a small number of senior official members. It provided excellent services through the Urban Services Department (USD), but its freedom of speech on matters outside its purview gave it a mixed reputation in some powerful circles.\n\nThe membership of the working party consisted of administrative officers from the middle ranks, considered \"promising\" but not yet authoritative. They were a contract officer with much local government experience in eastern Nigeria and Uganda, an officer with happy experience in the USD and of the Urban Council; the most senior Chinese officer, who had served with the British Army Aid Group against the Japanese and now worked in the SCA; and two other expatriates with various past postings including the NTA. Like Dickinson, all continued to perform their current duties, and remained surprised that with his determination they covered so much ground of consultation and discussion and (under pressure from leave entitlements) reported as relatively promptly as they did; that was on 23 November 1966, by which time the Cultural Revolution was spilling", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213980, "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-1997", "page_number": 49, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "The report gave thought to the degree of control which ought to be exercised over these new 'creatures of statute' by the Central Government under the Letters Patent & Royal Instructions which were Hong Kong's constitution. Legco should provide by law for central:\n\n(a) right of access to all records, approval and inspection of project plans in certain fields, approval of by-laws, and issue of binding memoranda on such matters as financial procedures;\n\n(b) financial approval or disallowance of annual estimates and loans, and the setting of a rate where a council failed to strike a sufficient or any rate;\n\n(c) audit, including power of surcharge subject to Exco's confirmation; and\n\n(d) direction, removal of powers or dissolution of defaulting local authorities.\n\nOffice accommodation, distinct from any existing for current government purposes, should be provided in advance. Finally, the details of each separate proposal for a new local authority council should be the subject of an inquiry and wide local public consultation before the relevant instrument received approval. The enabling Ordinance should be supported by a large-scale information campaign, to dispel the current lack of awareness. The present Urban Council should co-operate in devising a phased programme for implementation.\n\nThe report was submitted just as the 1966-67 'troubles' were beginning to afflict the streets and resettlement estates of Hong Kong. Little Red Books and parcel bombs preoccupied the Governor and his security advisers, and the Colonial Secretariat which gave the report a lukewarm reception was happy to leave it in the pending trays and to slumber in the background, while other officers placed on special duties dealt with the emergency with panache and publicity hitherto quite unknown in the colony. Just as great post-war events across the border up to 1949 had given reason for Hong Kong's governing minds to forget about Young's municipal proposals, so in 1967 the Cultural Revolution seemed excuse enough to concentrate on civil stability and to forget local participation in the daily administration of public life.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 } ]