[
    {
        "id": 204762,
        "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-1964",
        "page_number": 65,
        "title": "RAS-1964",
        "content_text": "54 \n\nK. M. A. BARNETT \n\npreviously described, no longer carries water, and part of which is still used to supply irrigation water to a village. The ancient grave at Lo-A-Tsai on Lamma Island is made of similar stones; and I am inclined to associate also with these people a number of high standing stones, some of which are still cult objects, of which one stands above Bowen Road, another overlooking Sha Tin115 is known to Europeans by the unnecessarily sneering name of the \"Amah Rock\". A stone of this type, standing above a rock pool which looks as though it had been artificially enlarged and made circular, stands between the deserted village of Pak Koks at the south-western tip of Shek Pik Bay128 and the new village to which the ancient Fung2 clan of Fan Puisi were moved to make room for the Shek Pik Reservoir. Another overlooks Long Harbour, and about this one there is some mystery, since every year at approximately the date of the Mid-Autumn Festival a considerable number of women can be seen flocking up the hill to this stone, but all villages within walking distance flatly deny knowledge of any such celebration. This is at best negative evidence, and may not indicate the persistence of a pre-Chinese tradition; for a similar reticence regarding religious celebrations by women is observed at the great Nu-kwa102 temple on Honam Island154 \n\nopposite Canton, which men are seldom allowed to visit. I am trying to plot the positions of all these stone works and believe that when the list is finished, it will arrange itself into three circuits on Lantao Island, one on Lamma Island, two on Hong Kong Island, two on the Saikung126 Peninsula and three or four in the rest of the New Territories. This work might well be taken in hand by someone younger, but it must be someone who is fond of walking; and walkers have a peculiar blind spot when it comes to the collection of this kind of evidence, for I have often had to draw the attention of my walking companions even to the most obvious systems of stone walls which they have been walking right past, or even over, without noticing. The Lo-A-Tsai grave is situated close by a path and the first time I passed it, in the company of five villagers, I asked them what it was though most of them used that path nearly every day, none had ever before noticed the grave! \n\nA piece which is of vital importance and may indeed be what holds the rest of our jigsaw puzzle together is the correct identification of occupied sites on the seashore. There are many",
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    {
        "id": 204765,
        "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-1964",
        "page_number": 68,
        "title": "RAS-1964",
        "content_text": "HONG KONG BEFORE THE CHINESE \n\n57 \n\nshould not, in the course of scientific investigation, be omitted as a possibility; even though subsequent events thrust them apart, by interposing a new and more vigorous culture, based on intensive agriculture and possessing sufficient military power and social drive to impose on the less numerous people of the waters and of the forests a language, a dress and a society different from that which they originally had. \n\nI will here ask you to turn your eyes for a moment to Canton, which is less than 100 miles from here and which when the first Chinese settled in this territory was, and had been for many centuries, the metropolis (and probably the only city of any size known to the inhabitants) of this region. Canton was founded originally as a Chinese trading settlement or colony, in the middle of non-Chinese territory with ethnologically non-Chinese inhabitants. It became first the capital of a peripheral kingdom, which from time to time acknowledged and was acknowledged by the Son of Heaven: then the capital of a province which from time to time, when the central government was weak, tended, and has continued to tend even into modern times, to re-assert its independence. Then in the Sui22 Dynasty it became the first port in which foreigners were officially permitted to settle and trade—I mean of course the Arabs, whose completely assimilated descendants are still to be found in Canton and Hong Kong; and finally, following the same well tried pattern (since Chinese administrators, like all others, adopted new ideas with grave reluctance and preferred to follow the old ruts) the first port to which the ebullient Europeans, following in the track of the Arabs, also came to purchase goods the Chinese did not particularly want to sell and to offer in exchange commodities they did not want to buy. \n\nThe frame of our picture, or of our jigsaw puzzle, would not be complete without a reference to Canton. Bricks bearing the imprint of, and presumably made in, Pun-yue1—that is to say Canton can be seen today in the roofs and walls of the ancient tomb, if it be a tomb, at Li Cheng Uk.83 Throughout the Tang139 Dynasty the inhabitants of Canton must still have been mainly non-Chinese, since the author of the Hsin Wu Tai Shih121 is at some pains to explain why it was that so many Chinese came and settled in this region during the disorders which brought down that dynasty. From the point of view of Canton, and therefore",
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    },
    {
        "id": 204767,
        "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-1964",
        "page_number": 70,
        "title": "RAS-1964",
        "content_text": "HONG KONG BEFORE THE CHINESE\n\n59\n\non the land with indigenous wives, probably seized from the boat people; a process of assimilation which was repeated all over South China and accelerated by the disorder of the times which prevented their embarking on the precarious journey to their ancestral homes, which their own tradition places in the province Kiangsi,58\n\nThis then is the picture, or the jigsaw puzzle. Subsequent work by those more qualified than I may show that I have put some of the pieces in the wrong place; may show indeed that some of the pieces are in the wrong puzzle, since I have indicated that there is yet no certainty whether we have one jigsaw puzzle or four. There are many Chinese sources into which I have dipped but which I have not thoroughly sifted. There are other Chinese sources to which I have not been able to obtain access: most important of these are the earlier editions of the San On Yuen Chi,123 to which the 1819 edition makes several tantalizing references, but reproduces only their prefaces. I have suggested how the geologists can contribute to this study. The botanists and agronomists should be able to reconstruct a general picture of the local flora a thousand years ago before removal of the forest cover started the rapid erosion which has defaced these hills. The archaeologists should do some really intensive work between Castle Peak and Mong Tseng. The Arabists and Indologists should contribute accounts of the voyages made by traders during the Tang139 and Sung132 dynasties. And the book collectors should hunt for the previous editions of the San On122 and Tung Kwun31 gazetteers.124 The first edition of the San On Yuen Chi123 was that of Chan Kwols of which the preface was written by Yau Tai-kin64 the sixth holder of the office of chi yuen.161 He wrote it in 1587 at which time there must have been several villages which preserved their former language, dress and customs which could not have failed to be noted. Even the list of Hakka149 and Cantonese villages in this and the intervening editions would teach us something about the subsequent pattern of occupation and agriculture and thereby give us some clues to other problems, such as the origin of the Hakka, which may have a bearing on the subject with which I have dealt today.",
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    {
        "id": 205762,
        "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": 68,
        "title": "RAS-1969",
        "content_text": "62\n\nR. G. GROVES\n\n44 Skinner, op. cit., Part 1, p. 27. The markets of the northern district of the New Territory seem to have been dependent primarily upon Sham Chun, rather than upon several intermediate markets. This may be an example of what Skinner terms a marketing system in a \"topographic cul-de-sac\". Ibid., p. 21.\n\n45 Baker, Hugh D. R. \"The Five Great Clans of the New Territories”, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. VI, 1966, p. 31.\n\n46 Freedman, op. cit., pp. 82ff., gives an account of the origins of the Ts'at Yeuk. The character yeuk may be translated as 'covenant', or 'agreement'. The seven covenants' were a confederation of seven groups of villages within the Tai Po marketing area.\n\n47 Papers Extracts, op. cit., p. 192.\n\n48 Hayes, \"The Pattern of Life.\", op. cit., p. 9.\n\n49 Freedman, op. cit., p. 81.\n\n50 Papers Extracts, op. cit., pp. 201ff.\n\n51 Hong Kong 1963, Hong Kong, 1964, pp. 363ff.\n\n52 Papers Extracts, op. cit., pp. 587-8.\n\n53 The following account has been assembled, somewhat in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle, from two sources: Hong Kong. Correspondence (June 20, 1898 to August 20, 1900) Respecting the Extension of the Boundaries of the Colony, Eastern No. 66, Colonial Office, London, 1900; Papers Laid Before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, 1899. Despatches and Other Papers Relating to the Extension of the Colony of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 1900. Specific references will be given only for quotations.\n\n54 Correspondence, op. cit., p. 261. A brief discussion of the activities of the land syndicate mentioned in the preceding paragraph is to be found in Endacott, G.B., A History of Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, London and Hong Kong, and Paperback Edition, 1964, p. 265, who says: \"The main problem of the take-over was not military but administrative. A land syndicate of Chinese among whom it was suspected Ho Kai [Dr. Ho Kai, a Chinese unofficial member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong] was one, had bought land at a fraction of its value by spreading the rumour that the British would seize all land. Blake threatened to restore this property, but the land problem proved too baffling for him to carry out his threat.\"\n\n55 Correspondence, op. cit., p. 261. Wakeman, op. cit., Chap. V, discusses similar charges made against the British at Canton almost sixty years earlier.\n\n56 One recipient was Liu Wan-kuk, of Sheung Shui. His support for the resistance appears to have been half-hearted throughout. On at least two occasions he protested: \"the villages in our Division have no plans. Moreover, our commissariat and arms being insufficient, how can we offer effective resistance? We request your Division [Yuen Long] to decide on the plan of campaign and we will follow your instruction\". The dominance of the Yuen Long Division—and of the Tang lineages within it—was to become increasingly obvious as the resistance movement developed. Papers Despatches, op. cit., p. 72.\n\n57 Translated in Correspondence, op. cit., pp. 138ff.\n\n58 Baker, op. cit., pp. 35ff.\n\n59 Correspondence, op. cit., p. 147.\n\n60 Ibid., p. 148.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d",
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    {
        "id": 206677,
        "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-1972",
        "page_number": 225,
        "title": "RAS-1972",
        "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n219\n\nthe reader as he gets to grip with it: who, apart from the authors' patron, cares at all how great will be Hong Kong's imports of cotton, rice, wheat and other foodstuffs in the years ahead? This intelligence is of no conceivable commercial use, nor does it serve the policy-maker. The Hong Kong Government is unlikely to set long-term plans in motion to provide export capacity designed to generate the foreign currency sufficient to meet these import requirements, nor indeed will it need to do so. The reader is left to ponder the point of the study. Apart from the fact that it answers a research director's need for work to occupy research assistants, the study could form part of a larger study geared to determining the world pattern of commodity trade flows in the future — a useful basis for UNCTAD discussions and U.S. agricultural policy. It is only within a context such as this that the study makes any sense: alone, it looks like a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle.\n\nGranted that the study has some point, how do the authors set about forecasting in Hong Kong and how well do they do it? The authors calculate imports as the difference between predicted demand and predicted domestic production, where such exists. The main body of the work is taken up by demand predictions which are made on the basis of the standard econometric model which expresses per capita consumption as a function of per capita income and the price of the commodity concerned relative to the general price index. Having estimated these demand relationships on the basis of past data, the authors predict per capita incomes and relative prices for the years 1970, 1975 and 1980 and calculate consumption with the use of the estimated regression coefficients: sound, routine stuff so far. In the course of this exercise, several difficulties emerge which show up the authors' strengths and weaknesses. The Hong Kong economy is wretchedly documented and the authors have worked commendably to build a few bricks without much straw. At all times the discussion and handling of data problems is honest, professional and interesting. This approach is illustrated very well in the reconstruction of a price index which overcomes the problems of unrepresentative weights applied in the construction of the 1947 base.\n\nWhen these statistics are actually used econometrically the study seems to flounder. The reconstructed price index performs very badly in all the regressions: it is statistically insignificant in all nine\n\nPage 225\n\nPage 226",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212774,
        "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": 83,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "68\n\nrendered as brevet rank, which Mesny did. 'Ts'an-chiang is an assistant regional commander [tsung-ping kuan], rank 3a in the Chinese forces called the Green Banner. However, according to Brunnert and Hagelstrom, [Present Day Political Organisation of China [1911], translated from the Russian], it equated to Lieutenant Colonel. Mesny lists it as 'Colonel, the lowest grade of general.\n\nBy the latter days of the second Kueichou campaign he appears to have been promoted to the rank of Major-General, and some twelve years later was awarded the rank of Brevet Lieutenant-General, bearing the title for the remainder of his life. As he is portrayed in foreign-style uniform in a photograph in the Miscellany and yet occasionally refers to himself wearing Chinese attire with his Chinese buttons of rank, it is far from clear whether these were genuine ranks or honorary ones awarded to an attached civilian. It is noteworthy that he never refers to himself wearing a mandarin square [the chest badge], though he does mention his cap button. His uniform as an instructor in the army of Tso Tsung-tang consisted of a cap of the French kepi pattern, ornamented with the Chinese coat of arms [two dragons struggling for a burning globe], with a coat and trousers of dark blue navy cloth, ‘nicely braided front, back and sleeves.\n\nMesny explained that between 1868-1871 for two or more years he was in one corps of fifteen2 battalions styled the Ko-i Ch'üan-chün [brigade], part of the Shu-chün, the Szechuan Army Corps; and another for four years with a corps styled Wu-tzu Ch'üan-chün741, also in Kueichou, i.e. from 1871-1874. The latter corps was also in the original Hsiang-chün, [the Hunan Army]. Regrettably this confuses his story rather than clarifying it, as we do not know when he served with the Hsiang-chün unless he means the Wu-tzu corps which in another part of his Miscellany he noted to have been part of the Hunan Force.\n\nAs far as can be ascertained from the jigsaw pieces he has supplied us with, Mesny, when he was with the Szechuan Army Corps in the first campaign in Kueichou province from 1868-1871, and again during the second campaign from 1871-1876 with the Wu-tzu Hunan Army Corps, almost certainly served with one of the new provincial armies which he refers to in his Miscellany as Disciplined Army Battalions.3 At no point does he actually say so in so many words, but bearing in mind the grades he gave for the ranks and styles of the senior officers in his Force and as he was particularly scathing about the proficiency of the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212834,
        "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": 143,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "128\n\nthat serve as leaves in this plant threw a new light on the perils of parachuting. The weather was propitious and the sortie a success. The supplies included a small proportion of gifts with which we were able to show our appreciation to the battalion commander, whose troops had provided most welcome assistance. On completion of the sortie I despatched Stan up the valley to enter Kokang further south towards Sincheng, where the Myosa's brother had his headquarters, and more especially to search for a suitable dropping zone inside Kokang, and not too near the Salween. Jack had already gone on into Kokang to Nancha, the place where the parachute party had stayed, and shortly after I broke camp to join him.\n\nMany paths over the mountains connect China and Burma throughout the length of the border; passage is unrestricted and along these paths the Chinese people are gradually infiltrating, circulating as hawkers, establishing their little shops, or cultivating a small plot of land. In Kok-ang the population was very mixed as it is all along the border country. Over half the population was now of Chinese blood; up on the mountains were many Lihsaw and Palaung villages. The Chinese distinguish between ‘Land' Shans and 'Water' Shans, Han Payee and Shui Payee; one meets them all through Western Yunnan and Eastern Burma, and Kokang had a proportion. There were also occasional Was and Kachins. The best description of all this country is to be found in Maurice Collis' Lords of the Sunset; and Where China meets Burma, a book written by a government official's wife, Beatrix Metford.\n\nOver a third of Burma is occupied by the hill people; they number three-and-a-half millions, and are governed by their chieftains and princes on the British principle of indirect rule; the princes come directly under the Governor of Burma and not under the corrupt clique of professional politicians, who have formed the core of the Burmese legislative assemblies during the past few years. The unit of control under the chief is the circle, which contains more or fewer villages, each under its own headman. The system has many feudal features well adapted to these conservative and primitive people. Nancha, where we stayed for a time, contained the residence of the circle headman of that district, a dear old gentleman, who could neither read nor write, but employed a Chinese writer for the purpose. The writer had married one of his daughters, as often happens, and lived in one wing of the house. The better houses are built round the four sides of an inner courtyard; the pack animals, the cows, and the pigs, may be housed on the lower",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212837,
        "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": 146,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "131\n\nwith him.\n\nThe marriage customs are many and curious. We happened to be passing a village on the day of a wedding and were invited to see the communal dancing; the ceremony included inspecting the bride and groom in bed by the fitful light of torches. It seems that immediately after the feast the lucky couple retire to bed and are there visited by all and sundry to an accompaniment of the sort of joking which does not appear in print. The custom of men seizing their brides in mock raiding attacks, staged for the purpose, is also common. During one such attack, until we discovered what it was about, we thought that we were being sniped at by the Japanese.\n\nNancha is high up the mountain, some 6,000 feet, overlooking the Salween, which here flows at 1,000 feet above sea level. The river itself was out of sight in the bottom of the valley where it ran between steeply-sloping banks. Across the valley on the mountain on the far side a mile away we could see in the bright sunlight the villages occupied by the Japanese. Their system of garrisoning was not continuous; they had one or two central posts, and from these they would man one or other of the lesser posts. Through my glasses I could see the posts; trenches with grass huts screened in the jungle nearby, and the ubiquitous Japanese flag. They were sited where the path entered the village high above the river: a mile away as the crow flies, to reach Nancha from one of those villages would take the best part of a day.\n\nFrom Nancha, Jack left to reconnoitre the Salween ferries, while I moved on more slowly as I wished to study the country and make friends with the people; we took three days to reach the Lihsaw village of Hsintang. Despite the small size of our party our progress was triumphal: the young women were shy and kept out of the way; the men were still cowed and not sure of their position; but the old women everywhere came out to greet us. They met us with gifts of bananas, brought up from the hot valleys below, chickens and eggs, neatly done up in long tubes of plaited rice-straw; and being of Chinese blood they prepared tea for our refreshment and invited us indoors to drink it. They said, \"We have not seen you Englishmen for a long time. Where have you been for the last two years? We have waited for you a long time, and now conditions are so bad that they are no longer to be borne. But you have at last returned and set our minds at ease.\" This blind confidence was very touching: may Britain long prove worthy of it.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212851,
        "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": 160,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "145\n\nand probably compelled them to increase the area of opium cultivation. Obviously the crop was being passed on through the Chinese officers at the Puppet's headquarters. I had found there that they used his office as if it were their own. This may have been another reason for the grip the Chinese had taken of this small state. When Allied government is re-established in Burma it is to be hoped that serious attention will be paid to the question of opium. On the barren slopes of Kokang it is one of the only crops which grow, and so the problem is chiefly economic, the finding of a substitute crop. I noticed that no opium was planted in the Lihsaw villages; they were all Christians, converted by the American Baptist Mission—a mission which does the same as Dr. Seagrave's very excellent work in Burma, and they had been taught to grow potatoes instead. But the Lihsaws are not numerous, there are limits to the demand for potatoes, and further alternatives will be required.\n\nKokang was not self-supporting in rice. The normal flow of commerce is along the motor road from Kunlong to Hsenwi and Burma; that road was now cut by Japanese occupation, and Kokang had to depend on China for additional supplies. I believe the Puppet did his best to exchange part of his opium for rice, but not very successfully. Yunnan itself had inadequate supplies to feed the large forces of the C.E.F. for whom quantities of rice had to be imported from further afield. It was a difficult situation for the Puppet and one which put him the more under Chinese obligation.\n\nI got to know many of the headmen personally and well; with two exceptions, men recently appointed by the Puppet, they were hostile to him, and anxiously awaited the return of the Myosa, whose fair and just administration had left happy memories.\n\nI did not fathom the system of appointing circle and village headmen. The Myosa appeared to have the authority to make appointments, but I found in many places that the post was hereditary; many of the headmen too were of the Myosa's family. They often had managers, or Prime Ministers, who managed their affairs for them; and in at least some instances the function of manager to a circle headman was hereditary too.\n\nI returned from Sincheng to Lunghtang with a baffled feeling; the Bren gun teams were sent for training, but I felt they were the last the Chinese would allow to come, and the event was to prove my doubts justified. The despatch of further men was delayed on one pretext after",
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    {
        "id": 214782,
        "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-1999",
        "page_number": 197,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "162\n\nWhich are all multiples of 33. This indicated that the letters should be divided into groups of 33 and not 34 as I had been doing. So I tried filling up each block by putting groups of 33 letters in columns rather than 34 letters in rows as I had done previously. I then ran my program to rearrange the 34 columns using the keyword made up of the names and looked at the output. There on the screen in front of me I saw the words 'war' and 'Japan'. I suddenly realised that I was looking at text which I could read! I sat there for a moment, hardly believing that I had at last cracked this 'simple' code.\n\nTranslation. I quickly translated the first few blocks of numbers which I had already put on the computer. I had to put in spaces between words and full stops were marked by an ‘x', (Note that the letter 'x' is two places higher up the frequency list from the diary compared with the standard list because of this.) The unfolding story was gripping. I borrowed a computer to take home so that I could type in more numbers during the evenings and then brought the disk in to work in the mornings, impatient to read the next chapter of the story. Finally the task was complete, and in 11 pages, a fascinating story of life in war-torn Hong Kong and as a prisoner of war was revealed for the first time in 55 years.\n\nThe work did not quite end there though. The last page of the diary contained an incomplete block. Because of the way it had been written, when this partial block was translated, it gave text with letters and blanks intermingled. Could the gaps be filled in to reveal more of the story? It is very difficult to guess at words which are incomplete. However, there was a dictionary on the computer that could be searched for particular strings which could include wildcards for the missing letters. This provided a very effective, systematic method for filling in the blanks. Some parts came together easily while others took more time but eventually, the gaps were filled in and the story told.\n\nThe Family. Mrs Hill was very pleased to have the diary translated after so many years. She said that reading it was like finding the missing jigsaw piece in her husband's life.\n\nAfterthoughts. The names on the front page and the boxes around the numbers on the first page were done by Donald when he once tried to show his son Christopher how to translate the diary. However, since",
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    {
        "id": 216069,
        "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": 368,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "302\n\nso that I may die childless, as I am now old and not likely to have any more children. I had never met or seen Mason before he presented himself to me as being the United States Consular Marshal at Hankou, which was a lie, he being actually a Custom House Officer at Zhenjiang.'\n\nLet us try to unravel the sorry story of Mason and Mesny. It is involved and still has aspects which are difficult to fathom. We have a number of versions or parts of it available to us but will confine ourselves to three: Mason's own story, briefly described below, written some 30 odd years later after he had roamed the world as a vagrant worker; the letters from the Inspector General of the Imperial Customs, Sir Robert Hart; and Mesny's bitter accusation. Mason, according to Mesny, practically ruined him and certainly caused Mesny great personal problems as he explained in great detail in his Miscellany. It is difficult to fit these three pieces of jigsaw together as there are few elements in common; however, the basic story is there. Mason bought a large quantity of foreign arms, ammunition, and explosives with which to arm a rising against the Imperial government, and having been arrested in Shanghai, was tried, sentenced, gaoled, and finally deported. Mesny was called as a witness but was accused to his face by the Chinese Premier, Li Hongzhang, of being the chief or very senior in the anti-Imperialist bandit body, the Elder Brother Society. This led to Mesny being ostracised by Chinese officialdom and, as his be-all and end-all as a business go-between was his contacts with Chinese officials, his life quietly slipped downhill thereafter.\n\nAccording to records — ‘Charles Welsh Mason, a young Englishman, had joined the Imperial Maritime Customs in December 1887 and was sent to Zhenjiang, an important post but a minor port on the Yangzi, as 4th assistant B, where he joined the Gelao Hui and became involved in a conspiracy to overthrow the Chinese government. In July of 1891, he took two months' leave and went to Hong Kong, where he purchased a quantity of arms and ammunition for the Society and arranged for it to be shipped to Shanghai and from there on to Zhenjiang. He also recruited men for the Society and bought a quantity of dynamite, which he carried with him to Shanghai, where he requested Commissioner Bredon of the Imperial Maritime Customs to allow it to be shipped on to Zhenjiang so that he, Mason, could uncover more of the Chinese rebels' plans. Bredon refused the \"sting\" and instructed Mason to report to Hart in Beijing. Instead, Mason took a river steamer",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]