[
    {
        "id": 209490,
        "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-1982",
        "page_number": 147,
        "title": "RAS-1982",
        "content_text": "125\n\nunfortunately, we shall never know. We could, perhaps, tentatively add a seventh motive for murder to Tennyson Jesse's list: murder born of pride or 'face', murder from shame,21\n\n22\n\nAn earlier Chinese murder had not baffled an English judge and jury; this was a 'murder for profit', to use William Bolitho's phrase. At the Worcester Assizes in 1919, a Chinese Birmingham factory worker, Sung Djang Djing, was accused of murdering a fellow countryman, Zec Ming Wu, on June 23, 1919, in Warley Park on the Warwickshire-Worcestershire border. The victim's head had been savagely battered. Sung was accused of luring Zee to the woods, murdering him, and then stealing his Post Office Savings Book, which had a £240 credit. Sung admitted stealing the Savings Book found in his possession but denied murder, accusing another Chinese of the crime. The evidence was too strong; the motive too obvious. Sung was hanged in Worcester Prison (where, curiously, he was converted to Anglicanism in the weeks before execution). Sung was one of a number of Chinese attracted to the Midlands by the prospect of high wages during the war. It is not clear whether he was, like Lock, a former seaman, or had been a member of the Chinese Labour Corps, recruited in China, especially Weihaiwei, to work behind the lines on the Western Front, or in Britain's war industries. The problem of special ‘Oriental motivation' did not arise in this trial; it was a commonplace murder.2\n\nThe Chinese in Britain\n\nIn 1925 there were three main areas of Chinese settlement in Britain: Liverpool, Cardiff, and Limehouse in the East End of London. These communities had been formed primarily by Chinese seamen who had either jumped ship or been paid off in England, from the 1850s onwards; for once shipping routes were opened up between Britain and the Far East, the demand for Chinese seamen steadily grew, especially as they, like Lascars, were then a source of cheap maritime labour. Many of those who settled in Britain started small businesses, especially laundries (as did their compatriots in Canada, Australia and the United States). It should be emphasised, though, that the Chinese restaurant business did not expand markedly, or flourish, until",
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    {
        "id": 209491,
        "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-1982",
        "page_number": 148,
        "title": "RAS-1982",
        "content_text": "126\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE 24\n\nthe 1950s, when the British had acquired more sophisticated tastes in food and had travelled more. After 1950, the Hong Kong Chinese, in particular, exploited this new market. But, in the 1920s, although there were a few Chinese restaurants, especially in Soho, they tended to cater more for Asians than Europeans.\n\nAt an early date, these Chinese settlements acquired a reputation as places where the curious, or addicted, could smoke opium. Opium-smoking and gambling were traditional Chinese pastimes and, on the whole, did not create problems for British policemen. Such Chinese communities governed themselves and concealed their delinquencies from the outside world. Inevitably, secret societies (tongs) flourished.\n\nSir Montagu Williams Q.C. describes a visit to what he calls London's 'Chinese quarter' in the 1870s. It was situated in Limehouse, off the Ratcliff Highway. During the evening, he writes, 'we went to the Chinese quarter, where are to be found the opium dens.\n\nAs they emerged from an exploratory visit to one, Williams and his party heard cries of 'Amok! Amok!'. It appeared that some Chinese had been drinking with Englishwomen in a public house and a dispute had broken out with some foreigners (probably sailors). The Chinese had drawn knives, to defend themselves, and 'rushed upon all they met, stabbing, and cutting men, women, and children, indiscriminately'. The Police arrested the Chinese. Subsequently, Williams concludes, 'I had the satisfaction of seeing (as magistrate) the culprits tried and convicted'. On the whole, as Scotland Yard detectives were wont to affirm, the Chinese formed a peaceful community in the East End, unless of course they were driven to defend themselves, as, perhaps, in the incident given above. Since there were few nubile Chinese women in England, Chinese tended to marry Europeans or acquire common-law wives of the same stock (i.e., British women). Having inherited strong familial sentiments — a cornerstone of Chinese society as it once was — they made good husbands, a fact confirmed by the devotion of their wives (Mrs. Lock adored her husband, according to all accounts).\n\nIn most reports of the Chinese in England, from the 1850s to the 1930s, there is a considerable degree of stereotyping.\n\n126",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p",
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    },
    {
        "id": 209500,
        "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-1982",
        "page_number": 157,
        "title": "RAS-1982",
        "content_text": "135\n\n1911.40 After the First World War, the number had risen to over 2,000. (These figures do not include several thousand seamen, mostly firemen, stokers and stewards, without permanent domicile). At the beginning of the century, it is claimed, Chinese tended to ‘avoid Scotland and Wales', but were strongly attracted to London, especially Limehouse. With such small numbers present in Britain, it seems certain British judges and lawyers rarely came in contact with Chinese, only very occasionally perhaps in certain Liverpool or London courts; but never, one surmises, in normal social intercourse. In the 1920s, then, the Chinese in Britain were still a mysterious, but minute, social entity, habitually caricatured in the press and by novelists as 'vellee' strange people who spoke a particularly difficult and dissonant language and wrote, as Dr. Johnson noted, a script that was perversely pictorial to alphabet-lovers. Even professors of Chinese, sinologues and sinologists, were regarded at that time with as much wry amusement as were Assyriologists or Egyptologists, seekers after equally rarefied knowledge of no great practical importance.\n\n47\n\nThe first mass movement of Chinese to the outside world occurred in the nineteenth century. It was mostly 'coolie emigration', to use Campbell's descriptive term, the drift of mainly uneducated and relatively unskilled, though hard-working, Chinese to places where opportunities appeared to be brighter than in the homeland (a territory then much wracked by rebellion, foreign wars, famine and other afflictions). Lock Ah Tam, as mentioned above, is representative of the first wave, an emigrant who did well in his adopted country. As China was forced reluctantly into the modern world and into normal diplomatic relations with foreign powers, a different type of Chinese was becoming known abroad — the educated Chinese, a member of the 'Mandarin class', as Europeans were wont to describe him. In 1876 Kuo Sung-tao was appointed as the first Chinese minister in England.18 A Legation was then established in London, in 1877, with a normal complement of officials and secretaries. Chinese diplomatic staff became a common sight in Whitehall although, until the 1911 Revolution, most wore traditional Chinese attire and sported the queue. (After 1911, they took to frock-coat and top-hat and adopted European hair-styles).",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212637,
        "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-1991",
        "page_number": 191,
        "title": "RAS-1991",
        "content_text": "17!\n\nFortunately our supply of waterproofing material was short. For proofing joints however we found local products, such as wood oil, bee's wax, and vegetable oil, made good waterproof compounds if mixed in suitable proportions.\n\nThe Chinese were very anxious that we should design a mine for use in the network of creeks and shallow waterways in the delta. The Chief produced some interesting combinations. I will describe one of these, which we called the Flamingo. It consisted of a bamboo stake about 3½ feet tall and pointed at the lower end. The top was cut to allow a long bamboo cross-piece to swivel at a point about three quarters down its length; the shorter arm of the cross-piece was weighted with a heavy stone so that it would pull up into the air the other much longer arm when released from a wire which held it down level. At the far end of the long arm a pipe mine was lashed, filled with H.E., connected to a pull switch. The idea was to drive in the stake in the soft mud at one side of the creek until the level cross-piece was about one foot under the surface of the water and parallel with the shore. The pull switch was made fast by a stone to the ground below and a string went off at right angles across the creek, also a foot or so below the surface. When a boat came along it pushed against the string, which released the retaining wire at the end of the long arm. The arm, pulled up by the weight at the other end, shot up; the sharp tug on the pull switch set off the pipe mine when it was about three feet in the air in such a way that the splinters burst all over the occupants of the passing boat. The Chinese were reluctant to use this mine as they were afraid it would catch their own boats. As Cyril said, \"They want a mine which will set itself, will distinguish between friendly boats and hostile boats, and will renew itself after going off.\"\n\nTo help in the manufacture of the various devices we designed, and to make tools for us, we operated our own little workshop. I had been lucky to secure the services of a most original character, Reginald. His father was a Chinese ship's carpenter, his mother was Irish, and for the first seventeen years of his life he lived in Limehouse. He then went out to his relations in China, joined the Shanghai Fire Brigade, and moved on from that to work under Rewi Alley in the Co-operatives. He managed a machine shop for the Co-operatives, but felt that because of his half-foreign blood he had not received fair treatment from them; so he left them to join us. He was able to borrow two lathes, a drilling, and a planing machine, from a Co-operative machine shop, which had been",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j",
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    }
]