[ { "id": 204464, "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": 96, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES\n\n85\n\nexamination by the District Magistrate at Nam Tau and by the Kwang Chau prefect at Canton, proceeded to the Viceroy's yamen in the same city where eventually a favoured few would manage to pass the first degree of sau choi. This in theory entitled the scholar to qualify for an official post. In practise there were many more sau choi than there were posts and a scholar had to pursue further study and pass other examinations before he stood a real chance of becoming an official. In every district there were sau choi who would never obtain posts. Many became local schoolmasters. Others by virtue of wealth and position became the local gentry who, by report, were sometimes a help to the magistrate and frequently a nuisance, both to him and to the litigant or criminal public. They sat on the local tribunals kuk and advised the magistrate on local affairs. Being literati like himself they had ready access to his yamen and to his ear. Sometimes they even outranked him. Elders, on the other hand, rarely sat on the kuk. Lockhart estimated that there were one hundred and fifty sau choi in the whole district.20 In 1898 the elders of important villages like Ha Tsuen and Ping Shan were literati. Several of them played a leading part in the planning of operations against the British take-over.27\n\n20\n\nSometimes the wealthier village elders enhanced their position by purchasing degrees. In the late Ch'ing period the sale of examination titles appears to have been considerable. Smith mentions it in his Village Life in China** and I have come across several such persons in villages in the Southern District of the New Territory. They were usually substantial villagers. Such a one was CHAN Tak-hang4 of Cheung Kwan O in Junk Bay who died in the seventeenth year of Kwong Shui (1892) at the age of sixty-four. According to his descendant, the present Village Representative, he was a man of substance who built a guest house in the village which is still standing to-day, gave money for the upkeep of the stone tracks which linked the villages of the area with Kowloon, and was well known locally. His portrait, painted at the age of fifty-seven, shows him in his borrowed finery as a kwok hok sang, for which he paid an unknown consideration to Government. A man such as this would obviously play a considerable part in the affairs of his immediate neighbourhood.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208558, "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-1979", "page_number": 15, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "CONTENTS\n\nPage\n\nvii\n\nPresident's REPORT\n\nTREASURER's Report\n\nTHE LIBRARY\n\nARTICLES:\n\n1 The United States and the Question of Hong Kong 1941-1945 · CHAN KIT-CHENG\n\n1 The Chinese Maritime Customs Remembered: An Appeal for Oral History on Hong Kong — LUKE KWONG\n\n1 The Maryknoll Mission, Hong Kong 1941-1946 - REV. JAMES SMITH and REV. WILLIAM DOWNS, M.M.\n\n27 Religion in a Chinese Town: Chinese Religion Rediscussed (Review Article) — JULIAN F. Pas\n\n149 Religious Life in Present-Day Taiwan: a preliminary report JULIAN F. PAS\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES:\n\n176 Copying Hong Kong's Historical Inscriptions — ALICE NG, BERNARD LUK, DAVID FAURE\n\n192 · A Study of the Ch'ing Forts on Lantau Island (from Chinese Sources) - ANTHONY K. K. SIU\n\n193 Two Examples of Chinese Religious Involvement with Islam KEITH STEVENS\n\n199 The Temple of the Supreme Ruler, near Sung Wong Toi, Kowloon\n\n202 (213 The Nam Pak Hong Commercial Association of Hong Kong 1868-1968 JAMES HAYES\n\n216 BOOK REVIEWS\n\n227 LIST OF MEMBERS\n\n235 More Notes on Tsuen Wan - JAMES HAYES\n\nDisturbance of Fung Shui on Tsing Yi Island 1977-78 JAMES HAYES · V\n\nPage 15\n\nPage 16", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208591, "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-1979", "page_number": 48, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "THE CHINESE MARITIME CUSTOMS REMEMBERED: AN APPEAL FOR ORAL HISTORY IN HONG KONG\n\nLuke S. K. Kwong*\n\nThe Chinese Maritime Customs has been called \"one of the great administrative achievements of the nineteenth century.\" This favourable appraisal in comparative history could hardly impress nationalistic-minded Chinese, who have since the late-Ch'ing period tended to condemn the same administration as a mainstay of Western imperialist aggressions in China. Chief among their complaints is that for ninety years since its inception in the late 1850s, the Chinese Maritime Customs had been controlled by a foreign Inspectorate, an arrangement which further violated China's sovereign rights in its own revenue matters. While the imperialist character of the Inspectorate is more often assumed than carefully defined, Chinese indignation does point to a real problem in the Service's past history. Not only had the Inspector-general of Customs always been a foreigner, but also, up until the late 1920s, when reform was introduced to improve Chinese personnel representation, nearly all senior posts in the Service had been staffed by foreign employees. It was only after foreign predominance in this respect had ended that more Chinese began to fill such key positions as commissioners and deputy commissioners. By mid-1948, they had come to occupy a great majority of these posts. The experience of these highly placed Chinese who now enjoyed career opportunities previously denied their compatriots, ought to make interesting data for the historical record.\n\nIn summer, 1979, this writer had the opportunity to interview three such former officials living in Hong Kong. All are at an advanced age: one is 90 and the others in their early eighties. They had been with the Service for 35 years or more before retiring in 1945 and in the early 1950s, respectively. One of them got to be Port Preventive Secretary at the Canton Customs, whereas the others rose to become full commissioners. Their long careers were\n\n* Dr. Kwong is Lecturer in History, Chung Chi College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210251, "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-1984", "page_number": 222, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "201\n\nfrom both the primary producers and protein-enriched detritus.\n\nResults from a Venezuelan lake suggest that the influence of detritus may be even more far-reaching than has been suggested here. Bowen (1980) has analysed detritus and reported that it contains significant quantities of a range of non-protein amino acids. On the basis of this finding, and on investigation of the physiology of the fish's alimentary canal, he attributed the rapid growth of tilapia to assimilation of non-protein detrital amino acids. Obviously this subject would repay investigation in the case of other fish and shrimps (vide Table 5).\n\nIn any event, removal of the mangroves from around the kei wais would remove the main source of detritus and thus lead to diminishing productivity of the kei wais. This points up the practical importance of maintaining the mangrove community.\n\nA kei wai, such as No. 7, gives a reasonable return of economic produce which is both varied in kind and distributed throughout the year. The actual financial return depends on the amount of rent paid to the landlord; in some cases this may be so high as to make the operation financially unattractive. Given the periodic nature of the work, operation of kei wais would seem to be best suited to a small cooperative which owned the freehold.\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nMost of this work was carried out during the period June-December 1978 when C.Y.H., K.Y.T. and S.W.T. were employed under the Summer-work programme of the Agriculture and Fisheries Department; we wish to thank the Director for arranging that financial support. In addition, we wish to thank Mr. Chan Sau and Mr. Wong Chiu for allowing us to investigate conditions in the kei wai and for answering our many questions so helpfully. Our thanks are due also to Mr. Lau Sin Pang, Mr. D.S. Melville, and Mr. Wong Pak Hei, all of the A.F.D., for their advice and help in carrying out the project, and to Dr. Chan Kwong-yu for kindly advising us on bacteriological methods. We acknowledge, with thanks, Mr. Melville's permission to use two photographs taken by him.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215695, "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": 472, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "425\n\npapers and only uses part of the available space.\n\nThere is the matter of romanization itself. Authors of books of this sort in the English language find themselves having to use a mix of Cantonese names, comprising old renderings of both Cantonese and Mandarin, the frequently encountered various misspellings by Western writers, and now with pinyin street and place names into the bargain. Like many more of us, Mrs. Garrett has also had to mix her romanizations here and there. Having myself been hauled over the coals for perpetuating just such a \"mish-mash\" in one of my books, by my former boss and mentor, the late K.M.A. Barnett (Journal, Vol 24, 1984, pp.329-330), I can greatly sympathize with a dilemma not of her making.\n\nThe disadvantages for author and reader alike come out particularly in Chapter 6, devoted to the local temples, where we encounter the confusions inseparable from using different systems of romanization within paragraphs devoted to the same institution - and compounded where a street named after the temple in question is (and has to be) rendered in pinyin (as at pages 64-65 on the Kwong Hau/Guangxiao Buddhist Temple). Mrs. Garrett has done her best to reduce problems of identification with her useful 'English/Pinyin and Cantonese/Pinyin Glossary' at pp.184-6, but this in itself cannot remove all the puzzles inherent in the mix.\n\nIn a book which is so full of facts, the attempt to write a review tests the reviewer's knowledge as much as the author's, and in truth often beyond it. However, \"history\" itself can sometimes be uncertain, as in the case of Macau's origins. It is widely believed that the Portuguese were permitted to settle there because of their help with the suppression of pirates (pp. 10, 73), but this is still not certain. Also, Macau was not \"granted\" (p.73) to the Portuguese, in the sense of bestowing possession or legal right, their occupation being made subject to various payments, that included customs dues and taxes and (later) payment of an annual ground rent, whilst Chinese were excluded from their jurisdiction, being placed under their own official. (For a useful, fairly recent, compendium, see R.D. Cremer (editor), Macau, City of Commerce and Culture, 2nd Edition: Continuity and Change (Hong Kong, API Press, Ltd., 1991).)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]