[ { "id": 206252, "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-1971", "page_number": 69, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS AND KAIFONGS\n\n63\n\nassociations, the district and dialect associations also embody economic objectives, since very often the members of each district and dialect group are engaged in the single occupation peculiar to their group. \"This close identification of a particular job... means that the various dialect associations have a definite economic raison d'être.\" Protection of economic interests may take various forms, with the associations taking the role of trade unions among small businessmen, and among laborers in particular lines of native industry. In many cases, the associations act as employment agencies, exchanging information on job opportunities and sponsoring job recommendations. It is a general practice among the associations to favour nepotism in job placement.\n\nThe main voluntary associations are also responsible for the welfare and social adjustment of the Chinese immigrants. They meet the new comers upon their arrival, accommodate them and help them to find jobs. They open Chinese language schools for the education of the immigrants' children and for the general upkeep of the Chinese cultural tradition. They open recreational centres (including gambling rooms) for the workers. They provide mutual aid benefits, relief funds, free loans, funeral and burial services. A very important feature of the work of the chambers of commerce, the district and the dialect associations is in their acting as spokesmen for Chinese interests and as intermediaries between the authorities and Chinese people. Specifically, this means that the associations, through their officers, intercede for individuals and groups who get into difficulties with the government. The associations present proposals and petitions to the authorities on major and minor policy issues touching Chinese interests; and very often the governments also seek the advice and even the prior consent of the associational leaders in matters regarding the Chinese communities.\n\nThe economic, social and political functions of the three major voluntary bodies have evolved during the process of adaptation of the Chinese people to their new environment. In most of the overseas Chinese communities (except in Malaysia and Singapore) the Chinese people are not only a numerical minority among the local population, but also a sociological minority dominated by the superior social and political status of other racial groups.\n\n* Ju-k'ang T'ien, op. cit., p. 17.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208899, "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-1980", "page_number": 61, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "CHINESE MONASTERIES, TEMPLES, SHRINES, ALTARS\n\n33\n\n14 Because of the exorbitant rents for such accommodation, temples in shop houses and flats in Hong Kong are few and far between. In Singapore and Malaysia, temples in shop houses are very common indeed, though they are becoming less so as the years pass and rents in urban areas rapidly rise.\n\n15 Occasionally such a temple may be a converted private house, as in the many examples in Lo Wai village, Tsuen Wan, but more often it is a purpose-built but inexpensive hut.\n\n18 Temples containing images of the Buddhist deities Di Zang Wang, Milofu, and Guan Yin are not necessarily specifically Buddhist, as all three of these deities nowadays are also extremely popular deities in folk religion temples.\n\n17 Mahayana is Northern Buddhism and Theravada or Hinayana is Southern Buddhism.\n\n18 \"Illegal\" is a Hong Kong term for buildings which have been built on Crown Land often by squatters without Government land control or planning permission, but which have been permitted to remain standing under sufferance. In practice, they are temporary structures put up without permission, occasionally ramshackle though more often they are well-built timber, weather-board, and corrugated iron buildings, clean and well-proportioned. (Illustration 17). Some have stood for such a length of time as to have been gradually converted to concrete and brick. All are labelled on the side in rough daubs of paint with the bureaucratic abbreviations and digits prefixed by \"TEM\" (= temporary) affixed by squatter control staff of the Housing Department.\n\n19 Demons are well known to Chinese to be unable to go around corners and must travel in straight lines, hence these inner doors to prevent the demons from entering the temple. The inner doors originally were opened exclusively for influential people.\n\n20 See also James Hayes' information at JHKBRAS 6 (1966): 129-130.\n\n21 In overseas Chinese areas, this kind of large street shrine is still very common and, in Singapore alone, some four to five hundred exist in all kinds of nooks and crannies. For a Hong Kong example, see JHKBRAS 14 (1974): 203.\n\n22 Chu is one of the 28 Constellations (= xiu).\n\n** See pp. 111-113 of the Hong Kong Government's publication Rural Architecture in Hong Kong (1979) for this pagoda.\n\n24 In Imperial times, such masts were always to be seen outside the local magistrate's yamen.\n\n25 Chinese bells have no internal tongue clapper, being tolled by an external blow with a wooden mallet.\n\n26 For the Evacuation of the Coast, see Lo Hsiang-lin and others, Hong Kong and its External Communications before 1842 (Hong Kong, 1963) Chapter VI.\n\n27 For background, see Jen Yu-wen's article \"The Southern Sung stone-engraving at North Fu-t'ang\" in JHKBRAS 5 (1965): 65-68.\n\n28 Government action is through the Chinese Temples Committee, serviced by the Trust Funds Section of the Home Affairs Department.\n\n29 Temples according to this Ordinance include Miao (廟), Si (寺), Buddhist and Daoist monasteries, Guan (觀) and Dao Yuan (道院), and nunneries An (庵).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209689, "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": 346, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "324\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nNewspapers in Asia Contemporary Trends and Problems. John A. Lent. Heinemann Asia 1982 pp. xxiii, 594, appendices, bibliography, index.\n\nJohn Lent, the editor of this far-ranging study, is professor of communications at Temple University in Philadelphia. Some of the chapters dealing with various aspects of journalism and newspaper-publishing in 23 Asian countries are supplied by contributors, but Professor Lent himself has written those dealing with the subject of Press freedom and also chapters on Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Bangladesh, Korea, Macao and Vietnam. Of his 21 contributors all are residents of Asia, or American academicians and government personnel who have lived there for a number of years, and some worked for newspapers before entering academic life.\n\nContributors were asked to follow the same guide-lines as to form and content and as a result, despite some differences of approach, the reader can make country-to-country comparisons.\n\nThe result is illuminating and depressing. The conclusion to be drawn from this large-scale survey is that there are very few good newspapers in Asia; and that most governments do not favour press freedom and take steps to control or throttle the newspaper industry. Papers in many countries suffer severely from the rising cost of newsprint. Poor communications make it difficult to distribute copies of city-printed newspapers out to the villages where most Asians live; and the low rate of literacy in a number of Asian countries acts as a heavy restraint on readership.\n\nHowever there are exceptions to this overall gloomy picture. In Japan, for instance, the combined circulation of daily newspapers in 1982 was already well over 63 millions in a population of 120 million. This means more daily papers sold in Japan than in the whole of the rest of Asia. Japan is an almost totally literate country, and widespread information plays a vital role in the running of its highly industrialised society.\n\nNear the other end of the spectrum Indonesia, with about 20 million more people than Japan, has fewer newspapers now than it did fifteen years ago and fewer readers less than two million. More than half of them are in the capital, Jakarta. And there", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213417, "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-1995", "page_number": 13, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "9 Feb 96\n\nLocomotives of the Sugar Railways of Java\n\nMr Brian Pearce\n\n8 Mar 96\n\nPaper Folkfore\n\nDr Janet Scott\n\nIn addition to these lectures we have had a series of 8 lectures given in association with the exhibition on buildings in Hong Kong presented jointly by the Society and the Antiquities and Monuments Office as follows:\n\nTitle\n\nLecturer\n\nVillages in the New Territories\n\nDr. Patrick Hase\n\nKowloon Walled City (in Cantonese)\n\nDr. Elizabeth Sinn\n\nApproach to Conservation - Work on Historic Buildings in Hong Kong (in Cantonese)\n\nMr S L. Lam\n\nThe Space and Face of 19th Century Urban in Hong Kong\n\nThe Rey Carl Smith\n\nThe Military Installations in Guangdong Coastal Area during the Qing Dynasty (in Cantonese)\n\nDr. Anthony Siu\n\nThe Architecture of Necessity: On the inhabiting of City Form and Space in Hong Kong\n\nMr. Desmond Hu\n\nOur Heritage: Hong Kong's Old Chinese and Colonial Buildings\n\nDr. Daniel Waters\n\nThe Three Hamlets of Mut Wo - Pak Mong, Tu Ho and Ngau Kwu Long\n\nDr. Joseph Ting (in Cantonese)\n\nThe response to these was excellent even though they were held on a Saturday afternoon. It was particularly gratifying to note that four were presented in Cantonese,\n\nMany of the lecturers are with us to-night and we welcome them as our guests.\n\nIn addition to the above no less than 15 visits within Hong Kong and three visits outside Hong Kong have been organised as follows:\n\nDate\n\nPlace\n\n7 May 95\n\nTam Kung Festival, Shaukerwan\n\n13 May 95\n\nMaryknoll Fathers, Stanley\n\n27 May 95\n\nBalthus Exhibition, HK Museum of Art\n\n15 Jun 95\n\n1st Battalion, The Royal Gurkha Rifles, Malaysia Lines\n\nxi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213870, "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-1996", "page_number": 222, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "196\n\nEuropeans believed that Africa belonged to tribes and power should be distributed among \"tribal chiefs\", so Africans constructed tribes to which to belong. Europeans believed that India belonged to religious groups and that chairs for direct election should be distributed to separate religious groups, so India became polarized along Muslim and Hindu lines, and eventually divided into Pakistan and India.\n\nIn colonies which were overwhelmingly Chinese, Malaya and Hong Kong, for instance, British administrators were struck by the fact that the Chinese had no nationalism toward the respective colony: the British feared that Malaya would be colonized by Chinese settlers and would one day be part of China. Because of a similar fear, Singapore was excluded from Malaysia.\n\nUnlike the cases of India and Africa, the concept of nationhood is readily available in China. Chinese settlers carried the concept along with them to the colonies. As a consequence, British rule in the overseas Chinese communities always faced enormous challenges which were exported from China. One of these challenges occurred at the turn of this century, when the concept of “China” and the method to present one's \"chineseness\" underwent very dramatic changes. The narrative of these changes went something like this: a Manchu China was overthrown by revolutionaries and then a Republican China was stolen by warlords. Before the Guomindang successfully promoted their ideology based upon the cult of Sun Yat-sen and unified China in 1927, China had already disintegrated into competitive regional powers. The overseas Chinese, linked to different competing groups, were drawn into this political arena in China. Their involvement was manifold. This short article deals with one aspect of this involvement - political investment in regional politics. It attempts to illustrate three points.\n\nI) The Guomindang ideology of a Chinese Republic based upon the legend of Sun was absent in this period of time. With or without this ideology, China was a political landscape with layers of national and regional networks\n\n2) British colonists commanded some, but not the final, authority over the colonial Chinese. To the overseas Chinese, the political arena that commanded their attention and participation was not in the colony, but in China.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215334, "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": 111, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "59\n\nin southern China. Although he is particularly remembered in the south of China as the General who conquered the Yue people [Tonkinese] in about AD 39, the Hainanese in South-east Asia regard him as one of their special heroes with his image on side altars in several Hainanese community temples in Malaysia and Sumatra. Support of such a powerful spirit of a general who symbolised courage and confidence in the comparatively newly conquered south was vital to bolster the spirits of the Chinese settlers and to counter threats from aborigines, the climate and the general misgivings of the migrants so far from the Han homelands of central and northern China. Although this was the original reason for the worship of this deity, in recent centuries it has been lost and, in general, replaced by worship for his magical efficacy in providing satisfactory solutions to daily problems.\n\nHe began his career under the Xin dynasty ruler, the usurper Wang Mang but stimulated by ambition he later took up arms against him. During one campaign when briefing his generals he produced a \"cloth model\" by tracing out the lie of the land in a large tray of rice pointing out the routes and lines of advance his assembled generals should take. He aided Liu Xiu in re-establishing the Han dynasty by defeating the forces loyal to Wang Mang. Ma was then appointed Governor of what is now Gansu province, in the north-west, from where he led an army down to Tonkin to put down the revolt against the Chinese overlords.\n\nMa Yuan, well known in Guangzhou for his great height and bravery as a general, was particularly renowned for his campaign in Annam where he had pacified the country and brought back to Guangzhou city a number of Tonkinese bronze drums which he had melted and cast into statues of horses. Apart from the award of the title 'The Conquering Wave' he had the honour of having his daughter joined in marriage with the heir apparent.\n\nA certain Lady Zhu headed the insurrection against the Chinese in Annam and was captured and sentenced to death. She had been stripped of her finery before execution and was dressed in her barest clothes. Ma Yuan took pity on her and gave her one of his robes to cover her bare limbs which is said to have led to the Tonkinese ladies' custom of wearing trousers and a long covering dress with wide sleeves.\n\nDespite his age he volunteered with his ardour and ferocity", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]