[ { "id": 211671, "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-1989", "page_number": 86, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "61\n\nTHE KIUKIANG INCIDENT OF 1927\n\nP. H. MUNRO-Faure\n\nThe turgid waters of the Yangtze rolled by to the sea, four hundred and eighty miles away. They swirled past the two hulks, alongside which river steamers came to discharge the cargoes of cotton material, hardware, salt, and those edible sea-products so dear to the heart of the Chinese gourmet; loading in return tea, porcelain, grass-cloth, and camphor.\n\nInshore small wavelets glistened in the wintry sun, and lapped along the edge of the dark mud, which sloped down to the water in front of\n\n* Editor's Note. Paul Hector Munro-Faure was born in 1894 of Swiss/Scottish parentage. Educated in England, he entered the Supplementary Army Reserve in 1912, and volunteered on the outbreak of War, being commissioned in the Sherwood Foresters. He was wounded on the Somme in 1916, and, on his recovery, was attached to the King's African Rifles, with whom he saw action in Tanganyika. By the end of the War he had risen to the rank of Captain. He was Mentioned in a Despatch for distinguished services in the field, and was commended in writing by the Secretary of State for War.\n\nAfter the War, he joined the Asiatic Petroleum Company, and remained in their service until the outbreak of the Second World War, as Manager of one or other of their offices in China. In 1937 he established a Chinese Refugee Safety Centre in Shanghai, and was later decorated for this by the Chinese Government with the Brilliant Star with Ribbon. In 1938 he was connected with the International Relief Committee in Nanking, by whose Chairman he was commended for his work for the displaced. He was also commended at this date by the Secretary of the Admiralty for his work in evacuating from that city civilians at risk.\n\nOn the outbreak of the Second World War he was commissioned as Major (shortly afterwards Lieutenant-Colonel) in the Special Operations Executive. He worked at first in the Bush Warfare School at Maymyo, Burma, which trained Chinese guerillas for behind-the-lines work. (For this school, see \"Prisoners of Hope\", Michael Calvert, (London, 1951), where Lt. Col. Munro-Faure is mentioned at p. 11). He then opened a similar school near the front lines in the Hangchow-Nanking area. For this he was awarded an OBE in 1943. Later still he worked between the front lines on the north-east frontier of Burma, attempting to ensure the continuing support for the British of the native princes of the region, in the face of Japanese, and particularly Chinese, attempts to replace the British as the dominant local power. He was commended for this work by his Commanding Officer. In 1944, he was recalled to England. After the War he was seconded as Oil Attache to the British Embassy in Romania. He retired in 1949, and died in 1956.\n\nLt. Col. Munro-Faure wrote a book of Memoirs in 1944-1945, in 11 chapters, covering his experiences in the Kiu Kiang Incident (1927), and between 1937 and 1944, together with an exposition of his views on the proper role of foreigners in China. The text is in the Imperial War Museum, London,\n\nBecause of the immensely valuable picture these Memoirs paint of the Kiu Kiang Incident (in which the writer was closely involved), of China during the early War years, and of the border areas of Burma during the period when the present troubles in the area were first developing, it is proposed to print them as a series in this and the next several issues of the Journal.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212452, "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": 6, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "CONTENTS\n\nPRESIDENT'S REPORT\n\nHON. AUDITORS' REPORT\n\nHON. LIBRARIAN'S REPORT.\n\nARTICLES:\n\nPui Tak Lee Business Networks and Patterns of\n\nCantonese Compradors and Merchants in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong\n\nWei Peh T'i Private Patronage of Scholarship and Learning During the Mid-Qing: Ruan Yuan and the Scholars Around Him\n\nZhang Ru - The Chinese Experience: Sino-American Arts Exchange, 1972-1986\n\nDan Waters Chinese Funerals: A Case Study\n\nP.H. Munro-Faure Guerilla Training, Maymyo 1941\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES:\n\nSolomon Bard A Brief Account of Early Post-war Hong Kong Archaeological Activity\n\nOctavius William Borrell — A Short History of the Heude Museum, 'Musee Heude,' 1858-1952 its Botanist and Plant Collector\n\nKeith Stevens A Chinese Memorial Hall Dedicated to Wang Te-lu, a Clan Hero..\n\nDan Waters — A Note on Hong Kong's Wildlife\n\nValery M. Garrett To Become an Adult\n\nDan Waters The Re-occupation of Hong Kong, August 1945\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nvii\n\nxiv\n\nxvii\n\n1\n\n40\n\n65\n\n104\n\n135\n\n181\n\n183\n\n192\n\n197\n\n199\n\n201\n\n205", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212601, "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": 155, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "Maymyo 1941 \n\nGUERILLA TRAINING* \n\nP. H. MUNRO-FAURE \n\n135 \n\nThe shortage of British shipping along the China coast became more marked during 1940 and 1941. The vessels built for this traffic, generally between three and four thousand tons in measurement, with comparatively shallow draft, were particularly suitable for use in the Persian Gulf and along the shores of North Africa. Many had been taken to serve as transports in those seas. Moreover, the Admiralty, sensitive to the dangers threatening the peace of the Far East, had directed such larger ocean-going vessels as still were available not to proceed west of Singapore. Consequently there was pressure on the remaining cabin space, and I was fortunate to obtain a berth in a small coaster, which took seven days to reach Hongkong from Shanghai, as against the usual four.\n\nHongkong was very quiet, a state of affairs not to be attributed to an entire absence of females. It was remarkable how many had succeeded in avoiding the order to leave the Colony. I had to wait a whole week for a passage to Singapore, where formerly berths on a dozen different ships would have been offered in the time. This gave me an opportunity to look around. Friends took me out to Deep Water Bay, where we sunbathed on the beach, and drank our tea on the club verandah, looking out over the little golf course. High up on the hill towards Wong Nei Chong Gap I could see the green tiled roof of the house where my wife and I, only three years previously, had been caught in the rain. I wondered whether the lady of the mansion was one of those who had contrived to remain behind. In the evening we drove round to the next bay and bathed from the Lido, a steel and concrete building of pleasing design housing a restaurant, and bathing booths. The hot weather had set in, but here a cool breeze blew down a gully on the hillside into the windows. I had always liked the place because of its informality. You could eat your dinner, and dance and talk, in shorts, and so keep cool, as compared with the stricter etiquette of the Gloucester and Hongkong Hotels, or the Repulse Bay Hotel, or even the Peninsular Hotel across the harbour, where several nights a week you were required to don “black ties”.\n\n*This is the third part of the Memoirs of Col. P H. Munro-Faure. See Editor's Note, p 61, vol. 29, and Plate I", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212604, "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": 158, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "138\n\nI was anxious to reach Burma, and when I arrived at Rangoon in July found that I was one of the early swallows. The garrison still only consisted of two British battalions, and some battalions of the Burma rifles. In 1937, when Burma was separated from India, the army, which had been part of the Indian army, achieved a nominal emancipation from that tutelage; but in practice, from the general downwards, the majority of the officers came from India and the dogmas peculiar to the North West Frontier prevailed.\n\nI was sent up to Maymyo, in the Shan hills, to collect the wherewithal for an establishment, later to be known as the Bush Warfare School. Maymyo was the hill resort for Burma, the summer capital of the government, and the station of one of the two British battalions. This battalion kindly provided an orderly room sergeant, a stout fellow from Yorkshire, and between us we started to get things ready for the troops who were due to arrive shortly. I made my first acquaintance with the great brotherhood of the Indian Babu, the parasitic growth that sucks energy from administration in India. The Babu's great idea in life is to find a job for his brothers, of whom there are many, and to do so he must write more and more letters. A reply, which postpones decision, invites further correspondence. The more letters, the more filing; the more filing, the more indexing; the more indexing, the more work; the more jobs for brother, until one job has been expanded into six, and promotion is created: for first-brother can then claim to be exalted to the rank of head-clerk, to supervise the other six. The promotion not only brings an increase of pay, but also creates yet another vacancy for yet another brother in the position originally held by first-brother. It is a great game, not, however, convenient for warfare.\n\nI was later to meet the Indian Canteen Contractor, whose profits are so great; and the Indian Controller of Military Accounts, who also multiplies himself exceedingly, and travels round with a whole shelf-full of Army Regulations, without reference to which he cannot place one foot before the other. In India, even in the banks, every entry, receipt, payment, or other transaction is checked and counter-checked by three people, as a control on corruption, a control, to judge by all one hears, that is not superlatively successful. In this welter of procrastination time ceases to have value: amidst this accumulation of paper, decision is bogged down. It is a bureaucrat's paradise.\n\nIn Burma too I first came across the great game of discards. It was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212605, "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": 159, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "139\n\na game, I suspect, long known to Burma, which until 1937 was a mere annex to India. The counters were not only things, such as aeroplanes, or guns, or cement; but also persons, such as administrators, or pilots, or corporals. It all depended where you were on the list of priorities. Top priorities took their pick of what was going. When a battalion commander, or the head of a government department, is instructed to detail so many men to such and such a job, outside his own sphere of interest, being human, he will naturally discard the men he can best spare. They will not be his best men; he will get away with what he can. It would be dangerous to try to impose too far on a high priority. All is permissible. A low priority is fortunate to receive anything, but must accept what is offered. Burma was at the bottom of all the priorities.\n\nNeedless to say by the time our troops were due we had received no cooking pots, no hurricane lamps, no latrine buckets, and no brown paper. I borrowed what I could from our father and mother, the Yorkshire Light Infantry, and the night before the troops arrived went into the bazaar to purchase the rest out of my own pocket.\n\nOur troops were a grand lot: they were collected from the Commandos in all parts of the world. Some came from Australia, while others had only recently taken part in the evacuation from Greece. We were put through the motions of S.K. (silent killing) and taught the art of booby-trapping. Our Chief Instructor, Calvert, later to win renown as a Brigadier under Wingate, was a regular sapper, with a bent for thinking up ever more ingenious ways of perplexing the enemy. We developed all sorts of devices, and blew up as much as we dared. The Maymyo valley echoed to the sound of explosions, and the local inhabitants, or the visitors from the plains, would say, \"There are those Bush Warfare people at it again.”\n\nI must confess that my first impressions of Burma had been poor. Rangoon looked decayed and depressing in the heat. The walls of brick, covered with plaster, showed large mould stains, the result of the damp monsoon climate. On arrival at Maymyo, a stranger, insufficiently briefed, and knowing no one, I was shocked at the formality, in the second year of the war, which required every one to change into evening clothes for dinner at the Club. It may have been something to do with the name by which the school was known, or the free and easy ways of our Commando men, but at first people seemed to look on us with a slight suspicion, not unlike the attitude towards the stage villain who is expected to do the wrong thing by the modest maiden. However, in time the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212606, "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": 160, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "140\n\ninhabitants got to know us better; they accepted our lack of dinner jackets, our effect on the drink stock at the Club, our — regrettable — neglect of the traffic signals, and our other little mannerisms, and treated us right royally.\n\nThere were two seasons in Maymyo, the second and briefer one, lasting several weeks, towards the end of the rains in October. The Club, a long rambling creeper-covered building, became gay with visitors. It looked out over a pleasance, cleared from the jungle, and spreading a mile towards the reservoir dam, built by Turkish prisoners in the last war. It goes without saying that a race course and golf links were laid out over the meadowland, very pleasant to behold. But here we were next door to India. The plumbing in the gentlemen's cloak room, consisted of a row of rusty and battered enamel utensils, set out at more or less even intervals on a long low shelf. Without the door, a shadow hovered, poised to dash in the moment he heard the rattle of a utensil returned to the board. No Americans visited Maymyo while I was there. It would have been interesting to hear their first reactions to these Arcadian simplicities.\n\nAfter all Burma was a rich enough country; it was not any lack of money that left it a Victorian remnant. Amongst the Burmese there is no caste, nor is there any desire to work. The house servants everywhere are Indians, of whom there were over a million in the country. Of the annual increase of 5,000,000 in India, a substantial proportion must be of the sweeper caste. Amidst a population with so abnormal a rate of procreation, the border line between a sufficiency and famine is a fine one, easily crossed; and any modernisation of sanitary installations would create serious unemployment: thus in India the vested interest in caste puts the brake, not only on plumbing, but on all progress; and Burma, until recently had been the backwater of India.\n\nI spent six months in Burma, but had little opportunity to learn much of the country. I saw very little of the Burmese, and never met one of those attractive country maids, who wait by the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking out to sea. Of the seventeen million inhabitants, only ten million are Burmans; besides the Indians, there are 300,000 Chinese, and the remainder are tribesmen from the hills.\n\nThe history of Burma is a bloody one; the country had seldom for long been united. The Chinese under Kublai Khan, the Mongol,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212616, "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": 170, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "150\n\nand the 3rd War Zone branch of the Central Military Academy, where the junior officers of the Chinese army are trained.\n\nThe outbreak of war between Britain and Japan had altered the nature of my visit. It was agreed that a British party would be sent to the 3rd War Zone to assist in guerilla warfare, and shortly afterwards I left for a reconnaissance of the forward areas where the school, which was to be the central feature of our assistance, would be established.\n\nThe lower Yangtze delta is the most densely populated and the wealthiest region in China. Within the triangle contained by Shanghai, Nanking, and Hangchow, there are many large cities, such as Soochow, Changhsing, Huchow, Chinkiang and Kashing. In this area there is more railway traffic, more road traffic, more river and canal traffic, more sea-going shipping, and more active industry, than in all the rest of China. For the past four years, since the fall of Nanking, the Japanese had occupied the main lines of communication in the region; the Yangtze, the railways, the large cities; and they had patrolled and used the roads and creeks: in short, on the security of this base rested the whole Japanese position in China. Any threat here, any blow at Japanese dispositions, would be correspondingly the more telling. Well, as it happened, a broad tongue of mountains reached from the southwest into the area, and in these mountains the guerillas had established their quarters.\n\nOur car followed the road along the Tsien Tang river gorges: we slept in little road-side inns and ate in busy fly-blown taverns. When I had last visited these parts there had been no motor roads; I had come by junk, hauled up the rapids by trackers who bent to the ground as they strained to advance foot by foot. A new railway, leading south from Wuhu on the Yangtze, had been completed only a few years previously. In face of the Japanese advance, Chinese engineers had dismantled the line to deny its use to the enemy: but the Japanese advance had stopped at the edge of the plain; the mountain area which reached back to the mass of unoccupied China was still untouched, except for desultory bombing. The steel railway bridges had been cut, their girders sloped at all angles; and the sleepers had been taken for firewood by the farmers, leaving the rails lying along the track.\n\nAll this derelict steel, the stone piers of the bridges, the embankments and cuttings, and the rails themselves, were ideal for use in training. We had here better facilities than we had ever had in Maymyo, though", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212621, "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": 175, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "155\n\nfoiled the third Japanese attempt to take that city. Mac was full of energy and good cheer, spoke fluent Chinese, and had a supply of good stories, which had by no means been exhausted during our stay at Maymyo. Over the next eighteen months in China he added to his fund of stories in English, another fund in Chinese of no less lurid a nature.\n\nOur plans were advancing slowly, and we decided to pay a visit to Kinhwa, the temporary capital of Chekiang and the largest shopping centre at that time in eastern China. We needed stores and supplies of various kinds and thought to fill in time by laying those in now. The intention was then to go on to Chin Ya to make all the necessary preparations for opening the school. Unfortunately I was taken ill and had to enter the hospital in Kinhwa kept by the American Presbyterian Mission, where I was given every attention. My symptoms were complicated and it was impossible to decide whether I was suffering from appendicitis or malaria: however, a regimen of alternate sulfanilamide and quinine - I am told they cannot be taken together - gradually restored my health, though it took a month. Meantime Singapore had fallen and I think my Chinese friends must have thought I was so mortified that I was feigning a diplomatic illness, which of course I was not. General Ku sent his Adjutant General to enquire after my condition and the Army Commander in that area also took a kind interest in me. Mac went off to Chin Ya with Michael and they engaged carpenters, masons, and furniture makers to provide for all the needs we could foresee.\n\nBy the beginning of March I had recovered and was back in Shangjao awaiting the arrival of the small convoy which was due with the first of our personnel and military stores. Part of a much larger contingent, destined for other purposes, they had driven in by lorry all the way from Burma, over the Burma road, through Kunming and Kweiyang, to the Hunan-Kwangsi railway, where the lorries had been entrained, to conserve petrol, already a rare and precious fluid. The contingent had detrained in south Hunan, from where our party had sorted out their stores and come on with four lorries. This advance party consisted of two officers, Leo and Cyril, and a stalwart warrant officer of the Royal Engineers, whom we shall call the Chief. They had with them several Hongkong Chinese, who had joined the British army in Burma, and some tons of explosives and gadgets calculated to cause the enemy unexpected discomforts.\n\nThe sight of these lorries, however few, with Union Jacks painted", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 } ]