[
    {
        "id": 204681,
        "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-1963",
        "page_number": 162,
        "title": "RAS-1963",
        "content_text": "146\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nA NOTE ON THE NAMES SAN ON AND PO ON\n\nBefore Hong Kong island and Kowloon were ceded, and the New Territories leased, to the British Crown, the region which is now the Colony of Hong Kong, along with the present-day Po On District on the Chinese Mainland across Deep Bay, formed a separate district of Kwangchou Prefecture. This district was called San On, a name by which it had been known since 1573, when it first acquired district status. Before this, from A.D. 716 to 1573, the region had been administered as part of Tung Kun District. Still earlier, from A.D. 331 to 716, it had been part of a larger division called Po On District 寶安縣.\n\nThis ancient name was revived in 1912 when San On District (or rather the small area that was left of it after the lease of the New Territories) was renamed Po On District. It is not unusual, even to-day, for the people of the New Territories to refer to themselves as natives of Po On District.\n\nPETER Y. L. NG.\n\nWHAT'S YOUR LINGO?\n\nMost of the etymological dictionaries of English published in this century derive the former cant-word lingo, now a contemptuous term in the standard language, for speech, language, from Provençal and ultimately, of course, from Latin lingua.\n\nSkeat's gloss, in his Etymological Dictionary, includes the following: \"Prov. lengo, lingo, speech (Mistral); lingo is the precise form used at Marseilles and lengo is Gascon (Moncaut.)”\n\nIf the dictionaries are right, lingo may have come into the thieves' jargon of English sea ports from the mouths of sailors who had picked it up from Sabir, the old maritime lingua franca of the Mediterranean which is said to have contained many elements from the Provençal dialect of Marseilles.\n\nHowever, while most of the modern dictionaries give us a Provençal etymology and merely ask us to bear in mind the Portuguese form lingoa, earlier works such as Dr. Johnson's,\n\n  \n    \n    !\n  \n  \n    i\n    !",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v",
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    {
        "id": 205104,
        "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-1966",
        "page_number": 60,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS\n\n55\n\nthere, one which it takes one month to cross, the other one whole year. Their ships are so big that they can hold between 50 and 100 men. These people presented a wine beaker made from the egg-shell of a sea bird. If one poured wine into it the wine became warm immediately... The emperor was very pleased that these people had come from so far and gave them liberal gifts of gold and textiles.\n\nThis is quite an extraordinary story. But it is, in more than one way, typical of most descriptions of foreign countries in the Middle Ages. It is always the fanciful and fantastic that is given predominant attention, and travellers seem always to have made a point of telling yarns that they knew would impress their foreign listeners. This entire problem of cosmography in the Middle Ages, European and Chinese, cannot be understood without investigating some of the basic underlying concepts that invariably show up in descriptions of regions and peoples at the end of the world. The unknown is full of marvels, of mirabilia and portenta. But there is equally, as a rule, some factual basis for even the most fantastic notion, distorted as it is by transmission and tainted by preconceived concepts about the world. I should add here in an aside that the description of the Mongols in the European medieval Latin sources shows the gradual transition from the apocalyptic Gog and Magog concepts, derived from late Hellenistic lore, to the sober accounts of the travellers and missionaries. The Franks at Kublai Khan's court evidently tried to impress their Mongol and Chinese hosts by some tall stories. But there are certainly a few factual data that can help to elucidate this curious report. The reference to the constant daylight seems to imply that these people came from Northern Europe because of the short summer nights there. In my opinion these blonde and blue-eyed men were traders from either the Scandinavian countries or, which seems even more probable, from some Northern trading center like Novgorod. It remains a question what is meant by the two seas they had to cross. Did they reach Shang-tu by sea, that is via the Indian Ocean? Or are the two seas the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, or the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea? We do not know and perhaps never shall. The curious remark about flies and mosquitoes being born from wood reminds one strongly of the Medieval European notion, derived from Aristotle, according to which insects like flies and fleas come from wood.3\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
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    },
    {
        "id": 206424,
        "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": 241,
        "title": "RAS-1971",
        "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n215\n\nThe opium trade of Shanghai may have taken place \"on the busy Bund\", but not until after 1858. The authors apparently never have heard of Woosung and its hulks.\n\nThe authors, intent on opium, assert an oil painting of an island with a British flag on a pole on the shore is \"Lintin”. In the background, with top masts housed, are ships. It is painted and signed \"C. Cramer 1803\", obviously an European artist. Evidently the authors do not realize that opium trading in 1803 was conducted at Whampoa and only reached Lintin in 1821. They also err when they state Jardine Matheson & Co. “diverted their ships to Lintin Island and other independents followed suit”. In 1803 Jardine Matheson & Co. was not in existence. They maintain the ships in the background are \"Scandinavian flag-ships”. Of course there is no such thing as a Scandinavian flag, and a look at the poor photograph shows a white field and a dark cross on a flag, more indicative of the St. George ensign than either a Danish or Swedish flag with its dark field and light cross. You will find this Scandinavian error repeated 5 other times. To cap it all, one finds a British sailor rolling a barrel along the shore, surely an impossibility in 19th century China. Can the scene be somewhere in the Mediterranean where there are islands and mountains and British warships in 1803?\n\nThe authors manage to insert a most extraordinary amount of misinformation into their nautical writings. In plate 37, correct to a French \"bark”, not a “schooner\". The liner Empress of Japan is identified correctly in plate 44, but why date the picture \"circa 1880\" when the steamer begins service in 1891? The painting is on the \"stern\" of the Chinese Merchant Junk, plate 63, not the \"prow\", as the rudder shows clearly just below. For the English \"clipper\" dated 1866, substitute \"bark\". Evidently they know nothing of monsoons or they would revise \"the cumbersome East Indiamen which could only make two round sailings each season between India and China”. Of course the answer is one sailing per season. The numerous islands between Macao and the China Sea \"make a landfall at Macao\" almost prohibitively difficult.\n\nSome of the identifications of Port Scenes are ludicrous. Any person who locates \"the Praya Grande bordering the bay of the inner harbor” at Macao or \"the Governor's Palace at the northern",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208470,
        "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-1978",
        "page_number": 194,
        "title": "RAS-1978",
        "content_text": "178\n\nDAVID H. S. CHAU\n\nThe fact that in the Tsin Dynasty (#), 303-379 AD, the technique had been widely used, and about the seventh or eighth century the Chinese already used woodblock to print calendars (Ɔ).\n\nThe oldest woodblock printed book still in existence, so far as we understand, is the Diamond Sutra (✨#∞) a Buddhist text (**) printed in the year 868 AD, which was found along with thousands of manuscripts from Mokao (†) the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas (†) at Tun-huang ( ). Tun-huang, a city situated on the outskirt of the Lob Desert in western Kansu Province (+), was once the main gate of the Old Silk Road (***). From the first century until the fourteenth century, merchants, caravans, travellers, monks, and armies leaving for the West all passed through Tun-huang on their way to the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Europe. The Italian merchant Marco Polo („§ +) used the same route to come to China.\n\nHollowed out in irregular tiers along the face of a steep cliff, the cave temples of the Thousand Buddhas were known in the Tang Dynasty () as Mokao or “Grottos of Surpassing Height\". They are located a few miles southeast of Tun-huang City. There had been huge Buddhist monasteries at the place for centuries, but it became forgotten when the Ming Dynasty (#9) began trading with the West by sea, and since then most of the caves had been buried by the shifting sand of the desert. In the late nineteenth century, it was rediscovered by a Taoist Priest called Wang Yuan-lu (10*), but by then all the wooden structures of the monasteries had vanished, and only the stone caves used as shrines remained.\n\nMokao is more than five thousand feet in length and consists of four hundred and ninety-two caves of various sizes. Over two thousand Buddhist statues and numerous huge murals can still be found in the caves. If we could have all the murals linked together, they would be at least twenty-five miles long.\n\nIn the year 1899, Wang Yuan-lu discovered an old monastery library in a walled-up chamber behind a mural in one of the caves. In the chamber, he found more than twenty thousand volumes of manuscripts and woodblock-printed documents and books, among them the Diamond Sutra. The news of the discovery soon spread abroad. In 1907 an Englishman, Sir Aurel Stein, traded with the priest and carried away 29 cases of manuscripts and books. More",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593",
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    },
    {
        "id": 213761,
        "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": 113,
        "title": "RAS-1996",
        "content_text": "84\n\nNOTES\n\nDetails of the 1911 Census are in Papers Laid before the Legislative Council of Hongkong, 1911, (Hong Kong Sessional papers), printed by Noronha and Co, Government Printers, Hong Kong, No 17, \"Report on the Census of the Colony for 1911, Laid Before the Legislative Council by Command of His Excellency the Governor, November 23rd, 1911” (Hereafter, Census Report, 1911). This Report consists of an eight-page (49 paragraph) Report (pages 103 (1-9)), with 41 Tables attached to it (pages 103 (10-59)), together with a section of 'Notes for the Guidance of Future Census officers'. Details of the 1921 Census are in Papers Laid before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, 1921, (Hong Kong Sessional Papers), printed by Noronha and Co, Government Printers, Hong Kong, No 5, \"Preliminary Report on the Census of Hong Kong, 1921, Laid Before the Legislative Council by Command of His Excellency the Governor, 23rd June, 1921\", and No 15, \"Report on the Census of the Colony for 1921, Laid Before the Legislative Council by Command of His Excellency the Governor, 15th December 1921\" (Hereinafter, the 15th December Report is noted as Census Report, 1921). The preliminary Report consists of an introduction (page 41), followed by Tables of 'Preliminary Figures of the Population' (pages 42-44). The 15th December Report consists of a 19-page Report, in 7 sections (pages 151-169), with 37 Tables (many with several subtables) attached to it (pages 171-232).\n\nThus, the Hoi Ha books which are now deposited with the Regional Council, in the Sha Tin Central Library, are the books and papers of a local doctor and teacher from the remote village of Hoi Ha, in North Sai Kung. Included in them are some notes of information on Italy and the Mediterranean Sea, which must be the record of a conversation with the priests. More specific evidence of contact is a book which the owner of the collection bound in fragments of an Italian newspaper. This evidence dates from 1910-1920. From the late 1890s, there is a deed from Hoi Ha regulating the village's relationship with the bottom-soil landlord, which states that a copy has been deposited with the priests \"for safekeeping\". The owner of the collection had no religious sympathy with the Sai Kung priests.\n\nEmigration is discussed in detail below.\n\nPapers Laid before the Legislative Council of Hongkong, 1912 (Hong Kong Sessional Papers), printed by Noronha and Co, Government Printers, No. 11, \"Report on the New Territories, 1899-1912, Laid before the Legislative Council by Command of His Excellency the Governor, August 22nd, 1912”. (the Orme Report) para 88.\n\nPapers Laid Before the Legislative Council of Hongkong, 1902, (Hong Kong Sessional Papers) printed by Noronha and Co, Government Printers, No 14, \"Report of the Committee on Education, Laid before the Legislative Council by Command of His Excellency the officer Administering the Government\", p 392. See also Sessional Paper, 1905, pages 536-7, 1907, page 514, 1908, page 339, Administrative Reports for the Year 1909, page M10; 1910, page N13, 1911, pages N7-8, 1912, page N11-12. The Yuen Long school was at Ping Shan between 1907 and 1912. The poor standards and low numbers of pupils are stressed in 1908, 1909, 1910, and 1911. See also the Orme Report op cit paras. 100-102 and Appendix G, and Administrative Reports for the Year 1920, page O15.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641",
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    },
    {
        "id": 215555,
        "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": 332,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "282\n\nEgypt, which was built in the 3rd century B.C. - one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was an eight-sided tower on top of which was a cylinder that extended up to an open cupola where the fire that provided the light burned. On the roof of the cupola was a large statue of Poseidon (the Greek God of the Sea and Earthquakes) facing the sea, northward. It was said ships could detect the light from the tower at night or the smoke from the fire during the day up to 100 miles away. The lighthouse collapsed in the 14th century, probably as the result of an earthquake. The remains of Pharos are now at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Its name, however, has become the root of the word \"lighthouse\" in the French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian languages.2\n\nModern navigation aids\n\nBy the 21st century traditional aids to navigation have already gradually taken over. These include satellite navigation systems in order to cope with the needs of high speed and the huge volume of modern sea transportation. Even more recent inventions like the Radio Beacon and the Decca Navigator System are now almost obsolete.\n\nThe Global Positioning System (GPS), provided by satellites, is now the primary position fixing system for marine navigation. A public Differential GPS service is able to enhance the accuracy of GPS signals to within 10 metres up to 50 nautical miles around the coasts off the United Kingdom and Ireland. This system assists the safe passage of all classes of vessels from cargo ships, cruise liners and fishing vessels to small yachts. As a back-up system to the GPS, chains of Loran C on land are also adopted.3\n\nNineteenth century Hong Kong\n\nIn Hong Kong, things were quite different. There was not much sea traffic going to China before the first Opium War (1839-42) because of the Chinese policy of keeping its doors closed to foreign trade. Canton (Guangzhou), in the Pearl River Delta, was the city where limited foreign trade was permitted under stringent conditions. Macao under Portuguese administration served well as a buffer for foreign merchants waiting for the start of the trading season. Only after the Treaties of Nanking, Peking and Tientsin (1842-1860) was China forced to open up more and more ports for trade. Hong Kong's Victoria harbour became",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216513,
        "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-2003",
        "page_number": 272,
        "title": "RAS-2003",
        "content_text": "224\n\njade, spices, ceramics, horses and so on of the old days. This book is enormously revealing in the understanding that it provides about the cultural melting pots that extend today from western China to the Mediterranean Sea. We are in as much need today of the understanding that travellers along the Silk Road gained about the cultures they encountered as were those travellers of the past.\n\nELIZABETH KENWORTHY TEATHER\n\nThis point is the focus of Chung, Tan (ed.) (1994). Dunhuang Art: Through the Eyes of Duan Wenjie. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts/ Abhinav Publications.\n\nTing, J.S.P. (ed.) (1996). The Maritime Silk Road. 2000 years of Trade on the South China Sea, Hong Kong: Urban Council.\n\nEbery, P.B. (1996). The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See P. 120.\n\nI found the WorldWideWeb an invaluable source of maps to clarify the historical geography of the Silk Road. Readers may like to try searching Google for 'Bactria,' for example.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390",
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]