[ { "id": 205945, "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-1970", "page_number": 25, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "20\n\nL. CARRINGTON GOODRICH\n\nthe number as 9,881 pên). In addition, the Wu-ying-tien press in the palace printed with movable type 286 works known only in manuscript in the YLTT. From this point on the story of the YLTT makes generally sad reading. The librarians of the Hanlin Academy during the next one hundred years must have been pretty careless in their custodial duties, for, by 1894, according to an entry in the diary of the statesman Wêng T'ung-ho (1830-1904), hardly more than 800 pên were left. During the siege of the legation quarter six years later, the Chinese made an attempt to storm the British legation by setting fire to the Hanlin, immediately to the north of the legation compound. Thousands of books in the library were consumed in the blaze, but many too were picked up by Europeans, Americans, and Japanese in the legation quarter, and either taken to their homelands, or, in the case of the British minister, returned to the authorities in Peking. In the troubles incident to the overturn of the Manchus (1911), others were dispersed; so that by 1912, when Aurousseau made his report, he recorded only sixty pên in the Metropolitan Library and four in the library of the Ministry of Education.\n\nToday the situation is much better, as there has been an effort to reproduce and make generally available copies of the volumes which have found their way to major collections, mostly public, such as the Library of Congress, the British Museum, the Bodley, the Toyo Bunko, the National Library of Peking, and the National Central Library. These include the volumes returned to the mainland by the authorities in the USSR in the flush of post World War II friendship: eleven volumes delivered in 1951 and fifty-three in 1954. The learned world now has available for study two facsimile editions of extant works, one brought out in Peking in 1960 in 730 chüan under the sponsorship of Kuo Mo-jo (1892-), and a second issued in Taipei in 1962 in 742 chüan, edited by Yang Chia-lo (1913-). Several lists of surviving volumes of the YLTT have been published, the latest being that of the venerable Japanese scholar, Iwai Hirosato, in a festschrift published in his honor: Tenseki ronshū (Tokyo 1964), 1-70. His census lists 799 chüan. A few others have come to light which he did not include. In September 1963 The British Museum Quarterly announced the acquisition of one volume containing chüan 6933 and 6934, a gift from the estate of Captain Francis Garden Poole, who", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205946, "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-1970", "page_number": 26, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "MORE ON THE YUNG-LO TA-TIEN\n\n21\n\nserved in the Legation Guard in Peking in 1900. The Chester Beatty Library (Dublin) has three volumes not otherwise accounted for (chüan 803/4, 805/6, and 10,110/1). The Wason Collection of Cornell University has chüan 13,853, and the National Central Library, Taipei, has chüan 7527, which Yang Chia-lo failed to reproduce. The number at present count then is 809 chüan out of the original total of 22,877 chüan (not counting the table of contents which has been separately published).\n\nWhat subjects are covered in the volumes that have been saved? Practically everything that concerned the Chinese around the year 1400, but in fragmentary fashion. Thought, morals, poetry of several kinds, frontier people (the Hsiung-nu and Hu, for example), geography, surnames, government, law, the spirits, biography, divination, architecture (gates, bridges, halls, storehouses, walls, offices), villages, capital cities, history, burial customs, astronomy, botany, grain, military matters, Buddhism, Taoism, travels, bronzes, food and drink, caves, dreams, scholars, drama, sacrifices, clothing, mathematics, images, carpentry, post stations, shamans, literary collections. Dr. Walter Swingle, writing on the YLTT in the Report of the Library of Congress (1922-23), asserted: \"It combined all existing Chinese books that were available to Yung-lo, excepting novels and possibly some plays.\" Fortunately, his remark was found to be in error when the Library of Congress acquired (1935) from the collection of Dr. H. A. Giles, professor of Chinese at Cambridge University, a copy of a \"short historical novel, Ch'ieh-fên-lu and a hsü-lu, purporting to describe the experiences of Sung Hui-tsung, made captive by the Chin in 1127.\" (The son of Dr. Giles, Lancelot, was in the British Legation during the siege in 1900, and doubtless picked it up then.) The first notice of the famous play P'i-pa chi (The Lute Song) also appears in a volume of the YLTT. Professor Pelliot has characterized as one of the most important volumes saved the sections from a great Yuan dynasty encyclopaedia (Ching-shih ta-tien, published 1331), including a part on courier stations (jamči), now in the Toyo Bunko. Among other interesting works saved, generally fragmentary, are geographical. Francis D. M. Dow of Australian National University has recently drawn attention to certain gazetteers preserved: one of the prefecture of Soochow, published in 1379, for example; and years ago (1929) the Metropolitan", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211491, "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-1988", "page_number": 207, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "183\n\nMaine, from 1953 to 1958. With some help from us and from scholarships, both managed to obtain a college education on their own earnings, Gar Shucy from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1960 and Gar Ling from Pembroke College in 1962.\n\nBefore long I was working temporarily as an interpreter with the U.S. Immigration Service and later as a typist for the Library Mutual Insurance Company. In November 1954 I found permanent work as a social worker at the Children's Unit of the Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham. I left this psychiatric setting for a day care agency, the Associated Day Care Services of Metropolitan Boston, in September 1959, because I felt that preventive work with young children was more effective than attempts to restore their mental health. It was depressing to feel the guilt and anguish of those parents who had mentally-ill youngsters. The day care experience proved to be challenging and rewarding. By the time I retired in 1973, I had become Director of Social Service under Mr. Sibley Higginbotham, a very sensitive and understanding administrator. From August 1975 to October 1976 I served there once more to fill a temporary vacancy. I am now enjoying permanent retirement with time to appreciate married life with a calm and supportive husband, and an excellent relationship with other members of the family and with my friends.\n\nDuring my years in Brookline, I brought Mother home several times for extended visits or have gone to Honolulu whenever she was ill. Since her death in 1974 John and I have continued to make an annual trip to the place of my birth, no doubt to recapture precious memories and relationships which have made my life so meaningful. In my twilight years, always aware of the fragility of life, I have endeavoured to record some aspects of my life and of those people who touched upon it, with the expectation that in the future someone in the family might become interested in his roots. It is also due to my own need to leave part of myself behind. In addition, it is my hope that what I have gathered would give a bit of historical perspective of the early Chinese immigrants as reflected in the history of our families; that it would give an insight to their industriousness, sacrifices, and handicaps, their hopes and ambitions, and the opportunities opened to them; and that it would give a glimpse of some of their social and cultural practices. I am a simple, uncomplicated person, intelligent and of good common sense, but subject", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212152, "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-1990", "page_number": 94, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "71\n\ntexts of these two works. Adam, working in the imperial library in Ch'ang-an sixty years later, probably translated Reuben's Syriac originals into Chinese without realising that translations had already been produced in far-off Tun-huang. Later, as the Book of Praise implies, he sent Chinese translations of thirty-five Syriac works to Tun-huang, and his new translations of the Kai-yuan documents were among them. The Tun-huang monks were evidently unwilling to destroy their own Chinese translations and replace them with Adam's, and it is their version which has survived, but in a copy made in the 780s. Adam had probably directed that new Chinese texts on Christian subjects should consistently use the 'Syrian brilliant teaching' identity, and that old texts should be edited where possible, to be brought into line with the new style. The monks therefore recopied and lightly edited their own Chinese texts to conform to the new identity. But they continued, understandably, to acknowledge the translation work carried out more than sixty years previously by their own monastery's monks, Chang-ku and Su-yüan.\n\nEpilogue: the Five Dynasties Period\n\nWe have seen how Adam tried to ensure that all Nestorian churches in China consistently used the term 'Syrian brilliant teaching'. During his lifetime, his position as metropolitan of China ensured that his flock complied with his wishes, but it is clear that the consistency by which he set such store broke down once he was no longer there to enforce it. This process can be seen at work in the manuscript in which the Hymn in Adoration of the Holy Trinity and the Book of Praise have been preserved. The former work seems to have been copied in the 780s, as it consistently applies the terminology found in the Sian tablet inscription. But the Book of Praise, although written on the same piece of parchment as the Hymn in Adoration of the Holy Trinity, is written in a different hand and clearly at a much later date.\n\nThe Book of Praise, much of which is a hymn of thanksgiving for the existence of the 35 Syriac works translated by Adam, seems to have been written either in the tenth or the early eleventh century. The Tun-huang cave in which it was found was sealed in 1036, providing a terminus ante quem for its composition, and the formulation ‘emperor T'ai-tsung of the T'ang', proves that it was written after the final collapse of the T'ang dynasty in 906. At any rate, it was written not long before or after Abu'l Faraj met the despondent Nestorian monk", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212518, "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": 72, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "52\n\nZang Yungtang (1767-1811) had studied in Suzhou in 1793, the centre of Han Learning at that time, and was invited by Ruan Yuan to edit the classical dictionary, Jing ji zhuan gu. In 1800 he was asked again by Ruan Yuan to collate the Thirteen Classics. He stayed on Ruan Yuan's personal staff until 1802. After failing the Metropolitan Examination, he went into business; then joined the personal staff of Yi Bingshou (1754-1815), who was then the Prefect of Yangzhou, in 1804, to write about the topography of Yangzhou. From 1807 onwards, he went back on Ruan Yuan's payroll, compiling Wu Dai shi [History of the Five Dynasties] at the behest of Liu Fengao (1761-1830).\n\nQian Taxin (1728-1804) came from a scholarly tradition, a grandson and son of noted men of learning. After obtaining his first degree at the age of 17 sui, he became residential tutor in a family with an excellent library which he used extensively. After attaining the jinshi degree in 1754, he remained in Beijing where he became friends with Dai Zhen and Ji Yun (1724-1805) who later became chief editor of the Si ku chuan shu. He directed the Chong shan Academy in Nanjing, and joined Ruan Yuan on the dictionary project in Hangzhou. He was the author of the critical notes on Er shi er shi kao yi [Twenty-two dynastic histories], 100 juan, 1782. Ruan Yuan's subordinate wife, Liu Wenru (1777-1849) was to compile the same for Er shi si shi [Twenty-four dynastic histories].\n\nChen Shouchi (1777-1834) of Minxian, Fujian had started his career with Zhu Gui. Afterwards he joined the faculty of Gu jing jing she and the Fu Wen Academy. He was recruited to work on Jing fu and Hai tang zhi by Ruan Yuan. At a later date, he served as editor-in-chief of Fujian tong zhi [Provincial gazetteer of Fujian] and Li xian fang zhi [Local gazetteer of the Li District of Jiangsu]. His own essays on the Classics, with several letters from Ruan Yuan, were printed in Zuo hai wen ji [Essays by Chen Shouchi].\n\nChen Wenxu (1775-1845) of Hangzhou was a “student” of Zhu Gui, who introduced him to Ruan Yuan. Ruan considered Chen one of the foremost poets of the province, and appointed him to his personal staff. He gained expertise in sea transport, salt administration, grain transport and flood control. He helped Ruan Yuan establish a humanitarian social welfare policy, including famine relief. He collected a large number of women students. Both his subordinate wives were acknowledged poets.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212521, "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": 75, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "55\n\nintellectually lethargic. It was also from Liu's diaries we discover that Ruan Yuan's house was burned down on April 2, 1823 with heavy losses, including Ruan's entire library.1\n\n31\n\nThe founding of the Xue hai tang in Canton brought to Ruan Yuan a number of Cantonese scholars. Besides Chen Li, who was cited by Hiromu Momose in Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period as perhaps \"the most brilliant among a group of Cantonese scholars who developed eclectic theories mid-way between Sung Neo-Confucianism and the School of Han Learning,\" the others included Lin Botun, Wu Lanxiu, Ma Fuan, and Xu Rong, Tan Rong from Nanhai, who had passed the provincial examination in 1824 and had been appointed to the Xue hai tang by Ruan Yuan but had chosen not to take the metropolitan examination, nevertheless persuaded his friends, the Wu Family hong merchants, to print the large collectanea, Yue ya tang cong shu, consisting of 180 titles.\n\nIt is disappointing that the personalities and idiosyncrasies of these scholars cannot be discerned from reading their writings. Employing the techniques of detective novelists by investigating whatever might be construed as clues that come my way, I have been able to reconstruct the person of Ruan Yuan to a certain extent, but the scholars around him have completely eluded my attempts. They were not easy prey. Neither were they easy to manage. At times their eccentricities hindered progress of Ruan's work.\n\nThe completion of Shi san jing zhu shu fu jiao kan ji was delayed considerably because of personality conflict among the compilers. The idea for such a project had originated with Lu Wen chao (1717-1796), a scholar-official from Hangzhou who had spent a greater part of his time copying various old editions of the Classics by hand, noting the differences and printing the corrected texts. After Lu's death his student, Zang Rong, who was working on Jing ji zuan gu, persuaded Ruan Yuan to undertake the project to print the Jiao kan ji as well. In 1799, after consulting his staff, a much more ambitious project became envisaged, to print the Thirteen Classics together with all the notations throughout the ages.\n\nBeing then Governor of Zhejiang with resources at his command, Ruan Yuan asked Duan Yucai (1735-1815), a Classicist with expertise in etymology and phonetics, to take on the responsibility as editor. Considering the task too arduous for a single man, Duan recommended his friend Gu Guangchi (1776-1835) to share the work. Gu, in turn, brought other scholars.\n\n33\n\nPage 75\nPage 76", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216355, "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": 114, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "63\n\nA NEW DISCOVERY AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE: THE STATUTORY DECLARATIONS MADE BY SIR ROBERT HART CONCERNING HIS SECRET DOMESTIC LIFE IN 19TH CENTURY CHINA\n\nLAN LI AND DEIRDRE WILDY\n\n[Hon Editor: See also NOTES ON THE ROBERT HART PAPERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG LIBRARY, JHKBRAS, Vol. 29, pp. 367-382]\n\nIntroduction\n\nSir Robert Hart (1835-1911) was one of the extraordinary Westerners who made a substantial contribution to both early China's modernisation and its foreign relations with the West. He was the only Westerner in the latter half of the nineteenth century to occupy an official post in the metropolitan bureaucracy—a position that allowed him daily access to China's highest officials in the Grand Council and Zongli Yamen. He built the first modern institution in China, the Chinese Imperial Maritime Custom (CIMC), and he also played a crucial role in China's imperial politics, significantly influencing its internal reform and diplomatic policy.\n\nDuring the early period of his life in China (1857-1865) Hart was involved in a sexual relationship with a Chinese girl called Ayaou. The relationship had a significant influence on Hart in that it immersed him deeper in Chinese society. Hart's success in China has been attributed to his good understanding of Chinese tradition. He acquired this capacity in a number of ways, one of which included a long-term intimate relationship with the Chinese girl Ayaou. Hence, Hart's secret domestic life is not simply the personal life of a Western man, who, according to the prevailing custom in the colonial Asia of the 1850s, kept a Chinese girl; it is more significant and, as Bruner, Fairbank, and Smith point out, \"does him credit as a human being\" and \"also shows his capacity for immersion in Chinese society and culture.\" (1986: 232)\n\nThe paper will examine and analyse the recently discovered statutory declarations made by Hart in 1905 and 1911. These documents provide us with new primary and significant material about Hart's relationship with Ayaou and his three children by her. This will address", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]