[
    {
        "id": 212201,
        "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": 143,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "120\n\nwhich the government was hurriedly building from Hengyang, on the Canton-Hankow line. The embankment was finished, the culverts and bridges were in, and the construction gangs laying the rails were only a few miles off. The rails had been salvaged from sections of line abandoned to the invader in the distant north, and brought to Kwangsi despite great difficulties.\n\nI drove on to Hengyang and on the way observed one of those curious inconsistencies to which you grow accustomed in China. The Ministry of Communications, all the handicaps of the war notwithstanding, continued resolutely with its programme of road building. Where rivers were too wide to justify bridges, ferries were used. The ferry boat, a wide pontoon long enough to carry two lorries, one behind the other, would be poled across the river, or rowed over those stretches where the water might be too deep. As the current often ran fast some skill was needed to bring the ferry safely to the far side, and it took time. You would have thought that on these main roads, on which the movement of war supplies depended, relays of ferries would have been installed at the wider rivers to avoid unnecessary delay. Not only was that not so, but the ferry men, who were controlled by the Provincial Road Bureaux under the Ministry of Communications, refused to work after dark, or at meal hours. The consequence was that again and again a long string of vehicles would be held up waiting to cross, and if the ferry-trip took half an hour, as it usually did, you might have to wait a whole day for your turn. The wooden ferry boats were of local construction and not difficult to build. It would have been easy to increase the number of boats and ferrymen, but these serious bottlenecks in transportation continued to hamper the Chinese war effort. Only too often have Japanese bombers taken advantage of the target presented by a group of vehicles bunched at a ferry.\n\nBetween Kweilin and Hengyang you pass the watershed that separates the Yangtze basin from the West river basin. An ancient narrow canal, five feet wide, recently repaired, connects the two headwaters. There is an old story of a British gunboat having come up from the West river past Kweilin to a point whence those on board could see the mast-tops of a sister ship which had sailed up from the Yangtze. The masts must have been very tall; or perhaps the story is tall, because actually the gap between them could not have been less than thirty miles.\n\nWithout stopping at Hengyang I went straight through the same",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215943,
        "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-2002",
        "page_number": 242,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "176\n\n22nd December, in the midst of some of the most savage fighting on Hong Kong Island, the single largest atrocity involving civilians of the entire battle period occurred. Much has been made of atrocities that affected Europeans, but this incident is worth analysing because it gives us hints on what the Japanese knew about Hong Kong. Ma Tso Yuen recounted how, while his family were having dinner, they heard shots and found that their building, No 42 Blue Pool Road, was surrounded by Japanese. The inhabitants of the building and its neighbour, No 44, were systematically rounded up and herded together. Through a door, Ma saw a neighbour being beaten for resisting. The women were separated, many raped, and then killed. The men were taken down near the nullah and bayoneted, with Japanese stabbing the bodies to make sure all were dead. Ma survived, although he suffered nine separate wounds, because he lay hidden. When the danger was over, he realised he was surrounded by the bodies of 30 men, including that of his own son. **The number of men, women and children killed in other parts of the building is unknown; the buildings were small, low-rise apartments, but crowded: in one flat, some fourteen people were sheltering. Phyllis Harrop, through her KMT contacts, estimated that at least forty persons in her building alone were killed. No other atrocity against civilians was as systematic, organised, or as savage as this. Normal battle mayhem was not the motive. Kempeitai agents travelled with battle units, even though they were not part of the normal military structure. Under cover of fighting, they could settle other opposition. Blue Pool Road was targeted because it was where KMT officials and agents lived with their families. It was no random massacre. Among the dead included men from the Ministry of Communications and the Central Trust, a front organisation for the KMT, whose offices had been searched by the British and whose members had been arrested and sometimes deported. Ma himself had been an employee of the Central Trust.\n\nThe relationship between the KMT, the colonial government, and individuals involved in undercover work might bear further investigation. Phyllis Harrop mentions in her private diary that 'at the request of Chinese members of the Dai Li organisation who had been left behind in the colony, (she) was asked to go to Chongqing with the complete details of the guerrillas' arms and ammunition, which was buried in various homes and gardens in the island, to deliver information and arrange for instruction to be given to the men remaining in Hong Kong to carry on their work. My escape was engineered by the Chinese.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]