[
    {
        "id": 212098,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 40,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "17\n\nwith its inculcation of “right thinking\", the complete process has been summed up in a few well-chosen words by Dr. Monlin Chiang, one of the most prominent educationalists of the early Republican period:\n\n“These moral precepts came from the Confucian classics. Moral ideas were driven into the people by every possible means — temples, theatres, houses, toys, proverbs, schools, history and stories until they became habits in daily life, 233\n\nThe effect of both the legacy and the drilling was not lost on competent Western observers. Writing over 150 years ago, in his standard work on China first published in the 1830s, a future governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Davis, then only lately returned to England from many years' membership of the Honourable East India Company's Select Committee at Canton, had this to say: \"The Chinese lower classes are better educated or at least better trained than in most other countries”.\n\nPART THREE: “Right Thinking\" in Action in Tsuen Wan\n\n134\n\n+\n\nTsuen Wan District (like all the rest) provides plenty of evidence for the effectiveness of the indoctrination, as well as occasional examples of emulation and performance. People knew what to think and what to do, and recognized the attainment of the prescribed high standards of conduct and behaviour even if they themselves did not measure up. Men who did so were greatly respected, to the point of veneration.\n\nIt is the general opinion among Tsuen Wan natives, then and now, that such a one was the late Mr. Chan Wing-on, a former Tsuen Wan Rural Committee leader and also Chairman of the New Territories Heung Yee Kuk. Mr. Chan, who unfortunately died comparatively young, left a fine reputation behind him. He is commemorated by a tablet in a traditional-style pavilion, named for him, which was erected the year after his death near the entrance to the Chuk Lam Sim Yuen, one of the large religious houses located above the town. The memorial tablet records his life and achievements as a teacher and as a public figure; with an emphasis on his virtuous conduct and character and how it had influenced others for good:\n\n\"Entering the teaching profession, he taught the village",
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    {
        "id": 212106,
        "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": 48,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "G. Knapp, The Chinese House: Craft Symbol, and the Folk Tradition (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1990). Knapp does not cover the paintings and stucco work that were a marked feature of the Kwangtung architectural style. For examples of this fine traditional decorative work, see Rural Architecture in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, Government Information Services Department, 1979).\n\nIn the Hakka villages of the Tsuen Wan district, this \"animal\" was always a unicorn. In Cantonese villages the lion was usual. However, their purpose and motivation was clearly the same. Informants said there were differences in the dance performances of lions and unicorns; unicorns \"crept, bobbed and weaved\", whereas lions would \"stand up and prance\". The musical accompaniment, drums and gongs, was the same, and previously firecrackers had been an indispensable part of any performance by lions or unicorns.\n\nHugh Baker mentions that the Liaos of Sheung Shui were known throughout the New Territories for their unicorn dance team. See the interesting information given in his Sheung Shui, A Chinese Lineage Village (London, Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1968), p. 193.\n\nSee my \"Notes on Temples and Shrines on Hong Kong Island\" in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 27 (1987), p. 287.\n\nMonlin Chiang, Tides from the West (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1947), p. 9. John Francis Davis, The Chinese, A General Description of the Empire of China and its Inhabitants (London, Charles Knight, 1836) Vol. 2, pp. 29-30.\n\nFrom the memorial tablet to Mr. Chan Wing-on, Chairman of the Tsuen Wan Rural Committee and Chairman of the 18th Term, New Territories Heung Yee Kuk 1950-52, at the Wing On Pavilion, Fu Yung Shan, Tsuen Wan. Mr. Chan died on 15 October 1956; see Annual Departmental Reports, District Commissioner, New Territories, (1953-54 para. 56, and 1956-57 para. 119).\n\nFrom a “Short History of Yeung Uk Village\" (in Chinese), published at the time of the village resiting in 1965 and written by Yeung's eldest grandson, Mr Yeung Cho-ling. According to the commemorative tablet, the grave was repaired on a lucky day in the middle month of the autumn season in the 10th year of Kuang Hsu, that is in September-October 1884.\n\n1736; but in fact the ping-san year is the 1st year of Ch'ien Lung's long reign. There was probably another, less altruistic factor at work here too: since it was believed that the graves of good people have a beneficial effect on the fortunes of their family for generations to come. It is implicit in this case that the good influences of the grave were not yet spent.\n\nFor a more recent example from Tsing Yi Island, see my Rural Communities, op. cit., p. 143.\n\nContents more than values, I suggest? Wolfram Eberhard, Cantonese Ballads (Munich State Library Collection) (Taipei, The Orient Cultural Service, 1972), p.2.\n\nR. David Arkush, \"Orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Proverbs\" at pp. 310-335 of Kwang-Ching Liu (ed.) Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990).\n\nHelen Kwok and Mini Chan, Fossils From a Rural Past, A Study of Extant Cantonese Children's Songs (Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 1990), pp. 17, 29.\n\nLucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1971), successively pp.126, 94-95.",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214819,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 234,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "200\n\nThe Effect on the People\n\nThe net result of all these \"teachings\" was to foster a particular outlook among the people, educated and illiterate alike. Along with other equally long-lived influences such as geomancy, and fortune-telling by various means, it created men like the father of Monlin Chiang, the well-known Republican scholar official, concerning whom the son wrote:\n\n\"He believed in feng shui, the spirits of wind and water, and in fortune-telling and therefore - with a sort of fatalism - that a man's life was predetermined by super-natural forces. However, he also believed that by virtuous conduct and clean thinking one could make these forces respond by bestowing blessings upon oneself and one's family; thus the predetermined course of life would gradually shift its ground to a better course.\n\n17\n\nThis outlook was probably quite uniform. Any variations to it were a matter of degree, dependent on to which end of the spectrum of belief and superstition men inclined rather than any more fundamental divide. Differences were determined largely by education, class, and status. In this particular instance, we are dealing with an educated man, a member of a gentry family, a regular Confucian. 18\n\nPART TWO\n\nPolytheism and Demonism: the \"Non-instructive\" Side of Chinese Religion\n\nThis second main division of Chinese religious thought and behaviour has to do with an immense preoccupation with gods and spirits, and the purposes and expectations lying behind it. Bombarded from every direction by Confucian exhortation and Buddhist admonition, the mass of the populace was aware that however filial or well-behaved people might be, there was much in this world that lay beyond human understanding or control.\n\nThis realization explains the existence of what may here be styled the \"non-instructive\" side of Chinese religion. It was an enormous arena in which, in their never-ending confrontation with evil spirits and",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214826,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 241,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "207\n\nold and modern form, they can be found hanging on many walls, even to this day. See Ibid. pp.235-243. Again, as with the religious works, the tracts have Buddhist/Taoist and Confucian connections. The first two are stated in the compilers' Notes to be respectively \"a Buddhist tract\", and the \"work of a literate adhering to Buddhism\". The third was a collection of classical sentences, memorized by schoolboys and often quoted in proverbs, described as the work of a [Confucian] literatus. The last named was by another literatus, again stated to be a Confucianist. The similar work printed earlier in the same Section, the Ch'i Chia or \"About Ruling the Family\" is described as \"the work of a Buddhist writer who is at the same time a Confucianist\". Ibid, pp.208, 222, 234 and 185. The Ch'i Chia, again with Chinese text, translation and Notes, is between pp.158-193.\n\nRefs. \"Instruction\" and cautionary tales could also be found here and there in the texts of opera plays performed all over the country, and were incorporated into the repertoire of traditional tales told by generations of storytellers in towns and villages in all the provinces.\n\n15 From the inside text of the dust cover of Francis C.M. Wei, The Spirit of Chinese Culture (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947).\n\nGeomancy was probably the most compelling of these beliefs, because it concerned both the living and the dead. In its two main branches, geomancy catered for the tombs of the dead as well as the abodes of the living, with their combined effect upon human destinies,\n\n17 Chiang Monlin, Tides from the West (Taipei, China Cultural Publishing Foundation, 1957 but originally Yale University Press, 1947), p.29. The second element in this credo is of particular interest. In it is made manifest the influence of the religious \"Instruction\" given in the works described above, and the whole thrust of the concern with moral teaching described by Hu Shih,\n\nis Ibid. pp.6, 29. Also the biography in Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard (eds.) Biographical Dictionary of Republican China (New York, Columbia University Press, 1967), Vol.1, p.347.\n\n19 This major aspect of Chinese religious belief is covered in the two final chapters of Mrs. J.G. Cormack's Everyday Customs in China (Edinburgh, The Moray Press, 1935), pp.229-256, entitled \"The Influence of the Spirit World\" and \"Spectres and How to Deal with Them\". See also Soothill, op.cit., pp.262-270",
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