[ { "id": 205355, "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-1967", "page_number": 117, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "110\n\nREV, MR. KRONE\n\nseveral times taking a cruise in his Tea-cup, the mountain was named after it “Poi-tou.' \n\n\"Poi-tou.\" Among the common people, however, the mountain is known by the name \"Shing-shan\", or holy mountain. The rough, barren, mountainous country I have described, has given birth to many superstitions and legends. Some of the huge stones on the hill sides are supposed to represent the tiger, the dragon, and the phoenix. The stones on some hills are said to have locomotive powers, and to pursue any adventurous traveller who attempts to mount their sides; other stones are said, when touched, to have the power of producing pains in the stomach, and others to emit white vapours from their surface. But these matters are of but little importance to us; of more interest are the caves which are found in some of the mountains. The most remarkable of these caves is near the market-place of U-shek-ngam, &, at the base of the mountain. For some centuries this cave has been used as a temple, and its aspect is so changed by the architecture and furniture which have been introduced, that one cannot get a good idea of its natural size and appearance.\n\nNatural History. Quadrumana, A number of small monkeys inhabit the island of Lintin; but this animal is not found in any other part of the district, though Chinese books relate that in former times they were found on 'Ng-tung, and most of the high mountains of the district.\n\nQuadrupeds, — The Chinese tiger, which seems to be a true tiger, is found about 'Ng-tung, and in the neighbourhood of most of the high mountains. It sometimes reaches a considerable size, weighing 200 catties, or 266lb. It feeds generally upon pigs and dogs, and the country people say it occasionally carries off a grass-cutter, but this seems doubtful. It is taken in traps, and is a great prize to its captor, as it will bring him in a sum of $150 to $200; for the bones are in great repute as a tonic medicine, and the flesh is eaten with the idea that the courage of the devourer is improved by the meal.\n\nMore than one species of deer, a fox, and a badger, have also been seen, and a large ant-eater -- the flesh of which is considered a delicacy, and is also supposed to possess medicinal powers. There are many snakes, and among them a large species of python, which sometimes grows to the length of twenty to twenty-four feet;", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205632, "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-1968", "page_number": 174, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n169\n\nOne of the areas in which we have particularly interesting and new information is that of Buddhist \"kinship\": one of the principles for organization used by monks and which copies that of the Chinese kinship system to an astonishing degree. Knowledge of this type of organization throws light in turn on the nature of Buddhist sects. Sects are merely a reflection of the number of disciples; if disciples proliferate then the \"lineage\" tends to divide into new sects; if they dwindle, the sect may disappear. As the author remarks, Westerners accustomed to connexions between sects and doctrines, and Buddhist specialists of Japan where sects have remained exclusive and doctrinal differences preserved, will no doubt find this difficult to accept.\n\nThe question of lay commitment is also pursued and the relation of recruited laymen to the monastic \"kinship\" system. Mr. Welch reveals, in fact, the whole complexity of inter-relationships among monks and laymen in this system and shows that a vast network of connexions existed among Buddhists despite the fact that Buddhism itself had no central leadership. Questions of syncretism are also discussed and the study of Confucian Classics by the monks. The author helps to correct the impression that all monks are illiterate also, by quoting figures from some local surveys conducted by the Communists during the first three years after they came to power.\n\nAs the author says himself: \"we have... a broad gamut of institutions and men, with the good and the bad \"the dragons and the snakes\" side by side. The system had room for both piety and commercialism, scholars and illiterates, vice and discipline - all making up a mixture whose components we know, although we cannot assay the proportions in which they occurred”.\n\nMr. Welch has done much in this work to adjust our perspective on Chinese Buddhist organization. He has already planned a second volume to cover the history of Buddhism. If it is anything like the present work we are in for some refreshing new statements and plenty of surprises.\n\nHong Kong, 1968.\n\nMARJORIE TOPLEY", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208120, "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-1977", "page_number": 159, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "CHEUNG CHOW LONG ISLAND\n\n143\n\npainted to the eyes, and clad in gay garments. Behind these a band of native musicians, youths dressed in gaudy clothes, provide the melody and rhythm. The dragon shakes his head and stamps his feet to the rhythm, the bearers grunt and sweat, the musicians fiddle and bang and blow, the spectators spit and chew, laugh and talk, admire and applaud. The last player disappears round a bend in the street and another procession begins to form itself with much good-natured chaff and chatter. Meantime the dragon processions which have already been sent off wander through the distant fields, and the curious rhythm of the dance rises and falls in every corner of the glens.\n\nSo much we have seen for ourselves, but our kind host, who has lived on the island for many years, tells us that on the great day of the feast, all the small processions meet at the special matshed, where are assembled also some of the local gods, as well as visiting deities who have been brought by the folk from other towns and villages. All these gods are then carried in procession to the Pak Tai Temple to make their how to the occupant. Following this they are carried about a mile to the temple of the Queen of Heaven, the Lady of the fisherfolk, through the streets densely packed with fishermen and townsfolk, and thousands of visitors. At this temple the processions stand aside, and the gods in their chairs of state are raced back to the special matshed. The first god to arrive, even if he arrives in several pieces, brings to his devoted supporters the best of luck during the year.\n\nIn the afternoon the cones are overturned and there is a scramble for the cakes, which are then eaten with the happiest consequences for all concerned. It would be interesting to hear more exactly what these benefits are, for the whole feast looks like an ancient fertility cult.\n\nWe are much indebted in this account to notes jotted down by Mr. A. C. Franklin, and kindly put at our disposal. The opportunity to witness the Moon-cake festival was also due to his kindness. If we have not reproduced all the interesting and suggestive comments which those notes contain, it is because we hope that he will find time to throw them into literary form and publish them. Meantime we would welcome corrections, and an elucidation of the meaning of the feast from our students, some of whom might well take time to visit Cheung Chow for that purpose.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211810, "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": 225, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "200\n\nrash decision to marry the first that came\". Another actor who was to become a local Roscius. Mr. Phunago BRUSHWOOD, \"gave the somewhat unusual stage character of a double-faced farmer (Wurzel) all the selfish cunning and irritable tone which it needed\". Other parts were taken by Miss Polly DEXTER, Mr. HEAVISWELL, Mr. Jehoshaphat SNAKES and Mr. PLEADWELL (as the lawyer!).\n\nIn Box and Cox Messrs PROTEUS, BRUSHWOOD and Mrs. CLAY \"kept the audience in a roar\" (NCH 22.2.1857).\n\n3.3.1857 (Tue)\n\nDramatic readings from Charles Dickens by Mr. Benjamin SEARE. Th: C\n\n―\n\nR: In the Herald of February 28 it was announced that \"we are apprized by 'Circular' that an entertainment of a novel character in Shanghai, but one which has greatly attracted the fashionable and literary world elsewhere, will be given by Mr. Scare in the Hall of the Shanghai Theatre on Tuesday Evening next the 3rd prox. The subject - The Early Writings of Charles Dickens is a theme affording scope for great versatility of talent. (...) The Community are much indebted to Mr. Scare for his gratuitous offer of an evening's intellectual amusement to diversify and enliven the monotony of Shanghai life. The Circular notifies that the divertissement will commence at half past 8 & precisely, that no personal invitations will be issued and that a syllabus of the Lecture will be placed in each seat for the use and acceptance of its occupant”. Then, in the issue of March 7, a report was published: \"A large and select circle of residents had met in the New Theatre\". It became a kind of one man show by Mr. Seare, as the \"requirements of versatility and mimic power were most successfully supplied. (...) The lecturer was perfectly at home in each and all of the various characters as they turned up, passed from one to another with an ease that was admirable and portrayed each with a force of comic power which elicited much applause, and, to select the most appropriate compliment we can bestow, did justice to the author. All in all the audience was \"kept in a roar”. Mr. Seare concluded with some general remarks on the necessity of some recreation of this kind in a community so distant from home and so isolated and comprising at the same time so much intelligence and ability\" (NCH 7.3.1857). One wonders how Mr. Seare was able to give these lectures free of charge; had he been a touring artist that would of course have been impossible. But as it turns out he was a mercantile assistant in the employment of Gilman & Co (this according to the Shanghai Almanac for 1858). In May 1865 he gave another performance (see 27.5.1865). No further details are available about the programme, but no doubt the characters from The Pickwick Papers figured largely in it. Who, after all, can resist Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Jingle and Sam Weller? Dickens himself began readings from his own works one year later, in April 1858, in Britain and the United States.\n\n26.3.1857 (Thur)\n\nJ.B. BUCKSTONE: \"A Kiss in the Dark\" (1840)\n\nT: Farce (1 act)\n\nM.B.W. JERROLD: \"Cool as a Cucumber\" (1851)\n\nT: Farce (1 act)\n\nH. DANVERS: \"A Conjugal Lesson\" (1856)\n\nT: Farce (1 act)\n\nC: Amateurs\n\nTh: N.N. (CH\n\nR: In a witty mind \"The Man on the Bund\" informed us that \"by way of introduction there was a kiss — and in the dark too! — perhaps the sweetest kiss of all, administered with enviable gusto by Mr. SNAKES as Fathom. Mrs. Pettibone submitted to it with less indignation than the fact of her being so much respected led us to suppose. But then, it was to punish the odiously jealous Mr. Pettibone who would insist on making\n\nPage 225\n\nPage 226", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211901, "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": 316, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "291\n\nout at church, and would be back before long, as the service began at nine o'clock. They only have one service, and get it over by eleven in time for breakfast. I was much disappointed, but of course it could not be helped.\n\nI took a long walk one afternoon with Mr Phillips, and posted my two letters. He took me through some parts I had never seen before. He had to call on business, so I came home alone. I passed the barracks, where I heard some native music, which to my ears was rather discordant.\n\nIn addition to their horses, the Malays use bullocks for drawing water casks etc. These bullocks are great thick clumsy brutes, with monstrous horns, and a great hump on their back. They have scarcely any hair, and go along at about two miles an hour. There is a strange breed of dogs and cats. There are plenty of snakes; one was shown me about three yards long, but with a very thin body, and covered with beautiful green and yellow marks. The frugivorous bats are very large, and as one walks about under the trees in the dark they almost flap their wings in one's face.\n\nAt last on Wednesday night we came off to the ship and once more took up our abode within its dreary sides. Everything seemed so dull and dreary, but I consoled myself with the thought that a fortnight ought to bring us to our journey's end. I brought with me a stock of pomeloes. They are a species of orange which grow larger than one's head, and are so healthy a fruit that one cannot eat too much of them. I got fourteen for two rupees. I have felt the benefit of eating them freely. In fact, they are such a cure for the bile that I have not been in the least troubled with it since eating them.\n\nI managed to catch two butterflies and a moth, all of them very large, compared with any to be seen in England. There are some very fine ones which seem to be very common there. The birds have the most brilliant plumage, of all colours; one kind of dove, which is wild, naturally keeps up a most curious noise which can be heard a long way off. Its note is rather long, and has a peculiar sound when heard in the stillness of the night. Indeed, Java abounds with everything that is lovely and enchanting. There is a perpetual summer. Everything is always in season, and the excessive fertility is the means of making the natives indolent and careless. They never work unless compelled to do so. Then having got a few cents, they live on it till it is gone, and only work again when they can go no further in debt. They creep about so slowly that one cannot help feeling tempted to help them to a kick. Even a small establishment", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213152, "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-1993", "page_number": 220, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "202\n\nwas a full hour's walk further from the market than Tsat Muk Kiu\n\n75\n\nA contact from a mountainside village explained that they could not keep poultry: \"We lived in the mountains, where there were too many snakes, civet cats, wild cats, and other animals. Any poultry we kept would be killed. At best we could keep just one or two for our own consumption.\"\n\n76\n\nThe Basel missionaries said in 1853: \"They do not pay attention to fruit-trees, and fruit-trees do not seem to grow in this region. Thus, fruit like pineapples, oranges, and mangoes are not found here.\" See PH Hase, \"Sha Tau Kok in 1853\", op cit.\n\n77 Contact from Tsat Muk Kiu village\n\n78\n\nThe late Mr K.M.A. Barnett told of a village house in an exceptionally remote mountainside village which he visited in the late 1930s, and which sported a cast-iron Victorian wash-hand stand and a framed picture of the \"Shang at Bay\". A hawker had picked these up in Hong Kong in a second-hand sale, and thought it worth his while carrying these very cumbersome things around the mountain villages until he got a sale.\n\n79\n\nThis trade in imported vegetable seeds was noted by the District Officer in 1926, Administrative Reports for the Year 1926, App. J. \"Report on the New Territories for the Year 1926\", p. J4. \"It is noteworthy that nearly all the vegetable seed used comes from Chinese territory.\"\n\n80\n\nEastern no. 66, Extension of the Boundaries of the Colony, op. cit., Enclosure No. 12 in Item No. 204, 28 April 1899", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216224, "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": 523, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "457\n\nRoad. That is the supermarket and estate agency at No. 44. Now, many of the buildings flanking Conduit Road top 30 or 40 storeys blocking their neighbour's view. Certainly today barking deer can no longer be heard calling from Victoria Peak. But, proving the location is still peaceful, Realty Gardens does have its own flock of pigeons and it is not infrequently visited by a destructive, gregarious group of sulphur-crested cockatoos.\n\nNevertheless the pattern of nature does change. In the 1970s crested-mynah birds were common in the grounds at Realty Gardens. Nowadays, you seldom see them. Snakes are not uncommon. But much of the wild life on the slopes of the Peak itself is nocturnal and limited. However I did see dead ferret badgers and masked-palm civets, in the 1990s, which had been run over by vehicles. Although rare on the Peak, one can occasionally even see fresh-water crabs and blue-tailed skinks. The latter is Hong Kong's most attractive lizard.\n\nAlthough customs have changed one can still sometimes see and hear street criers in Conduit Road. They vary from the itinerant, tiny, wizened old sharpener of knives and scissors to the trader who buys odds and ends of scrap metal. There is also the old man who sells lengths of bamboo. These are used for hanging out the washing to dry when it is euphemistically called \"flags of all nations.\" In the mid-1950s, I remember there was a peddler with a pet monkey.\n\nCertainly if the present old, worn, steps, which are original, which Han Suyin and her boy friend once trod in the film shot at Realty Gardens, together with the original balustrades and the heavy, battered, gravity retaining walls which still exist today, could talk, they would have wonderful tales to tell.\n\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nThe author gratefully acknowledges the assistance given by Mrs. Betty Chiu, long-time resident of Realty Gardens, in the writing of this paper. The author is also grateful to Mr. David Roads, Honorary\n\n'The picture in the Hong Kong Museum of Art, of 41 Conduit Road, is a watercolour on paper titled, Fairview, Conduit Road 1926', by Alfred Lane, reference AH72.1. It was donated to the Museum of Art by Mr. Kwok On.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]