[ { "id": 209490, "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-1982", "page_number": 147, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "125\n\nunfortunately, we shall never know. We could, perhaps, tentatively add a seventh motive for murder to Tennyson Jesse's list: murder born of pride or 'face', murder from shame,21\n\n22\n\nAn earlier Chinese murder had not baffled an English judge and jury; this was a 'murder for profit', to use William Bolitho's phrase. At the Worcester Assizes in 1919, a Chinese Birmingham factory worker, Sung Djang Djing, was accused of murdering a fellow countryman, Zec Ming Wu, on June 23, 1919, in Warley Park on the Warwickshire-Worcestershire border. The victim's head had been savagely battered. Sung was accused of luring Zee to the woods, murdering him, and then stealing his Post Office Savings Book, which had a £240 credit. Sung admitted stealing the Savings Book found in his possession but denied murder, accusing another Chinese of the crime. The evidence was too strong; the motive too obvious. Sung was hanged in Worcester Prison (where, curiously, he was converted to Anglicanism in the weeks before execution). Sung was one of a number of Chinese attracted to the Midlands by the prospect of high wages during the war. It is not clear whether he was, like Lock, a former seaman, or had been a member of the Chinese Labour Corps, recruited in China, especially Weihaiwei, to work behind the lines on the Western Front, or in Britain's war industries. The problem of special ‘Oriental motivation' did not arise in this trial; it was a commonplace murder.2\n\nThe Chinese in Britain\n\nIn 1925 there were three main areas of Chinese settlement in Britain: Liverpool, Cardiff, and Limehouse in the East End of London. These communities had been formed primarily by Chinese seamen who had either jumped ship or been paid off in England, from the 1850s onwards; for once shipping routes were opened up between Britain and the Far East, the demand for Chinese seamen steadily grew, especially as they, like Lascars, were then a source of cheap maritime labour. Many of those who settled in Britain started small businesses, especially laundries (as did their compatriots in Canada, Australia and the United States). It should be emphasised, though, that the Chinese restaurant business did not expand markedly, or flourish, until", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209492, "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-1982", "page_number": 149, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "127\n\n20\n\nPart of this, at a later date, was due to the influence of the popular novelist Sax Rohmer who invented the sinister but suave Dr. Fu Manchu, perennially at war with the tight-lipped, establishment Nayland Smith (Ian Fleming's Dr. No revives this stale mythology).2 The British public came to believe, as a result of press reports, that the insidious Doctor had become incarnate in the person of 'Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurateur and 'dope-king', whose premises were located in Gerrard Street, London, opposite the Forty Three Club, Mrs. Kate Meyrick's notorious night-club.27 Chang was a member, and supplied the club's rich clientele with narcotics, especially cocaine, until April 1924, when he was sentenced to fourteen months imprisonment, followed by deportation.28 Although the great majority of Britain's Chinese population were hard-working, intent on bettering their lot by economic enterprise, a constant process of stereotyping caricatured Chinese as inscrutable and complex, unknowable and different, sly and dangerous, separated by a vast cultural chasm from Englishmen. This, I believe, is suggested by Marshall Hall's comments in the Lock Ah Tam case and, as we shall see, by Sir Travers Humphreys' animadversions on Miao Chung-yi, whose case will now be examined.\n\nDr. Miao Chun-yi: a murder for profit?\n\nMiss Siu Wai-sheung married Miao Chung-yi, a doctor of law or jurisprudence, in New York on May 12, 1928.20 Born in 1899, she was the eldest daughter of Siu Ying-chau, a rich Macau merchant with business interests also in Hong Kong. Her mother was Siu's primary wife (tsai), but there were other children born to Siu's concubines (tsip). As a girl she was clever and able, and when her mother died in 1910 she helped run her father's household. She was educated at St. Stephen's Girls' College, Hong Kong, which she left in 1917 to further her education at Emerson College, Boston, U.S.A., and graduated in 1922. Then she returned home. In 1924 her father died. She was named sole executrice in his will; he left over a million dollars — an unusual event in those days when unmarried Chinese women had few, if any, testamentary rights. Moreover, she inherited much of his wealth, although she had a younger brother, and several half-brothers and half-sisters. Soon after", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209498, "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-1982", "page_number": 155, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "133\n\nstrangled by three pieces of string or cord. Travers Humphreys asserts: 'The method is peculiarly Oriental, and indicated that she had been sitting on the ground when someone, with the string held in both hands, had suddenly drawn it tightly round her throat and knotted it behind'.42 Strangulation by this method — a ligature — is not, surely, 'peculiarly Oriental'? It was adopted, for example, by the murderer in the celebrated Yarmouth case of 1900, where the victim was strangled by a mohair bootlace.4 Another source of perplexity, to repeat, was language: people who do not speak your language are apt to be regarded as dense or odd. Miao often declared he had been misunderstood. Thus at first he believed his wife's body had been found by Miss Crossley, and he is alleged to have asked 'Did she go to the place where they bathe?' (indicating that he knew where she had been murdered). Later, Miao's counsel urged that what he really said was, 'Had she gone to look for his wife at the place where people take the bus'.\n\nThe three pieces of paper, with the cabbalistic or arcane questions on them, also worried Travers Humphreys. One of the statements made by Miao, he relates, 'to the Appeal Court was that he was in the habit of asking God which of two or more courses he should take, when he would put the alternatives on separate pieces of paper, would then pray for guidance and decide by drawing a lot. Does not that statement indicate a confusion of mind sufficient to account for almost any action?'44 But the art of divination — the drawing of lots — has a long history in China; so, too, has fortune-telling, once a normal custom when a marriage was projected between families. The mysterious I Ching has also been widely used by Chinese for centuries as a means of grasping the future. One should also refer to a widely-held belief in the efficacy of feng-shui, certainly in the 1920s. The rational Travers Humphreys, in the quotation given above, was suggesting, of course, that Miao was suffering from religious mania or acute superstition; but, if so, why should this provide a motive for the crime unless he believed his wife was the Antichrist?\n\nOn balance, it seems obvious that Miao's crime was a murder for profit. He had little money in his possession when he married; the planned two-months vacation appears to have been financed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209499, "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-1982", "page_number": 156, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "134\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nby Mrs. Miao. Miao was not in employment, having just finished his studies in America, though he did state he had been offered a legal post in China and was to take it up when he returned from his lengthy honeymoon. Little is known about his father's finances. Presumably he was an official, but had he lost his post when the Nationalists seized power in 1927, or was he dead by then? It was not only a murder for profit, but a premeditated one, planned before he left America. Miao wanted not only his wife's inheritance but her jewellery and other possessions.\n\nIt has been argued that the real motive for the crime was Mrs. Miao's infertility. She had been told at Albany, so it is alleged, that she would be unable to bear children, and the knowledge depressed her husband. An article in The Sunday Express of March 24, 1929, quotes Miao as saying his wife died willingly to allow him to remarry and have heirs. This story sounds implausible. Divorce was not impossible in China in 1928; in any case, it would have been legitimate for Miao to have taken a secondary wife (tsip), as his wife's father, the Macau merchant, had done on several occasions. Adoption was, and is, a common practice in China and often utilised when a married man has no male heir. Even if Miao had been barred by his devotion to Christianity, a monogamous religion, from either divorcing his wife or taking a concubine, religious scrupulousness does not seem to provide a realistic motive for his crime. One surmises that if the statement were in fact made by Miao, it was an afterthought, a justification for a cruel murder and theft. One would agree with Travers Humphreys that Miao was an ‘odd fellow'; but to the non-murderous most murderers must appear odd, simply because they have indulged in, rather than daydreamed about, murder they have crossed the line that separates the good and the not-so-good from the truly bad.\n\nNarrowing the gap\n\nLock Ah Tam and Dr. Miao Chung-yi exemplify, broadly speaking, the two strands of Chinese migration into Britain: uneducated or lower-class Chinese and educated or upper-class Chinese. In 1901, according to MacNair, there were only 387 Chinese reported as resident in England and Wales; 1,319 in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209504, "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-1982", "page_number": 161, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "139\n\n10 The Homicide Act of 1957 extended to the English courts the Scottish doctrine of Diminished Responsibility, S. 2 of the Homicide Act, 1957, reads that the accused can be found guilty not of murder but manslaughter, if he was suffering from such abnormality of the mind (whether arising from a condition of arrested or retarded development of mind or any inherent causes or induced by disease or injury) as substantially impaired his mental responsibility for his acts and omissions in doing or being a party to the killing'.\n\n11 Marjoribanks, op cit, 388. The police stated in evidence that Lock was drinking one-and-a-half to two bottles of whisky a day.\n\n12 Op cit, 389.\n\n**There is an excellent discussion of 'running amok' in Isabella Bird, The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (London: John Murray, 1883) 355-357.**\n\n**Sir Ellis Griffith (1896-1934). Called to the Bar, 1925.**\n\n**Sir Frank MacKinnon (1871-1946), afterwards Lord Justice MacKinnon, 1937, MacKinnon had little or no experience of the criminal courts before his appointment to the Bench.**\n\n**Sir Travers Humphreys, A Book of Trials (London: Heinemann, 1953) 162.**\n\n17 F. Tennyson Jesse, Murder and Its Motives (London: Harrap, 1924) 11.\n\n1 In R.D. Laing and A. Esterton, Sanity, Madness and the Family (London: Tavistock, 1964), the authors attempt to discover meaning in madness. They argue that schizophrenia, for example, is not something that comes out of the blue but is a product of family interaction: the sources of schizophrenia are to be found in the family environment, family life.\n\n10 See, for example, the tragic 1938 case of Sidney Paul in E. Spencer Shew, A Second Companion to Murder (London: Cassell, 1961) 168-170. Paul killed his wife because he had lately lost his job. This he had concealed from his wife to save her anxiety, and day after day he had left home as if to go to work as a salesman in the city. At last, in desperation, he killed his wife to save her from destitution.\n\n* This celebrated and unique series was founded in 1905 by Harry Hodge (1872-1947), the Glasgow Publisher.\n\n#1 Homicide and suicide are both forms of aggression: one turned outside, the other inside. Loss of standing or position, related to feelings of shame or injured pride often motivate suicide.\n\n**See William Bolitho, Murder for Profit (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926).**\n\n29 See The Times for September 8, October 23, and December 4, 1919. Also E. Spencer Shew, A Second Companion to Murder. (London: Cassell, 1961) 221.\n\n\"A good account of this development, especially of Man-owned restaurants, is given in James L. Watson, Emigration and the Chinese Lineage: The Mans in Hong Kong and London (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1975).\n\n20\n\nMontagu Williams, Q.C., Round London: Down East and Up West (London: Macmillan, 1893) 76-78. It is possible that Williams mistook a party of Malays or Lascars for Chinese. It is also not likely that a group of Chinese would charge into the street shouting \"Amok!\". Williams' account is retrospective and written many years after the events were witnessed by him.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210896, "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-1986", "page_number": 247, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "230\n\nCARL SMITH\n\nplague, the Hongkong Government cleared most of the district of Taipingshan. This had been the city's most congested area, and its removal displaced a large number of people.\n\nTo provide needed housing, Ho A-mei explained that the Fuk Tin Co was building houses across the harbour, where it was still rural. There would be fresh air, wide streets and better sanitary conditions.\n\nSome several scores of houses were almost completed and site formation for others was in progress. The houses were of brick with tile roof, two storeys high and with ample room between the blocks. The intention was to build several hundred. Built in bulk, the properties could be sold at a bargain price, at the same time the promoters could realise a substantial profit.\n\nThe hope was that \"many respectable Chinese will buy land and houses over the way as family residences and that thus many well-to-do Chinese who have houses in the interior will find it convenient and pleasant to 'pitch their tent' in the neighbourhood of this thriving colony.\" Nor need there be any anxiety about security as there were military personnel at the Chinese custom's station at Laichikok.\n\nBut looking ahead only a little farther, there was the prospect of the area becoming British, for as the interviewer stated, “such an extension of Hongkong has long been needed, and, I am glad to say, the day when it will be un fait accompli is now within measurable distance.\" The distance was three more years.\n\nOPIUM MONOPOLY AND HO CONNECTION\n\nSomehow Ho A-mei became involved in a Chinese scheme to solve the opium question. Some background will aid in understanding his role in the scheme.\n\nIn 1875 the British took the opportunity presented by the murder of a member of a British exploratory expedition in the province of Yunnan to press China for a treaty revision. As a consequence, the Chefoo Agreement was negotiated the following year.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 } ]