[
    {
        "id": 206010,
        "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": 90,
        "title": "RAS-1970",
        "content_text": "CHINESE EMIGRATION AND THE DECK PASSENGER TRADE 85\n\nat the French settlement on New Caledonia, after which the French authorities sent a ship to rescue the survivors on Rossel Island. Only one small Chinese boy was found, whose story was that the rest of the passengers and crew had been eaten by the natives. This was accepted as gospel by the press in Sydney where the boy was taken, although there were some glaring inconsistencies in his story, and it was repeated in the British Admiralty Sailing Directions. Not until thirty years later was it seriously questioned, when its most important critic was Sir William MacGregor, the first Australian administrator of New Guinea. It is now generally believed that, rather than wait to be taken on to Australia and a life-time of labour to repay the inflated cost of their passages, the Chinese had preferred to take a chance in New Guinea. Food, including the highly prized luxury bêche-de-mer, was comparatively plentiful, and life in New Guinea with freedom must have appeared infinitely preferable to life in the Australian goldfields saddled with a heavy personal debt. When the first official census was taken in New Guinea, many Chinese were recorded, of whose origins there was no satisfactory explanation.\n\nAnother notable incident in the history of Chinese emigration, and which had a happy conclusion, concerned the Peruvian ship Maria Luz in 1872. The Maria Luz had left Macao with over 300 indentured labourers for the Peruvian guano islands, and was forced into Yokohama harbour in distress. One coolie jumped overboard and swam to H.M.S. Iron Duke, where he reported that the passengers on the Maria Luz had either been kidnapped or decoyed on board under false pretences. As a result of the publicity and outcry which this caused, all the passengers were sent back to China. Peru had then no treaty relations with Japan, but threatened war unless Japan apologised and indemnified her. The British government, however, warned Peru that any hostile act on her part would invite retaliatory action by the Royal Navy; and the whole question was referred to France, who gave her verdict in favour of Japan. This case focussed public attention on the many unsavoury aspects of the emigrant trade, and also led to the opening of diplomatic relations between China and Japan.\n\nIt is necessary to remind ourselves that conditions in many of the emigrant ships to South-east Asia during the 1850's and\n\nPage 90\n\nPage 91",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210989,
        "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-1987",
        "page_number": 51,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "26\n\ngiant dams, expressways, large-scale forestry felling, with 'appropriate technologies' better adjusted to the natural and social environment? How to check the power and influence of foreign technicians indifferent to local problems? How to control the abysmal growth of destitute shanty towns? These basic problems of China have become the problems of Amazonia, South Asia, Black Africa, Melanesia. The interests of some Parisian intellectuals may have shifted elsewhere, but other intellectuals have remained deeply concerned with the relevance, or the irrelevance, of our Western model of development for less affluent countries. In a recent book dealing with the problems of development, Edgard Pisani, a French intellectual who is also a former French High Commissioner in New Caledonia, has compared the energy gains offered by a large-scale modern dam with the energy savings of 5,000 peasant earthenware stoves. His point is this: these 5,000 stoves are very cheaply produced and they save the heat otherwise wasted when the kettle was just put on stones; these stoves compare very favourably in terms of energy gains with the expensive dam built by transnational corporations under the supervision of highly-paid foreign experts. Pisani is a moderate social democrat. He never indulged in radical Maoism. Yet his argument clearly amounts to a posthumous and quite unexpected validation of some basic themes of the Great Leap Forward thirty years ago.\n\nFrom Watteau paintings and the Pompadour festivities to peasant stoves in Black Africa, from the Confucian mirage of the eighteenth century to the Maoist mirage of the twentieth century, from Victor Hugo's maledictions against Anglo-French vandalism in Peking to the Gaullian joint celebration of France de toujours and Chine de toujours, from the Philosophes' appeal to China against the tyranny of the old monarchy to the New Radicals' appeal to China against the tyranny of the Western model of development, the story of Sino-French intellectual relations for the last three centuries has been extraordinarily rich and diversified.\n\nFrom this kaleidoscopic sequence, possibly the most sensitive, the most radical and the most disruptive image is that of Baudelaire:\n\nJust as in the old days we would leave for China",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522",
        "rank": 0
    }
]