[ { "id": 205278, "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": 40, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "The Travelling Palace of Southern Sung\n\n33\n\nFirst,\n\nWhat in fact is the significance of this stone gate? According to Sung Hsueh-p'eng, in the original temple in the former Ma-tau-wei Village, which used to be populated by Chiu clansmen, descendants of Sung emperors and princes, there were two idols, one male and the other female, dressed as an emperor and an empress respectively. During the reign of Kuang Hsü in late Ch'ing, the male idol was clad in a gorgeous yellow robe embroidered with dragons. Later, the Chiu clansmen removed to another place and people of other clans came to live there until the evacuation of the population and the demolition of the whole village. It is, therefore, apparent that at least some members of the royal party did stay in the village during their visit to Kowloon. Secondly, apart from being the only historical relic besides the Sung Wong Toi stone commemorating the visit of the two emperors of Southern Sung in Kowloon, it marks the boundary line of the Kuan-fu Travelling Palace in the west. As a result of the valuable work done at the present site by the Government, we now have an additional attractive and distinctive symbol of the cultural history of Hong Kong and Kowloon.\n\nVIII. THE TRAVELLING PALACE\n\nOne must do away with the conception, rather the misconception, that by the word \"palace\" is meant a single, magnificent building for the residence or office of a king or emperor constructed to a beautiful design, of valuable materials and of gorgeous colours. The term \"travelling palace\" (literally translated from the Chinese hsing-kung) implies the place where an emperor stayed on his travels. Such was the Travelling Palace of Southern Sung in Kowloon (Kuan-fu).\n\nPerhaps a translation of the more detailed account of the Travelling Palace in Ya-shan written by one of the officials in the court at that time gives a clear view of what a travelling palace was like. In 1278, after arriving at Ya-shan, the mountain behind the Ya-men Bay where the Sungs met their last defeat from the Mongols, the royal party constructed the travelling palace. In the sixth month, they entered the mountain and chopped down trees wherewith to construct one thousand military houses and a travelling palace of thirty houses. In the compound, the central (or", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212927, "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-1992", "page_number": 236, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "221\n\nThe book is therefore both factual and interesting, and at times even amusing. The reader is thus able to learn much about Hong Kong's new town development process through the personal insights of many of its past and present inhabitants. The result is therefore a very readable variety of perspectives on the growth of Tsuen Wan, from government and newcomers alike, but perhaps more than any other through the eyes of the many indigenous inhabitants who grew up with the early town and endured the heady expansion of the 1960s and 70s.\n\nHaving worked on parts of the Hong Kong new town story before, the reviewer is well aware of how much remains to be learned and told of this amazing story which has been created largely over the last thirty-five years. In this book James Hayes has added a large and unique addition to that academic enterprise, and has been kind enough to add some very important gaps in our knowledge of that story that only he could fill. For that we should be grateful, for the result is a text that not only gives the wider public the first detailed account of just how one of Hong Kong's nine new towns has developed, but perhaps even more importantly it has been put into a social and cultural context that has rarely been touched upon before. It can well be said that a town is its people. In Tsuen Wan: Growth of a 'New Town' and Its People James Hayes has given us the very best of an account of how such a new community has grown up to form one of the dynamic new centres of contemporary Hong Kong.\n\nMICHAEL BRISTOW\n\nAnne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction. Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press, 1993. xix + 322 pp. Bibliography. Indices.\n\nAnne Birrell's Chinese Mythology is unquestionably the best book on the subject in print in English. Despite Birrell's obvious and acknowledged debt to Yuan Ke's works in Chinese, her book is a vast improvement over Yuan Ke's recent publication in English, Dragons and Dynasties (Penguin), which supplies a single version of each myth (usually a composite of several versions), with no attribution to any Chinese text. Birrell's Mythology is to be applauded for the care with which it lists variant versions of the same myth and gathers different myths on the same theme. All the major subjects in early Chinese myth", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216206, "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": 505, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "439\n\nthe walls (St Francis healing the sick etc) and statues around the altar. In the surrounding grounds, a garden seemed to have been abandoned; a large copper statue dominated. We managed to snap a few interior shots. With the light fading rapidly, we walked down to a nearby spring from where St Francis was supposed to have drawn his water supply. The stone upon which he is said to have died can still be seen.\n\nWe were rushed onwards for our remaining sight-seeing: a huge, fat Buddha on the nearby hillside, an ex-PLA storage cave which had been turned into the Nine Dragons Cave, complete with waxwork figures, and Flying Sand beach - a lovely 2-mile stretch where our hotel was situated. A few weeks before our visit, the hotels had all been full for the Golden Week holiday in China, but now everywhere seemed deserted except for a few hopeful souvenir shops. The hotel itself was also empty but we were nevertheless given rooms right next to the disco and so were \"entertained\" (or changed rooms in our case) to the sounds of karaoke till 3am.\n\nWe agreed on an early start the next morning, including a pre-breakfast swim despite a chilly wind, to enable us to include an extra sight on our tour, back on the mainland - a typical village with watch tower. Roger, our guide, was very accommodating on this, though as we sped through the outskirts of Tai Shan we also spotted a Ming dynasty pagoda in the distance which looked worthy of investigation: \"No time” was Roger's response, which, at least, provided us a good reason to return.\n\nAfter lunch in Tai Shan, we walked around the central area and Roger showed us a recently completed pedestrian mall. The old facades of the buildings had all been renovated and painted in pastel tones - our photographs look like a typical Macau street scene. Tucked amongst the mall buildings was another church and we were invited inside by the female pastor, Huang Bi Juan. She gave us a brief history of the \"Three Self Patriotic Protestant Church\" and its present active role serving some 200 local families.\n\nWe took the country road for our return journey and soon spotted a suitable village with watchtower. We wandered into our chosen village with its harvest of golden grain spread out to dry in the sun in front of the houses, and spoke to some elderly residents - one old lady was 105", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]