[ { "id": 204271, "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-1961", "page_number": 39, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nORASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n35\n\nTo begin with a few examples in poetry: the poet Ts'ao Chih (A.D. 192-232), son of Ts'ao Ts'ao and younger brother of the first Emperor of Wei, wrote about the knight errant in \"The White Steed\", also known as \"The Knight Errant\":\n\nA white steed decked with a golden halter\nGalloped past towards the north west.\n\n\"Who is the rider?' I enquired from a by-stander.\n'A knight errant from the north' was the reply.\n'He left his native district when he was young,\nAnd spread his fame across the distant desert.\nHe always carries a fine sturdy bow\nWith arrows of bramble wood, long and short.\nPulling the string, he hits the target on the left;\nShooting from the right, he hits it again.\nLooking up, he shoots an ape in flight;\nBending down, he hits the bull's-eye once more.\nHe is more agile than a monkey,\nAnd as fierce as a leopard or dragon.\n\nWhen alarms came from the frontier\nThat barbarian troops had made repeated raids,\nAnd when a call to arms was heard from the north,\nHe mounted his steed and reached the frontier fort.\nHe rode on right into the land of the Huns,\nHolding the Mongol tribes in high disdain.\nHe threw himself before the pointed swords\nWithout giving a thought to his own life.\nHe did not even worry about his parents,\nLet alone his children and his wife.\nHis name entered the register of heroes;\nHis heart had no room for personal feelings.\n\nHe risked his life at a time of national disaster,\nAnd regarded death merely as coming home'.10\n\nThis portrait of a knight errant may be a little idealized, for the poet is, in all probability, using the subject as an excuse to express his own frustrated patriotic wishes and military ambitions, being prevented from fulfilling these by his elder brother. Nevertheless, the poem remains a good illustration of some of the ideals of knight errantry. Notice, in particular, that the knight errant did not allow filial devotion to deter him from his heroic task.\n\n10 Ts'ao Tzu-chien shih-chu (with notes by Huang Chieh, Peking, 1957), pp. 69-70.\n\n2000", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205395, "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": 157, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "150\n\nLIN SHU-YEN\n\nfamilies the men and women were in their fifties. In the third, the son, who is about thirty, did most of the work.\n\nThe leaching process, Lin tells us, was carried out mainly by natives of Lantau Island and was the only method inherited from their remote ancestors. In 1962 I was able to speak to an old lady who came in 1898 at the age of 16 to the village of Leung Uk, at the south-west edge of the salt pans, to be married to one of the villagers. She told me that men and women from the locality worked in the fields, some of them from Leung Uk. Not many people worked in the fields at that time, and they were operated by an outsider. The workers were paid on a piece work basis depending on their output, but it was customary for the company to advance money for daily food and deduct the sum from the final wage.\n\nFor how long the local village people, as opposed to outsiders, carried out the work on the salt-pans is not known. The Leung Uk settlement, since it is named after the Leung family, it is reasonable to suppose that they were the first inhabitants of the present settlement, was apparently settled about 1800. This estimate is based on calculations from a genealogy which also states that the first ancestor came to Tai O from a village near Shum Chun Market to the north of the present Sino-British frontier. These people are Hakkas. The other villages in the Tai O basin, adjacent to the market town, are the similar small settlements of Nam Chung, San Tsuen, and Wang Hang, and it is unlikely that they are earlier than Leung Uk. At the 1911 Colony census, the population of these three small villages was recorded at 50, 42, and 90 respectively, whilst the population of Leung Uk was 104 persons. There were other, larger villages a little further afield, and some of their inhabitants may also have worked at the pans.\n\nSince writing the above, I have chanced upon a note in The Hong Kong Naturalist, also in Vol X (1940), by Father R. Maglioni, the noted archaeologist, in which he offers some comments upon Lin's article and an earlier one by Dr. C. M. Heanley on some of the problems connected with local, i.e., Hong Kong archaeology. He writes:\n\n\"About the furnaces described by Dr. Heanley in The Hong Kong Naturalist (Vol. VI, Nos. 3-4), I must confess that I am not", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205753, "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-1969", "page_number": 59, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "MILITIA, MARKET AND LINEAGE\n\n53\n\nlocal recruits. The venture was rumoured to be the work of the Ming Lan Tong, a literary society of Tung-kuan city. Additional credence was given to the reports when it was learned that some officers of the Tong were members of the Hsin-an Tang clan. Police on patrol in the New Territory also noted that women were leaving their villages. By 10th May the exodus had reached major proportions.\n\nIt was evident that the Sham Chun river was not a defensible frontier and that the best way to forestall attack was to occupy the area from which it was to be launched. On 16th May two columns, numbering 1500 men in all, landed from Deep Bay and Mirs Bay and marched on Sham Chun. That evening the Union Jack was hoisted over Sham Chun market, to the accompaniment of a 21-gun salute. A proclamation was issued declaring that Sham Chun was British territory and that the Viceroy had no further jurisdiction in the district. There had been no resistance and no sign of forces massing to attack the New Territory.\n\nThe occupation of Sham Chun was confined to an area within five miles of the Sham Chun river, including Sha Tau, Sham Chun, and the road between them. Neither civil nor military jurisdiction were extended further. However, in the hinterland the occupation of Sham Chun and the proclamation which accompanied it were interpreted as a prelude to the occupation of the entire district. In particular, the Tangs of Pan T'in feared a punitive expedition against themselves.\n\nMuch of the information about subsequent events comes from one source. The Rev. Martin Schaub* of the Basel Mission had a station at Li Long, near Pan T'in, in the north of the district. Rev. Schaub wrote periodically to the officer commanding at Sham Chun and his letters convey a vivid impression of the activity precipitated by the occupation. Late in May he wrote that the leaders of Pan T'in had asked the larger villages to help in resisting the British. He said money was being collected and that armed men were making their way toward Pan T'in.\n\n* The printed documents call him \"Hart\", but this must be in error for Rev. Martin Schaub of the Basel Mission. A photograph and brief biography are given at pp. 16, 438 of Marshall Broomhall, The Chinese Empire: a General and Missionary Survey, London, [1907]. Perhaps hand-writing was responsible for the wrong transcription into the printed documents, Ed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206982, "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-1974", "page_number": 53, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG\n\n47\n\nthe Chicago meat trade. Morès soon joined forces with Drumont,49 the brilliant anti-semitic editor of La Libre Parole, served as the paper's official duellist, and created a body of street fighters called 'Morès and His Friends'. These street fighters, the first 'storm-troopers', were recruited from among the butcher boys of the district of La Villette in northeastern Paris. Morès outfitted his 'friends' in cowboy hats, purple shirts and other Wild West accoutrements.\n\n51\n\nIn June 1890 Morès was sentenced to three months imprisonment50 for the publication of inflammatory writings; but this experience did not dampen his ardour as a fervent nationalist, socialist and anti-semite. He fought four duels, in one of which he killed Captain Armand Mayer, a Jewish officer in the French Army; but in 1893 his political position was compromised when Clemenceau revealed that the anti-semitic Morès had borrowed money from Cornelius Herz, a Jew associated with the notorious Panama scandal. In 1894 the impetuous Morès landed in Algeria and immediately embarked on a violent campaign to arouse the Moslems in North Africa.\n\nIn 1895, after a short visit to France, Morès returned to Algeria. His purpose was to create an alliance between Catholic France and Moslem Africa so as to block British expansion in the African continent. His scheme was visionary and it is not clear how he expected to unify Frenchmen and Arabs in a crusade against British imperialism; but we do know he planned an expedition from Tunis through Ghadames and Ghat across the Sahara Desert to Bahr el Ghazal, where the French would be in a strong position on the Upper Nile to throttle British power in Egypt and prevent complete British control of the route from Cape to Cairo.\n\nIn Tunis on 29 April 1896, Morès signed an agreement with a certain El Hadj Ali to guide a caravan from Gabes, Tunisia, to Ghat, a distance of some thousand miles. He left Gabes on the morning of 14 May with a small escort. On the journey south a party of Touaregs attached themselves to the caravan, claiming they would guide the party through the desert. In fact, they were the henchmen of the Touareg Bechaoui, who was waiting to plunder the caravan and kill Morès at a place on the Libyan frontier called Mechiguig.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206985, "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-1974", "page_number": 56, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "H. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nEuropean expansion and domination that ended in 1914 provided a more richly fertile environment for this social type. Adventurers do not compose a social group held together by common beliefs or ideology like anarchists, bolsheviks or suffragettes; rather they are supreme individualists and their individualism and egomania asserts itself most brutally in periods of rapid social change, in periods of social dislocation, fluid social boundaries, disorder and political ambiguity. Adventurers surface in greater numbers, then, under particular social conditions; they can impose their will, in the short run at least, by force, bluff, imposture or sheer physical courage,56 either because their social audience is credulous or because their victims desire victimisation, as a martyr seeks martyrdom; for the need to be dominated is as strong sometimes as the urge to dominate. Domination means accepting constraints, and constraint may bring a measure of psychic security and peace.\n\nSouth-East Asia, Central and South America, the Wild West and the Pacific, all provided an ideal terrain for the adventurers' individual obsessions, whether it was the pursuit of power, wealth, status, excitement, luxury or sensuality. And these were areas, of course, where the white man increasingly exercised control, by means of his advanced technology and dominant culture. Mayréna in the land of the Moï and Morès in the Bad Lands of North Dakota, a frontier area only recently cleared of Sioux, lived outpost lives on the margin of civilisation—one became, briefly, the King of the Sedangs, the other, likewise, the Emperor of the Bad Lands. Conditions in these places were perfect for the seigneurial role they sought to play. Such conditions would not be found easily today.\n\nAt this time, two other factors favoured the adventurer class: respect for titles and poor communications. Mayréna succeeded in making dupes of several influential and wealthy persons because they were deeply impressed by his assumed rank—the 'King of the Sedangs' or 'le comte de Drey'. Morès was a nobleman and a grand seigneur by birth; the fact that his name and that of his noble house could be found enshrined in print in the Almanach de Gotha seduced people of lesser rank. The European bourgeoisie achieved economic and a larger degree of political power in the nineteenth century; this parvenu class, ostensibly resentful of social distinctions was, on the other hand, often mesmerised by titles of any kind. This was true even in democratic America: the shady thespians who", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212604, "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-1991", "page_number": 158, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "138\n\nI was anxious to reach Burma, and when I arrived at Rangoon in July found that I was one of the early swallows. The garrison still only consisted of two British battalions, and some battalions of the Burma rifles. In 1937, when Burma was separated from India, the army, which had been part of the Indian army, achieved a nominal emancipation from that tutelage; but in practice, from the general downwards, the majority of the officers came from India and the dogmas peculiar to the North West Frontier prevailed.\n\nI was sent up to Maymyo, in the Shan hills, to collect the wherewithal for an establishment, later to be known as the Bush Warfare School. Maymyo was the hill resort for Burma, the summer capital of the government, and the station of one of the two British battalions. This battalion kindly provided an orderly room sergeant, a stout fellow from Yorkshire, and between us we started to get things ready for the troops who were due to arrive shortly. I made my first acquaintance with the great brotherhood of the Indian Babu, the parasitic growth that sucks energy from administration in India. The Babu's great idea in life is to find a job for his brothers, of whom there are many, and to do so he must write more and more letters. A reply, which postpones decision, invites further correspondence. The more letters, the more filing; the more filing, the more indexing; the more indexing, the more work; the more jobs for brother, until one job has been expanded into six, and promotion is created: for first-brother can then claim to be exalted to the rank of head-clerk, to supervise the other six. The promotion not only brings an increase of pay, but also creates yet another vacancy for yet another brother in the position originally held by first-brother. It is a great game, not, however, convenient for warfare.\n\nI was later to meet the Indian Canteen Contractor, whose profits are so great; and the Indian Controller of Military Accounts, who also multiplies himself exceedingly, and travels round with a whole shelf-full of Army Regulations, without reference to which he cannot place one foot before the other. In India, even in the banks, every entry, receipt, payment, or other transaction is checked and counter-checked by three people, as a control on corruption, a control, to judge by all one hears, that is not superlatively successful. In this welter of procrastination time ceases to have value: amidst this accumulation of paper, decision is bogged down. It is a bureaucrat's paradise.\n\nIn Burma too I first came across the great game of discards. It was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213097, "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": 165, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "EASTERN PEACE:\n\nSHA TAU KOK MARKET IN 1925\n\nPH. HASE\n\n147\n\nIntroduction\n\nThe aim of this article is to describe the old Sha Tau Kok Market and its economic life as it was in 1925 before the market moved across the frontier into the New Territories. Before doing so, however, a sketch of the earlier history of the market, and the effects on it of the new frontier are given, with a brief description of the roads and ferries which lay at the heart of the market's prosperity in the early years of this century.\n\nSha Tau Kok before 1898\n\nMirs Bay is a forbidding place.** Its coast is almost uniformly mountainous. There is very little flat land: only patches here and there where one of the mountain streams reaches the sea. The mountains behind the coast are steep and high, reaching 3,000 feet in the Ng Tung Shan (芽嵘山) at the north-west corner of the Bay, immediately behind Sha Tau Kok. Many support patches of forest. Tigers, deer, wild boar, and other wild life were common here until recent times. The description of Hsin An County in the 1688 Gazetteer, 'The County is made up of many high mountains and lofty peaks, which rise up immediately from the shores of the deep sea,'2 is particularly true of the Mirs Bay area.\n\nDespite the forbidding nature of the Bay, however, the area attracted imperial attention from an early period. An imperial salt commission was active here from the tenth, or even the fifth century. The imperial pearl monopoly, too, was active in the bay, probably from the eighth century. During the Ming, however, imperial interest in the area waned. The pearl monopoly ended its local activities in 1374, as a consequence of the exhaustion of the beds, and growing concern in enlightened circles.\n\n* In this article, placenames within Hong Kong are transliterated as in the Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories, (Hong Kong Government, 1969); placenames in China are transliterated into Cantonese, using the same transliteration standards as in the Gazetteer, with the characters for the placename, and a pinyin transliteration, on first occurrence.\n\n** See Map 1\n\nPage 165\n\nPage 166", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213106, "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": 174, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "156\n\nbecoming \"import\" or \"export\", and subject to all these controls.\n\nVillagers from Wo Hang or Nam Chung buying a new plough animal, or seed-pig, were \"exporting live animals\"; if they bought a new plough, or reaping knife, they were \"exporting ironwork\"; if they took cloth to market to be made into a pair of trousers, or to be dyed, then they were \"importing cloth\" - duty in all these cases had to be paid. Traditionally, sugar was grown in this area, carried as cane to Sham Chun, pressed and refined there, and then carried back for sale in the New Territories markets. This now became “importing sugar” in the first instance, and “exporting sugar\" in the second.28 In the 1930s, the Chinese Government imposed a heavy import duty on fish, causing the very important carrying trade in fish from Sha Tau Kok to Sham Chun to face the same problems.29\n\nAs soon as the new frontier was established, the Kowloon Customs (the local division of the Imperial Maritime Customs) moved to control it. The Kowloon Customs was headquartered in Hong Kong, but established its new operational headquarters at Sham Chun. Below this, work was initially conducted through three Divisions: Duty Collection, Border Patrol, and Sea Patrol. The Border Patrol duties were conducted from Patrol Stations, which were arranged in Districts, with a Patrol District Headquarters in each District. Duty was collected at only a relatively few Duty Stations, which were the only places where dutiable imports and exports could legally be handled. The Kowloon Customs also had half a dozen steam launches as gun-boats: each had a Sea Patrol District to control, centred on a Sea Patrol District Headquarters.\n\nSha Tau Kok was chosen as the Patrol District Headquarters for the Patrol District running from Lin Ma Hang to Siu Mui Sha (Xiaomeisha), with sub-stations at Yim Tin (Yantian) and Chan Hang (Chenkeng). It was the Duty Station for the north-west quadrant of Mirs Bay. It was also the Sea Patrol District Headquarters for the Mirs Bay Sea Patrol District. It was one of the centres of the Mounted Horse Patrols which, from 1932, patrolled the area behind the zone covered by the foot patrols of the Border Patrol staff. After 1934 it was one of the centres of the new Automobile Patrol, which patrolled the newly completed motor road along the frontier. The Customs Station at Sha Tau Kok was headed by an expatriate Assistant Superintendent of Customs. For most of the time, there were between 70 and 100 customs staff working in Sha Tau Kok.30", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213117, "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": 185, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "167\n\nThere is some evidence of the traffic on the other routes out of Sha Tau Kok to the west in the same period. In 1910 22,000 persons \"carrying goods\" crossed the Shek Chung Au pass each month, carrying about 880 tons of goods, with probably a further 50,000 - 55,000 crossing the pass without carrying goods. This pass was clearly a major nodal point. With about 250 travellers crossing it every day, one every three minutes, including a laden coolie every ten minutes - it must have been a very busy road indeed, with, at peak periods, an almost non-stop flow of travellers. There were good reasons for the Ming and Ch'ing military post to be placed here.\n\nOf these 75,000 travellers, about a third went on to cross the Miu Keng Pass for Sham Chun, as noted above. A further 40% went to, or came from, destinations along the Yuen Long road - probably mostly to the villages nearest to Sha Tau Kok, who marketed there. A further sixth travelled to and from the villages south-west of Sha Tau Kok, in the Nam Chung-Luk Keng area, including some who continued on to Kowloon. The remainder travelled only as far as the villages between the Shek Chung Au and Wo Hang Au passes.\n\nIn 1904 a daily total of 600 travellers crossed the Sha Tin Pass between Sha Tin and Kowloon, of which nearly half were \"carrying goods\" (mostly fresh fish from Sha Tin to Kowloon). Of this total perhaps 75-100 went on to Sha Tau Kok via Ang Chung and Kuk Po, including perhaps 25 carrying goods - this route may have seen a monthly total of as many as 3,000 travellers carrying up to 35 tons of goods.\n\nWhile none of these statistics was as well gathered as would be expected today, they can be used to give an impression of the size of local trade in the early twentieth century. The traffic they suggest (75,000 persons, and nearly 900 tons of goods) as entering Sha Tau Kok from the south and west is very substantial. Probably a half again as many travellers entered Sha Tau Kok from the north and east, from where statistics are not available, and probably as much again in goods carried. In total, Sha Tau Kok was probably visited by up to 120,000 travellers a month (most of these travellers, of course, entered Sha Tau Kok, only to leave it again a few hours later) and handled some 1,850 tons of goods.\n\n55\n\nThese ancient roads and ferries remained the sole arteries of local trade until 1898. The drawing of the new frontier between Hong Kong and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215102, "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-2000", "page_number": 198, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "155\n\nIMAGES ON CHINESE POPULAR RELIGION\n\nALTARS\n\nOF THE HEROES\n\nINVOLVED IN THE SUPPRESSION\n\nOF\n\nTHE AN LUSHAN REBELLION [AD 755 - 763]\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nChina suffered a major internal political upheaval between 755 and 763 when General An Lushan led a rebellion against the Tang emperor. It took some seven years for it to be decisively suppressed by government forces.\n\nFrom some records it would appear that An Lushan was half Turkish and half Soghdian, the son of a Soghdian officer and known as Rokhshan before he took the Chinese name of An Lushan. Recent histories written by foreigners only rarely refer to An Lushan prior to his command of a punitive expedition against the Khitan in 736. This campaign was a failure to such an extent that his superior general considered having him executed. Within ten years, however, he became one of the most powerful of the generals, ruling most of the north-east of what was then China, and in particular holding the governorship of three frontier cities, Pinglu, Fanyang and Hedong, along the northern borders of present day Hebei and Shanxi provinces. This meant that he commanded the best and largest armies of the Empire.\n\nProfessor Giles' provided An Lushan's biography in some detail, and although very dated it is still of great interest:\n\nAn Lu-shan died in AD 757. He was born in Luk-chak, of Turkic descent, whose original name had been K'ang. [Presumably Giles was quoting Chinese sources when he related that]... An Lu-shan's mother had been a witch who had prayed for a son on the Ya-lao mountains and at his birth, a halo was seen around the house, and the beasts of the fields cried aloud. The authorities sent to have the child put to death, but he was successfully concealed by his mother. His father died young and his mother re-married, a man named An;", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 } ]