[
    {
        "id": 205060,
        "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-1966",
        "page_number": 16,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "REGIONAL APPROACH TO CHINESE HISTORY\n\n11\n\nThirdly, historians have tended to think of recent Chinese history largely in terms of the \"impact of the West\", forgetting that for most Chinese the foreigner and his activities were of little real importance. They may have been important to Peking and to some members of the bureaucracy in certain areas of the empire, but the barbarian and his doings could not have loomed large in the day-to-day life of the average Chinese villager or even the average Chinese official. Yet most studies of nineteenth-century Chinese history have been concerned with the Opium Wars, the \"scramble for concessions\", the Boxer Uprising, the impact of Western thought on Chinese intellectual history. Even the Taiping Rebellion has been thought of largely in terms of its Christian origins and its impact on Sino-Western relations and little has been done, until recently, to treat it as a Chinese phenomenon, which ultimately it was. But what relevance did all this have for the fisherman in his junk off Lantau or the peasant farmer in Szechuan?\n\nIf there is any validity to the above comments about distortions in Chinese history, it may be that a useful corrective device would be a regional approach to Chinese history. We might be able to gain a better insight into the life and times of nineteenth-century China, for example, by limiting the scope of our studies to cohesive geographic and cultural areas. This would tend to neutralize the all-China, or north-China bias. It would put the impact of the West in its proper perspective. Above all, it might provide answers to the questions raised at the very beginning of this paper: for the person living at a given place and at a given time, what was really “going on”?\n\nAs an experiment, I have chosen the Hong Kong-Macao-Canton area of south China. This has the advantage of being comparatively small and relatively homogeneous in terms of language, culture, and economic base. Its people were aware of their regional cohesiveness, especially in comparison to outside-province people, though even within this area there were racial and linguistic differences. I have limited my study, more or less, to the first half of the nineteenth century.\n\nPolitically, the area approximated the territory included in the hsien,3 or districts, which occupied both sides of the Canton River estuary. The districts constituted about two-thirds of the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205786,
        "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": 92,
        "title": "RAS-1969",
        "content_text": "86 \n\nR. BRUCE \n\nmonopolies abolished whilst levies on imports were to be limited, and vessels were to pay a tax on their size. But Burney failed to get permission for a British Consul to reside at Bangkok. Nor was he able to free British nationals from Siamese law. \n\nNext came the Americans. A merchant, Mr. Edmund Roberts, was commissioned by the President to secure a treaty at least as good as the British one. This was seven years later, in 1833. Although a President seemed to the Siamese a much less august personage than a King and America was both remote and less important, Roberts secured his treaty. It was almost exactly the same as the Burney agreement. \n\nIn the next two decades, especially in the \"forties, trade became more difficult. In fact the treaties with the British and the Americans gradually eroded away, and the old monopolies were taken back by the Court. Imports and exports were farmed to Chinese merchants by the King. Duties were arbitrary and heavy and trade dwindled. Everywhere else the British had greatly expanded their commerce by mid-century. Singapore was growing rapidly, the China trade had increased still further after the Opium War, the northern coast of Borneo was open to British commerce. It seemed only natural and civilised to the bold merchant princes and sea captains of Victorian England that Siam should, willy-nilly, share in the new prosperity, especially now that the first steamships had reached the Gulf of Siam. \n\nSir James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, was the next British envoy to sail up the Menam to Bangkok. He came in August 1850 on board H.M.S. Sphinx accompanied by a merchant vessel of the Company, the Nemesis, both steamers. Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, cautioned Sir James to be careful in his quest for better trade. \n\n\"In conducting these negotiations\", he directed, “you must be very careful not to get involved in any disputes or hostile proceedings which would render our position in Siam worse than it now is or which might compel Her Majesty's Government to have recourse to forcible measures in order to obtain redress. It is very important that if your efforts should not succeed they should at least leave things as they are and should not expose us to the alternative of submitting to fresh affront or of undertaking expensive operations to punish insult”.'",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 209316,
        "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-1981",
        "page_number": 219,
        "title": "RAS-1981",
        "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n205\n\nfarmers could ever raise enough cash for those expenses requiring substantial cash payments, e.g. to build or repair extensively a house or buy a new plough. I was told that careful management could make a plough last almost indefinitely: a completely new plough was needed only if the old one shattered into fragments. The wooden parts could be replaced by the farmer cutting and preparing wood himself, the coulter had to be regularly replaced by a coulter bought new but could be fitted on by the farmer. The blacksmith in Tai Po would accept the old coulter in part payment for the new one; he would then melt it down to recast it. Small expenses (e.g. extra rice, sugar, oil, other comestibles) could be met by the sale of firewood etc. Sugar was very cheap: sale of 1 picul of firewood would enable enough sugar and oil to be bought to last a thrifty family several weeks. As for houses, these were repaired as soon as the slightest signs of wear, cracks, leakage or ants appeared, and would thus survive almost for ever, barring typhoon or fire damage. If a home did get so damaged a poor family could only repair it by mortgaging its fields at a high price (say, at the rate of 1 or 5 picul per harvest per tau). If good years supervened in which there were good harvests and opportunities for wage labour such a family could recover and pay off the mortgage, but if bad years came the mortgage might be foreclosed and “that family would starve and might well die\". Substantial wealth in ready cash \"usually came from outside\" from remittances from seamen etc. as in Wai H.L.'s father's and uncle's case, or the Ng family in West Lane etc. One member of Chan family (Name given me by Wai H.L. but I forgot it) in Tai Wai “about 30 or 40 years older than Wai Siu-ling” (i.e. born about 1855-1865) became very rich as a seaman at the turn of the century or thereabouts or a little earlier. He became the \"leader” of an American ship. Villager wanting to go to sea would have to receive his recommendation, and would have to pay to get it. He also smuggled opium to Chinese communities in the U.S.A., making great profits which he used to buy up houses and fields in Tai Wai. He shamed the other villagers \"by wearing only silk when they could afford only hemp, and eating pork and chicken when they could afford only rice and salt fish” He also married the most beautiful girl in Sha Tin, However, he was caught when his last smuggling adventure \"just before he retired\" (1915?) went wrong and was fined very heavily. He could not pay and had to sell all his belongings at an auction. He was considered a \"bad man\" - not because of his smuggling but because he did not help the village. \"Other men who became rich like this would repair the r'ong (ancestral hall) or do other communal acts, but he not only refused but would not even help his",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214667,
        "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-1999",
        "page_number": 82,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "46\n\ntrust in his father's name (the Chan Hok Yin Tso) which owned 2.7 acres (Chan Tak-hing and his brother Chan Tsan-hing,\n\n(\n\n, were the only beneficiaries - it is likely that much of the property of this trust was amassed by Chan Tak-hing). His son, Chan Kwok-yan, 1872-1937) succeeded him on the Lok Sin Tong Board, the Kowloon City Kaifong, and as trustee for the Chan Hok Yin Tso, but he took to smoking opium, and the family business was closed down in 1930, when the family shop in Kowloon City was cleared for re-development.\n\nAs for the Lis, Li Ping-ngam, an \"honest farmer, who, on coming back from a meeting in Kowloon City, would take off his shoes and go back to work in the fields\", and resident in Sha Po, was an early Director as well312. He was probably dead by 1902. Li Ping-shang, who does appear in the 1902 Block Crown Lease, may have been his brother; if so, the lady Li Ip Shi mentioned above was very possibly Li Ping-ngam's widow, since Li Ping-shang owned a small piece of land jointly with the widow Ip. It is entirely likely that Li Ping-ngam was not quite the simple farmer he was remembered as. He may have been the dominant leader of the Li clan before Li Lai-ting (who could also have been called \"an honest farmer\").\n\nNg Shue-fan was also one of the Directors of the Lung Chun School within the Walled City () at the end of the nineteenth century33. This had been founded in the 1840s when the Sub-Magistracy was moved to Kowloon City, as a mark of the importance the Ch'ing Government placed on education and scholarship. Five trustees, who probably represented the local groups who had paid for the erection of the school in the 1840s, managed it: it is likely, therefore, that Nga Tsin Wai had been significantly involved in the foundation. By the end of the nineteenth century this school was being used as a Meeting Hall when meetings of the district elders and gentry were called. That Nga Tsin Wai provided one of the trustees is eloquent evidence of its local prestige and importance.\n\nNg Shue-tong was similarly important in local charitable affairs outside the Lok Sin Tong. Thus, when the Hau Wong temple was restored in 1879, he was the Chief Manager for the project (at least seven other Nga Tsin Wai villagers can be identified from the Donation Tablet)34. When the Hau Wong Temple had been restored in 1822,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]