[ { "id": 204385, "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-1962", "page_number": 17, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "12\n\nF. S. DRAKE\n\nsouthern border of the Ordos region within the loop of the Yellow River, as Pao-t'ou was on its northern border. Fr. Mostaert, it appears, was already familiar with the Crosses and he gave some valuable information from his personal observations, as to the use to which they were put by the Mongols of his day:\n\nThe Mongols constantly dig them up from old graves and elsewhere; they know nothing about their history, but wear them on their girdles, especially the women. When they leave home to take their sheep to graze, they close their doors, and seal them with mud or clay, in the same way as other people use ordinary seals.4\n\nIn 1932 during his residence in Tsinan, Shantung, Mr. Nixon committed his collection to the late Dr. J. Mellon Menzies of Shang dynasty fame, then professor of Chinese Archaeology at Cheeloo University, for study and classification. The result was embodied in a monograph entitled Chinese Nestorian Bronze Crosses which was published with the help of a grant from the Harvard-Yenching Institute in December 1934 as a double number of the Cheeloo University Bulletin 齊大季刊,第三、五合期, 青銅十字專號。The volume consists of impressions in red (somewhat in the manner of Chinese rubbings, but not true rubbings) of each of the crosses and seals in the collection, to the number of 979, followed by tables giving the number, weight, measurements and description of each cross, and where possible the provenance of each, the whole being classified in certain clearly defined groups, together with two essays in Chinese: 'Christianity in China in the time of Marco Polo' by Dr. Menzies; 'The Swastika Cross Badges Unearthed in Sui Yüan Province, China' by Professor P. Y. Saeki; and a short Introduction in Chinese on the Nixon Collection by Dr. Menzies. This volume has long been out of print, and Cheeloo University itself has been disbanded, The Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Hong Kong hopes, when funds are available, to publish a complete set of photographs and rubbings of the whole collection with Dr. Menzies' tables, classification and enumeration.\n\n4\n\nDr. Menzies classified the crosses, which measure from 11 to 31 ins. across, first according to shape into four main groups,\n\n1 Moule, Christians in China before the Year 1550, London, S.P.C.K., 1930, p. 92; Saeki, Nestorian Documents and Relics in China, Tokyo, 2nd ed., 1951, p. 423; Menzies, Chinese Nestorian Bronze Crosses, Cheeloo University Bulletin, 1934, pp. 92-3.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204391, "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-1962", "page_number": 23, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "14\n\nF. S. DRAKE\n\na swastika, turning to the left or to the right; Type 3, a simple cross drawn vertically; Type 4, a simple cross drawn diagonally; Type 5, a figure similar to a Roman capital I; Type 6, a solid circle or dot; Type 7, a hollow circle; Type 8, Miscellaneous. No attempt has been made to illustrate all of these on the plates. When the nineteen types according to shape are combined with the eight types according to design, a total of 152 well-defined types is given. But within this total an infinite variety of individual differences is possible; in the present collection not more than one pair of duplicates has been identified as coming from the same mould (No. 463 and the sixth unnumbered seal). It would seem therefore that duplication has been purposely avoided, perhaps for security reasons.\n\nOf the 979 pieces in the Collection about three fifths are cruciform in shape, about one fifth are bird-shaped, some of which, a single bird with spread wings, may suggest a cruciform outline, while the bird itself is also a Christian symbol.\n\nOf the central patterns the greater number are the swastika, whether turning to the left or to the right, a symbol adopted by the Buddhists, but being of older origin, and used also in such Christian monuments as the Nestorian Tablet of Sianfu (A.D. 781). Next in number comes the cross, whether placed vertically or diagonally. Attempts to read Greek letters in the other linear designs have not succeeded.\n\nThe backs of the crosses are flat, with a strong loop (or two loops crossing each other) fixed for attaching a leather thong for suspension (Pl. II, Fig. f). Some of these are worn through, as though carried for a long time on the person by a horseman.\n\nThe designs are in high relief, too deep for an ordinary seal, but admirable for impressing on a slab of mud.\n\nII. THE NESTORIAN CHURCH\n\nman.\n\nWe may now ask how it came about that these bronze crosses of Mongolian workmanship and of Christian origin became buried in the sands of the Ordos region beyond the memory of living. We must remember that in the beginning Christianity not only spread westwards from Palestine into Europe, but that it moved eastwards at the same time through Syria to Persia and India. According to ancient Christian tradition St. Matthew and St. Thomas evangelized the East as St. Peter and St. Paul", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204395, "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-1962", "page_number": 27, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "18\n\nF. S. DRAKE\n\nworking with their hands in the well-kept vineyards, the cherished penmanship and the care of ancient manuscripts reminiscent of 'the knowledge and zeal, which once so eminently distinguished the Chaldaean priesthood'.\n\n4\n\nThis is the Church which evangelized the greater part of Asia during the ancient and mediaeval periods, truly it has been called a Church on Fire, and the Great Missionary Church of Asia. But that the fruit of its labours are no longer manifest is because no Church has suffered martyrdom as this Church has; it has become the great martyred Church of the world.\n\nIII. THE NESTORIAN CHRISTIANS OF THE ORDOS REGION\n\nThe story of the Nestorian missionary movement before the Mongols conquered Central Asia and established the Yüan Dynasty in China (A.D. 1260 to 1368) can be pieced together with difficulty from scattered references in the Syriac records; but during the Mongol domination vivid descriptions of their activities have been left to us in the pages of the Mediaeval travellers from Europe to the courts of the Mongol Khans. These can be divided into two groups: Franciscan Friars and travelling merchants.\n\nIt was the time of the Crusades, and the great widening of men's horizons that these brought about. The enlightened policy of the Arabs had been followed by the restrictive measures of the Turks, now converted to Islam. Europe was stirred by the danger. The astonishing success of the First Crusade (1096-1104) was followed by the failures of the Second (1146-1187), and Third (1189-1192). The Fourth Crusade was diverted against Constantinople (1200-1205); shortly after, the Mongols appearing from the ends of the earth ravaged Armenia, and crossing the Caucasus, penetrated into Southern Russia in 1232. The great invasion followed in 1238—Russia, Poland, Hungary. At the\n\n11 A. H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, London, Murray, 1849.\n\n12 Stewart, The Nestorian Missionary Enterprise, 1928.\n\n13 These have been collected by Assemanni, Bibliotheca Orientalis, Rome, 1728 (4 vols.). See also Mingana, The Early Spread of Christianity in Central Asia and the Far East, Manchester Univ. Press 1925, and Bull. of John Rylands Library, July 1925.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204398, "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-1962", "page_number": 30, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "NESTORIAN CROSSES\n\n21\n\nNestorian community in his letters, and their king George, whom he converted from Nestorianism to the Catholic faith.\n\nThe scattered references to the Nestorians in the accounts of the friars are confirmed by Marco Polo (1271-1295) who with his father and uncle can represent for us the second group of travelling merchants. Everywhere through Central Asia and China Marco found Nestorian Christians, usually in the service of the Court, and probably more often than not of Syrian, Persian or Turkish race, employed as administrative officials by the alien government on account of their high standard of literacy.\n\nMarco Polo also confirms the existence of a Nestorian Christian tribe with their Christian king George (whom he confuses with Prester John as Odoric also does) at the Yellow River bend. It seems likely that the name 'Tenduc' which he gives to the region is the early pronunciation of T'ien-tê which was an old name of the present city of Kuei-hua{ in that region, near which is the important market town of Pao-t'ou in which Mr. P. M. Scott found the first fourteen crosses of our paper. Similarly the Tozan of Odoric may be identified with Tung-sheng, an early name for the same region. The Christian Mongol tribe situated by the Ordos bend of the Yellow River is known from various sources to have been the Onguts (Wang-ku people), to which Marco Polo refers, though confusedly, in calling their king Ung-Khan.\n\nThese facts are confirmed in a remarkable way by a Syriac document describing a pilgrimage of two Eastern Nestorian monks—one an Ongut, the other of Uigur stock—from their monastery near Peking to the seat of the Nestorian Patriarch in Mesopotamia in A.D. 1278. In the course of their journey they visited the Christian Ongut tribe by the Yellow River bend, and from them received a touching farewell.19\n\nIV. NESTORIAN RELICS IN CHINA AND MONGOLIA\n\nWith the expulsion of the Mongols from China at the fall of the Yuan dynasty in A.D. 1368, the Christianity both Nestorian and Franciscan that had been associated with their regime disappeared.\n\n17 Letters of Montecorvino, see Yule, op. cit., and Moule, op. cit., pp. 171 ff.\n\n18 Yule, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, revised by Cordier, London, Murray, 1903.\n\n19 Budge, The Monks of Kublai Khan, London, R.T.S. 1928.\n\nPage 30\n\nPage 31", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214302, "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-1998", "page_number": 160, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "124\n\nschool in Chefoo in Shantung province before returning to England where he attended the Bath Art and Technical School. There he studied art before switching to Bristol University to read for a BSc in science. He would appear to have given up his higher education following the shattering of his romantic aspirations when he ran away to sea and worked his passage to Canada. He toiled for a while in Canada before returning to his parents in Taiyuan in 1905 with vague plans to hunt and explore the wild and barren areas of north China; he was twenty at the time. In practice he took up a teaching appointment at the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin and only during the vacations was he able to hunt and seek specimens for the natural history museum he was establishing at the college. From the vague evidence available he would appear to have remained at the school for only a matter of a year as he was invited at the end of the final term to join the Duke of Bedford's expedition to collect zoological specimens in Shensi province for the British Museum. Shensi is the neighbouring province to Shansi and lies to its west.\n\nThe Duke of Bedford's expedition travelled through Sowerby's home province of Shansi where they lived for a week or so in one of the typical village cave houses of the Yellow Earth country, in a village some fifty miles west of Taiyuan. From there they continued west, across the Yellow River to Yenan in Shensi and on into the Ordos desert. Their return route took them north to the Great Wall, which they then followed to the east before turning south to Taiyuan down the main route through Shansi. The whole expedition took some five months and Arthur Sowerby would have been just twenty-one. It was during this expedition that Sowerby discovered a new species of jerboa [kangaroo rat] which was sent back to the British Museum and subsequently named after him, Dipus sagitta sowerbyi.\n\nComing from a missionary family he would have had little or no financial support from his father and would have needed to work for a living. He was sponsored for a number of years by a wealthy American, Robert Sterling Clark, who remained a friend for most of Sowerby's life, and although it is no more than supposition he may well have continued teaching at the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin especially in view of his marriage in that city in 1910, at the age of twenty-six. The long vacations would have been an advantage enabling him to gather the material he later used in the China Journal, especially his", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214303, "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-1998", "page_number": 161, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "125\n\nnotes on nature and hunting in Manchuria. He founded the first natural history museum in China, at the Anglo-Chinese College and this brought him to the notice of directors of museums in the United States and England.\n\nWe have little idea what he did between his return from the Duke of Bedford's expedition and the start of the next expedition nearly three years later, the Clark expedition of 1908/9, which again sought specimens. This time they again set out from Taiyuan to the west, across the Yellow River into Shensi and then on to the north-west, into Kansu province travelling up the Silk Road as far as Lanchou. It was a well-financed private expedition with Sowerby taken on as the Naturalist and though not spelled out - the interpreter. Their route took them through Yulin, a city in the Ordos desert in Shensi province, noted for its large Buddhist temple. This was selected as the first main stopover where they remained undisturbed within the temple compound. Sowerby, brought up in Taiyuan, spoke the local dialect and was able to converse with the local officials and obtain their co-operation and assistance. They remained in Yulin over the winter during which time the Emperor and the Empress Dowager died in Peking. This event brought the second most senior Chinese official in Yulin to the compound to break the news and warn the party of the general apprehension that the deaths of their Majesties might bring about a revolt against the dynasty. Clark, who was also an amateur astronomer, had been seen by Chinese peering through his telescope at the night sky leading the second most senior Chinese official to ask Sowerby whether Clark had foreseen this calamity? Sowerby's answer that he had foreseen it led the official to demand to know why Clark had not passed on the warning to him. Sowerby was able to answer that the official knew full well that it would have been treason for anyone to even suggest that such a thing would take place before it happened. This satisfied the awed official, though the warning of possible unrest left the expedition in a quandary. They decided that the best move would be to set off at once for Sian [now known as Xi'an], the provincial capital, where they would expect to have better protection. On reaching Yenan, some short distance to the south of Yulin, en route for Sian they were assured that the situation was stable and once more settled down for a while, hunting and prospecting locally. After several weeks of visits to Loyang and Honan Fu [now Chengchou] in a neighbouring province, whilst Clark returned to Shanghai to settle a family matter, they continued on to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 } ]