[
    {
        "id": 208951,
        "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-1980",
        "page_number": 113,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "FUNG SHUI, AN INTRINSIC WAY TO ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN WITH ILLUSTRATION OF KAT HING WAI\n\nIN THE NEW TERRITORIES OF HONG KONG\n\nDAVID LUNG*\n\nIn modern society where our environment is largely dictated by economy and technology, much of the deep meaning in places and placemaking has been lost. Scientists, psychologists, sociologists and environmentalists have repeatedly warned us of the danger of alienation from nature, from other men, and more drastically, from our inner self. What Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock, published in 1970 is no longer shocking to us; instead, the symptoms have become real societal sickness. Rapid industrial developments and acceleration of social changes have created what Toffler calls a ‘new throw-away culture': our relationship with things is more temporary; with human beings, more transient; with our environment, ‘nomadic.’ Too much is happening too fast. In expressing his strong anguish that human value is being eliminated by technology, Rene Dubos, a distinguished microbiologist, pathologist and Pulitzer Prize winner, protests by saying that \"[s]cientific technology is presently taking modern civilisation on a course that will be suicidal if it is not reversed in time.\" He finds no excuses in affluent societies where, although resources are ample, human values are still neglected by establishments concerned with self-interests only. \"[The institutions base their] choices and decisions on technological means rather than on human ends; [their] criteria are power, efficiency of production, and quantity of consumption, rather than the quality of human life.\" \"Yet... productivity and efficiency have no value in themselves; they have merit only as means to ends.” Therefore, in viewing modern architecture, he deplores that \"apartment and office buildings [in particular] have nothing to communicate beyond efficiency and conspicuous wealth, hence their architectural triviality.\" Indeed our buildings today are so utilitarian that human\n\n* Mr. Lung is a practising architect in Hong Kong. This article is excerpted from his M.Arch. thesis Heaven, Earth and Man: Concepts and Processes of Chinese Architecture and City Planning. Oregon: Centre for Environmental Research, 1978.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 211493,
        "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-1988",
        "page_number": 209,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "\"THE ONE BRIGHT SPOT IN SHANGHAI” \n\nA HISTORY OF THE LIBRARY OF \n\nTHE NORTH CHINA BRANCH OF \n\nTHE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY \n\nHAROLD M. OTNESS* \n\n185 \n\nThe North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society had its beginning on September 24, 1857, as the Shanghai Literary and Scientific Society. From its inception Shanghai had a reputation as a city of commerce rather than an intellectual and cultural center. As Henri Cordier, a key figure in the development of the society's library, dryly recalled in his retirement, \"some spirited gentlemen thinking that tea, silk, and Manchester goods, however important they were from a mercantile standpoint, were not sufficient food for the mind, created a literary and scientific association\".1 Eighteen men, six of them missionaries, gathered in the Reading Room of the Shanghai Library, then a membership circulating library, to elect officers. Three weeks later the group met again to hear the inaugural address of its president, the Rev. Elijah C. Bridgman, an American highly regarded as a Chinese linguist and the publisher of the Chinese Repository. His address called for the increase of opportunities for understanding between foreigners and Chinese. He emphasized the need for more Westerners to undertake seriously the study of Chinese with the ultimate goal of enlightening the Chinese. In the rhetoric of his trade and times he stated, \"let the Shanghai Literary and Scientific Society set itself in battle array, and let each and all of its Members be prepared and resolved to quit themselves like men\".2 \n\nRev. Bridgman was not mobilizing for war, but rather proposing a learned society which would conduct a regular series of lectures and the publication of a scholarly journal. He also called for the establishment of a library: \n\nof such diversified work, and for so many labourers, an extensive apparatus is needed; especially do we want a \n\n* Southern Oregon State College Library",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 211527,
        "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-1988",
        "page_number": 244,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "220\n\nstock of the company was $1,000,000, and it was all needed before the end of the first year's business.\n\nPrior to the appearance of Rennie as a miller, the chief obstacle to milling with a profit in China was the lack of a market for the offal. Practically all of the profit enjoyed by the Pacific coast millers came from the high prices at which they were able to market millfeed, for which there was no demand in the Orient. Rennie, without much investigation, decided that the offal from his two thousand barrel mill could be fed to pigs at a profit and he established a “piggery” with several hundred animals at the start.\n\nBut millfeed for Chinese hogs was but little more nutritious than poison, and they died by hundreds; the experiment proved a flat failure. This was the beginning of the trouble, and as there was no market for millfeed in the Orient, it became necessary, in order to dispose of it, to ship it to Honolulu. Here it was sold at a very low price in competition with the Oregon mills. As Rennie secured most of his wheat from Portland and Puget Sound, the bran and shorts that finally found a consumer at Honolulu, had to stand a freight rate across the Pacific, and thence half way back again, compared with a short mileage between the Pacific coast ports and Honolulu, paid by the American millfeed.\n\nWhile the pigs were dying, the Chinese were refusing to buy the flour. Mr. Wilcox had spent a large sum of money in working up a trade throughout the Orient for particular \"chops\", as the fantastic brands are known. The Chinese by years of experience had learned to have confidence in these “chops\". So long as Rennie had them for sale, they bought from Rennie, but when Rennie, with his new mill, attempted to sell something \"just as good\", the Chinese buyers politely but firmly refused.\n\nThe Orientals are conservative in the extreme and they steadily refused to take up the new brands put on the market by the Hongkong mill. With slow sales for flour, and no profitable outlet for millfeed, matters were far from bright last winter when a cargo of weevily wheat from India distributed the industrious weevil throughout the mill and warehouses so thoroughly that Americans who have since visited the mill express the opinion that it will be impossible to rid the plant of the pest.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213213,
        "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-1994",
        "page_number": 35,
        "title": "RAS-1994",
        "content_text": "14\n\nheard that Petersen's barman had been discharged for neglecting his duties due to lack of supervision. The board commented that Petersen's more lucrative employment at the German Consulate led him to neglect his business. If he was to continue to hold his spirit licence, he could not leave the management of his business to others (DP 2 Nov. 1875).\n\nPeter Henry Schmidt was a German by birth but came to the East as a young man and married a Portuguese girl from Macao. For many years he was the proprietor of a licensed boarding house for seamen. Over the years he and Petersen built up a money-making business as shipping masters for the recruitment of crews. While Petersen worked his business through the German Consulate, Schmidt did the same through the American Consulate. In 1881, Mr. Smith - he had changed his name from Schmidt to Smith - brought action in the Supreme Court against the American Consul, Colonel John Mosby, for slander. The alleged slander were remarks published by the Consul concerning the involvement of Smith in the desertion of two seamen from the \"Belle of Oregon\". The Consul had been informed that Smith had harboured the deserters in his garden in Kowloon and that after the \"Belle of Oregon\" left port, he brought them to his boarding house in his launch. The testimony of Smith stated he had been in Hong Kong about twenty years and had held a licence for a seamen's boarding house for some eighteen years. \"During that time,\" he continued, \"I have done a great deal of business for the various Consuls. I and Mr. Petersen have done lately more than half the foreign business of the port. On December 24th, they (the two deserting seamen) brought permits to ship and I took them into my house. They were Scandinavian. I do work for the Consulate. I have done so for the last ten years, gave them board and lodging in the ordinary course of business.\" Smith then goes into some of the history of his connection with the American Consulate and its licensing of crews, \"Since Colonel Mosby has been in the Colony, I have not been an officer of the American Consulate nor in any way connected with it. Under his predecessor I had a desk and a clerk in the U.S. Consulate.\" Mr. Smith's assistant testified that Colonel Mosby had said, \"You can tell Peter Smith he is not going to ship any more men in this office. I shall tell all the American shipmasters not to have anything to do with him.\" The assistant also told the court that in his despatches the Consul had called Mr. Smith some very hard names. Mosby had attacked everyone who had previously been connected with the Consulate.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]