[ { "id": 205148, "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": 104, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "FOREIGN RELATIONS OF BUDDHISM\n\n48 Ts'en, Hsü-yün ho-shang nien-p'u, Hong Kong, 1962, pp. 21-22.\n\n49 Ts'en, Hsü-yün, pp. 40-43.\n\n99\n\n50 Ts'en, Hsi-yün, pp. 47-48. I have been unable to get confirmation of this story in Thailand; nor have I been able to confirm the related episode, in which Hsü-yün on his way to Bangkok that year met an Englishman who had been British consul in Teng-yüeh and Kunming and who gave Hsü-yün 3,000 pounds Sterling towards the expense of transporting a set of the Tripitaka back to Yunnan. The records of the Foreign Office in London do not appear to reveal who this may have been.\n\n51 White marble images from Burma and Thailand, termed in Chinese \"jade buddhas\" (yi-fo) have been popular in China during the past century. In the late 1890's a set of such images was made in India for a Chinese monk from P'u-t'o Shan, who spent the better part of three years at Oudh overseeing the work. So popular were these particular images that when they arrived in Shanghai, they were kept on exhibit in nearby Woosung at the request of the authorities as a large number of Chinese visit them daily, which was quite profitable for the railway.\" See Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 31 (1896-1897), 203. These may well have been the jade buddhas installed during the reconstruction of the Fa-yü Ssu on P'u-t'o Shan,\n\n52 Ts'en, Hsi-yün, p. 66.\n\n53 Cheng-lien, Ch'ang-chou T'ien-ning ssu-chih, Shanghai, 1948, 7:102. Cf. Chou Hsiang-kuang, History of Chinese Buddhism, Allahabad, 1955, p. 214,\n\n54 See Eastern Buddhist, 3.3 (October-December, 1924), p. 274. This is the earliest instance I have encountered of a Chinese Buddhist going abroad to study Theravada. Unlike Huang Mao-lin he is not stated to have had the goal of spreading Mahayana as well.\n\n55 For example in 1916 the head of the Chi-le Ssu, Pen-chung, led a group of his Refugee disciples to Ku Shan to receive the lay ordination: they numbered five out of the six upasakas and forty out of the 114 upasikas. This information comes from the 1916 ordination yearbook.\n\n56 See Yüan-ying fa-shih chi-nien k'an (Memorial volume for Yüan-ying), Singapore, 1954, pp. 13-14.\n\n57 However, they came from around Amoy rather than around Foochow, where Ku Shan was located.\n\n58 Chinese Year Book 1937, p. 74.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206774, "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-1973", "page_number": 51, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "EARLY STEAMSHIPS IN CHINA\n\nA. D. BLUE*\n\nIn East Asia: The Modern Transformation, Professor J. K. Fairbank writes, \"This carrying trade on China's waterways was to prove the Westerners' main point of entry into the Chinese economy, for here the introduction of the steamship could alter the inherited technology\" As late as 1880 there was still not a single mile of railway in China, nor a single machine-driven loom or spindle. At that date, however, the three leading steamship companies owned forty-two steamships operating on the various routes on the Canton River, the Lower Yangtse, and between the various treaty ports on the coast. As K. C. Liu points out in his Anglo-American Steamship Rivalry in China, 1862-74, the steamship was not only a technological innovation. It was also a business innovation, because it brought with it new methods of capital organisation and management on a scale hitherto unknown in China. Many Chinese of the scholar-official class also recognised the importance of steamships, and of guns, and—by inference—the political system which made these things possible. From the mid 19th century onwards, memorial after memorial to the Throne emphasised this. Sir Charles Snow was not exaggerating so very much when he wrote that the steam engine helped to shape the modern world as much as Adam Smith or Napoleon. Unfortunately for China, officials closer to the Throne discouraged its occupants from pursuing modernisation.\n\nSteam navigation in China began in the south, on the Canton River, and—like so many other aspects of the Western invasion—came by way of India. The first steamship in Asia seems to have been the Nawab of Oude's steam yacht, about which little information has survived. According to Prinsep, this was built at Lucknow in 1819, and equipped with an eight horse-power engine sent out from England, so she must have been very small. She is said to have been capable of seven to eight knots, but when the Nawab tired of her was allowed to go to ruin. Apart from this, the first\n\n* Mr. Blue is well-known to readers of the Journal. An engineer officer of the British Merchant Marine since 1928, he has now contributed five articles on Eastern marine subjects.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209755, "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-1983", "page_number": 14, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "Links with other Overseas Branches of the RAS\n\nFrom time to time we have established short-lived links with one or other of our sister branches of the Society, including the Korean Branch (established in 1900) and the Asiatic Society of Bengal (established in 1784); and since Mr. K. M. A. Barnett left Hong Kong I have been the Corresponding Member in Hong Kong for the main Society in London. At the last AGM a member asked if ties could be renewed with branches in the region. This has been discussed by the Council recently, and I have written to the Korean and Malaysian Branches asking for information on their activities and expressing an interest in maintaining contact. I was also invited to attend the bicentenary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in January 1984, but unfortunately the notice came late and no direct reply was given to my letter expressing willingness to go. (In this connection Members may have seen the rather distressing account of this venerable body in the Far Eastern Economic Review for 15/3/84). We will continue the effort to keep in touch.\n\nMembership\n\nOur total membership as at 29th February 1984 was 478, comprising 7 honorary members, 105 local life members, and 2 institutional members, with 75 overseas life members and 37 ordinary overseas members. Changes since last year at this time included 36 resignations, 2 deaths, 19 persons not sending subscriptions and 20 renewal notices returned by the GPO because the members were no longer at their notified addresses. Against this there were 29 new members. There was, as you will perceive, a marked reduction in total membership, mostly in local ordinary membership and mainly attributable to the doubling of the annual subscription from $50 to $100 in 1982. There had been an earlier loss of this kind when the subscription was raised from $30 to $50 in 1975. This is seemingly unavoidable in a busy place like Hong Kong with its many competing interests and claims on people's time, leading some members to say, in their letters of resignation, that they felt they did not take sufficient advantage of the Society's activities to warrant the increased cost. All the more reason, then, for us all to make a special effort to provide interesting programmes if we are to find new members.\n\nxiii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 } ]