[
    {
        "id": 205719,
        "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": 25,
        "title": "RAS-1969",
        "content_text": "CHINESE UNOFFICIAL MEMBERS OF COUNCILS\n\n19\n\nan outstanding job in these difficult times in enlightening the Chinese masses and in explaining to them the purpose of the Government measures. For these invaluable services he was later presented with a gold medal and a letter of thanks from the general public of Hong Kong.\n\nWei Yuk was also a far-sighted person, for it was he who first seriously pursued the idea of constructing a railway from Kowloon to Canton and thence to Peking. He spent large sums in furtherance of the scheme which failed, however, owing to the obstacles placed in its way by officials in China.21\n\nWei Yuk served on many Government and public committees. While not being noted for long speeches, he was always clear and precise in expressing his views and advice. He retired from public service in 1917 at the age of 68. For his invaluable services to the Colony, he was awarded the C.M.G. in 1908 and knighted in 1919. He died in 1922.\n\nWhen Sir Kai Ho Kai retired in February 1914, his place in the Legislative Council was filled by Lau Chu-pak, who was born in Hong Kong in 1866. He was a brilliant scholar at the Central School and in 1885 was the first boy to be awarded the Stewart Scholarship.22 After leaving the Central School, he was for a time chief clerk at the Hong Kong Observatory. Later he became a tea merchant and amassed a fortune. He was a generous benefactor of education and helped financially many poor children to complete their schooling. With Ho Fook, he was co-founder, in 1900, of the Chinese Merchants Bureau which was renamed in 1913 the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Before he was appointed to the Legislative Council, he was for many years an active member of the District Watch Force Committee, the Sanitary Board, the Board of Education and the Council of the University of Hong Kong. He was Chairman of the Po Leung Kuk in 1903, a founder-director of the Kwong Wah Hospital in 1907 and Chairman of Tung Wah Hospital in 1909/1910. In January 1909 when a powerful committee was nominated, with the Governor Sir Frederick Lugard as Chairman, to raise funds to start the University of Hong Kong, Lau, Dr. Ho Kai and Wei Yuk were all members of the Committee.\n\nLau Chu-pak's concern in education was demonstrated in 1916 when he suggested, in a Legislative Council meeting, that the",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212720,
        "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-1992",
        "page_number": 29,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "14\n\nmostly written by himself, which sadly adds little to our overall knowledge.\n\nOne of the problems is dating, not only of his personal life though the general outline is well defined, but also the dates prior to publication when he wrote up the notes and the final narratives. There would appear to be times when flashes of inspired hindsight have been included into episodes of his biography or into his essays on China's recent past, her problems and how they should be solved.\n\nMesny's writings have brought to life again a number of now long forgotten aspects of life in China in the nineteenth century. It was not a China of pagodas, silk, tea and pigtails but one of hostility, dirt, bug-ridden towns and villages, a mass of poverty-stricken peasants and the ever-present threat of early death from disease. We tend to forget or overlook the acceptance as a norm in those days of the complications and tedium caused by time, distance, and poor communications when it took days and even weeks of tiring travel on foot or on the backs of animals to reach the capital of a neighbouring province. Nowadays we also tend to imagine that during Imperial days the peasant population of China was fairly sedentary with little knowledge of much beyond the neighbouring village or the annual district fair. Mesny describes at one point how memories of distant parts of China were brought home to their villages by the many individuals who served with armies suppressing revolts in distant provinces such as Mongolia, Yunnan and Dzungaria [now part of Sinkiang province]; and, for example, how far and wide the Cantonese, as traders, had spread their presence. Mesny also vividly brings alive on a number of occasions the atmosphere in which foreigners, often alone or in very small parties, were out on a limb in far-flung parts of China with ever-increasing xenophobia, and with anti-foreign violence threatening their very lives.\n\nThe Miscellanies contained remarkably few illustrations. All were photographs of people apart from several poorly reproduced photographs in 1905 of astronomical instruments in the Peking Observatory before they were borne off to Germany by the German contingent during the Boxer rebellion in 1900, and one litho in Volume 4 of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, merely recording who it represented. The picture of Chu Yuan-chang in all his ugliness was also reproduced later in 1910 in a small book also printed in Shanghai written by William Kahler, 'Chinese Hotchpotch', accompanying one of the articles reprinted from",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]