[ { "id": 206671, "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-1972", "page_number": 219, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\nCHINESE CONNOISSEURSHIP: THE KO KU YAO LUN. The Essential Criteria of Antiquities. A translation made and edited by Sir Percival David. Introduction, etc., 62pp., translation text 292pp., reproduction of original Chinese text 50pp.: 32 plates; indices of names, subjects and books referred to. Faber, 1971, £15.00.\n\nThe Ko-Ku Yao-Lun (referred to here as KKYL) is not such a difficult book, provided one is conversant with the peculiarities of Ming \"authorship\" and publishing practices and provided one can find one's way through the vast labyrinth of pre-Ming literature. The first and most prominent characteristic of Ming writing is that the material is hardly ever original. Most Ming authors, writing on any subject, tend to plagiarise with more or less skill from earlier writers, adding interjections which may or may not serve as connecting passages between long unacknowledged quotations. Ming publishers, especially those of the sixteenth and early 17th centuries, have no qualms about freely \"editing\" a well-known title on grounds of commercial expediency, or changing the title or \"author\" of a well-established work and calling it a \"new\" publication. When Ming authors actually write, they adopt a style that is grammatically straightforward enough but the writing is usually choked with erudite references to classical or pre-Ming literature. The Chinese \"scholarly\" practice of referring to a historical person by one of his many names or, worse, by one of his several official positions which he might have held however briefly at some stage of his career, is one of the most vexing inconveniences faced by the uninitiated. This practice is carried to its extreme in the Ming period.\n\nSir Percival David came across the KKYL while doing research for his famous study of Ju wares of the Sung period. He then developed great interest in the book, so much so that he wanted to translate it and, in association with other specialists, make a detailed study of the book and subjects connected with it. To the great misfortune of students of Chinese art, he was not given time to finish his task before he died in 1964 after having, on and off, worked on the project for nearly ten years. Any criticism of the book as it stands must be made and read with this important fact in mind.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206672, "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-1972", "page_number": 220, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "214\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nWhen Sir Percival David undertook to translate the KKYL, he avoided one of the pitfalls of working with Ming books, and Ming editions of earlier work, by making sure he had a reliable edition. This he did in 1940 in Shanghai, when he acquired the earliest known edition of the book which is most probably the first edition of 1388. It would have been a relatively simple task to translate this original (\"original\" in the sense that it was the first book published in this name by Ts'ao Chao) work of three chapters. But later he also had the good fortune to acquire an equally rare 1462 printing of the enlarged edition of 1459 which had been swelled to thirteen chapters with additions made mainly by Wang Tso who brought out the 1459 edition. Sir Percival decided, bravely but perhaps not so wisely, to translate the enlarged edition. But then he failed to avoid the other pitfalls mentioned at the beginning of this review.\n\nFirst, there is the original three chapter edition. The copy acquired by Sir Percival, called \"O\" in the translation, is reproduced in full at the end of the book. Sir Percival thought it was \"the result of Ts'ao's study of actual specimens and ancient texts concerning them\". This is not so. For, with the exception of a few very brief entries on Sung porcelain and on lacquer, the whole book is a collection of mutilated passages extracted from similar works of the Sung and Yuan periods, such as Chao Hsi-ku's Tung-t'ien-ch'ing-lu-tsi (hereafter referred to as the TTCLT) and Hsia Wen-yen's T'u-hui Pao-chien. The latter is itself a notorious work of plagiarism.1 It should be noted here that the \"erudite\" manuscript notes in \"O\" written by a Ming reader consist mainly of sentences from the TTCLT which Ts'ao Chao omitted in his copying. Indeed Ts'ao was such a poor plagiarist that he made nonsense out of some of the most important passages in the TTCLT. For example, the detailed and accurate description of the cire perdue process of bronze casting in the TTCLT, incidentally one of the earliest Chinese accounts of this method of bronze casting, appears in the KKYL as (David's translation): \"Ancient moulds (reviewer's italics) for casting bronzes were made of wax. The patterns were finely and neatly carved as finely as a hair, and the strokes of their inscriptions were even and clear. They were inverted like roof-tiles, though not very deep.... \"The mistranslation of the word mo, meaning the original wax model of the bronze, into English \"mould\" is of course at least partly due to the brutal précis-ing of two long", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206673, "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-1972", "page_number": 221, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n215\n\npassages in TTCLT dealing with two separate aspects of ancient bronzes into one short paragraph. This is only one example of the jumbled passages which are scattered throughout the book. Such passages can only serve to confuse the translator who in the present case has succumbed unquestioningly to the apparent difficulty and made literal readings of the \"O\" text.\n\nThere is yet another source of confusion in the \"O\" text. These are the misprints—which are obvious to those acquainted with the texts from which the KKYL is derived. In the passage just referred to there is a misprint in “O” which substitutes a non-existent character for \"grain\". What should read as \"not a grain of grit” is translated as \"not a trace of grit\" through intelligent interpretation. A more serious error arises in another passage which describes the brush strokes representing water as \"grain\" (ku, i.e., comma-like shaped) strokes rather than “crêpe de Chine” (hu ✯, i.e., undulating surface) strokes. This again is literally translated.\n\nThere are other types of errors caused by other types of difficulties (some of them mentioned already at the beginning of this review), but enough has been said to show that the securing of original and early texts is only one of the many aspects of the preliminary work which needs to be done before a satisfactory translation can be made. There is also the question of the very worth of the KKYL as a work of scholarship. For surely it is not \"a pioneer work of epochal importance, for it was the earliest comprehensive and systematic treatise on Chinese art and archaeology\". This honour should be accorded the TTCLT which predates the KKYL by more than a century, if it is to be accorded to any one book of this kind which is extant. To be fair to Sir Percival David, it must be said that he was well aware of the existence of TTCLT and other similar early books, but this knowledge did not shake his faith in the KKYL. The most recent Chinese study of the KKYL, by Chang T'ieh-hsüan, also accepts without question the general importance and great value of the book.\n\nBut why was the KKYL so widely received and taken seriously for the entire Ming period and into the Ching, and even until now? The answer must be that it was published at a time when printed literature was for the first time available to a much wider public, whereas the TTCLT just missed the period of the great flourishing of the printing industry and was little known to most scholars and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206675, "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-1972", "page_number": 223, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS \n\n217 \n\nfourteen centuries (i.e. from the 7th century, the period of the beginning of the grand romance of the Lan-t'ing Preface, to less than ten years ago?) evaporates in the presence of the magical magnificence of the calligraphy. By religiously translating every single word of the miscellaneous writing on the Lan-t'ing as collected in the KKYL by Wang Tso, Sir Percival David became the first Englishman to dive into the dark waters of the mystery of the cult of Lan-t'ing. The translation reads well, even if no attempt is made to ease the task for the English reader of identifying personages referred to by multifarious names and titles. A great deal of patience and labour must have gone into the translation of this long section which can only have minimum appeal to the general reader but will be useful to the specialist student who wishes to explore the more esoteric subjects of Chinese art—although the student must also expect to do some homework before he or she can achieve full understanding of the stories told in this section. Similar criticism can be applied to other sections of the book which are mainly Wang Tso's additions. They deal with such subjects as imperial patents, imperial seals, and wandering spirits.\n\nThe reviewer must not give the impression that there are no notes at all; but that many more notes are required to make such a strange (in the sense of being foreign) book intelligible to the English reading public which, though large in numbers, is not and cannot be generally familiar with China of the 14th century and before. Of the notes which are given, some are useful, such as that on \"hsi-p'i\" lacquer on pp. 145-6.\n\nAll in all, the most accomplished production of the book contrasts sharply with the unfinished nature of its contents. And this brings us back to the cautionary remark made earlier, that the book must be judged as an unfinished work. With this work, Sir Percival David has taken English scholarship in Chinese art history to the verge of a new level of understanding. It is hoped that a new generation of scholars will follow the path that he has shown.\n\nAs a postscript, it may be mentioned that the plates, chosen by Mr. Basil Gray who has otherwise done excellent work in preparing the book for printing, do not relate too well to the subject matters dealt with in the book. Again, to perform this task satisfactorily, it would have been necessary to do a great deal of research into the kind of objects which would go into the collection of a Ming scholar.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207917, "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-1976", "page_number": 305, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "290\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\ncareer, since this Nan-hai artist had continuously worked as a professional over half a century; and finally his works were mainly sold at a very reasonable price.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 See Chuang Shen: \"Some observations on Kwangtung paintings\" in Kwangtung Painting (1973, published by the Urban Council, Hong Kong), pp. 9-24.\n\n2 According to the 6th chuan of Ming-hua-lu, “Records of painting in the Ming Dynasty\", edited by Hsu Hsin in the early years of the Ch'ing Dynasty, Lin Liang was active in the Hung-chih era (1488-1505), mainly in the late 15th century.\n\n3 Chu Pi-shan was famous for his specially designed silver wine cup in the shape of a hollow tree. For a colour reproduction of such a cup, dated 1345 by Chu's own carved inscription, see \"The selected Handcrafts from the collections of the Palace Museum\", edited by the Palace Museum, (1974, Peking), pl. 34.\n\nA similar silver wine cup, also dated 1345 by Chu's own carved inscription, in the form of a boat made of a hollow tree in which Chang Ch'ien is seated, is owned by Lady David of London. For its reproduction, see Perceval David: Chinese Connoisseurship (New York, 1971), pl. 19C.\n\n4 The origin of this name seemingly inspired by a famous line of the 5th century poet Tao Chien, in the 5th poem of his \"Drinking wine\". This line reads:\n\n\"Culling chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge, 悠然見南山\n\nI see afar the South hills.\"\n\nFor the English translation of this poem, see Robert Kotewall and Norman L. Smith: The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse (1962, Middlesex), p. 9.\n\n5 In \"Lo-yu-yüan\", the mid-9th century poet Li Shang-yin (813-858) wrote:\n\n\"The setting sun has boundless beauty\n\nonly the yellow dusk is so near.\"\n\nSee also Robert Kotewall and Norman L. Smith; ibid, p. 25.\n\n6 See Wang Chao-yung \"Lin-nan hua-cheng-yueh\" 'A Brief Document on Kwangtung painting' (1927, Shanghai), chuan 10, p. 7.\n\n7 The most important literary man who loved plums during the Sung China was no one but Lin Pu (967-1028). As a native of Chekiang, Lin Pu lived in a mountain overlooking the West Lake of Hangchow. When he lost his wife he had not re-married. Having planted a lot of plum trees near his house, he began to regard the plum blossoms as his wife. For this blossom he had this famous line written:\n\n\"Your slanting shadow reflects on the clear, shallow lake 斜水清淺\n\nYour elusive fragrance floats about in the yellow of the evening moon”.\n\nFor the English translation of this poem, see Max Perleberg: Lin Ho-ching (1952, Hong Kong), p. 15.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212303, "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-1990", "page_number": 245, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "222 \n\nand Jardine's Crescent, both in Causeway Bay, and Jardine's Corner on the Peak. Bulkeley Street market, and streets named Perceval, Irving, Anton, Landale, Matheson, Paterson, Johnstone and Keswick are named after Jardine taipans.\n\nThere is also Jardine's Lookout. It was from this 433 metre high vantage point that observers galloped down by 'pony express' to head office, in the days before modern communications, with the news that a Jardine ship was approaching. In early Hong Kong the company is said to have had a fleet of 12 ships which were faster than those of rival firms,\n\nThe late Richard Hughes, wrote that, of the two founders, Jardine was the older and tougher, and the planner. He was respected and even feared, and nicknamed 'Iron-headed Old Rat', in Chinese, because of his insouciant attitude when attacked and hit over the head with a club in Canton (Hunter, 1844). Except for the one on which he sat, there were no chairs in his office. Visitors were not encouraged to dally.\n\nMatheson was more genteel, although not of exalted stock, and some of his family had been clergy and others army officers. He was more liberal, suave and affable, and even, so it is believed, regarded with some affection. Unlike most businessmen at the time, he was a person of some taste and culture. In 1827, he supplied a small hand printing press so the Canton Register, an English newspaper, could be published. He owned the only piano in Canton or Macau. But as Hughes writes, no one laughed when he sat down to play'. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK) on the 19th February 1846.\n\nMatheson was a good organiser and administrator. He could draft a dry, caustic minute as the following illustrates:\n\n\"The 'Gazelle' was unnecessarily delayed at Hong Kong in consequence of Captain Crocker's repugnance to receiving opium on the Sabbath. We have every respect for persons entertaining strict religious principles, but we fear that very godly people are not suited for the drug trade. Perhaps it would be better that the Captain should resign.\"\n\nIncidentally David Matheson, a member of the 'clan', did resign some years later to become chairman of the executive committee of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213399, "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": 221, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "209\n\nNevins, John Livingston (1829-1893), China and the Chinese, New York Harper, 1869\n\nNorthey, James E, People Go to Church the Story of Greater Lancashire, London Salvationist Publication and Supplies, 1973\n\nOliphant, Laurence (1829-1888), Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's Mission to China and Japan in the Years 1857, 1858, 1859, New York Harper, 1860\n\nOrleans, Pierre Joseph d' (1641-1698), History of the Two Tartar Conquerors of China. Including the two Journeys into Tartary of Father Ferdinand Verbiest, in the Suite of the Emperor Kang-Hi from the French, London printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1854\n\nOsbeck, Per (1723-1805), A Voyage to China and the East Indies Together with an Account of Chinese Husbandry by John Reinhold Forster - Appendix of Faunula and Flora Sinensis, London B White, 1771\n\nOwen, David Edward, British Opium Policy in China and India, London and Oxford Oxford University Press, 1934\n\nParker, Edward Harper, Chinese Customs, a Lecture, Shanghai Kelly and Walsh, 1899\n\nParliamentary Papers, House of Commons (1857) Session 2, No XLIII, papers relating to the opium trade in China 1842-56 (Opium Trade 1932, Correspondence Relating to China 1840, Additional Correspondence Relating to China 1840, Report from the Select Committee on the Trade with China 1840)\n\nPaterno, Roberto M, The Yangtze Valley anti-Missionary Riots of 1891, Harvard University PhD dissertation, 1967\n\nPelliot, Paul, Notes on Marco Polo, Paris Imprimerie Nationale, 1957-1963\n\n1\n\nLe voyage de MM Gabet et Huc a Lhasa (a reprint of 1850 article) in Toung Pao 24 133-78 (1926)\n\nPennell, Wilfred V, A Lifetime with the Chinese, Hong Kong Privately printed, 1974\n\nPercival, William Spencer, The Land of the Dragons, My Boating and Shooting Excursions to the Gorges of the Yangtze. London Hurst, 1889\n\nTwenty Years in the Far East, Sketches, London Simpkin, 1905\n\nPereira, Thomas, The Treaties and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689, the Diary of Thomas Pereira, SJ, Rome 1961 (Bibliotheca Instituti Historici S J vol 18)\n\nPlayfair, G M H, The Cities and Towns of China, a Geographical Dictionary, Shanghai Kelly and Walsh, 2nd edition, 1910 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen publishing)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 } ]