[
    {
        "id": 206647,
        "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": 195,
        "title": "RAS-1972",
        "content_text": "THREE CHINESE DEITIES\n\n189\n\nMalaya, in nine of which he is the main deity. Twenty-seven of these temples are run by Fukienese emigrants or their descendants; one is run by Hakka, three by Cantonese, two by Ch'ao Chow and one by Hainanese. In Taipei all eleven observed images are in temples maintained by Ch'üan Chow emigrants. There are three Cantonese temples in Malaya in which he has been seen; one is in Seremban and two are in Kuala Lumpur. In one of the Kuala Lumpur temples he is to be seen beside a sand divination table; the temple keeper in the other said that he was a lesser deity donated by a Fukienese devotee. The Seremban temple had all three brothers seated together on an altar in a temple devoted to Hsuan Tien Shang Ti (玄天上帝).\n\nIn a Hainanese temple in Singapore there is a standing image of Fa Chu Kung with the usual unkempt hair, but he has only one foot resting on a fire wheel. He is the secondary deity in the temple, which is dedicated to Wen Chow Hou Wang (溫州侯王) who is a specifically Hainanese deity.\n\nIn one spirit medium temple in Singapore, where Fa Chu Kung is the main deity, the medium and the keeper are both Fukienese. The female medium speaks with a very deep voice, said to be that of Fa Chu Kung, and writes prescriptions for medicines dictated by him. To stimulate the spirit to reply, and thereby causing considerable interest to the spectators around the table, the female medium pauses between writing each prescription and extinguishes a lighted candle on the roof of her mouth.\n\nProfessor Wolfram Eberhard has confirmed that in his researches he has encountered this deity, the god of the cult of tea merchants localized in the areas of Ying Ch'üen (#) and Te Hui (德惠) whose birthday is on the 27th day of the 7th lunar month. Law suits were settled before this deity, who is mentioned in the Taiwanese folk almanac of 1963.\n\nMyths concerning the origins or deification of Fa Chu Kung\n\nMost temple keepers who have an image of Fa Chu Kung in their temples tell a different story about his origin. These tales do, however, contain certain common factors:\n\na. Fa Chu Kung is the head of all demons and is to be feared. His black face signifies his demonic origins. He warned all gods in the area of Ying Ch'üen in Fukien that the area was too\n\nPage 190 is missing\n\nPage 195\n\nPage 196",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206911,
        "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": 188,
        "title": "RAS-1973",
        "content_text": "182\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nmajor systems of romanization now in use by English speaking sinologists, viz. Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Pinyin, and Yale. This alone might make the book worth the money to those of us who have trouble keeping them all sorted out. I, for one, would like to call for a revised and expanded version, with smaller print and less wasted space and adding the French, German, and Russian systems. In such a form one might predict that it would be a must for every beginning scholar in the field.\n\nCornell University, 1972.\n\nJOHN MCCOY\n\nARMANDO DA SILVA. TAI YU SHAN, TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL ADAPTION IN A SOUTH CHINESE ISLAND. Taipei, Orient Cultural Service, 1972 pp. 102, U.S.$4.75.\n\nThis brief work is one in the series 'Asian Folklore and Social Life Monographs' (Vol. XXXII) edited by Professor Lou Tsu-k'uang in collaboration with Professor Wolfram Eberhard. The author was educated in Hong Kong and at the time of publication was on the faculty of the Geography Department in the University of Hawaii. The book is of particular interest to Hong Kong residents because it is written about the Colony's largest island, Lantau or Tai Yu Shan; and because little has been written on the particular aspects of local rural life with which he deals,\n\nThe book is an abridged version of a master's thesis for the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, for which the field work was done on Lantau in 1962-64. The author states in his preface: \"I chose the island of Tai Yu Shan as a place for study as it still possessed many cultural relics of archeological, historical, and ecological interest; old forts, abandoned beach-temples, disused lime kilns, ruins of former settlements, hillside terraces in disuse, and well-constructed hillside trails that led to nowhere. Fast disappearing even then were certain forms of livelihood such as sea-weed collecting, stake-net fishing, and hillside liquor distilling. But most of all, I chose Tai Yu Shan because I just enjoyed being there.\" His purpose was to describe a traditional coastal way of life that had endured for so long. \"I thought it important then, as I still do now, that I had to understand and to interpret, before imminent changes made things difficult, the man-land processes that made for the genre of Tai Yu Shan.\"",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210051,
        "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-1984",
        "page_number": 22,
        "title": "RAS-1984",
        "content_text": "TEMPLE ORACLES IN A CHINESE CITY\n\nA Study of the Use of Temple Oracles\n\nin Taichung, Central Taiwan*\n\nJULIAN PAS\n\nPrelude\n\nIn the early morning of February 26, 1978, our group of over a hundred pilgrims from Taichung arrived in the city of Peikang, one of the major centres of the Matsu cult. The ch'ao-t'ien temple there was first built in 1694 and enlarged in 1775. The whole previous day had been spent in visiting temples in other places and burning incense to prepare for this solemn visit. As we arrive, the sedan chair of the goddess which we had brought from Taichung is carried toward the temple gates by ten strong men; the pilgrims follow behind, while musicians blow high-pitched trumpets and beat gongs and drums.\n\nSoon our group disappears inside the temple gates, while the great bell and drum are beaten to welcome the visiting Matsu. All the courtyards and halls are crowded with worshippers. It is still three weeks before the deity's birthday celebration but already every day large crowds of visitors pour into the small town from all over Taiwan. Peikang is the seat of the mother temple of Matsu on the island, and hundreds of temples claim affiliation with it.\n\nWhile the visiting gods and goddesses are carried into the inner shrine and seated on the altar tables to pay homage to the Peikang Matsu, the crowd of pilgrims go about their private devotions. They offer incense to all the deities enthroned here, pray to Matsu, tell her about their problems and uncertainties at home, and ask her advice. Matsu's counsels have been embodied in her temple\n\nTo prepare this survey I was greatly inspired by my learned friends Mr. Liu Chih-wan, a research scholar at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Institute of Ethnology, and by Professor Wolfram Eberhard of the University of California at Berkeley. I am also indebted to the untiring efforts of Miss Ch'en Yu-mei in Taichung, who collected many samples of the temple oracles. I finally wish to recognize my gratefulness to the Tunghai University in Taichung: my team of anthropology students, 1977-78, contributed to the completion of the Taichung sample collection, while the Centre for Environmental Studies kindly offered me office space. (Dr. Pas is professor of Religious Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada,)",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212102,
        "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": 44,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "21\n\nMin Ha Old Village was removed and resited in the 1980s, this hall was also part of the reprovisioning. It was rebuilt on a terrace next to the Ho family's new ancestral hall, as in the old village; and honours are still paid to the benefactor's spirit tablet in the same way as to those of their own ancestors.\n\nConclusion: Are there Other Interpretations?\n\nIn Parts I and II of this article, I have suggested that the problems created for the Hong Kong Government by continued large-scale immigration and the concurrent need to modernize were greatly mitigated by its being able to rely on a remarkably well-behaved and generally cooperative population.\n\nI have presumed that this phenomenon was largely derived from the inherited traditions of the Chinese people of that and earlier generations. However, in making this suggestion, I have borne in mind that public and private life in China had already been subject to change in the first half of this century, and that in practice the Chinese people might at an earlier date have been more resistant to the influences described above. The degree to which peasants and other ordinary folk have shared Confucian values has always been an open question, and has drawn much attention in recent years. In his study of Cantonese ballads, of the kind to be regarded as \"folklore written by simple writers, not by scholars, and for simple folk to be read by them or to be listened to\", Professor Wolfram Eberhard has shown that \"the values which the ballads represent are often not the so-called 'Confucian' values\". And a recent survey of twentieth-century Chinese peasant proverbs, which focuses on material from the north and northwest, also gives a somewhat varied impression of the extent of peasant acceptance of traditional Confucian values and shows some variation from them.42\n\nHowever, I do not see why these should be considered to be mutually exclusive phenomena. The Chinese peasant was quite capable of absorbing and evincing both Confucian and non-Confucian sets of values, and this I think he did. For instance, to take a Hong Kong example, the \"Extant Cantonese Children's Songs\" recently studied by Helen Kwok and Mimi Chan, besides revealing the \"prevailing attitudes\" expressed in \"the speech of semi-literate peasants, direct and frank, often to the point of being coarse\", did also in their opinion",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    }
]