[ { "id": 205179, "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": 135, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "JAMES HAYES \n\ntype based on the Tai Shek Kwu temple, the kaifongs usually deliberated in a temple.\n\nThe Yau Ma Ti Kaifong was closely linked with the Tin Hau Temple. This temple was apparently removed from another site in 1876-7743 and it is almost certain that the Kaifong took the lead in its removal and reconstruction. They also took the opportunity to construct a school building to one side of the temple about the same time. These building projects were considerable undertakings and as such were highly creditable to the Kaifong members. Some years later (1888) the Kaifong presented the temple with a large cast iron bell which bears their name. Finally in 1894, the growing wealth of the Yau Ma Ti community enabled the Kaifong to build a separate community office or kung sor (2) on the other side of the temple building. The commemorative tablet recording this event comments:\n\n\"Yau Ma Ti district has undergone many changes and it can hardly be said that it still remains as it used to be.\n\nConsequently there was a need for larger premises in which to handle the affairs of a growing population. As the organisers put it:\n\n\"Persons who desire that right and wrong can be clearly discerned must help to set up a community office\".\n\nThe tablet concludes:\n\nThe organisers and donors confidently expect to see the new office uphold justice and righteousness\".\n\nThis temple, school and community office still exist today. They stand on Public Square Street, Kowloon, in substantially the same form as when they were erected in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by the leaders of the Yau Ma Ti Kaifong, to whose enterprise and community spirit they are a fitting memorial.\n\nFortunately we have a good example who spans the two localities considered in this article, the one a group of villages and the other a township. This man, WONG Lan-sang (£), 1878-1935, came from one of the villages. His father was a small farmer whose ancestors had come previously to Mong Kok village from the Wai Yeung region of Kwang Tung. The son is a good\n\nPage 130\n\n44\n\n+1\n\nPage 135\n\nPage 136", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205831, "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": 137, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "131\n\nTHE MAPPING OF HONG KONG\n\nLARGE-SCALE PLANS\n\nJ. T. COOPER*\n\nRapid and intense development requires accurate and up-to-date large-scale plans. This is equally true of large housing or engineering projects. Where such plans are not available, all detailed planning and design must await their completion. This is particularly true of Hong Kong, where the steep terrain usually requires extensive earthworks before construction of buildings or roads can commence.\n\nAnother factor adding to the necessity for accurate large-scale plans in the Colony is the high value of land, especially in the built-up areas, where a square foot of land can be worth $300 or more.\n\nThe Survey Branch of the Crown Lands & Survey Office (a sub-department of the Public Works Department) is responsible, not only for all land surveying and mapping in the Colony, but for the demarcation of all lot boundaries in the urban areas, and the implementation of town-planning layouts. Hong Kong is one of the few Commonwealth territories where there are no licensed land surveyors in private practice.\n\nWith the intense development which began in the nineteen-fifties, the staff of the Survey Branch became fully occupied with title surveys, the setting-out of lot boundaries, Government sites, roads, etc., and was unable either to produce large-scale plans of all the areas planned for new development or to keep up to date the plans in the older areas where re-development caused many changes.\n\nThe city areas of Victoria, and the northern part of Hong Kong Island, together with most of the Kowloon peninsula (south of Boundary Street) had been mapped at 1/600 scale (50 ft. to one inch) before the war, but the plans had been plotted onto linen-backed paper, and in the climatic conditions of Hong Kong, they had become distorted and inaccurate. None of these plans\n\n* Mr. Cooper is Assistant Superintendent (Survey), Crown Lands and Survey Office, Public Works Department, Hong Kong. Ed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206806, "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": 83, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "SWATOW HORIZONTAL STICK PUPPETS\n\n77\n\nbeing 2-3 feet high but cannot remember how they were manipulated. They were probably Fukienese string-puppets, which would not be surprising, as Fukienese Min-nan opera groups were popular in Ch'aochow, so why not Fukienese puppets? In Mr. Su's home, in Ch'aochow city, the greatest pleasure children derived was to play their own leather-shadow puppets behind the paper-screen. Besides the ceremonial puppet-shows at the temple festivals there were always puppet-shows performed for public entertainment in those days. He recalls that the leather shadow-puppets were by far the most interesting to watch.\n\nApart from traditional subjects, they offered a kind of political cabaret caricaturing the confusion after the 1911 Revolution or performing an amusing burlesque. They are said to have given realistic renderings of the feats and behaviour of the warlords and bandits who roamed the country between 1911 and the 1930s. These street performances were usually given by a team of two opera-singers who were too old to perform on stage. From a bamboo pole balanced on their shoulders hung a bundle of personal belongings at the rear end, and a trunk containing puppets, stage, and musical instruments at the front end. The two would set up their bamboo-frame stage in a rich private house or a public square, adjusting their lamp behind the paper-screen. They manipulated the puppets, spoke, sang, and played musical instruments using their mouths, hands, and feet simultaneously.\n\nOne very special occasion in Ch'aochow was the lantern festival on the fifteenth day of the first moon, when puppets were of prime importance. In the evening, a crowd would throng the streets to find a place at one of the many puppet-performances. Street-vendors offered puppets, with delicate heads made of clay and complete with clothes, for sale. The puppets looked exactly like those for performances, but were immovable and had no sticks at their hands or back. If parents wished to have a son or a daughter, or a groom or bride for their children, they would buy an appropriate doll on this day and keep it at home.\n\nThe transition from shadow to round puppets is clearly stated in the Chinese literary sources.* It is there repeated that shadow-puppets came to Ch'aochow in the Sung dynasty and were always performed behind a paper-screen on a bamboo-frame called chu-chuang44* (bamboo-window); and that by the end of last century\n\n* See Liu and Sun under Bibliography to this article.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208953, "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": 115, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "FUNG SHUI; ILLUSTRATED BY KAT HING WAI, N.T.\n\nKai Hing Wat. the walled Hamlet of Good Fortune\n\n83\n\nKat Hing Wai, Walled Hamlet of Good Fortune, is the residence of an extended family of the Tang lineage. All the people who live here are closely related in Chinese kinship terms. It is situated in the middle of the Kam Tin Valley separated from most of the Tang hamlets by a modern highway. The dwelling units built by the clansmen during 1465–1487 are flanked by a fortified wall and moat of later construction, 1662-1721. The walls, measuring 275 feet by 290 feet, form roughly a square plan with gun towers about 25 ft at the four corners. Along the 18-ft high walls there are gun slots near the parapets. The moat of about 20 ft width is crossed by a stone bridge at the entrance, fenced by a pair of wrought iron gates. The entire hamlet with its main entrance and the entrances of the houses orient toward the west instead of the usual southerly orientation.\n\nThe layout of the hamlet is highly formalised and symmetrical. The main street, 10 ft wide, running from the entrance gate to the shrine at the opposite end, forms the central axis. On both sides of the main street are row houses with 10 units per row, six rows on each side, and three foot lanes separating the rows. All public facilities such as storerooms, washing facilities and animal shed are located on the periphery walls enclosing the compound. Guarding the main entrance is the shrine of the Earth God. There is no commercial establishment within the hamlet. It is a kind of communal dwelling similar to others in Kwangtung and Fukien. Shared facilities such as the market square, schools and ancestral temples are not found within the hamlet, but are located in proper places where governed by fung-shui principles, as indicated on the map.\n\nAccording to the villagers, there were as many as 600 members living here at one time; the present population is about two hundred.\n\nAll individual dwellings are identical in size and layout, with the exception of those in the first and last row where the front room is missing. It is basically a three-part house with a front room 10 ft wide by 12 ft deep, a t'ien-ching (courtyard) of 10 by 8 in the middle and a back room equal to the size of the front room. A\n\nKat Hing Wai Kam Tin 錦田\n\nfung-shui * t'ien-ching #", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214518, "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-1998", "page_number": 376, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "345\n\nIt immediately became clear, however, that although very similar to the building in the picture taken by Tess Johnston, the present building was somewhat different. On enquiry, we were told that the old building had been demolished and rebuilt as an almost exact replica. This appeared to be true.\n\nBeyond this, along the road, were a line of impressive European-style residences, with delightfully contrasting back streets leading left and right. The far end of this street opened into a cobbled square with six or eight storey apartment buildings, reminding me of the suburbs of Milan. In fact the whole city has a very European feel to it. Compared to many Chinese cities, Dalian is very neat and tidy, and organised. It is proud of being the first (or only?) city in China to rid itself of rats. (I witnessed some public garden workers in a state of great excitement when they thought they saw a rat in the garden they were working in - it turned out to be a squirrel when the four of them flushed the unfortunate beast out of the bushes.) The streets are clean. There are trees everywhere. The roads leading out of the city are marked with white bollards at the roadside. One finds oneself wondering how come this particular part of China can stand out so much as being - well, rather nice. The answer is quickly offered by anybody to whom you ask this question, and that is that it is the Mayor of Dalian who is responsible for the city's progress. He has travelled extensively overseas, and when he comes home he tells his officials that he wants to see in Dalian the sort of facilities that he has seen abroad. And he is getting his way. The man deserves a medal. It would not be surprising for Dalian to be giving Shanghai a good run for its money some time in the new century.\n\nAnother feature of Dalian is that there is very little in the way of graffiti, although our guide spoiled the illusion somewhat by explaining that \"nobody can afford the paint\".\n\nLunch was in an enormous restaurant where our party were the only customers.\n\nThe city tour continued with a visit to the Nanshan suburb, the former Japanese residential area. Here are a number of quiet leafy streets containing very smart houses that would be at home in Surrey or Kent or a London suburb.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 } ]