[
    {
        "id": 204295,
        "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-1961",
        "page_number": 63,
        "title": "RAS-1961",
        "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\nVol 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n59\n\nIn the appendix to Robert Ainslie's book of religious essays lacking a title page, but published about 1820 under the title Reasons of the hope that is in us, there appears \"A Short Account of Lee Boo and Sackhouse, two Youths, brought at different periods from distant regions of the earth, still the rudest states of human society\" and we may read the following curious story:\n\nLee Boo was born in one of the Pelew Islands. The Antelope East India packet was, in 1783, wrecked on its shore.\n\nLee Boo was the son of the rupack, or king... and was brought to Britain for his improvement at the desire of his father. He was sent to an academy, and instructed in reading; being not a little proud of his acquirements. He was of a most affectionate temper. But why, amid all the cares of his friends of this amiable young man, did they not innoculate him? Exposed to the infection of the smallpox, he was seized with the fatal malady, and, at the age of twenty, died of it on 27th July, 1784, to the great sorrow and regret of all who knew him. The East India Company handsomely erected a neat monument over his grave in Rotherhithe churchyard, with an inscription, expressive of their gratitude for the humane and kind treatment afforded by his father to the crew of their ship the Antelope, when wrecked upon his island\".\n\nSackhouse was an Esquimaux, born in 1797, who in 1816 stowed away on a Scottish whaling ship and went with it to Scotland at his own request. He too learnt English, danced well, and played the flute; and those accomplishments, with his good-natured honest face, and obliging manners, rendered him a favourite and welcome guest wherever he went. He also died an early death in 1819 “most sincerely regretted”.\n\nThe appendix continues:\n\nHow unfortunate was it that those two excellent youths met such untimely fates! Had they lived they might have been the means, under Providence, of facilitating the introduction of Christianity into the most remote regions; and contributed to the happiness of millions,\n\nMr. Ainslie's two books of religious essays which he published remain deservedly obscure, but he himself has a claim to fame as a friend and correspondent of Robert Burns.\n\nBefore turning to Morrison's own contributions to Chinese studies and those of his contemporaries, mention must be made of his collection of Bibles in nearly thirty different languages, from Breton to Irish, from Hawaiian to Esquimaux, and Amharic to Catalan, more than a hundred of which are still in the Library,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205806,
        "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": 112,
        "title": "RAS-1969",
        "content_text": "106\n\nJOHN MCCOY\n\nCatullus or Boccaccio, and sometimes approaches Robert Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia without a similar need to expunge words from the Chinese text.\n\nFrom the literary point of view, one of the problems of handling the Mountain Songs, and especially any attempt to translate them, is just the question of how to handle the double meanings which are so much the key to these verses and their enjoyment. Too many footnotes would kill a translation and too little by way of explanation would probably leave a lot of the allusions lost to modern readers. Some of this is of course already lost forever because we have no way to recover all of the secondary references so familiar to the original singers of these songs. Even some of the primary references are difficult and it will take considerable research to dig all of the meaning out of some of the obscure vocabulary. But the problems of handling the grammatical markers and functors of this dialect are solvable. In spite of the fact that some of these items are written with characters not to be found in most dictionaries and obviously made up to handle the unusual Wu dialect pronunciations of the time, we are still able to reconstruct probable phonetic approximations and to propose probable meanings on the basis of our knowledge of modern dialects. It is in this special area that the linguist is in a unique position to help the student of literature.\n\nIf this sort of popular poetry attracts interest, we will necessarily need the services of the dialect specialist to solve some of the problems of interpretation. The linguist will gain a great deal from the information the Mountain Songs give him on Ming Dynasty dialects. Then the linguist will in turn enrich Chinese literature studies by opening up a neglected field.\n\nAlthough their reasons are quite different, Western scholars are beginning to agree with Peking that we have neglected popular literature too long. It seems reasonable to predict that more departments will give some room to folk songs and poetry in Chinese literature courses if the genre can be made accessible to the average reader.\n\nFrom the linguist's point of view, an analysis of the rhyme patterns of the Mountain Songs, done much on the same plan as Karlgren's Ancient Chinese, would be very useful when we are ready to work out a reconstruction of proto-Wu. I have carded",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d",
        "rank": 0
    }
]