[
    {
        "id": 212848,
        "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": 157,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "142\n\nfires and flying away again unable to find them. Inevitably there were some accidents and losses.\n\n―\n\n--\n\nRarely half a dozen 'planes would make a sortie the same night; we would then be busy for days collecting the heavy containers they would weigh up to three hundred pounds and carrying them back to camp. We received reinforcements; officers with long experience in the East; British wireless operators; Chin, Kachin, and Burmese assistants. Our money and our mail also came this way; Bren guns, Stens, Italian carbines, clothing, food and occasionally drink. Sometime later we were visited by two American officers attached to the Nth division; they spent the day with us. We discovered they had a partiality for Bourbon whisky, a thing most difficult to find in Calcutta. However, we thought we would plan a little surprise for them; we asked our friends in Calcutta whether they could not find a couple of bottles and include them in the next sortie. The sortie was made in due course, several containers crashed, and when we anxiously looked over the lists of contents, we sadly found that the precious bottles had \"pranged\" as Stan put it in his airforce jargon.\n\nThe problem of cutting a way through the jungle was ever present in Burma. We decided we would equip one man out of every two with a cutting implement for the purpose. There were many opinions about which implement was the best; each officer had his own idea. We left it to our 'furnishers' to supply what they had, and I have never seen such a collection of deadly looking hacking weapons as the variety sent. It included dahs, the light Burmese single-handed sword, with a blade about two feet long and in my opinion not quite heavy enough for the job; kukris, a choice for the expert; the East African panga, which I like best, but then perhaps I am prejudiced it reminded me of my days with the King's African Rifles during the last war; a short two-edged stabbing sword, obviously borrowed straight from the Roman Legion; and some quite unrecognisable kinds, probably designed by enthusiastic cranks.\n\nThe Italian carbines had been captured in Africa and were believed useful for our type of work; they only weighed four pounds, were short and handy but they had a very high muzzle velocity and kicked like an anti-tank rifle, without the rubber padding with which that rifle is fitted. They had fixed sights; on the little thirty yards range, which Stan had built in a fold of the mountain, we found they threw at least a foot off the bull; but they appeared to be fairly accurate at somewhere around",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214822,
        "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-1999",
        "page_number": 237,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "203\n\nis result-oriented, clients either multiply or fall away. The more \"miracles\" a god is perceived to have worked, now or in the past, the more popular he or she becomes with the public. Money flows like water to that temple, enabling major reconstructions that can double its size and more. Where there are no miracles, and results cease to flow from that image or shrine, the disappointed, discontented supplicants turn their attention elsewhere. I have frequently come across this attitude in the local temples, among worshippers and temple keepers alike, and it is apparently one of very long standing.\n\n25\n\nThis capacity to discard as well as acquire gods, is due to the very pragmatic attitude adopted by the people. It has been styled the \"shopping approach\" towards religion and the deities because it is so deeply grounded in expectation and its continuation is so much dependent upon results.26 In line with this approach, frustrated devotees sometimes took their disappointment and dissatisfaction a step further. Especially in crises, gods who failed to protect were not only abandoned but sometimes harshly treated. Whilst this phenomenon had been noted by many Protestant missionaries in 19th century China, the practice was observed long before that time. In 1583, the most famous of all Roman Catholic missionaries to China, Father Matteo Ricci, had written that “when these [idols] do not grant them what they [the people] desire, they beat them hard and make peace again with them later on.”??\n\nMany Gods in the Chinese Pantheon\n\nFrom the foregoing, it will scarcely come as a surprise to learn that the gods were legion. The pantheons of both Buddhism and especially Taoism have shown over many centuries the extreme creativity of the Chinese people in the matter of finding extra deities to worship. Over a century ago, Rev. Hampden Du Bose, \"for Fourteen Years a Missionary at Soochow,\" described the very wide range of gods adopted by different professions and groups in the late 19th century.\n\n28 There has, in addition, always been a strong impulse to seek assistance and protection from any new deity or spirit which appeared to have miraculous powers, and this is far from being dead to-day.29",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]