[ { "id": 206009, "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-1970", "page_number": 89, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "84 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\ncame from cholera and fire, and not from revolt. It was generally believed that the Chinese were more able to look after themselves than the Indians. \n\nOne of the greatest tragedies in Chinese emigration befell the American clipper Flora Temple in 1859. The Flora Temple left Macao for Havana with 850 passengers, who were rebellious from the very start of the passage. Although they were unsuccessful in breaking out of the holds, they killed one of the crew who fell into their clutches. The ship ran into bad weather four days out from Macao, and was unable to take accurate sights. Two days later she ran on a reef off the coast of Indo-China. It was apparent that she would soon break up, so the captain and crew launched and provisioned the two lifeboats, and abandoned the ship and passengers. After a rough passage the captain and one of the lifeboats reached the coast near Touron twelve days later, but nothing was heard of the other lifeboat. A French naval ship was sent to rescue the deserted coolies and search for the missing lifeboat. When they arrived at the scene of the wreck, however, all they could find was a few planks of the Flora Temple, but no trace of the passengers or other lifeboat. \n\nAnother tragedy, but on a smaller scale, befell the British barque Sophia Fraser when taking emigrants from Amoy to Penang. The Sophia Fraser ran into a typhoon three days out of Amoy, and during the pandemonium which broke out among the coolies confined in the 'tween decks thirty-five died. The subsequent enquiry revealed that only four of the deaths were due to natural causes, the rest having been killed in the senseless fight caused by panic. This bears some resemblance to the central incident in Conrad's novel \"Typhoon\", as the burning of the Shah Jehan in the Indian coolie trade resembles the central incident in \"Lord Jim\". \n\nWhat appeared at the time to be one of the major tragedies in the history of Chinese emigration concerned the French ship St. Paul in 1858, when taking 327 indentured labourers from Hong Kong to the Australian gold fields. The St. Paul ran on a reef off Rossel Island, a small island lying to the east of the New Guinea islands, and the captain and eight of the crew were picked up fifteen days later by the British schooner Prince of Denmark. After an inexplicable delay of two months they were put ashore", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206010, "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-1970", "page_number": 90, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "CHINESE EMIGRATION AND THE DECK PASSENGER TRADE 85\n\nat the French settlement on New Caledonia, after which the French authorities sent a ship to rescue the survivors on Rossel Island. Only one small Chinese boy was found, whose story was that the rest of the passengers and crew had been eaten by the natives. This was accepted as gospel by the press in Sydney where the boy was taken, although there were some glaring inconsistencies in his story, and it was repeated in the British Admiralty Sailing Directions. Not until thirty years later was it seriously questioned, when its most important critic was Sir William MacGregor, the first Australian administrator of New Guinea. It is now generally believed that, rather than wait to be taken on to Australia and a life-time of labour to repay the inflated cost of their passages, the Chinese had preferred to take a chance in New Guinea. Food, including the highly prized luxury bêche-de-mer, was comparatively plentiful, and life in New Guinea with freedom must have appeared infinitely preferable to life in the Australian goldfields saddled with a heavy personal debt. When the first official census was taken in New Guinea, many Chinese were recorded, of whose origins there was no satisfactory explanation.\n\nAnother notable incident in the history of Chinese emigration, and which had a happy conclusion, concerned the Peruvian ship Maria Luz in 1872. The Maria Luz had left Macao with over 300 indentured labourers for the Peruvian guano islands, and was forced into Yokohama harbour in distress. One coolie jumped overboard and swam to H.M.S. Iron Duke, where he reported that the passengers on the Maria Luz had either been kidnapped or decoyed on board under false pretences. As a result of the publicity and outcry which this caused, all the passengers were sent back to China. Peru had then no treaty relations with Japan, but threatened war unless Japan apologised and indemnified her. The British government, however, warned Peru that any hostile act on her part would invite retaliatory action by the Royal Navy; and the whole question was referred to France, who gave her verdict in favour of Japan. This case focussed public attention on the many unsavoury aspects of the emigrant trade, and also led to the opening of diplomatic relations between China and Japan.\n\nIt is necessary to remind ourselves that conditions in many of the emigrant ships to South-east Asia during the 1850's and\n\nPage 90\n\nPage 91", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210782, "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-1986", "page_number": 133, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "116\n\nD.L. MICHALK\n\nAnnexation and subjugation of Hainan\n\nAlthough some ancient sources refer vaguely to the existence of Hainan, it was the act of annexation of the island in 111 BC during the reign of Wu Ti, the Han Emperor, that marks the start of Hainan's recorded history (Schafer, 1969). Of the condition of Hainan when invaded by the Han armies, little is known, except that the island was in the possession of unorganized aborigines called Li, who today number 700,000 and rank as the largest minority group in the island's 5.6 million people. The Chinese invaders had no conception of the size of the island, and for more than seven hundred years of occupation, Hainan was depicted on maps as little more than a wavering coastal strip with occasional southward bulges.\n\nThe lack of thorough exploration was due first to a pre-occupation with exploitation of the island's northern pearl beds, rumours of which initially lured the Chinese to this “treasure island” (Schafer, 1969), and second to the strength of the Li people in the hinterland which confined the Han invaders to the coastline. Two administrative areas were established by the Han government to subjugate the \"savage Li\" and thereby hopefully sap the untouched treasures from the island's interior: drugs, incenses, precious metals, pearls, tortoise shell, ivory and coloured, scented cabinet timbers (Mayers, 1872), all luxury goods prized by the Chinese Court.\n\nThe southern and larger half, including those wild and inaccessible areas which were the principal centres of the Li population, was called the Prefecture of Tan-erh (literally Drooping Ear), a name used to describe the Li whose ornament-weighted ear-lobes hung down to their shoulders (Savina, 1929) as photographed by Clark (1938). The northern and smaller division of the island was known as Chu-yai, signifying the Shore of Pearls after the lustrous gems produced in the mussel beds adjacent to the Straits of Qiongzhou.\n\nPearl gathering became an important industry as the demand for personal adornment increased at Court, and the Hainan pearls were particularly prized for their lustre. Rapid colonization followed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213984, "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-1997", "page_number": 53, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "19\n\n# THE CRAFT OF THE BAMBOO SCAFFOLDER\n\nDAN WATERS\n\nAdmired by Taoists for its resilient beauty, tenacity and flexibility, bamboo symbolises endurance and the lifestyle of an upright, virtuous gentleman. It has rings marking, as it were, important events in a person's life. It is fast-growing and has great powers of survival. Not long after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945, bamboo on the devastated site was said to have sprouted new shoots.\n\nBamboo also, with classical, delicate leaves like painting on porcelain, bends but seldom breaks. The tender sprouts are a popular vegetable. With its unbounded usefulness it is employed to make waterpipes, poles for hanging out washing, mats, incense sticks, wide-brimmed hats to offer protection from the sun, shields used by riot police, chopsticks, pillows, divination blocks for temples, carved ornaments and countless other types of utensils. The elderly will have slept in bamboo cradles as children. Their coffins will be conveyed at their funerals by bearers using bamboo carrying poles.\n\nJames Stewart Lockhart, a senior Hong Kong civil servant who played a major part in the taking over of the New Territories by Britain from China at the end of the last century, described bamboo in a large, undated notebook, as follows:2\n\nTo start with, the bamboo has seven virtues of its very own: it is clean and unspotted in itself; a sheaf covers the stem as it pierces the dark earth, so the bamboo has protection from the world; being hollow it is symbolical...of a pure heart; it is strong and unyielding; the stem being divided into segments is orderly; the stalk is pure green without blemish; and is lastly eternal and enduring.\n\n3\n\nAlthough the Victorian naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace,3 described bamboo as one of nature's most valuable gifts, the main purpose of this paper is to look at bamboo as a material for scaffolding, together with the methods of training and the role of the bamboo scaffolder.\n\nA legendary sage named Yau Chao Shi is said to have lived 5,000", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213996, "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-1997", "page_number": 65, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "31\n\nCertainly, for heavy duty scaffolding laid out on a grid pattern, say when constructing a flyover and for other civil engineering work, metal scaffolding has advantages. Metal has already taken over in some cases from timber in areas such as hoardings around building sites and for site offices, when containers are sometimes utilised. Also, on large projects managed by the Government Housing Department, precast concrete units are used together with gondolas. This does away with much scaffolding.\n\nAlthough the change from bamboo scaffolding to metal has been much slower than many people expected over the past 40 years, especially with a limited number of trainee scaffolders entering the trade, the changing to metal can be expected to continue. Nevertheless, one can expect bamboo scaffolding, with its many advantages, to be in use for many years to come.\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nThe author is grateful to Mr Albert Tong Yat Chu, Mr Cho Hon Chiu and scaffolding instructor Master Chor Keung, all of the Construction Industry Training Authority, for the information and photographs they supplied. The author is also grateful to Mr Jimmy C. M. Yuen, of the Occupational Safety and Health Council and to Mr S. L. Lam, Senior Architect of the Architectural Services Department, for their assistance.\n\nREFERENCES\n\n \n 1.\n TC Lai, Hasem Role. Philip Mao, Hings Chinese (Hong Kong, 1971), pp 13 and 14\n \n \n 2.\n Shrona Anbe, Fhustle ontd Bamboo, the Life and Times of St. James Stewart Lockhart, Oxford University Press (1989), p. 58\n \n \n 3.\n Alfred Russel Wallace, FRS (1823-1913) British naturalist, widely travelled, had many publications to his credit. See Chambers Biographical dictionary (Revised edition 1961)\n \n \n 4.\n Ho So, The Craft of Chinese Scaffolding, Ho So Kee Construction and Scaffolding Co (Hong Kong, circa 1974), p 3\n \n \n 5.\n Naomi Yin-yin Szeto, 'Bamboo Scaffolding”, of Hearts and Hands Hong Kong's Traditional Trades and Crafts, ed Joseph Ting, Urban Council Museum of History (Hong Kong, 1995), P 219\n \n \n 6.\n Ho, loc cit\n \n \n 7.\n Anthony Walker and Stephen M. Rowlinson, The Building of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Construction Association, Hong Kong University Press (1990), p 121-131", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214777, "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": 192, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "A DECODED DIARY REVEALS A WAR TIME STORY\n\nP.J. ASTON\n\n157\n\nAbstract\n\nA diary written using a numerical code in a prisoner of war camp in 1941/2 should not be too difficult to decode, should it?\n\nHong Kong, 1941. On December 8 1941, the Japanese attacked Hong Kong. Seventeen days later, on Christmas day, the brave but outnumbered defending forces surrendered and were put into prisoner of war camps in which many died. A young squadron leader in the RAF, Donald Hill, kept a diary of events during the battle for Hong Kong and for a while during his captivity. In order to keep it secret, he wrote it in a numerical code which, according to the cover of the book in which he wrote, was supposedly \"Russel's Mathematical Tables\". Donald survived the camp and brought the diary out with him. However, his experiences were so traumatic that he did not like to talk about them. The diary was never translated before his death in 1985.\n\nGuildford, 1996. The phone rings again. The secretary in the Department of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, University of Surrey answers it, polite as always. The caller, Col Ian Quayle of the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen's Families Association, asks to speak to a mathematician. Having just finished some photocopying, I happen to be the nearest person to the phone so the secretary asks if I will deal with the call. Col Quayle explains about Donald Hill's diary. Mrs Pamela Hill, Donald's widow, is keen to have the diary decoded so that she can find out more about a closed chapter in his life. I suggest that he sends a copy of the diary and say that I will have a look at it.\n\nThe Diary. The first page described how the 'Tables' could be used for multiplication. Instructions for multiplying 83 by 26 were given which could be followed on the first page of numbers. However, the claimed answer of 2118 was clearly incorrect. This presumably was part of the disguise.\n\nTwelve pages filled with numbers followed. On each page there", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 } ]