[
    {
        "id": 207736,
        "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-1976",
        "page_number": 124,
        "title": "RAS-1976",
        "content_text": "IN SEARCH OF THE CHINESE NAME FOR “LI SUN”\n\n109\n\nlocate a photograph of Chan Lai-sun. It is not very surprising that there is none from his College days, as photography was not yet widely adopted in the 1840's. And no photographs were usually taken of honorary degree recipients in the late nineteenth century. As to the reference in the 1872 letter to Professor North, the family photographs are not in the correspondence file. They were evidently separated out when the alumni correspondence files were established. I have searched the miscellaneous North papers, but with no success. There is an old trunk of North memorabilia which I will also search as soon as time permits. . .\n\nChan's letters to Professor North from October 28, 1872 to September 10, 1873 and selections from Hamilton College Literary Monthly, July 1869 to February 1887, made possible a tentative biographical sketch. Also very helpful were Carl T. Smith's two articles in the Chung Chi Bulletin of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.\n\nChan Laisun (hereafter this name will be used just as he used it in his signature) was born 1829 in Singapore, the son of a poor gardener. Chan attended the Chinese day and boarding schools conducted by the American Board missionaries. His mother tongue was Malay, although his father was from the Ch'aochow prefecture of Kwangtung Province. His parents died leaving him an orphan.\n\nThe Reverend Joseph S. Travelli of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, and his wife served as missionaries of the American Board. Soon after their arrival in Singapore, their attention was attracted by a Chinese boy waiting on the table of the American Consul, and they took him into the school which they established for Chinese children for English and Chinese studies.\n\nWhen the school was disbanded in 1842, Chan was taken to the United States and put into Mr. Randall's School in East Bloomfield, New Jersey until 1846. Then the Reverend Samuel Wells Williams of the American Board arranged for him to receive free instruction at Hamilton College. His college term ended in June 1848, and he returned to China with Reverend Williams as an assistant with the American Board mission in Canton until 1853. He had lost almost all knowledge of the Chinese he had known and had to engage a language tutor to relearn Chinese. In July 1850, he married Ruth Ati (1827-1917), one of two girls Miss",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 211477,
        "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-1988",
        "page_number": 193,
        "title": "RAS-1988",
        "content_text": "169\n\nBefore I started to go to school, we spoke Chinese exclusively at home, using the Heong Shan dialect, but I was able to understand much of the Nam Long subdialect (derived from Fukien Province) spoken in Father's village, and to speak it through the process of osmosis. Since my parents seemed concerned that their children become proficient in Western studies, my attempts to learn Chinese have been erratic and comparatively brief. Ching I Sun, a scholarly gentleman, conducted a small one-room neighbourhood school on Vineyard School and to him Father sent Ruth and me to study Chinese. It was learning chiefly by rote. When we were not memorizing aloud, we were practising calligraphy, something I did quite well. We did not attend school very long. Ruth went on to study under another teacher, Chang Garm Bo, but I did not resume studying Chinese until I was in my early teens when I went to Wah Mun School for a short time before transferring to Mun Lun School, where classes were held in the afternoons and Saturday mornings.\n\nOur programme here also included history, geography, composition, calligraphy and the classics. Once a week one of the teachers would entertain us with stories from the historical romances, the most famous of which was the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I was very happy and proud to use the set of Ancient Classics that Father had used when a student in China, and he was pleased and patient in explaining the difficult passages.\n\nThe principal of Mun Lun School and some of the younger teachers were staunch supporters of the Loyalist Bow Wong Party, which supported the preservation of the imperial regime, and was opposed to the Revolutionary Party led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, whose supporters favoured Wah Mun School for their children. The teachers were also anti-Christian and were always making derogatory remarks about Christians, referring to them as \"pigs, dogs and robbers\", and being immature and sensitive, I took it as a personal affront. One day when I was late arriving from high school, the principal humiliated me by stopping his teaching to write on the blackboard that I was late. Having been conditioned not to fight for my rights, I decided to quit Chinese school in order that I could continue my afternoon typing class without further anxiety. This was the extent, about four years altogether, of my formal education in Chinese. The kindly and benign attitude of some of the other teachers, such as Tsze, Yee and Seto, elderly and scholarly...",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q",
        "rank": 0
    }
]