[
    {
        "id": 205325,
        "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-1967",
        "page_number": 87,
        "title": "RAS-1967",
        "content_text": "80\n\nTHE CHINA COASTERS\n\nA. D. BLUE\n\nJames Matheson sent his San Sebastian from Canton to ports in Fukien Province in 1820, to open up new markets for opium, and this is generally considered the pioneer voyage in the China coast trade. Although Matheson was Danish Consul at Canton at this time, and the San Sebastian sailed under Spanish colours, it is correct to describe this voyage as a British venture. The men who sailed the opium clippers, therefore, were the first 'China coasters', and since that time 'China coasters' have considered themselves a breed apart, distinct from the rest of the British Merchant Navy. The tradition of more liberal manning, of better pay, food, and conditions in general, pioneered by the opium clippers has continued to the present day.\n\nMany of the customs and practices of the lordly East Indiamen and of the Indian 'country ships' were inherited by the humbler 'China coasters'. The East Indiaman's captain could, and was expected to, make a fortune from carrying passengers and private cargo, in addition to the company's, and in self defence the latter stipulated a definite scale of perquisites for each member of the crew, from captain down to bosun and carpenter. Generous as this was, it was invariably exceeded. There was a much greater variety of 'pidgin' (=business) on the China coast, although it did not comprise such a high proportion of the China coaster's total earnings. As on the East India Company's ships, dabbling in certain types of 'pidgin' was considered legitimate and carried no moral stigma.\n\nThe most common and profitable pidgin came from deck passengers. It was on the emigrant runs to the Straits and Bangkok that this type of 'pidgin' was most prolific. I was introduced to this on my first ship on the coast, the Antung. The Antung was\n\nThe author served as an Engineer Officer with the China Navigation Company from 1928 until 1938, and was on the Yangtse in 1930 in the Shengking and again in 1934 in the Wuhu. He was captured by pirates in the Newchang river in Manchuria in 1933 and held prisoner for five and a half months. Two of his articles have been published previously in the Journal. \"European Navigation on the Yangtse\" in Vol. 3, 1963, and \"Piracy on the China Coast\" in Vol. 5, 1965.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 207789,
        "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": 177,
        "title": "RAS-1976",
        "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA (With especial reference to the Upper Yangtze)\n\nA. D. BLUE*\n\nWest China, and in particular the provinces of Szechwan and Yunnan, interested British merchants in India before the end of the eighteenth century, and this interest increased after Britain got a foothold in Lower Burma in the early nineteenth century. Not until Britain was established at Shanghai and on the Lower Yangtze, however, did the British China traders take any great interest in West China. Until the 1860s, therefore, the initiative in opening West China to British trade came from the West, and concentrated on reviving the old caravan routes from Upper Burma into Yunnan. The Treaty of Yandabo between Britain and Burma in 1826, which established Britain in Arakan, Assam, Manipur, and Tenasserim, rekindled interest in these old routes. Sino-Burmese contacts went back many centuries, but were usually recorded from a diplomatic or military aspect, although it was well known that there had been considerable trade along these routes. At this time Canton was the only British foothold on the China coast, and the much shorter land route across Burma seemed to offer many benefits to British and Indian merchants in both India and Burma. Then, and for many years afterwards, India was the source of most of China's foreign imports, cotton and opium in particular, and much of British policy in the Far East was concerned with maintaining and extending this trade.\n\nAn interesting side product of this China-India relationship was the proposal to import workers from west China for the infant Assam tea industry. The East India Company had become interested in the possibility of tea production in Assam as early as 1823, when indigenous tea plants were found in the Upper Brahmaputra\n\n* The author served as an Engineer Officer with the China Navigation Company from 1928 until 1938, and was on the Yangtze in 1930 in the Shengking and again in 1934 in the Wuhu. He was captured by pirates in the Newchang river in Manchuria in 1933 and held prisoner for five and a half months. Five of his articles have been published previously in the Journal. \"European Navigation on the Yangtze\" in Vol. 3, 1963, \"Piracy on the China Coast\" in Vol. 5, 1965, \"The China Coasters\" in Vol. 7, 1967, \"Chinese Emigration and the Deck Passenger Trade\" in Vol. 10, 1970 and \"Early Steamships in China\" in Vol. 13, 1973.\n\nPlates 20-25 and the sketch-maps at the end of the volume illustrate this article.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213803,
        "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-1996",
        "page_number": 155,
        "title": "RAS-1996",
        "content_text": "126\n\n47\n\nform of incense ashes rather than tablets suggests that the ancestor halls did not use tablets to represent ancestors individually. It is also found in the Yingsheng (\"Reception of the Holy\") dedicated to the main honoured gods during the Jiao festivals, and the Yingshen Guiwei (\"Escorting gods to their places\") during the Hongchao festival of Fanling, both conducted by Cantonese Daoist priests in the New Territories. An elder of Kam Tin compared the Yingsheng ritual with the ancestral hall ritual found in the Qingle ancestral hall of Kam Tin, to which I shall refer below. I am not sure if a cloth “bridge” is used in this ancestral hall ceremony.\n\nOp cit pp 142-144. In a recent visit to Cheng Tau, a woman in her 60s referred to the ancestral hall as a-gong ha (\"the Place of Ancestors\"), which seems to have been the more usual expression for ancestral halls among the Hakka. Compare the expression with Bak-gong ha ('the Place of the Bak-gong earth god'). It is interesting that the title of this category of earth god, whose territory is more limited than the dawang, shares the expression for \"elder brother of grandfather\".\n\nibid p. 224 » 10\n\n174\n\nibid p 160\n\nDiscussion of this aspect of ancestral worship is summarized in C Fred Blake, Ethnic Groups and Social Change in a Chinese Market Town, The University Press of Hawaii, 1981, pp 92-93, 115 n 1, 116 n 2. A possible example is the case of Wo Hang, N. T. where an ancestral hall of the second fang houses the spirit tablets of the first and second generation. See Allen John Lueck, Lun Chun, Land is to live: A study of the concept of isu in a Hakka Chinese village, New Territories, Hong Kong, unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1985, p 273.\n\nCompare H G H Nelson, \"Ancestor Worship and Burial Practices\", in Arthur P. Wolf ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, Stanford University Press, 1974, pp. 263-267, on the shen-ting which fulfilled the functions of domestic altars for the households in each area” in a Cantonese village in the New Territories. He observes that the shenting \"occupy a place half way between [tang ancestral halls] and domestic altars”.\n\nVol under Donga jie (\"Winter festival\")\n\nTON Op cit. pp 147-148\n\nOp cit. p 12\n\nOp cit. p 176\n\n100\n\nIt is interesting to note the distribution and context of Mountain Songs. It is interesting to note that Mountain Songs were sung only by the male villagers (in some festivals with women hired from other villages) in the Cantonese villages whose dialect is known to others as daaih ga wo (\"big family language\"), and which correspond to the area of the five big clans. In some of the other Cantonese villages, e.g. in Shatin and Saikung, Mountain Songs were sung by the women on the eve before a wedding at the bride's home. Mountain Songs, and related pre-marital courtship, was more popular among some female Cantonese villagers in the Kowloon area who cut grasses for sale as fuel. The livelihood of these women, like that of the Hakka immigrants, depended more on the city. I know much less",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 216408,
        "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-2003",
        "page_number": 167,
        "title": "RAS-2003",
        "content_text": "117\n\nretired as a Rear Admiral. At the outbreak of World War II he was to rejoin but sadly, as a Convoy Commodore, was to die at sea on 17th September 1940 when his ship, S.S. CITY OF BENARES steaming 470 miles to the south of Iceland on passage to Montreal, was torpedoed and sunk by 'U-48' (Heinrich Bleichrodt).\n\nCaptain Mackenzie was to have a more normal, less exciting period of command for the remainder of the commission.\n\nTrue, while at Wei-Hai-Wei during the summer of 1932 he experienced the passage of three typhoons in close succession and fairly close by. During one, on 12th June, S.S. SHENKING was driven ashore on Chimeng Island just up the coast. As Senior Naval Officer Captain Mackenzie was closely involved, not only in arranging for a guard to be maintained over the ship as protection against pirates, but also in the subsequent successful efforts to refloat her. First her passengers were rescued, fortunately without injury or loss. To facilitate her salvage next she had to be lightened. Over the next few days her cargo was discharged into lighters, also into another company ship, S.S. FENGTIEN.\n\nSubsequently Captain Mackenzie was able to report that:\n\n'No difficulty was experienced in selling her cargo of flour well in Wei-Hai-Wei.'\n\n925\n\nThe Chinese Naval Commodore on the spot greatly assisted by providing a gunboat guardship at the scene of the grounding.\n\nS.S. SHENKING was refloated on 17th June. She was brought to Wei-Hai-Wei where further temporary repairs were carried out by the use of cofferdams and the pouring of cement between various of her frames. Finally on Wednesday, 22nd June she departed under her own steam for Shanghai and full repair. Subsequently she re-entered service, in fact following World War II service with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, was to remain with China Navigation until 1955.\n\nThe remainder of the commission was to pass without great incident.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390",
        "rank": 0
    }
]