[ { "id": 212547, "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-1991", "page_number": 101, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "81\n\nrelations with China were employed for the first time by Richard Nixon. Among a number of measures, he lifted restrictions against Americans wanting to travel to China as a gesture for and, therefore, a step to reconciliation. Nixon approved the visit of the American table tennis team to China. At the White House, the president chatted with members of a table tennis team which was the first Chinese sports delegation that ever toured the United States since the founding of the People's Republic. On 13 January, 1973, he interviewed the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe. Such meetings were conducted as part of the administration's policy of strengthening the U.S.-China general relationship. Even at a time when the administration could only place cultural exchanges low on its priority list, they still enjoyed the attention and support of the president.\n\nAt this stage, Sino-American ties in culture were far from sufficient. This does not mean that either party failed to see the importance of such exchanges. Thus, the Nixon Administration repeatedly expressed its recognition of the importance of cultural relations in the Shanghai Communique and the communique on 22 February, 1973 which actually announced a programme to expand cultural relations. The president's meetings with visiting Chinese artists were also expressions of this concern. However, in the two years after Nixon's visit, the administration could not find the time to handle matters other than strategic concerns. Furthermore, the president was bogged down in the domestic political difficulties which eventually led to his resignation. The Ford Administration, afraid of irritating the Soviet Union and the right wing at home, could only maintain the status quo and even sacrificed arts exchanges with China. By doing so it accelerated a general deterioration in Sino-American relations.\n\nThe Carter Administration made no improvement in either the general relationship or cultural relations with China in its first eighteen months in office. When a new China policy began to take shape in the middle of 1977, the general relationship improved. In May, the State Department prepared a memo for the president which pointed out that unless diplomatic relations were established, the existing cultural and economic relations would possibly stagnate or even be weakened. It also pointed out that Sino-Soviet relations would get closer if the United States failed to have a formal relationship with China. But what played a decisive role in the American efforts to establish diplomatic relations was the soaring influence of the Soviet Union in international affairs, a situation Nixon faced before the Sino-American rapprochement. Clearly", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212722, "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": 31, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Mesny's Personal Life\n\nPART TWO\n\nConsidering how detailed and verbose Mesny could be in his writings it is surprising how little we know about his personal life during the later years. A certain amount about his well-being and illnesses, his religion and his relationships with the female sex during his first fifteen to twenty years in China can be extracted from his autobiographical snippets but on the whole they add little but colour to the overall picture. He did however reveal relatively more to us about his financial situation but only because it had deteriorated and was obviously causing him great anxiety.\n\nMesny must have lived from hand to mouth for most of his later years. He had always had an eye for the big break and though at times he seemed to make himself a small fortune, though we never hear the details, he soon enough appears to have reverted to scraping by. He loved the adventure of travel and for some years managed to earn sufficient or at least obtain adequate sponsorship to visit all eighteen provinces of China. However, the day came when he could just dream. In 1896, at age of 54, he wrote that being strong and active though getting old, he would like to make an expedition to Lhasa [he called it Lassa]. He bemoaned the fact that he had not the necessary funds - but, he wrote, if he had had sufficient he would liked to have journeyed to Mukden [Shenyang] and Kirin, then via the Amur region, return via Urga [Ulan Bataar] or the K'un-lun and the Seven Lakes including Ch'ing-hai [Kokonor], Tengri Nor to Lhasa and Darjeeling [in India]. He felt capable of accomplishing the feat penetrating right through unknown Thibet [sic] to India and added the hopeful 'Wait and see.' He never made it.\n\nHe was forever trying to persuade Chinese officials to allow him to help them and China with his grandiose ideas. Presumably he was planning and hoping to earn commission from any scheme which took off though he repeated several times in his writings references to such schemes in which he was prepared to act on behalf of China for the good of the Chinese people without benefit to himself. But for one reason or another, and we rarely learn why, these failed to come to anything. In 1878 he had been asked by a French bank to contact a very senior Chinese official, Marquis Tso, to arrange a loan to build railways, etc. in China's Northwest. Mesny would have to pay his own travelling expenses crossing China by land but would receive a handsome commission if", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213493, "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-1995", "page_number": 89, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "57\n\n19\n\non the stage and never mention the word \"Meng\" when back stage. What do you do when you have to use the forbidden words in a specific place? You simply substitute, as in the first place, the word “Geng” with the word “Jing”. So instead, the actor will sing, in one play \"Ting qiao lou da chu jing,\" which means \"When I heard the Drum Tower strike the first hour ..\" You will note that in the script the word \"Geng\" remains, but when the singer sings it, he immediately changed it to “Jing” in order to comply with the Taboo. There is no singing back stage, so when someone struck up a conversation with someone else and needed to use the word \"Meng\", you simply say “Da Huang Liang” instead. I have asked many people inside the profession, but no one can tell me why it is so and who started it.\n\nFinal Word of Appraisal\n\nI have written so many paragraphs of anomalies in the setting and acting of the Peking Opera - the question arises as to why the Chinese people still flock to see it. The answer is that the Opera gives them \"beauty\" - beauty in singing, beauty in the acting, beauty in the story as written and acted upon. (Sometimes, though, the beauty is far fetched and subject to logical questioning.) This is why some of the audience will go back to see the play a hundred times and never get tired of it. Certainly, in their heart, they have some fondness toward the acting, the singing which they want to enjoy, which they could not do without, like drugs. In China, we have a word for this kind of mentality, we call it \"itching\". They go back to see the same play many, many times in order to “quench” their itching.\n\nThen what about the anomaly?\n\nIn the psychology of the theatre goers, the whole play is a fake, not the real thing and if there is some small misinterpretation of the story, or the wrong costume the actor wears on the stage, why worry. As long as their \"itching\" is touched and satisfied, everything will be just fine.\n\nA Word of Thanks\n\nOn June 16, 1991, the Shenyang Beijing Opera Troupe was in town for a nine-day performance at the City Hall in Hong Kong. My friend,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215007, "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-2000", "page_number": 103, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "59\n\nChinese, were one of four forms. ‘A Noble Duty Bravely Done', 'Faithful unto Death', 'A Good Reputation endures Forever' and 'Though Dead He still Liveth'. As with all CWGC cemeteries, this one was well maintained.\n\nWe (Friends) then visited the Tincourt British Military Cemetery which has 57 graves of the CLC.\n\nThe base depôt, prison and hospital of the CLC was at Noyelles-sur-Mer and the cemetery there contains the graves of 838 men of the CLC, with a memorial bearing the names of 41 men whose graves are unknown12. The site of this cemetery was selected by the Chinese themselves so that the fengshui was correct. Whilst many of the CLC in this cemetery had home addresses in Shandong and Zhili provinces [about 98%] there were also about 25 from other provinces all north of the Yangzi River; two were from Fengtian in Manchuria [the old name for Mukden and now Shenyang], seven from Henan, seven from Jiangsu, five specifically from Hebei [the modern name for Zhili], one from Anhui, two from Shenjing [the archaic name for Jilin province in the north-east] and one from Gansu. The latter is unusual, it being a province to the north-west of China. One grave is noteworthy being that of an early recruit whose serial number was 53. Wang Yufong came from Rongcheng in Shandong, a mere 35 miles from Weihai Wei, and he died on the 10th June 1918. Many of those buried here had died of flu from the post-war epidemic.\n\nChinese visiting France today appear to be intrigued by signs saying Cimetiere Chinois [Chinese Cemetery] and, having visited them, have been surprised to see compatriots buried there. An entry, from a Chinese visitor from Qingdao, in the Memorial Book at Noyelles-sur-Mer, commented that he was a man from Shandong province himself and had not realized so many of his fellow provincials had died and had been buried in France. The CWGC, in response to our comment that we were surprised that there were no signs in French explaining the background to the fallen Chinese, wrote:\n\nA certain amount of historical information can be gleaned from the introduction to the registers made available at the cemeteries and some of the more significant sites have permanent historical notices. However, it should be", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216420, "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": 179, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "129\n\nChemulpo (later Inchon). This would drive north along thawing and impassable roads, across the Yalu River into Manchuria, heading for Liaoyang and Mukden (now known as Shenyang) north of the Liaodong peninsula. Then, with what remained of the Russian fleet bottled up in the harbour at Port Arthur, the second and main force would be landed some thirty miles north of Dalny (Dairen to the Japanese and now known as Dalian) cutting off Port Arthur at the tip of the Liaodong peninsula. The final stage was the landing of a third Japanese army in January 1905 and its assault on Port Arthur. The war began as planned with a Japanese 'Pearl Harbor' bombardment at Port Arthur, taking the Russian fleet by surprise.\n\nAlthough the Japanese met with a number of set-backs their overall plan succeeded. The crowning moments were the Fall of Port Arthur at the beginning of January 1905 and the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, the titanic clash between the Japanese fleet and the Russian Baltic Fleet, the latter having made its slow progress across the world from Latvia in October 1904 to Tsushima seven months later, and to its fate and destruction. News of the devastating Japanese victory alarmed a number of Chinese officials who, whilst they did not wish Japan to lose, had not wanted her to gain such an overwhelming victory.\n\nFinally, after the eighteen month campaign the land war ended with the destruction of the Russian army before Mukden. The succeeding months were a matter of Japanese mopping-up operations and the capture of Liaoyang and Mukden.\n\nDuring the final stages of the war the Japanese finally took the fighting on to 'sacred' Russian territory when they invaded the large island of Sakhalin. This was of great political importance as it was regarded as Russian territory and, with rioting on the streets of the Russian major cities, the Russians realised that they had lost. Also at that point, Japan now holding most of the cards, but militarily and financially exhausted, sought President Roosevelt's good offices to bring about a peace conference. This took place in September 1905 concluding with the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth in the United States. The Russians ceded the Guandong peninsula (Chinese territory) and half of the island of Sakhalin to Japan but without having to pay any indemnity. The Russians, so the Japanese believed, had been allowed by the Americans to get away without paying any financial compensation.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]