[ { "id": 204601, "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-1963", "page_number": 82, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "BRITISH LEGATION AT PEKING\n\n71\n\n1866 the student-interpreters put on an amateur theatrical performance, consisting of Our Wife, and To Paris and back on £5. The female parts were all taken by the students, and it was voted a great success. The faces of the Chinese servants, watching from the back of the hall, gave Mitford a lot of quiet amusement. The next summer he was staying in a temple which he calls Ta Chio Ssu or \"Temple of Great Repose\", about twenty-three miles from Peking, having moved there with all his furniture together with chickens and a cow and its calf. But even there he could not entirely escape the despatches. \"Copying despatches with the thermometer at 100° in the shade, with a basin of water and a towel at one's side for very necessary hand-wiping, and a pad of blotting-paper over the blank part of one's paper, is indeed an affreux métier.\" The climate took its toll, and Mitford mentions two of his young companions who died of fever.\n\nMitford left Peking for Japan in 1866. In the same year Major Crossman of the Royal Engineers was sent out from England by the Government to inspect the British Legation and Consular Buildings in China and Japan. From one of his reports, written at Shanghai in July 1867, we can glean some more information about the early development of the Legation at Peking. For instance he gave a hint as to the origin of the Legation Chapel when he wrote: \"There is a large house opposite to the Chinese secretaries' quarters, used partly as a theatre and partly as a lumber-room, well and solidly built, which can be converted into a good church by the addition of an external porch, removing the flooring of the upper storey so as to throw it open to the roof, and by the addition of some wood work and ornament, to give it a somewhat ecclesiastical appearance.\" He also mentioned that the number of student-interpreters was shortly to be increased to thirteen.\n\nMeanwhile Sir Frederick Bruce had been succeeded by Sir Rutherford Alcock at the end of 1865, while Sir Thomas Wade was promoted to be Minister in 1871, a post which he held for the next twelve years. In 1883 he was succeeded by another ‘old\n\n14 Parliamentary Papers, \"Reports from Major Crossman and Correspondence respecting the Legation and Consular Buildings in China and Japan\", 315 of 1868, No. 7, p. 22.\n\n!\n\n1", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214152, "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-1998", "page_number": 10, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "Keith Stevens - Another Dilemma for Today's Youth in China ... \n\n369\n\nKeith Stevens - An Irish Fantasy.. \n\n372\n\nPenny Robbins, Meredith Tong-Draper and Geoffrey Roper - Backstreets of Beijing: Notes on the RAS HK Easter, 1998 Visit to Beijing \n\n375\n\nKeith Stevens and Jennifer Welch - Monument to the Westmoreland Regiment The 55th Regiment of Foot in Dinghai City on Zhoushan Island...................... \n\n383\n\nDan Waters - Tracing Graves in Hong Kong: Research Methodology \n\n395\n\nKeith Stevens - An Unusual and Extraordinary Ancestral Image \n\n399\n\nPhotographs of the Function to Mark the Award of the Bronze Bauhinia Star to Dan Waters contributed by Phillip Bruce............. \n\n403\n\nPaul Bolding - Visit to the Aurel Stein Collection of the British Museum by the Friends of the RAS \n\nBOOK REVIEWS \n\n404\n\nGerald Choa - The Life and Times of Sir Kai Ho Kai, a Prominent Figure in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong....... \n\n407\n\nGillian Bickley - The Golden Needle: The Biography of Frederick Stewart \n\n411\n\nix", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215955, "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-2002", "page_number": 254, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "188\n\ndeaths of Chinese persons within these fourteen personal absences Legge experienced, one stood out over time because it became so formative in shaping Legge's public image in Hong Kong. The images of both Legge and this seminal Chinese figure were first promoted through extracted letters and reading literature of missionary journals where the story about Ch'ea Kam-Kwong first appeared. After Ch'ea's murder, however, it became a festering and frustrating element within the larger political scenario of the unequal treaties period in foreign policy between the Qing Manchurian empire in China and the newly established British ambassador. Legge made the issue all the more prominent in 1863 by publicly challenging British officials' complacence about the matter and condemning attempts by Sir Frederick Bruce (1814-1867), the first British ambassador to the Qing empire, to defuse the whole tragedy by general claims about missionary incompetence.\n\nThe period from 1861 to 1863 was pivotal in Legge's missionary-scholar career because of three books and two supremely “felt” public absences. In February and November 1861 he published the first two of the eight-tome-five-volume series he entitled the Chinese Classics. In October and at the very beginning of 1862 he faced news about the deaths of Ch'ea Kam-kwong and his eldest brother George respectively, writing special memorials to both men in the subsequent months. In the latter case, James Legge edited and introduced his brother George's selected lectures and sermons (an introduction of just over 100 pages!), an act of filial respect simultaneously Scottish Nonconformist, Ruist/Confucian, and Victorian in style and content.\n\n2\n\nYet Ch'ea's death in October 1861 and its consequences had a power over Legge's career he himself could not fully anticipate. So influential was it that in the balance of the decade of the 1860s Legge was regularly referred to in local Hong Kong and overseas missionary literature as \"James Legge of Hong-kong and Poklo.\" Here we will explore the meaning of Ch'ea's death for Legge's life, and the broader implications it had on a surprising range of “larger issues\" in the study of cross-cultural interactions during the later decades of the Manchurian Qing dynasty. Part of the significance is shown in a negative fashion in Paul Cohen's early work of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215985, "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-2002", "page_number": 284, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "218\n\nthe Zongli yámén, he cannot be faulted for missing this major tragic event among Chinese Protestants in southeast China, because it was apparently never reported or discussed by British and Qing officials.\n\nMaybe the \"oversight\" happened because the turn of events shifted attention to the military problems associated with the resistance of Tàiping forces during the next three years before they were destroyed. They had become the target of a common effort by the Qing armies as well as some foreign (and particularly British/Scottish) militia under General Gordon, probably causing a host of special problems demanding the \"immediate attention\" of the British Ambassador, Sir Frederick Bruce.4 Nevertheless, it was against the Ambassador that Legge expressed his most piercing salvo of Protestant Dissenter displeasure in 1863, nearly two years after the riots in Poklo and Ch'ëa's murder had taken place.\n\nIn a brief note leaked to the public a year after it had been written, Sir Bruce explained his opinion to Lord John Russell (1792-1878), then Secretary of State, that missionaries should not be permitted to enter into China because of the troubles they caused and the dangers they faced. His arguments stood in blatant opposition to the conditions codified by the 1860 treaty, but were nevertheless read with approval by Lord Russell. This occasioned an outburst of righteous anger from Legge, who took Bruce's letter apart piece by piece, and showed its insensitivity to missionary work as well as its incoherence in the face of the recent treaty conditions. In and of itself, this letter written by Legge, first published in the Patriot in London and soon afterward in the local China Mail in Hong Kong, was one of the most perceptive and articulate pieces of political analysis he ever wrote. But the coup de grâce came in the end, where the level of frustration Legge felt against British bureaucratic reticence and its discounting of missionary and Chinese Christians' rights had grown to a new height.\n\n95\n\nI will conclude this long letter by referring to a case in point,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215986, "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-2002", "page_number": 285, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "219 \n\nand in doing so will avail myself of a rough copy of some remarks which I addressed to Her Majesty's Consul in Canton [Harry Parkes, 1828-1885] upon it in January of the present year [1863]. The outrages complained of were then of more than twelve months' standing; the Consul had been more or less in correspondence with the Chinese authorities about them during all that time; he had submitted the case, he told me, to Frederick Bruce, but had got no reply; nor has he got any, I suppose, up to this time. Everything provided for by the treaties has been broken at Pok-lo; Christians pursuing their calling peaceably were interfered with and persecuted; our Catechist was torn from the house which has been purchased to be converted into a place of worship, and barbarously put to death, because he would not renounce Christianity; placards were issued offering rewards for the head of any Foreign Missionary who should visit the district, and for the heads of all Chinese Christians who should assist him in his measures. These and other violent proceedings were taken, and the Government has yet done nothing effectual to show its regard for the treaty stipulations. I should be sorry now, after the lapse of time, if life were to be taken, even by justice, for the life that was sacrificed for Christ, and still more sorry if the district were to be visited with the scourge of military operations in avengement of the deeds done. But can nothing at all be done? I do not doubt that you represented gravely, again and again, to the Governor-general here, how serious the offences were. Since those representations have proved ineffectual, Her Majesty's Representative at Peking will surely bring the case before the high officers of the Imperial Government. Her Majesty is committed may I not say so? - by the articles of the Treaty not to let the matter rest, without signifying by Sir Frederick Bruce her strong displeasure, and entering her solemn protest at least against the impunity allowed to such despite to her subjects, and such persecution of Chinese Christians. \n\nSo Legge voiced his protest, full of Dissenter concerns opposed to military escalation, but based on treaties purchased at the price of military muscle. The irony of this situation would play itself out in the multitudinous problems encountered by missionaries and Chinese Christians within the subsequent decades of the Qing \n\nPage 285\n\nPage 286", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]