[ { "id": 205620, "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-1968", "page_number": 162, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n157 \n\nThe only study of the question which has any pretence to authority is that by Sayer in his work on the first 20 years of Hong Kong under British rule. In that study he makes use of various contemporary descriptions and accounts to fix the site of the first building to which the name 'Government House' has been given on the location of the Victoria District Court at the top of the present Battery Path. Though I do not contest that the site was so used for a period, it would appear that Sayer's conclusion is at variance with other contemporary material which should have been available to him. The problem stems partly from a failure to distinguish between the offices where the Governor performed his official functions and the residences where he lived. When Sir Henry Pottinger, the first Governor, arrived in 1841, he spent one night in a tent. When he returned to Hong Kong after the successful conclusion of the war against China, he lived in a number of houses, though there is positive evidence only about one of them. Though visual evidence from drawings of Hong Kong suggest that he may have resided in a house in the possession of Major Caine, the Chief Magistrate, there is no documentary evidence of the fact and I am not concerned with it; if he did so reside, he must have done so gratuitously, for the Government Accounts of the period do not record any rent payments which might be attributed to this.\n\nSayer is able to state confidently that \"the first Government House has disappeared without trace” as a preamble to his attempt to re-trace it. The Canton Press of January 1842 reported that “a public office to serve as a temporary residence for the head of the Government\" had just been finished. The same newspaper shortly after this referred to this building as \"Government House,\" but added that it had changed its name to the \"Record Office\" since \"the late Acting Governor has been metamorphosed into a Lieut.-Governor.\" The reference is to A. R. Johnston, who administered Hong Kong during Pottinger's absences from the Colony. Sayer concludes from this that the building referred to by the newspaper must have been the house undeniably built by Johnston at the top of Battery Path. He further supports this by pointing out that, on Collinson's Map of 1844, Johnston's House is marked 'Government House.' Lest, however, this should seem to answer the question beyond further argument, I have a few observations to offer.\n\nAs early as the end of 1841, Johnston was writing letters dated 'Government Hill' and there is no doubt that this was the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205882, "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-1969", "page_number": 188, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "182\n\nTHE LIBRARY\n\nAsia; with an appendix of sailing directions for those seas and coasts. 5th ed. Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1966. YULE, Sir Henry.\n\nY95\n\nCathay and the way thither; being a collection of medieval notices of China. New ed., rev. throughout in the light of recent discoveries by Henri Cordier. Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1966.\n\nThe following bound volumes of periodicals are now located in the British Council Library, Gloucester Building, where they may be consulted. They are not available for loan.\n\nAsia major, London, vols. 9-11, 1962-1965,\n\nEast and West, Rome, vols. 14-17, 1963-1966.\n\nFrance. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Bulletin signalétique.\n\nSec. 21: Sociologie, etc., vols. 16-18, 1962-1964. Sec. 24: Sciences du langage, vol. 19, 1965.\n\nJapan quarterly, Tokyo, vols. 10-14, 1963-1967. Journal of Asiatic studies, Seoul, vols. 8-10, 1965-1967. Monumenta serica, Los Angeles, vols. 19-25, 1960-1966. Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm. Bulletin,\n\nvols. 1-4, 1929-1932; 38-39, 1966-1967.\n\nRoyal Asiatic Society, London. Journal, 1957-1966.\n\nRoyal Asiatic Society. Korea Branch. Transactions, vols. 34-39, 1958-1962.\n\nSarawak Museum journal, vols. 9-14, 1960-1966.\n\nSinologica, Basel, vols. 7-9, 1962/63-1966/67.\n\nTōhō Gakuhō, Kyoto, vols. 32-39, 1962-1968.\n\nTsing hua journal of Chinese studies, Taipei, new series, vols. 2-6, 1960/61-1966/67.\n\nThis collection comprises 14 different titles, and 75 vols. (bound in 60).\n\nHong Kong, 28 April, 1969.\n\nH. A. RYDINGS,\n\nHon. Librarian.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206328, "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-1971", "page_number": 145, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "THE DISTRICT WATCH COMMITTEE\n\n139\n\n36 In 1917 there were 31 guilds for employers only (in trades such as silk, sandalwood, wicker furniture and copper), 35 skilled craftsmen guilds (sandalwood workers, masons, tinsmiths, etc.) and 5 guilds with mixed membership (employers and workers). There were also 17 district societies, such as the Heung Shan (Hsiang-shan) resident merchants association and the General Commercial Association of the Tung Kun (Tung-kuan) merchants resident in Hong Kong. See the list of exempted and registered societies in the Gazette, 27 April 1917.\n\n37 Wei Yuk was appointed in 1891 and served until his death in 1929. He resigned several times in order to allow a newcomer to join the Committee but was soon re-appointed. Lau Chu-pak was appointed in 1902 and served until his death in 1922. Sir Shouson Chow was appointed in 1917 and was still a member in 1949, the year of the demise of the Committee.\n\n38 During the years 1929 to 1931 and in 1936 the Committee met four times a year at Government House. Lennox Mills states that members had the right to a guard of the District Watch Force on the occasion of weddings and other festivities'. The Secretary for Chinese Affairs tells us in his report for 1936 that through the kindness of His Excellency the Committee was able to meet the members of the Mui Tsai Commission on the occasion of their first visit to the Colony, 'All members attended and there was a valuable discussion with frank interchange of views'. When the Governor, Sir Henry Blake, left the Colony in 1903 on the day of his departure he inspected the District Watchmen. Clearly, everything was done by the government to give prestige and éclat to the Committee and the force.\n\n19 T. C. Cheng, op. cit., p. 18.\n\n40 Of the Chinese land population in the 1901 census 227,615 returned themselves as natives of Kwangtung Province, 179,296 of this number belonging to the Kwong Chau Prefecture, 28,844 came from Tung-kuan hsien, 28,587 from P'an-yü hsien, and 27,221 from Nan-hai hsien. The situation was substantially the same in the censuses of 1911, 1921 and 1931. In 1911, for example, 311,992 out of 350,418 Chinese in Hong Kong, exclusive of the New Territories, spoke Cantonese,\n\n41 Op. cit., pp. 399-400.\n\n42 Heung Shan, present-day Chung Shan, is the arid county on the west side of the Pearl River, stretching down to Macau. It was the Heung Ha, the Cantonese term for the province, district or village from which each person derives his ancestry, of many prominent Chinese, including Ng Choy (Wu Ting-fang), Yung Wing (Yung Hung), Wong Shing (Huang Shêng), and Sun Yat-sen. Many Chinese merchants in Hong Kong came from this county; for example, Wei Yuk, Ma Ying-piu (founder of the Sincere Company), M. Y. San (before 1941 the largest biscuit manufacturer in China), Tsang Foo, Look Poong-shan (founder of the Bank of Canton). Su Chao-cheng, organiser and leader of the Seamen' Strike in 1922, came from this county; in 1928 Su was elected to the Central Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party. The anarchist, Liu Ssu-fu, was also born there. In 1938 the Chung Shan Commercial Association had a membership of over 4,000 in Hong Kong.\n\n43 In 1905, for example, at least seven members of the Committee were compradores to important western firms; one was manager of a native bank; another of a prosperous pawnshop; a third ran a large export firm. Ho Kai was primarily a financier rather than an entrepreneur. See on this point the Chinese speculator Marie-Claire Bergère, \"The Role of the Bourgeoisie' in M. C. Wright, ed., China in Revolution: The First Phase 1900-1913, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1968, p. 236.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206391, "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-1971", "page_number": 208, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "182\n\nREV. JAMES LEGGE\n\nI have drawn, you probably think, sufficiently long on your attention and patience already, and yet, that we may get a sufficient view of the growth of the Colony, I must ask you to go back with me to the time at which I had arrived when the unhealthiness of 1843 led me away into all these digressions. I will try, however, to be brief in what I have further to say.\n\nSir Henry Pottinger, I observed, was governor of the Colony when I came to it, and I was surprised to find that he was not by any means popular. He was a good man, people said, to conquer China, and a bad man to rule Hong Kong. The impression which I received from my intercourse with him was of a man condensed, reticent, powerful, who would have his own way, and was able to force it. Mr. Davis, afterwards Sir John Davis, arrived and relieved him in May, 1844; and his coming was hailed with eager expectation. He had been in China before in the East India Company's time, was a Chinese scholar, and had written a book on China, which is still the most readable and entertaining work on the country up to the time to which he was able to bring it down. He, it was thought, was just the man for the place. How it came about, I hardly know; but of all our governors he left his office under the greatest cloud of popular dissatisfaction. In his time, however, the Colony made very considerable advances. The arrival of Judge Hulme was almost contemporaneous with that of Sir John Davis, and a Court of Supreme judicature was constituted. Mr. May, whom we all know, arrived in March, 1843, and the police force began to take shape. Not long after, the tax on house property was proposed, and never was there a greater clamour in the place. It was argued that it was unconstitutional, an imperilling of that palladium of English liberty that taxation must go hand in hand with representation; and the revolt of the American Colonies in the last century was alluded to. It was not my lot, however, to be in Hong Kong during the greater part of Sir John Davis's administration. I was laid down with Hong Kong fever in the autumn of 1844, which returned with other complications in the following year, till I was carried on board ship on the 18th November, to make the passage round the Cape, my friends all supposing that Hong Kong had seen the last of me.\n\nTwo days after I had left, Ke-ying, the Chinese statesman, paid a visit to the Colony, and gave a grand entertainment to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207826, "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": 214, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963\n\n199\n\ndeeper inroads into rural society than the undermining of the scholarly elite. The Chinese legal system had assumed (more: it had required and been adapted to ensuring) that people would try to look to the settlement of their own differences and stay away as much as possible from the yamen as a court of law. The system of political control was loose and a large measure of autonomy, by default of efficiency if not by design, was accorded to local communities. The early British Administration was thin on the ground by comparison with what has been seen in very recent years, but by Chinese standards it was intense, and it quickly established for itself a reputation for accessibility and quick justice that attracted to it many of the disputes which had earlier been settled, or had lain unsettled, at the local level. Moreover, by preventing some disputes from being literally fought out in traditional feuds (an institution which the Chinese government often thundered against but hardly ever took steps to suppress), the British increased their burden of dispensing justice. (The feud-fights which in recent times have been witnessed in the Yuen Long District—interestingly enough in the area of the fullest development of deep clan organisation—are but shadows of their former selves). It cannot be said that the new Administration succeeded at once in imposing law and order. There was banditry in the early years; some of the village watchtowers were put up after 1899. But, within the limits of poor communications, the new Administrators made a determined effort to eliminate violence from the countryside. Certainly, they brought to their work a conception of positive government quite alien to the ideas informing the system operated by their Chinese predecessors.\n\n16. I cannot in this report document all my historical statements about China and the early New Territories, but in connexion with the previous paragraphs I should like to quote what seems to me to be an important passage in an administrative report written thirteen years after British rule began:\n\nReference should also be made to the waning influence of the village elders throughout the Territories. It was the intention of Sir Henry Blake that, 'existing village organisations should be maintained and utilised', and that the village tribunals should continue to decide local cases. But it soon became clear that the authority of the village elders was of no account, with the stronger authority of the Magistrates so easily accessible, and the idea of local tribunals had perforce to be dropped. Under", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212747, "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": 56, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "41\n\nHis leaders in his Miscellanies and his letters to the local papers are little different from present day British local paper indignation. A typical Mesny throw-away remark was the comment that ‘As China licks the hand that slaps her most, even a mailed one, so she has decided to give Prince Henry of Prussia’ a befitting reception at Nanking, of all places.\n\nHe frequently made the point that his knowledge of Chinese customs outweighed that of virtually all other foreigners, and that he, understanding Chinese ways, was in the position to inform foreigners how they should react to Chinese behaviour with due decorum. He explained manners and Chinese courtesy at great lengths, including the various bows and genuflections to be afforded to whom and when. It must have irritated many a foreigner to be reminded so often that he, Mesny, ‘knows better’ what is ‘the done thing.’\n\nOne of the hundreds of short essays in the Miscellany in which he informs his readership of such Chinese mores and customs is simply entitled ‘Etiquette’. He begins by explaining that the Chinese people beat the world for official etiquette, social politeness, ceremonies, manners and customs. He added that ‘I have never yet found or met a foreigner who has been so careful as myself to observe all the Chinese manners and customs of society, whether official or private and without sacrificing any important privilege of my British birthright. Without performing the degrading ceremony of kotowing to anybody, I have nevertheless observed all the other rites and ceremonies. Some foreigners, like Sir Halliday Macartney, have performed the kotow to their superiors, Li Hung-chang, for instance, but I have rigidly declined to do so, although many Chinese officials of the highest rank have kotowed to me; on such occasions I have bent my knees and picked them up.’\n\nMesny continued in this vein for several more paragraphs instructing his readers on polite behaviour. He then described the matter of ‘equipage’ which he suggested was ‘a serious one, especially at Peking.’ ‘I was advised by a friend,’ he continued, ‘not to travel in a cart or carriage drawn by a horse or pony. A mule is the proper animal. A cart with four openings on each side, three at the back, and one at the front is called a Shih Erh Kai, or twelve openings, and is only used by dudes, saunterers or other persons noted for their irregularities in the matter of genteel propriety. I was quite surprised to find the veteran Doctor Dudgeon riding in a cart drawn by a pony. I called his attention to this", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213405, "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-1994", "page_number": 227, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "215\n\nYounghusband, Francis, The Heart of a Continent. London John Murray, 1896 (Hong Kong Reprint. Oxford University Press)\n\nYuan, Chung Teng, Reverend Issachar Jacob Roberts and the Taiping Rebellion, Journal of Asian Studies 23.1:55-67 (November 1963)\n\nYule, Colonel Sir Henry, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, edited and with notes by Henri Cordier, London John Murray, 3rd edn, 1903\n\n—, Cathay and the Way Thither, new edition revised with notes prepared by Henri Cordier, London Hakluyt Society, 1915 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen Publishing)\n\nJ\n\nMANI", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 } ]