[ { "id": 205098, "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-1966", "page_number": 54, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "49\n\nSINO-WESTERN CONTACTS UNDER THE\n\nMONGOL EMPIRE*\n\nHerbert FRANKE\n\nContacts between Chinese civilization and that of the West, whatever we take \"West\" to mean in this context, have a long and tortuous history which, for some periods, is still far from sufficiently studied. All historians, however, even the most Europe-centered ones, do agree that these contacts reached a pre-modern, all-time high under the Mongol empires in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even the most superficial or condensed textbooks of world history have a few words to say about East-West relations following the conquests and campaigns of Chingis Khan. In such books, we frequently encounter the statement that this period facilitated intercourse and exchange because of the so-called Pax Mongolica, \"Mongol Peace\", when the Mongol domination of East and Central and even great parts of West Asia crystallized into an empire stretching from the Yellow Sea to Southern Russia. Like so many historical tags, this is, however, a statement that loses much of its seemingly uncontrovertible truth when one considers the historical facts. If it is really the task of the historian to reconsider from time to time historical writings and historical dicta, and to debunk history if necessary, then this notion of Pax Mongolica requires qualification.\n\nA historian of China will therefore perhaps ask if cultural contacts and interchange between China and the non-China West were really more frequent and easy under the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than under the Six Dynasties and the T'ang when no Eurasian universal empire like that of the Mongols existed. We know that a great number of travellers, missionaries, and merchants from the Western Regions came to China between the late second and the ninth centuries A.D., and that many non-Chinese cultural elements penetrated East, among them the world religion of Buddhism that became such an important part of Chinese culture. Most of the early Buddhist\n\nText of the Hume Memorial Lecture delivered at Yale University, February 5th, 1965. The author is Director of the Institute for East Asian Cultural and Linguistics Sciences, University of Munich.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205111, "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-1966", "page_number": 67, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "62\n\nHERBERT FRANKE\n\ngols and in China merchants were more powerful and influential than under previous dynasties. The Mongol rulers in China followed in their attitude towards trade and private enterprise a policy of compromise between non-interference and the traditional Chinese bureaucratic hostility to free trade. It was normal for the Chinese scholar-literati class to view the rise of merchants with misgivings and whenever they could they tried to curb the activities of the merchant class. Some of these traditional features can be found in Yuan Dynasty legislation. Yet rich merchants, mostly foreigners, found access to offices in great numbers. Tax-farming became a common practice, and some Westerners rose to positions of power and prestige by their activities in tax-collecting and in the state monopolies. The best known among these careerists is the famous or rather infamous Ahmed who became a minister of state under Kublai Khan and whose assassination is described with many colorful details both in Marco Polo's book and in the Chinese sources.13 As late as the 1350's we find foreigners mentioned as office holders in the state monopolies administration. A text published in 1360 tells us that the officers of the Hangchow Sugar Bureau were all \"wealthy merchants of Jewish and Mohammedan extraction\".14 It is not surprising that the Chinese historical sources for the Mongol period have not many friendly things to say on these foreigners and their techniques of money-making. At best tax-collectors are not popular in any country, and if they happen to be foreigners some additional venom is apt to appear. Historiography under the Mongols remained firmly in the hands of the Chinese, and therefore the picture that they give is inevitably distorted and biased.\n\nIt cannot be denied that international and transcontinental trade and relations on a non-official level contributed greatly to cultural contacts. Yet these contacts remained marginal and did not affect the basic features of Chinese civilization. The spread of Western music in China under the Mongols is a repetition of what had happened in the Six Dynasties and T'ang periods (third to ninth centuries) when dances, musical instruments, melodies and whole music bands were introduced from Central Asia and had a lasting effect on Eastern Asiatic music. Exotic music has, it seems, always found acceptance in high civilizations and been more easily integrated than other cultural elements. Europe is no exception — some of the names of our most common instruments", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205534, "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": 76, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "FURTHER NOTES ON THE SUNG WONG T'OI\n\n71\n\nment outside, possibly T'ang; two fragments of stoneware bowls with pale blue glaze, much weathered and probably old; and two thick stoneware bowl bases roughly hollowed out below, with their yellow glaze decayed, probably of Sung date; one of them was apparently not glazed so far down as the base. Lastly there is one fragment of the neck of a large stoneware jar, wheel-turned, the external diameter of which was 37 cm. at the mouth, and internal 35 cm.; it shows no sign of slip or glaze, and seems to be of Six Dynasties date.\n\n2. Pottery from the beach. A group of 21 bowl bases and sherds were collected from the boulder-strewn beach at the south-east foot of the hill. All but two were submitted to the British Museum for determination of the probable dates of manufacture, with the following results:\n\nT'ang dynasty; broken bowl glazed olive-green, with 17-tooth comb mark.\n\nProbably T'ang: two bowl bases, one with 10-tooth comb marks.\n\nProbably Sung: three bowl bases and two sherds, without incised ornament.\n\nProbably Southern Sung: two bowl bases and one sherd with shallow incised grooves on the outside.\n\nAll the above bowl bases are unglazed below a line part way down their outsides, and are hollowed out with a tool that left a helical mark within the footrim.\n\nSouthern Sung or Yuan: three bowl bases of 13th century date, two with white porcellanous bodies and white glaze, and one with pale buff body and creamy glaze: their unglazed bases are flat with very low footrims. Each of the first two has incised ornament, one an underglaze wave pattern within the bowl, the other a lotus petal pattern on the outside with raised outlines. The third shows signs of wear on a beach, which are seen on no other specimen. This specimen was overlooked and not submitted to the Museum, but has a strong resemblance to the two others in its style and appearance. These three pieces are broken across their bases in such a way that outline tracings of the base in section could be made. Figures 1, 2 and 3 below", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205535, "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": 77, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "72\n\nW. SCHOFIELD\n\nare the outlines so traced: they are numbered to correspond with the order in which they are described.\n\nThe remaining items from this group are:-\n\nFig. 1\n\nFig. 2\n\nFig. 3\n\nProbably Yuan: piece of the shoulder of a jar with the base of a handle; glazed gray, roughly made.\n\nProbably early Ming, 14th to 15th century; two sherds with worn opalescent blue and white glaze, each of them part of the rounded lips of thick bowls.\n\nMing, 16th century: three pieces, a bowl, a sherd, and a plate, with blue underglaze designs.\n\n19th century: small broken porcelain wine cup, light blue glaze. This piece could well date back to the days of quarrying on the hill: it looks newer and less worn than any other piece, and was not submitted to the Museum.\n\n3. Pottery fragments from the exposed surface of a cutting through the south end of the earthwork, where it faces east.\n\nThese fragments, numbering 13, were also submitted to the British Museum experts, who reported as follows:\n\n'We are agreed that these are of Six Dynasties and T'ang Dynasty date. The sherd with the impressed designs is not parallel with those found on Lamma Island,* and\n\nThe reference is to Father Finn's discoveries pre-war. See Archaeological Finds on Lamma Island (*) near Hong Kong, Ricci Publications, Ricci Hall, University of Hong Kong, 1958 reprinted from The Hong Kong Naturalist between 1933-36 and edited by T. F. Ryan, S.J.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206335, "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": 152, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "146\n\nJ. C. Y. WATT\n\nindicates that they are highly localised and probably all come from the kilns of Fu-shan, the area which produce the famous Shih-wan (Shek-wan) wares of a later period. The most common type found in Nim Shu Wan is one that has been attributed to the late T'ang period (Plate 1 and note1). The stoneware and porcelain finds consist almost exclusively of various greenish glazed wares, the detailed description of which is beyond the scope of this paper. However, discussion in very general terms may not be out of place.\n\nThe great majority of these greenish wares consist of bowls and dishes of various sizes. The most common shapes and style of potting are similar to the bowls found in Puerto Galero, Mindoro, (see L. & C. Locsin, Plates 118 and 119). These bowls are usually decorated either on the inside or outside, or both, with a comb-like instrument used with great boldness and flourish. (Plate 7). The inside designs are usually some kind of floral pattern and the designs on the outside are either of the type described as \"chrysanthemum petals\" (closely spaced slanting lines radiating from the base of the bowl), or the type which is generally described as \"lotus petals\". The chrysanthemum petals as well as the floral designs which are woven into \"scrolls” in either a coherent or a \"dissolved\" manner are very similar to those found at the Hsi-ts'un kilns in Canton2, as well as some Fukien kilns, and show common features with certain designs found on celadon wares of the north, especially the Yao-yao varieties; while the \"lotus petals \" (Plate 8) seem to have directly descended from a class of decoration commonly found on Han earthenwares of Kwangtung13 and on the early Yueh wares. The Han potter, in his turn, probably derived his design from the decoration found on some Han bronzes. If this is the case, then this kind of \"lotus petals\" had nothing to do with the lotus plant in its beginnings. However, it is quite conceivable that the Wu and the Yuch people turned this pattern into a variety of the lotus design during the Six Dynasties when the lotus was greatly sung in the Yueh-fu ballads of South China origin because it punned with the word for “love” or “sympathy\". Thus this design can claim to be one of the chief characteristics of wares from South China from the Han to at least the Sung period.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206500, "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-1972", "page_number": 48, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "42 \n\nJ. L. CRANMER-BYNG \n\nHaving signed treaties with these countries the best policy is for China to keep the barbarians very strictly to the clauses of these treaties so that outwardly Chinese officials show \"sincerity and friendship\" while covertly carrying out a \"loose rein\" (chi-mi) policy. Six regulations are attached for deliberation. These are: 1) Regulations for establishing the Tsungli Yamen. It is envisaged as a temporary body. \"As soon as military operations come to an end and affairs concerning the various countries become more simple it will be abolished, and its functions will revert to the Grand Council as before so as to tally with the old system.\" 2) Separate posts for superintendents of trade for the southern and northern ports be established. 3) Regulations for the collection of revenue at all the newly opened treaty ports. 4) Instructions to be sent to the great officials in each province where foreign affairs are dealt with that they should keep each other informed of what they are doing, so as to produce uniformity of action. 5) The authorities at Canton and Shanghai respectively are to send two persons who understand written and spoken foreign languages to the capital for translation purposes. 6) Monthly reports are to be sent to the Tsungli Yamen on Chinese and foreign trade as well as copies of foreign newspapers, so that the Yamen shall be kept properly informed on matters of trade, and China's situation vis-a-vis the foreign countries. The memorial received the emperor's vermillion endorsement to the effect that Prince Hui and others were to deliberate on it and memorialize. Here follows the memorial and memorandum.\n\nWe venture to observe that the imperiousness of the barbarian nature burst forth during the reign of Chia-ch'ing. By the time the Treaty of Nanking was exchanged they were acting more arrogantly and in the present year they penetrated right into the capital and acted with outrageous and compelling force, and the barbarian scourge reached its violent climax. Critics citing barbarian calamities in former dynasties as a warning advocate the use of force alone. From of old there has certainly been no other plan than this for warding off the barbarians.\n\nHowever, your servants, in the light of all the circumstances, consider that of the various barbarians the English are tenacious and arrogant, the Russians are treacherous and the French and Americans secretly adhere to them. We observe that before the defeat at Taku we could either use force or resort to pacification,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206624, "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-1972", "page_number": 172, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "166\n\nW. SCHOFIELD\n\nand exported them to Hong Kong. Even a scrap of tin, perhaps smelted from ore obtained on the Kwangtung coast, was found during excavation at one site where bronze axes were cast. At the same time, the bead trade, so active in Malaya and the great islands, and even in the Philippines, appears to have passed South China by, for the only beads found are either of jade or of soft greenish local stone used as a substitute. This bead trade is in fact coextensive with Indian influence in the Archipelago.\n\nFifth, these finds raise the vast question of the immigrations of the Polynesians and Indonesians from Asia into the Pacific, and the routes they followed. Having regard to the distribution of anthropological types today, we cannot suppose that any large number of Polynesians ever visited the China coast; but there is the strongest probability that tribes of the types of those inhabiting Hainan, Formosa, the Philippines and Borneo frequented the coast, and perhaps started from it to their present seats. It may be possible eventually to prove that survivors of these peoples still live on the coast; personally, I am disposed to regard the Tan Ka or boatpeople of the Kwangtung coast as such survivors. Certain tribes of the interior, the Yui or Yao, and the Siapo of Foochow, may be similar remnants.\n\nThe archaeology of the historic periods has, inevitably, been comparatively neglected in the attractions of unearthing ancient and unknown cultures. Pottery of types familiar to archaeologists in Canton, and attributed to the Han and the Six Dynasties period (100 B.C. to 600 A.D.), has been found at several Hong Kong sites: urns probably of pre-T'ang date (615 A.D. or earlier) have been unearthed at Sheung Shui near the border and elsewhere; and pottery and porcelain of Sung, Yuan and later dynasties can be found everywhere, especially near villages. Forts and watch-posts are to be seen on islands and promontories, and walled towns and villages are frequent inland; such fortifications are, however, post-mediaeval, and the oldest are late Ming, designed for coast defence against Japanese pirates. Of megalithic remains, such as are known as near as the Laos country in Indo-China, no trace exists. No ancient porcelain kilns, such as exist in North and Central China, were ever started within the Colony, though one small establishment for making rice bowls and cooking pots has been found. In one road cutting a mass of broken porcelain of early Ming date, much", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209167, "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-1981", "page_number": 70, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "56\n\nHUBERT SEIWART\n\nand modern Chinese culture. They present, to a certain degree, a religious interpretation of modernization in Taiwan. But if we examine the above mentioned elements, we find that virtually none of them is really new. They are all patterns which are well known from Chinese intellectual history. I shall just give a few examples:\n\nThe devaluation of the present time as a period of moral decline can be traced back as far as Confucius. In the earliest Confucian writings we can also find the theme of the return of the Golden Age of Yao and Shun.\n\nThe concept of the Great Harmony, Ta T'ung, also originated in antiquity, it is elaborated in the Li Chi. Probably somewhat later, during the Han dynasty, the idea was formulated that the emergence of the new ideal world would be preceded by a period of destruction, as can be seen in the T'ai-p'ing Ching. Finally Buddhism added to these elements the theory of the declining dharma and the expectation of the future Buddha Maitreya. Maitreya is still of utmost importance in the eschatological teachings of I-kuan Tao.\n\nThe rejection of foreign influence is also a familiar topic. As we know, Buddhism has long been the target of anti-foreign propaganda. During the Six Dynasties Buddhism was held responsible for all the deficiencies of the time.\n\nFinally, we should observe that I-kuan Tao as well as most of the other popular cults combine elements of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, and promote the idea of san chiao he i, \"the three teachings form a unity\". This explicit syncretism goes back at least to the Sung dynasty.\n\nThese remarks suffice to show that the reactions of these popular religious movements to the social changes resulting from modernization are by no means new. The symbolization of the tensions caused by cultural contact and modernization draws heavily upon the traditional symbol repository. Not only are the traditional symbols relied on, but also their content: The values by which modern society is measured derive mainly from the traditional moral teachings. It would therefore not be untrue to say that the religious responses to modernization as we have analyzed them so far can be characterized as traditionalism and conservatism.\n\nNevertheless, it would be misleading to regard movements like I-kuan Tao as mere survivals of a past historical period. For, as we shall see presently, besides the traditional elements there are also", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210387, "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-1984", "page_number": 358, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "337\n\nperiod — which lasted from the bronze age Dongson period of the third century B.C. to the end of the T'ang dominance in the early tenth century A.D. He has divided this long period into six distinct phases, constructing the main characteristics of each one as the centre-piece of a chapter.\n\nThe first (Chapter 1, \"Lac Lords\") covers the emergence of organized society in the plains of the Hong and Ma rivers (near present Hanoi) under feudal lords. Sources for this bronze age period are largely archeological and linguistic, with a heavy reliance upon the interpretation of myths and legends.\n\nThe second chapter or phase (\"The Han-Viet era”) charts the invasion of Chinese forces and particularly the southern expedition of Ma Yuan, the great Han general, and the emergence of a mixed Sino-Viet ruling class.\n\nThe third phase (Chapter 3, \"Regionalism and the six dynasties\") covers the consolidation of Chinese political and cultural domination.\n\nChapter 4, \"Local rule in the sixth century\" is the fourth phase, which Taylor calls a \"time of self-discovery” for the Vietnamese. It was a time when Chinese control weakened slightly before the consolidation of Sui-T'ang control of the south. And in this weakening the Vietnamese, according to Taylor, began looking to their pre-Chinese roots.\n\nThe Sui-T'ang period of rule is covered in Chapter 5, \"The protectorate of An-nam\". In this phase he chronicles the \"intensity\" of pressure upon Vietnam to conform to the Chinese model of civilized society, as well as the growing resistance to Chinese domination. That resistance bore success of sorts when in the tenth century the T'ang dynasty collapsed and Vietnamese rebellions succeeded in throwing off direct Chinese rule. This is Taylor's Chapter 6, \"The T'ang-Viet confrontation\", and Chapter 7, \"Independence\".\n\nWhile critical of Chinese and French historians as treating the Vietnamese past as a “branch of Chinese history\" Taylor uses", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214196, "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": 54, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "17\n\nSome Westerners and Hong Kong Chinese will tell you that Chinese humour on the circumscribed Mainland is not subtle. It is too ... and a great deal of it falls flat on the average European. Although 200 Cartoons from China (Xu, 1989) goes down quite well, in the series of four books Selected Jokes from Past Chinese Dynasties only about four per cent of the jokes appeal to the author's sense of humour. An exception is:\n\nA father and son were both fond of the bottle and one night they were both staggering back home. On entering the gate the father said: 'Strange! Why do you have three faces? You look neither like a ghost nor a man. I'll never leave my house to you.' The son replied, 'I don't want such a rickety, revolving house anyway' (1997; vol. 4, joke 86)! To give another example of the more simple humour on the Mainland. The sound 'wok', in Chinese, can mean either a Chinese round-bottom frying pan or 'trouble' or 'problem.' Thus a large trading company with a television 'dish' (wok) on the roof is known in Guangzhou as the ‘Trouble Company.' This more direct form of humour, common in Guangdong, contrasts with the complicated humour which requires a person to use his 'grey matter' more.\n\nFor instance Nury Vittachi, Hong Kong journalist, author and part-time comedian, writes that he believes what he calls 'personality humour' works best with Westerners. In such cases the comic goes into his role and recreates a conversation with his mother-in-law, the taxi driver, or whoever. This does not always work, says Nury, with Asians who prefer more direct, straightforward, 'Man goes into a bar' approach.\n\nBut Hong Kong, as opposed to China, is a relatively small place with western influences. As Harry Wong, the talk-show host and co-median of Metro Broadcasting said: 'In this city-state (Hong Kong) people are short of time. There is a ‘combat' situation and people have a better command of English. Western-style Rotary, Round Table clubs and the like, with their style of humour, are common. Put all this juxtaposition to Chinese humour, including films made in Hong Kong often consisting of vulgar, triad language, and obvious jokes with excessive action, and you have a peculiar mix' (Bolton, 1997; 300). Such exaggeration, found for instance in Chinese films, contrasts with much of the British humour which often relies on understatements. Some", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214313, "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": 171, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "135\n\nProfessor Drake summed up the probable chief monument to Sowerby's life in Shanghai as the China Journal. He added that it was not a sinological journal but a storehouse of information on all manner of subjects, the range and variety of which reflect the editor's [Sowerby's] mind. To a large extent it is a record of a world that is past and one of its chief functions was to educate the foreign community in the China of those days in appreciation of varied aspects of Chinese civilisation and life.\n\nWith his increasing knowledge in Chinese Art Sowerby gradually made a small but choice collection of Chinese pottery and porcelain, being attracted chiefly by the animals of the T'ang and Six Dynasties periods. These, with his fine collection of books on Chinese Art and his natural history specimens he donated to the Heude Museum, Shanghai before he left China in 1946.\n\nHis last illness was the now all but forgotten debilitating sprue which left him an apparently broken man, yet whilst in the Japanese concentration camp he maintained his interests and discovered a new species of some small creature.\n\nIn his final year, in Washington DC he began composing an ambitious history of the old Saxon family from which he was sprung - The Sowerby Saga - which included in the third and later parts his own autobiography. [Note: this does not appear to have been published and nothing more is known about the work].\n\nBefore the centenary of his and his family's fortunate furlough in 1900 passes I wanted to pay a debt of pleasure to the author and publisher, Arthur Sowerby, on behalf of all those who gained some insight into a China now long departed.\n\nPost Post Script\n\n[Editor's Note: Keith must have sent me at least six revised versions of this article, each time declaring that \"this is definitely the last one.\" Then things went quiet and I edited the \"absolute final version.\" Then this arrived with the usual \"final\" exhortations. I include it to confirm to readers that here at HKBRAS we truly go the extra mile!]", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216023, "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": 322, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "256\n\nMountain, a former small island now joined to the mainland by alluvium, referred to by Victorian travellers as a 'pyramidal rock'. This used to stand out in the Yangzi a mile or so upstream from the city of Zhenjiang, hence their use of its name generically for the city. There is a further island, Jiao Shan Scorched Island, an islet some mile or so downstream from the city with its own ancient temple, Dinghui Si concealed within its tree-covered slopes. It too has its own memorials from the era of the Six Dynasties - two or three ancient cypress trees, whose storm-riven and almost barkless trunks were in the 1920s still held together by iron bands. According to Allom, Silver Island [Mountain], the name formerly given by foreigners to Jiao Shan, is to the westward of Zhenjiang, within sight of the Gold Island [Mountain] [see illustration]. Legend has it that Jin Shan, Gold Mountain takes its name from the time during the Tang dynasty when a certain Bei Totuo was digging into the hill and found a pot of gold; this has long been denied by Buddhists who believe that the name of the hill has a Buddhist symbolic meaning. Although the British Concession was originally laid out with intervening ground between it and the old walled city it did not take many years for the new native city to encroach and reach the Concession boundary. This meant that foreigners wishing to leave the Concession had to battle their way through the main street of the new native city, facing filthy and disease-ridden beggars, open drains and past open spaces which were used as public conveniences, constantly patronised by squatting men.\n\nCaptain Cunynghame, serving with the British force sailing up the Yangzi and about to mount an assault on Zhenjiang, arrived off the city on the 18th of July 1842. The force had been proceeding with great care as it was the first opportunity that western warships had had to penetrate as far inland up the Great River. He described his first sighting of Golden Island as 'the most beautiful little fairy isle imaginable, covered with temples, whose gilt-topped pagodas shone brilliantly in the evening sun'. A week or so later, once the city had been stormed and he was able to walk through it and wrote that \"the walled portion of the town was reckoned about four miles in circumference. The suburbs, extending a long distance to the west, probably occupied an equal extent of ground. The former space was chiefly occupied by streets containing shops, with an occasional blank space of wall within which were the houses of the most wealthy inhabitants. A very large portion, however, was occupied by gardens", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]