[ { "id": 206008, "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-1970", "page_number": 88, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "CHINESE EMIGRATION AND THE DECK PASSENGER TRADE 83\n\nlanded in Cuba alive. Losses of up to 40% were not uncommon on such voyages, and it is not surprising that the emigrant trade was sometimes called the \"Pig Trade\".*\n\nMost of this emigration continued to be in sailing ships as the early steamships were not particularly popular in the emigrant trade; it was thought the passengers were not landed in such good condition as from sailing ships. The number of days at sea was not so important as the number and condition of the passengers landed. It is probable, however, that like the contemporary objections against carrying tea in steamships, the objections against steamships in the emigrant trade were mainly based on prejudice.\n\nBetween the 1840's and the 1870's, when emigration to South America and the West Indies was practically uncontrolled, conditions on the long passage from the China coast were as bad as those on the notorious 'Middle Passage' of the African Slave Trade. Sometimes they were so intolerable that the Chinese rose in revolt, and attempted to kill the captain and crew. Sometimes they would set the ship on fire, hoping either to capture the ship or escape in the confusion. Emigrant ships were usually provided with barricades on deck in those days, like those on convict ships, to prevent the coolies from attacking the officers' and crews' quarters, a device later adopted as an anti-piracy precaution on late 19th and early 20th century emigrant ships in the South-east Asian trades.\n\nDuring this same period Indians were emigrating to the West Indies, Mauritius, Fiji, and other places, and the Indian section of the emigrant trade has been studied more intensively than the Chinese. The Indian trade was not subject to such great abuses as the Chinese, as it was under more effective control at each end. Indians were also more amenable to discipline, so there was less danger of revolt on Indian emigrant ships. Their passivity and personal habits, however, made them more liable to illness, and the greatest dangers in the Indian emigrant trade\n\n* S. Wells Williams, Chinese Commercial Guide (Hong Kong, 1863) pp. 223-224, shows that coolies for the American countries were known as \"chü-tsai ## or pigs\" among contemporary Cantonese \"by an allusion to their [i.e. the Cantonese] mode of catching and carrying off swine in round baskets\". It is not known whether this phrase, which is still remembered today as 7, is of earlier origin. Ed.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206254, "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": 71, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS AND KAIFONGS\n\n65\n\nlinguistic and economic elements of the community into one self-protective league.\" The self-protective\n\nThe self-protective league among the overseas Chinese takes its physical form in the famous \"Chinatowns', and its invisible form in the numerous associational ties which we just described. However, the closeness of Chinese communities has proved, in the long run, to be a disservice, to both the Chinese themselves and to their host societies. For centuries the Chinese emigrants have not been culturally and socially assimilated with the native populations. To the governments of the newly independent South East Asian countries, the Chinese communities form special social and political problems of their own, standing particularly in the way of national unity. No wonder many newly independent governments take up aggressive policies towards the Chinese, including both political control, such as by abolishing systems of indirect rule, and social-cultural assimilation, such as by a system of compulsory national education, and by discriminatory economic opportunities.\n\nSome writers have noted that it was only a myth that the Chinese overseas were \"unassimilable” and ascribed the closeness of Chinese communities to the fact that the host governments had not provided the Chinese with special services. Thus, it is logical to predict that in due course, the Chinese will be integrated into their host societies once the protective functions of their associations are removed. Also, the third and fourth generations of the immigrant Chinese are not exempted from the all-pervasive influence of the Western culture, particularly because they live mainly in the cities where the influence of the West is most intensively felt. Thus, the younger generations are subject to the same processes of cultural change as those experienced by the younger generations of the native population. Therefore it is not difficult to foresee that both the Chinese and the indigenous South East Asian peoples are going to be drawn together by the influence of the West.10\n\nKAIFONG ASSOCIATIONS IN HONG KONG\n\nHong Kong is considered by some as an overseas Chinese community. However, I believe that strictly speaking, Hong\n\n9 Richard Coughlin, op. cit., p. 60.\n\n10 Ibid., p. 190.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208474, "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-1978", "page_number": 198, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "182\n\nDAVID H. S. CHAU\n\nin print making for generations since Late Ming. To Hua Wu is a district in the city of Soochow. Fatshan is a town near Canton, also noted for its many temples, beautiful scenery and many other crafts. Prints made from these centers varied in style and printing technique, but only the prints made from Fatshan retain the ancient traditional forms, as Fatshan has been the supply center of folk prints for the Chinese overseas who have emigrated and settled down in South Asian countries for many generations. The folk prints used by Chinese people in Hong Kong were also supplied from Fatshan. There had been several woodblock printers in Hong Kong producing religious folk prints by using blocks supplied from Fatshan until fifteen years ago. Then, for economic reasons, some local printers closed down their business and the remaining ones turned to modern printing techniques by using machines.\n\nIn the nineteenth century modern printing techniques were introduced to China from Western countries, and eventually the use of woodblock for printing started to decline and began to vanish. The remaining woodblock printers only engaged in the printing of religious matter. When the Communists took over the government of China in 1949, almost all these printers closed down their trade. Those still in existence are mainly engaged in reproducing paintings of old masters. One is Wing Po Chai in Peking, another in Shanghai is styled To Wan Huen. There is also one left in Hangchow of Chekiang Province.\n\nThe usages of woodblock printing\n\nWoodblock printing had a wide range of usage in Chinese daily life. Besides printed books, calendars, folk prints and religious matter, woodblocks were used for printing stationery, account sheets, letter heads, calligraphic copy books, trade labels, posters, circular notices, playing cards, etc. The government's official documents, orders, legal contracts, etc. were also printed by using woodblocks. Decorated letter sheets had been in fashion in high society in the old days. High-ranking officials, noted families, wealthy merchants and literary scholars and artists had, for their own exclusive use, beautiful specially illustrated and coloured woodblock printed personal letter sheets for writing letters or poems. Card games were also popular in the feast gatherings of scholars, poets or artists. Monochrome, illustrated, woodblock-printed, paper playing cards", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208506, "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-1978", "page_number": 230, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\nANCESTRAL IMAGES; A HONG KONG ALBUM. Dr Hugh Baker. Hong Kong, South China Morning Post Limited, 1979.\n\nAt last, a book for those interested in Chinese traditions and beliefs in Hong Kong, that is about Hong Kong, and written with the ordinary layman in mind. Dr. Baker, known to members of this Society from the several talks he has delivered, is a sinologist trained in anthropological field-work, and he brings his knowledge and first-hand experience to us here in forty very readable short pieces. Some of our longer-term residents will recognise, and may have kept, many of them as they were originally serialised in the South China Morning Post between 1977-1978, but it is unlikely that they will have preserved them all. Now they are here, all together between one hard-back cover with a dramatic photograph of “daai si,” one of the gods described in the text, on the front of the dust sheet.\n\nAlthough the book is entitled Ancestral Images it covers a comprehensive range of topics: from pigs to incantations, and geomancy to New Year biscuits, all amply and expertly illustrated with the author's own black and white and coloured photographs. This book would make an excellent gift for expatriate newcomers and their parents back home; and it affords a good introduction for those wishing to pursue the study of Chinese culture further. There is a useful list of secondary source references in English at the back.\n\nHong Kong. June, 1979.\n\nMARJORIE TOPLEY\n\nHONG KONG : STABILITY AND CHANGE, A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS. Henry Lethbridge Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1978.\n\nThis book contains ten essays on the social history of Hong Kong, all concerned in one way or other with questions of social stability: a stability which, as the author points out, stands in marked contrast to the conditions obtaining in many other Asian countries. Nine of the essays were previously published elsewhere (five", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210988, "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-1987", "page_number": 50, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "in much broader terms, a crisis about France itself and not only its intellectuals, it is an ideological dilemma about the validity of our privileged position in the world of today. And at both levels, China is still part of our intellectual horizon.\n\nHow should intellectuals stand in relation to politics? Should they be involved? The prevailing trend in today's France is almost total rejection of the intellectuel engagé figure, of the politically committed intellectual in the tradition of Voltaire and Hugo, of Emile Zola, Romain Rolland and Jean-Paul Sartre. Here China has certainly played an indirect yet influential role; for the simplistic excesses of the pro-Maoist rhetoric of yesterday and the bitter, almost overnight realisation that the Maoist mirage was just a mirage, greatly contributed to the discredit of the intellectuel engagé. Ironically enough, the same ex-radicals who are presently disavowing their Maoist past have not altogether given up their incorrigible tendency to look abroad for an ideal society. The New Philosophers have turned far away from China to a completely new direction, namely the United States and Reaganism. This is the New Libertarian Right, campaigning in France for economic deregulation and military solidarity with Washington.\n\nAnother critical question for present-day French intellectuals deals with their own position in society at large. With the present-day tendency towards elitist professionalisation of academics, doctors, architects and engineers, the ‘barefoot doctor' of the Maoist era appears more and more remote. But did the barefoot doctor just represent a Utopian dream, a Rousseauistic image? Interestingly enough, in many developing countries of Asia and Africa, people who probably never read a line of Mao Zedong in their lives commonly refer to ‘barefoot architects', more familiar with local building materials than with reinforced concrete, and more concerned with the needs of the ordinary people than with the tastes of high-ranking business executives in their luxury hotels.\n\nMore generally, the relevance of the Western model of development for most African, Asian, South American and also Pacific countries is vigorously debated today among French and other Western intellectuals, and this brings us back to China. How to balance heavily centralised technologies, \"white elephants' such as", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212421, "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-1990", "page_number": 363, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "340\n\nThe jacket proclaims this to be a \"meticulously researched study\"; therefore, I was all the more surprised to find elementary errors. For example, Hong Kong Island was ceded to the British Government in 1842 in the Treaty of Nanking, not in 1843 (p 2). Also, South Sea Textile Manufacturing Company, Limited has never, to my knowledge, been known as \"South Sea Cotton Mill\" (p 55). Such unfortunate lapses, while they may be minor, tend to cast doubt about how much meticulous research went into this manuscript.\n\nThere is a tendency to report, not analyze. One might be led to believe that mill owners felt insecure as immigrants to Hong Kong (p 51). Yet, on the very next page, the Shanghainese entrepreneurs are credited with having a \"long term time horizon\" and that “in spinning, one has to wait before the capital will yield profit\" (p 52). This contradiction is neither pointed out nor elaborated upon. Incomplete research in other places leads to trivial or misleading conclusions.\n\nI found myself frustrated that, with all the data the author had in hand, other questions were not addressed. A Shanghainese industrialist in 1948, armed perhaps with an MBA, would, if he had done a thorough analysis, probably not have set up a spinning and weaving operation in Hong Kong. In those days, all raw materials, machinery and spare parts, down to nuts and bolts, had to be imported. There was no domestic market. And yet, not only did the Shanghainese establish themselves in Hong Kong, they, by and large, prospered. Why? And did they do as well in other Asian countries? We will have to wait for another book to find out the answers to these questions.\n\nMARTIN TANG\n\nMichael Y. L. Luk. The Origins of Chinese Bolshevism, and Ideology in the Making. Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1990 (East Asian Historical Monographs) viii + 366pp. Bibliography. Index.\n\nAnalysis of the incubation and early development stages of the Chinese Communist movement, lasting through the 1920s, presents historians with a difficult and complex task. For decades many of the intellectual elite of China had been convinced that only sweeping political and cultural changes could save the country from unlimited", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215282, "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-2001", "page_number": 59, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "where the territory was not debarred from doing so by treaty. In preparation for the negotiations at Ottawa the colonies were also asked to consider what preferences might be accorded them by the dominions and what preferences they might give to the dominions in return on the lines of the Canada-West Indies agreement.”\n\n34\n\nThe governor, Sir William Peel, discussed Hong Kong's position while visiting the Colonial Office in June 1932. Officials agreed with him that Hong Kong's status as a free port made it impossible to impose anything like a general tariff. Any such tariff would ruin the entrepôt trade which was vital to Hong Kong's existence and no practicable means could be devised of landing goods in bond for re-export without involving so much inconvenience as to drive the entrepôt trade to other neighbouring ports. Peel was prepared as a gesture to give a preference to empire products on articles such as spirits and tobacco which were subject to excise duty and to impose a higher rate of first registration tax on foreign motor cars than on cars imported from Britain and Canada. He did not ask for any preference from the dominions in return since in his view the bulk of Hong Kong exports consists of foreign goods the proportion of the cost of which, due to treatment in Hong Kong, was not large enough to secure a preference...” This showed a surprising ignorance of Hong Kong's growing trade in domestic manufactures which were largely exported to neighbouring Asian countries.\n\nThe Ottawa conference convened in July 1932. The British delegation was led by Stanley Baldwin, the former prime minister, and four other cabinet ministers. Canada, Southern Rhodesia and Newfoundland were represented by their prime ministers; Australia and New Zealand by former prime ministers; South Africa and the Irish Free State by their finance and trade ministers. India, which had been given the freedom to establish protective duties in 1923, was represented by Sir Atul Chatterjee and other members of the Viceroy's Council. The interests of the colonial empire were safeguarded by the secretary of state for the colonies, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister and one civil servant from the Colonial Office, G.L.M. Clauson.\n\nThe conclusions of the conference were embodied in agreements between the United Kingdom government and the governments of the dominions and India. Britain consented to continue the free entry of goods grown, produced or manufactured in any part of the empire, and to impose additional duties on specified foreign goods which would give empire produce a preferential margin higher than the 10 per cent tariff already imposed by the Import Duties Act. Britain also agreed to 'invite' the non-self-governing colonies and protectorates to extend to all the dominions any preference at present extended to any part of the empire, and to increase the margin of preference or impose specific duties on a long list of items requested by the dominions. In return the dominions confirmed the existing", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216287, "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": 46, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "2003 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE FRIENDS OF THE HONG KONG BRANCH OF\n\nTHE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY (UK)\n\nAlthough the number of Friends' activities during the past year cannot compete with those in Hong Kong, it is nevertheless pleasing to report that the quarterly meetings which have taken place have been of a very high standard. They started in May 2003 with a bold and forthright talk by Dr. Francis Wood, entitled 'Marco Polo and Me.' Dr. Wood is curator of Chinese Collections at the British Library and author of 'Did Marco Polo Go To China?' and 'No Dogs, Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China 1843-1943.' Her talk was very convincing and one was left in no doubt that there are still many unanswered questions about Marco Polo's trips to China.\n\nThe second event took 35 Friends to Bath and Bristol for two days in early October, 2003. Bath has an excellent Museum of East Asian Art, originally set up by Mr. Brian McElney, who lived in Hong Kong for many years in the 1960s and 70s. He became a well-known collector of Chinese artefacts. The museum now houses a wide range of Far Eastern art, including items from South Korea and Japan. Our visit coincided with the very well presented exhibition 'Death and Burial: The Chinese and the Afterlife.' The Friends were particularly impressed by the emphasis on education and the museum's outreach to local schools. The day ended with a very authentic Chinese meal at the Cathay Rendezvous in Bristol.\n\nThe following morning the Friends met at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum, which was opened in Bristol three years ago, with a great deal of local and overseas backing, including the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. It was particularly pleasing to see Dr. Dan Waters' name inscribed in the entrance hall. The exhibition portrayed in very enlightened and balanced ways a history of the Commonwealth countries, as seen by many of the local people who lived there. The items on display showed that the build-up of Empire and Commonwealth was a remarkable achievement, but there were clearly some aspects which did not come up to the high ideals many expected - this precipitated a lively topic for discussion during the lunch that followed after the visit and the subsequent river cruise through the old town of Bristol.\n\nxlvi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]