[ { "id": 204250, "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-1961", "page_number": 18, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n15\n\nEgypt had sailed through the Red Sea, and keeping the land on their right had rounded Africa and returned through the Straits of Gibraltar; on the way they had found that the sun appeared for a time on the north side.\n\nA hundred years later, after Egypt had fallen into his hands, Alexander had founded the city of Alexandria on the western side of the delta of the Nile. The city was destined to become the second city of the Roman Empire. Connected by canal with the Red Sea, and making use of the newly understood monsoon winds (A.D. 47) for crossing the Arabian Sea, it became the chief port of the maritime trade with Persia, India, and the regions beyond.\n\nReferences to this maritime trade exist in the Chinese histories as well as in the writings of the Greeks. In A.D. 97 a Chinese envoy, Kan Ying, travelling from Central Asia reached the shores of the Persian Gulf, and was informed by the seamen whom he met that the sea-route from the Gulf proceeded first south-west and then north-west to the port of Wu-ch'ih-san (Alexandria), the return journey taking three months with favourable winds, and two years with unfavourable winds.\n\nThe Chinese records speak of the Persians and the Indians trading by sea with Ta-ts'in (the Chinese name for the Eastern Provinces of the Roman Empire: Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor) and of the fact that the profits were ten-fold.\n\nThey speak also of traffic between India and China by sea, and record that in A.D. 120 two jugglers who claimed to have come from the Roman Orient (Ta-ts'in) reached Burma, and were sent by the king of Burma as a present to the Emperor of China, via the Burma Road.\n\nAbout the same time a book was written by an unknown Greek sailor called The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea giving a port-to-port description of the voyage down the Red Sea and around the Indian Ocean to the Malay Peninsula (The Land of Gold) 'under the very rising of the sun, with a notice of China beyond.\n\nShortly after this in the 2nd century A.D. the Geography of Ptolemy was written at Alexandria, where Ptolemy gathered together and systematized all that was known to the Western world about Asia and Africa. In particular he plotted the longitude and latitude of the places known, which when transferred to a modern map give surprisingly accurate results, reaching to China itself.\n\nFrom this time notices of the sea-route increase, both on the Greek and on the Chinese side. The Chinese histories in particular show a rapidly increasing knowledge in the early", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206079, "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": 159, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "154\n\nS. F. BALFOUR\n\npopulation who took on Chinese surnames and customs. The town of Canton itself, although parts were surrounded by walls, continued to be inhabited by a large matshed population. It was full of Arabs, Indians and Persians who were allowed to have their own administration and laws and to settle in the place without hindrance. Here is a quotation from the famous Arab book known as the Chain of Chronicles which is an account of the trade with China in the ninth century compiled by the Zaid Hassan of Siraf in Arabia. The merchant Soleyman states:\n\n\"The reason why Chinese merchandise in Baghdad is at present rare is because fires are so common in Khanfu (Canton). This town is the principal port for ships and is the entrepôt for all trade between Arabia and China. The fires which consume the merchandise break out because the houses are built of bamboo and reed. Another cause of the paucity of merchandise (in Baghdad) is the large number of shipwrecks and the fact that the ships are so often raided by pirates or are forced to remain in port for long periods during their journeys.\"\n\nAnother merchant states in the same book: \"In 878 the rebel Ban Shua (Huang Chao) besieged Khanfu (Canton). After many days the town was taken. On this occasion 120,000 Mussulmans, Jews and Christians who were established in the city perished by the sword.\"\n\nSince this event preceded a decline in the trade with the west from Canton it is as well to try and form a picture of it up to this period.\n\nThe boats used were larger than any of the native craft that are now seen on the Chinese coast. As early as 413 Fa Hsien the Buddhist pilgrim returned from Java on a boat which carried over 200 people. It drifted, he says, at the mercy of the wind without taking any particular course and \"only by observing the sun, moon and stars was it possible to go forward.\" Fa Hsien's ship was set for Canton but was blown out of its course as far as Shantung where they landed without knowing in the least where they were. In spite of the difficulty of steering without a compass the trade route was very much helped, as it has always been, by the monsoons which blow from the north in winter and from the south in summer. There is some evidence that tacking was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206898, "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-1973", "page_number": 175, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\nYING-YAI SHENG-LAN \"THE OVERALL SURVEY OF THE OCEAN'S SHORES' [1433] Translated from the Chinese text; with introduction, notes and appendices by J. V. G. Mills. The Hakluyt Society, Extra Series, No. 42, pp. xix, 391. Cambridge University Press, 1970. £11.50 U.K.\n\nWhen the Emperor Yung-lo died in 1424, the Ming dynasty had reached the height of its power. Chinese fleets commanded the eastern seas, and foreign potentates as far west as Egypt acknowledged the suzerainty of the Emperor. Between 1405 and 1433 a remarkable eunuch, Cheng Ho, as outstanding a seaman adventurer as any produced by Elizabethan England, commanded seven overseas expeditions, and visited over thirty countries. Chinese naval, and consequently trading, hegemony extended from Japan to the east coast of Africa.\n\nThe expeditions usually extended over two years. Setting out from the neighbourhood of Nanking in the autumn, powerful fleets, including sixty or more 'treasure-ships', and twenty-eight to thirty thousand men, moved down the Yangtze to the mouth of Liu creek (near Shanghai), where organisation was completed; thence to an anchorage near the mouth of the Min river in Fukien province where the ships waited for the favourable north-east monsoon. Java, Palembang, Malacca, Ceylon, Calicut, and Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, were regularly visited. On some occasions, detachments from the main force called at Arabian and at East African ports, sailing southward as far as Malindi. On the fourth expedition (1413-15), Cheng Ho was accompanied by a young Chinese interpreter Ma Huan who, on the basis of observations in the course of succeeding voyages with the 'grand eunuch', contributed perhaps the most important record of life and manners in south Asia by any traveller before the arrival of the Portuguese.\n\nYing-yai Sheng-lan, introduced in two parts, the first describing the expeditions under Cheng Ho, and the second discussing Ma Huan and his book, may have been first published in 1451. Its author died about ten years later, scarcely better known than his book which never acquired a wide circulation. Ma Huan claimed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209677, "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-1982", "page_number": 334, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "312\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nto a halt and where the physical past remains frozen or fossilized by political currents.\n\nALAN BIRCH\n\nFujiwara Iwaichi, F. Kikan: Japanese Army Intelligence Operations in S.E. Asia, 1983. Heinemann's Asia.\n\nProfessor H. J. Benda, authority on the Japanese occupation of the Indonesian archipelago, once remarked \"Japan's war-time aims were never as clearly defined as in South-east Asia”.\n\nRecognizing this significance of Japanese plans and preparations for the war waged against the imperialism of the West, Heinemann's have published a number of studies illuminating in depth several aspects of this important programme, notably Joyce Lebra's Japanese trained Armies in South-east Asia. It is she who writes the introduction to this present volume Lt. General Fujiwara's account of the operations of F. Kikan in Malaya in this critical area of World War II in the Far East. (Actually, this is a translation by the noted Japanese scholar Professor Akashi Yoji, biographer of Loi Tak, the notorious and typical middleman figure in these entanglements of the contending forces of imperialism).\n\nLebra claims for the author of this war-time account of the activities of this Japanese propaganda intelligence group stood for Fujiwara, Freedom and Friendship that he developed a vision of Japan's military role in Asia at its most idealistic, Seeing himself as the Japanese 'Lawrence of Arabia' he took the war-time propaganda slogan ‘Asia for the Asians' most seriously.\n\nFujiwara's relatively short-term, but significant, role in furthering the formation of the Indian National Army, which, of course, was to attempt the removal of the colonial bondage of the British rule of India and further to demonstrate the self-proclaimed role of Japan as the instrument of liberation, is therefore of more than passing interest to historians of that critical period in the shifting of political power in the East.\n\nFujiwara's part in this crusade, and particularly his relations with the least ambiguous of Indian nationalists, Chandra Bose,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212425, "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": 367, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "344\n\nREVIEW NOTES The following books have been received by the Journal from the publishers and are briefly noted here. Titles of immediate interest to the region are in bold letters; others are in standard type. All the books noted here have been placed in the RAS Library.\n\nTHE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR\n\nBalfour-Paul, Glen, THE END OF EMPIRE IN THE MIDDLE EAST: BRITAIN'S RELINQUISHMENT OF POWER IN HER LAST THREE ARAB DEPENDENCIES, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1991. xxiii + 279pp. Notes. Bibliography. Comparative chronology. Index. The three Arab dependencies from which the British withdrew after World War II were the Sudan in 1955, South West Arabia (Aden) in 1967, and the Gulf States in 1971.\n\nBernstein. Gail Lee, JAPANESE MARXIST: A PORTRAIT OF KAWAKAMI HAJIME 1879-1946. Paperback. Cambridge (Mass); Harvard University Press, 1976. Second Printing 1990. xiv + 221 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. The subject, a professor at Kyoto Imperial University who embraced Marxism at the age of 40, is especially interesting in the context of his samurai family and early 20th century Japan.\n\nBlake, Stephen P., SHAHJAHANABAD: THE SOVEREIGN CITY OF MUGHAL INDIA. 1639-1739, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xvi + 226 pp. Glossary. Bibliography Index. This is a study of the old capital city of Old Delhi as a symbol of the power and influence the Mughal rulers were extending over their states in Pre-modern India.\n\nBrodie, Patrick, CRESCENT OVER CATHAY: CHINA AND JCI, 1898-1956, Hong Kong, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.\n\nChan, Wing-tsit (editor), CHU HSI AND NEO-CONFUCIANISM, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1986. xii + 644 pp. Notes. Glossaries. Appendixes. Index. This is a comprehensive and extremely important publication on Neo-Confucianism, comprising more than 30 papers presented at an international conference on Chu Hsi (Zhu Xi; 1130-1200) at the University of Hawaii in the summer of 1982. The papers, by noted and respected contemporary scholars in the field in Chinese, English, and Japanese, are presented in English in this volume.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 } ]