[ { "id": 206636, "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": 184, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "178\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nC. as a fierce, two or six-armed, three-eyed general or two-eyed Taoist priest.\n\nd. as an array of sixty rather characterless seated images, each with a two-character cyclic date on a scroll or tablet (...), or a number between one and sixty painted on the stand or pedestal, or painted over its head. The sixty statues have been seen only in Cantonese and Shanghainese areas though reported on one occasion by Hodous in Foochow. Sometimes all images are identical, sometimes they are a mixture of fierce and gentle, and in one particular Cantonese temple they were beautifully finished. Werner, however, says that the 60 cycle-gods are represented by most grotesque images. (See plate 16).\n\nIn Ningpo in the 1890s the gods of time, gods of the year, months, days and the hours were all represented with long black moustaches. The central one was seated beneath a triple scarlet umbrella, richly embroidered in gold and colours representing the highest emblem of authority. They are also represented in the temple of the Thunder God in the same town. Rev. Henry in Canton saw sixty small images each one to the presiding genius of each year on a minor shrine in the temple of the City God. Some were raised on tiles and some bedecked with gaudy red coats, the gifts of those who had received special favours in their particular years.\n\nC. B. Day says that in Buddhist temples in Chekiang province these are 12 protectors of the Chinese cycle of years. In Suifu, Graham9 saw two images of the 12 rulers of the cyclic year (元甲).\n\nThe Cantonese version of the youth in a. above, is more often than not dressed only in an apron and shoes. The apron is gilt or green, covering the chest and below the waist only, and is secured by a string around the back of the neck and by a girdle around the waist. In several Cantonese temples he is the main deity. The bell he carries has magical properties. Very occasionally he is to be seen with either a sceptre or a silver shoe in his hands; and on still rarer occasions he can be bearded.\n\n7 Henry, Rev. B. C., The Cross and the Dragon (London, Partridge 1883).\n\n8 Day, C. B., Chinese Peasant Cults (Shanghai 1940).\n\n9 Graham, W., \"The temples of Suifu\" in The Chinese Recorder, (vol. LXI, 1930).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207798, "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": 186, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA \n\n171 \n\nwhich was brought out in sections and assembled in Shanghai. The Chinese, however, refused to allow the Kuling above Ichang, and after a year of wrangling, Little sold her to the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, reputedly at twice she had cost him, and she was put on the Hankow--Ichang service. \n\nLittle was not disheartened, however, and set himself up in business in Chungking, among other activities specialising in insuring cargoes on the Upper Yangtze. At last in 1898, three years after the Treaty of Shimonoseki, he had the satisfaction of taking his wooden twin-screw launch Leechuan through the gorges to Chungking, acting as his own captain and chief engineer. The Leechuan was too small to carry any cargo, and needed trackers to pull her up the rapids; but this success enabled Little to enlist support from friends and form the Upper Yangtze Steam Navigation Company. The new company built a much larger steamer in Britain, the Pioneer, at Dennys of Dumbarton. This was a paddle steamer 180 feet long, sixty feet across the paddle boxes, drawing six feet when carrying a full cargo of 150 tons deadweight, and several hundred deck passengers. \n\nThe Pioneer made her first voyage between Ichang and Chungking in 1900, a few months after two British river gunboats, Woodcock and Woodlark had also made the passage; but these only drew two to two and a half feet of water. These gunboats, later, sometimes went a further 130 miles above Chungking to Suifu, at the junction of the Yangtze and Min Rivers. A similar type of French river gunboat also made the passage between Ichang and Chungking in 1901, the Orly, under the pilotage of Captain Plant who had commanded the Pioneer on her successful voyage. In later years these, and similar gunboats, made regular patrols along the open stretch of the Upper Yangtze above the rapids and gorges, between Wanhsien and Suifu. \n\nIn December 1900 the first of many serious casualties occurred on the Upper Yangtze, when the German steamer Suichsiang was wrecked at the Tungling Rapid thirty-six miles above Ichang on her maiden voyage. This and the Boxer and other political troubles delayed further attempts to establish a regular steamer service on the Upper Yangtze for many years. When this eventually came about in 1908 it was through the initiative of Captain Plant of Pioneer fame. The Pioneer was requisitioned by the Royal Navy during the Boxer troubles, and used to evacuate British subjects down the Yangtze, and rechristened H.M.S. Kinsha. Afterwards", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207799, "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": 187, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "172 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nshe was retained as the headquarters ship of the Royal Navy's Upper Yangtze squadron. \n\nThe Royal Navy had always maintained a strong presence on the river, since British ships commenced to trade on the Yangtze in the early 1860s. So far as the Yangtze was concerned, ‘trade followed the flag\". Naval ships were the first British ships to navigate the lower Yangtze, and continued to lead the way as British shipping extended its operations further up the river. As we have seen, H.M.S. Woodcock reached Chungking and beyond to Suifu a few months before the Pioneer made the first successful commercial passage of the Upper Yangtze. By the mid 1920s, when British shipping had reached its peak there, the Royal Navy's Yangtze Squadron consisted primarily of six general purpose gunboats of the \"Insect\" class based on Hankow. These had been built originally for service against the Turks on the Tigris and Euphrates in World War 1. Each carried fifty-four officers and men, and had two six-inch guns, and they were powerful little ships in flat country. For the Upper River there were several smaller ships of the \"Bird class\", which carried twenty-six or thirty-one men. Two operated on the Tungting Lake and on the Siang River to Changsha, and another two on the Upper Yangtze to Chungking, with occasional trips to Suifu. In the high water season the \"Insect\" class ships could also operate on the Upper River. \n\nThis force was commanded by the Rear-Admiral, Yangtze, at Hankow, who came under the overall command of the Commander-in-Chief of the British naval forces in the Far East at Hong Kong. The Yangtze Squadron, therefore, consisted of about 500 officers and could be quickly reinforced from Shanghai and Hong Kong if necessary. It was also possible for a 10,000 ton cruiser to reach Hankow in the high water season. The Royal Navy was frequently called on to protect British ships and British interests on the Yangtze, sometimes against rebels, pirates, war lords, or threats from other foreign powers. The term 'gunboat diplomacy' probably originated from the operations of the Royal Navy on the China coast and on the Yangtze. \n\nThe most notable naval occasion on the Yangtze, since the First China War of 1839-42, was the Wanhsien Incident of 1926. This originated in the refusal of the captain of the China Navigation Company's Wanliu to carry soldiers of Yung Lin, one of the war", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207800, "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": 188, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA \n\n173 \n\nlords then fighting for power in Szechuan. Before the 'Incident' closed nearly a month later, another two China Navigation Company ships had been seized by Yung Lin. All available ships of the Yangtze Squadron were involved, and H.M. ships Dispatch, a light cruiser, and Hawkins, the flagship of the China Station, had been sent to Hankow. In addition the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company's Kiawo had been requisitioned by the Navy to carry reinforcements to Wanhsien. During the sometimes severe fighting which occurred at times, the chief engineer of the Wanliu and seven servicemen lost their lives, and several others were wounded. It was nearly two years later, and after Chiang Kai-shek had expelled the left wing elements of the Kuomintang and his Russian advisers, before the situation on the Yangtze returned to something approaching normal.\n\nAfter the Royal Navy took over the Pioneer, Captain Plant built a junk and traded between Ichang and Chungking, and made a thorough study of the Upper Yangtze. In 1908 he persuaded a group of Chinese business men and government officials to form the Szechwan Steam Navigation Company, forty per cent of the capital coming from official sources, and the balance from private Chinese merchants. The Company's first ship, the Shutung, was built by Thorneycrofts in Southampton under Captain Plant's supervision. She cost £26,000 and arrived at Ichang in 1909. The Shutung was 115 feet long, sixteen feet beam, and six and a half feet depth, and was described as 'a mass of machinery.' She towed a float alongside in which her cargo and passengers were accommodated, and in spite of only being able to carry sixty tons dead-weight of cargo, twelve first and sixty-six steerage passengers, was a great success financially and comparatively trouble-free. The Shutung's success was largely due to Captain Plant's intimate knowledge of the Upper River, his ability to inspire confidence in Chinese official and commercial circles in Chungking, and in his Chinese crew. Until 1914 the Shutung was the only steamer on the Upper Yangtze; but in April of that year she was joined by the Shuhun, a larger and more powerful sister ship, also built in Britain, sent out in sections, and assembled in Shanghai. At the same time the Szechwan Railway Company, then planning a railway from Hankow to Chungking, put three smaller steamers on the Upper Yangtze. Two of these ran between Ichang and Chungking, and the third between Chungking and Suifu. By 1914, therefore, the technical", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211634, "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-1989", "page_number": 49, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "24 \n\nand not even a tablet is permitted. Images of the Jade Emperor seen in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and in South-East Asia are all very similar, portraying him as a bearded, usually gilded, image of an official seated on a throne, with a jade tablet clasped in both hands before his chest (see Plates 2 and 3). His head-dress is not a crown in the western sense, but a classic hat, the mien (mian) the rectangular mortar board cap from which is suspended, front and back, thirteen red cords bearing green, red and blue beads and descending almost to the level of his eyes. Thirteen indicates his supreme rank. This, it should be noted, is the typical standard image of a great number of official deities other than the Jade Emperor, and the only way one can categorically identify his image is to see it on his altar, or to find that it bears an original inscription describing it as the image of the Jade Emperor.\n\nHis image is placed as high on the altar as possible, even to the extent of placing it on as many as three to four tiers; his image, even more than most, must never permit his feet to be touching the ground. In a number of places he is considered to be too holy and too powerful to be portrayed by an image; his title only being recorded on a tablet which occupies the centre of his altar. Images of the Jade Emperor are to be seen not only on the main altars of temples dedicated to him but also, in a small number of instances, on secondary altars in temples dedicated to lesser deities. In Suifu in Szechuan, Graham in 1928 counted nineteen images of the Jade Emperor on altars in the town. The images were placed on the first floor of the temples whereas other gods were normally on the ground floor.\n\n7\n\nGrootaers noted that the cult of Yuh Huang was well represented in the sanctuaries built in high spots in the city of Hsuan Hua (south of Chang Chia Kou [Kalgan] and northwest of Peking). The earliest was dated 1535 AD. Yuh Huang was better known there as Hao T'ien Shang Ti and his image portrayed him as a bearded scholar with a mortar board cap.\n\nIn many folk religion temples in Ch'aochou (Teochew) communities his tablet stands in the front centre of the altar table nearest the main entrance, and in front of the main altar, with only an image of the Third Prince on his altar table standing between the Jade Emperor's tablet and the entrance. The altar of the Jade Emperor is referred to as the T'ien Kung T'an (Tiangong Tan). On his birthday, the 9th of the first lunar month, large sacrificial offerings to T'ien Kung are placed on this special altar", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211637, "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-1989", "page_number": 52, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "27\n\nOne of the unique features of the cult of the Jade Emperor is the extent to which members of his immediate family also appear on altars. In Taiwan and South-East Asia in Fukienese community temples, some of the daughters of the Jade Emperor are portrayed in image form on altars both with their father and alone, and prayed to in their own right. The Jade Emperor is said to have sons and four, or according to others, seven daughters. Temple keepers, when asked, without exception denied that the sons and daughters were approached by devotees who hoped for indirect but preferential treatment of their requests from the Jade Emperor.\n\nGraham in Suifu noted two statues in Jade Emperor temples portraying his daughters. (Regrettably Graham did not provide characters, simply giving their titles as Yin Fei U Nu and U Giang U Nu (the U Nu probably being Yuh Nu)).\n\nThough his daughters did not become prostitutes in the ordinary sense of the word, many amusing and ribald stories are told about them. The Jade Emperor's seventh daughter, Chang Ch'i-chieh (A) [Chang the seventh sister] chose to marry a woodcutter who, from the description in the legend, must have been not far off mentally defective. He did not even understand what a wife was. She overcame the woodcutter's mother's natural reluctance to see a beautiful and intelligent young woman throwing away her life to marry her idiot son. Ch'i Chieh was a good wife and all went well. However, unfortunately, she came to the notice of a rich and handsome young man who was determined to have her. She arranged to marry him in exchange for a very large bride-price to be paid to the idiot and, being an immortal, she punished the rich man severely on their wedding night. He promptly changed his mind and released her, whereupon she returned to the idiot who was now rich, and bore him a son. She then returned to Heaven having fulfilled the curse, but at the same time, she had punished the wicked and rewarded the filial, if idiot son.\n\nIn one temple only, small images of the mother and two wives of the Jade Emperor stand alone in a small shrine behind the main altar on which stands the image of the Jade Emperor himself. This temple layout in Silat Avenue in Singapore is very rare as the consort of the Jade Emperor, according to several different god carvers, is never portrayed on the altar. However, Graham, in Suifu in Szechuan in 1928, noted an image of the Jade Emperor's mother on the side altar in his temple, called Yuh Huang.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211643, "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-1989", "page_number": 58, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "NOTES\n\n33\n\n1\n\nChinese Religions; D Howard Smith, Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1968.\n\nThe Monastery of Jade Mountain; Peter Goullart, John Murray, 1961.\n\nThe Origin of Yuh Hwang, H. Y. Feng, Harvard Journal of Asian Studies, 1936, p. 242-250.\n\n4\n\n\"Religion in the villages of North China\"; Rev. A. J. J. Murray, Religion, No. 16. July 1936, p. 18-25.\n\nLao T'ien Yeh was one of the titles given to the Jade Emperor in North China.\n\nIn Min Hsien in North-West China, where hailstorms are very prevalent during harvest time, peasants used to believe they occurred when the Jade Emperor was angry and the actual hail itself was produced on his instructions by the Mountain Gods.\n\nD. C. Graham, \"The Temples of Suifu”, Chinese Recorder, Vol. 61, 1930, p. 108-120.\n\nK\n\n\"Rural temples around Hsuan Hua\", Folklore Studies, XI, 1951.\n\n1\n\nop. cit.\n\nThe Jade Emperor's heir is very rarely seen on altars, but the author has an image of him, described on the base as \"The Imperial Heir\" (XRF). See Plate 6.\n\nA. S. Goodrich, \"The Peking Temple of the Eastern Peak\", Monumenta Serica, (Nagoya) 1964.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212158, "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": 100, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "77\n\nexalt the magical power of the tree god.'\n\nOn the 23rd day of the first lunar month in 1925 just west of Suifu in Szechuan province some Chinese saw a beggar lying on the ground. They returned very shortly after to find the beggar had disappeared completely, the ground where he had lain was bone dry and his imprint on the wet grass stood out. They realized that he must have been an Immortal and built a small shrine dedicated to him. Once a year thereafter, on the 23rd of the first month anniversary local people held a special festival to celebrate his disappearance.\n\nInnumerable stories are told of the creation of such new deities. These tend to have the following common factors:\n\na. a human dies under unusual circumstances and his spirit is 'found' to have special and supernatural characteristics.\n\nb. An image is carved and placed on an altar as a direct result of the god's behaviour or action. Usually the deity has appeared in a dream, or in a more tangible form as a piece of wood sometimes rough, at other times shaped (a gate or door) — floating in the sea, on a lake or a river, and manifesting supernatural characteristics.\n\nAlthough in theory the deification of a dead soul requires the joint authority of the supreme Taoist deity, the Jade Emperor and the terrestrial emperor of China, there have been a large number of minor deities in particular who owe their deification to the common people, voting with their feet, going to shrines to offer up incense and oil. And just as gods fade and disappear because of lack of support from devotees who have found other and apparently more potent deities, so the creation of new gods springs from a natural but unusual happening such as was the case of the small boy in Singapore, who, as we shall see later, was killed in 1963 by lightning.\n\nCults spring up whenever the spirit of a dead person responds to public devotions and offerings and grants devotees their requests. The deceased need not be from the distant past. An image of Chiang Kai-shek, who only died in 1976, has been seen on at least one major altar in Taiwan, against the wishes of the Kuomintang government, though they would appear to have turned a blind eye. Sun Yat-sen, one of the Republic's greatest worthies, has also been seen in both image and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215595, "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": 372, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "322\n\nracing through the Gorges make this section difficult and dangerous both at low and high water. Chongqing, the chief commercial port of western China and an important distribution centre, was opened to foreign trade by an Additional Article [1890] to the Chefoo Agreement of 1876. This stretch also includes the River down to Chongqing from its junction with the Min River at Yibin [Suifu].\n\nThe fourth and final stretch, the Upper Yangzi of 1,600 miles, is torrential almost from its source in Eastern Tibet far to the west, down to Yibin. It has several major tributaries.\n\nWe, however, are interested in the Gorges. They have long been regarded by Chinese junkmen and especially foreigners who had travelled through them as passengers on river junks, as one of the most difficult stretches of river navigation on earth, with a current in places running at 13 knots.\n\nOur story concerns two British expatriates in China who, as far as we know, never met as they were of different social circles. One is Archibald Little, a British Shanghai merchant, married to a British lady and William Mesny, a struggling entrepreneur also in Shanghai but married to a Chinese. Paul King wrote that 'One of the foreign tea-tasters who each year visited Kiukiang [Jiujiang] was Archibald Little, who was never very successful in business but found himself in Yichang in the uphill work of establishing as a fact that the rapids in the upper reaches of the Yangtze could be negotiated by steam craft. In my [King] time the Navy was represented in Yichang by H.M.S. Kinsha - the famous pioneer merchant steamer on the Upper Yangtze owned and operated by the late Archibald Little.'\n\nThe first steamer to ascend the upper waters of the Great River, the Yangzi, through the Gorges above Yichang and as far as Chongqing during the low water season in the month of March 1898 was the 9-ton steam launch, Leechuen [Li Chuan], the property of Mr. Archibald Little who travelled aboard the steamer with his wife.\n\nArchibald John Little was born in London in 1838, and arrived in China in 1859 where he remained, apart from short visits back to Britain, until 1907 when he returned there and died the following year. He was a merchant, traveller and writer and is as well known to some as the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]