[
    {
        "id": 212819,
        "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": 128,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "BEHIND THE FRONT LINES IN BURMA THE MARCHES OF THE SALWEEN BORDER\n\n1942-1944\n\nP.H. MUNRO-FAURE*\n\n113\n\nI had lost what was left of my worldly possessions in a fire which had unfortunately destroyed one of the temples at Chin Ya and so I took the opportunity of a period of leave in India to refit. By August I was back in Kun-Ming.\n\nYunnan province is recognised by all to be one of the provinces in China least affected by western ideas. It is a remote province, appointment to which in the old imperial days was considered by Chinese officials a form of banishment, indicating imperial disapproval. Until 1254 the semi-independent Shan kingdom of Nanchao shut off communications between China and Burma. In that year the capture of Talifu, the Shan Capital, by Kublai Khan extended Chinese control westwards to the Burmese border, where however through the centuries the March Barons, or Shan Sawbwas, continued to behave as independently as they might, sometimes affecting allegiance to the overlord in the East and sometimes to the overlord in the West, the kingdom of Ava.\n\nUnlike the British policy of indirect rule, which leaves the population in the Shan States on the Burmese side of the border under the administration of their own princes, with some restriction regarding the imposition of the capital sentence, the Chinese policy has been to displace the tribal chieftains by Chinese magistrates. With a few minor exceptions on the immediate border there are thus no Shan Sawbwas left inside China. As for the tribal people, they are gradually driven by the encroaching Chinese into the remoter regions and out of the valleys onto the mountain slopes: they are suffering the fate that awaits weaker peoples in the rough and tumble of natural selection.\n\nIn 1855 a great Mohammedan rebellion, known as the Panthay rebellion, broke out and a Mohammedan ruler set himself up in western Yunnan, styling himself the Sultan Suleiman. The Chinese recovered his capital again, Talifu, in 1873, put the city to the sack and destroyed\n\n*This is the fourth and concluding extract from Lt Colonel Munro-Faure's memoirs (Editor)",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212820,
        "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": 129,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "114\n\nits population. With the fall of Tengyueh, soon after, the rebellion was finally suppressed. Survivors of Sultan Suleiman's family took refuge with King Mindon at the Court of Ava in Mandalay. Two years later a British consular official, Margary, who had been appointed with the consent of the Chinese government to accompany a British expedition, which was to leave Bhamo to explore a commercial route to Tengyueh - now called Tengchung - was murdered under treacherous circumstances near the latter town. It was thought at the time, but not proven, that a Chinese official, named Li Su Tai, whose mother was Burmese, was implicated: the incident led to negotiations between the Chinese and British governments and was settled by the Chefoo Convention.\n\nAfter the British occupied Mandalay and Upper Burma in 1885 they sought to define the boundary between Burma and China. The question was not found to be easy because the Chinese advanced claims to large sections of territory which had obviously been part of the Kingdom of Ava. However, a considerable length of boundary was agreed upon and marked by enormous stones: they are the size of a small cottage, I suppose to discourage easy removal, and each stone is numbered and its position is marked on the quarter-inch map. The length of border left undefined made for an unsatisfactory situation, not unlike that between the United States and Mexico before that boundary was fixed, or like the situation which now exists on the border between China and Tibet. Various attempts were subsequently made to agree the undelimitated part of the boundary, and by 1942 only a stretch of the frontier from just N.W. of Tengchung up to Tilset remained undemarcated.\n\nThe railway from Haiphong, through Indo-China, reached Kun-ming in the early years of this century and so opened the province to French influence; whether, however, owing to strong local conservatism or a lack of enterprise on the part of the French, their influence appears to have left little mark. It was only with the opening of the Burma road in 1939 that Yunnan for the first time felt the full impact of the modern world.\n\nI had had no previous experience of western China. I knew that Lung Yun, the Old Dragon, as the Governor of Yunnan was generally called, had for long been almost independent of the National Government. It was only with the transfer of Government troops to Burma through Yunnan in 1942, and their subsequent retreat to Yunnan, where they remained, that the Chungking government had established a partial",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]