[ { "id": 206512, "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": 60, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "54\n\nJ. L. CRANMER-BYNG\n\nCouncillors at Jehol at this time: Mu-yin; K'uang-yüan; Tu Han; Chiao Yu-ying. Information on all these officials can be found in Hummel, Eminent Chinese, especially in the biography of Su-shun. Their power relationships are discussed in Banno, China and the West, passim, but especially 55-56. The term \"minister of the imperial presence\" (yü-ch'ien ta-ch'en) is rendered by Brunnert and Hagelstrom, Present Day Political Organization, p. 28, no. 101, as adjutant-general.\n\nII Tengchow is on the northern side of the Shantung promontory. In fact it was not opened to foreign trade which was carried on at Yen-tai near Chefoo. S. Wells Williams, The Chinese Commercial Guide, 211-212. Ch'aochow was the old name for Swatow; Ch'iungchow is in Hainan. Taiwan City and Tamsui were ports on the island of Taiwan which came under the administration of Fukien province.\n\n12 Ch'ung-hou was appointed to this post by an edict of 20 January with the designation superintendent of trade for the Three Ports, with his headquarters at Tientsin. Hsueh Huan, governor of Kiangsu and acting imperial commissioner at Shanghai, was made responsible for the newly opened ports along the Yangtze and the coast to the south of it, by the same edict. As far back as 1844 the imperial commissioner at Canton was currently designated imperial commissioner for the Five Ports. With the addition of new ports it was made a concurrent post of the governor of Kiangsu in 1861, until 1868 when it was made a concurrent post of the governor-general of Liang Kiang residing at Nanking. In 1870 the post of superintendent of trade for the Three Ports was raised to an imperial commissionership and held concurrently by the governor-general of Chihli. It is not clear when the commonly used designations for these two posts viz: superintendent of trade for the southern ports and superintendent of trade for the northern ports were first used. Meng, The Tsungli Yamen, 40-41; Banno, China and the West, 233-5.\n\n13 Article 3 of the Convention of Peking between Britain and China refers. See W. F. Mayers, Treaties Between the Empire of China and Foreign Powers, 8. The phrase to avoid complications arising is a euphemism for 'to avoid peculation'.\n\n14 Tentatively we have translated the Chinese phrase hui-tan as counter-foil. Note 19 also refers.\n\n15 The term is fuyin. See Brunnert and Hagelstrom, Present Day Political Organization of China, 793.\n\n16 See Frank H. H. King, A Research Guide to China Coast Newspapers, 1822-1911.\n\n17 Translated in collaboration with Mr. Vei-Tsen Yang. Chinese text in Ch'ow-pan wu shih-mo, Hsien-feng, 72: 2-3. A second edict was issued on the same day, and on the same subject, to the Grand Secretariat. This edict was translated by T. F. Wade along with the six-point memorandum. Note 2 above refers.\n\n18 Not to be confused with the Russian Hostel nor with the language school for the Russians in Peking, both of which were often referred to in Chinese documents as O-lo ssu-kuan, thus making confusion likely with the Russian language school referred to here. See Meng, The Tsungli Yamen, 111, note 48.\n\n19 Lit. 'draw up a joint document'. Glossed by T. F. Wade as a paper signed by both parties showing that the amount deducted is in due proportion to the collection'. Translation of Peking Gazette in F.O. 17/352 p. 42.\n\n20 Presumably referring to Robert Hart, the Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and the westerners serving under him. On the general subject of foreigners taking part in the administration of China after the middle of the nineteenth century see Fairbank, The Chinese World Order, 273-5; also Fairbank \"Synarchy under the Treaties\" in Fairbank (ed.) Chinese Thought and Institutions, 204-231.\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210985, "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": 47, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "22\n\nTwo completely different factors come into the picture, namely Gaullism and Italy.\n\nA hidden but deep correspondence had always existed between Gaullists and Maoists. Both emphasised the importance of historical roots and long-term perspectives, for France de toujours as well as for the Sons of the Han on their everlasting Yellow Earth. Both had refused to align their nuclear policies with the strategies of the superpowers. André Malraux's visit to China in the 1960s, both as a former activist in the 1926-27 revolution and as a prominent Gaullist intellectual, was a symbolic episode, much publicised in France. Had General de Gaulle not died suddenly in 1970, he most probably would have paid Mao Zedong the visit already arranged by his old companion Etienne Manach, then French Ambassador to Peking. It would have been an extraordinary performance, in both the grand French and Chinese traditions.\n\nItaly was also very influential. There has always been a special connection between Italy and China. Chinese intellectuals have always felt very much at home in Italy, and the active sympathy for Maoist China of such prominent Italian intellectuals as Malaparte, Alberto Moravia and Maria-Antonietta Macchiocchi certainly made an impact on Parisian literary circles. Altogether, many influential French intellectuals were in those years very keen on visiting China and however brief their visit publicising their sympathy for China. Be they Claude Roy, Etiemble, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva18 or many others, their individual approaches may have differed one from another, but they were all indulging in China as if their commitment to China was more important than China itself. They also affected a definitely revivalistic attitude, as if they were the new sinophiles in the grand eighteenth-century tradition.\n\nBy and large, Maoist China was very chic in French cultural life of the 1950s and 1960s. The theatres were packed full at every Peking Opera visit, the books of Han Suyin sold very well, Chinese exhibitions of art at the Grand Palais were a must, the veteran film-director Joris Ivens, Dutch by birth but settled in France, embarked on a 12-hour film on Yu Gong and People's China's achievements, and the well-established literary publishing series", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211345, "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-1988", "page_number": 61, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "37\n\nofficials in Shanghai stopped Sulin from sailing to America because Mrs. Harkness had neglected to obtain the necessary permit to export live animals. After much discussion and wrangling, Mrs. Harkness was able to leave Shanghai for San Francisco with Sulin on the President McKinley, carrying with her a \"passenger voucher\" for \"one dog\".\n\nTwo years later, in 1938, Floyd Smith succeeded in bringing five live giant pandas to England, creating a general sensation around the world.\n\nResearch into Chinese records for records on the giant panda\n\nWith all the hoopla around the world starring one of China's very own, faces were red indeed back in the Central Kingdom. Nobody had even suspected the existence of such a delightful treasure in China's own backwoods.\n\nResearchers were challenged to dig into Chinese historical records and ancient writings to find proof that, after all, the Chinese had known all about the giant panda since antiquity.\n\nThe Synthesis of Books and Illustrations of Ancient and Modern Times, a work compiled during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) but not printed until 1722, is a wonderful source for quick reference of Chinese scholarship throughout the ages. Thumbing through the chapters on animals, scholars of the 1930s came up with a plethora of animal names that they fitted into physical descriptions of the modern giant panda in one way or another. Some of these choices could be traced to the classics, the Book of Odes, an anthology of poetry mostly dating from the early Zhou era (1122-722 B.C.), and Erya, a dictionary thought to date from the third century B.C. Antiquity indeed.\n\nThat giant pandas had existed in China since geological times was never a point in dispute. Studies of fossil remains have proved beyond any doubt that pandas had lived in China during the Pleistocene. Furthermore, their geographical distribution had been much more extensive than today's. They had lived in areas outside the southwestern mountains, and had roamed the provinces of the north and the east, including Liaoning, Shandong, Anhui, and Jiangsu.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212671, "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-1991", "page_number": 225, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "206\n\nChina 1890-1938, From the Warlords to World War, A History in Documentary Photographs by Eric Baschef, with an Introduction by Han Suyin (Swan productions AG. Zug/Schweiz, October 1989). The publication details are not on the title page but in the rear of the volume.\n\nHistorical photographs of China have a perennial fascination for those many persons the world over who share an interest and affection for the country and its people. China 1890-1938 is as good a collection as any that have appeared to date. The publishers' dust-cover claim that these are \"striking, often haunting, photographs portraying the full range of the great empire\" is valid enough. Many are familiar, others less so; but much instruction and enjoyment may be had from perusing them all.\n\nNonetheless, the book itself is rather unsatisfactory. The texts of the titling are not always carefully worded or in some cases accurate, and the translations from the original German or French (the map inside the front cover is in French) sometimes show up clumsily. I imagine that many readers will be able to spot inaccurate captions and attributions for themselves. For me, there is a classic at page 92, where the bottom left photograph has nothing to do with the execution of “Boxers” in Peking but is a well-known record of the execution of pirates on the beach at Kowloon City by the Chinese authorities in 1891: though I have seen this variously described elsewhere, too. And on page 192, a wag is surely having us on! Six heads in wooden cages suspended below a sign in English and Chinese bearing the caption \"Speed Limit 15 Miles per Hour\" are described as follows: \"Anarchy reigns. Speeding motorists are beheaded\". I hope not! On P. 205, top, a photograph of a post office is the wrong way around.\n\nThe chapter summaries are far too short, almost as though the layout had determined what space was available for the scanty text throughout the book. Also, the one covering the 62 pages on “Immortal China” (pp. 12-73), a fascinating section, is placed at its end, instead of at the beginning where it would be more useful. In fact, this treatment is continued throughout the book, with the same results.\n\nHan Suyin's five-page Introduction is somewhat one-sided in its approach and treatment, as one might expect. It also provides another, revealing, instance of the way in which this book has been compiled. Whereas she covers the years 1900 to 1937, the book's title deals with the period 1890 to 1938, showing the compiler's failure to marry up\n\nPage 225\n\nPage 226", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214592, "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-1999", "page_number": 7, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "of Chinese and Western humour, The Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 38:1-50\n\nNOTES\n\nA word on punctuation\n\nPunctuation is not an exact science and styles vary. The Journal's style for quotation marks, however, is: direct verbal or written quotes - single quotation marks; and anything else in quotes - double quotation marks. Please ensure that quotation marks \"wrap around\" commas and full stops, e.g. 'Life's greatest tragedy,' wrote Han Suyin in A Many Splendoured Thing, 'is not to love.'\n\nEndnotes only\n\nvi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214915, "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-2000", "page_number": 11, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "CONTENTS\n\nPRESIDENT'S REPORT ............................................................ XIV\n\nFRIENDS OF THE HKBRAS (UK) REPORT .......................... xxvii\n\nHON. AUDITOR'S REPORT ....................................................... xxx\n\nHON. LIBRARIAN'S REPORT ................................................... xlii\n\nARTICLES\n\nSolomon Bard - Tea and Opium ............................................... 1\n\nTeresa Kowalska - Tea, Ivory and Ebony: Tracing Colonial Threads in the Inseparable Life and Literature of Han Suyin ........ 21\n\nBrian C. Fawcett - The Chinese Labour Corps in France, 1917-1921 ............................................................... 33\n\nKeith Stevens and Jennifer Welch - The Celestial Ministry of Time ............................................................... 113\n\nKeith Stevens - Images on Popular Religion Altars of the Heroes Involved in the Suppression of the An Lushan Rebellion (AD 755-763) ........................................................ 155\n\nDan Waters - The Two Obelisks at Tai Tam ....................... 185\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nKeith Stevens - Patron Deity of Prostitutes: Zhu Bajie ........ 195\n\nBarbara Park - A Walk along Harlech and Lugard Roads ...... 197\n\nDan Waters - Designatory Letters after an RAS Member's Name ............................................................... 205\n\nDan Waters - Photographs from the HKBRAS Photographic Exhibition held in January 2001 at the City University ........ 207", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214917, "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-2000", "page_number": 13, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "CONTRIBUTORS\n\nSolomon Bard, O.B.E., E.D., is a long-time, well-known resident of Hong Kong and amongst his many other accomplishments is a musician, archaeologist and historian. His published works include the following: In Search of the Past: A Guide to the Antiquities of Hong Kong (Urban Council, Hong Kong, 1988); Traders of Hong Kong: Some Foreign Merchant Houses, 1841-1899 (Urban Council, Hong Kong, 1993); and Garrison Memorials in Hong Kong: Some Graves and Monuments at Happy Valley (Antiquities and Monuments Office, Hong Kong, Occasional Paper No. 4, 1997).\n\nBrian C. Fawcett, was born in the Far East where his father served with the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation. He also joined the bank and served from 1961 to 1978, being based in Hong Kong from 1971 to 1978. During that time he was also a volunteer with the Royal Hong Kong Auxiliary Air Force, now the Government Flying Services. He is a life member of HKBRAS.\n\nPeter Halliday, M.A., Ph.D., is an Assistant Commissioner with the Hong Kong Police Force and is in charge of the Information Systems Wing. He has been the Hon. Editor of the HKBRAS Journal since 1993 (peterhalliday@police.gov.hk).\n\nJames Hayes, Ph.D., D.Litt. (Hon.), is a Past-president of HKBRAS. He is a noted scholar and Hong Kong historian, and has written several books, the most recent being Friends and Teachers: Hong Kong and its People, 1953-87. He has contributed prolifically to the Journal (mouseh1@bigpond.com).\n\nTeresa Kowalska, Ph.D., is a professor of physical chemistry at the Silesian University, Katowice, Poland. She has a distinguished academic record in her chosen field and publishes widely. Her interest in and admiration of, the writer Han Suyin is an extracurricular pursuit (kowalska@uranos.cto.us.edu.pl).\n\nJack Lao Mou Chi, is a retired Assistant Commissioner of Labour of the Hong Kong Government and a member of HKBRAS.\n\nBarbara Park, is a landscape designer and a long-time member of HKBRAS.\n\nxii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214969, "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-2000", "page_number": 65, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "21\n\nTEA, IVORY AND EBONY: \n\nTRACING COLONIAL THREADS IN THE INSEPARABLE LIFE AND LITERATURE OF HAN SUYIN\n\nTERESA KOWALSKA\n\nHan Suyin, medical doctor and fierce Chinese patriot, is the grand dame and doyenne of Chinese writers, born and brought up in pre-communist semi-colonial Old China, and has devoted over fifty long years, in a splendid literary career, to the interpretation of her beloved and largely misunderstood motherland China to the Western world. In spite of perfect fluency in French, Mandarin Chinese and English, she decided to write in the latter language in order to reach the largest possible audience. Her ultimate intention has always been to build bridges of communication and understanding between East and West, and her much under-estimated artistic and intellectual contribution has added a non-Eurocentric reflection on modern history of the Far East and South-East Asia to the treasury of contemporary global thinking. Maybe the humiliating touch of quasi-colonial atmosphere in Peking of her childhood and adolescence spurred her to undertake this challenging task of becoming an outspoken ambassador of her nation in front of the outer, fairly prejudiced and occasionally hostile world. Her inner independence irritated many, provoking accusations of being a communist, or a communist sympathizer at least. The artist's answer to these unfounded objections and simultaneously her meaningful artistic as well as human credo is contained in the below cited fragment of Chapter Eleven from Phoenix Harvest, volume five of her powerful six-volume epic cycle on modern history of China:\n\nI have had to live by what was imprinted in my cells, remaining averse to and suspicious of high-flown abstractions, but totally engaged to that smell and savour and warmth, that feel of the tide, blood beat, which is for me the people of China. With others, exultant ideologies may have priority, but it has never been so with me. I shoulder and make do with systems, with ideologies. I am not committed to any. Only one thing concerns me: in the great sweep of history, will this or that system have been another step forward for the Chinese people? They are the only 'side' I am on.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214970, "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-2000", "page_number": 66, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "22\n\nHan Suyin's patrimonial heritage is very specific, as her father originated from the Hakkas, or \"Guest People,\" a sub-group of ethnical Han Chinese, which initially meant displaced, dispossessed, and hungry peasants, the refugees from misery, migrating in millions from the regions struck by floods, droughts, foreign invasions, civil wars, and rural upheavals, and simply \"seeking a roof.\" The Hakkas themselves claim that they moved five times within recorded history, their first migration dating at about A.D. 311, and the fifth one at the end of the Taiping rising (i.e., in the sixties of the nineteenth century). Their culture was to a very large extent affected by the turbulence of political and social events, by their own relative insecurity in the territories of new settlement, and by the resulting enormous eagerness and ability to survive. For these particular reasons, a somewhat remote analogy can perhaps be drawn between the mobile, industrious, and hard-working Hakkas, dispersed among the settled Han population, and the Jewish enclaves dispersed in medieval Europe and in the contemporary world as well.\n\nIn the thirteenth century - the time of Gengis Khan's invasion and of the resulting third migration - Han Suyin's distant ancestors, named Chou, settled in Meihsien in the province of Kuangtung, a purely Hakka district. The wave of the Manchu-dynasty-inspired fourth migration (1680-1720) took some of them further to Szechuan, the region of Four Streams, a remote Chinese hinterland guarded from the outer world by the cliffs of Tibet, the Snow Mountains, and the Cold Mountains, and the dangerous Yangtse gorges. The recorded family history starts from the first ancestor, who arrived in Szechuan as an itinerant pedlar, most probably carrying across his shoulder a pole, with the baskets swinging at both ends to transport miserable personal property and sale goods.\n\nBy the nineteenth century, Han Suyin's family had managed to climb up the economic and social ladder, to attain the top echelon, i.e., the scholar-official-administrator class. They had become local landed gentry, the cornerstone of the Chinese feudal social setup, and this anachronistic setup might have continued ad infinitum, had it not, under pressure from the colonial superpowers, ultimately collapsed.\n\nHan Suyin's father, Chou Yentung, was born in 1886 in China already invaded by the French and the British, the two colonial", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214972, "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-2000", "page_number": 68, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "24\n\npromised quick liberation from technological backwardness of China and consequently from the dependence on non-altruistic foreign assistance, or so at least hoped young, aware, fierce and idealistic Chinese patriots of the mandarin origin, Han Suyin's father, Chou Yentung, among them. Belonging to the upper class of the Old China's society, a scholarship was rather easily granted to him by the provincial government of Szechuan to study railway engineering in Belgium. He spent ten long years in Brussels (1903-1913), studying and working, and there he met his future wife, Marguerite Denis, and eventually married her in 1908. In Chapter One of The Crippled Tree Han Suyin briefly comments:\n\nWe are all products of our time, vulnerable to history. I was born because there had been, in China, a Boxer Rebellion (as the Europeans called it) in 1900, and because of this event, which the Chinese call the Uprising of the Righteous Fists, my Chinese father, instead of becoming a classical scholar, perhaps a Hanlin Academician, married my Belgian mother.\n\nRe-settlement of the Chou family from Belgium to China was a great disillusionment for both, Marguerite Denis and her young Chinese engineer husband. At that time (which - unfortunately enough - would end with the Communist Revolution only) Chinese were treated in their own motherland as citizens of the second category, by definition inferior to the whites. Han Suyin's great epic cycle on autobiography/history of China gives multiple examples to prove this abhorring and painful truth. The return trip alone was a bitter humiliation for the couple travelling such an enormously long way to the Chinese homeland with their first-born son. In Chapter Eighteen of The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin quotes fragments of her father's memoirs, which describe some details of that event:\n\nWhen we went to collect the tickets [for the English boat], the man in the booking office (tall, blond, low-voiced) said to Marguerite: \"But, madame, you can go in first class if you wish, but not monsieur. It is the rule.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Marguerite, astonished, \"but he is my husband. Of course I shall go with him.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214973, "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-2000", "page_number": 69, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "25\n\n“As you wish, madame.” He gave us a second-class cabin, looked at our son doubtfully. \"Tall for his age, isn't he? Only four and something, did you say?\"\n\nAnd another, equally persuasive fragment:\n\nIn Singapore we were refused a room at the English hotel, and the Chinese ones were very hot and uncomfortable; there was opium-smoking, prostitution and gambling all round us. Marguerite had prickly heat, and our son cried all night long. Our clothes were all too heavy for the damp, hot weather\n\nHaving returned home as a former engineering student from Belgium, Han Suyin's father was then employed by the Belgian company developing a railway network throughout the Chinese interior. There are many fragments in the pages of her books, referring to this period in her and her family's lives. A happy one is given already in Chapter One of The Crippled Tree:\n\nRailways meant a lot to my father, and they were also part of the climate of my growth since my childhood was spent in small or large railway stations. Even now, whenever I hear the siren hoot of an engine, my childhood comes cantering back to me.\n\nInequality between Western high school diplomas granted to the Chinese and to the whites was indisputable, self-evident and absolutely “natural,” and was thus quite impossible to argue against. The Chou family was confronted with this inequality right from their re-settlement to China. In Chapter Nineteen of The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin mentions:\n\nIt was in the yellow plains of Honan; not far from it, the Yellow River had burst its dykes and gone flooding once again, and there were many displaced peasants and also bandits and soldiers, the latter more than the former and more to be feared. The little station was safe, however. There the Big Engineer, whose name was spoken of with indrawn breath and a small pause of respect because he was a Belgian and had a large salary, stayed in a new brick house constructed specially for him on a small hill. Mama and Papa lived in a small Chinese house of earth walls on the other side of the railway, about two miles away", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214974, "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-2000", "page_number": 70, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "26\n\nfrom the hill, in the town.\n\nIn that particular place on the Chinese provincial railroad construction, Han Suyin's baby elder brother, Gabriel (Sea Orchid), died simply because he was Eurasian. The French doctor working for the Belgian railroad-building company was engaged basically to look after the European employees' and their families' health, and these patients could see him at any time in his house on the hilltop. For Chinese and Eurasians he was available exclusively in his morning clinic, not meant for Europeans. Sea Orchid was most unlucky to get suddenly and seriously ill at a wrong time of the day, late in the evening, and his Belgian mother - obviously scared of the worst - took him immediately, although against the company's regulations, to the hilltop doctor's house. She was not even let in by the doctor's French wife and this shattering episode is described in detail in Chapter Nineteen of The Crippled Tree. The most dramatic part of the dialogue between the sick baby's mother and the doctor's French wife is cited below:\n\n“But my child is dying, he has convulsions. Madame, for the love of God, let me see the doctor.”\n\n“Certainly not, Madame. Don't shout like that, it is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with your child, only teething. The doctor cannot see you.”\n\n“My baby is dying, my baby is dying,” screamed Mama, striking the door more violently, hurling her weight against it.\n\n“Get out, you and your filthy halfcast brat, get out of my house,” shouted the French woman upstairs. Then Mama heard a man's voice, and again the woman's: “I forbid you to go. Do you hear, Pierre? I forbid it. I will not have you kill yourself for the sake of a halfcast throwndown.” The next morning Sea Orchid was dead.\n\nHan Suyin was born to Roman Catholicism, owing to her deeply religious Belgian mother. Surprisingly enough, even Catholicism seemed split on racial grounds in that surrealistic land of Old China. In Chapter Twenty-Seven of The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin recollects her early memories of attending a Chinese Catholic school, attached to the Peking's Chinese Catholic Church (also known as East Church, or", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214975, "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-2000", "page_number": 71, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "27\n\nTungtang):\n\nPapa gave in, and Rosalie [Suyin] and Tiza [her younger sister] went to the Catholic Chinese school; every morning there was half an hour of Bible story, and in this version St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary were Chinese, born in Shantung province.\n\nRosalie asked: “How can this be? The Western School says born in Judea, and the family were all Jews.\"\n\n\"That's what they say, but we here believe it is in Shantung,” replied the Chinese lay-sister who taught Catechism.\n\nRosalie was not happy, and talked to the other children about it, and three days later Mother Superior sent for her after school and told her to stop asking questions.\n\n“You must understand, my child, that the others don't know any better. They are Chinese.'\n\nThe devastating atmosphere of her childhood years made Han Suyin write a bitter paragraph in Chapter 11 (The End and the Beginning), taken from volume five, Phoenix Harvest. In this episode, she describes the family's difficult life in pre-revolutionary China:\n\nTheir [Han Suyin's parents'] decades together were of sorrow and pain and insecurity, of war and running away and making do; and seeing their children despised for being Eurasians. Only I had the courage (or the foolishness) to scream against the general contempt for Eurasians, \"But we are the future.\"\n\nIn her early teens, Han Suyin had the courage to think of a sky-high virtually impossible dream for a female Eurasian in pre-revolutionary China, namely of becoming a medical doctor. In order to at least partially finance these very costly studies, she first had to learn typing and shorthand writing, and then got a secretarial job with P.U.M.C. (Peking Union Medical College). At P.U.M.C., this child of barely fourteen was immediately confronted with inequality in payment for equal accomplishment, depending on the employee's racial status, white, Eurasian in various different proportions, or simply Chinese. In Chapter", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214976, "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-2000", "page_number": 72, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "28\n\nFive of volume two, A Mortal Flower, she remarks:\n\nI was making fifteen dollars a month more than he [the Chinese male secretary] did. I had crossed the “Chinese\" line, I was on my way towards \"Eurasian\" pay, though a great deal below European pay. I never would attain the latter, unless I married a European, perhaps.\n\nThe subtle well-ordered differences in status and in pay even among Eurasians, where it depended upon being more, or less, Chinese, I learnt about during the two years I was a secretary at the P.U.M.C. But I had no sense of personal injustice because I was not there to stay, I was there to earn money while preparing myself for the University. I did not fight for wages, I merely found two extra jobs to do in my spare time, to increase my study fund quickly.\n\nPreparation for the University meant a lot of self-educational effort also, which in the simplest way could be attained by the passionate devouring of books. One of them was entitled Races of the World and included the following 'pre-medical knowledge' for the covetous young student (the same Chapter Five from A Mortal Flower):\n\nThere are four races in the world; white, yellow, red and black... the white race is distinguished by the characteristic that its BRAIN WEIGHT is the highest; the brain of the average white man weighs one thousand six hundred grammes, that of the yellow man one thousand four hundred, the red man's brain weighs one thousand three hundred and forty and the black man's round about one thousand two hundred...\n\nFurther, Han Suyin continues:\n\nThis account was illustrated by pictures, front and profile of skulls; with captions calling attention to “width of brow.” There were a few lines on mixtures. “Racial mixtures are prone to mental unbalance, hysteria, alcoholism, generally of weak character and untrustworthy...\n\n\"Oh God,\" I prayed, \"don't let me go mad, don't let my brain go, I want to study.”\n\n17\n\nThroughout her life, Han Suyin was to incessantly be confronted with racism, to a considerable degree the derivative of colonialism and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214977, "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-2000", "page_number": 73, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "29\n\nnot only by the white races but the coloured ones as well. Being by birth Eurasian, she made an only too easy and vulnerable target from both sides. In volume three of her epic autobiographical/historical cycle, Birdless Summer, explicit and abundant evidence is provided of almost unsurpassable difficulties in her first marriage to a Chinese aristocrat, chauvinist and Chiang Kai Shek general, due to her half-European roots. Let us quote just a short and very mild passage from Chapter Four, introducing us to this serious and later on gradually growing problem:\n\nIt was on this journey that Pao's [the Chinese husband's] friends began to tease him about me. When we stopped at night they would comment about my looks... \"There is foreign blood in her, one can see that...\"\n\n“Not at all, she is pure Chinese,\" retorted Pao. As if it was not written on my face that I was a Eurasian!\n\nThe greatest resonance of Han Suyin's artistic prose, echoed in the field of film-making also, was attained by a tragic love story, entitled A Many-Splendoured Thing (later made into the motion picture Love is a Many Splendored Thing by Twentieth Century Fox with Jennifer Jones and William Holden in the leading roles). It describes a great love affair between the author (then a medical doctor in Hong Kong) and Ian Morrison, a foreign correspondent of the London Times. This sublime love affair, perhaps the greatest in the whole of Han Suyin's life, lasted several months only and was tragically ended by Ian's front-line death in Korea, when reporting on the Korean war. The love affair was also a scandal in Hong Kong society of the early fifties, when interracial amorous ties were still considered improper and an attempt on the divine social order. Where they occurred, they were rationalised as the virtuous white man, assiduously corrupted by a sly coloured female of loose conduct.\n\nHan Suyin can indisputably be regarded as a reliable eye-witness and a true expert in the most subtle and often confounding issues arising from colonialism. Her painfully sober judgement is highly impressive. I myself very frequently return to fragments of Chapter Ten from The Crippled Tree, very eloquent about the colonial powers' cunning attempts to win ‘native' hearts and minds. Here is one fragment:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214978, "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-2000", "page_number": 74, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "30\n\nAfter the First World War and the return to China of the Powers, a movement to finance a new westernized Chinese élite began among the Powers. Each country hoped that the Chinese educated by them would naturally favour their country of education; gratitude, ties of friendship, as well as cultural and emotional orientations, would see to that. This also Leopold, the astute King of the Belgians, had foreseen. He had spoken of it urging that young men be sent to Belgium for training. \"Ils seront des nôtres,\" they will be ours.\n\nAbout her own Western studies, she wrote the following equitable lines:\n\nI myself was, in 1935, a recipient of a scholarship derived from the Belgian Boxer indemnity fund; I went to study in Belgium, following in my father's footsteps. But it was, in the end, China's money which was being spent to educate me, it was the Chinese people paying the Boxer Indemnity of 1900 who paid for my years in Belgium. And so my gratitude must go to them, for making me in turn, as they made my father, a privileged person, a returned student from abroad. Later I was to study in England, on a British Council scholarship, and also be grateful to England. But this has not influenced me in the end. For truth is truth and it cannot be bought at any price.\n\nVigilant yet dispassionate, non-compromising yet lacking even the slightest urge for revenge, always eager to unveil painful truths about enslavement of one people by another, Han Suyin is a born defender of human dignity and human rights. In the pages of her autobiographical/historical cycle, multiple shrewd remarks about interference of indigenous Chinese and foreign powers' interests in Old China are a most natural and therefore a matter-of-factly element, masterly interwoven in a vast political and economic panorama of Chinese life in that pre-1949 epoch. After all, the so-called 'gunboat diplomacy' and also the other forms of political blackmail, extensively practised by the white powers to threaten feudal, backward and corrupt society in order to press even more lucrative concessions out of it, had directly affected Han Suyin's and her family clan's existence on an everyday basis. Surprisingly enough and in the circumstances incomparably more neutral (or even favourable) for her, Han Suyin wrote a stunning and remarkable book - And the Rain My Drink - devoted entirely to the declining post-World War II period of the British", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214979, "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-2000", "page_number": 75, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "31\n\nrule over Malaya (known as the Emergency) and unmasking multiple pointless atrocities of the decaying colonial system.\n\nAnd the Rain My Drink, the novel considered the most exhaustive and also the most accurate picture of this particular period of time ever written, was first published in 1957 and it summarizes Han Suyin's experience of Emergency, accumulated during her several years' stay in Johore Bahru, British Malaya, in the double role of wife of Leonard Comber, her English second husband, at that time Assistant Superintendent in the Special Branch (i.e., in the British colonial police), and a doctor running a private medical practice:\n\nThe Emergency. We lived and breathed it; it penetrated our pores, we chewed it with every mouthful of food. Its formless pervasive threat held gaunt shape in my unquiet mind (from Chapter Three of My House Has Two Doors).\n\nAt that time everyone except for the British already seemed to realise that there was absolutely no future for the colonial system either in that region, or in the rest of the world.\n\nThe book describes the great thirst for independence of the two peoples side by side inhabiting Malaya, namely the Muslim Malays and the Chinese national minority, and it emphasises the significant contribution of the Chinese jungle guerillas to liberation of Malaya from white rule:\n\nIt was the Japanese conquest of Malaya in 1942 which spurred national independence. The white man's myth of invincibility was shattered by the Japanese victories (from Chapter Three of My House Has Two Doors).\n\nHan Suyin gives an abundant and informative record on ruthlessness of the British Special Branch in handling the evading situation, on their failed attempts to suppress the upheaval, on numerous penal re-settlings of whole villages of Chinese rubber-tappers from the regions neighbouring with the jungle taken over by the guerillas to the true concentration camps, additionally located in unhealthy marshlands far away from the rubber-tree plantations, and on imprisonments, torturing and blackmailing both active participants to the liberation\n\nPage 75\n\nPage 76", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214980, "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-2000", "page_number": 76, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "32\n\nmovement, and the innocent uninvolved citizens as well. In a memoir-like fragment somewhat randomly chosen from the volume My House Has Two Doors, we read:\n\nAnd so the Emergency began. It would justify the suspending of all rights, giving the police (Special Branch) total power to arrest, search, detain anyone without trial and indefinitely, to disband all trade unions, arrest trade unionists, ban demonstrations, mete out the death sentence for 'possession of dangerous weapons,' which included school penknives, to apply censorship in all its forms, to impose curfews, to shoot suspects on sight.\n\nThere are a vast number of Han Suyin's excellent essays also, which had originally been published basically in the magazines of South East Asia (e.g., in the Hong Kong journal Eastern Horizon) and tackle various different sociopolitical problems of former colonies, generated just in the course of their colonial past. Luckily enough, a good deal of these largely dispersed essays were saved from oblivion by a rather recent re-editing them in a book entitled Tigers and Butterflies - Selected Writings on Politics, Culture and Society (London, 1990). The very titles of some of these essays are eloquent enough to remind us of Han Suyin's steady interests and passions: Social Changes in Asia (1960), The Aborigines (1961), Relations between East and West (1963), The Rich vs the Poor (1964), or The Troubles Miscalled Racial (1965).\n\nThe entirety of Han Suyin's literary achievements - and especially those parts which tackle predominantly colonial threads - have still to be sufficiently investigated and discussed. One reason for this situation seems to be the vagueness of average Western opinion in the matter of colonialism as sociopathology of the world's not so very distant past. In this particular context, Han Suyin's profound analyses followed by very moderate conclusions ought to be studied very attentively indeed, whereas her remarkably open, yet self-restrained and balanced attitude can only be gratefully acknowledged, admired and revered.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215195, "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-2000", "page_number": 291, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "SOME THOUGHTS ON HAN SUYIN'S A MANY SPLENDORED THING\n\n'Love is a Many Splendored Thing'\n\nPETER HALLIDAY\n\n255\n\nAs I have said before, I believe, generally, that editors should edit, rather than write, but I should like to share the following with you all.\n\nA few weeks, or so, after I arrived in Hong Kong in the fall of 1967, I was taken to the movies by what had now become a new friend. The motion picture we saw that Saturday afternoon - I remember the circumstances with undiminished clarity - was Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, starring William Holden (born William Franklin Beedle Jr., 17 April 1918 - 16 November 1981) and Jennifer Jones (born Phyllis Flora Isley, 2 March 1919). For a reason that is not central to this Note, the movie made a very deep impression upon me and I have to confess that, as we filed out of the movie theatre, I wept unashamedly.\n\nIn 1972, or thereabouts, I was contentedly idling away an hour or so, browsing in the old YMCA bookshop in Salisbury Road - to this day still a particular pleasure (browsing, that is) - when I came across a book entitled A Many-Splendoured Thing by Han Suyin (born Elizabeth Kuanghu Chou, 12 September 1917). Memories of the old motion picture came flooding back. Could this be the book behind the film or vice versa, I wondered?\n\nHan Suyin, circa 1950", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215196, "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-2000", "page_number": 292, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "256\n\nTHING\n\nT\n\nNeedless to say, I bought the book (for $8.40!) but for many years until quite recently in fact - could not bring myself to read it properly. This I have now done and have discovered that it is not a book to be trifled with. It should be read slowly and carefully, and savoured, if one is truly to understand and enjoy it. It is, as the Daily Express described it at the time, 'a true story of piercing beauty' and as Ed Murrow said of Winston Churchill, Suyin 'mobilised the English language, and sent it into battle.'\n\nThe book\n\nTrue story? I didn't know that, either, until very recently and this explains how, and why, I came to write this Note. In April 2001 Council Member Jason Wordie wrote a piece about our immediate Past-President Dan Waters in The South China Morning Post. Dan shared with us the fact that he lives in Realty Gardens, Conduit Road, which was the former site of the Foreign Correspondents Club. Dan also noted that behind his apartment block is the pavilion where Han Suyin and Ian Morrison, a correspondent for The Times, used to meet before he was killed during the Korean War.\n\nIan Morrison, circa 1943\n\nHurried e-mail to Dan. Was this the basis for A Many-Splendoured Thing? Yes. But Suyin's lover was called Mark Elliot, both in the book and the motion picture? Yes, but obviously dramatic licence was involved. But Ian Morrison was British and Mark, in the motion picture, was American? Well, maybe William Holden, consummate actor though he was, would have had trouble imitating a British accent. Can I have a look at the pavilion? Sure, come for lunch next Sunday. So I did.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215197, "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-2000", "page_number": 293, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "257\n\nHan Suyin was the daughter of a Belgian (Dutch/Flemish) mother, Marguerite Denis, and a Chinese father, Chou Yen Tung, (a railway engineer) and one of eight children. She was born in Sinyang, Henan Province. Her parents met whilst her father was studying at university in Belgium. In 1932, she started work as a typist at the Peking Union Medical College to earn money to study. She entered Yenching University in 1933. She transferred to the University of Brussels in 1935 but abandoned her studies in 1938 and returned to China after the Japanese invasion. The same year, she married a Kuomintang officer, Tang Pao Huang, who rose to the rank of general before he was killed during the Civil War in 1947. Tang served for a period as a military attaché in London during World War Two. Before his death, they adopted a daughter, Mei.\n\nHan Suyin, aged three (second from left) with her father behind her\n\nIn 1944, she entered the School of Medicine, University of London and in 1948 graduated M.B., B.S. (Hons.). She took an appointment as a paediatrician at Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong, in 1949. After Mr. Morrison's death in August 1950, she continued working in Hong Kong and married Leonard (Leon) F. Comber, an English publisher, on 1 February 1952, in Hong Kong. She spent the next 10 years in Johore Bahru, Malaysia, working at an anti-tuberculosis clinic. Mr. Comber was a Special Branch officer (assistant superintendent) in Malaya between 1948 and 1960. It was in Malaysia, also, that she met her current husband, an Indian Army colonel Vincent Rathnaswamy. There is a confusing report that she practiced medicine in China until about 1961.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215198, "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-2000", "page_number": 294, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "258\n\nFrom 1964, she has been a full-time writer of autobiography/history, fiction, and sociopolitical essays/written testimonies. She once said: 'I write as an Asian, with all the pent-up emotions of my people. What I say will annoy many people who prefer the more conventional myths brought back by writers on the Orient. All I can say is that I try to tell the truth. Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.' She was acquainted with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. She presently lives with Vincent in Lausanne, Switzerland and is also known as Elizabeth C.K. Comber.\n\nHan Suyin and her husband with Zhou Enlai, 19708\n\nJan Morrison was born in May 1913 and was the son of the well-known Australian doctor and journalist (first Peking correspondent for The Times of London, 1897-1912) George Ernest Morrison (1862-1920). He was schooled at Winchester, England and was a graduate of the University of Cambridge. After going down from Cambridge, he became Professor of English at the Imperial University of Hokkaido, Sapporo.\n\nHe visited China in 1937, for the first time, to 'watch the Japanese occupation of Tientsin and the invasion of north China.' Later that year he became private secretary to the newly appointed British Ambassador to Japan, in Kyoto. In 1939, he went to Shanghai and became the representative in China of The British and Chinese Corporation, a London financial house. He traveled extensively throughout China for the next two years.\n\nHe arrived in Singapore in October 1941 and became deputy director of the Far Eastern Bureau of the (U.K.) Ministry of Information.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215199, "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-2000", "page_number": 295, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "259\n\nAfter the Japanese invasion of Malaya on December 8, 1941 he accepted an invitation by The Times to become its war correspondent. His wife, Maria, and other expatriates were evacuated to Batavia (Jakarta) in January 1942. Mr. Morrison covered the Malayan campaign through to the surrender of Singapore on February 15, 1942, leaving the city for Batavia on February 10, where he rejoined his wife. He was in Melbourne by May of 1942, and appears to have spent the rest of the war in Australia as a war correspondent, although there is some evidence that he was in New Guinea for a period.\n\nAfter the war he and his wife returned to Singapore where he continued as a correspondent for The Times. He met Han Suyin in Hong Kong in June 1949. He went to Korea in July, 1950 to cover the Korean War and was killed on August 12, near Taegu, when the jeep in which he was travelling was blown up by a land mine. He had a brother, Alastair, in the Diplomatic Service and another brother, Colin, in the colonial service in Hong Kong.\n\nCloud service in\n\nAnd now I've seen the pavilion where Ian and Suyin sat together under the stars, and the tree, and the steps that Mark ran down (in the motion picture) after saying his final goodbye to Suyin, on his way to the airport (the book is much less romantic — they say goodbye on the street and Mark boards a 'bus for the airport). What an incredibly poignant experience!\n\nPavilion behind Realty Gardens\n\nI made my visit to the pavilion with my two young children (my wife was otherwise engaged) and understand, perhaps for the first time, that passage in Han Suyin's book where she quotes Mark as saying that life's greatest tragedy is not to be loved, which he promptly amends to not to love.\n\nAnd then, of course, there is the passage central to the book's theme and from which the title is taken:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215200, "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-2000", "page_number": 296, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "260\n\nThe angels keep their ancient places:-\n\nTurn but a stone and start a wing!\n\n'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,\n\nThat miss the many-splendoured thing. (Francis Thompson, O world intangible)\n\nAt the risk of being presumptuous, I do hope that the Journal's many and valued readers have not, themselves, missed the many-splendoured thing. It takes some working at but, by goodness, it's worth it!\n\nI have now read several of Han Suyin's books and learned a great deal more about her. Accordingly, I offer this short Note as a tribute to her life and achievements.\n\nOpposite is a recent photograph of Han Suyin and her husband, Vincent, which seems an appropriate postscript.\n\nHan Suyin and Vincent Ruthnaswamy, October 2000\n\nREFERENCES\n\nHan, Suyin. (1952). A Many-Splendoured Thing, London: Jonathan Cape\n\nHan, Suyin (1994). Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, 1898-1976, London: Jonathan Cape.\n\nIllustrated London News, The. 19 August, 1950.\n\nMorrison, Ian. (1942). Malayan Postscript, London: Faber and Faber.\n\nMorrison, Ian. (1943). Malayan Postscript, Sydney: Angus and Robinson Ltd.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215234, "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": 11, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "## STYLE SHEET\n\n### TITLE (UPPER CASE, BOLD, CENTRED)\n\nAUTHOR (UPPERCASE, REGULAR)\n\n#### PART ONE, TWO etc (UPPER CASE, BOLD)\n\n##### **Main heading** (lower case, bold)\n\n###### _Sub-heading_ (lower case, italics)\n\nSub sub-heading (lower case, underlined, regular)\n\nText1 (lower case, regular)\n\n#### **Table title** (lower case, bold, centred)\n\n#### **Figure title** (lower case, bold, centred)\n\n### REFERENCES (UPPER CASE, BOLD)\n\nSamples\n\n* (Book)\n\nHayes, James (1996). Friends and teachers: Hong Kong and its people, 1953-1987. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press\n\n* (Chapter in a book)\n\nPearson, Veronica, and Yu, Rose Y.M. (1995). Business and pleasure: Aspects of the commercial sex industry, in Pearson, Veronica, and Leung, Benjamin, K.P. (Eds.), Women in Hong Kong, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press (China) Ltd\n\n* (Article in a journal)\n\nWaters, Dan (2000). Laughter across the Great Wall: A comparison of Chinese and Western humour, The Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 38:1-50\n\n### NOTES (UPPER CASE, BOLD)\n\nA word on punctuation\n\nPunctuation is not an exact science and styles vary. The Journal's style for quotation marks, however, is: direct verbal or written quotes single quotation marks; and anything else in quotes - double quotation marks. Please ensure that quotation marks \"wrap around\" commas and full stops, e.g. 'Life's greatest tragedy,' wrote Han Suyin in *A Many Splendoured Thing*, 'is not to love.'\n\n1. Endnotes only (regular)\n\nviii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215236, "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": 13, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "Elizabeth Teather - Deathspace in Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Seoul: A Review of Recent Research, 1995-2001 .... \n\nChiu Hang Shi - Unicon Dancing in Pat Heung \n\n329 \n\n341 \n\nKeith Stevens - A Contentious Christian Missionary in Central China, 1887 \n\n353 \n\nKirsty Norman - Friends of the HKBRAS Trip to Cornwall....... 357 \n\nDavid Akers-Jones - Tea and Opium: Some Further Notes on Macartney's Role \n\n367 \n\nJennifer Welch - Coincidence? \n\n... 373 \n\nDan Waters - Another Donation to the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society \n\n375 \n\nRichard Garrett - Taipa Fort and a Nineteenth Century Cannon 379 \n\nPeter Halliday - More Thoughts on Han Suyin's A Many Splendoured Thing: A Tribute to Ian Morrison...... \n\n391 \n\nRosemary Lee and A.C. Bromfield - The Life and Times of Captain Samuel Cornel Plant \n\n407 \n\nAnon. - More on the Two Obelisks at Tai Tam \n\n417 \n\nBOOK REVIEWS \n\nDan Waters - Long Night's Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941-1945 \n\n419 \n\nJames Hayes - Heaven is High, the Emperor Far Away:Merchants and Mandarins in Old Canton \n\n423 \n\nPatrick Hase - Hong Kong Metamorphosis \n\n427 \n\nPeter Halliday - Searching for Frederick and Adventures Along the \n\nWay. \n\n430 \n\nX", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215662, "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": 439, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "YET MORE THOUGHTS ON HAN SUYIN'S \n\nA MANY SPLENDOURED THING: \n\nA TRIBUTE TO IAN MORRISON \n\nPETER HALLIDAY \n\n[From the author: This Note is a sequel to that which appeared in Vol. 40, pp. 255-266. It now appears that there is a significant error in the earlier Note. My original research indicated that Mr. Morrison and Ms. Han used to meet at a pavilion behind the former site of the Foreign Correspondents' Club at 41A, Conduit Road. This does not now appear to be the case, one reason being that the FCC did not move to this location until 1951, a year after Mr. Morrison's death. Their favourite meeting place appears to have been as in the book; at 'Lovers Lane' (Conduit Path), behind Queen Mary Hospital. The confusion seems to have arisen from the fact that parts of the motion picture Love is a Many Splendored Thing were filmed at the FCC and on the steps leading up to the pavilion.\n\nOther corrigenda are as follows:\n\nMs. Han's first husband was \n\nTang Pao Huang \n\nMs. Han was principally employed in the Casualty Department of Queen Mary Hospital and was not a paediatrician \n\nMs. Han met Mr. Ruthnaswamy \n\nin Nepal in 1956 \n\n391 \n\nOld Foreign Correspondents' Club, 41, Conduit Road1 \n\n(1)瑪麗醫院 \n\nQueen Mary Hospital \n\nLovers Lane", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215667, "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": 444, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "396\n\nheal up, but hope to resume filing about Thursday. Another bullet grazed side without doing any damage,\n\nAfter the Second World War he spent some months in India reporting the growing agitation for independence and spent six months travelling in China in 1948, reporting the progress of the Chinese civil war for The Times. In between specific assignments he was stationed in Singapore, where he lived with his Czech wife, Maria, and their two children.\n\nOn Thursday, 29 June 1950, a few days after the outbreak of the war in Korea, Mr. Morrison was telegraphed by The Times and asked if he would be willing to cover the war for the paper. He never hesitated. He flew to Hong Kong on Sunday 2 July and spent the night with Han Suyin. The following day he bade farewell to Han Suyin and flew to Tokyo, and thence to Korea. Han Suyin never saw him again. His first report was published in the paper on July 10. On Saturday, August 12 he was killed, along with Colonel M. K. Unni Nayar, and Christopher Buckley.\n\nCABLE & WIRELESS LTD\n\nIan Morrison's cable to The Times agreeing to go to Korea\n\nHan Suyin, circa 1952", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215671, "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": 448, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "400\n\nIn researching the original Note, I came to a profound admiration for Ian Morrison. His newspaper reporting was erudite and he demonstrated a perceptive understanding of the issues involved. His two books; Malayan Postscript (1942) and This War Against Japan (1943) were equally perceptive. By all accounts the picture that Han Suyin painted of him in A Many Splendoured Thing; as being a gentle, kind and understanding man, is borne out by the facts. Alastair describes him as ...a cultivated and gentle man and no swashbuckler but (he) had an insatiable curiosity about events in Asia.' Accordingly, I offer this tribute to his memory. R.I.P.\n\nREFERENCES\n\nMorrison, Alastair (1993), The Road to Peking, Canberra: The Highland Press (for private distribution).\n\nPearl, Cyril (1967). Morrison of Peking, Sydney: Angus & Robertson Ltd.\n\nNOTES\n\nhttp://www.fechk.org/archives/achives historyconduit.htm\n\n2 See JHKBRAS Vol. 40: The Battle of Hong Kong: A Note on the Literature and\n\n3\n\nthe Effectiveness of the Defence, Lawrence Lai Wai Chung, pp. 115-136.\n\nSource: Alastair Morrison, personal communication and The Road to Peking, p. 151\n\nAll images, unless otherwise stated, courtesy of The Times of London.\n\nIan and Maria met in Shanghai and were married, in Hong Kong, in 1941. Maria was Steffi's sister (Colin's subsequent wife) Their first home was at the Cathay Building, in Singapore. After the War, they returned to Singapore and lived in Gallop Road. According to Alastair, the marriage was not a happy one (The Road to Peking, p. 151). After her husband's death, Mrs. Morrison and the children (who were seven and five at the time of his death) appear to have stayed on in Singapore, at any rate for a while, and then moved to Australia. According to Alastair Morrison, Maria 'died long ago.' The son, Nicholas (?), lives in the U.K. and visited Alastair in Canberra on his eighty seventh birthday", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215722, "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": 21, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "NOTES\n\nA word on punctuation\n\nPunctuation is not an exact science and styles vary. The Journal's style for quotation marks, however, is: direct verbal or written quotes - single quotation marks; and anything else in quotes - double quotation marks. Please ensure that quotation marks \"wrap around\" commas and full stops, e.g. 'Life's greatest tragedy,' wrote Han Suyin in A Many Splendoured Thing, 'is not to love.'\n\n'Endnotes only (regular)\n\nxii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215725, "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": 24, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "Peter Stuckey and Chris Bailey - Visiting St. John's Island\n\nDan Waters - Projects and enquiries ........\n\n435\n\n449\n\nDan Waters - Yet more thoughts on Han Suyin's A Many Splendoured Thing: Conduit Road and its environs\n\n453\n\nJohn Wilson - A poem from the HKBRAS visit to East Bhutan, February 2003......\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\n459\n\nPeter Halliday - Voices from the past: Hong Kong, 1842-1918 (Solomon Bard)\n\n467\n\nPeter Halliday - The development of education in Hong Kong, 1841-1897 (Gillian Bickley)\n\n468\n\nPatrick Hase - The fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation (Philip Snow)\n\n472\n\nJames Hayes - From rice to riches: A personal journey through a changing China (Jane Hutcheon)....\n\n474\n\nXV", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216100, "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": 399, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "333\n\nSuyin's autobiographical novel, A Many Splendoured Thing, was partly shot there in the mid-1950s. In real life the boyfriend, a war correspondent killed in Korea, was British. In the film he miraculously became an American.\n\nI frequently walked past the FCC on Saturday nights when riotous parties were in full swing. The old number 41, \"Fairview,\" was the first private residence in the territory to have a lift. This came right up from road level. The house depended on water from a watercourse, on Po Shan Road, for flushing toilets. There is an artist's embellished painting of the old \"Fairview\" in the Hong Kong Museum of Art's collection at Tsim Sha Tsui.\n\nRemaining from the days when it was occupied by a private family, the master bedroom had four bell-pulls. These were connected to the bedrooms of his four concubines. In fact, during his lifetime he was said to have had eight (some say nine) concubines. This was by no means unusual. When a rich Hong Kong man went to the United States in the 1930s, a headline in a newspaper read, 'Here comes the man with 20 wives!'\n\nA Chinese could legally take a concubine up until October 1971, just as up until the 1960s most weddings were customary Chinese marriages. Some concubines taken before October 1971 remain legal secondary wives to this day. There was, of course, a customary ceremony for concubines too and they had their place in the hierarchy of the family. I did know families however where, when the principal wife found out the old man had “another woman,” she was brought in to live with the family. There, the principal wife could keep an eye on her. She was not infrequently made by the first wife to live and eat with the servants. Later, if the first wife died, the concubine, who was usually quite a bit younger, sometimes took her place as a “fill the room” (t' in fong) as a succeeding main wife is known.\n\nAnother important event, in October 1971, was the legislation that came into force making it compulsory for everyone to have at least one day's holiday a week. Up until then, certainly in the 1950s, there would be no problem with crowds on beaches. But no, it was not all work and no play and I swam in the Cross-harbour Race in 1955 and took part in the 42 mile 'Round the Island Walkathon' the following year.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216144, "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": 443, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "377\n\nADVENTURES IN PUBLISHING:\n\nHOW THE CRIPPLED TREE BECAME KALEKIE\n\nDRZEWO\n\nPETER HALLIDAY\n\nA few weeks after I took up residence in Hong Kong in the autumn of 1967, I was taken to the cinema by what had now become a new friend. The film we saw that Saturday afternoon - I remember the circumstances with undiminished clarity - was Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, starring William Holden and Jennifer Jones. The film made a very deep impression upon me and I have to confess that, as we filed out of the cinema, I wept unashamedly.\n\nIn 1972, or thereabouts, I was contentedly idling away an hour or so, browsing in a bookshop - to this day still a particular pleasure - when I came across a book entitled A Many-Splendoured Thing by Han Suyin. Memories of Love is a Many Splendored Thing came flooding back. Could this be the book behind the film or vice versa, I wondered?\n\nI bought the book but for many years - until quite recently in fact - could not bring myself to read it properly. This I have now done and have discovered that it is not a book to be trifled with. It should be read slowly and carefully, and savoured, if one is truly to understand and enjoy it. It is, as the Daily Express described it at the time, ‘a true story of piercing beauty.' As Ed Murrow said of Winston Churchill, Suyin 'mobilised the English language, and sent it into battle.'\n\nAlthough the Daily Express described Suyin's book as a true story, for some reason I had always assumed that it was a novel. Last year, however, through various circumstances, I discovered that this was the literal truth (I would have discovered it much earlier had I read My House Has Two Doors, also by Han Suyin, but unfortunately I did not read this until very recently). A Many Splendoured Thing tells the true story of a love affair between Suyin and Ian Morrison, a correspondent for The Times of London. They met in June 1949, in Hong Kong. Tragically, Ian was killed in Korea on 12 August 1950, when the jeep in which he was travelling was blown up by a landmine.\n\nA tribute to Ian Morrison appeared in Vol. 41 of JHKBRAS.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216145, "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": 444, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "378\n\nI was spellbound by this revelation and decided to write an article on the subject for The Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, a Hong Kong publication of which I am the Hon. Editor. This appeared in 2001.2\n\nIn researching this article I had a look around the WWW and came across a webpage dedicated to Suyin hosted by the University of Minnesota and maintained by Professor Teresa Kowalska of the Silesian University, Katowice. Without any real hope of getting a response, I e-mailed Teresa and she promptly replied. This started an exchange of e-mails, which continues to this day, initially about Han Suyin, but latterly about every subject imaginable. We have become friends.\n\nTeresa has been an ardent admirer of Han Suyin for many years and has met her four times now. She has written a number of articles about her and in 2002 told me of her magnum opus; a Polish translation of Suyin's The Crippled Tree. However, she was having great difficulty in finding a Polish publisher and the cost seemed likely to be prohibitive.\n\nBy this stage I had also developed an admiration for Suyin. None of her books had ever been published in Polish and it seemed important to rectify this state of affairs by making the power and poignancy of her writing available to the Polish reading public. What follows is an account of a collaboration between a Polish professor of chemistry and a then Hong Kong assistant commissioner of police (who, incidentally, headed the information technology department at the time) to publish Kalekie drzewo!\n\nI spoke to the HKBRAS publisher in Hong Kong (Pally Printing Co.) and he agreed upon a very favourable fee. Both he and I, however, were considerably worried about our ability to produce a book in Polish, of which we speak not one word. Taking the plunge, however, I asked Teresa to e-mail me the manuscript. This I handed to our publisher and asked him to produce the first proofs in hard copy. I forget the details but it seems that we got the typesetting all wrong for the Polish language and when Teresa saw the proofs she understandably went into paroxysms of despair at what we had done to her epic work. Henry Law (our\n\n'Vol. 40.\n\nSuyin and husband Vincent live, in retirement, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vincent died in December 2002. R.L.P.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216146, "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": 445, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "379\n\npublisher) and I persevered, however, and Teresa was mightily impressed with our second effort. Apparently we had reproduced the manuscript exactly, including all the Polish diacritics.\n\nNow came the editing. Teresa hand-edited her hard copy and sent it to me. I was agreeably pleased to find that Microsoft Word contains all the Polish diacritics and edited the soft copy of the proof on my office computer. I leave to the reader's imagination the thought of a Hong Kong police officer, sitting in his office, editing a 500-page book, written in Polish. Finding the places in the book which needed correcting was, frankly, a labour of love but pride in finishing won through. I e-mailed the final version to Teresa who was highly impressed with my new-found Polish language skills!\n\nSo much for the text. There then followed an e-discussion on a dust-jacket for the book. I was keen on this, as it would give the book some colour. The Crippled Tree is an autobiographical work about Han Suyin's childhood in China. This led our thinking to the idea that the illustration on the dust-jacket should be of a tree, or forest, or some such. It was ultimately Teresa who came up with the brainwave that the illustration should be drawn by a child.\n\nAnd so it was. I sat my seven-year-old son, Alexander, down one evening at home with paper and coloured pencils and asked him if he would contribute to literary history (!) by drawing a tree. This, obviously, went through several iterations before we were both satisfied with it but Alexander is rightly proud of the fact that his artwork now graces the shelves of bookshops and institutions in Poland! His name also appears on the credits page.\n\nKalekie drzevo\n\nHan Suun\n\nFirst proof of the dust jacket for Kalekie drzewo. There is a deliberate mistake!", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216147, "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": 446, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "380\n\nFinally, there was a synopsis of the book and of Han Suyin to write and the whole thing then went off for printing. This was a nail-biting period because I know, from personal experience, that even perfect texts can somehow get mangled during the printing process. However, Henry duly produced \"Job 1,\" which I, in turn, mailed off to Teresa. All was quiet for several days until an e-mail arrived from Teresa saying that the book was perfect! There were celebrations in both Katowice and Hong Kong that day.\n\nAnother 999 copies were produced and sent to Teresa by ship and have now been distributed or sold widely. Almost unbelievably, the book was in the Polish bestseller list for a while towards the end of 2002.\n\nThis venture, on the part of HKBRAS, coincided with a decision by Council to put HKBRAS more on the world map, a process which continues. As a member of Council subsequently remarked: 'And, of course, Poland was the obvious place to start!'\n\nI have had a profoundly fulfilling life but my life goals never, obviously enough, included publishing a book for a Polish professor of chemistry. What an amazing world it is!\n\nBy way of a postscript, Teresa and the author finally met, face-to-face, on 14 November 2002, in Katowice.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216220, "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": 519, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "453\n\nYET MORE THOUGHTS ON HAN SUYIN'S A MANY SPLENDOURED THING: CONDUIT ROAD AND ITS ENVIRONS\n\nDAN WATERS\n\nIn Volume 40, (2000), of the HKBRAS Journal, there were two fine articles. One was entitled Tea, Ivory and Ebony; Tracing Colonial Threads in the Inseparable Life and Literature of Han Suyin, and the second was Some Thoughts on Han Suyin's A Many Splendoured Thing. These were contributed by Teresa Kowalska and Peter Halliday respectively. I will continue from there and include also a little more history about the interesting district around Conduit Road.\n\nAs we read in the above articles, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, starring Jennifer Jones and William Holden, was partly shot at 41 Conduit Road in the 1950s. This film was based on Han Suyin's autobiography, A Many Splendoured Thing, where Han's lover, a British correspondent, was killed in the Korean War. In the film, in addition to the slight change of title, the hero miraculously became an American. The Chinese-style pavilion out at the back, over towards Po Shan Road, which was used in the film, still stands today. A bit further away is a watercourse, which seldom dries up even during a drought. Water was piped from there for flushing toilets, at the old mansion at No. 41, right up until it was demolished in the 1960s. There was water rationing in those days.\n\nConduit Road itself really came into being as a result of Hong Kong's first water supply scheme, which resulted from the construction of Pok Fu Lam Reservoir. Water began to flow in 1864. Before then, the entire Island depended on wells and streams. Later, a water main was laid around the southwest slopes of Mid-Levels and a road was constructed at the turn of the century, which became known as Conduit Road. The well-to-do in the Colony liked the location and some built their dwellings there.\n\nA Chinese gentleman, Mr. Mok Kon Sang, in 1911 built a palatial residence at 41 Conduit Road where Realty Gardens stands today. Mr. Mok was a comprador for Butterfield and Swire (in 1974 the name was changed to plain Swire). In keeping with rich Chinese of his times, he", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216221, "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": 520, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "454\n\nhad eight (some say nine) concubines. In 1928, the house was passed on to his son, Mr. Mok Hing Shung.\n\nUp until the 1950s and 1960s, there were several palatial mansions standing in their own grounds in the Mid-Levels. Some had tennis courts. One splendid example was Marble Hall, at 1 Conduit Road where Chater Hall now stands. Marble Hall was built by Sir Paul Catchick Chater, a wealthy Armenian merchant and philanthropist. It was said in his days: \"What Chater does today Jardine does tomorrow.\" The general design of Marble Hall was similar in many respects to the old mansion at 41 Conduit Road. In addition to the photographs hanging in the entrance lobbies of the five blocks at Realty Gardens today, there is an artist's embellished impression of No. 41 in the Hong Kong Museum of Art at Tsim Sha Tsui.1\n\nFrom 1951 to 1961 the Foreign Correspondents' Club (FCC), a period some members describe as its heyday, was ensconced in the splendid building at No. 41. One could drive to the Club then and either drive up the slope or, alternatively, there was space for about three cars to park at the Conduit Road level. One could then take the lift (the first installed in a private dwelling in Hong Kong) up to the main entrance. There were nine bedrooms on the upper floor and the fireplaces were of Italian marble. The whole house had a wonderful ambience. With a little stretch of the imagination one can almost picture Han Suyin sitting under a cupola on the roof partaking of afternoon tea. The FCC was offered the lovely old building for a mere HK$250,000 in the 1950s, but the political situation was considered too precarious at the time to contemplate purchase.\n\nI first came to live in Conduit Road in March 1955, at the previous (then newly completed) block at No. 56. I frequently walked past the old Foreign Correspondents' Club, sometimes when boisterous parties were in full swing. On Saturday nights it was considered the place to be. The FCC had its own band but it also hired bands from the armed forces. Private parties were common there as well as diplomatic corps and airline lunches.\n\nBut, in spite of the noise emanating at times from No. 41, Conduit Road was generally quiet and peaceful. At the western end especially it was almost like a country road, with trees and undergrowth, and one", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216224, "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": 523, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "457\n\nRoad. That is the supermarket and estate agency at No. 44. Now, many of the buildings flanking Conduit Road top 30 or 40 storeys blocking their neighbour's view. Certainly today barking deer can no longer be heard calling from Victoria Peak. But, proving the location is still peaceful, Realty Gardens does have its own flock of pigeons and it is not infrequently visited by a destructive, gregarious group of sulphur-crested cockatoos.\n\nNevertheless the pattern of nature does change. In the 1970s crested-mynah birds were common in the grounds at Realty Gardens. Nowadays, you seldom see them. Snakes are not uncommon. But much of the wild life on the slopes of the Peak itself is nocturnal and limited. However I did see dead ferret badgers and masked-palm civets, in the 1990s, which had been run over by vehicles. Although rare on the Peak, one can occasionally even see fresh-water crabs and blue-tailed skinks. The latter is Hong Kong's most attractive lizard.\n\nAlthough customs have changed one can still sometimes see and hear street criers in Conduit Road. They vary from the itinerant, tiny, wizened old sharpener of knives and scissors to the trader who buys odds and ends of scrap metal. There is also the old man who sells lengths of bamboo. These are used for hanging out the washing to dry when it is euphemistically called \"flags of all nations.\" In the mid-1950s, I remember there was a peddler with a pet monkey.\n\nCertainly if the present old, worn, steps, which are original, which Han Suyin and her boy friend once trod in the film shot at Realty Gardens, together with the original balustrades and the heavy, battered, gravity retaining walls which still exist today, could talk, they would have wonderful tales to tell.\n\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nThe author gratefully acknowledges the assistance given by Mrs. Betty Chiu, long-time resident of Realty Gardens, in the writing of this paper. The author is also grateful to Mr. David Roads, Honorary\n\n'The picture in the Hong Kong Museum of Art, of 41 Conduit Road, is a watercolour on paper titled, Fairview, Conduit Road 1926', by Alfred Lane, reference AH72.1. It was donated to the Museum of Art by Mr. Kwok On.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216254, "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": 13, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "Waters, Dan (2000). Laughter across the Great Wall: A comparison of Chinese and Western humour, The Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 38:1-50\n\nNOTES\n\nA WORD ON PUNCTUATION\n\nPunctuation is not an exact science and styles vary. The Journal's style for quotation marks, however, is: direct verbal or written quotes - single quotation marks; and anything else in quotes - double quotation marks. Please ensure that quotation marks “wrap around” commas and full stops, e.g. 'Life's greatest tragedy,' wrote Han Suyin in A Many Splendoured Thing, 'is not to love.'\n\n1 Endnotes only\n\nxili", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]