[ { "id": 205618, "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-1968", "page_number": 160, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "164\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nhusband's family were Hakkas from near Tam Shui and they had then been in Ngau Tau Kok for three generations.\n\nThese accounts are selected from others known to the writer, and are intended to illustrate a feature of old village life in the Hong Kong region at the end of the last century and, no doubt, for centuries before.\n\nBy way of a postscript it appears that travelling Hakka craftsmen were not only to be found in South China. Agnes Smedley's book The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1956) mentions regular visits from such persons at his home when he was young. He was born in a village near the market town of Ma An Chang in I Lung (四川) district in Szechuan in 1886. The following extracts are of interest:\n\nFrom time to time during the year, itinerant artisans left the big towns and cities and came along the Big Road, wandering from village to village to work for such families as needed their special skills. Carpenters, metalsmiths, mat weavers, cloth weavers and others, all were skilled artisans who owned and carried their own tools of trade... An old weaver, whom General Chu referred to simply as \"the Old Weaver\", came each winter to weave cloth from the cotton thread spun by the women of the Chu family. The coarse woven cloth was then dyed an indigo blue, hung on long bamboo poles to dry, after which the women cut and sewed it into garments for the family, into quilt coverings or other uses of the household... These itinerant artisans were a part of the peasant economy. Coming from the big towns or cities, they were much more advanced and independent than the peasants, to whom they brought new ideas. They were even folk historians and some of them could read and write. They lived in the homes where they worked, and each evening the family gathered about to listen to their talk... The Old Weaver who wove cloth for the Chu family each winter seems to have been a Hakka also. He was a grim old fellow with a scalding tongue who would set up his long narrow loom in the courtyard or, if it was too cold, in the kitchen, and begin his weaving... the old man's long brown hands worked as swift as light. He could weave twenty chih, some twenty to thirty feet of cloth, a day, for which", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207764, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1976", "page_number": 152, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "Tehgchuan \n\n甘肅 \n\nGANSU \n\nPaschi \n\nSHANSI \n\nSlau \n\n= \n\n成都 \n\nSZECHMAN \n\nCheng tu \n\nHUBEI \n\n重度 \n\n演练 \n\nChungKinE \n\nLushien \n\n贵州 \n\nKHEICHOW \n\nPichieh Kweiyang \n\nTali \n\nAnshun \n\nKutsing, \n\nTu yun \n\n下面 \n\n南庄 \n\nUstakuan \n\nPaoshan \n\n昆明 \n\nNactan \n\nKunming \n\n河池 \n\nHochih \n\nTUNNAN \n\n源涟 Yuinling, \n\n長沙 \n\nChangsha \n\n兴遠 Xingyuan \n\n○ 柳州 \n\nLiuchow \n\nKWANGSI \n\n湖南 \n\nHUNAN \n\nFig. 1. Map of China showing FAU Transport Main Routes \n\nA ROAD TRANSPORT SYSTEM IN WEST CHINA 1942-46 \n\n137", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207768, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1976", "page_number": 156, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "A ROAD TRANSPORT SYSTEM IN WEST CHINA 1942-46 141\n\nloading and unloading, a week-long trip and turn round with a 24 ton payload. Charcoal powered trucks would, on average, cover 100 km. per day with a payload of 2 tons. One experimental charcoal powered truck took 5 weeks to cover the 500 km. from Kutsing to Kweiyang but, as a contrast, on one occasion Chungking to Kweiyang (490 km.) was covered in 24 days with a full load on charcoal.\n\nIn addition to cargo, passengers were carried. This was done by all transport organizations since there was no public road transport. Passengers were of three varieties: official, ones who were on the manifest and had paid the organization; unofficial or huang yu (★★) who had paid the driver, and other drivers or mechanics whose truck had ‘pie mao'd' () and were going for spares etc.\n\nThe Unit endeavoured to carry 'variety one' passengers only. These might be missionaries travelling to or from station, officials of cooperating or friendly organizations such as IRC, CIC, NCC, YMCA and YWCA, and also refugees. In 1942 these included Professor Gordon King and numbers of H.K. University students (including the present Vice-Chancellor) travelling to continue their studies in Szechuan. Passengers, unless with a child or otherwise privileged, rode on top of the load. Plate 19 shows the two Sentinel-HSG trucks on route to Chungking with cargo and the entire staff of the IRC Kweiyang office aboard.\n\nThe normal procedure on main routes was to run trucks in convoys. This reduced the number of spares which had to be carried and ensured that help was available for extraction from ditches and repairing breakdowns. However, the speed of a convoy is that of the slowest member and optimum results for liquid fuel trucks were obtained with 2 or 3 in each convoy. With charcoal power, because of the variation in performance between trucks and the skill of drivers, single truck operation with a crew of two or three was eventually found best. For long range convoys, on liquid fuel, such as the 5,000 km. round trip to Suchow, there were a minimum of two men per truck.\n\nEquipment\n\nThe original transport equipment, purchased in USA, was 20 Chevrolet trucks with a normal load capacity of 3 short tons. These came equipped with steel cabs and had wooden bodies with hoop", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208023, "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-1977", "page_number": 62, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "46\n\nW. A. REYNOLDS\n\nhere, the surveillance is curiously haphazard and capricious. We could not see that we were followed on leaving; perhaps they have given up checking on foreigners\". We had also been to a large reception given by General Chou En-lai on January 7th which was attended by General Marshall and, from the Kuomintang; Chen Li-fu, Feng Yu-hsiang and Dr. H. H. Kung, together with the Chungking establishment of Ambassadors, Consuls etc.\n\nThe Journey There\n\nThe route followed is shown in Fig. 1.* The convoy finally set out on a misty morning on January 21st intending to cross the Yangtse by the upper ferry. Disaster overtook us within four kilometres. Going down a steep slope the driver of the leading truck missed his gear change and ran off the road into a paddy field. The truck finished up on her side (Plate no. 6). With help from the base garage, she was hauled out, (Plate no. 7), the Garage Manager directing. The convoy returned to base, spent a day straightening and reloading and set forth again on January 23rd. The route went through Sui Ning, San Tai, Mien Yang over the Chien Men Kuan or Sword Gate Pass to Kwang Yuan and then over another Pass, Ch'i P'an Kuan or the Gate of Shensi, in the Mi Ts'ang Mountains to Pao Ch'eng.†\n\nNorth of Mienyang the 'new' motor road follows the route of the old Imperial Highway to Ch'eng-tu. Impressive “pai lo's”, fine trees and stone bridges mark the route (Plates 8 & 9). Just after Pao Ch'eng is the famous Buddhist temple Miao-T'ai Tzu, where we stopped for a visit. A place of peace and beauty to which one might dream of retiring for a while.\n\nIn Pao-ch'eng the scene is very different from the Szechuan towns over the mountains to the south. This was the southern limit of the camel trains coming down from Sinkiang and Kansu, some with loads of dried Hami melon. Perhaps some of the flavour of the place is given in a quotation from a letter home: \"We spent one night in Pao-ch'eng and as we came up across the bridge in the late afternoon, the long flatness of the Han-hui Ch'u valley behind us, lines of camels drinking at the river side were mirrored\n\nP.54 Plates 6-19 at rear illustrate the article.\n\n+ The romanisation of place names is that used in the Times Atlas of China since this is the detailed reference most easily available to Western readers.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208031, "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-1977", "page_number": 70, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "54\n\nTien-Shui\n\nHui-Hsien\n\nW. A. REYNOLDS\n\nNINGSIA\n\nKANSU\n\nYung-Ping\n\nYEN-AN\n\nKan-Cho\n\n-Chu\n\nSlo-Pa\n\nKien Rateni (?)\n\n \n-Cheng\n\nCheng-Ku\n\nHan-Chang\n\nDigi-Hsiang (?)\n\n?\n\nSHENSI\n\nNan-Hsing\n\nturng (?)\n\nWEI HO\n\nHsing-Ping\n\nPAO-CIT\n\nHung-Hua-Pu\n\nHSIA Fang\n\nKuang-Shih-Pu\n\nHONAN\n\nLo-Chuan\n\nHiao-Ho-Kou\n\nHuang-Ling\n\nI-Chun\n\nSHANSI\n\nRiver\n\nKuang-Tiao\n\nChien-La (?)\n\nTru-Tung (?)\n\nHien-Yang\n\nTe-Yang\n\nSun-Tai\n\nWan-Yuan\n\nLo-Heh-Pa\n\nShuang-Po-Chang\n\nSZECHWAN\n\nTa-Haien\n\nRs In-Tu (?)\n\nCHENG-TU\n\nSui Ning\n\n \nden-Yang (?)\n\nLa-\n\nTung-an\n\nIzu-Yang (?)\n\nPeng-Ch\n\nChu-Hsien\n\nCHANG\n\n CETAM (?)\n\n-Nan-Char (?)\n\nTa-Chu\n\n-Ch:\n\neng/An\n\n1in-Shui (?)\n\nChung\n\n ́ung-\n\nLo\n\nJung-Shi\n\nHei-Chiark\n\nP1-Shi (?)\n\nhg-Chuan (?)\n\n\"Lung-Chiang\n\nKWEI CHOW\n\nHUPEH\n\nHIUNAN (?)\n\nSzechuan & Shensi Main Road System 1946. Scale: 1:3,000,000. Figure Map of Szechuan & Shensi showing routes.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212614, "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": 168, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "148\n\nnormal form of exercise was the evening stroll. There is, perhaps, nothing which so readily distinguishes the Chinese from their lugubrious neighbours to the west, the Indians, as their cheerful spirit. That evening the scene was more animated than usual. I could read in the happy faces of the crowd the joy they felt at finding themselves at last no longer alone in the struggle.\n\nArrangements had been made to send the officers of our little group to various parts of the Chinese front to study war conditions. The others had already left, and I was due to leave by air for Kweilin next day. I went down to the island air-strip early in the morning to find several planes just in from Hongkong, with the families of the C.N.A.C. staff who had been living there. The American crews had flown to Kaitak from a field in China, loaded up, and flown out again all at night. Over a cup of bad Chungking coffee they described the events in Hongkong, the bombing of the airfield and the destruction of the majority of the C.N.A.C. planes, caught on the ground by the sudden Japanese attack.\n\nBy and by the covers were taken off the three engines of the old Junkers 52 plane, in which I was to fly, and mechanics started them up. The plane was the last of those belonging to the Eurasia Aviation Corporation, a Sino-German company, the only competitor of the C.N.A.C. The German pilots had been replaced by Chinese. There were a dozen passengers; we clutched our seats a little nervously as the heavy-looking machine accelerated down the runway towards the river only to rise from the ground just before we hit the water. We spiralled up above the Chungking escarpment and flew away over the Szechuan mountains at a steady hundred miles per hour, until we dropped back through a gap in the clouds to see below us the sabre-toothed hills of Kweilin. I was taken in hand by an efficient \"Fu kuan\" (Adjutant) of General Li Tsung Jen's staff and motored into the city, where I found Michael waiting.\n\nMy destination was the 3rd War Zone, the most important of the nine war zones in China. It covered the greater part of the richest provinces, Kiangsu, Chekiang, Anhwei, Kiangsi and Fukien: bounded by the Yangtze to the north, the sea coast in the east, Fukien to the south, the area of the 3rd War Zone reached west as far as the Kan river. General Ku Chu Tung, famous for his defence of Shanghai in 1937, was the Commander.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212740, "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": 49, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "34\n\nhad a head of steam and wrote several pages of detailed description on one particular theme, usually with an educational value aimed at foreigners in China. One in particular was his portrayal of a Chinese banquet, consisting not only of various menus, but seating plans, courtesies and the role of the servants.\n\nHis Promotion of Western Education\n\nSince 1868, Mesny claimed, he had had an inclination to do something towards dispelling some of the gross darkness that prevailed amongst the Chinese. In 1870 he established a small day school for boys and girls in a temple called the Yu-huang Kung [The Temple of the Jade Emperor], which served as a club house for the people of the Hu-kuang provinces who resided in Kuei-yang. He imported some school books which he considered suitable and paid a Chinese teacher to teach the children during the four years of his residence in Kuei-yang.\n\nMesny in later years had interviews with senior Chinese mandarins with a view to promoting western sciences and other subjects of study for examinations in China. He also claimed that he had persuaded a Chinese Viceroy to submit a memorial on educational reform to the throne and that this was the start of such reform. The reforms were abolished by the Empress Dowager in 1898.\n\nMesny and Women\n\nDespite the genuinely colourful life he led in China, his experiences living with the Taiping rebels, his service with the Szechuan Force în Kueichou and his treks across much of the country; when we come to his descriptions of his love life with Chinese ladies, although they may have been real and authentic, for the most part they read like episodes out of a modern pulp novelette. This may be due to a possible inability to describe them without a modicum of exaggeration or 'editing' or, though unlikely, they may have been figments of his imagination. There is little doubt that he was red-blooded and normal, and as a single man in foreign parts with few if any women of his own race or culture it was the understood thing for expatriate westerners to have a local female partner. He frequently wrote of pretty women at the roadside during his journeys across China who attracted him or, more to the point, were attracted by him. However, the exact measure of his intimacy with any but his wives is destined to remain tantalizingly obscure.\n\nCorrected minor OCR errors, reformatted text into paragraphs, and corrected \"în\" to \"in\" for consistency and correctness.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212750, "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": 59, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "44\n\nacknowledging the initial concept having been his, or so he claimed.\n\n+\n\nHe has been described as 'an adventurer and an explorer, a plant collector and a Chinese general. He was certainly an adventurer though nowadays he would be referred to as a soldier of fortune, an adviser, an opportunist, and even a mercenary.\n\nThe question remains, how successful was he? Money certainly came his way at times though judging from his Will, he was not a particularly successful businessman. He certainly collected plants and sent them back to the British Consul in Canton and has one specimen, Jasminum Mesnyii, named after him. He bore the brevet rank of Lieutenant General in the Chinese Imperial army but to what extent this was a genuine rank rather than an honour and a courtesy rank, though fully earned during his military service, is hard to judge. Again, though accurately described as an explorer, he was in fact much more of a traveller in parts of China already settled by Chinese and visited earlier by other foreigners. The trek he made, as recorded by Captain Gill, from Ch’eng-tu in Szechuan province to Burma through what was then called lower Tibet has a different slant to what would have been Mesny's account. In Gill's Mesny is scarcely mentioned and he would appear to have been taken along by Gill as his interpreter. It would have been interesting to have read what Mesny would have, and indeed may have written about his journey of very nearly four months with Gill.\n\nHe saw himself as what nowadays would be called a go-between, a consultant, and in those days regarded, perhaps, as a fixer. Mesny had a few major bees in his bonnet the most barefaced of which was the value he put on the advice he constantly proffered to every senior Chinese official whose ear he could reach on how to modernise China. He had, for example, prepared a list of some nineteen items, suggestions presented to the Viceroy Chang Chih-tung, and although Mesny assures us that Chang accepted the list there is no evidence that he did anything about it or if he did, that he even mentioned Mesny in any memorials to the throne. Mesny wrote indignantly at one point in his Miscellany about his list of suggestions to Chang having been ignored, or put into practice piecemeal and inexpertly, penny pinching and ineffectually without any reference whatsoever to Mesny.\n\nIn 1906 at the very end of his fourth and final volume of his Miscellany he prided himself on his advice with the words 'All those great industrial", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212757, "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": 66, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "51\n\non the Chinese military, its organisation, terminology and weapons almost certainly from his own experience. The second section is a two-page on-going essay on the need for China to modernise, for the construction of railways, the establishment of a foreign-style economy, etc. and finally, an on-going school boyish adventure describing his life on the Yangtze, commanding Chinese troops or as a prisoner of the Taipings. The whole was sub-titled A Text Book of Notes on China and the Chinese.\n\nMesny appears to have written and published this weekly magazine single-handed both from his memory, and notes written years beforehand stored against the day, together with material culled from other people's works. It ran for twenty-six weekly issues at a time, which were later bound into a total of four volumes. The individual issues were sold by subscription.\n\nVolume I: This ran from 26 September 1895 to 19 March 1896. His address, at this stage, was given as Club Chambers, 2 The Bund, Shanghai, with the printing of his Miscellanies at the China Gazette with offices at the same address.\n\nVolume II continued on from 26 March 1896 and ceased on 17 September 1896 when financial problems brought publication to an end.\n\nAfter a gap of some two and a half years Issue I of Volume III was published on Saturday 25 March 1899 with a firm promise of one year of publication. It ended, however, on Saturday 7 October of the same year with issue 26, and a regret that the Editor cannot commence Volume IV yet. The quality of the paper of Volume III was very poor indeed and has faded to a dull brown. The office had moved to Szechuan Road in Shanghai. Volume III was more literate than the previous two, suggesting perhaps that Mesny had employed a sub-editor. The format too had changed with Volume III. It was more professional and included some Peking court news, two pages of Commercial Notes and extracts from Reuter's telegrams. In a notice in issue 3 of Volume III Mesny explains that the Miscellany is 'a novel journalistic enterprise... which fills a gap. Its peculiar and unique features appeal to the intelligence of all discerning foreign residents in China as well as the intelligent readers of all nationalities in all parts of the World.' In August of 1899, some eight weeks before apologising to subscribers that he could not commence Volume IV yet, he doubled his subscription price. He was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212795, "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": 104, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "89\n\nChang was the first scholar in the land. Sir Everard Fraser, the Consul-General in Hankow for ten years [1901-1911], was an excellent scholar. He once told Green that he had taken a despatch in Chinese to Viceroy Chang, of Wuchang, who had become a friend of his when he was in Hankow, for his opinion on it. The Viceroy read a few lines, and then taking up his brush-pen began to edit. ‘And then,' said Sir Everard, ‘I had the finest lesson in Chinese that I ever got.' Chang was that rara avis, the official who scorned to enrich himself.\n\nChiang Chao-ling #*# @ Chiang Pa-hsia (1846-1891)\n\nA native of Szechuan, Chiang met Mesny when he, Chiang, was travelling to Yunnan to take up an appointment as County Magistrate of Hsi-o Hsien. He and Mesny were thrown out of the province at the behest of the French in Tongkin. They met again in Canton and Shanghai where Chiang's pursuit of reform was not appreciated by other officials. He died in Peking. Mesny and Chiang were to have started a monthly magazine in Shanghai in 1887 to be called the Yueh Pao ♬ which was to have been the organ of the reform party. Chiang was to have been the chief editor and Mesny the registered owner and business manager. Mesny intended to use his nom-de-plume of Meng-hua # but in the event the magazine appears not to have been published.\n\nCooper T.T.\n\nVisited Hankow and asked Mesny to accompany him on a trek to India. Mesny refused as the fees offered were too low. He later expressed regret at having refused as he 'had missed an opportunity to travel.'\n\nDamström\n\nCaptain Damström was referred to by Mesny three times during his times in Hankow in the mid 1860s. Once as a gunnery officer on one of the first steam boats ever owned by the Chinese, at Ningpo, and later as Captain of the S.S. Pao-hua [nfd]. Mesny took him along together with a Captain Dix to offer their services to General Tso of the Imperial Force in the Northwest of China. Tso offered all three of them positions as instructors but we never hear the outcome as far as Damström and Dix were concerned.\n\nThe second occasion was when Damström went off with the other", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212821, "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": 130, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "115\n\ncontrol. Lung Yun still maintained his own troops, well equipped and better paid and fed than those of Chungking, out of the revenues he had collected from the supplies which had flowed over the Indo-China railway and the Burma road. The control of the only communications into China had made the Governor of Yunnan a very rich man.\n\nMy experiences during the subsequent year were to be discouraging. In the past my championship of the Chinese cause had been unpopular with my own people; it had involved me not only in disapproval but also in financial loss. As the situation in Western China unfolded itself to me I began to wonder whether, after all, there was not a lot to be said for the view of the die-hards. Since my return to England I have made a point of studying the aspects to which I have drawn attention in these writings. I examined the history of Sun Yat Sen's Three Principles and the record of Kuo Min Tang teaching. I have set out the facts as they came to my notice, and will leave it to the reader to judge for himself how far the extraordinary incidents in which I was now to find myself involved sprang from independent impulses present in a backward province, or more directly from the nationalist teaching of Sun Yat Sen.\n\nAs the 'plane flies in from India, over the mountains of Yunnan, and begins to circle to come down to Kun-ming, the ribbon of the Burma road shows up below where it passes a cluster of villas nestling, some fifteen miles short of the town, at the foot of the hills on the edge of the lake. The 'plane crosses the tip of the forty-mile long lake to land on the large airfield at the far side of the city, 6,150 feet above sea level.\n\nAccommodation in the city was hard to find; for some weeks I stayed out at the lakeside. Owing to its height, Kun-ming enjoys an excellent climate all the years round, cool in summer, mild in winter. The great mountain ranges to the west absorb the moisture of the monsoon, leaving an adequate but moderate rainfall: apart from a period in the autumn the sun shines daily. The two Chinese characters Yun and Nan mean 'South of the Clouds,' an appropriate reference to the climate of Szechuan to the North East, where for six months in the year, at Chungking, they never see the sun.\n\nThe foreign community, in addition to the small number of French who were concerned with the operation of the railway line to the Indo-China border, included the Consuls of the leading countries, and an increasing number of American military personnel, attached to the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214572, "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-1998", "page_number": 430, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "399\n\nAN UNUSUAL AND EXTRAORDINARY ANCESTRAL IMAGE\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nI wrote about Hunanese wooden ancestral images in the Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume 18, 1978, when I explained that there were a number of such images on sale in curio shops in Hong Kong's Hollywood Road. Each represented an ancestor and usually took the form of an elderly or middle-aged man or woman often identified by a slip of red paper concealed in an opening in the back, sealed with a tight-fitting bung. Nearly all were impersonal figures, though several were well-carved portrait images. Since 1978, many more have appeared on the market, and even more have been seen in places as far afield as Yangshuo in Kuangsi province and Chengtu in Szechuan province, the majority still being identified by the red slip as having originated in Hunan province.\n\nRecently I acquired a most unusual image, portraying a hunter. His red slip gave little detail, merely listing his relatives who had ordered the image to be carved. It is presumably Hunanese, probably an ancestral image which can be dated very roughly by the iconographic detail and the copper coins concealed with the red slip within the cavity in the back. It stands some 11 inches high and has lost all of its original paint apart from minute lumps of non-chemical paint in crevices within the deep carving.\n\nHe is portrayed standing, facing half right, holding a muzzle-loading flint lock to his shoulder in both hands, and aiming it at an unknown prey. He is accompanied by a small dog which is also pointing at the same prey. The hunter is dressed in a jacket buttoned down the front with some five loop and cloth 'buttons', with a pouch at the waist at the front, a powder horn at the waist on his left side, and a further bag again at the waist at the back. He is wearing open-toed sandals and a standard peasant cloth cap.\n\nThe base of the image is decorated on three of the four faces with pictures of the hunt, animals such as the small deer brought down, a running rodent-like creature, and a rabbit. The fourth side of the base,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 } ]