[ { "id": 204406, "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-1962", "page_number": 38, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "CURRENCY PROBLEMS\n\n29\n\nMemory calls to mind how that, in 1911, when I rode out of the Minshan range, which lies between the provinces of Kansu and Szechwan, I came out onto the great silk road of the Empire at Kwangyuan and travelled along it to Chengtu. On this road one found the most magnificent hotel accommodation then existent in the Empire. Yet in the best hotel I got the best room, together with all the rice I could eat at the evening meal, for forty cash a night—then the equivalent of about 3 cents U.S. currency!\n\nThis problem of the weight of the brass cash was well exemplified during the relief work I was called upon to direct in 1921 in North West China following the catastrophic earthquake that took place in December 1920. The quakes changed the whole face of nature in some fourteen counties and it became a matter of the utmost importance that we restored communications and set free the dammed up streams before break-throughs could cause flood devastation in the lower reaches of the Yellow River. To this end I had some fifteen thousand men at work in the 14 districts, engaged in this work of vital importance. They were paid on the basis of labour giving relief. On the largest undertaking at a place called Chin-Chiang-Yi I had four thousand eight hundred labourers. Of this number 10% were overseers or foremen gangers and received five hundred, or over, cash per day. The rank and file received a straight four hundred each. This means that the total weight of the cash required to meet a single day's pay on this one undertaking amounted to just over 12 tons deadweight. Something over 35 tons of cash was needed each day to pay the fifteen thousand men. Those were the days before motor transport in that part of the country and with the roads wiped out by the earthquake and pack-animals of all kinds exceedingly scarce the situation soon became impossible. After much thought I decided to put out my own note issue to meet the emergency. This though was easier conceived than executed. Neither paper supplies nor printing facilities were available. Therefore I had wooden blocks carved representing cash denominations of four hundred and five hundred cash. From these impressions were taken on strips of calico. The pull-offs were then oiled to prevent falsification. These notes were used in paying the workers who were able to use them for the purchase of food and necessities. The Chambers of Com-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204436, "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-1962", "page_number": 68, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "CHINA'S 35 MILLION NON-CHINESE\n\n57\n\nminor groupings in south China. In the southwest were the Ch'iang, the Fan (properly read Po), the Wu-man14 (who include the Yi, Lolo, Norsu, etcetera), and a fourth group of poorly differentiated tribes. In the south were the Austronesian Tai or Thai, the Yao and TanE, and the Liao#. The six subsidiary groups he considered derived from intermixtures and cultural overlays. These include the Miao (descendants of the Fan or Po), the Ch'i-lao or K'e-lao2 of the southwest plateau lands, the Pae of Szechwan, the Pai-man of the Ta-li✯ plain in west Yunnan, the Li of Hainan Island, and the Yueh centered on the Canton delta in early times.\n\nAlthough, in general, the historical movement of the non-Han people of central and south China has been southward in the face of the constantly expanding pressures of the Han from the north, the migratory paths of some of the chief ethnic groups within south China are interesting to note. Four of these groups of present importance are the Miao, the Yao, the Yi or Wu-man, and the Tai.\n\nSince the Miao are high mountain dwellers, their migration routes generally have followed mountain ranges where they could practice their fire-field or forest-burning, shifting type of cultivation and semi-nomadic pastoral herding. The Miao, apparently derived from the Fan or Po of the west Szechwan mountain lands, migrated slowly eastward along the Ta-pae and Ch'in-ling ranges and down into the Tung-t'ing lake region after traversing the Wu mountains of the Yangtze Gorges. Here they must have established themselves for a long time and acquired the name Ching Man# or the Barbarians of the Ching (Tung-t'ing Lake) region.\n\nThe Miao then spread southward in several directions, but especially into the west Hunan and east Kweichow regions among the tributaries of the Yuan river from which they acquired the name Wu-ch'i* (Five Streams) Barbarians. They became further dispersed during various dynastic struggles among the Han and especially during the Sung and Mongol struggles. The Manchu and their Han Chinese forces during the Ch'ing dynasty dispersed them further in many bloody battles with the Miao. Today the Miao have sought refuge not only in the more", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204438, "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-1962", "page_number": 70, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "CHINA'S 35 MILLION NON-CHINESE\n\n59\n\nmen among these people shape their hair into a single forward-pointing horn has not changed since the time of the Later Chou (A.D. 951-960), an amazing adherence to a cultural trait that must have had a deep-seated significance now possibly lost in the mist of antiquity. According to Eric von Eickstedt, the Lolo legends, their sphere of economy and their language and culture point unquestionably to the northeastern part of the Tibetan high plateaus as their early habitat. This would be the area of eastern Chinghai Province.\n\nInstead of moving eastward as the Miao did, the Yi moved southward to their stronghold region of the Ta-liang mountains in the southwest of Szechwan. From here they appear to have spread eastward along the Ta-liang mountains and the western part of the Nan-ling mountains into Kweichow, as well as southward into the Yunnan plateau. Although the earliest habitats of the Yi are shrouded in mystery, their European-type features and pastoral traditions point to at least a Central Asiatic origin. Fiercely warlike, they have created a much larger Yi cultural sphere by capture and enslavement and ultimate absorption of numerous other peoples, Han and non-Han, to their language and way of life. Strongly caste-conscious, the noble clans have maintained a racial purity distinguished from the lower castes of assimilated or enslaved people. The former are known as Black-bone Yi, the latter White-bone Yi. At least until 1950 the Black-bone Yi in their Ta-liang mountain strongholds continued to exercise virtually exclusive control over their own affairs.*\n\nIn contrast to the Miao, Yao and Yi, all of whom are fond of the cooler climates of the high mountains, the T'ai ethnic groups all are addicted to lowland, streamside valley locations. Since they occupied a much more productive type of land, they were able to develop a superior type of economy and a stronger type of political organization. Thus, we find that the T'ai have historically been great state-builders, from the period when they occupied the entire Yangtze valley to their present seat of power in Thailand. They are no doubt among the earliest occupants\n\n* Eric von Eickstedt, Rassendynamik von Ostasien (Race dynamics of Eastern Asia), Berlin, 1944, 175-176.\n\n* Lin Yuch-hua, Liang-shan Yi-chia (The Yi people of the Liang mountains), Commercial Press, Shanghai, 3-5, 9, 13.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204439, "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-1962", "page_number": 71, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "60\n\nHEROLD J. WIENS\n\nof south China that have evolved a significant culture. But precisely because of this and because they occupied irrigable valley lands, the Han Chinese came into conflict with them. Moreover, because of superior culture, technology and number, the Han gradually took over the T'ai states of the Yangtze valley and assimilated their populations. Those among the T'ai leadership who escaped Han political and cultural conquests were the ones who led their following in migration away from the front of contact. The direction of this slow historical flight was southward and southwestward,\n\nBefore the Han Chinese conquest under the Ch'in dynasty (Third century B.C.), south China contained 6-8 large T'ai states. In Szechwan the T'ai state of Shu was centered on the present provincial capital of Ch'eng-tu. The Pa state was centered at Chungking. In the central and lower Yangtze region were the T'ai states of Ch'u and Wu respectively. The T'ai state of Nan-yueh included such areas as the Canton delta and the Red river delta of Tongking. In Fukien were the Pai-yueh, sometimes politically centralized at Foochow. All of these were absorbed into the political body of China during the 400 years of the Han dynasties. Sinicization, however, took many more centuries and reached its greatest flowering in the Canton delta region during the T'ang period. West of this region in the Yunnan-Kweichow plateaus, however, a Sinicized T'ai power lingered on through the T'ang and Sung periods in the state of Nan-chao, at times strong enough to pose threats to the stability of the T'ang empire. The successor to this state, Ta-li, withered under the Mongol onslaught directed by Kublai Khan, and T'ai political genius moved across the southern borders of Yunnan into the Mon-Khmer cultural sphere in the basin of the Chao Phya river where it evolved the present state of Thailand.\n\n7\n\nT'ai autonomy within southwest China continued in smaller units in the lake and river basins of Yunnan near the Burma borders until the Communist conquest of China. The reasons for the extended freedom from close Han Chinese control over the southwest include the rough topography of the region with agriculture restricted to small basins or primitive self-sufficiency\n\nCh'en Pi-sheng, T'ien-pien san-yi (Reflections on the Yunnan borderlands), Chungking, 1941, 21-24.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204449, "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-1962", "page_number": 81, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "70\n\nHEROLD J. WIENS\n\nbut their main concentration in a solid bloc is in the Ta-liang mountains southwest of I-pin district of Szechwan.\n\nMore closely related to the Tibetans, the Ch'iang live in the west fringes of the Szechwan basin east of K'ang-ting city. The chief areas of Tibetan settlement are almost all in the Tibetan plateaus, though politically the areas are divided among five provinces in addition to Tibet proper and not counting now-abolished Sikang province. These are Kansu, Chinghai, Yunnan, Szechwan and Kweichow. Since Sikang has largely been incorporated into Szechwan, the latter now contains over 700,000 Tibetans, whereas Yunnan has some 67,000,\n\nAside from the Chuang who constitute about seventy per cent of the total population in what is called the Kwangsi Chuang Autonomous Region, other T'ai-related groups are widespread especially in Yunnan and Kweichow. The T'ung occupy a solid bloc of territory joining three provinces: southeast Kweichow, northern Kwangsi, and western Hunan. They are related to the Shui who live in the southeast corner of Kweichow. The Pu-yi (also called Chung-chia) are a T'ai-related group in southwest Kweichow. In central Kweichow they live intermingled with the Miao, and they constitute the majority of the country people around the provincial capital of Kuei-yang. The T'ai proper have settled in the southern half of Yunnan where they are divided into two branches: the Hsi-shuang pan-na T'ai and the Te-hung T'ai. The former of these branches constitute \"Twelve pan-na or basin 'states'\", whence their name. The latter are close relatives of the Burma Shan people. Also related to the T'ai more distantly are the Li people of Hainan Island, with their heartland in the Li-mu (\"mother of the Li\") mountains that dominate the southern half of the island. Some Miao also are found on Hainan, having been imported during the Ch'ing dynasty to make poison arrows in the campaigns against the Li.20\n\nThe Miao are a very scattered group and only in two regions do they form compact settlements: eastern Kweichow and southwest Hunan. In Szechwan they live along the Kweichow borderlands. In Kwangsi they have settled in small groups in the centre of the province. In almost all regions the Miao have\n\n20 Hsu Sung-shih, Yueh-chiang liu-yü jen-min, 122-123.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204453, "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-1962", "page_number": 85, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "74\n\nHEROLD J. WIENS\n\nTABLE II\n\n(Population in 000's) Provincial distribution of South China peoples\n\n \n \n Szechwan\n Kwangsi\n Kweichow\n Yunnan\n Hupei\n Chekiang\n Fukien\n Kiangsi\n Kwangtung\n Hunan\n \n \n Chuang\n \n 6,445\n 43\n 1\n \n \n \n \n 18\n \n \n \n Molao\n \n 116\n 14\n \n \n \n \n \n 1\n \n \n \n Maonan\n \n 14\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Pu-yi\n \n 1,233\n 479\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n T'ai\n \n \n 439\n 1,333\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n T'ung\n \n 360\n 1,425\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Shui\n \n 84\n 204\n \n \n \n \n \n \n 378\n \n \n Li\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n 469\n \n \n \n Miao\n 453\n 150\n 1,233\n 70\n \n \n \n \n 21\n 72\n \n \n K'e-lao\n \n \n 41\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Yao\n \n 358\n 14\n 1\n \n \n \n 14\n 28\n 14\n \n \n She\n \n \n \n \n \n 25\n 96\n 52\n \n 2\n \n \n Tibetan*\n \n \n \n 713\n 67\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Ch'iang\n 36\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Nu\n \n \n \n 13\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Tu-lung\n \n \n \n 2\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Ching-p'o\n \n \n \n 102\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Yi\n \n \n 275\n 1,852\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Ha-ni\n \n \n \n 481\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Li-su\n \n \n \n 317\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Nakhi\n \n \n \n 143\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n La-hu\n \n \n \n 139\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Achang\n \n \n \n 18\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Pai\n \n \n \n 567\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n T'u-chia\n 549\n \n \n \n 1,123\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n K'a-wa or Wa\n \n \n \n 286\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Peng-lung\n \n \n \n 3\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Pa-lang\n \n \n \n 35\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Kao-shan\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n (found only in Taiwan 200,000)\n \n \n \n Ching\n \n 4\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n (Vietnamese)\n \n \n \n 2\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\n* In Tibet proper and in the Chamdo region there is an additional Tibetan population of about 1,274,000.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204650, "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-1963", "page_number": 131, "title": "RAS-1963", "content_text": "NAVIGATION ON THE YANGTSE\n\nUPPER & MIDDLE YANGTSE\n\nChengtuy SZECHUAN Chungking TID\"E 100 MILES 200 HUPLE H sichang Shesi 117 Hankow Yoshow FUNGTING GLAKE HUNAN Changsha 1104/2\n\nIt was not until 1878, two years after the Chefoo Convention was signed, that the first steamers went up beyond Hankow. In that year the China Navigation Company and the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company commenced a joint service between Hankow and Ichang. For technical reasons they were unable to maintain this service during the winter months of low water, and it was not until 1884 that a regular all-year-round service was commenced by Archibald Little with his small steamer Y-Ling, the other companies following suit a short time later. By 1901 there were twenty-two steamers running regularly between Hankow and Ichang, during daylight hours only, and it was not until 1920, after intensive surveys by the Chinese Maritime Customs, that night-time sailing was possible.\n\nA further section of the Yangtse was opened to foreign trade after China's defeat by Japan in the war of 1895, namely the 400 miles from Ichang to Chungking. At the same time Chungking and Shasi, the latter between Hankow and Ichang, became treaty ports. With the addition of Chungking to the list of treaty ports,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205127, "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-1966", "page_number": 83, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "78\n\nHOLMES WELCH\n\nFor the next ten years Buddhist exchanges happily continued between the two countries. Japanese scholars toured China to collect material on Buddhist history and art, while Chinese went to Japan to study.13 Probably in 1936 (and at any rate before the Japanese invasion) the Sino-Japanese Buddhist Association was formed.14 It would not be too cynical to suppose that the Japanese viewed it as an instrument for political penetration, while the Chinese hoped to use it to mobilize Buddhist opinion in Japan against that country's aggressive policy.\n\nWhile the invasion of central China in 1937 put an end to voluntary cooperation with Chinese Buddhists, it increased Japanese opportunities to get cooperation under pressure and enlarged the scope of their missionary activity. As one Japanese source puts it, \"where the Japanese army went, Japanese religion went too.\"15\n\nWhile in the preceding sixty years about a dozen permanent temples had been established, nearly all in Shanghai, no less than thirty-five were opened between 1937 and 1942, not only in Shanghai, but in Nanking (six temples), Hankow (four), Hangchow (three), Soochow (two), Wuhu (two), Wusih (two), Chen-chiang, Kiukiang, Yangchow, Changchow, and many smaller cities. Most of the parishioners were Japanese — in three cases entirely so17 — but at four temples out of five there were at least a few Chinese parishioners and at one out of six the Chinese were in a majority; in other words, these were really missions.\n\nNot all Chinese monks and devotees could follow their government to Szechwan. Those who remained had to cope with the realities of foreign occupation. They had no choice but to welcome the increasing number of Japanese priests who came to work in China, living in Chinese monasteries or in Japanese research institutes, and in return they went to Japan themselves. In 1939, for example, over twenty Chinese monks were selected by competitive examination. As one of them told me in an interview, he was twenty-two at the time and had been serving as a sacristan (i-po) at Chin Shan. He wanted to go partly because he was curious about the state of Japanese Buddhism. Also he believed that if he learned the language, he would be better equipped to cope with the occupation forces on his return. “If I knew Japanese, they would not be able to bully me. I would be able to reason with them.” After qualifying in the examination,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205136, "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-1966", "page_number": 92, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "FOREIGN RELATIONS OF BUDDHISM\n\n87\n\ntemples, they were treated with the utmost courtesy and kindness. For example, in 1850 an eminent abbot near Hangchow recommended to a missionary visitor that he use an adjoining piece of land to build a Christian church. He made the recommendation, he said, despite his experience with other missionaries who, as he gently suggested, ought to \"show greater tolerance for the customs of other religions.\"39\n\nAlas! tolerance was not their outstanding trait, nor was it outstanding among the foreign tourists and businessmen, who found it increasingly fashionable to regard all things Chinese as inferior and absurd → particularly the \"bonzes.\" Since they also found that the loveliest spots in China had been utilized by the \"bonzes\" to build their monasteries, which were often the only places to stay on travels or holidays, the result was friction.\n\nThe chances for friction were less if all or part of a monastery at a low ebb had been rented outright, as was common in the Western hills outside Peking, at the foot of Omei Shan in Szechwan, and sometimes on the southeast coast. The few monks involved either vacated the premises entirely or moved to a rear building where, being grateful for tenants, they were ready to put up with whatever they had to.\n\nBut when foreign visitors stayed as guests at a prosperous monastery with a full complement of monks, friction was more likely. In 1924, for example, a doughty Philadelphian, Harry A. Franck, visited Omei Shan. Despite the prohibition on the import of meat, of which he was fully aware, he brought along several cans of it, as well as two live chickens for slaughter on the very top of the sacred mountain. As soon as he arrived, he began to bargain over the price of accommodations, thus degrading the monastery to the status of a hotel. (He should, of course, have waited until he was about to leave and then made an unsolicited gift.) Since he felt that he was being overcharged for the charcoal on which to cook his chickens, he took pleasure in making the abbot “lose face by coming himself late in the evening and pretending to verify the weighing.\"\n\nThe next day Mr. Franck professed surprise at the “half-hostile attitude towards foreigners... [of] the fat, lazy monks.” Elsewhere he calls them \"cynical-looking young loafers.\" Yet he complains that (in spite of their laziness and cynicism) they had", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205319, "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-1967", "page_number": 81, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "74\n\nL. G. AIJMER\n\n16 The still wider surname groups, hsing (M), in Chinese society, based on entirely fictitious agnatic relationships, expressed in at least preferred exogamy, have often indiscriminately been designated 'clans'. See e.g. Lee 1960, p. 134f. and Willmott 1964, p. 33. This purely conventional consanguinal kin group comes close to the sociological concept of 'phratry', and kin group constellations of this kind may be described better as units of this higher order. The Hakka nomenclature may vary but the units discussed are always conceived of,\n\n17 Freedman 1958, pp. 47, 129.\n\n18 Census 1911, p. 103f.\n\n19 Nine villages with Cantonese-speaking Punti population in the same district at the same time display numbers ranging between 346 and 9, with an average of 108.\n\n20 However, Jean Pratt, in her account of a Hakka village to the north of Tolo Harbour in the New Territories, gives an example of a non-symmetrical segmentation, reflected in the establishment of a new ancestral hall; Pratt 1960, p. 148.\n\n21 This also applies to the Hakka village studied by Miss Pratt: 'The three lineage halls are merely buildings in a row like an ordinary dwelling house'; Pratt 1960, p. 148.\n\n22 Freedman 1958, p. 50.\n\n23 Skinner, in discussing the importance of marketing communities, points out that in Szechuan there existed organizations of Hakka 'composite lineages', with headquarters in teahouses in the market towns (Skinner 1964/65, p. 37). I have no knowledge of similar organizations in the New Territories. One would have expected something of this kind in a portion of China where the Hakka groups suffered political strain from the Punti population. Local groupings on a non-kin basis may sometimes have fulfilled a protective function. Such local organizations, with headquarters in small temples, are for instance to be found in the Sha Tin Valley, and in the Three Fathom Cove area. All three villages studied belonged in pre-British times to an administrative organization called Luk Yeuk, focussed on the old government centre of Kowloon City. Freedman (1966, p. 86) sees yeuk organizations as means for weak communities to seek 'protection against being molested by local powers'. For a discussion of yeuk see op. cit., pp. 82-89 and for the Luk Yeuk especially pp. 85f.\n\n24 A map of Hakka migrations is, for instance, provided by Kuo 1964, facing p. 6. But there are also other views as to the origin of the Hakka, see e.g. Barnett 1958, p. 2.\n\n25 Izikowitz 1963, p. 171.\n\n26 One man from Grass Field Village has settled for good in Borneo. He has taken his wife and children there. This is the only instance of permanent overseas settlement I have come across.\n\n27 This particular migration is said to have been encouraged and even given financial assistance by the Chinese Government as an aftermath of the war mentioned below; Dyer Ball 1925, p. 282. Another author thinks less of the generosity of the government:\n\n'Comme ces tribus Hak-ka se montraient particulièrement turbulentes, les mandarins chinois ne pensaient qu'à les éloigner de leur territoire; c'est ainsi qu'en 1864 et 1866, à la suite de nombreuses revoltes, ils furent expulsés dans le sud du Kouang-Si, vers ces marches frontières qui, comme la province de Moncay, étaient peu habitées et dans un état habituel d'anarchie politique.'", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205396, "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-1967", "page_number": 158, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "SALT MANUFACTURE IN HONG KONG\n\n151\n\nwell acquainted with the Hong Kong area, and never saw those remains. In Hoifung I did not find any furnace or anything which could be referred to an ancient salt industry. In China the manufacture of salt has been of the greatest importance from the most ancient time. In the salt-lake districts (Shansi, Shensi, Kansu and Mongolia) the heat of the sun causes the salt to crystallise at the edge of the lakes and in some cases on the surface of the water. In Yunnan and Szechwan the brine is drawn up from the salt-wells and boiled in cauldrons. Boiling is rare in other provinces. At the sea-coast the salt-pan system is generally in vogue.\n\nIn the last issue of the Hong Kong Naturalist (Vol. X, No. 1) Mr. S. Y. Lin has published a good article on salt manufacture in Hong Kong. In Hoifung both the leaching and the ordinary method are practiced; at the bay of Tchanki.... the former is more common, and at the bay of Swabue only the latter is in use. The salt produced by the leaching method is somewhat refined; it is freer from soil and in fine crystals and is required therefore for kitchen use; but its production needs much more work and its price is greater, too. The salt produced by the ordinary system is coarser and more impure and is chiefly used for pickling and salting fish. People say that the latter salt is more bitter than the former. If this statement is true we must suppose that the mother-water is more easily over-saturated in the ordinary salt-pan method, so that magnesium sulphate can be produced along with sodium chloride. As here the salt season is principally in the dry autumn and winter and from mother-water saturated at over than 32°5 Baumé during cool nights the magnesium sulphate easily crystallises, likely much of our salt is really a mixed-salt.\n\nNowhere in our province, as far as I know, the boiling system is now in use, except occasionally by boat-men when it is impossible to buy salt. Here fuel is very expensive and scarcely sufficient for domestic purposes. Moreover, I note that on the granitic rocks at the sea-shore salt easily crystallises; ancient people may have collected it and so learned how to manufacture salt. Even at the present time some people gather salt by sweeping it from the rocks. However, the note of Dr. Heanley suggests a new field of research; indeed, many of our prehistoric sites are near modern salines or in a good position for salt-works.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205490, "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": 32, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "CHINESE RELIGION AND RURAL COHESION\n\nSectarian Religion and the Rural Area\n\n27\n\nSome of the organizations referred to as sects in the literature were in fact religions in their own right. Their ideas were taken from both Buddhism and Taoism certainly, and they also used cosmological notions accepted by the State and the more scholarly members of society; but they often combined such elements in a way forming a distinct ideology of their own. Many were strongly messianic, looked forward to a millenium, and sometimes had secular, even political aims, connected with their ultimate religious goals.\n\nThe literature on such organizations suggests they had a regional distribution, although the evidence is not entirely clear because various names were used by one and the same body at different times or in different places, and some of them themselves ramified into sects.\n\nSpeaking generally, they appear to have been most active in the poorer parts of the rural area especially in regions with large dislocated populations. Szechuan was birth-place to several and was not only an area of scattered settlement but the land of much of the province was poor (perhaps a factor contributing to absence of nucleated settlement). They also operated a great deal in Anhwei, and on the borders of Honan, Shantung and Hopei. Exile appears sometimes to have been a factor in their extension to new areas. Some groups I studied in Singapore in the 1950's were brought down to village areas in Kwangtung, Kwangsi and Fukien leaders exiled from Honan in the mid-nineteenth century.\n\nBut when trying to visualize their operations at the rural level one realizes how thin information in the literature is on their activities in relation to communities of different type and size. Where were their lodges, what did they look like? Were their bases in villages, towns or the open country-side? If one of the more militant, the Nien, said to be an off-shoot of the White Lotus is any example, it appears they might change their base. At one phase in its development it operated from nests in the mountains and at another based itself on earthwall communities in Anhwei for strategic reasons.34 The Nien, however, might in fact have been a secret society type organization and not a religious sect. I will return to the question of secret societies presently.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205603, "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": 145, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "140\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nIV. EFFECTS OF SUPPRESSION ON SECT ORGANIZATION\n\nOne effect of campaigns against the Hsien-t'ien sects was to create leadership problems. Patriarchs were sometimes put to death before any successor could be appointed, sometimes several of those likely to succeed to office were put to death simultaneously too, and there was no precedent for electing a leader from among the remaining rank-holders. This led to further splintering into sub-sects: new off-shoots appeared headed by various of the remaining men of top rank.\n\nAn effect of all this on the sect which concerns us here was to cause it to abandon the patriarchate entirely and also do away with the next highest places which were occupied by five men known as the \"Five Elements\". Leadership was handed over to men of the rank immediately below these five who became known as \"family heads\" (chia-chang), and were placed in charge of groups of vegetarian halls occupied by his \"kinsmen\".\n\nAnother effect was on the establishment of vegetarian halls themselves. In some cases members met in their own homes when campaigns against the sects were at their highest, or non-residential halls were established in the towns where they could pass as shop-houses. Sometimes only the \"family head\" and other top rank-holders lived in residential halls and these were built in lonely places difficult of access.\n\nBut the banishment of leaders also brought the sects down to the south of China: to places where they were exiled. Previously their strongholds appear to have been Szechuan and Anwhei provinces. They were strong also in the Hanyang region. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they began to spread into Hong Kong and to other places overseas: Singapore and Malaya, Thailand, Indonesia, and Borneo. For instance, during our visit we were told that there are currently 100 halls of the Hsien-T’ien Tao sect in Thailand and on the walls of several of the halls visited we were shown photographs said to be those of halls there and in Singapore.\n\nV. VEGETARIAN HALLS AND THE Hsien-T'ien SECT IN HONG KONG\n\nAt the present time we have only fragmentary information on the Hsien-t'ien sect in Hong Kong. The sect appears to have reached here, however, sometime in the late nineteenth century: it will", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "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": 206071, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1970", "page_number": 151, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "146\n\nS. F. BALFOUR\n\npeoples. They too are an ancient population living on the seaboard without any trace of their earlier habitat. But as we have seen in the first chapter they have been so overwhelmed by the force of Chinese culture that not a trace remains of their original customs. However it is proposed to show that some aspects of their life might suggest a connection with the \"Indonesians\", however far fetched the theory may be,\n\nThe Tanka boats must be of recent design, and they were probably evolved as a result of contact with foreign peoples, even as late as the Portuguese. The eyes painted on the prows of Hoklo boats may also point to earlier contacts, although it is possible that this custom evolved quite independently. What seems more likely to be the survival of an earlier boat is the “dragon boat” or huge canoe used by the Tanka, Punti and Hoklo in their yearly festival.\n\nThis festival occurs on the 5th of the 5th month when the 'dragon' constellation is highest in the sky and celebrates the death of a poet Chü Yûan who drowned himself in a river in Hunan because his King would not take his advice. But it is difficult to understand the connection between the poet and the rather war-like parade of boats accompanied by the beating of a drum and throwing of rice into the waters. In fact, the festival appears more likely to be an annual sacrifice to a fishing god, or in places where rice culture depends upon irrigation caused by floods, to an agricultural god. Its distribution (in connection with the Chü Yuan legend) is confined to South China and to Szechuan. In Fukien, besides the poet a famous general is sometimes commemorated. Remembering the tendency of all religions to adapt new gods to old customs, we may be justified in discounting Chü Yuan from the festival's origin,\n\nThe regatta is formed by a number of very long canoes paddled to the rhythm of a drum beaten in the middle of the boat by some forty to eighty half naked men. It is unlike any other Chinese feast and the canoe and style of paddling are more reminiscent of Polynesian methods than of Chinese. Similar regattas exist all over the Indonesian regions; in Pnom-penh, for instance, it is almost identical (see accompanying illustrations),* and the first mention of the feast in Chinese literature occurs in books written\n\n* Plates 17-18.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206622, "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": 170, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "164\n\nW. SCHOFIELD\n\nMeanwhile work had been going on under the Geological Survey of China in Kwangsi, where the Tertiary and Recent deposits were examined, and the earth in the caves, known to yield ‘dragon bones’ in considerable quantities, was searched, with the result that a flaked-tool culture related to the late Hoabinhian culture (Mesolithic) of Tongking was found. It is unrelated to the cultures of the coast. These, however, seem to extend as far north as the neighbourhood of Nanking, for stone artifacts and pottery with geometric decoration have been found near there and around Hangchow, lying on the surface of the earth. No details of these discoveries are yet published. The same is true of investigations carried out round Foochow, where a culture similar to that of Hong Kong is said to have been discovered.\n\nAfter the Oslo congress of prehistorians in 1936, at which Father Finn was present just before his death, Dr. J.G. Andersson went to China, and turned his attention to the problems of South China’s archaeology. In Hong Kong, after visiting several sites, he suggested a trial excavation of a site at Shek Pek on the island of Lant’au, which I had discovered. We accordingly collaborated in this task for some days; after he left I did further excavation there. At this site, for the first time, were found undisturbed burials. Dr. Andersson next visited Foochow, and later went to Szechwan, where he discovered a number of Neolithic sites. After the Japanese began the war he returned to the coast by Canton, and later worked in the islands along the north Tongking coast at the invitation of the École Française of Hanoi, where a number of sites were discovered; some were excavated by Mlle. Colani of that institution.\n\nMeanwhile a Chinese scholar of the National Research Institute had pursued researches at Wup’ing, West Fukien, where he found cultures akin to the earlier Hong Kong cultures and to those of Swabue. He communicated his results to the third Prehistorians’ Congress at Singapore* and in his address he showed that objects belonging to this group of cultures are to be found in several sites in Fukien and Chekiang provinces, but that all finds made so far are surface finds only.\n\nThese investigations, partial and local as they are, have yielded very interesting (and in some respects sensational) results. First,\n\n* These proceedings were published by the Government Printing House, Singapore, 1940.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206655, "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": 203, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n197\n\nand his three small survey ships have given their names respectively to Sulphur Channel, Starling Inlet and Plover Cove.\n\nJ. R. JONES.\n\nCHINA'S EARLIEST PRINTING A NOTE\n\nLLL\n\nIn Volume 7 (1967) of this Journal I published a brief note entitled \"Printing, a new discovery.\" This told of a find in a stone stupa, standing in the courtyard of a temple called Pulguk-sa, in Korea, erected in 751, of a printed Buddhist sutra. The find was hailed by the Korean archaeologists as perhaps the oldest example of printing known, although the exact date of the printing still remains a mystery.\n\nRecently I have learned that the Chinese discovered another piece of printing as far back as 1944. (Somehow, perhaps because of the war, news of this had escaped my attention.) Known in Chinese as T'o-lo-ni ching chou (dharani sutra charm), it was unearthed in a T'ang dynasty grave site in Chengtu, Szechwan, inside the silver bracelet of a young woman. As Professor Max Loehr has written, it \"is a charm printed on a single sheet showing a six-armed Bodhisattva figure in the center of concentrically laid out Sanscrit words written in Lantsa letters.\" This is surprising, but not unreasonable. In the last half of the Tang, Chengtu happens to have developed into perhaps the chief center of printing, and, as everyone knows, by the middle of the eighth century Chinese civilization had reached one of its heights. It was the age of Li Po and Tu Fu, Wu Tao-hsüan and Wang Wei, and Buddhism was at the summit of its influence. With the demand for reduplication in every circle - Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist - and with all the tools and techniques at hand, the printing of a highly popular charm seems natural. So it came about that there have come to light charms, printed within a few years of each other, in Korea (751?), China (757), and Japan (764-770).\n\nBibliography:\n\nChung-kuo pan-k'o lü-lu, compiled by the Peking Library (Peking 1961), pl. 1, text Vol. I, p. 7;", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206805, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1973", "page_number": 82, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "76\n\nHELGA WERLE\n\nThe hands are made of wire (Plate VII) which facilitates the fastening of the sticks or arms, but their appearance is ugly.\n\nThe sticks have the length of chopsticks. Made of iron, they form a small ring at one end and have a wooden handle on the other, to prevent the sticks from slipping out of the hands. The third stick is thicker and is hooked into a hole at the puppet's back from below. The puppeteers tell that in Ch'aochow some puppets were considered so precious that they were handled with sticks made of pure gold.\n\nNeither the waist nor the stick is movable.\n\nThe Historical Background in Ch'aochow\n\nAlthough well proportioned and even beautiful, this puppet has many technical disadvantages compared to the Cantonese rod-puppet or the Fukienese string or glove-puppet. The reason for this incongruousness can be found in the dominance of Ch'aochow's ancient leather shadow-puppet tradition, which was definitely well established in the Ming dynasty in that area. One can assume that it existed earlier but any proof is lacking so far.\n\nIn Ch'aochow these shadow-puppets were cut out of cowhide (which is very rough when compared to the donkey-hide used in North China or Szechuan) which was coloured. They have two-jointed arms and legs and are handled with three sticks attached to the hands and the back of the two-dimensional puppet. The author has seen such Min-nan shadow-puppets in Taiwan, and some old Ch'aochowese confirmed that the Ch'aochow ones had exactly these features. By the end of the last century, supposedly under the strong influence of the extraordinary perfection of the string and glove puppets of Ch'uan-chou, Fukien, a new type of puppet evolved, a hybrid with the beauty of a Ch'uan-chou puppet, but handicapped in movement by the technique of a two-dimensional puppet. The name paper-shadow-theatre chih-ying-hsi was also applied to the new puppet. These two kinds of puppets existed side by side for one generation, and according to witnesses the leather shadow-puppets disappeared in the 1920s.\n\nIt is yet possible to receive first-hand accounts of the time when puppets were much used. An educated elderly Ch'aochow gentleman, Mr. Su related that in his childhood, at the beginning of the Republic, there were still 3 different kinds of puppets: shadow, horizontal stick-puppets and a third kind which he describes as...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207271, "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-1975", "page_number": 39, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "MERCHANT ORGANISATIONS IN IMPERIAL CHINA\n\n31\n\ntrades and geographical origins became acquaintances and friends as they shared power and worked with the political process in Soochow. When these two merchants returned to Canton to open up their separate lines of business there, their joint social ventures while as sojourners in Soochow would help them toward similar across-guild collaboration in Canton.\n\nIt is generally assumed that the presence of Landsmannschaften suggested strong localism among merchant groups which, in turn, inhibited China's social and economic integration. In fact, one can just as well argue that the reverse is true. Landsmannschaften facilitated the communication among merchants in the various trade guilds on one level, and between merchants and officials on another. They provided outsiders an organisation with which they could participate in the political processes of the local power structure. More broadly, by promoting regional emigration, they upgraded the cosmopolitan tradition of their host provinces.\n\nLandsmann Guilds (Kung-so or Pang)\n\nBy early Ch'ing times, many of these merchant-run Landsmannschaften had given birth to a more specialised organisation, as merchants with the same geographical origins organised independent Landsmann guilds in the large commercial centers. This was conveniently carried out since in many towns, the trade of any one commodity was often controlled by merchant sojourners from one area. In cases where the given trade was not so monopolised, it was likely to find several guilds of the same trade in the same city, each guild attracting its members on the basis of common geographical origin. Meanwhile, the individual Landsmannschaft had many subdivisions formed by its members in the different trades. In Hankow, the Landsmannschaft of Szechwan organised separate pang or kung-so for the dealers in herb medicine and boatmen. From the outside looking in, however, these two subdivisions which gradually assumed independent status were collectively known as the Szechwan pang.8\n\nBy the late nineteenth century, a number of Landsmann guilds assumed very dominant positions. In Shanghai, the most important of these were the Ssu-ming kung-so, a conglomerate of Ningpo merchants in the various trades in Shanghai, and the Kuang-ch'ao kung-so, a similar organisation for the two neighbouring prefectures in the Canton area. The importance of these Landsmann guilds in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207285, "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-1975", "page_number": 53, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "CHINA'S ECONOMIC PLANNING & CHANGING GEOGRAPHY 45\n\nthe present regime is making efforts to convey water from the Yangtze River in the south to the Yellow River in the north. Since 1958, several survey parties in western Szechuan and southern Kansu have studied the possibility of transferring superfluous water to the Yellow River from the Gold Sand River, the Taito River, and other tributaries of the Yangtze.\n\nThere are, of course, many difficulties to be encountered in carrying out this plan. For example, the northwestern region is so sparsely settled that a tremendous number of workers must be brought in to construct the necessary canals and locks. The area has a serious problem of seepage and evaporation, and it experiences violent earthquakes.\n\nIf the plan is successful, however, it will provide ample compensation for the effort required. It will lessen the threat of flood in the southeast part of China, and will prevent drought in the northwest. It will improve the use of the region for pasture land, and increase its agricultural production. It can also develop electric power, which will make up for the shortage of coal in the region. It will modify the dry climate to some extent; this in turn will encourage forest growth. It will form a system of waterways that will facilitate navigation throughout the country.\n\nThe building of Railroads—For the sake of political coherence and the furtherance of economic development, the present government has paid great attention to the building of railroad systems. The length of the main line built since 1949 was 16,000 miles. Of the many completed systems of railroads, three have geopolitical significance. They reflect the determination of the present regime to unify the state and to open up the frontier border by connecting it with the inner areas.\n\n1. Along the east coast, five ports—Yentai, Ningpo, Foochow, Amoy, and Chiankiang—have been linked to the interior by short lines. The military intention of the railroads built in the areas around Foochow and Amoy apparently is that of “liberating” Taiwan.\n\n2. Two long railroads have been built for the purpose of connecting China with the Soviet Union. One, which was built in 1954, runs from Tsining to Ulan Bator in Outer Mongolia, and then to the Soviet Union. With the completion of this railroad, China was joined to the Mongolian People's Republic. The other, which is", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207549, "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-1975", "page_number": 317, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n309 \n\nwith Taoist exorcisms and are performed at wedding ceremonies to obtain from Heaven the happy union, using the ritual of a local Taoist folk religion heterodox cult of the Three Ladies' (三娘). The 'Three Jesters' are called by the puppeteers the \"Three Brothers' (三兄弟) or, individually, the Great, Second and Third Wang Yeh.* \n\nSchipper then explained that he and his informants had made many conjectures in order to identify the Three Jesters. He believed tradition links the Three Brothers (Three Jesters) with the Three Tien Brothers and thus with Tien To Yuan Shuai, and this seemed to him to be better founded than other conjectures. He continued that the identity of T'ien is extremely confused, and claimed that T'ien is reputed to be the master of T'ang Emperor Ming Huang (唐明皇) and to have taught the actresses of the Peach Garden (梨园), popularly believed to be the first academy of the theatre. Iconography, he said, represents T'ien the puppet as the 'laughing lad', similar to T’ien To Yuan Shuai. \n\nSchipper observed that when the plays are of the northern Fukienese type, the Three Jesters are identified with T'ang Ming Huang, the patron of the theatre of North China. When the play is Southern Fukienese or Ch'aochow, T'ien To Yuan Shuai (Chief Marshal T'ien) is the patron, and the Three Jesters are identified with him. The T'ang Emperor is also often referred to in Taiwan and South East Asia, where he is also accepted as the God of Actors bearing the title of the Imperial Prince or King of the Western Ch'in (Hsi Ch'in Wang Yeh, 西秦王爷) or Hsi Ch'in Lao Wang Yeh (西秦老王爷), or, on Taipei and Keelung altars just as Hsi Ch'in Wang (西秦王). (He is called the King of the Western Ch'in because of his exile in Szechuan, in Western China). His image is more colloquially referred to as The Young Gentleman (小哥) and less respectfully as The Old Boy (老郎). Schipper agreed all this might seem highly incongruous, but, he continued, the tradition which links the 'Three Brothers' (The Jesters) with Tien To Yuan Shuai (Chief Marshal T'ien) seems, as we said earlier, better founded than others. \n\nWang Yeh \n\nSchipper has linked the Three Jesters with the Fukienese epidemic gods by the title of Wang Yeh. He also noted the legend \n\n* More often than not Wang Yeh (Imperial Princes) in Fukienese communities are epidemic deities.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207717, "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": 105, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "90\n\nELIZABETH L. JOHNSON\n\nloom does not appear to have been part of the inventory of Han Chinese material culture, this leads one to speculate that the Hakka may have learned the technique through contact with pre-Han people in the hill areas of Kwangtung where they settled. This is, at least, one possible explanation for their use of this technique.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 The research reported here was done in Kwan Mun Hau Village, Tsuen Wan, during 1975-76, following my dissertation research which was done in the same village in 1968-70. The work was supported by the Joint Centre on Modern East Asia, at York University in Toronto.\n\n2 Recent research reports on Tsuen Wan include:\n\nGraham E. Johnson, \"Leaders and Leadership in an Expanding New Territories Town\", The China Quarterly, March 1977, pp. 109-125. Elizabeth L. Johnson, \"Women and Childbearing in Kwan Mun Hau Village\", in Women in Chinese Society, Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, eds., Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1975.\n\nAn exhibit of patterned bands, and Szechwan peasant embroideries, was held at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology from April 15-June 15 of this year, with the title \"Chinese Peasant Textile Arts: Kwangtung and Szechwan Provinces\". The exhibit was prepared by the students of Anthropology 431.\n\n3 I wish to express my gratitude to my informants in Kwan Mun Hau Village, who not only introduced me to the subject of patterned bands but were also very patient in supplying me with information about them. I should also like to thank my very able research assistant, Jennifer Woon Chi-yee.\n\n4 Dr. James Hayes has raised the interesting question of whether the bands used on these occasions would be woven in the colour and style of the wife's or the husband's village or would always be red (a lucky colour). Unfortunately I cannot answer this question without further research.\n\n5 Some of the mountain songs were learned while others were sung in a kind of spontaneous repartee between two groups, often of men and women. The form of the wedding and funeral songs was learned, but the content varied according to the feelings which the individual singer wished to express.\n\n6 See: James Hayes, \"Itinerant Hakka Weavers\", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch. Vol. 8, 1968, pp. 162-165. Aijmer, in his article \"Expansion and Extension in Hakka Society” (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, Vol. 7, 1967, pp. 42-79 (p.48)) mentions home weaving of fabrics, but this was apparently not done in Tsuen Wan, at least in recent memory.\n\n7 For a general study of this phenomenon, see Aijmer, op. cit.\n\n8 G. W. Skinner states that this was also true of Szechwan peasant embroideries. G. William Skinner, \"Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China, Part I\" The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. xxiv, no. 1, November 1964, pp. 3-44 (p.40)\n\nPage 105\n\nPage 106", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "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": 207789, "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": 177, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA (With especial reference to the Upper Yangtze)\n\nA. D. BLUE*\n\nWest China, and in particular the provinces of Szechwan and Yunnan, interested British merchants in India before the end of the eighteenth century, and this interest increased after Britain got a foothold in Lower Burma in the early nineteenth century. Not until Britain was established at Shanghai and on the Lower Yangtze, however, did the British China traders take any great interest in West China. Until the 1860s, therefore, the initiative in opening West China to British trade came from the West, and concentrated on reviving the old caravan routes from Upper Burma into Yunnan. The Treaty of Yandabo between Britain and Burma in 1826, which established Britain in Arakan, Assam, Manipur, and Tenasserim, rekindled interest in these old routes. Sino-Burmese contacts went back many centuries, but were usually recorded from a diplomatic or military aspect, although it was well known that there had been considerable trade along these routes. At this time Canton was the only British foothold on the China coast, and the much shorter land route across Burma seemed to offer many benefits to British and Indian merchants in both India and Burma. Then, and for many years afterwards, India was the source of most of China's foreign imports, cotton and opium in particular, and much of British policy in the Far East was concerned with maintaining and extending this trade.\n\nAn interesting side product of this China-India relationship was the proposal to import workers from west China for the infant Assam tea industry. The East India Company had become interested in the possibility of tea production in Assam as early as 1823, when indigenous tea plants were found in the Upper Brahmaputra\n\n* The author served as an Engineer Officer with the China Navigation Company from 1928 until 1938, and was on the Yangtze in 1930 in the Shengking and again in 1934 in the Wuhu. He was captured by pirates in the Newchang river in Manchuria in 1933 and held prisoner for five and a half months. Five of his articles have been published previously in the Journal. \"European Navigation on the Yangtze\" in Vol. 3, 1963, \"Piracy on the China Coast\" in Vol. 5, 1965, \"The China Coasters\" in Vol. 7, 1967, \"Chinese Emigration and the Deck Passenger Trade\" in Vol. 10, 1970 and \"Early Steamships in China\" in Vol. 13, 1973.\n\nPlates 20-25 and the sketch-maps at the end of the volume illustrate this article.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207791, "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": 179, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "164 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nand gorges in their upper reaches. Yet British and French explorers light-heartedly planned roads and railways through the region, when earth moving and other civil engineering techniques were primitive by modern standards. \n\nPolitical difficulties were equally formidable. In addition to Anglo-French rivalry, there was an involved relationship between Britain, Burma, China, and the Kachin and Shan hill peoples in the borderlands. A further complication, from 1855 to 1873, was the devastation of Yunnan by the Panthay Rebellion, a Moslem uprising almost as destructive as the more famous Taiping Rebellion. \n\nAlthough the Treaty of Yandabo had established Britain in Lower Burma, Upper Burma continued as an independent state, with an ill-defined tributary relationship with China. However, during the sixty years before Britain annexed Upper Burma in 1886, Britain obtained the province of Pegu (1852), and mounted a succession of expeditions to find a practicable trade route from Burma into Yunnan, contemporary with other expeditions up the Yangtze from Shanghai. \n\nBetween Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century, and the French priest M. Huc in the 1840s, practically no European had travelled in West China. So little was known of it that while their compatriots in China looked on neighbouring Szechwan as the El Dorado of the East, the British in Burma and India had their eyes on the province of Yunnan. The extravagant and over enthusiastic appraisal of Yunnan's potential wealth gave rise to what became known as the \"Yunnan Myth\". \n\nThe first British attempts to reach Yunnan and West China came from Burma in the late eighteenth century. When Captain Sorrel went to Ava in 1792 to deliver a letter to the King of Burma from Lord Cornwallis, Governor-General of India, some Burmese offered to take him overland to China. Sorrel's reference to this aroused great interest in India. Over a century earlier, Dutch East India traders in Ava and Syriam had given glowing accounts of a flourishing trade between Burma and China, conducted through Chinese merchants in Bhamo. In 1795 when Captain Michael Symes was sent on an official mission to Burma, he was instructed to “find a mart in the south west dominions of China by means of the great river of Ava”. Symes' report was enthusiastic. He said the principal export from Ava was cotton, which went up the Irrawaddy in large", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207792, "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": 180, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA\n\n165\n\nboats as far as Bhamo, and then partly by land and partly by water into China. Other exports were amber, ivory, precious stones, betel nuts, and edible birds' nests; while in return Burma got raw and wrought silk, velvet, gold leaf, preserves, and chinaware. Similar reports came from other sources. By 1850, the possibility of extending trade from Yunnan into Szechwan was envisaged, and the glowing prospect of an extensive market for British goods in West China became an obsession among many British officials and merchants in Burma and India.\n\nCaptain McLeod's mission of 1836 is the first official British attempt to find an overland route to China. McLeod went from Moulmein, the port in the newly acquired province of Tenasserim, via Kungtang to Kenghang, a Shan state on the border of China. Here he failed to get permission to enter Yunnan, being told that if the British wanted to trade with China they should go to Canton, and that if he still persisted in wanting to enter Yunnan he would require official permission from Peking. McLeod had to admit defeat, and turned back.\n\nAfter this came a succession of other ventures from Assam and Burma, all—for one reason or another—failures. These culminated in the famous and ill-fated Dual Mission of 1874-75, which led to the Margary Affair.* This was a joint attempt to explore West China from the Burmese and Chinese sides. Previous to this the only important attempts to find a route between Burma and China from the eastern side had been Captain Blakiston's in 1861 and T. T. Cooper's in 1868.\n\nThe Royal Navy's expedition of 1861 which went up the Yangtze to establish the first treaty ports on the great river—Chinkiang, Kiukiang, and Hankow—continued 153 miles beyond Hankow to Yochow. Here they transferred Blakiston's party to junks in which they continued for another 1050 miles to Pingshan, nearly 1800 miles from the sea and 400 miles above Chungking. It had been intended to follow the Yangtze to its source in Tibet, and then cross the Himalayas into India. Because of unsettled political conditions at Pingshan and beyond, however, they were forced to turn back; but they had obtained valuable information about the Middle and Upper Yangtze.\n\nSee pp. 169-170 below.\n\nPage 180\n\nPage 181", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207793, "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": 181, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "166 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nIn 1868 T. T. Cooper, a British merchant in Burma, came to Shanghai and attempted to improve on Blakiston's feat. His venture was partly financed by the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce. Cooper went up the Yangtze to Chungking, and then overland to Chengtu, the capital of Szechwan. Here he received permission from the Governor General to travel on through Szechwan and Tibet to India; but he met such determined opposition and hostility from the lamas on the Tibetan border, where he was imprisoned for five weeks, that he was forced to turn back. \n\nIn the following year, Sir Rutherford Alcock, British Minister at Peking, sent Robert Swinhoe of the China Consular Service to investigate trade prospects on the Upper Yangtze. Vice-Admiral Keppel, R.N. was making a survey of the river, and Swinhoe's party, which included Alexander Michie and Robert Francis of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce and two naval surveyors, travelled to Ichang on H.M.S. Opussum. This was the first time a steamship had reached Ichang, and the Chinese pilot refused to go any further. A junk was hired for the passage through the Gorges to Chungking, and soundings and surveys taken en route. The surveyors, however, gave an unfavourable report on the feasibility of steam navigation on the Upper Yangtze. They particularly commented on the force of the current, lack of suitable anchorages, intricacy of navigation because of the changeable channel, and so on. They also thought descent would be even more difficult than ascent. The chief engineer of Opossum described a sample of coal obtained half way between Ichang and Chungking as resembling good anthracite in appearance, but requiring large furnaces and a long time for combustion. \n\nThis was the most thorough navigational survey of the Upper Yangtze, and many of the factors militating against steam navigation between Ichang and Chungking were investigated and made known. The bed of the river falls 470 feet in the 360 miles between the two places, and this fall of one and a third feet per mile is the cause of the strong currents and rapids in this section of the river. The most difficult stretch is the first half of the Upper River between Ichang and Wanhsien, where the most difficult rapids and gorges are encountered. The Ichang Gorge begins five miles above Ichang, and then come the Ox Liver and Horse's Lung Gorges, and the Hsintan Rapid immediately after the latter. The most spectacular", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207794, "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": 182, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA\n\n167\n\ngorges are the Wushan, Witches' Mountain, and Windbox Gorges, which provide some of the most spectacular and awe-inspiring river scenery in the world. There are places where the river is only 150 yards wide, where the passenger on a steamer has the feeling that the almost sheer precipices actually overhang the river. The cliffs in Windbox Gorge are 700 feet high, and it was here that the record rise in the river level of 275 feet once took place.\n\nAbove Wanhsien the valley of the river opens out, and navigation to Chungking and beyond is comparatively simple. Until the Szechwan Steam Navigation Company's second steamer, Shuhun, went into service in 1914, steamers on the Yangtze, like junks, required trackers to pull them up the most powerful rapids, and a unique feature of the Upper Yangtze was the trackers' paths cut in the hillside thirty or forty feet above the river level. At these places junks were often lightened of their cargo and passengers before negotiating the rapid.\n\nIn the year after the Swinhoe expedition the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce supported another expedition up the Yangtze and into Szechwan by the famous German explorer Baron von Richthofen. His report on Szechwan is the most important until then, being the first to include an accurate description of the famous Red Basin of Chengtu, and its legendary irrigation system. This basin, with an area of some 3,500 square miles, is the only large area of level ground in the whole province, and has a population of about six million. Its remarkable fertility is due to the irrigation system introduced by Li Ping in the third century B.C. Li led the Min River through a hill and distributed its waters over the wide plain through a network of canals.\n\nOther notable journeys in Szechwan and West China between the late 1870s and early 1900s, included those of E.C. Baber and Sir Alexander Hosie of the China Consular Service, Archibald Little of Upper Yangtze fame, and A.E. Pratt, the zoologist. Pratt's travels lasted three years from 1887 to 1890. He built his own boat at Ichang to take him through the Gorges and past Chungking to Kiating, from where he journeyed overland to the sacred Mount Omei, over 11,000 feet high. Pratt's travels deserve to be better known, as they were the first in West China to be undertaken for purely scientific purposes. He blazed the trail for the later journeys of the botanists George Forrest, Kingdon Ward, and E.H. Wilson.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207797, "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": 185, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "170 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\ndays later rumours of an ambush by Chinese and Shan tribesmen led to Margary deciding to go in advance as scout, and he left the main party on 19th February with five Chinese companions. Three days later word came back that he had been murdered at Manwyne, with rumours that 4,000 Chinese troops were on their way to annihilate the whole expedition. Before Browne had time to recover from this blow, the camp was attacked by an advance guard of the Chinese force, but was beaten off by the Sikh and Burmese soldiers. Next day confirmation of Margary's murder came from the King of Burma's commercial agent at Bhamo, and on 20th February Browne's whole expedition retraced its steps to Mandalay and Rangoon.\n\nMargary's murder, and deteriorating relations between the British and the King of Burma, prevented further expeditions from Burma; but ironically led to further progress on the Yangtze,\n\nSir Thomas Wade, British Minister at Peking, took advantage of the Chinese government's failure to protect Margary to press for further trade relaxations, and the result was the Chefoo Convention of 1876 between Wade and Viceroy Li Hung-chang. This provided for the opening of five more ports to foreign trade, and of the 400 miles of the Middle Yangtze to foreign shipping. Among the new treaty ports was Ichang, located at the upper end of the Middle Yangtze and 400 miles below Chungking, the main port of Szechwan. When the Convention was ratified in 1885, a supplementary clause provided for Chungking to become a treaty port; but not for free navigation on the 400 miles of the Upper Yangtze between Ichang and Chungking. This was granted after the Treaty of Shimonoseki between China and Japan on the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95.\n\nMore than ten years before this, however, the remarkable Archibald Little had appeared on the Yangtze scene. Little began his career as a tea taster in Kiukiang in 1859, but soon started up business on his own. He was attracted to the possibilities of trade in Szechwan and West China, and fascinated by the problems posed by steam navigation through the famous gorges of the Upper Yangtze. He made a trip by junk from Ichang to Chungking in 1883 to investigate trade and navigational prospects, and in 1887 attempted to run a steamer service between Ichang and Chungking, by the Kuling. This was a Clyde built stern-wheeler of 450 tons", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207800, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1976", "page_number": 188, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA \n\n173 \n\nlords then fighting for power in Szechuan. Before the 'Incident' closed nearly a month later, another two China Navigation Company ships had been seized by Yung Lin. All available ships of the Yangtze Squadron were involved, and H.M. ships Dispatch, a light cruiser, and Hawkins, the flagship of the China Station, had been sent to Hankow. In addition the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company's Kiawo had been requisitioned by the Navy to carry reinforcements to Wanhsien. During the sometimes severe fighting which occurred at times, the chief engineer of the Wanliu and seven servicemen lost their lives, and several others were wounded. It was nearly two years later, and after Chiang Kai-shek had expelled the left wing elements of the Kuomintang and his Russian advisers, before the situation on the Yangtze returned to something approaching normal.\n\nAfter the Royal Navy took over the Pioneer, Captain Plant built a junk and traded between Ichang and Chungking, and made a thorough study of the Upper Yangtze. In 1908 he persuaded a group of Chinese business men and government officials to form the Szechwan Steam Navigation Company, forty per cent of the capital coming from official sources, and the balance from private Chinese merchants. The Company's first ship, the Shutung, was built by Thorneycrofts in Southampton under Captain Plant's supervision. She cost £26,000 and arrived at Ichang in 1909. The Shutung was 115 feet long, sixteen feet beam, and six and a half feet depth, and was described as 'a mass of machinery.' She towed a float alongside in which her cargo and passengers were accommodated, and in spite of only being able to carry sixty tons dead-weight of cargo, twelve first and sixty-six steerage passengers, was a great success financially and comparatively trouble-free. The Shutung's success was largely due to Captain Plant's intimate knowledge of the Upper River, his ability to inspire confidence in Chinese official and commercial circles in Chungking, and in his Chinese crew. Until 1914 the Shutung was the only steamer on the Upper Yangtze; but in April of that year she was joined by the Shuhun, a larger and more powerful sister ship, also built in Britain, sent out in sections, and assembled in Shanghai. At the same time the Szechwan Railway Company, then planning a railway from Hankow to Chungking, put three smaller steamers on the Upper Yangtze. Two of these ran between Ichang and Chungking, and the third between Chungking and Suifu. By 1914, therefore, the technical", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207801, "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": 189, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "174 \n\nA. D. BLUE \n\nproblems involving steam navigation on the Upper Yangtze may be said to have been solved, or at least understood. Only political unrest, civil wars, and the preoccupation of Britain with the First World War prevented further development.\n\nSzechwan suffered severely from the breakdown of the central government after 1915. At times trade was almost at a standstill because of civil war and organised brigandage, and to a lesser extent because of floods and famines. In spite of this, steam navigation on the Upper Yangtze flourished, a tribute to the keen business instincts and adaptability of the Chinese merchants. The first British steamer to appear on the Upper Yangtze since the Pioneer of 1900 was the Asiatic Petroleum Company's Anlan which went into service in 1918, and was followed in the following year by their Anning.* In addition to carrying petroleum products, these ships carried a few European passengers.\n\nThis heralded a period when there was a great increase in steam navigation on the Upper Yangtze, remarkable in that it took place against a background of continuing and increasing civil war, political unrest, and general trade depression.\n\nOther British companies followed the Asiatic Petroleum Company. In 1919 Mackenzie and Company of Shanghai built the famous Loong Mow at Shanghai's Kiangnan Dockyard, 196.5 feet long by thirty-one feet beam, moulded depth of nine feet six inches and gross registered tonnage of 1,112. The twin reciprocating engines and oil-fired water tube boilers were built by Thorneycroft of Southampton, and the luxurious accommodation for both Chinese and foreign passengers led her to be called \"The Queen of the Gorges\". Soon after this the China Navigation and the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company at last built their own ships for the Upper Yangtze, until then having used chartered junks flying their house flags for their Upper River trade. Then the Stars and Stripes appeared with several Dollar Line ships and some small tankers of the Standard Oil Company; and in 1925 by several steamers of the Yangtze Rapids Steamship Company. For a time this latter company operated a through service between Shanghai and Chungking. French, Italian, and Japanese steamers also appeared at this time. By the end of 1925 there were at least thirty-two steamers on\n\n*This company was the Far Eastern branch of the Shell Company.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207802, "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": 190, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA\n\n175\n\nthe Upper Yangtze-eight British, seven American, three Chinese, six French, five Italian, and three Japanese.\n\nPolitical troubles, however, had forced the pioneering Szechwan Steamship Company out of business in 1920. During the previous few years its Shutung and Shuhun had so often been forced to carry troops for the different war lords as to make their operations uneconomic. After 1920 the Chinese flag was flown by the China Merchants Steam Navigation and the Ming Steamship Company, both of whom seemed more able to accommodate themselves to the political changes. Captain Plant, however, was still active on the Upper Yangtze, but in a different capacity. He had left the Szechwan Steam Navigation Company in 1913 to become River Inspector in the Chinese Maritime Customs, and his work was one of the factors contributing to the development of steam navigation on the Upper Yangtze in the early 1920s.\n\nThere was a period during the brief heyday of the Kuomintang government between 1927 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, when shipping on the Upper Yangtze almost settled into a regular pattern. Probably 1928 was the peak year, when there were seventy small steamers in regular service between Ichang and Chungking; the smallest about thirty tons and the largest just over 1,000 tons. The average time between Ichang and Chungking was three days, as against an average of a month by junk. Britain had fifteen ships of 5,357 tons; China twenty-six of 3,672 tons; and America eleven of 2,934 tons.\n\nLosses, however, were heavy. Several of the smaller companies were forced out of business, some selling their ships to the China Navigation Company. In this manner, the latter acquired the famous Loong Mow in 1923, which was renamed Wanliu I, and the Alice Dollar in 1926, which was renamed Wantung. This company also built six ships at Yarrows on the Clyde between 1922 and 1926. These included the Wanhsien, 210 feet long with a loaded draft of eight feet and reciprocating engines of 3,000 indicated horsepower, the most powerful ship on the Upper Yangtze; two turbine steamers of less than half this tonnage, the Kiating and the Kintang, for the low water season; and two small motor ships, the Siushan and Suiting, of 296 gross tons for the Top River above Chungking. British shipping was supreme on the Upper Yangtze for the last few years of the treaty port era, since political troubles hampered", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207804, "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": 192, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "LAND AND RIVER ROUTES TO WEST CHINA \n\n177 \n\nAlthough British commercial shipping operations on the Yangtze and on the China coast came to an end in 1940, the official death knell came in 1943. On the 11th January of that year China concluded new treaties, on a basis of equality and reciprocity, with Britain and the United States. This ended the period of the 'Unequal Treaties', the 'treaty port' era which had started with the 1842 Treaty of Nanking between Britain and China. Not only British shipping in Chinese waters, but significant British and Western influence in China on the former pattern came to an end with the treaties of 1943.\n\nLooking back, and with some measure of hindsight, it is evident that there was no solid commercial basis for West China providing an expanding market for British industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All the Western countries concerned with the China trade failed to appreciate the self-sufficiency and poverty of China's predominantly peasant population. Although Szechwan was considered a prosperous province, neighbouring Yunnan was sparsely populated and poverty-stricken, and much of its reputed mineral wealth was nearing exhaustion when Europeans first heard of it. As on the coast, and on the Lower Yangtze, the success of British shipping depended on established domestic trades, some of which it stimulated further. Two economic activities which expanded greatly on the Upper Yangtze during the latter years of the treaty port era were the Chinese passenger trade between the treaty ports, and the import of kerosene; while an important export from Szechwan was tung oil, a valuable wood oil used in the manufacture of high-quality paints and varnishes.\n\nThe motives of the British effort to open up West China to British trade may be questioned by some today; but the courage, determination, and ingenuity displayed by British merchants and sailors are still worthy of admiration.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207919, "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": 307, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "292\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nCHINESE PRESERVED MONKS (肉身塑像)\n\nThe preservation by both Taoists and Buddhists of the bodies of famous monks and abbots by lacquering, varnishing or coating and embalming in clay was not as uncommon as one would think. It is only too easy to see how after the death of a particularly wise and beloved abbot, his presence would be badly missed throughout the monastic community. They would begin to venerate his memory and perhaps even a cult might emerge. Again we can visualise that his contemporary detractors, should there have been any, would eventually die and their prejudice, jealousy or even dislike perhaps, would fade in time. The opposite however, would be true of the memory of his wisdom, piety and gentleness. Another major motive for the preservation of such saints and very religious monks was the very mundane desire to obtain more funds for the religious institution by exhibiting the body to the faithful. In some monasteries such mummies were kept in private apartments hidden from public gaze. They had been members of a community, so their brethren claimed, and only other members had the right to see them. Most monks were cremated after death and their ashes retained in reliquaries in their monastery.\n\nSome of the more famous \"preserved monks\", or 'fleshy bodies' which is a direct translation from the Chinese, displayed or kept for personal reverence, were to be found in the following temples and monasteries:\n\nPai Sui Kung on Chiu Hua Shan, Anhui\n\nTsu Shih T'ien on O Mei Shan, Szechuan\n\nTien T'ai Ssu in the Western Hills near Peking\n\nYuch Lin Ssu in Chekiang\n\nNan Hua Ssu in Northern Kwangtung\n\nTien An Fu below T'ai Shan in Shantung\n\nHui Chu Ssu in Pao Hua Shan, Kiangsu.\n\nThere is also one such in the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas above Sha Tin, Hong Kong.\n\nA Danish architect, J. Prip Møller1 spent a considerable time in the early thirties touring around many monasteries throughout China in his research into monastery construction. He referred on several occasions to 'fleshy bodies' set up as images in monastery", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207920, "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": 308, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n293\n\nhalls, noted how common they were in Central China and continued \"they may almost be said to abound in Szechuan\". He suggested that the custom sprang from the belief that the benevolent influence exercised by the deceased during his lifetime would still be active if his body was preserved and set up. These mummies were placed in a hall on their own and even in the main hall beside the Buddha's image directly in front of the main altar. The \"images\" were usually gilded, though several on O Mei Shan were made up in fresh colours and dressed in silken robes which sometimes produced quite a monumental effect. The finest example he saw was in a wayside monastery on Chiu Hua Shan at the Ts'ui Yun An where the features of a monk who had died about the turn of this century had been gilded and “stood out as though carved in oak”.\n\nThe Chinese appear to have used two ways of preserving corpses. The usual method consisted first of evisceration; the body was then pickled in salt for a considerable period of time, afterwards being placed in a sealed urn and left for several years. If, when opened up, the urn was found to contain an undecayed body a subscription list was opened for the gilding and enshrining of the relic. The body was thickly gilded or varnished and, if not exposed to the elements or to great extremes in temperature and humidity, it would then last for centuries. The second method was for the dying monk, if he felt divinely inspired, to fast before death and in the process dry himself out, so that after death little was required to finish off drying the body into a leathery, hard mass of skin and bone3.\n\nThe following short notes on the better known \"fleshy bodies\" provide a clearer picture of how widespread the practice was. In May 1975 a preserved body, just emaciated skin and bones, seated in a cross-legged position was returned from Japan to Taiwan. The relic, the body of the monk Shih Tzu-kung (#4) known as the Stone Monk (GI✯✯), had been in Japan since World War II when it had been secretly shipped there by a Japanese military dentist. The body, more than a thousand years old, was of a T'ang Buddhist leader born about 700 AD in Kwangtung into a family named Ch'en (#). His title during life was Wu Chi Ta Shih (AR), which is the title he is still known by. He has now been returned to his original monastery in Taiwan.\n\nAn embalmed body exhibited in the eastern part of the Great Hall of the Yueh Lin Temple in Chekiang was claimed to be that", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207922, "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": 310, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n295\n\nThere was a 'fleshy body' in Anking in Central China. It had been placed in a large earthenware k'ang filled with willow charcoal and left for three to four years. The corpse was then gilded and set up beside an image of the Buddha, Sakyamuni7.\n\nThe shrivelled and varnished body of a Taoist priest named Sun (), who died in 1703 aged 94, was enshrined in a glass case in the Grotto of the Immortals in the east side of the lower Court of the Temple of either the Jade Emperor or, as stories vary, of the Three Sovereigns on T'ai Shan in Shantung. He had lived in the temple nearby for some sixty years under the religious title of Chen Ch'ing and was known as \"the Immortal\". Apparently he felt divinely inspired, and slowly starved himself to death; he became just skin and bone sitting cross-legged. He had requested his fellow priests not to inter him but instead to leave him in a vacant room. This they did, and he remained withered but not decayed as a relic for future generations of believers. One could see, apparently, only the bare bones of his arms and legs. His face had been replaced by a mask in his likeness and all that remained on his hands was skin and nails.\n\nIt was not only monks who had their bodies preserved. In 1878 Reverend MacKay, a missionary in Taiwan, wrote of a Chinese girl who died of consumption not far from Tamshui, North of Taipei. Someone in the neighbourhood more gifted than the rest announced that a goddess was present, and her wasted body immediately became famous. She was given the title of the Virgin Goddess, (Sien Lu Niu in Fukienese) and a small temple was erected and dedicated to her. Her body was immersed in salt and water for some time, and then placed in a sitting position in an armchair with a red cloth around her shoulders and a wedding cap on her head. Seen through the glass of the case in which she was placed she looked to MacKay, with her black face and teeth exposed, very much like an Egyptian mummy. Before many weeks had passed, hundreds of sedan chairs were to be seen bringing worshippers, especially women, to her shrine, and rich men sent presents to adorn the temple. Another preserved body of a female was exhibited in a temple near Fenchow in Szechuan. She was a Buddhist devotee who died there in a sitting position: being Tibetan she was particularly worshipped by the local aborigines?.\n\nThe most recent example of a 'fleshy body' has been the mummification of the corpse of the Buddhist monk, Yueh Chi Fa Shih", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207924, "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": 312, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n297 \n\nBIBLIOGRAPHY \n\n1 Chinese Buddhist Monasteries, J. Prip Møller; published G. E. C. Gad of Copenhagen, 1937. \n\n2 'The disposal of the Buddhist dead in China' P. W. Yetts, JRAS, July 1911. \n\n3 New China Review, Vol. II, 1920. \n\n4 Truth and Tradition in Buddhism: K. C. Reichelt, Commercial Press Ltd., Shanghai 1928. \n\n5 Buddhist China, R. F. Johnston, 1910. \n\n6 Récherches sur les Superstitions en Chine. Vol. VII, H. Doré, Shanghai 1931. \n\n7 Temples of Anking: J. Shryock, Paris 1931. \n\n8 From Far Formosa; Rev. G. L. MacKay, 1896. \n\n9 Mythical & Practical in Szechuan, James Hutson, Shanghai, 1915. \n\nHong Kong, 1976. \n\nKEITH STEVENS \n\nPRELIMINARY LIST OF THE BAKER COLLECTION OF NEW TERRITORIES GENEALOGIES IN \n\nTHE BRITISH LIBRARY \n\nVol. No. Village (and Gazetteer* reference) \n\n*. \n\nPing Shan (p. 163) ♬ \n\nTang Clan Association Handbook \n\nSurname \n\nTang \n\n(Hong Kong Branch) 香港鄧氏宗親會特刊 Tang 鄧 \n\nPing Long (p. 199) ** \n\n4. \n\nSha Lo Tung (p. 197) \n\nM \n\n5. \n\nEconomic Survey of Ping Shan (p. 163), \n\n屏山1956. \n\n6. \n\nChung Mei (p. 193) Æ \n\n涌尾 \n\n7. \n\nSiu Kau (p. 194) 4 \n\n小落 \n\nChung đề \n\nCheung # \n\nLei 李 \n\nLei李 \n\n8. \n\nChung Pui (p. 193) M† \n\n9. \n\nKam Chuk Pai (p. 194) \n\n金竹排 \n\n** \n\nLei李 \n\nWong 王 \n\n10. \n\nNai Tong Kok (p. 193) \n\nA \n\nLei \n\n11. \n\nTai Kau (p. 194) ★ \n\n大落 \n\nLei李 \n\n12. \n\nWang Leng Tau (p. 193) ††† \n\nLei李 \n\n13. \n\nUnidentified \n\nTang 鄧 \n\n* A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and The New Territories (Hong Kong, Government Printer, n.d. but 1960)", "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": 208029, "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": 68, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "52\n\nW. A. REYNOLDS\n\nMethodist missionaries travelled with us to Pao-chi and we sat together against the front of one truck singing quietly as the train rumbled onwards through a star-lit night.\n\nSo we travelled through Shensi into Szechuan, our passengers making themselves comfortable with bedding rolls in the back of the trucks (Plate no. 18). Both girls had learnt English at University but considered my Chinese needed improving. Plate no. 19 shows Comrade Hu-nan at a roadside stop cuddling a small child who had been frightened. Interestingly the other, Comrade Yang, turned up in Chengtu a week after we reached Chungking and spoke to a left-wing group meeting in the dark in the Women's Dormitory of West China Union University of which my future wife was then Warden.\n\nTravelling Arrangements\n\nAt meal times we distributed ourselves among the different fan tien at our stopping place. Our passengers slept at inns or in the back of the trucks while the crew slept in or on top of the cab. This latter was the best position.\n\nAfter some years of experience as a transport organization the Unit had developed a relative sophistication in sleeping arrangements. The trucks used on this trip were, as mentioned, Canadian WD Dodges. These were adapted from commercial models and had heavier springs and bumpers and towing hooks. They were equipped with a steel and timber body with three-foot high sides, steel hoops and canvas cover. We fitted a wide board hinged to the front of the body which was kept in an upright position during the day and covered by the tarpaulin to which it formed a solid back. At night the front of the cover was cast loose and the board folded down on to the top of the cab forming a flat platform. There were also three or four loose boards laid along the hoops and these helped to support the canvas. When the front board had been folded down these roof boards were pulled forward three or four feet and a canvas roof was formed over the platform. There was thus a flat floor, two foot by six foot six, with two feet six of headroom above it and something to hang a mosquito net from. Here the taller members of the crew slept at night. The shorter members usually slept in the cab or found a reasonably flat place on top of the cargo. Sleeping on the truck was standard procedure for crew;", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208030, "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": 69, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "A JOURNEY TO YENAN 1946\n\n53\n\nit helped prevent disappearance of vital parts of the trucks (and also the precious cargo) and one did not have to contend with the intelligent West China bed bugs which were liable to infest the inns.\n\nReturn to Chungking\n\nComing through the passes and down into Szechuan the first signs of spring appeared, the delicate pale green of the young willow leaves and the rich red earth contrasting with the dry, dusty, harshness of the Shensi countryside. Most of our passengers had not, one gathered, been to Szechuan before and were seeing all this fabled richness of the province for the first time. Crossing the Fu River ferry at Mienyang brought us into the plains and we came next to Ching Mo Kuan (Green Pines Pass) where the main customs and control station for Chungking was situated. This was another place where we had anticipated difficulty, especially if the negotiations had taken a turn for the worse since we left Yenan two weeks before. We pulled up near the barrier and everyone stayed in the trucks. We kept the engines running while Yu Chin-lung and I took our documents for checking to the duty officer. When asked what passengers we had we truthfully replied \"Forty members of the 8th Route Army\" which he solemnly wrote down and then chopped our pass. We were in the trucks and handing this to the sentry before the officer could report to higher authority. So, much relieved, we drove on to Chungking, off-loaded our passengers outside the city and then returned, via the upper ferry, to our South Bank base. Distance covered about 3200 kilometres in a travelling time of 32 days and, apart from our initial crash, no accidents, and few roadside repairs.\n\nThree days after our return we were again entertained by the 18th Group Army and General Chou En-lai personally thanked us for what we had done. Later we were invited to send medical teams up into the Border Region working directly with the medical authorities there. The FAU/FSU continued after Liberation and the last member left China in 1952.", "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": 208211, "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": 250, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "234\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nmountains about Kuatun and Sanchiang.... It is secretive, hiding by day in the beds of the streams and apparently prowling by night.\" The only other record of the distribution of this species of which I am aware lists it for both Fukien and Chekiang (Anon., 1977).\n\nDoubtless the specimen found in a catchment channel near Shek Kong had been carried down with water collected from a stream at a higher altitude, most likely from Tai Mo Shan.\n\nREFERENCES\n\nAnonymous (Compiled by the Amphibians and Reptiles Research Department of The Biological Research Institute of Szechwan Province)\n\n1977 Systematic Keys to China's Reptiles. (In Chinese) Press, Peking.\n\nBoulenger, G. A.\n\n1912 A Vertebrate Fauna of the Malay Peninsula. Reptilia and Batrachia. Taylor and Francis, London.\n\nPope, C. H.\n\n1935 The Reptiles of China. Natural History of Central Asia, Vol. 10. The American Museum of Natural History, New York.\n\nSmith, M. A.\n\n1935 Sauria. Reptilia and Amphibia, Vol. 2. The Fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma. Taylor and Francis, London.\n\nHong Kong, 20 July 1978\n\nJ. D. ROMER\n\nTHE PUBLIC BOTANIC GARDEN OF HONG KONG\n\nSir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong from April 1854 to May 1859, was a Governor with wide interests. In his History of Hong Kong, George Endacott relates (pp. 104-105):\n\nHe cared for cultural things; he set up a museum in one of the rooms of the Supreme Court to the annoyance of the court officials, and he was the leader of the local branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. He was also very keen to set up a public Botanic Garden, and lectured to the Royal Asiatic Society in Hong Kong on its value in spreading knowledge of Chinese trees, woods and fibres.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208321, "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-1978", "page_number": 45, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "MILITARY EDUCATION IN CHINA, 1842-1895\n\n29\n\nthe Yalu River in mid-September, 1894, China and Japan each had twelve ships, but the encounter was no contest. China's problem was less the quality of her ships than the lack of an effective command structure, poor communications, cowardice (on the part of Liu Pu-ch'an), poor training, and ammunition shortages.\" Chinese firing was comparatively effective, especially in the early stages of the fighting, but too often the shells were faulty. At Wei-hai-wei, in early 1895, the situation was even more grim. By this time, the war had been lost, and Chinese naval forces were completely demoralized, even mutinous.92\n\nChina's use of foreign talent could not remedy her military deficiencies. Unlike the Japanese, who succeeded in eliminating reliance on foreigners entirely by the outbreak of the war, the Chinese were forced to continue using them on both land and sea. A surprising number served, in spite of the existence of various neutrality ordinances and foreign enlistment acts.93 At one point, the Ch'ing government even contemplated establishing an army of 100,000 Chinese troops under 2,000 foreign officers—an effort, in the words of the North-China Herald to \"re-create an Ever-Victorious Army” under Constantin von Hanneken.94 Predictably, however, the plan met heavy opposition from Ch'ing officials, including Li Hung-chang, and it was never implemented.95\n\nIn all, the Sino-Japanese War was a disaster for China. Yet there were optimistic voices to be heard even in the midst of China's despair. The journalist, Wang T'ao—as shocked as anyone by Japan's sudden victory—undoubtedly spoke for many reform-minded Chinese in expressing the hope that defeat by the Japanese would finally shake China out of her lethargy. National humiliation was a prelude, he felt, to meaningful change,\n\nThe alliance between Chinese nationalism and agitation for reform, was evident in many sectors of Chinese society during the first few years following the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The writings of newly-politicized Chinese intellectuals, as well as the publications of the burgeoning Chinese periodical press, reflected these related concerns.97 The immediate post-war era also witnessed the proliferation of Chinese reform associations and study groups. Even remote Szechwan was touched by the reform spirit. In late 1896, a group of gentry members issued a manifesto which called for the abolition of footbinding and argued with tortured but telling logic: \"The present is no time of peace. Foreign women have natural feet,\n\nPage 30 is missing, actual page number in original text is \"45\" and \"46\"\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208780, "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-1979", "page_number": 237, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "210\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nDespite its rapid development in Southern Kiangsi, during the period 1904-1911 the religion was subject to occasional harassment from the prefectural authorities and the local Boxers (more or less similar in nature to the Boxers in North China). The latter even attempted to burn one of the churches of the Chun Hung Kau.\n\nIn 1912 a law protecting freedom of religion was introduced. Therefore, despite the general unrest in the provinces, there was no longer any real threat to the propagation of the religion. In 1925, a new church was added to the original main church in Wong Yue Shan in Kiangsi.\n\nOutside Kiangsi, the religion also spread to central and south China. After the death of Liu, it began to spread into Fukien and Kwangtung and other provinces. The number of the churches of the religion founded in China from 1862 to 1937 is as follows:-\n\n \n Kiangsi\n Fukien\n Honan\n Szechwan\n Kiangsu\n Kwangtung\n Hupeh\n Hunan\n Kansu\n Anhwei\n Taiwan\n Shensi\n Hopeh\n \n \n 85\n \n 7\n 3\n \n 22\n 8\n 6\n 1\n 5\n 1\n 3\n 1\n \n \n \n 28\n \n \n 23\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n 20\n \n\nTotal: 205\n\nPropagation Overseas\n\nHong Kong\n\nA follower of the religion, Chu Sau-kui (***) went to Hing Ning (A) in Kwangtung to preach in 1901 at the orders of Lai Yan-cheung. As there were many natives of Hing Ning who were operating business undertakings in Hong Kong, Chu was invited to preach there. He came to Hong Kong in 1904 to preach. A native of Hing Ning residing in Hong Kong, Yeung Sin-sam (#☀) founded a Ming Tak Tong (*) at 1160, Canton Road, Kowloon.\n\nTsui Tao-shun (##) of Wai Yeung (✯∞) founded the Sing Kwong Tong (†) in Shaukiwan in 1936. Yim Tao-wan (LLT), also of Wai Yeung, founded the Chun Ning Tong (†*) in Des Voeux Road West in 1938. In 1947, a Leung Yi-ku (第二站) of Nan Hoi founded the Kwong Ming Tong (光明堂) in ...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209706, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 363, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n341\n\nmight threaten the Brookes' autocratic rule. Again, on page 43 the author describes Rajah Vyner as \"resisting change\" yet in the following chapter (IV) we find the last rajah pressing strongly for a most drastic change of direction to a constitutional monarchy. Given the idiosyncracies of Rajah Charles's rule and the weakness and downright boredom with official obligations of Rajah Vyner perhaps this is an unfair criticism. It may just be impossible to label either ruler so precisely.\n\nThe book is the most exhaustive study of the last few years of Brooke rule that has yet appeared.\n\nLEIGH WRIGHT\n\nStudies in Chinese Archaeology, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. 1982. Xii, 148 pp., 45 plates, 3 maps, bibliography, index.\n\nCheng Te-k'un. \n\nThis book is a collection of nine articles previously published in various journals by Prof. Cheng Te-k'un, formerly of Cambridge University and now with the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It is the third in a series published by the Centre for Chinese Archaeology and Art, and the reader is informed fully about the financing of the Centre's publication programme on the page just after the title page. Unfortunately, one searches in vain for biographical information or even an identification of Prof. Cheng himself. The editors have also neglected to include a map of China, a map of Szechuan province (subject of four of the nine articles), or a map of Fukien province (two articles). One minuscule map of \"The Coast of China\" measures 1 x 4 inches, and is useless. There is, on the other hand, a good map of the Santubong region of Sarawak, also showing Sarawak in its Southeast Asian context.\n\nThe articles fall into three groups: general surveys, field reports, and miscellaneous notes. Seven of the articles were written in the period 1933-1949, the other two in 1969 and 1982. As basic descriptions of excavations and field survey results, the earlier articles contain hard data, and have not been rendered obsolete by more recent work, apart from some points of interpretation offered by Cheng. However, the articles do not", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209707, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 364, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "342\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nform a coherent and readable entity, since they only contain information of a very specialized nature, and constitute only snippets from the enormous archaeological literature of even the 1930's and 1940's. Four of the seven articles deal with Szechuan province, which Cheng wrongly described in 1947 as “fundamentally a marginal area [whose culture] has never been a product of an independent development.\" Another article treats Tang dynasty tombs in Fukien, while the remaining two of the pre-1950 period concern monuments of the Hopei-Honan-Shantung area, and cannon of the Opium War.\n\nAs the author notes in the Introduction, these and many similar studies are scattered in various learned journals. One may thus entertain serious doubts about the claim of the publishers that “it is worth gathering some of the more important [of Cheng's archaeological writings] together for reference.\" For whose reference? The few interested scholars can easily obtain copies of the original publications, whereas the general reader would have little interest in reading 40-year-old site reports and field surveys, concluded by out-dated interpretations. Regardless of Cheng's occasionally enjoyable style, as in the anecdotal archaeological tour of the three provinces, the reader will not gain even a partial overview of Chinese archaeology from these articles.\n\nMany of the same considerations apply to Cheng's essay on archaeology in Sarawak. Although more recent (1969), it does not give a current or balanced view of Sarawak's past. One assumes that Cheng himself approves of including Sarawak in a volume on “Chinese archaeology,\" since he views the area as the extreme southern frontier of the Han empire—a notion which is highly debatable, to say the least. In support of this line Cheng in this article takes \"Chinese relics\" automatically to indicate \"Chinese activities”, relates Sarawak's Iron Age to the Chinese invention of iron metallurgy in the Shang dynasty (the date should actually be Late Chou, and it may have been a borrowed idea rather than an “invention”), describes a flat stone with two perforations as \"an import from the mainland”, and suggests that the custom of boat burials in cliff caves was spread by \"southern Chinese\" throughout southeast Asia. Suffice it to say that the chapter on Sarawak, though containing interesting tidbits of information, is cast in a strong sinocentric perspective.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211417, "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": 133, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "109\n\nfollowing summer, on 25 July 1896, he wrote that he was working in Chicago because he now had to support not only himself but also a wife. On 23 April 1897, he announced that he had graduated the day before, and he felt it was a great honour. He liked medicine and hoped to pursue post-graduate studies in New York. Instead we find him practising in San Francisco by 24 December 1897, but because he was not doing well, he thought he might leave for Hawaii or Shanghai after the Chinese New Year.\n\nUncle decided to go to Shanghai and on the way there he stopped in Honolulu to visit with the family. He wrote on 15 June 1898 from China that he had been thinking of Father and Ping Lim ever since he left them. He enjoyed Shanghai, which he described as a beautiful and luxurious city where inhabitants were either very rich or very poor. He was paying 25 dollars a month for a pleasant office on the corner of Ningpo and Szechuan Roads, with living quarters in the back for himself, Aunt and their two servants. Although his income of 60 dollars a month was quite adequate, he wished that he had taken up dentistry as it would have brought an income of 1,000 dollars a month, or mining which was then gaining importance in official circles. He advised his two brothers to consider these professions even though job opportunities might be limited, or they would have to serve under someone. In response, Father indicated he would like to take up one of the careers suggested and asked for financial help, but Uncle wrote back on 29 August 1898 that although his practice was improving, he could not save anything; nor could he assist Father at that time, but perhaps he could the following year. After a few slow months, Uncle decided to teach an evening class to meet expenses, and by March 1899, he had six students paying him each two dollars a month. Two months later, he had 18 students in three classes.\n\nIn July 1899, Uncle noted that Father was not going to school but was working as a newspaper reporter and commended him on choosing a good subject to deliver at his graduation exercises. Uncle found the winters in Shanghai very cold and the summers very hot. There were many deaths from the extreme heat and the plague, which was raging in Hong Kong, Canton and Heong Shan. Uncle still wanted to go back to America as he felt there was no place like 'Blessed America'. In December he wrote that he was grieved over the news of the death of their mother (Grandfather's second wife), and that he would wear", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211633, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 48, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "23\n\nhe examines each human's conduct and adds his comments to the records kept on each person against the day when that human will die and be summoned to enter the Courts of the Underworld for judgement.\" A temple dedicated to the Jade Emperor on Coal Hill in Peking was where the living emperor of China prayed for rain during long droughts, requesting the Jade Emperor to instruct the Dragon King to cause rain to fall.\n\nReverend Hutson in Szechuan recorded his observation that lanterns hanging before the altars of Yuh Huang were taken home by childless couples and a new lantern presented in its place if a son was born to them. These lanterns were also hung in orchards and elsewhere to secure a good crop.\n\nThe Jade Emperor is a puritanical god, offended, for example, by the sight of a pregnant member of the family attending a sacrifice. In some places women are not permitted to worship him. As supreme Sovereign of the universe he is rarely approached directly, and usually only receives devotional offerings. Worship is therefore performed with great care, and his image and altar is treated with the greatest solemnity. The common man is loath to approach him unless he has little choice. The main reason for doing so is to obtain a prediction of fate; he knows that he cannot always change it, but if the common man is aware of what is in store he can plan ahead.\n\nThe Jade Emperor is only approached directly, with great trepidation, when the plea being submitted by the devotee is of the greatest import, or when the Jade Emperor's underlings have failed to come up with the goods, and devotees' expectations have not been achieved; under normal circumstances pleas are submitted to the Jade Emperor through lesser deities. In a small temple in an immigrant community in Kowloon, the Jade Emperor, their only main deity, is approached by devotees for remission of punishment for their sins in return for promises of future good deeds. The devotees have to submit their pleas to the Jade Emperor through the temple keeper. He in turn voices their pleas to an unnamed invisible bodhisattva (pusah) who approaches the Jade Emperor on their behalf.\n\nIn many parts of China the Jade Emperor was considered too holy, too awesome, and too powerful to be represented by an image, and only a tablet bearing his title was permitted to be placed on the altar (see Plate 1). In other parts, amongst the Fukienese in particular, he is believed to reside in the ash of the main incense pot on his altar (the main altar)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211634, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 49, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "24 \n\nand not even a tablet is permitted. Images of the Jade Emperor seen in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and in South-East Asia are all very similar, portraying him as a bearded, usually gilded, image of an official seated on a throne, with a jade tablet clasped in both hands before his chest (see Plates 2 and 3). His head-dress is not a crown in the western sense, but a classic hat, the mien (mian) the rectangular mortar board cap from which is suspended, front and back, thirteen red cords bearing green, red and blue beads and descending almost to the level of his eyes. Thirteen indicates his supreme rank. This, it should be noted, is the typical standard image of a great number of official deities other than the Jade Emperor, and the only way one can categorically identify his image is to see it on his altar, or to find that it bears an original inscription describing it as the image of the Jade Emperor.\n\nHis image is placed as high on the altar as possible, even to the extent of placing it on as many as three to four tiers; his image, even more than most, must never permit his feet to be touching the ground. In a number of places he is considered to be too holy and too powerful to be portrayed by an image; his title only being recorded on a tablet which occupies the centre of his altar. Images of the Jade Emperor are to be seen not only on the main altars of temples dedicated to him but also, in a small number of instances, on secondary altars in temples dedicated to lesser deities. In Suifu in Szechuan, Graham in 1928 counted nineteen images of the Jade Emperor on altars in the town. The images were placed on the first floor of the temples whereas other gods were normally on the ground floor.\n\n7\n\nGrootaers noted that the cult of Yuh Huang was well represented in the sanctuaries built in high spots in the city of Hsuan Hua (south of Chang Chia Kou [Kalgan] and northwest of Peking). The earliest was dated 1535 AD. Yuh Huang was better known there as Hao T'ien Shang Ti and his image portrayed him as a bearded scholar with a mortar board cap.\n\nIn many folk religion temples in Ch'aochou (Teochew) communities his tablet stands in the front centre of the altar table nearest the main entrance, and in front of the main altar, with only an image of the Third Prince on his altar table standing between the Jade Emperor's tablet and the entrance. The altar of the Jade Emperor is referred to as the T'ien Kung T'an (Tiangong Tan). On his birthday, the 9th of the first lunar month, large sacrificial offerings to T'ien Kung are placed on this special altar", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211637, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 52, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "27\n\nOne of the unique features of the cult of the Jade Emperor is the extent to which members of his immediate family also appear on altars. In Taiwan and South-East Asia in Fukienese community temples, some of the daughters of the Jade Emperor are portrayed in image form on altars both with their father and alone, and prayed to in their own right. The Jade Emperor is said to have sons and four, or according to others, seven daughters. Temple keepers, when asked, without exception denied that the sons and daughters were approached by devotees who hoped for indirect but preferential treatment of their requests from the Jade Emperor.\n\nGraham in Suifu noted two statues in Jade Emperor temples portraying his daughters. (Regrettably Graham did not provide characters, simply giving their titles as Yin Fei U Nu and U Giang U Nu (the U Nu probably being Yuh Nu)).\n\nThough his daughters did not become prostitutes in the ordinary sense of the word, many amusing and ribald stories are told about them. The Jade Emperor's seventh daughter, Chang Ch'i-chieh (A) [Chang the seventh sister] chose to marry a woodcutter who, from the description in the legend, must have been not far off mentally defective. He did not even understand what a wife was. She overcame the woodcutter's mother's natural reluctance to see a beautiful and intelligent young woman throwing away her life to marry her idiot son. Ch'i Chieh was a good wife and all went well. However, unfortunately, she came to the notice of a rich and handsome young man who was determined to have her. She arranged to marry him in exchange for a very large bride-price to be paid to the idiot and, being an immortal, she punished the rich man severely on their wedding night. He promptly changed his mind and released her, whereupon she returned to the idiot who was now rich, and bore him a son. She then returned to Heaven having fulfilled the curse, but at the same time, she had punished the wicked and rewarded the filial, if idiot son.\n\nIn one temple only, small images of the mother and two wives of the Jade Emperor stand alone in a small shrine behind the main altar on which stands the image of the Jade Emperor himself. This temple layout in Silat Avenue in Singapore is very rare as the consort of the Jade Emperor, according to several different god carvers, is never portrayed on the altar. However, Graham, in Suifu in Szechuan in 1928, noted an image of the Jade Emperor's mother on the side altar in his temple, called Yuh Huang.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211668, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1989", "page_number": 83, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "58\n\nTaiwan is dedicated to General Su. He is worshipped by Lukang traders of Quemoy (Chinmen) stock for protection. Two images of him stand on the main altar, one being the main image (Su Fu Ta Wang Yeh *) and the other a secondary image (Erh Wang Yeh Em). According to the temple keeper the latter was carved to satisfy the demand of worshippers for a portable image to take home for private reverence. A third image known as the San Wang Yeh (=E) was placed on the altar of a nearby branch temple (Fen miao). A number of branch temples dedicated to Su as a Wang Yeh, a Ch'ien Sui and as a General or Marshal (Chiangchun and Yuanshuai é) are to be found in many places in central and northern Taiwan.\n\nHis image on the main altar of his temple in Lukang portrays him as black faced and black bearded, a standard carving of a seated dignitary wearing a scholar's gilded cap. Before him are seated five other images, one is the portable image of him in the centre, flanked by the four minor Ch'ien Sui, Chiu, Liang, Chin and Ts'ai,\n\nIt is interesting to note that the deities in the temple at Lukang are colloquially referred to as Su Fu San Wang Yeh, The Three Su Wang Yeh. This despite them being but one person, and there being only two images in the main temple whilst the third is in a temple nearby.\n\nFinally, some dozen or so small images of standing soldiers in a V formation together with their commander crowd a secondary altar in the temple. They represent the army of General Su.\n\nThese four are examples of non-pestilence protective deities referred to as Wang Yeh; there are a few other deities, not protective deities as such, who are also referred to as Wang Yeh in Taiwan. A good example is the T'ang emperor Ming Huang, patron of actors and actresses, known also as the Prince of the Western Ch'in (Hsi Ch'in Wang Yeh Еƒ). He fled to Szechuan province in the far west of China after he abdicated which led to him being given this title. T'ang Ming Huang is probably best known to foreigners for his infatuation with the concubine Yang Kuei-fei which nearly lost him his throne.\n\nTo conclude, the large cult of Pestilence Wang Yeh, almost exclusively worshipped nowadays by the Fukienese and referred to simply as Wang Yeh has been confused over the years with other cults whose individual deities have borne the same honorific which, despite being protective", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212158, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 100, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "77\n\nexalt the magical power of the tree god.'\n\nOn the 23rd day of the first lunar month in 1925 just west of Suifu in Szechuan province some Chinese saw a beggar lying on the ground. They returned very shortly after to find the beggar had disappeared completely, the ground where he had lain was bone dry and his imprint on the wet grass stood out. They realized that he must have been an Immortal and built a small shrine dedicated to him. Once a year thereafter, on the 23rd of the first month anniversary local people held a special festival to celebrate his disappearance.\n\nInnumerable stories are told of the creation of such new deities. These tend to have the following common factors:\n\na. a human dies under unusual circumstances and his spirit is 'found' to have special and supernatural characteristics.\n\nb. An image is carved and placed on an altar as a direct result of the god's behaviour or action. Usually the deity has appeared in a dream, or in a more tangible form as a piece of wood sometimes rough, at other times shaped (a gate or door) — floating in the sea, on a lake or a river, and manifesting supernatural characteristics.\n\nAlthough in theory the deification of a dead soul requires the joint authority of the supreme Taoist deity, the Jade Emperor and the terrestrial emperor of China, there have been a large number of minor deities in particular who owe their deification to the common people, voting with their feet, going to shrines to offer up incense and oil. And just as gods fade and disappear because of lack of support from devotees who have found other and apparently more potent deities, so the creation of new gods springs from a natural but unusual happening such as was the case of the small boy in Singapore, who, as we shall see later, was killed in 1963 by lightning.\n\nCults spring up whenever the spirit of a dead person responds to public devotions and offerings and grants devotees their requests. The deceased need not be from the distant past. An image of Chiang Kai-shek, who only died in 1976, has been seen on at least one major altar in Taiwan, against the wishes of the Kuomintang government, though they would appear to have turned a blind eye. Sun Yat-sen, one of the Republic's greatest worthies, has also been seen in both image and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 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": 212715, "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": 24, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "9\n\nany newly-opened port for them to be snatched up and at almost any price by Chinese merchants..... until the Chinese purchaser came to close quarters with the English importer, eliminating middlemen at small ports and to transferring operations chiefly to the great emporiums of Hong Kong and Shanghai.'\n\nHankow was the other city in which, on and off, Mesny spent a dozen or so years and where eventually he died, a city on the north bank of the Yangtze, part of the three-city metropolis now known as Wuhan. It was the major commercial port in central China during the second half of the 19th century, containing British, German, Russian, Japanese and French settlements, known as Concessions. Hankow was opened as a treaty port in 1861, a year before Mesny arrived there and became famous abroad as the start of the annual tea-clipper race back to England.\n\nThe province of Kueichou in south-west China, where Mesny also spent a number of years was one of the most backward areas of China. It had been under Chinese rule since the Han at about the time of Christ, but only became a separate province during the Ming, in AD 1413. Waves of Chinese immigration, mainly from neighbouring Szechuan and Hunan provinces, forced the non-Chinese minority tribesmen out of the fertile valleys leading eventually to discontent and finally rebellion. Mesny's story is illuminating in a number of respects. There were always foreigners who took up minor posts with the Chinese bureaucracy, particularly during the modernisation campaigns which took place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Old photographs exist showing foreigners in, for example, a Chinese arsenal beside foreign machinery or weapons, both as advisers and trainers, but few ever wrote of their experiences. The most interesting part of Mesny's life, however, standing out as a unique experience, was the short period of some five to six years when he served with two provincial forces of the Chinese Imperial Army on active service helping suppress a rising of the Miao, a subjugated minority race in a remote part of southern China. [See Appendix C for a summary of the first campaign against the Miao in which Mesny took part]. Probably the most interesting part of these narratives is the reasonably detailed description of Chinese soldiering during this relatively minor campaign. It is full of anecdotal descriptions of campaigning in central south China against a redoubtable foe, the Miao people, though regrettably Mesny fails to go into detail about such interesting subjects as how he was paid, how patronage worked up to him personally, etc. He does, however, cover a number of themes in his Notes on the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212719, "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": 28, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "13 \n\nimposes upon readers. He had joined the large skirmishing force led by General Liu Ho-ling, commander of the Ko-i Force of the Szechuan Army Corps and Mesny's immediate chief, to harry the Miao tribesmen. Mesny remarks that upon retiring the General and Mesny came under fire from a Miao ambush with hundreds of bullets whizzing close to them. Mesny quickly dismounted and soon cleared the wood [in which the ambushers were hidden] and the enemy fled leaving their dead and wounded. Some ten lines further on, after an anecdote about a splendid prize that he had captured, an eight foot long Miao rifle, he explained that the Miao-tzu had lost more men in and near that wood than they had all day as Mesny had laid an 'ambuscade' for them with two companies of General Liu's guards. If one bears with Mesny's usual hyperbolic claim that he had laid the successful ambush, one is left wondering what he was doing, alongside the General, when they fell into the ambush, which Mesny would appear from an earlier paragraph to have foiled alone with great success.\n\nAt another point in the narrative, when General Liu goes off leading a local attack, he leaves Mesny behind because 'the Commander-in-chief needed Mesny's advice more than he, General Liu, did.' Liu was defeated, 'badly' says Mesny, and one can sense the schadenfreude. Mesny added that one of the battalion commanders had commented that General Liu would appreciate Mesny's abilities better in future! It is not hard to imagine General Liu becoming more and more irritated by this young foreign whippersnapper who always knew best. General Liu has only to leave Mesny behind and, as luck would have it, be defeated.\n\nHis lengthy and often involved autobiographical essay in his Miscellanies only cover the period from 1861, when he was 19, to 1870 and the end of the first campaign in Kueichou to suppress the Miao tribesmen's rebellion, when he was still only 28. From 1870 on we are dependent upon the copious and varied snippets in his Miscellanies, both long and short, until the final publication of the Miscellanies in 1905 when he was 64. Dr Tiedemann of SOAS, University of London, has discovered that Mesny wrote at least a dozen letters from Kueichou from May 1872 to February 1874 published in the Shanghai newspaper, Shanghai Budget and perhaps even more in the Celestial Empire, the paper which took over the Shanghai Budget in 1874. No copies of these papers appear to be available though we can surmise that they probably covered Mesny's activities during that period. From 1905 until his death fourteen years later, in 1919, we have to rely on his obituary, admittedly", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212735, "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": 44, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "29\n\n1st Class in a sedan carried by four bearers.' This was probably no more than hyperbole. He stated in his Miscellanies that he had once possessed a very fine sedan-chair presented to him in Szechuan, with a magnetic compass let into the hand rest or bar which is placed across the chair in front of the rider to rest his hands on.\n\nImperial officials, and their principal wives, wore large embroidered square badges tacked across their surcoat's chest and back, which in addition to their hat buttons, denoted their rank. These were worn by all nine grades of civil officials and, according to Garret, by military officers of the Manchu army stationed in provincial garrisons and in Manchu quarters in large cities. This might explain why Mesny failed to mention squares, apart from five paragraphs describing them and their use, and a remark in passing that a Major-General, 2nd Class of the 2nd Degree would have a 'lion' breast badge. When he visited Amoy in 1879 he was reported in the local foreign press having worn western clothes but with the red button of mandarin rank on top of his foreign cap. As he never spelled out that he ever wore the badge and button commensurate with his military rank we shall probably never know whether he ever did wear such a badge.\n\nHe possessed a Chinese passport consisting of a large single sheet of printed white paper, usually endorsed with certain conditions but in Mesny's case it entitled him to protection in all provinces and beyond the Great Wall, unlimited as to a period of time. He was, he added, never asked for it. It called on all county officials to afford the traveller due protection, safe guidance and reasonable information. He also had at various times official Circular Dispatches [ch'uan-p'ai]. These, he explained, were issued to officials travelling on government service entitling them to named supplies of food, fodder, carts, chairs, pack mules, saddle horses, coolies and accommodation in official inns along the whole line of march.\n\nHe had an official seal when he was the General Superintendent of Foreign Ordnance for the whole of Kueichou province, an appointment he obtained during the Winter of 1875 and held until March of 1877. He explained that he observed all the due formalities of putting away his seal during the New Year annual rites and ceremonies. The seal, he claimed, bore his rank as Lieutenant-General, and Knight Ying of the Order of Pa-t'u-lu. We have no idea of the rank and grade of the Superintendent and as he does not refer to himself as Lieutenant-General", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212737, "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": 46, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "31\n\nA native of China generally, whose chief characteristics are: sobriety, frugality, and industriousness; having a burning desire for male offspring, an insatiable appetite for public notoriety, and a terrible affinity for lucre; a being who is perfectly willing at all times, and in all places, to worship the God of Wealth, Ts'ai Shen, or any other particular god or deity, as well as all the known and “unknown\" gods and his own ancestors, as far back as he, or somebody else, may be able to have traced them, but more especially any of them who may have acquired wealth or fame in any age.\n\nPatronage and Name Dropping, and Incidental Anecdotes\n\nHe appears never to have missed an opportunity throughout his long life in China to pay his respects by calling on the local county, provincial and even national mandarins. A number of these officials were referred to thereafter on more than one occasion as 'friends' or 'officials with whom [Mesny] had conferred.' The one he most prided himself on was his 'intimacy' with the Chinese senior statesman, Li Hung-chang, by whom he would appear to have been tolerated, but only just, though with the normal Chinese courtesies.\n\nMesny knew the importance of patronage and name-dropping, especially in China: this we can see from the two and a quarter pages he devoted in one of his Miscellanies to the momentary meeting with a Manchu hereditary prince; his obituary of Tso, etc. He was as obsessed with his affiliation and rapport with the Chinese as he was about females, and at every possible opportunity he managed to name-drop and rub home his kindred feeling for the Chinese together with descriptions of their reciprocation in kind. Mesny refers with pride on a number of occasions to Chinese 'sworn brothers.' He disclosed these individually either without ever referring to them again or in some instances he simply mentioned their names in passing during descriptions of his journeys. One such blood brother was Chang Kuang-chun (or -chin) who in about 1874 was an Expectant ta-t'ai of Szechuan, and a Metropolitan literary graduate [Chin-shih] of the Tao Kuang reign. Another was Chang Ping-tang, the Military Secretary to the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force. Elsewhere in the Miscellany he claimed to have two Chinese sworn brothers, one a literary and the other a military undergraduate whom he had met whilst travelling in a provincial town in Kueichou. He met", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "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": 212742, "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": 51, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "36 \n\nsomething more than ordinary adventure.' \n\nAgain, after a theatrical performance by a Chinese actor and actress in a provincial town in Kueichou province, Mesny wrote that local people, believing him [he was then 36] to be very old as he had a beard, knew that foreign women must be inferior; \"They must be, “they added\", as foreign men pass by but never foreign women, and foreign men marry Chinese wives.' Mesny added that he had one 'with very small feet and wears elegantly embroidered red satin shoes!' This must have been in 1878. \n\nWriting a paragraph under the heading of 'Slave Girls', Mesny noted that it was a common thing for well-to-do people to present a couple of slave girls to a daughter as part of their marriage dowry. It was also customary with respectable people to release slave girls when marriageable. Mesny added that he had bought three different girls, two in Szechuan, for a few taels each [less than 15 dollars Mexican]. One he released in Tientsin, another died in Hong Kong; the other he gave in marriage to a faithful servant of his. \n\nIn his Miscellanies he described a number of Chinese women, young and beautiful, who [or so he claimed] desired to marry him. Some he encouraged but in each instance the story peters out, others disappear out of his stories without explanation or further mention. He also had a 'romantic and intimate interlude' with a young Chinese widow, who did not appear to be short of money, and who accompanied Mesny down river to Hankow where they remained in a house near the Yamen where Mesny frequently visited her. He noted at one point that 'there was nothing like gushing love between us, but I could not fail to admire such an admirably sensible woman. What she thought was admiring in me I know not, but I know she said from the first that she required my protection. The only time that I ever noticed anything like affectionate love on her part for me was on my first visit to her after my misadventure at the Lung-wang Miao\". Then she wept. She took my head very gently between her fine hands and repeatedly kissed the fresh scars of my recent wounds... we were both silent.' Despite this, he shortly afterwards described in the Miscellany that he, Mesny, 'had been busy at work and with his friend Pickerell, and paid frequent visits to my charmer near the Tao-t'ai's Yamen. She complained of the scarcity and brevity of my visits and showed unmistakable signs of being in a condition likely to increase the already great population of the vast empire of China.'", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212749, "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": 58, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "43\n\nespecially in water, He wrote that the Chinese generally assert that snakes and tortoises cohabit; he continued with a story with details at variance with his original version, “and I have seen paintings of turtles and tortoises,1 and metal castings also, with a snake wound about, the emblem of strength and longevity; and on inquiry, I have always been told the same story that it was the only way of multiplying both species. In the Miscellany he also wrote that he had seen a bronze image of a turtle and snake connected together in one of the taoist temples at Chi-nan Fu in Shantung.\n\nVery occasionally his stories verged on the salubrious but were never risqué. Describing his voyage up the Yangtze and passing Wu Shan he described an incident from Chinese mythology which led to a Chinese euphemism. The legend was about the 'pious and eccentric lady Yao-chi who lived before the Christian era immortalised by the ancient poet Sung Yü in an ode. She had entertained a princely guest in the Yang Tai Tower of Voluptuousness, and gratified him with the delights of Yün-yü, 'the Clouds and Rain,' hence the saying Yün-meng T'ai, 'Cloudy Dream of the Voluptuous Tower' which had become a synonym for excessive love and passionate desire for sexual intercourse. The name Yao-chi has in the same manner become the common appellation of renowned courtesans.\n\nSumming Up\n\nMesny's life in China falls neatly in two parts, the first thirteen years of excitement and adventure, followed by forty-five years living to a great extent on his 'bubble reputations', a spent force, living from day to day always in the hope of something turning up. It rarely does and on his own admission he fluctuated from comparative wealth to living hand to mouth.\n\nThere is however little doubt that at one period in his life at least, Mesny was trusted by his immediate Chinese superiors, as far that is as any Chinese official would have faith and confidence in a non-Chinese. These were the Chinese generals in the Imperial Army of Szechuan under whom Mesny served in Kueichou. Mesny seems to have spent the rest of his life trying, not all that successfully, to ensure that his ambitions were beneficial and to the best advantage of all, including himself. He made a great point about his ideas for the modernisation of China, each of them in turn rejected but then later put into practice without", "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": 212753, "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": 62, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "47\n\n18\n\non the depth and interest of their writings. Some, like Archibald Colquhoun1 went into great detail describing the wealth of minerals, the scope for modernisation in communications and the economy, all subjects which Mesny too, at the same period if not earlier, had written about at length. Others like Mrs Scidmore2 list 'intrepid travellers to Szechuan3 and the far west,' with names like Richtofen, Pumpelly, Von Kreitner, Hosie, Baber, Blaikiston, Little, Gill, Hart, Parker, and Pratt, Mrs Little and Mrs Bishop, and Dr Morrison, but not one of these authors referred to Mesny whose travels and experiences outweigh most if not all of them. Was it because he was considered to have gone native or been more Chinese than ‘one of us\"? We shall never know but each time yet another book was published it must have been galling for Mesny to find only very rarely he had earned a mention. After his trip with Gill to Tibet and India in 1877 he was scarcely referred to in books on China; this together with his constant and repeated reference to his contacts with and closeness to Chinese friends and acquaintances, mostly in high places, suggests that he was ostracised or perhaps no more than ignored by the western social community in Chinese ports and in Shanghai in particular.\n\nDuring his later years when fortune seemed to elude him, when there was no caste lower than the impoverished European or American, a number of themes and points of view in Mesny's writings place him fairly firmly into a class and category of his time. A plague of self-importance swept late-Victorian Britain and spread through its colonies and dependencies. Mesny suffered a massive dose and never, as far as his Miscellany record, appears to have had his balloon pricked. He must have been seen by foreigners in Shanghai and, in particular by his fellow 'Old China Hands', during the latter years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this as a vulgar, low-born upstart, too fond of his own ideas, a self-centred braggart and an opinionated man, but let it be stressed that he would not be alone in this category in Shanghai or for that matter in all the other major western communities in the Orient. His own notes reflect the disdain with which he was regarded by people like Sir Thomas Wade and Sir Robert Hart. His name dropping in many of his writings, mostly in his personal relationships with Chinese viceroys, provincial governors and commanders in chief, suggests that he probably also dropped names to the same extent in everyday conversation. However, he knew the importance of patronage, especially in China, as one can see from his obituary of Tso, and his description of the momentary meeting with a Manchu hereditary prince.", "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": 212760, "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": 69, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "54\n\ncontinuation of Chapter VII of his long-running serial on The Life and Adventures of a British Pioneer in China describing his journey from Hankow to Kueichou in 1868. The Notice explained that 'the original notes taken by me [Mesny] on the journey were sent by special request to Mr. William Tarrant, Editor and Proprietor of The Friend of China, a newspaper published at Shanghai in those days. Before having published my notes, however, Tarrant died and his printing establishment was taken over by Messrs. Little Brothers, I believe, and my notes thus fell into their hands, and no doubt sharpened the appetite of Mr and Mrs Archibald Little for travelling in Szechuan. At any rate I never saw or heard anything more of those notes although I occasionally saw in the columns of the North China Daily News, notes of a Journey to Szechuan which were so very much like mine that I wrote to Mr F. H. Balfour about them, believing they formed part of the notes I had sent to Tarrant. In the winter of 1880-1881 I happened to be again at Chungking and there told the late Consul-General E. Colbourne Baber about the lost notes. Baber thereupon persuaded me to rewrite them from memory without further delay and I did so, hence the present chapters with their many imperfections.' The accusation that the Littles had been involved in 'pirating' his travels would have been serious and may have prompted a response. However, none appears to have been made. The explanation that he had had to rewrite the travels from memory explains why there were so many gaps and duplications. It was however strange that he delayed so long the publication of such a serious allegation against the Littles.\n\nIt is clearer in Volume IV, even more than in previous ones, that Mesny likes to portray himself as more Chinese than Western. He has long commented on individual friendships with numerous Chinese whilst rarely mentioning Europeans and Americans. When he does, they are usually sinologists of one form or another, mainly missionaries like Moule, Griffith, etc. The first article, if it may be called such, was a two-page biography of Tso Tsung-t’ang, a former Governor General or Viceroy of the Min-Che provinces. When Tso was posted to the Shen-Kan provinces in 1865 Mesny called on him in Hankow to pay his respects, and after the Viceroy had learnt that Mesny had been a prisoner of the Taipings, he immediately appointed Mesny as his French and English secretary. In the early 1880s, he invited Mesny to visit him in Foochow where he was again the Viceroy of the Min-che provinces, with a view to Mesny undertaking some progressive works including telegraphs, railways, and mining. The Viceroy died before Mesny was able to call", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212762, "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": 71, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "56\n\ntogether with his regular recommendations to the Chinese government, such as the one for the Chinese capital under a new regime to be moved from Peking but not to Nanking which would, he suggested, be the natural Chinese choice, but to Si-an, nearer central China and better able to be defended from invaders, were interspersed amongst other more mundane factual paragraphs.\n\nVery occasionally his stories verged on the salubrious, but were never risqué. He described Patriarch Lu Tsu, one of the Eight Immortals, as the author of an extraordinary work on the art of massage. By a certain process of massage, if systematically continued for some time, it was possible, so wrote Mesny, to deprive young men and women of their desire for sexual intercourse. They were practically rendered impotent and maintained so, without injury to their health or intellect. This was practised in Szechuan and Hupei provinces, especially in the large monasteries and nunneries of the Taoist and Buddhist priesthood, wherein celibacy was strictly enforced and easily maintained.\n\nMesny was not above writing very puerile articles. One such in 1896 was a parody on the subject of the Shanghai Mixed Court in the British Concession, referred to by him as the 'tribunal of injustice', which is now practically impossible to understand without knowledge of the personalities of the day, whom Mesny disguised behind pseudonyms. It filled some five columns on four pages and may have amused some readers and rid Mesny of some of his spleen, but a century later it reads so poorly that it is embarrassing. Something at the Mixed Court had so upset Mesny that he must have rushed into print, writing in the vein of many similar letters to the press in England at that time signed by 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' etc.\n\nThe contents of the Miscellany included serialised weekly parts running for a couple of months or so on substantial subjects such as:\n\n[1] The Taiping Rebellion or the Life and Adventures of a British Pioneer in China. This provided many pages of detailed and often petty experiences, such as his voyage up the Yangtze in 1868, where he repeats minor incidents often ad nauseam. Better descriptions of, for example, voyages up the Yangtze have been written by other westerners, such as Little, with excellent photographs, something Mesny appears not to have", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212767, "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": 76, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "61\n\nNovember 1862\n\n1863 March\n\n1863 May 1864 April\n\n1864\n\n1864-1865\n\n1867 Winter\n\n1867\n\nhis junk and three others\n\nCaptured at Fu-shan-chan by Taiping rebels. Mesny held first in Soochow and Chang-shu, then at Pao-ying the Taiping camp, and finally in Nanking\n\nRescued by Adkins, the British Consul at Chin-kiang aboard HMS Slaney and taken back to Chin-kiang\n\nJoined Chinese Imperial Customs Service, Hankow\n\nResigned from Customs Service after fourteen months Involved in cotton broking\n\nEstablished the Hankow Horse Bazaar, a private hotel in Hankow, and set up Hupei Iron and Brassworks, Han-yang Romantic interlude with a Chinese widow in Hankow Mesny called on Tso Tsung-tang during the latter's visit to Hankow and was appointed his French and English Secretary, and was further offered the opportunity to accompany Tso on his campaign to the Northwest. Mesny also claimed that he had made recommendations to Marquis Tso Tsung-tang for a number of undertakings to help modernise China\n\nSold the Huper Iron and Brassworks to officials of the Viceroy of Szechuan province\n\nMesny's trek to war\n\n1868 June\n\nLate July or early August Late August\n\nSeptember\n\nLeft Hankow, after five year's residence, for Szechuan to become a drill instructor with the Szechuan Force\n\nArrived Chungking\n\nDeparted Chungking for Kueichou to join the Szechuan Force suppressing the Miao rebellion: he accepted employment as a military instructor (wu-chiao hsi)\n\nArrived Niu-ch'ang, the headquarters of the Szechuan Force in Kueichou\n\nSeptember 1868-May 1874 Involved in the military campaigns to suppress the Miao\n\nThe Advance: Late Summer 1868-March 1869\n\n1869\n\nPromoted Colonel, awarded the Star of China and the Flowery Plume The Retreat: Summer 1869-Summer 1870 1870/1871\n\n1871\n\n1872\n\nHelped form a joint stock company in Kuei-yang to \"recover mercury\"\n\nThe Withdrawal: mid-August 1870-Lunar New Year 1871\n\nca 1873\n\n1873\n\n1874 Spring\n\nEstablished a small day school for poor boys and girls in the Jade Emperor temple in Kuei-yang, importing suitable books and paying a Chinese teacher, a struggling student painter, Chin Yü-t'ang Siege of Hsin-ch'eng in upper Kueichou (Mesny involved in preparations for the siege during 1871)\n\nWent to Szechuan with General Chou Ta-wu\n\nPromoted Major-General and awarded the Ying-yung Pa-t'u-lu Left Kueichou for Szechuan: Margary expected to meet Mesny in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212768, "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": 77, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "62 \n\n1874 April \n\nJuly October \n\n1874 \n\n1874 December Late 1874 \n\n1875 Summer? 1875 Winter \n\n1877 February \n\nKueichou, but Mesny had already departed \n\nTo Ch'engtu (six month stay] \n\nVisited the temple dedicated to Tu Fu the poet in Ch’engtu Returned by very large houseboat via Sui-fu, Chungking and I-ch'ang to Hankow. Mesny entertained at the palace of General Viscount Pao Chao in K'uei-chou en route on the Yangtze. In Hankow he met Rev. David Hill \n\nPublished 'Tungking' [date in the book itself: Mesny however, claimed later that it was published in 1875] \n\nOfficially married Nien Suey-tsen in Hankow \n\nTravelled overland from Chin-kiang, through Shantung [Chi-nan], en route for Peking. Spent winter in Chi-nan at invitation of Ting Pao-chen, the Governor of Shantung, to whom he claimed he had been an adviser \n\nPeking \n\nReturned to Kueichou via Shanghai [November]. Hankow and Human [1876] Re-appointed Superintendent of the Kueichou Armouries, an appointment he held until March 1877 \n\nMesny entertained two British Protestant missionaries in Kuei-yang \n\nOverland Trek to Western China, through Burma to India and by sea to England \n\n28 May \n\nJune 1878 8 January \n\nNovember \n\n26 December 28 December \n\n1879 February \n\n9 March 4 June \n\nDeparted Kuei-yang for Szechuan [his third visit to the province (en route for England, via Tibet, Burma and India, with Captain Gill)] Arrived Ch'engtu \n\nArrived in England from Calcutta \n\nVisited Channel Islands \n\nReceived telegram from Chinese Minister in London desiring Mesny to accompany the returning Chinese Minister at Berlin to China: departed! Marseilles for Hong Kong aboard the Irrawaddy Arrived Hong Kong from England \n\nDeparted Hong Kong for Canton \n\nVisited Amoy \n\nDeparted Canton for Kueichou, via Kuei-lin (Kuangsi] Arrived Kuei-lin \n\n25 July \n\nArrived Tu-yun Fu \n\n4 August [1880/1881] \n\n1880 February \n\n15 March \n\nAugust \n\n1881 January \n\nFebruary \n\nArrived Kuei-yang \n\nPossibly visited Hanoi? \n\nGovernor of Kueichou province recommended Mesny to the Throne for the bestowal of posthumous honours for three generations [San-tai Erh-p'in Kao-feng] \n\nSet out for Lan-chou via Chungking [where he had remained six months] \n\nMesny spent the night at Ch'ien-hsi Chou, some 90 kms NNW of Kuei-yang, where he was attacked by an armed mob Departed Chungking [after 'delay due to unexpected contretemps\" which Mesny did not clarify] \n\nArrived Lanchou \n\nDeparted Lanchou, crossed Gobi to Ham taking six to seven weeks", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212771, "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": 80, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "65\n\n1900 ca 1900\n\n1901 December\n\n1904\n\n1905 Jan/Jun\n\n1907\n\nca 1910/1911\n\n1914 November\n\nca 1914/1915\n\n1914-1919\n\n11 Dec 1919\n\nClaims to have volunteered for service in Peking [Boxer troubles]\n\nMesny visited Nan-chang in Kiangsi where he met Hsiung Shih-fu, a young reformer\n\nInterviewed Viceroy Liu K'un-yı în Nanking.\n\nPublished Mesny's Chinese and English Almannac\n\nPublication of his final volume of his Chinese Miscellany\n\nMost Excellent High Priest in the Keystone Royal Arch Chapter, in Shanghai\n\nHis wife, Han, obtained a legal separation in Shanghai\n\nMesny moved to Hankow\n\nClaims to have passed a medical and then offered his services to the Crown [World War 1]\n\nEmployed by Messrs. Reiss and Co. in Hankow\n\nDied in rue de Paris in Hankow\n\nAppendix C\n\nThe Chinese Imperial Forces\n\nMesny's Involvment in the Suppression of the Miao Revolt\n\nThe First Campaign by Imperial Troops\n\nin Kueichou Province\n\n1868-1871\n\nand\n\nOrder of Battle of the Szechuan Force\n\nChinese Imperial Forces, with the aid of a number of foreigners and foreign arms, had by 1864 succeeded in suppressing the Taiping rebellion against the dynasty. They then turned to liquidating the other rebellions seething in various parts of China which included the Nien movement in northern China, the Moslem minority revolt in Yunnan province, another major Moslem uprising in the North-west, and finally the Miao aboriginal tribes which had revolted in Kueichou province.\n\nThe Miao, or Miao-tzu as Mesny refers to them, rose against the Ch'ing dynasty Manchu rulers of China in 1854 after discontent reached boiling point due not only to Chinese settlers colonising the best lands in the low lying areas of the province of Kueichou, but also to the exploitation of the Miao by Chinese officials and merchants. According to Mesny the passionate and untamed Miao gradually took back almost the whole province apart from the capital, Kuei-yang Fu, and the city", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212772, "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": 81, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "66\n\nof An-shun Fu until, by 1867, the Imperial troops, who had first fought to suppress the major threat from the Taipings, were able to raise sufficient forces to recover the 'lost' lands. The two Kueichou campaigns dragged on for five or more years with, so some claimed, possibly only one tenth of the Miao population surviving. Mesny only describes the first campaign.\n\nThe story of the first campaign which took place in the northern part of the remote and mountainous province of Kueichou during the four years from 1868 as described by Mesny consists of episodes, incidents and background in a day by day or month by month description of one or two of the major skirmishes and assaults, victories and defeats of the one particular Chinese Imperial force, raised and funded by the province of Szechuan. Two other forces were involved, the armies of Hunan province and the internal force of Kueichou province whose army was combined with a force from Yunnan province [northern Kueichou being flanked by the provinces of Szechuan, Hunan and Yunnan]. Mesny's descriptions of the problems of military re-supply, funding, rewarding merit, the punishment of criminals both military and civilian, the treatment of prisoners and medical problems, as well as his descriptions of camp life and inter-officer relations, make the narrative a most interesting story.\n\nThe campaign has been hardly mentioned in histories of China and was probably of little interest in Peking at the time. However, here we had three Chinese Imperial forces operating far from supply bases, some with little incentive to do much more than draw their pay and keep their heads down, and a foreigner with a glorified opinion of his own importance, based in the heart of the Szechuan Force alongside the general in charge of the Central Army and not too far from the Commander-in-Chief [C-in-C]. Mesny's role, so he told us, was to advise his C-in-C and his general on modern foreign arms and their maintenance. We should however bear in mind that Mesny was but 26 at the start of the campaign, and had had no official military training other than having been a seaman and having learned something about the handling of artillery from British ex-servicemen whilst he had been a Customs Officer with the Chinese Imperial Customs on the Yangtze. Amongst his numerous claims to military fame one of the lesser ones was his successful organisation and training of a company of artificers for use at headquarters during the first Kueichou campaign.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212773, "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": 82, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "67\n\nMesny, writing in the first person some thirty years later, was not in any way slow in claiming that he played key roles in the campaign and frequently related how his improvements on the battle plans conceived by the Szechuan Force's senior officers were immediately adopted and were always successful. On the occasion when a general went ahead with his plan without Mesny, which ended in defeat and failure, Mesny made no bones about it; the failure was due to the lack of foresight of the general concerned for not first consulting Mesny!\n\nAlso of significance is the infrequent mention by Mesny of the Manchu Tartars. Considering that China was at this stage still under the rule of the Manchu dynasty, with the main forces of the Imperial Army in Manchu hands, and whose armies consisted to a considerable extent of Manchu bannermen, there is no indication from Mesny of Manchus being involved in the campaigns to suppress the Miao, and his only reference to the Manchus was the sighting of Manchu women in a town on his journey along the Yangtze. Manchu emperors had permitted only Manchus real power and had not allowed Chinese to hold independent commands until Tseng Kuo-fan was given a military command during the Taiping rebellion, in 1852. His army, called the Army of Hunan, won many of its battles leading to other Chinese armies being raised, one of which was the Army of Szechuan into which Mesny was recruited. How much Mesny understood the behind-the-scenes politics in play directing the control of the force in which he served is difficult to assess as, for example, he does not refer to the Manchus at any point. He would have us believe that he was frequently the confidante of Chinese senior military officers; logic, however, suggests that he, a foreigner in his twenties who had had no previous military experience, would be unlikely to be told anything of the more complex struggles and challenges for control and power within his or other Chinese forces.\n\nMesny's position within the Chinese Imperial military, as he described it, was complex. On joining the Szechuan Army Corps at Kuei-yang at the age of 26 in 1868, he was given a commission and brevet rank of Ch'ien-tsung +, which he equated on one page of his Miscellany to a First Class Warrant Officer or Sergeant Major, and on another page with a Company Commander or Captain.\n\nIn early 1870 he was awarded the rank and honour of ts'an-chiang hsien. The 'hsien', according to Hucker in his Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China, is a troublesome term. It is often", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212774, "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": 83, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "68\n\nrendered as brevet rank, which Mesny did. 'Ts'an-chiang is an assistant regional commander [tsung-ping kuan], rank 3a in the Chinese forces called the Green Banner. However, according to Brunnert and Hagelstrom, [Present Day Political Organisation of China [1911], translated from the Russian], it equated to Lieutenant Colonel. Mesny lists it as 'Colonel, the lowest grade of general.\n\nBy the latter days of the second Kueichou campaign he appears to have been promoted to the rank of Major-General, and some twelve years later was awarded the rank of Brevet Lieutenant-General, bearing the title for the remainder of his life. As he is portrayed in foreign-style uniform in a photograph in the Miscellany and yet occasionally refers to himself wearing Chinese attire with his Chinese buttons of rank, it is far from clear whether these were genuine ranks or honorary ones awarded to an attached civilian. It is noteworthy that he never refers to himself wearing a mandarin square [the chest badge], though he does mention his cap button. His uniform as an instructor in the army of Tso Tsung-tang consisted of a cap of the French kepi pattern, ornamented with the Chinese coat of arms [two dragons struggling for a burning globe], with a coat and trousers of dark blue navy cloth, ‘nicely braided front, back and sleeves.\n\nMesny explained that between 1868-1871 for two or more years he was in one corps of fifteen2 battalions styled the Ko-i Ch'üan-chün [brigade], part of the Shu-chün, the Szechuan Army Corps; and another for four years with a corps styled Wu-tzu Ch'üan-chün741, also in Kueichou, i.e. from 1871-1874. The latter corps was also in the original Hsiang-chün, [the Hunan Army]. Regrettably this confuses his story rather than clarifying it, as we do not know when he served with the Hsiang-chün unless he means the Wu-tzu corps which in another part of his Miscellany he noted to have been part of the Hunan Force.\n\nAs far as can be ascertained from the jigsaw pieces he has supplied us with, Mesny, when he was with the Szechuan Army Corps in the first campaign in Kueichou province from 1868-1871, and again during the second campaign from 1871-1876 with the Wu-tzu Hunan Army Corps, almost certainly served with one of the new provincial armies which he refers to in his Miscellany as Disciplined Army Battalions.3 At no point does he actually say so in so many words, but bearing in mind the grades he gave for the ranks and styles of the senior officers in his Force and as he was particularly scathing about the proficiency of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212775, "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": 84, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "69\n\nGreen Standard forces and not so about the Lien-chün, we can assume that he was a member of, or attached to one of the Lien-chün.\n\nMesny wrote relatively short explanatory notes in the first volume of his Miscellanies on the three armies, the Army of the Huai River, the Army of the Hsiang River and the Army of Ch'u, about which he felt he had unique knowledge having served with the Chinese military.\n\n'The Huai Army, an important Field Force raised in the area drained by the River Huai, did such good service to the Imperial cause under the C-in-C Li Hung-chang, who had been wise enough to advocate and introduce the use of foreign weapons. The Ever-victorious Army, styled Chang-sheng Chün, first organised and disciplined in a foreign manner by General Ward and subsequently rendered so famous under the command of General Gordon, was the principal corps of this army, and consisted of 5,000 men all told. The Ming-tzu Ying, another corps of the same army, raised by General and later Governor Liu Ming-ch'uan, and disciplined by General Pinel and Colonel Lucas, though senior to the Ever-victorious was, however, secondary in importance at the time' [but still existed when Mesny was writing this in 1895].\n\nAt no time did Mesny allude to a general staff in the sense we understand it today. This raises the question what did the Force have by way of what we now call an operations staff or department? Nor did Mesny refer to staff officers responsible for the organisation of manpower or materials; and although he mentioned procurement officers and a staff of officers surrounding the General commanding to carry out his bidding, 'operations' as such, the most crucial aspect of an army's functioning was kept strictly in the hands of the Szechuan force C-in-C. It would appear that military operations in their wider sense were directed by civil mandarins who were more interested in cost cutting than in the direction of the campaign, whereas the military officers, who grade for grade were very much the juniors to the civil mandarins, were responsible for the day to day running of the various forces.\n\nForward planning was always limited by financial constraints. Arms and ammunition, rations and reinforcements had to be reviewed and planned well in advance, but with the attitude of the Viceroy in Ch'eng-tu [according to Mesny] and the restraints imposed by him little could ever be expected to be achieved.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212776, "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": 85, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "70\n\nOne of the problems faced by the Szechuan Force commander was the distance between his headquarters and the Viceroy's Yamen in the Szechuanese capital at Ch'eng-tu and the time it took for orders and reports to be carried between them. The length of time between reporting back to Ch'eng-tu and receiving instructions either encouraged the Force commander to take too much upon himself or to sit and wait for further intelligence or instructions. When the Hunanese Force was defeated on its way to take part in a joint operation with the Szechuan force, communications were such that the first the Szechuanese general knew that the plan had gone wrong was from stragglers from the defeated Hunanese Force and from captured Miao. Considering the terrain the commanders had no real choice as communications relied upon runners who had to cross enemy country where the Miao who knew the country well were in full control.\n\nWhilst Mesny did not provide any evidence of the consultative procedure, if indeed there was one, between the Viceroy of Szechuan and the Szechuan Force commander, we do know from Mesny that the military commander in Ch’eng-tu, the Tartar General Chung-shih, was visited by the Szechuan Force commander when the Szechuan Force commander returned to the provincial capital to pay his respects to the visiting Li Hung-chang.\n\nAn Outline Description of The First Campaign against the Miao: 1868-1871\n\nThe first campaign by the Chinese Imperial Forces in Kueichou to suppress the rebellious Miao tribesmen, as seen through Mesny's eyes, began with a thrust by the major element of the Szechuan Force into the heartland of Miao territory during the late summer of 1868. The Kueichou provincial Force and the Hunan Force, two other separate armies under their own commanders, paid and supported by their own provinces, flanked the Szechuan Force though, as we hear little about them and their activities from Mesny, we are led to believe that they were relatively inactive. The interesting point about the forces used to suppress this local rebellion of Miao tribesmen [which was minor on the scale of events], was that each of the Chinese Imperial forces was controlled unilaterally and led by Chinese officers from the contiguous provinces of Kueichou, Hunan and Szechuan without any senior general empowered to command all three forces. Until relatively recently senior military commanders in the Chinese Imperial Army had in the main been Manchus and not native Chinese.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212777, "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": 86, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "71\n\nThe Szechuan Force, of five corps with a total of thirty-three battalions* [i.e. 18-20,000 men] to start with, had two brigades up to full strength, the An-ting Brigade and the Ko-i Brigade [the latter with fifteen and a half battalions]. Mesny was located with the headquarters of the Ko-i Brigade during most of the campaign as a foreign adviser to the C-in-C of the Force on the use and maintenance of foreign arms. His descriptions of skirmishes between the Imperial troops and the Miao tribesmen reflect this limitation, being restricted to what he saw for himself and information he was able to gather within both the C-in-C's and the Ko-i Brigade Headquarters.\n\nThe first location of the headquarters of the Ko-i Brigade referred to by Mesny was Niu-ch'ang, though it moved forward shortly afterwards towards the old city of Huang-p'ing Chou. The vanguard advanced to Ma-ping-bah, occupying a Miao camp where the Szechuan Force planned to spend the winter of 1868/9. Shortly after this, Mesny moved to Huang-p'ing Chou, and described a skirmish at Ta-ngai, followed the next day by a full-scale battle at Huang-p'ing itself.\n\nJust before Chinese New Year in 1869, the Ko-i Brigade despatched a reconnaissance party in the direction of the Miao headquarters at Hsin-chou [Huang-p'ing New Town] some ten miles further into tribal Kueichou beyond the old city of Huang-p'ing. They discovered that the Miao had left only a small body of men in the town, having withdrawn their headquarters to Wu-ku Lung. The day after the New Year, a large body of Miao rebels descended from the hills and fired on the Imperial camp at Huang-p'ing but were driven off by the Ko-i Guards Regiment.\n\nRegionalism and factionalism were two powerful factors influencing the inter-personal relationships between members of the various Forces involved in the Kueichou campaign. In order to achieve anything, one had to rely on personal connections. Mesny, who did not hide his partisan views, repeats again and again how unfairly his Commander-in-Chief, T'ang Chiung, had been treated both in rewards for good service and in support, both financial and matériel [both of which were withheld]. Jealousy between the commanders of the various forces caused not only disharmony but, if Mesny is to be believed and there is no reason to doubt him, the failure of the whole of the first campaign. One of China's cultural characteristics was reflected in a number of instances referred to in Mesny's narrative. Personal relationships and connections, 'squeeze', and deep concern for one's self to the detriment of others were the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212778, "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": 87, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "72\n\nbasic elements of the social network and were such obvious facts of life that Chinese took them for granted and did not think of them as in any way unusual.\n\nThe Army of the Hsiang was an important Field Force raised in Hunan, especially in the area of the Hsiang River, a sort of counter-balance to the Huai River Army, raised about the same time for the suppression of the Taiping rebellion in the valley of the Yangtze and elsewhere. The Marquis Tseng Kuo-fan was the C-in-C of the Hsiang-chün consisting of Hunan troops which had at first been designated as the Ch'u-chün or Army of Ch'u, a name derived from the ancient state of Ch'u, which comprised the provinces of Hunan and Hupei, as well as other provinces including the whole or part of Anhui and Honan. The Ch'u-chün was commanded by Tso Tsung-t'ang. The Hsiang Army was divided into several army corps or divisions, each numbering from ten to twenty, or even thirty battalions each of five hundred men. Each corps had a distinct designation or appellation, derived from the locality where it was actually organised or from the name or part of the name of the commander of the particular corps. One corps however, the principal one, was styled the Hsiang-ying from its having been organised in the prefecture of Changsha Fu on the banks of the Hsiang River. When more corps were required, however, the name Hsiang-chün was brought into use as with the Huai-chün, to represent all the corps of each army.”\n\nAlthough Mesny obliquely mentioned a higher command, the Ministry of War in Peking, regrettably he did not offer any information which would explain the subordination and chain of command other than telling us that the commander of the Szechuan Force, General T'ang, took his orders from the Viceroy of Szechuan and obtained supplies and funding, when they were forthcoming, from the Szechuanese provincial authorities in Ch'eng-tu.\n\nThe plan now was for the main body of the Ko-i Brigade to advance and occupy the city of Chung-an [Szu] on the Chung-an River by way of Ta-ngai and Chung-pai (later renamed Chung-sheng), whilst another element of the brigade would advance and occupy Huang-p'ing Hsin-chou [New Town].\n\nThe advance began on 18 March 1869. Several days later Chung-an had been occupied and fortified, as had Huang-p'ing New Town. Chung-an was overlooked by hills and mountains occupied by", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212779, "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": 88, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "73\n\nmany Miao, a number of whom wished to live in peace and had offered allegiance to the Imperial Force. Meanwhile the Miao rebels who were constructing stockades on the mountain sides above Chung-an prior to attempting to destroy the Imperial Force, were able to observe the C-in-C's headquarters together with Imperial reinforcements and supplies arrive from Ma-ping-bah.\n\nThe Szechuan Force's next objective was the city of Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien some 20 miles away, on the far side of the river. Despite having been in rebel hands for the previous eighteen years it was captured without too much difficulty though the Imperial Force had had a tough time for a day or so repelling Miao counter-attacks.\n\nThe C-in-C of the Szechuan Force sent a proposal to the C-in-C of the Hunan Force suggesting that the Szechuanese should advance on one side of the river Chung-an with the Hunan Force advancing up the other and, as the Hunanese had gunboats, they could also advance up the river itself.\n\nMeanwhile, and here Mesny's chronology is questionable, in early May 1869 the Ko-i Brigade advanced on Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien and prepared to storm the thirteen Miao stockades on the Tieh-chang Po heights above the town. Eventually after a fierce struggle and capture of the stockades, the Ko-i Brigade awaited the approach of the Hunan Force which should have been taking the next mountain range at the same time. Mid-afternoon on the day of the assault on the stockades, as the Hunanese had not appeared, the Ko-i Brigade withdrew to their camp in Chung-an, only to learn that the Hunan Force after initial successes had been badly defeated at Wu-ku Lung.\n\nThe Szechuan Force then remained comparatively inactive in Chung-an for the next seventeen months, until November 1870.\n\nMeanwhile, during the summer of 1869, Miao rebel forces had defeated the Kueichou provincial Force at Tu-yün Fu which left the Szechuan Force undefeated but out on a limb with both flanks exposed by the defeat of the Hunan Force on one side and the defeat of the Kueichou Force on the other. The emergence of a new Miao rebel chieftain threatened the Szechuan Force whilst at the same time the lines of communication between the Szechuan Force and the provincial capital at Kuei-yang and the rear base at Tsun-i were in danger of being cut.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212780, "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": 89, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "74\n\nRepeated references by Mesny to the refusal by the Szechuan provincial Viceroy to send funds, supplies, reinforcements and rations to his provincial Force in Kueichou were followed by harrowing descriptions of the great hardships caused to the Szechuanese troops, with rations virtually non-existent and rampant disease carrying off many men.\n\nBy mid-winter of 1869/70 the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force decided that he could no longer wait for the Hunan Force to complete its reorganisation, and made up his mind to capture Ka-ba Niu-ch’ang, near to where the Hunan Force had been defeated the previous year. In the event the main body of the Ko-i Brigade were defeated with heavy losses though the rest of the Szechuan Force managed to hold on. The Ko-i Brigade, after a feint attack by a flanking element of the Szechuan Force which drew off the Miao rebels, eventually reached Wu-ku Lung and Ka-ba Niu-ch'ang.\n\nAgain the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force proposed joint action with the Hunan Force, supporting an advance this time towards Tu-yün Fu and Ma-ho Chou with the express aim of relieving pressure on the provincial capital. The Hunan Commander appears not to have agreed and, without co-operation and united action, nothing could be attempted and nothing therefore was done. However, T'ang, the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force again decided to act alone. He seemed to be unaware at the time that a new Kueichou provincial C-in-C, Chou Ta-wu, had been appointed to command all troops within the province operating against the rebels; this included the Szechuan and Hunan Forces. T'ang went ahead, ordering the withdrawal of the main body of the Szechuan Force from its forward positions in Miao territory in mid August, leaving behind at Ch'ang-p'ing Hsien some fourteen battalions of his now increased Force to hold the line until new plans could be made and carried out. In less than three days the main body of the Force had retreated unmolested through Ta-ngai and Niu-ch'ang to Weng-an Hsien where the main body remained whilst the C-in-C and his headquarters withdrew a further 20 miles to Kou-ch'ang (later renamed Lung-ch'ang: about half way between Kuei-yang and Tsun-i).\n\nThe commander of one half of the force of the fourteen battalions left behind at Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien decided off his own bat to evacuate the city, abandoning all camp kit and equipment, and fleeing with his seven battalions to Kuei-yang where he spread a report that the main body", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212781, "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": 90, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "75\n\nof the Szechuan Force under the C-in-C had been badly defeated and had left him in the lurch without support. However, the other half of the fourteen battalions remained in Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien and stood firm, and even recovered much of the abandoned equipment. This was not reported to Kuei-yang and Ch'engtu in Szechuan in time to benefit the C-in-C of the Szechuan Force, the story put about by the commander of the seven battalions who had evacuated Ch'ing-p'ing Hsien being believed and acted upon. The C-in-C, T’ang, was therefore degraded and posted to Szechuan,\n\nThe story, according to Mesny's narrative, ended with the demobilisation of several units of the Szechuan Force, the C-in-C's guards and the Ko-i Brigade in particular, and with Mesny settling into life as an adviser to the new supreme commander of all the Imperial forces in Kueichou, Chou Ta-wu; leaving us in anticipation of the next and successful campaign to suppress the rebel Miao, beginning later the same year, 1871, to be published by Mesny. Regrettably it never seems to have got beyond either Mesny's pencil jottings or good intentions.\n\nThe Organisation of the Szechuan Force\n\nIn his Notes on Chinese Military Services Mesny explained that there were several branches of the Army, the Manchu Banner Corps, the Mongol Banner Corps and the Chinese Banner Corps, each with eight banners. There were also the Chinese militia called Chih-ping; volunteer troops raised during the Taiping Rebellion and on many other occasions of emergency, called Yung-ying or simply Yung i.e. braves [known to Mesny as the Mobile Volunteer Force], and the local train bands\", Tuan-lien [known to Mesny as the Sedentary Volunteer Force]; armed peasants trained in the use of weapons for the defence of their homes in both town and country.\n\nMesny appears to have used notes written during the early 1870s to compile his descriptions of the Chinese Imperial forces and seems not to have taken much advantage of the benefit of hindsight to amend them prior to going to press in 1895. It had proved difficult to differentiate between Mesny's personal knowledge and his accuracy in recording detail, and information he acquired from other non-Chinese sources. Many of his notes on the Manchu Army and the Green Standard Regiments have been taken from Mayers'\n\nPage 90\n\nPage 91", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212782, "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": 91, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "76\n\nThe Chinese Government, Mayers does not refer to the Lien-chûn Ying. Mesny's ambiguous descriptions are confusing though it would seem that there were four separate bodies, the Banner Forces, the ill-trained Green Standard armies under provincial control, the Disciplined Battalions formed from the Green Standards forces, and the local defence train bands.\n\nThe standing army was divided into two great classes, the Banner Forces, [Ch'i-ping], and the Militia Forces (Chih-ping]. The real Chinese National Army also called Ying-ping generally styled by foreigners as the Green Banner Force [Lu-ch'i Ying'] derived its title from the colour of their triangular standard, green satin with a red satin scalloped border and a golden dragon embroidered in the centre. Each province had a separate army corps under a C-in-C styled Ti-tu Chün-men [one such force was the Kueichou Provincial Force operating alongside the Szechuan Force in which Mesny served]. The forces consisted entirely of Chinese and were, in fact, a part of the local militia. Three centuries ago, wrote Mesny, it was the finest military force in the world: as it was in 1895, he added. The force was beneath criticism.\n\nThe Disciplined Army battalions, the Lien-Chün Ying [troops trained by and after foreign advisers], was a new organisation instituted by Ts'en Yü-ying, formerly Governor of Yunnan, Kueichou, Fukien and subsequently Governor-General of the Yun-kuei provinces. It consisted of detachments from the various Territorial Green Regiments formed into battalions and bearing the same territorial name as the regiment from which they had been detached and of which these detachments actually formed or constituted a fighting or field battalion. The Disciplined Battalions were armed with obsolete rifles but far superior to anything opposed to them in Yunnan or Kueichou. These Disciplined Armies, often referred to as the Anhui and Hunan Armies, were originally privately raised and financed by Tseng Kuo-fan and Li Hung-chang to combat the Taiping rebel armies and were under the personal command of Han Chinese generals. Later, they employed westerners such as Mesny to assist China's programme of 'self-strengthening', primarily in the sphere of armaments.\n\nAlthough Mesny explained that there was a lack of uniformity in organisation throughout the whole of China he went into some detail, and added that each provincial army corps was considered a regular", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212783, "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": 92, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "77\n\narmy in itself, especially organised to meet the requirements of its own territorial demands or necessities. The various provincial army corps [chün] consisted of two or more territorial divisions called chen besides several [from 3-10] territorial brigades called hsieh. The divisions consisted of several regiments and battalions, both of which were called ying; the regiments were commanded by ts'an-chiang [colonels] or yu-chi [lieutenant-colonels], and battalions by tu-ssu [majors]. Most regiments and battalions were divided into two or more companies, shao; however, a few regiments and battalions were not divided at all, with the officers in each regiment or battalion holding common authority over all portions of the regiment or brigade.\n\nMesny frequently referred to individuals as holding the rank of lieutenant-colonel in one context whilst elsewhere describing them as generals. This was finally clarified in a throwaway line buried in other text when he wrote, 'In China Brigadier-Generals, Colonels and Lieutenant-Colonels in command were all considered to be General officers, that is Chiang-Chün.' General officers, chiang-kuan, in the territorial army were those brigadiers, colonels and lieutenant colonels in command. In field forces the commanders of battalions were also so styled by courtesy irrespective of rank. The same courtesy was extended to the chief of battalion, ying-kuan, in field forces where many of them had only permission to wear a button sometimes of the lowest civil rank and degree.\n\nMesny summarised the order of battle including the Chinese naval forces, with two provinces, Kuangtung and Fukien each having a naval force, and another stationed on the Yangtze. Finally, with the northern steam fleet of iron-clads there was a total of twenty-one army corps, i.e. provincial forces, and four naval corps for the whole Chinese empire. To these had to be added the Tartar Banner forces forming the garrisons of several important towns, Canton, Foochou, Hangchou, Cha-pu, Chinkiang, Nanking, Peking and elsewhere. Also the numerous regular field troops denominated Yung or Lien-chün which had been kept under arms in various parts of the empire since the Taiping Rebellion (which, he added, were a great deal more formidable in numbers as well as effectiveness than the whole of the sedentary garrisons or ordinary chün or army).\n\nIt was not until, literally, the latter days of the first campaign that an overall commander was appointed, with the Szechuan Force commander", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212788, "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": 97, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "82\n\nof the Anhui troops made much more. In the Wu-tzu Hunan Army Corps in which Mesny served during the second campaign in Kueichou, twenty battalions were farmed out to their respective chiefs who were each paid monthly two thousand eight hundred and forty taels to find pay and rations for their men. Those chiefs of battalions cleared about one thousand taels a month. The men usually got one tael a month mess money and about thirty catties of rice, for which sixty tael cents was deducted from the men's pay, even when they ate rice that had been obtained by capture from the enemy.\n\nA soldier's uniform consisted of a long shirt worn over his undershirt; a long robe or coat, split before and behind, for riding; a short over coat with a round patch on the breast and shoulders on which was inscribed the name of his division or brigade as well as the name of his regiment and company, also his own name. The riding coat was dark blue with green or red facings, the long coat was grey; he also wore a sash, hat and boots. The price for this outfit was deducted by small instalments from the soldier's regular pay, so that it took one a year or two to get out of debt on the Adjutant's books.\n\nThe Miao Rebels\n\nAccording to Mesny the enemy, during the mid-nineteenth century, consisted of four separate and individual groups.\n\n1. Remnants of the Taiping reformers detached from Shih Ta-kai's Second Army (Hung-ping chün)\n\n2. Two local factions of local rebels\n\nA. Huang-hao The Yellow 'Signals'\n\nB. Pai-hao The White 'Signals'\n\n3. Mohammedan rebels: Hui-fei, called Pai-ch'i- White Flags\n\n4. The Miao-tzu aboriginals Miao-fei (83 different tribes)\n\nThe Szechuan Force had suppressed the first three groups before beginning the campaign to suppress the fourth, the Miao.\n\n83", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212789, "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": 98, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "83\n\nFrom Mesny's various descriptions of the Szechuan Force with which he served the following, extracted from numerous items within his Miscellanies, is a considered view of the Order of Battle of the Force:\n\nSzechuan Army Corps\n\nKueichou\n\n(1868-1872)\n\nCommander-in-chief [tsung-t'ung]: T'ang Chiung\n\nThe Szechuan Army Corps consisted of\n\ntwo self-contained rifle brigades of Chinese forces\n\ni.e. Field Force Units (Lien-chün Ying)\n\nthe An-ting Ch'ũan-chün and the Ko (or Kuo)-i Ch'ũan-chün\n\n安定全軍\n\n果義全軍\n\nunder the direct\n\ncommand of the C-in-C\n\nconsisting of ten battalions\n\nunder command of General Liu\n\nHo-ling consisting of fifteen\n\nbattalions", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212790, "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": 99, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "84\n\nThe Szechuan Force\n\n劉軍\n\nC-in-C: General T’ang Chiung [tsung-t'ung]\n\nHeadquarters\n\n \n An-ting Brigade\n Ko-i Brigade\n An-chi Ying ??\n \n \n [10 battalions]\n [4 battalions]\n [3 battalions]\n \n\nUnder direct command of the C-in-C\n\n \n Comd: Ch'en Shui-ching*\n Comd: Ch'en Shui-ching*\n Ch'en Tzu-ho\n \n \n Centre Battalion\n Left Battalion\n Right Battalion\n \n \n Rear Battalion\n ??? Battalion\n Vanguard Battalion\n \n\nunlocated: General Chou Shou-ching\n\n*Mesny refers to General Ch'en commanding both of these forces individually and as a combined force", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212792, "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": 101, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "86\n\nNOTES\n\nIn one of the notes written by Mesny in his Miscellany, [Volume 4 page 34], he listed the various classes and degrees of military rank in what he terms the Chinese Militia Service. A marshal or general was a T'i-tu Chün-men, a lieutenant-general was a Tsung-ping Kuan, a major-general a Fu-chiang; and a colonel a Ts'an-chiang.\n\n2 Mesny gives various totals for the number of battalions serving with the Szechuan Force and in particular with the Ko-i Brigade, with a grand total of thirty-three battalions in the whole Force. These vary from eight to fifteen and a half operating with the Ko-i Brigade. Presumably the explanation lies in the arrival of new battalions to support the Force from time to time, though we are unable to be certain how many battalions were serving at any one particular moment.\n\nMesny states at the beginning of Volume 1 of his Miscellanies that in 1861 General Ward had organised a disciplined force for the Chinese Government, at first locally styled \"Ward's Force\" and later as the 'Ever-victorious Legion'.\n\n4 Mesny later keeps referring to thirty-five battalions.\n\nThe I-ho-t'uan, the \"Patriotic Train Band\", was the official title of the Boxers, of ill-repute.\n\n6 Mesny too had been a member of a train band, the volunteer force in Hankow between 1863-67, under arms several times during the approach of the Nien-fei rebels, when he wore the uniform of the Queen's Western Rifles [sic].\n\n7 Mesny goes into some detail providing recruitment policy, promotion schemes, ranks and titles, training and duties.\n\nUse of the term Disciplined Force was a contemporary fashion. It later became popular to refer to the Lien-chun Ying as Field Forces.\n\n9\n\nMost of the ranks of unit commanders given by Mesny do not tally with those given by Hucker in his Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China.\n\n10 All commanders of divisions and corps had one or more battalions, regiments or brigades, serving a sort of staff brigade and forming the headquarters of that particular army corps. It was popularly designated the Body Guard Battalion or Regiment.\n\nPresumably Han Chinese rebels such as the Huang-hao or the Pai-hao, the remnants of the Taipings or even the Moslem rebels.\n\n12 This is the same title as the Force previously operating under the command of General Gordon during the Taiping Rebellion. Either Mesny has incorrectly recalled the title of the new Force or the new Force continued to bear the former title.", "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": 212796, "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": 105, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "90\n\nThree Bold Adventurers to fight alongside the Nien rebels. After being captured and carried to Chin-chiang in a cage, he was saved by two British artillery officers serving with the Taiping forces.\n\nThe third time was in Hankow when Mesny took Damström along with him as a heavy-weight. The incident occurred after Mesny 'arrested' the dishonest Chinese merchant who had swindled Dupuis. [These incidents are probably not in temporal order].\n\nDupuis, Jean\n\nA French merchant born ca. 1828, who arrived and lived in Hankow in about 1860. He built up a thriving trade in armaments. Fluent in Chinese, he introduced Mesny to the Szechuanese officials whose invitation to serve with the Szechuan Force changed his life. Mesny remarked that Dupuis was a distinguished explorer and 'conqueror of Tonkin.'\n\nGill, William J: born Bangalore 1843\n\nServed in India after being commissioned into the Royal Engineers. Inherited a fortune and indulged his passion for exploration. One of his travels was through north Szechuan province, where first he travelled alone and then later with Mesny to Burma. He wrote The River of Golden Sand in 1880, and after several other travels, in Tripoli and Afghanistan, he was murdered by Bedouins in 1882.\n\nGiquel, Prosper M. [1835-1886]\n\nA French naval officer who arrived in China during the Second China War. Formerly Commissioner of Imperial Maritime Customs at Ningpo and Hankow. He assisted the Sino-French 'Ever Triumphant Army' that fought alongside Tso Tsung-t'ang's force in Chekiang province to recapture Hangchow and Ningpo, and later commanded the force in operations that led to the recapture of Hangchow, for which he received high rank and honour from the Ch'ing government. His principal achievement was the construction and administration of the Foochow Arsenal in 1866, and dockyard with its fleet of warships. He was the only foreigner besides Gordon to receive the honour of the Yellow Riding Jacket.\n\nPage 105\n\nPage 106", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212801, "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": 110, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "Terminology\n\n95\n\nButton : The knobs used by the Manchu dynasty to indicate rank, worn on top of caps. They were either transparent or opaque and, depending on rank, red, blue, white or plain gold.\n\nCash: the only coin cast in Imperial China prior to modernisation in the early twentieth century; a crude copper disk each with a square hole in the centre for convenience in carrying a large quantity, hence the expression ‘strings of cash'. Cash, like taels [see below] lacked uniformity in value, and strings, normally a thousand cash, often were composed of 700 pieces or even 1100 according to the regulations prevailing in the locality at the time. Giles claimed that the name was derived from Caixa, the Moorish name for the coin found at Malacca by the Portuguese in AD 1511.\n\nCh'al-kuan : Orderly Officers. These were men of all ranks, risen from the lowest grades, and were the operative staff of any commander.\n\nChai-tzu #7: a common term for a stockade or more commonly in southern Chinese rural areas, the village outer stockade.\n\nChen-t'ai #✩ : General of Division and an Area Commander\n\nChiang-chün #: General, a rank in the Chinese Imperial army used for commanders of reasonably substantial bodies of men be they regular forces or forces recruited for a specific campaign. Mesny explained that any commander lieutenant-colonel and above was referred to as general, and provided a good example with General Hsieh, the adopted son of General Liu, a major commander in the Szechuan force in which Mesny served. Hsieh was only 22 at the time of the campaign, some four years younger than Mesny. He had been the orderly to General Liu and had been adopted by him as his son after Hsieh had carried Liu off the battlefield, saving his life. General Hsieh's command in the Kueichou campaign consisted of the Left-wing Regiment and its second battalion; he could therefore be a regimental commander equating to a full colonel or brigadier at the most in western parlance. Another example is the \"solitary battalion' under command of General Ho Te-wu, the Chung-tzu Ying, with Ying being a 'force of a number of battalions' or ‘a lone battalion'.", "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": 212838, "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": 147, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "The mule track wound along the mountain side. Looking backwards, or forwards, you could sometimes see the green waters of the Salween glistening in the sun far below. At one point, the place was pointed out to me where Chu Ko Liang had built a fort on a knoll commanding both track and river. He was the able counsellor of Liu Pei, who in the time of the Three Kingdoms mounted the throne of Shu (Szechuan) in the second century of our era. Liu Pei stood 7 ft 5 in high; 'He could see behind his back, his ears reached to his shoulders, and his hands to his knees. He possessed the invaluable power of creating a good first impression and was able to keep his countenance under the most trying circumstances.' He sent Chu Ko Liang on an expedition to the south to subdue the border tribes. Chu Ko Liang is said to have penetrated to Burma: 'He made use of the famous device of \"wooden oxen and running horses\" as a means of transport. What the device was nobody now knows.' (From A Chinese Biographical Dictionary by H.A. Giles.) Legend relates that it was Chu Ko Liang who first thought to keep down the numbers of the wild Wa tribesmen by teaching them to bury a human head in each field at the planting of the spring crop; the plan worked all right until the Wa discovered that a Chinese head was equally effective in propitiating the gods, after which they looked beyond the tribal limits for the supply of heads.\n\nSmall side streams ran into the Salween, and each time we crossed one of these the path dropped several thousand feet, almost to Salween level: it would then rise steeply again up the mountain. Down there the hollows were very hot and steamy; the vegetation tropical and thick; higher up it was cool in the shade and many great trees spread their branches over the mountain slopes. We saw few large wild animals: the commonest I believe is the bear. The inhabitants say there are three kinds of bear; the pig bear, the dog bear, and the cow bear. I saw one pig bear in captivity; it had a thick black coat, little pig eyes, and must have weighed about 300 lbs. Tiger, elephant, panther, wild pig, wolves, sambur and barking deer also exist; the lovely Amherst and Stone pheasants, bamboo partridge, jungle fowl, hare, duck, snipe and quail. But we had no time for any of these; later, when our numbers had increased, one of our Gurkha wireless operators used to go out sometimes to shoot for the pot.\n\nNews of our arrival had gone ahead. As we moved along the headmen came out to welcome us; they prepared food for us and were disappointed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212862, "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": 171, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "156\n\nThe Abraham Family\n\nEleazer Joseph Abraham\n\nDavid Ezekiel Joshua Abraham\n\nDavid Abraham Reuben m Ruby Moselle (1890-1982)\n\nEzekiel\n\nJoseph\n\nIsaac\n\n1\n\nAziza\n\nof the Jewish community, and served it well. His son, Ezekiel Abraham, recalled how the Jewish community had rallied to succour the refugees from Eastern Europe and Germany in 1938 and 1941 when some 17,000 to 18,000 refugees found their way to Shanghai.\n\n\"The Japanese commander had called in R.D. Abraham, as leader of the Jewish community in Shanghai, to tell him that a shipload of Jewish refugees had arrived. 'We cannot let them land,' said the Japanese. 'Why?' Abraham wanted to know. 'There is no place for them to live, and the refugees have no money to feed themselves,' reasoned the Japanese. 'In that case,' said Abraham, thoughtfully, without a smile, 'you will just have to shoot all of them, because there is no other place on earth for them to go.' Then he paused for a few moments before confiding in the Japanese, 'or, we can open the Sassoon warehouses in Hongkew and let the refugees live there, and put them to work in the factories.'\n\nGhe Ezras\n\n+15\n\nEdward Ezra switched from the opium trade to large-scale real estate construction and management in 1900. He erected - on the land bounded by Nanking, Kiujiang, Szechwan and Kiangse Roads - 1,000,000 taels worth of residences that enjoyed modern amenities. His own home on Joffre Road boasted a ballroom and a music room. The family interests included hotels. The Astor House Hotel, on Broadway and Whangpoo Road, occupied three acres of ground. Edward Ezra, who was a Director of Astor House, was the first person born in Shanghai and educated at the Shanghai Public School to be elected to the Municipal Council. Socially linked to the Sassoons from the beginning by marriage, today", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213492, "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-1995", "page_number": 88, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "56\n\nof the Pear Garden\" (T).\n\nThis Chinese version of Don Juan lived an absolute profligate life. In his later years, he lavished much of his love on a country-bred beauty called Yang Yu-huan (E) and neglected his State's affairs, which brought about his downfall. In 755 A.D., one of his trusted lieutenants named An Lu-shan (I), a half-Turk, half-Sogdian, revolted. The poor Emperor had to flee from Ch'ang An (E), his capital, with just a few escorts, including his immediate family and a few soldiers, heading for Szechwan (PTI). When the entourage arrived at a place called Ma Wei Po (5), the escorting soldiers refused to go any further and demanded that the Emperor get rid of the concubine Yang. The Emperor had to give in and act accordingly. At last, a general named Kwo Tzi-yı (97) put down the rebellion and restored peace to the land. The Emperor Xuan-zong lost his throne to his son.\n\nIf you ever go to Xian (1) in the Shaanxi Province, you will find a bathhouse called Hwa Ch'ing Chih (#) in the suburb where Yang Yu Huan used to bathe. The area has been restored and kept in good condition to this day.\n\nTaboos\n\nThere are many, many regulations and taboos in the Chinese theatrical circle, including the Peking Opera group. Some of these taboos help to keep smooth the running of the theatre as an orderly institution; otherwise, chaos would reign. For instance, the actors and actresses are not allowed to sit on the trunks of other performers. Once I had the privilege of visiting the backstage of a Peking Opera theatre. There were rows and rows of heavy trunks on the floor where the stage clothing was stored. Some of the actors or actresses were doing their make-up. Layers and layers of stage clothing were neatly folded and stacked in the trunks. There was order and neatness everywhere. Imagine, in the absence of taboo and regulations, what the situation would be. It could be a madhouse where everyone was fighting to have the right kind of clothing to go on the stage, and when they finished acting, they would just throw things around.\n\nI know one or two other taboos, of which everyone, yes everyone, has to observe, such as you should never utter the word “Geng\" \"E”", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214277, "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": 135, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "98\n\nthe shoulder and forbidden by the Buddha.\n\n12 The Afterworld is usually referred to in English as The Underworld and to most Chinese this is apt as the entrance is often described as a large hole in the ground in Szechuan province or at the base of T'ai Shan in Shantung. However, in several Underworld scrolls hanging in Buddhist monasteries the Courts of the Underworld are portrayed in the clouds with carefree humans wandering below.\n\n13 The hammer and chisel produce the avenging thunderbolts, and the drums cause the rumbling thunder.\n\n14 These Four Great Celestial Kings are to be seen in the entrance hall to most Buddhist temples. They are the Hindu Lokapala, the guardians of the Four Corners of the World and known colloquially as the Four Diamond Kings.\n\n15\n\nx stands for an illegible character.\n\nPage 135\n\nPage 136", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214364, "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": 222, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "188\n\ncults. Popular religion is an amalgam of Chinese peasant beliefs with shamanism and the use of magic. The reason for the interdict on popular religion, apart from the reference to it as \"purely superstition,\" would appear to be because it is not in any way an organised religion with a controlling malleable body and having to obey orders in a chain of control.\n\nIn the first flush of the Communist victory in 1949-1950 temples in a great many places were closed down, taken over and used for community purposes such as granaries, police and even local military barracks, schools or créches, or destroyed. The few that remained, having been allowed to lie unused and untouched, were mostly laid waste during the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976] when the young Red Guards saw it their duty to destroy all elements of old ways. Since the early 1980s more and more religious establishments within Mainland China have opened or, in the majority of places, re-opened. They have been refurbished and new statuary made to replace those destroyed during the early days of communist rule or during the Cultural Revolution.\n\nMany temples have now been renovated and restored to their old glory with statuary created by young artisans guided by the elderly whose memories of the iconographic detail has proved, on the whole, to be comparatively poor. As an example we can see in Kuan Hsien near Chengtu in Szechuan province, the former image of the major local deity, Li Ping, the official who designed and arranged the irrigation system which made the Chengtu plain the major agricultural region it is today. Previously he was portrayed as a standard scholar-official, sitting, dressed in robes and cap but without a unique characteristic. Today, however, he is depicted as a politicised middle-aged man, standing in a Stakhanovite pose typical of the nineteen fifties and sixties. This in no way inhibits devotees today from kneeling before and revering him.\n\nMany of the new images depict dynastic scholars, officials or women, with well formed and not unattractive heads and faces, and swathed in silken robes which conceal a basic frame constructed of slats of wood unlike pre-1949 images the bodies of which were made in the whole. The images of small children usually accompanying the image of maternity goddesses are almost without exception modern children's dolls without their clothes whereas during dynastic times the children were all equally well carved as the major deities. It is worth adding how truly hideous and garish some of the new edifices are.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "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 }, { "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": 214971, "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": 67, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "23\n\nsuperpowers of that time, incessantly challenging one another, and by the Belgian, German and other colonial regimes soon following exactly in the pioneers' footsteps. All of them were hypnotised by China's reported wealth, by the trade of Central Asia and Tibet, and Szechuan was the key to Tibet. All were active in corrupting the declining Manchu regime, thus receiving multiple concessions as a reward, one of them being the privileges for Christian missionaries to preach their faith all over China. French endeavours made Szechuan into the main bastion of Roman Catholicism and the reservoir of missionaries to convert further regions of Central Asia, Tibet, and Mongolia. These events, which resulted in a series of anti-European and anti-Christian riots and culminated in the Boxer Rebellion (1900), are well described in Chapter Five of The Crippled Tree (volume one of the aforementioned epic cycle):\n\nTheir [i.e. the French priests'] courage and ability to endure hardship might have been praiseworthy had it not been only too clear that the religious garb covered most unreligious actions. Catholic priests and bishops bought up whole villages in times of flood and famine, demanded and obtained on threat of military action the best land in cities for their churches, after evicting the inhabitants and paying no compensation. Catholic priests formed militia bands of their own, and claimed to rank higher than our own magistrates. Bishops were invested with the pomp and power of governor-generals. They used sedan chairs with eight carriers, a drummer going in front, and everyone in the street where they passed had to stop work, stand up, and unroll their headbands in obeisance to the Catholic bishop, on pain of being beaten with the heavy bamboo.\n\nThe Boxer Rebellion marked the end of the feudal epoch and announced an approach of an unpredictable Great Change. In the Boxer Protocol of 1901, imposed after the defeat, China had to pay an enormous indemnity sum of five hundred million dollars, open more ports and cities, accept a permanent garrison of soldiers in Peking and other towns and along the existing railways. Moreover, the Boxer Protocol abolished the Imperial Examinations, an inevitable part of recruiting imperial administration and training classical Chinese scholars. This reform prepared the way for the long awaited New Learning, i.e. for finally educating young people in Western science and technology, until then almost unknown in China. New Learning", "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": 215681, "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": 458, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "410\n\njunk and used this to trade up and down the river between Ichang and Chunking, all the while studying the river and its treacherous rapids. He soon gained the deep respect of all the junkmen he came in contact with and was given the name Pu Lan Tian by them.\n\nAfter trading in this way for some years he was approached by the Chinese owned Szechwan Steam Navigation Company to assist in the design of a purpose built steamer to trade on the Upper Yangtze. This vessel \"Shutung\" was built in Southampton by Thorneycrofts for £6,000. She was 115 feet long, 16 feet beam and drew 3 feet. Under Plant's command \"Shutung\" operated a 14 day service between Ichang and Chunking. She carried 12 First Class passengers, 66 deck passengers and 60 tons of cargo in lighters lashed alongside the vessel. The service proved to be very popular and a second vessel \"Shuling\" was commissioned.\n\nIn 1910 Plant was offered the post of Senior Inspector, Upper Yangtze in the Chinese Maritime Customs (CMC). He accepted and, in the course of the next few years, compiled a 'Handbook for the Guidance of Shipmasters on the Ichang-Chunking Section of the Yangtze River.' He also wrote a slim volume entitled 'Glimpses of the Yangtze Gorges.'\n\nPlant retired from the CMC in 1919. In recognition of his outstanding service, the CMC and the Chinese Government built him a small bungalow on the outskirts of the village of Xintang. This bungalow perched on a small promontory overlooking the mouth of the Xiling Gorge and the Hsin T'an Rapids. Steamers using this stretch of the river saluted Captain Plant by sounding their whistles and he would reply by waving his hat or handkerchief.\n\n1921 and the Plants decided to return to England for a short holiday before returning to Xintang to live out the rest of their lives. They were feted everywhere they stopped on the journey downriver to Shanghai. Here they took the Blue Funnel ship which was to take them to England. Sadly, en route to Hong Kong, Captain Plant came down with pneumonia and died at sea on 26th February, 1921. Tragedy struck again when Mrs. Plant died in Hong Kong shortly after arrival. They were buried together in the Colonial Cemetery, Happy Valley (now called Hong Kong Cemetery).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]