[
    {
        "id": 209960,
        "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-1983",
        "page_number": 219,
        "title": "RAS-1983",
        "content_text": "197\n\nFrom 1860 there is, firstly, a collection of China Medals and related items and eight drawings by a Royal Marines Light Infantry officer who served in the Second China War. There is also a vase and a gilded, seated, Buddha which were taken from the Summer Palace in that year.\n\nThe Marines were involved in the fighting occasioned by the Boxer uprising in 1900, and the Museum holds a number of relics of this involvement. A Boxer flag is, for instance, on display. This was captured by Sgt. Preston, Royal Marines Light Infantry, on the walls of Peking on July 14, 1900, an act for which he was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal. The notes explain that Preston kept the Boxers at bay while an American Marine seized the flag.\n\nA Victoria Cross was won at about the same date which is commemorated by the display of a large pike. This was captured by the RMLI detachment during the siege of the Legations. Captain L.S.T. Holliday led a sortie during which he had half a lung shot away. He later became Adjutant General of the Royal Marines and when he died in 1966 at the age of 95 he was the oldest holder of the VC. A squat, gape-mouthed, mortar about two feet high is also on show. This was seized at the capture of the Taku forts in 1900. A large brass shell case used by the Quick Firing guns at the Taku Forts is mounted in the museum as a gong. The case has the name Berndorfer stamped upon it, an Austrian firm.\n\nNext came a quick visit to the National Army Museum, in Chelsea, London. Among the items which I spotted there were the following, and I am sure there must be others which I missed.\n\nThere is a large, full-length, portrait of Sir Hugh Gough, by an unknown artist. He is shown with what looks to be an Indian servant buckling on his sword and is impressively bemedalled. A tall, slim, figure, with a white moustache, the General was in his fifties or sixties when the picture was painted. A silver model pagoda commemorating the Treaty of Nanking, August 1860, is on loan from the present Viscount Gough. It was made by Richard Hennell and is hallmarked London 1860-61.\n\nA long rampart gingall, manufactured at South Tientsin Arsenal in 1895 slants diagonally across a case which also features",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214293,
        "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": 151,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "114\n\nMarines and it was not until an action at Amoy on 26th August 1841 that the British Army (Her Majesty's 55th Regiment of Foot) used them in anger.\n\nApart from the musket itself, the soldier was also equipped with a bayonet which extended the musket into a thrusting weapon equivalent to a short pike. It had an overall length of about six feet, and time and again proved itself to be a formidable weapon. This was used both defensively, as in a formed square fending off cavalry, and offensively as in the charge. Its offensive use was considered by some commanders to be more effective than firing the muskets, and it was common to describe the number of troops by the number of bayonets.29 Officers would carry a sword and perhaps one or two single shot pistols. Swords (cutlasses) and pistols were also the weapons of marines when boarding opposing ships, and some may have been carried by those operating on land; however, they were more likely to have been equipped with muskets.\n\nOn the Chinese side, there were a wider variety of arms. Lord Jocelyn describes a display put on by the Manchu Tartars, who were the elite of the troops in China, where the: \"Tartars were dressed in white cotton garb and black cap, and their weapons were swords and matchlocks, or bow and arrows.\"30 Ouchterlony31 illustrates a Chinese swordsman brandishing a sword, but also holding in his left hand a matchlock and with a powder horn slung from his waist. Hence, it can be seen that the projectile arms were matchlocks and bow and arrows. The matchlock musket uses a form of ignition even earlier than a flintlock. It derives its name from the match, which is a hemp cord impregnated with saltpetre and spirits of wine such that it burns steadily without going out. The mechanism is simple in that the match is held in an arm which, on pressing the trigger, descends onto the priming charge and, hence, ignites the main charge. At this time, it was archaic, and it was also a danger to its user, as the burning match could set fire to clothes or, more seriously, to the powder pouch which the user carried round his waist. Also, when wounded, the danger was compounded, and there are reports of troops being burned to death after falling with otherwise non-lethal wounds.32 Perhaps this had helped to preserve the use of the bow, although it continued in use well beyond the adoption of more modern firearms. Photographs33 of the Taku forts taken after their fall in 1860 show crossbows34 amongst the debris. Also Arch-",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214331,
        "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": 189,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "153\n\nsation to the Released British Prisoners and to the Families of those who were Murdered.\"36\n\nThe 16 February issue had a full page illustration, \"Curiosity-Street, Pekin.\"37 The brief accompanying narrative explains that \"Curiosity Street\" was where \"the British officers got rid of much of their superfluous cash in the purchase of doubtful antiquities and modern enamels. ... The street is densely crowded. Carts, horses, ponies, and wheelbarrows obstruct one's movements at every step, and the confusion is increased by the number of British officers, most of them in Chinese fur coats. Boys, sharp as those of London or Paris, are always at hand ready to carry any possible amount of one's purchases to any distance.\"38\n\nGenre subjects such as this also appeared in following issues. \"Sketches of a Peking Cab,”39 “Amusements on the Ice,\"40 “Teahouse in Peking\"41 and an illustration of \"what I had to sketch throught\"42 (\"A Group of Chinese\" who crowded round the artist, impeding his work).43\n\n41\n\nMore formal general subjects also continued to appear: \"The Russian Mission Church in Pekin,”44 “the Chinese General Prince San-Ko-Lin-Sin,\"45 \"a Portion of the Emperor of China's Summer Palace Near Pekin,\"46 “Part of the Imperial Palace, Pekin,”47 and “View of the Gardens and the Buddhist Temple in the Imperial City, Pekin”.48\n\n49\n\nEven the potentially hostile subject of \"Chinese guns\" is presented in a way that includes a complimentary bow to the Chinese, demonstrating that they had mastered a particular technology earlier than European ordnance-makers. The Illustrated London News published a letter from a Royal Navy surgeon, who wrote, “There has been a great noise made of late years through what has been looked upon by scientific men as a new and grand discovery in the manufacture of iron ordnance... Judge, then, my astonishment when, as I was walking through the Taku Forts, at the entrance to the Peiho, I came upon a lot of cast-off Chinese guns evidently very old, but made almost upon these principles and rejected about the end of the seventeenth century, when the famous Ferdinand Verbrist [sic for Verbiest] taught them to manufacture cast guns of brass and iron.50\n\n** 50",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214336,
        "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": 194,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "158 days later, coincidentally, on 23 September 1861, a small postscript to the China coverage of The Illustrated London News established that there was indeed a link between Hong Kong and British actions in China.\n\nThe item took the form of an illustration of a Monument to the Royal Marines, erected in the Cemetery at \"Hong Kong, China\". In explanation of the illustration, it read: “The front inscription is as follows; 'In memory of the officers, non-commissioned officers, buglers, and privates of the Brigade of Royal Marines (Light Infantry); and the non-commissioned officers, buglers, and gunners of the battery of Royal Marine Artillery, who fell in the execution of their duty in China during the years 1857, 1858, 1859, and 1860. Erected by their comrades.' The slab on the right-hand side gives the names of three officers and 48 men killed in action; whilst that on the left shows the total loss from all causes to have been 257; and the numbers wounded were 27 officers, 16 sergeants, 20 corporals, four buglers, and 155 gunners and privates. The rear slab records the services of the brigade, from the taking of Canton in Dec. 1857, with the various expeditions in the neighbourhood, the Taku Forts in 1859, the defence of Shanghai, and the brilliant campaign in the north, which ended in the Treaty of Peking on Oct. 24, 1860.\"\n\nHong Kong, SAR, China\n\nAt midnight, 30 June 1997, Hong Kong was returned by Britain to China.\n\nThe Monument to the Marines \"who fell in the execution of their duty in China during the Years 1857, 1858, 1859, and 1860\" still stands, known only to the few Hong Kong residents today who take an interest in things of the past. And to most of these few, the past events which the Monument records are too distant in ethos as well as in time even to be uncomfortable; but are felt rather as irremediably alien.\n\nThis brief survey and commentary on the contemporary China coverage in one British periodical during the period 5 January to 23 September 1861 may perhaps offer reassurance that, like us today, the contemporary British public before, during and after Lord Elgin's China Campaign was also more comfortable when the soldiers could come",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    }
]