[
    {
        "id": 204801,
        "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-1964",
        "page_number": 104,
        "title": "RAS-1964",
        "content_text": "92\n\nJ. W. HAYES\n\n19 The Harbour Master's Report for 1906 in Sessional Papers 1907, p. 130, which presumably gives figures for the whole Colony, states that 1,796 native craft were sunk, and in the majority of cases totally lost. The total loss of life, he said, \"must have been excessively high, amounting to approximately 5,000, though there are no positive records to show the actual number that perished\". The typhoon was not expected, and a few days afterwards a committee was appointed to enquire whether earlier warning could have been given to shipping. A month later its members opined that \"reviewing the evidence as a whole, the committee find that prior to 7.44 a.m. on the 18th September 1906 there was no indication of a typhoon approaching Hong Kong... and warning was given as soon as, in the circumstances, was practically possible.\" The Report of the Typhoon Relief Fund Committee in Sessional Papers 1907, pp. 277-287, gives no information about Peng Chau, though Table 1, p. 283 may include some Peng Chau craft,\n\n20 The system of credit is briefly described on p. 2 of the Report of the Fisheries Department, Hong Kong Government, for 1946-47.\n\n\"The practice of the laans before the war was to obtain control over the fisherman by granting loans to him for the repairing of his boat, buying of new gear, etc. at certain period during the year. In return the fisherman was expected to market all fish caught through the laan who would make appropriate deductions although, in many cases, the laan would ensure that the fisherman never settled the loan and therefore was never free to market his catch through anyone else.\"\n\nPeng Chau appears to have had several concerns of this type, though they combined their activities in this direction with general shopkeeping. They dealt in a variety of goods and sold also to land customers, besides acting as middlemen for the fishermen's catch and providing them with all their requirements. The big dealers connected with the Peng Chau fishing fleet at the time of the repair tablet of 1878 appear to have been seven Hong Kong laans mentioned on the tablet. This shows that the number of Peng Chau boats was sufficiently large for outside merchants to do business with them, either directly or through the local smaller dealers.\n\nOne should not, however, take too narrow a view of the fishermen's position vis-à-vis the laan. The same willingness to allow the fishermen goods on credit, and so run up debts and incur obligations which would ensure that they continued to patronise the same shop or laan, was also extended by shopkeepers to the farmers and townspeople. S. Y. Lan op. cit. gives much detail on laans, some of whom were Tankas.\n\n21 For this information see Hong Kong Annual Report for 1899, pp. 14-15, Colonial Reports, Annual, 1899, No. 314 (London, HMSO, 1901).\n\n22 BCL.\n\n23 BCL.\n\n24 Arthur Waley, The Opium War through Chinese Eyes (London, Allen and Unwin, 1958) p. 101. Orme's Report mentions, p. 44, the diversity of the fishing population thus, \"The Hoklos, who are a kind of sea-gypsy, only form a very small section of the land population, some 1500 in all, but much of the fishing is in their hands. Of the junk population, the large majority are Puntis (I assume he means Punti-speaking), and of the remainder some Hakka and some Hoklo.\"\n\n25 Hong Kong Government Gazette, Government Notification No. 557 of 1901.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206798,
        "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": 75,
        "title": "RAS-1973",
        "content_text": "PERSIANS, ARABS IN T'ANG CHINA\n\n69\n\nshould be well-treated.48 The Emperor based his policies on the principle of 't'ien-hsia pai-ch'uan kuei ta-hai' 天下百川歸大海 (all rivers in the empire enter the sea), and accepted everyone from different parts of the world, either to pay tribute to or to trade with China.\n\nThere is no doubt that Persians, Arabs, Turks, Japanese and others did enjoy their stay in China; and it is also an undeniable fact that T'ang emperors wished to befriend these foreigners. It is equally true that in such a highly Sino-centric society as the T'ang period, nobody felt that such a process of assimilation was untraditional or against the theory of Sino-centrism. In T'ang times, such a social pattern was a reality, not a myth, and its spirit may serve as a model for the future.\n\nNOTES\n\n* I wish to express my appreciation to Professor Woodbridge Bingham of the University of California, Berkeley (Visiting Professor in Chinese History, Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong 1970-71) for reading an earlier version of this paper, weeding out mistakes and suggesting improvements.\n\nAbbreviations used in the footnotes:\n\nCTS Chiu T'ang-shu\n\nHTS Hsin T'ang-shu\n\nTCTC Tzu-chih t'ung-chien\n\n1 In T'ang time, Islamic followers used to call the Chinese Tamghai, Tomghaj, Tonghaj, Tangas, Tubgao or Tapkao. Some historians believe that these were transliterations of T'ao-hua-shih. However, Kuwabara Jitsuzō suggested that these were derived from T'ang-chia-tzu. Cf. J. Kuwabara 'On P'u Shou-keng', Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 2:1-79 (Tokyo, 1928), 7:1-104 (Tokyo, 1935). See also Chinese translation of this, with additional notes by Ch'en Yü-ching, P'u Shou-keng k'ao (Peking, 1954), pp. 103-109.\n\n2 Edward O. Reischauer and J. K. Fairbank, East Asia: The Great Tradition (London, 1958), p. 155.\n\n3 See Lo Hsiang-lin, T'ang-tai wen-hua shih (Taipei, 1963), pp. 54-87.\n\n4 Hsiang Tai, T'ang-tai Ch'ang-an hsi-yü wen-ming (Peking, 1957), pp. 24-25.\n\n5 Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963), pp. 10-11. I must express my thankfulness to Professor Schafer's opus magnum; I have fully made use of Professor Schafer's work.\n\n6 See Chiu Ling-yeong, Superintendents of Customs in Canton during the Tang and Sung Dynasties (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Hong Kong, 1963), Chapters 5 and 6.\n\nPage 75\n\nPage 76",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214123,
        "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-1997",
        "page_number": 191,
        "title": "RAS-1997",
        "content_text": "ARE THE TANKA PEOPLE DESCENDANTS OF MONGOL SOLDIERS?\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\n161\n\nI have not done any research into the origins of the Tanka people of the Pearl River Estuary and have always assumed from something I read many years ago that ethnically they were one of the many original minority groups of southern China.\n\nHowever, I have just come across a paragraph in 'Pulling Strings in China', a book written in the late twenties by W.F. Tyler, suggesting that the Tanka boat people were a mixture of Mongol soldiers and Chinese with whom they had intermarried. Tyler was an interesting character, an Englishman who had been not only a young officer serving with the Chinese Imperial Navy during the Yalu battle in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 but had gone on to be a Commissioner with the Chinese Maritime Customs.\n\nThe relative passage from the paragraph concerned claims that:\n\n*\n\nIn about 1370 the conquering Ming dynasty ordered that the soldiers of the previous Mongol garrisons - descendants of the famous hordes of Ghengis Khan - and their families should be slaughtered. At Canton there had been intermarriage and absorption in a century of Mongol rule, and enmity was dead, so there was reluctance to fulfil this drastic order: consequently it was reported to the capital that they had been driven into the river, and by inference, drowned. They were not drowned; they were allowed to live in boats and in piled shacks below high-water line. And so they lived and bred and grown for five hundred years or more, and it was no one's business to institute a change. These were the Tankas; fine-looking men and pretty girls”.\n\nHas any reader confirmation of Tyler's story?\n\nNOTE\n\nTyler, William Ferdinand Pulling Strings in China Constable London 1929",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215370,
        "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": 147,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "96\n\nnumerous meandering vers\n\nThere were two main groups of land dwellers in the New Territories, the largest being the Cantonese or Punti local people whose dialect is spoken and understood by the majority of the population. The other group were the Hakka 'guest people' or 'strangers' who are said to have originated from northern China, and settled in Guangdong and Hong Kong in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then there were the fishing people, the Hoklos originating from Fujian province, and the Tankas or sui seung yan, who, in the past, had lived their whole lives afloat on the small sampans and junks moored along the coast of Guangdong and Hong Kong. All these groups used baby carriers, but the styles differed particularly between the land and boat dwellers.\n\nTraditionally the carrier was made from a decorated square of cloth, with long strips of fabric extending from the corners of the square to form straps. The child was placed against the woman's back as she leaned over, with the feet encircling her waist, and the carrier laid on top. Two straps were brought over her shoulders and two more went under the child's legs and under the woman's arms, to tie in a knot at her chest. As the family grew, it became the turn of older girls to carry the younger siblings (Fig 1).\n\nIt had been the custom for the grandmother to make a carrier to greet the new offspring. This carrier, and subsequent ones were lovingly made by hand in spare moments when the woman was not tending to the farming, or cooking the evening meal while sailing off to distant fishing grounds. If the woman did not have sewing skills she would order the carriers from a neighbourhood seamstress. Despite the little education most women had received, the designs and colours were lively and varied, and each carrier was unique.\n\nDifferent Styles of Carriers\n\nBaby Carriers used in the 19th and early 20th century were quite large, measuring as much as 60cm overall. The centre panel, approximately 35cm square, was embroidered or left plain. Two wide straps made of calendared cotton or hemp, dyed black or indigo blue, extended about 110cm at each edge along top and bottom of the carrier.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]