[
    {
        "id": 205522,
        "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": 64,
        "title": "RAS-1968",
        "content_text": "NOTES ON HONG KONG LIBRARIES\n\n59\n\nlater, were badly damaged by insects, so much so that one copy of the catalogue of this collection, printed in 1873, is annotated to indicate which titles had to be discarded for this reason.\n\nWe now move on fifteen years, to 1867, when the Victoria Library had fallen on evil days. No doubt a further search would reveal more of its history in the years between, but this must wait for a future article. On 21st January an editorial in the Evening Mail opens \"It seems probable that the decline and fall of the Victoria Library will afford material for the local historian during this year of grace 1867.\" The reason was apparently that the membership had fallen to 60, whereas to provide the necessary income from subscriptions 80 to 100 members were required (yet in the satisfactory report for 1851-52 already noted the membership had risen to only 66). The Evening Mail goes on to say \"There is no advantage to be derived from membership at all equivalent to the high rate of subscription.\" This rate was $2.00 a month. Although the Evening Mail praises the quality of the magazines received, it notes that there are not enough of them, and only a few of the subscribers make much use of them. Similarly so many local residents themselves subscribe to overseas newspapers that there is little demand for those taken by the Library. Of the book stock the main criticism is that it consists almost entirely of standard authors — Scott, Dickens, Thackeray and Cooper are mentioned and neglects current literature. Most people again have their own copies of the former, but would be glad to subscribe if they might be kept up to date with modern writers. The Evening Mail editorial ends with a suggested solution, to convert the library into a book club, the books purchased to be distributed amongst the subscribers instead of being retained as the property of the institution.\n\nThis solution was not adopted, and by the end of the year, after a further decline in membership, it appeared that the gloomy prognostications in the Evening Mail editorial might be fulfilled. Before coming to that situation, however, it will be interesting to examine a list of the 34 newspapers and periodicals which the Victoria Library received regularly at this time. The list appeared in the China Mail (the new name of the Evening Mail) for February 15th, 1867, and is rather inaccurately divided into “Newspapers\" amongst which are included Punch and the Saturday Review",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206030,
        "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": 110,
        "title": "RAS-1970",
        "content_text": "A NEW LOOK AT CANTONESE EXPLETIVES\n\n105\n\nLRIT-ZRYNV (biographies) as you can, for they are in my judgment the essence of SHIHMRAAR. The longest is that of SHOW CREONN3 (Vol. 69) but don't miss the important LREE-SHIH\" (Vol. 87).\n\nThen, just as I advised my Chinese friends to jump from Milton to Shaw, going back afterwards to Scott and Thackeray, so I advise my English friends seeking the essence of Cantonese to jump (a far longer jump) from SHIHMRAAR-CHINN30 to LREONO KAECHIW32 and, using the same method (reading the original aloud with a Cantonese teacher, sentence by sentence, and making him paraphrase it) tackle at least three chapters of his JARM-BHENO-SHAT essays. And observe, please, how much more he has to alter in his paraphrase of BRAAKWRAAV-MRANN34, even though LREONQ12 himself was a Cantonese, than he had to either with the late ZHAW philosopher or the late XON historian,\n\nAfter this you will be able, perhaps even without a teacher, to read the SEOE-WUUR-ZRYN3 and the SHAAMM-GWOK-ZI JIRNJRI3, after which if you still haven't got it there is no hope for you.\n\nWhat, then will you have “got”? And can I in a few sentences of analysis save you a little pain and trouble?\n\nWell, I think you will have found for yourselves that although modern Cantonese, like late Archaic Chinese, Historical Chinese and LREONQ's32 BRAAKWRAAV-MRANN34, does not possess parts of speech distinctively labelled as they are in Latin & Greek, it does have them in the more fluid sense that English has. Not usually by their form, but by their position, and the way they combine with certain particles and not with others, we may identify words as (if we like to call them so) nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and the rest. Except that a new class of words, often described as “particles\" but which I prefer to call \"expletives\"\n\n29 3014 30\n\n7\n\n31A 32 梁啟超 33 飲冰室\n\n34 #X. It is a great pity that journalists, and even scholars, will persist in calling this “Mandarin\", a totally different dialect for which the\n\nChinese is\n\n35周\n\n✯.\n\n16**\n\n37水浒傅 38 三陆志演義",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 207347,
        "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": 115,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "EUROPEAN WORKING CLASS IN 19TH CENTURY\n\n107\n\nof the underdog Portuguese or Eurasian communities. The one social event that united—for one evening—all classes of European was that great Scots tribal festival, the St. Andrew's Day Ball. Celebrated on November 30, it ushered in the Hong Kong season, a season that closed with the Volunteer Ball.* The St. Andrew's Day Ball was open to any Scot or his friends who could afford the price of a ticket. Held in St. George's Hall, a spacious ball-room within the City Hall edifice, it was attended normally by over a thousand adults. Although an Army chaplain inquired plaintively: \"Why should pig-iron turn up its nose at ten-penny nails (in Hong Kong)?\" for one evening at least status distinctions between retailers and wholesalers were partially ignored, although the proceedings were always dominated by the chieftains of Jardine, Matheson and Co., the patriarchal Scottish hong,\n\nThe European lower orders were excluded not only from the more amusing social life of the colony, they also had little say in its government. In 1885, for example, the total number of ratepayers was eighty-two: from this small group the unofficial members of the Legislative Council normally were elected or chosen. The pong-paân were thus totally unrepresented in this, a British colony. Their names, moreover, are not found on the lists of Justices of the Peace, Special Jurors, and those of members of official and other important committees. They were of course sworn in on occasion as common jurors.\n\nWhy did the European lower orders experience such treatment from the well-to-do and influential? Partly, it was a consequence of social attitudes formed in the homeland: Victorian notions about the ordering of social classes and occupational groups, such as are analysed in Thackeray's The Book of Snobs. However, in early Hong Kong another notion was also prevalent: the view that there were 'dangerous classes', a term that connoted the lumpenproletariat, a class of persons spawned in the new industrial cities of Europe, 'those who had so miserable a share in the accumulating wealth of the industrial revolution that they might at any time break out in political revolt as in France'.32 Predictably enough, working-class Europeans were often viewed with some suspicion; there was fear that middle-class control over them would cease to prevail in certain\n\nFor the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Force see James Hayes' article in this Journal Vol 11, 1971: 151-171.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
        "rank": 0
    }
]