[ { "id": 209435, "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": 92, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "70\n\nELIZABETH SINN\n\neconomy of the Colony could be crippled by the whims of coolies and boatmen,24\n\nIn an effort to break the strike James Stewart Lockhart, the Acting Registrar-General, had several interviews with the boat people and their sureties. He believed he had succeeded in persuading them to resume work on the 3rd.25\n\nOn the morning of the 3rd, the police were on the alert, anticipating that the resumption of work would not be trouble free. Extra police were placed on the Praya. Boats did return to the British side of the harbour. As they approached Praya West, they were, as expected, attacked by a group of cargo coolies with stones and bricks, and they promptly moved off again. One of the stone throwers was arrested.\n\nThe stone-throwing stopped when the boats were gone, and the cargo coolies then appeared to turn their wrath upon the rickshaw and chair coolies, wanting them to stop work as well. They started to turn over chairs and rickshaws, pelting coolies as well as passengers with stones. Interestingly enough, the chair coolies resisted being forced into the strike, fighting back at the cargo coolies as did several of the European passengers.\n\nIn the midst of the scuffle, Sikh policemen arrived, and the mob stoned them too. The Sikhs, who were heavily armed with carbines and a good supply of ammunition, got into action at once. They fired into the crowd and cut their way into the crowd with their swords.20\n\nThe Acting Captain Superintendent, having called out all the available men at the Central Police station, sent a request to the Military Barracks for support. One hundred men of the East Kent Regiment, the \"Buffs\", were marched to the scene of the disturbance with fixed bayonets. Their presence seems to have restored order and it was not necessary for them to interfere actively.27\n\nOn hearing of the disturbances, Marsh immediately called the Executive Council, and it met at 11 o'clock on the 3rd. After hearing the account given by Colonel Barton, the Assistant Military Secretary who had just returned from the scene of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209653, "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": 310, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "288\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nThe reply from the Secretary of State, Lord Salisbury, was, “I approve your proceedings\" (F.O.228, v.605, p.237, dated Dec. 9, 1878).\n\nThe letter from the Foreign Office to Mr. Herton which he referred to in his letter to Mr. Keswick has not been traced in F.O.228. Perhaps he would have been less pleased with Foreign Office action if he had been aware of the above exchange.\n\nNothing further appears to have happened until 24th July 1879, when Sir Thomas Wade, who as H.M. Minister in Peking had meanwhile taken over from Chargé d'Affaires Fraser, wrote to Mr. Scott enclosing a memorandum on the Herton claim (F.O.228, v.630, p.101-2), and instructing him to inform the Superintendent of Customs at Kiungchow that the firm's claim for $909.57 was supported, and that the attention of the Chinese authorities in Canton had been directed to the case. It is not entirely clear whether this was before or after Scott's letter of 3rd July, enclosing one from Herton of 2nd July to Sir Thomas Wade (F.O.228, v.630, p.134-6), had reached Peking, though the latter are filed later. Herton claimed that, because of his \"unfair treatment at the hands of the Authorities\" his business had been \"entirely crippled\", and he was \"now in most pressing need of the money,\"\n\nIn accordance with Sir Thomas Wade's instructions, Scott wrote on 22nd August 1879 to the Customs, claiming $909.57, and rehearsing the whole affair on the lines of Wade's memorandum (F.O.228, v.630, p.165-7). No reply of substance was received until November, when, on the instructions of the Governor General of the two Kwangs, the old argument was reiterated, that no instructions for issue of transit passes were drawn up until January 1879 and as Herton had made his journeys in 1877 the duties paid were legally charged (F.O.228, v.630, p.174-5). In reply, Scott referred Acting Taotai Liu to the Treaty of Tientsin, art. XXVIII (see note 3 below), and pointed out that transit passes had been obtainable at Shanghai and other open ports for many years. He continued, \"Are the Canton Authorities then alone to be free to carry out their individual opinions under pretext of drawing up rules, refuse to issue passes and levy any dues they please in opposition to Treaty rights?\"\n\nIn", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "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": 214973, "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": 69, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "25\n\n“As you wish, madame.” He gave us a second-class cabin, looked at our son doubtfully. \"Tall for his age, isn't he? Only four and something, did you say?\"\n\nAnd another, equally persuasive fragment:\n\nIn Singapore we were refused a room at the English hotel, and the Chinese ones were very hot and uncomfortable; there was opium-smoking, prostitution and gambling all round us. Marguerite had prickly heat, and our son cried all night long. Our clothes were all too heavy for the damp, hot weather\n\nHaving returned home as a former engineering student from Belgium, Han Suyin's father was then employed by the Belgian company developing a railway network throughout the Chinese interior. There are many fragments in the pages of her books, referring to this period in her and her family's lives. A happy one is given already in Chapter One of The Crippled Tree:\n\nRailways meant a lot to my father, and they were also part of the climate of my growth since my childhood was spent in small or large railway stations. Even now, whenever I hear the siren hoot of an engine, my childhood comes cantering back to me.\n\nInequality between Western high school diplomas granted to the Chinese and to the whites was indisputable, self-evident and absolutely “natural,” and was thus quite impossible to argue against. The Chou family was confronted with this inequality right from their re-settlement to China. In Chapter Nineteen of The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin mentions:\n\nIt was in the yellow plains of Honan; not far from it, the Yellow River had burst its dykes and gone flooding once again, and there were many displaced peasants and also bandits and soldiers, the latter more than the former and more to be feared. The little station was safe, however. There the Big Engineer, whose name was spoken of with indrawn breath and a small pause of respect because he was a Belgian and had a large salary, stayed in a new brick house constructed specially for him on a small hill. Mama and Papa lived in a small Chinese house of earth walls on the other side of the railway, about two miles away", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214974, "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": 70, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "26\n\nfrom the hill, in the town.\n\nIn that particular place on the Chinese provincial railroad construction, Han Suyin's baby elder brother, Gabriel (Sea Orchid), died simply because he was Eurasian. The French doctor working for the Belgian railroad-building company was engaged basically to look after the European employees' and their families' health, and these patients could see him at any time in his house on the hilltop. For Chinese and Eurasians he was available exclusively in his morning clinic, not meant for Europeans. Sea Orchid was most unlucky to get suddenly and seriously ill at a wrong time of the day, late in the evening, and his Belgian mother - obviously scared of the worst - took him immediately, although against the company's regulations, to the hilltop doctor's house. She was not even let in by the doctor's French wife and this shattering episode is described in detail in Chapter Nineteen of The Crippled Tree. The most dramatic part of the dialogue between the sick baby's mother and the doctor's French wife is cited below:\n\n“But my child is dying, he has convulsions. Madame, for the love of God, let me see the doctor.”\n\n“Certainly not, Madame. Don't shout like that, it is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with your child, only teething. The doctor cannot see you.”\n\n“My baby is dying, my baby is dying,” screamed Mama, striking the door more violently, hurling her weight against it.\n\n“Get out, you and your filthy halfcast brat, get out of my house,” shouted the French woman upstairs. Then Mama heard a man's voice, and again the woman's: “I forbid you to go. Do you hear, Pierre? I forbid it. I will not have you kill yourself for the sake of a halfcast throwndown.” The next morning Sea Orchid was dead.\n\nHan Suyin was born to Roman Catholicism, owing to her deeply religious Belgian mother. Surprisingly enough, even Catholicism seemed split on racial grounds in that surrealistic land of Old China. In Chapter Twenty-Seven of The Crippled Tree, Han Suyin recollects her early memories of attending a Chinese Catholic school, attached to the Peking's Chinese Catholic Church (also known as East Church, or", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214977, "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": 73, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "29\n\nnot only by the white races but the coloured ones as well. Being by birth Eurasian, she made an only too easy and vulnerable target from both sides. In volume three of her epic autobiographical/historical cycle, Birdless Summer, explicit and abundant evidence is provided of almost unsurpassable difficulties in her first marriage to a Chinese aristocrat, chauvinist and Chiang Kai Shek general, due to her half-European roots. Let us quote just a short and very mild passage from Chapter Four, introducing us to this serious and later on gradually growing problem:\n\nIt was on this journey that Pao's [the Chinese husband's] friends began to tease him about me. When we stopped at night they would comment about my looks... \"There is foreign blood in her, one can see that...\"\n\n“Not at all, she is pure Chinese,\" retorted Pao. As if it was not written on my face that I was a Eurasian!\n\nThe greatest resonance of Han Suyin's artistic prose, echoed in the field of film-making also, was attained by a tragic love story, entitled A Many-Splendoured Thing (later made into the motion picture Love is a Many Splendored Thing by Twentieth Century Fox with Jennifer Jones and William Holden in the leading roles). It describes a great love affair between the author (then a medical doctor in Hong Kong) and Ian Morrison, a foreign correspondent of the London Times. This sublime love affair, perhaps the greatest in the whole of Han Suyin's life, lasted several months only and was tragically ended by Ian's front-line death in Korea, when reporting on the Korean war. The love affair was also a scandal in Hong Kong society of the early fifties, when interracial amorous ties were still considered improper and an attempt on the divine social order. Where they occurred, they were rationalised as the virtuous white man, assiduously corrupted by a sly coloured female of loose conduct.\n\nHan Suyin can indisputably be regarded as a reliable eye-witness and a true expert in the most subtle and often confounding issues arising from colonialism. Her painfully sober judgement is highly impressive. I myself very frequently return to fragments of Chapter Ten from The Crippled Tree, very eloquent about the colonial powers' cunning attempts to win ‘native' hearts and minds. Here is one fragment:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215250, "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": 27, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "this project will now be completed by the summer. Please keep an eye on the Newsletter for details.\n\nDuring the year, apart from the Journal, the only other publication with which the Society was associated was the publication of a Polish translation of Han Su-yin's The Crippled Tree. The translator of this novel asked for the Society's assistance. The Society accordingly acted as publisher for the work, and co-ordinated dealings with the printer. No cash assistance was required. A copy of the translation will be available for members in the Society's Library.\n\nThe Volunteers\n\nThe Society has a group of Volunteers who do voluntary work for the Antiquities and Monuments Office, both by visiting historic buildings with a view to grading them, and by assisting with archaeological excavations undertaken by the Office in Hong Kong. The group provides tremendous support for the Office, while, at the same time, providing those members who give up their time to the job with the perfect opportunity of getting to know Hong Kong's antiquities on an intimate level. I must express the Society's thanks to the Volunteers, and especially to Mr. Bob Horsnell and Mr. Bill Greaves, who run the group so noticeably well.\n\nDuring this last year the group has visited a number of historical buildings and sites, and in particular has been researching the Tiger Balm Gardens, and some of the remaining structures connected with the old RAF Station at Kai Tak, a few of which still remain from before the War. Buildings under consideration for grading in old Wanchai have also been researched. On the archaeological side, the group assisted Dr Solomon Bard in his important excavations in the garden at Tai Fu Tai, San Tin, where a number of interesting finds were made, including a very large garden pavilion, a well-laid pathway, and a large pool with a small pavilion built over it on a granite platform.\n\nThe Volunteers remain very much a group in being, and have a programme of work stretching over the next few months. Members interested in joining the group should contact Bob Horsnell: anyone willing to give up a weekend-day on a regular basis would be considered!\n\nxxiv", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215295, "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": 72, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "20\n\ntax incentives and other government assistance? Apart from its superb harbour Hong Kong had no natural advantages. Almost all the raw materials for industry had to be imported. The population (840,000 at the 1931 census) was wretchedly poor and could not provide the purchasing power to support large-scale industry. But Hong Kong was well-placed to export cheap manufactured goods to the vast market of China and the neighbouring countries of Asia where until the 1930s tariffs on imports were low. The world depression led China and other Asian countries to erect high tariff barriers which threatened to cripple Hong Kong's burgeoning industry. The colony was saved by the decisions taken at the Ottawa conference to adopt the policy of imperial preference. This handicapped its main competitor, Japan, by imposing high tariffs and later quotas designed to exclude Japanese manufactures from markets in the British empire. This created a vast imperial free trade area embracing Britain, its colonial territories and New Zealand. Traders and businessmen in the African or Caribbean colonies could have seized the opportunity to exploit it, but it was only the energetic and adaptable Chinese entrepreneurs of Hong Kong who did so. The decisions taken at Ottawa which were designed to help industry in the dominions gave an unintended boost to Chinese factory owners in the back streets of Kowloon.\n\nUniversity of Hong Kong\n\nNOTES\n\n1. M. Havinden and D. Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and its tropical colonies, 1850-1960 (London, 1993), 1. D.K. Fieldhouse, Colonialism 1870-1945: An Introduction (London, 1981), 51–108. David Meredith, \"The British Government and Colonial Economic Policy 1919-1939', Economic History Review, 28 (1975), 484-99. Louis Nthenda, 'From Trade to Manufacture: Britain's Dilemma in the Face of Colonial Industrialization 1931-1938', Journal of Social Sciences, 1 (1972, University of Malawi), 95-112.\n\n2. Leo Amery in 1926, quoted by Meredith, 495.\n\n3. Meredith, 494. The only supporting evidence for this theory in the Colonial Office files is a letter from the governor of Uganda, 22 Dec. 1934, who warned that any large-scale industrial development which caused rural depopulation would result in a serious increase in sleeping sickness. CO323/1298/10, Public Record Office, London (PRO).\n\n4. See for example J. Riedel, The Industrialization of Hong Kong (Tubingen, 1974), 5-6; F. Welsh, A History of Hong Kong (London, 1993), 451; D. Lethbridge, The Business Environment in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 1980), 1–2. A contrary view is given by Frank Leeming, \"The Earlier Industrialization of Hong Kong', Modern Asian Studies, 9 (1956), 337-42, who cites evidence from Hong Kong and Macao Business Classified Directory (1940, in Chinese).\n\n5. Minute by G.L.M. Clauson, 7 Nov. 1933, CO323/1232/8. Memoranda and Draft Report of Interdepartmental Committee 1937, CO852/164/6 and T160/763/F14811/1 and 2, PRO.\n\n6. According to D.J. Morgan, The Origins of British Aid Policy 1924-1945 (New Jersey, 1979), 9, the proportion of general revenue in the colonies derived from customs duties in 1933 was:", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215724, "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-2002", "page_number": 23, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\nGliding: How Louis de San beat the Asian duration and altitude records in Chungking, China, in 1940, from the Belgian journal Aviation, Volume 2, Number 14, March 1946, translation by Paul Bolding\n\n345\n\nPaul Bolding - More on Louis de San\n\n357\n\nArnold Graham's Shanghai Christmas card, 1905\n\nJulia Chan - The Library of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society\n\n361\n\n373\n\nJames Hayes - Afterthoughts on South China Village Culture, Oxford University Press, 2001\n\n385\n\n393\n\nbecame Kalekie drzewo\n\nPeter Hansell - The colourful Douglas Lapraik (1818-1869)\n\nPaul Harrison - Introducing the Conservation Section of the Hong Kong Government\n\nPeter Halliday - Adventures in publishing: How The Crippled Tree\n\n377\n\n381\n\n...\n\nRobert Horsnell - A note on the Japanese gun emplacement at Tathong Point, Tung Lung Chau.........\n\n399\n\nDavid Mahoney - More on THE CHINESE LABOUR CORPS IN FRANCE, 1917-1921: A new discovery\n\n....\n\n405\n\nDavid Mahoney - Yet more on THE CHINESE LABOUR CORPS IN FRANCE, 1917-1921 ....\n\n411\n\nMartin Merz - Yet more on TEA AND OPIUM\n\n413\n\nFebruary 2002...\n\nRobert Nield - Photographs from the HKBRAS' visit to Bhutan,\n\nKeith Stevens - The wrestling princes\n\n417\n\n431\n\nxiv", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216144, "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-2002", "page_number": 443, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "377\n\nADVENTURES IN PUBLISHING:\n\nHOW THE CRIPPLED TREE BECAME KALEKIE\n\nDRZEWO\n\nPETER HALLIDAY\n\nA few weeks after I took up residence in Hong Kong in the autumn of 1967, I was taken to the cinema by what had now become a new friend. The film we saw that Saturday afternoon - I remember the circumstances with undiminished clarity - was Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, starring William Holden and Jennifer Jones. The film made a very deep impression upon me and I have to confess that, as we filed out of the cinema, I wept unashamedly.\n\nIn 1972, or thereabouts, I was contentedly idling away an hour or so, browsing in a bookshop - to this day still a particular pleasure - when I came across a book entitled A Many-Splendoured Thing by Han Suyin. Memories of Love is a Many Splendored Thing came flooding back. Could this be the book behind the film or vice versa, I wondered?\n\nI bought the book but for many years - until quite recently in fact - could not bring myself to read it properly. This I have now done and have discovered that it is not a book to be trifled with. It should be read slowly and carefully, and savoured, if one is truly to understand and enjoy it. It is, as the Daily Express described it at the time, ‘a true story of piercing beauty.' As Ed Murrow said of Winston Churchill, Suyin 'mobilised the English language, and sent it into battle.'\n\nAlthough the Daily Express described Suyin's book as a true story, for some reason I had always assumed that it was a novel. Last year, however, through various circumstances, I discovered that this was the literal truth (I would have discovered it much earlier had I read My House Has Two Doors, also by Han Suyin, but unfortunately I did not read this until very recently). A Many Splendoured Thing tells the true story of a love affair between Suyin and Ian Morrison, a correspondent for The Times of London. They met in June 1949, in Hong Kong. Tragically, Ian was killed in Korea on 12 August 1950, when the jeep in which he was travelling was blown up by a landmine.\n\nA tribute to Ian Morrison appeared in Vol. 41 of JHKBRAS.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216145, "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-2002", "page_number": 444, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "378\n\nI was spellbound by this revelation and decided to write an article on the subject for The Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, a Hong Kong publication of which I am the Hon. Editor. This appeared in 2001.2\n\nIn researching this article I had a look around the WWW and came across a webpage dedicated to Suyin hosted by the University of Minnesota and maintained by Professor Teresa Kowalska of the Silesian University, Katowice. Without any real hope of getting a response, I e-mailed Teresa and she promptly replied. This started an exchange of e-mails, which continues to this day, initially about Han Suyin, but latterly about every subject imaginable. We have become friends.\n\nTeresa has been an ardent admirer of Han Suyin for many years and has met her four times now. She has written a number of articles about her and in 2002 told me of her magnum opus; a Polish translation of Suyin's The Crippled Tree. However, she was having great difficulty in finding a Polish publisher and the cost seemed likely to be prohibitive.\n\nBy this stage I had also developed an admiration for Suyin. None of her books had ever been published in Polish and it seemed important to rectify this state of affairs by making the power and poignancy of her writing available to the Polish reading public. What follows is an account of a collaboration between a Polish professor of chemistry and a then Hong Kong assistant commissioner of police (who, incidentally, headed the information technology department at the time) to publish Kalekie drzewo!\n\nI spoke to the HKBRAS publisher in Hong Kong (Pally Printing Co.) and he agreed upon a very favourable fee. Both he and I, however, were considerably worried about our ability to produce a book in Polish, of which we speak not one word. Taking the plunge, however, I asked Teresa to e-mail me the manuscript. This I handed to our publisher and asked him to produce the first proofs in hard copy. I forget the details but it seems that we got the typesetting all wrong for the Polish language and when Teresa saw the proofs she understandably went into paroxysms of despair at what we had done to her epic work. Henry Law (our\n\n'Vol. 40.\n\nSuyin and husband Vincent live, in retirement, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Vincent died in December 2002. R.L.P.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216146, "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-2002", "page_number": 445, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "379\n\npublisher) and I persevered, however, and Teresa was mightily impressed with our second effort. Apparently we had reproduced the manuscript exactly, including all the Polish diacritics.\n\nNow came the editing. Teresa hand-edited her hard copy and sent it to me. I was agreeably pleased to find that Microsoft Word contains all the Polish diacritics and edited the soft copy of the proof on my office computer. I leave to the reader's imagination the thought of a Hong Kong police officer, sitting in his office, editing a 500-page book, written in Polish. Finding the places in the book which needed correcting was, frankly, a labour of love but pride in finishing won through. I e-mailed the final version to Teresa who was highly impressed with my new-found Polish language skills!\n\nSo much for the text. There then followed an e-discussion on a dust-jacket for the book. I was keen on this, as it would give the book some colour. The Crippled Tree is an autobiographical work about Han Suyin's childhood in China. This led our thinking to the idea that the illustration on the dust-jacket should be of a tree, or forest, or some such. It was ultimately Teresa who came up with the brainwave that the illustration should be drawn by a child.\n\nAnd so it was. I sat my seven-year-old son, Alexander, down one evening at home with paper and coloured pencils and asked him if he would contribute to literary history (!) by drawing a tree. This, obviously, went through several iterations before we were both satisfied with it but Alexander is rightly proud of the fact that his artwork now graces the shelves of bookshops and institutions in Poland! His name also appears on the credits page.\n\nKalekie drzevo\n\nHan Suun\n\nFirst proof of the dust jacket for Kalekie drzewo. There is a deliberate mistake!", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]