[
    {
        "id": 212103,
        "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": 45,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "22\n\n\"help to reinforce in the young certain clearly-defined modes of behaviour and ways of looking at the world regarded as acceptable to the community”.\n\n43\n\nEven after making every allowance for the variable gap between Confucian indoctrination and the degree of acceptance among Chinese individuals, and for human behaviour in practice as opposed to precept, it has seemed to me that some great and tangible quality, part of the legacy of the old order of “right minded-ness” in doing and thinking, had manifested itself in the people of Tsuen Wan in those crucial decades. It was certainly something that made all the difference to the execution of the Hong Kong Government's schemes for developments.\n\nThere is, of course, another and more pessimistic view to be taken, which would attribute the people's behaviour less to cultural characteristics and ethical indoctrination than to the fact that they were still part of the \"peasant masses\". In at least one historian's mind, the **peasant masses** had still in the then fairly recent Republican period:\n\n“continued to be supernumeraries as they had been throughout Chinese history, the anonymous human dough that suffered and submitted, the governed...\" \n\n44\n\nresigned to poverty and what it brought as their fate; and that moreover, in a country of whose society Dr. Sun Yat-sen had once quipped that it \"was composed of only two classes, the very poor and the less poor\". Nevertheless, whilst accepting that poverty and acceptance of fate had undoubtedly played their part in Tsuen Wan's postwar saga, I much prefer an interpretation which is more complex and accommodating; allowing more scope for the human quality that is so visible in this narrative, and for the liveliness and enterprise so abundantly observable in the people who went to live there in those spartan and difficult times.\n\nNOTES\n\nR.O. Joliffe in Yi-fang Wu and Frank W. Price, China Rediscovers Her West, A Symposium (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1942), pp. 20-21. See, too, the almost identical estimate given nearly forty years before by the well-known American missionary Dr. Arthur H. Smith in The Uplift of China (London, Church Missionary Society, 1908), pp. 49-50.\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214824,
        "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-1999",
        "page_number": 239,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "205\n\nphilosophy and ethics among the Chinese\", p.298.\n\n2 A convenient modern summary of all Chinese religions, past and present, is provided by D. Howard Smith in his Chinese Religions (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968). Useful summaries are also contained in the relevant sections of Trevor Ling's A History of Religion: East and West; An Introduction and Interpretation (London, Macmillan, 1968).\n\n3 Arthur H. Smith, The Uplift of China (London, Church Missionary Society, 1908 and revised new edition 1914). Both are used in this paragraph, pp.83-4 and 41 respectively.\n\n4 Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1934), p.79.\n\n5 Smith, op.cit., 1908, p.84. Professor Latourette adds one more element: \"The average Chinese has long been and still is an animist, a Buddhist, a Confucianist and a Taoist with no sense of incongruity or inconsistency\", he wrote, in the first edition of his survey The Chinese, Their History and Culture (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1934), Vol.II, p.125.\n\n6 However, this \"intertwining\", as Smith called it, did not extend to the temples and monasteries of the three religions. As the 19th century English missionary cleric Archdeacon Moule observed, they were each characterized by a different atmosphere and possessed a different significance, which he summarized as follows: \"Confucian and ancestral temples generally are for the commemoration and reverence and cultus of the great departed. Buddhist and Taoist temples and monasteries are open for the worship singly or in company of the people generally, addressed to images representing deities of living and present power\". Ven. Arthur Evans Moule, The Chinese People, A Handbook on China (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1914), p.212. Rev. F.W.S. O'Neill, The Quest for God in China (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1925), p.33.\n\n7 This was a truly enormous field of endeavour, as practically every woman in every household in China and its Dependencies would have recourse to Taoist magic in one form or another to ward off evil from the home. The propensity was so marked that it could extend to converts to Christianity who, used to pasting up protective words and phrases, could include “Emmanuel” and “Trust in God” above the doorways and windows where hitherto Taoist charms had",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    }
]