[ { "id": 206223, "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-1971", "page_number": 40, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "34\n\nCHIU LING-YEONG\n\nher seeming weakness and the record of her ancient greatness, they thought that, having become effete, the 19th century air would prove too much for her aged lungs. Here is the opinion of a distinguished diplomatic agent writing of China in 1849:- 'With a fair seeming of immunity from invasion, sedition or revolt, leave is taken to regard this vast empire as surely, though it may be slowly, decaying.'\n\nTseng pointed out that this was the opinion of a writer whose knowledge of China was slight. China was asleep but not about to die, he said. Further, China had failed to make her way with the foreign powers because for centuries she had been contented with her brilliant achievements in the past. He went on:\n\nPerhaps she thought she had done enough, had sat down and fallen asleep in that contemplation which, if not always fatal is at least always dangerous, the contemplation of her own greatness. What wonder if she had done so? Everything predisposed her to such an attitude of mind. The fumes of the incense brought by many embassies from far off lands, the inferiority of the subject races that looked up to her, the perfect freedom from the outer din ensured to her by the remoteness of her ample bournes all predisposed her to repose and neglect to take note of what was passing in the outer world. Towards the end of the reign of Tao Kwang, however, the sleeper became aware that her situation scarcely justified the sense of security in which she had been reposing. Influences were at work, and forces were sweeping along the coast very different from those to which China had been accustomed. Pirates and visitations of Japanese free-booters had occasionally disturbed the tranquillity of certain places on the seaboard; but the men who now began to alarm the authorities were soon found to be much more redoubtable than these. Wherever they came they wished to stay. Submissive at first, they engaged in trade with our people, and tempted them with strange merchandise. It was not long before troubles arose which showed that the white trader could fight as well as buy and sell. The", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207123, "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-1974", "page_number": 194, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "In his book on Plant Geography (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1903) A.F.W. Schimper produces a World Plant Map which is based on climatic conditions. It is interesting to see that, in this classification system, Hong Kong lies within the area of \"evergreen broad-leaved forest\" type of vegetation.\n\nThis classical type of forest, however, has virtually disappeared, largely as a result of human activities such as repeated cutting and the use of fire both intentional and accidental. Consequently, there are few areas of forest-type vegetation which could be described as \"probably indigenous\" left in the Colony today.\n\nThese remaining patches of forest consist generally of low scrub growth in ravines and relatively inaccessible places, together with isolated areas of woodland which are often quite dense and which, paradoxically, are located very near to villages and hamlets in the New Territories.\n\nThese are the so-called \"Fung Shui\" woodlands, and they provide a remarkable contrast with the adjacent hillsides which generally carry a sparse vegetation of grasses and shrubs with scattered pine trees of poor form and insignificant size. These \"Fung Shui\" woodlands may, in fact, give a fair impression of the character of the original vegetation of Hong Kong before \"Homo sapiens\" came on the scene.\n\nSuch \"Fung Shui\" woodlands owe their present existence to the protection afforded by the villagers in accordance with ancient traditions relating to the interactions of Wind (Fung) and Water (Shui) on the village environment.\n\nThe location of villages, and indeed of ancestors' graves, was decided upon after due consideration has been given to aspect, exposure, elevation, drainage, air movement, etc. A village which is favourably sited with regard to these considerations is thought likely to confer good fortune on its occupants, and this quality of site and environment has come to be known loosely as the \"Fung Shui\" of the village.\n\nIn China, the factors which collectively make up favourable \"Fung Shui\" were often \"assessed\" by an expert in geomantic art, whose advice was sought in the final choice of site for a village or an important grave.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207242, "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": 10, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "2\n\nwhich followed his talk. In May, Mrs Carole Morgan talked on Dogs and Horses in Ancient China, a subject for which she is preparing a doctoral dissertation for the Sorbonne in Paris, and also in May we were invited by the Hong Kong History Society for a cultural evening. It was an Indian occasion, with a talk by Mrs Raj Ghose on Buddhist Art, followed by curry at the Gaylord Restaurant in Kowloon and a film on Rock Carvings. In October we invited Mrs. Raj Ghose back to talk to the Society and her subject was Tibetan Iconography. In September we had a talk by Miss Helen Perrell on Mandarin Squares, and in October our members were invited to the Fung Ping Shan Museum of the Hong Kong University to hear a talk on the museum given by the curator, Dr. Michael Lau, to University staff. In January Mr. John Myers, another doctoral candidate, for the University of Pittsburgh, talked on his field research into Chinese spirit-medium cults in Hong Kong's urban area. Mr. Myers is currently with the anthropology section of the Sociology Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.\n\nThree other talks have been organised so far this year, all on China. One, also in January by Professor Cheng Te-k'un, scholar of international renown in the field of Chinese archaeology and art, was on Chinese export ceramics, and was illustrated with beautiful slides. In February Professor Hsieh Chiao-min talked on contemporary problems in modern Chinese geography. Professor Hsieh is on sabbatical leave from the University of Pittsburgh and honorary visiting professor in the Geography and Geology Department, University of Hong Kong. Finally in March Professor Noah Fehl, Chairman of the Department of World History of the Chinese University and a long time resident of Hong Kong, talked about the work and thought of the philosopher/scholar Tsou Yin, who matches Aristotle in period of time and some of his ideas. All our talks drew good size audiences and from the variation in their constitution from lecture to lecture it would appear that our policy of variety to suit different interests is a correct one. During the period, then, we were fortunate in being able to borrow the talents of many visiting and resident scholars.\n\nEXCURSIONS\n\nMr. James Hayes, one of our Vice-presidents was as usual active in organising many of our excursions during the period. In", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211345, "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-1988", "page_number": 61, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "37\n\nofficials in Shanghai stopped Sulin from sailing to America because Mrs. Harkness had neglected to obtain the necessary permit to export live animals. After much discussion and wrangling, Mrs. Harkness was able to leave Shanghai for San Francisco with Sulin on the President McKinley, carrying with her a \"passenger voucher\" for \"one dog\".\n\nTwo years later, in 1938, Floyd Smith succeeded in bringing five live giant pandas to England, creating a general sensation around the world.\n\nResearch into Chinese records for records on the giant panda\n\nWith all the hoopla around the world starring one of China's very own, faces were red indeed back in the Central Kingdom. Nobody had even suspected the existence of such a delightful treasure in China's own backwoods.\n\nResearchers were challenged to dig into Chinese historical records and ancient writings to find proof that, after all, the Chinese had known all about the giant panda since antiquity.\n\nThe Synthesis of Books and Illustrations of Ancient and Modern Times, a work compiled during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) but not printed until 1722, is a wonderful source for quick reference of Chinese scholarship throughout the ages. Thumbing through the chapters on animals, scholars of the 1930s came up with a plethora of animal names that they fitted into physical descriptions of the modern giant panda in one way or another. Some of these choices could be traced to the classics, the Book of Odes, an anthology of poetry mostly dating from the early Zhou era (1122-722 B.C.), and Erya, a dictionary thought to date from the third century B.C. Antiquity indeed.\n\nThat giant pandas had existed in China since geological times was never a point in dispute. Studies of fossil remains have proved beyond any doubt that pandas had lived in China during the Pleistocene. Furthermore, their geographical distribution had been much more extensive than today's. They had lived in areas outside the southwestern mountains, and had roamed the provinces of the north and the east, including Liaoning, Shandong, Anhui, and Jiangsu.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212012, "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-1989", "page_number": 427, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "402\n\ncivilization occurred during the time of Confucius and not, as Schwartz argued in his latest book, The World Of Thought In Ancient China (1985), half a millennium earlier in the Western Zhou. Metzger underlines foundations for individual moral autonomy in traditional Chinese thought, a position contradicting the general evaluation (supported by Schwartz) that 'Confucian norms emphasized the importance of the group at the expense of the individual's freedom, spontaneity, creativity and moral autonomy', (p. 263). The fact that Chang's analysis uncovers no decisive break with tradition, but only a 'counter-tendency' to the cosmological myth which legitimated imperial rule (pp. 30-31), manifests the need to question the usefulness of positing an axial age when applied to pre-Qin cultures. Studies edited by Eisenstadt have recognized this methodological dilemma, noting the difficulty of identifying a period of radical metaphysical construction and social repositioning during Confucius' era. This leaves open the possibility that Schwartz's location of the major shift in the earlier period of the sage kings, in spite of oracular bone evidence to the contrary (pp. 18-19), may yet identify an important option. Metzger's challenge, on the other hand, unveils a leitmotif which weaves the polychronic essays into a single tapestry: the question of the relationship between modernity and China.\n\nThese essays being divided into four general sections entitled 'Thought', 'Literature and Culture', 'Political Theory', and 'Culture and Methodology' — tend to converge on either characterizing the process of modernization in some dimension of Chinese societies or evaluating the methods scholars have employed to illuminate China's status in the modern world. These convergences are imbedded in comparative discussions of intriguing complexity, making this thread less easy to identify at times. Nevertheless, recourse to the touchstone of modernity is a central feature of the volume. In fact, the discussion regarding it is not always complementary.\n\nDon Wyatt, like Metzger, locates a singular continuity in Confucianism: Confucian language is \"this-worldly\", especially in its use of analogical arguments, (pp. 42-57). Surprisingly, perhaps, this does not mean that Confucianists (especially in the Song) did not address metaphysical, even other-worldly, ideas. Emphasizing this kind of 'language consensus' which sinologists have regularly typified as this-worldly, Wyatt goes so far as to claim that, although Confucian society was clearly stratified, no class-bound structures are evident in Confucian language, (p. 61). Whether or not this is still the case, this assertion", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212293, "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": 235, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "212\n\nKong CT. London Missionary Society Archives, South China, April 24, 1845: Legge writes to the headquarters, sending copies of Collie's work to them.\n\nC Andrew J Nathan, \"The Place of Values in Cross-Cultural Studies: The Example of Democracy and China\", in Paul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays on Chinese Thought in Honor of Benjamin I. Schwartz (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 293-314. I quote here the three relevant sections.\n\n**After World War II] relativism especially recommended itself as a corrective to our society's nineteenth and early twentieth-century missionary impulses... that their way of life was not going to sweep the world.... (Ibid. p 296).\n\n**The relativist position |-| adopted in order to prevent missionary zeal from clouding our understanding of the non-Western world |. led in some cases to an equal but opposite kind of self-deception”. (Ibid. p 304).\n\n\"Evaluative universalism by no means requires a return to the missionary mode of promoting Western values. It is not a call for proselytism but an expression of the belief, first, that value differences when they exist can, and can only, be honestly expressed, and second, that beliefs originating in different societies can fruitfully be confronted with one another, compared, and judged, even though disagreement is expected to persist”. (Ibid. pp 312-313).\n\nRecorded in Legge's autobiographical account entitled \"Notes of My Life\" (pp. 25-27), kept now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.\n\n12 These books are Paraphrasis Psalmorum Davidis Poetica (n.p., 1566) and Rerum Scoticorum Historia (ed. apud A. Arbuthnetum, 1582). English translations of both were available in Legge's time.\n\nLi\n\nThis version was apparently intended as a replacement of the earlier rendition of The Book Of Poetry published by Legge in 1871. It was a completely revised text of both the verse and the commentarial notes. Because it only included the English text and not the Chinese text which appeared in the first edition, however, the later Oxford edition of 1893-1895 republished the earlier text. A comparison of this earlier rendition with the second edition (which others called Legge's \"metrical“ Shijing \"jén) would display the kind of discipline Legge had as a translator of classical texts. See James Legge, The Chinese Classics: translated into English, with Preliminary Essays And Explanatory Notes – Vol III: The She King; or, The Book Of Odes (London: Trübner & Co., 1876). See also Alfred Lister, \"Dr. Legge's Metrical Shi-King\", The China Review 5:1 (July 1876), pp. 1-8.\n\n11\n\nThis Hebrew Psalter was prepared with a twenty-seven page introductory essay which included some critical commentary, and over three hundred pages of metrical paraphrases of the Psalms. Legge's position in presenting the Psalter was primarily meditative and not textual-critical; neither did this tome contain the kind of extensive commentarial apparatus which The Chinese Classics always included. Perhaps it is for some of these reasons that the manuscript was never published. It is now kept in the library of New College at the University of Edinburgh.\n\n14 The printed text of this poetic summary of Chinese history I found in the Oriental Studies Library in Oxford. It was clearly planned and printed as part of some larger work.\n\nFor the value of \"cherishing the old\", see the Analects 2:11, The Chinese Classics: Vol 1, op. cit., p. 49. Han Yu's opposition to Buddhist and Taoist superstitions, his courageous attack on their spiritual deceptions, and his consequent punishment must have stood as a courageous example to Legge. Han's specific interest in the old style, and his influence in stimulating interest in the renewed study of ancient texts and writing styles, parallels some of Legge's own interests.\n\n17 After graduating from King's College, the young James spent time with his father", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 } ]