[ { "id": 210159, "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-1984", "page_number": 130, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "109\n\nscenery of the same area. He wrote,\n\n\"In general, the south side of Hong Kong Island is far more picturesque and less bleak than the north. The villages we saw, unlike the mat-huts in the harbour, are exceedingly neat in appearance with blue tiled and white walled houses.\"14\n\nNonetheless, there were attractive places on the north and east too. A description taken from the English language Canton Press of January 1842 mentions the view of the whole valley and village of Wong Nei Chung obtained from a gap cut in a hill following the line of one of the new roads, and how the branch road to the east\n\n\"takes one to the village of 'Soo Kon Poo', at present a sequestered, well wooded and very pretty part of the island\"+15\n\na character it has not entirely lost even today!”\n\nThomas Allom's celebrated View of China, for which the text was prepared from various works by Revd. G.N. Wright, also pays tribute to the natural beauties of the island:\n\n\"The maximum length of the isle is about eight miles, its breadth seldom exceeding five; its mountains of trap-rock are conical, precipitous, and sterile in aspect, but the valleys that intervene are sheltered and fertile, and the genial climate that prevails gives luxuriance and productiveness to every spot, which, by its natural position, is susceptible of agricultural improvement.\"\n\nAnd in another place:\n\n\"Few areas so limited include so many scenes of sylvan beauty as the sunny island of Hong Kong. The country immediately behind Queen-town (sic) is peculiarly rich in romantic little glens, or in level tracts, adorned with masses of rock, in the fissures of which the noblest forest-trees have found sufficient soil for their support. These wood-crowned crags rise abruptly from wide-spread rice-grounds that closely encircle them; so", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210184, "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-1984", "page_number": 155, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "134\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nequally there is no reason to doubt that arrangements similar to those at Stanley and Shau Kei Wan were to be found there.\n\nThis account does not claim to be a comprehensive account of Hong Kong before 1841, but aims to stimulate an interest. If it reaches members of old Hong Kong village families by one reason or another, I hope it will encourage them to dig into their family chests to see if anything remains that will fill out the story.\n\n89\n\nNOTES\n\nThe material for this essay is varied. I am in considerable debt to several good friends; Ian Diamond, Tom Poon, Anthony Siu Kwok-kin, Patrick Hase, and Carl Smith among others. Nineteenth-century writers, including officials, especially those who saw Hong Kong in its early colonial years, are also valued contributors to the story. Correspondence in the possession of the Tang family of Kam Tin figures prominently. I have also been fortunate to have spoken with old persons in their 'seventies' and 'eighties' back in the 1960s. They were able to give valuable information about life in their youth, when the lifestyle and appearance of the Hong Kong villages and boat people's anchorages had changed relatively little since the 1840s, compared with the total obliteration and change all too frequently experienced in the past fifteen years. These interviews took place in a variety of places; in an old tenement in Shaukeiwan, in one of the old hillside villages there, in a resettlement estate, in a Housing Society estate for fishermen's families, on a friend's pleasure craft manned by a boatman whose family had been living on boats in Deep Bay for generations, on a working cargo boat in a typhoon shelter, in a converted stake-net fisherman's hut, in a village house overwhelmed by squatter huts, and so on. Each of these locations testified to how modern Hong Kong was dealing cards to the persons concerned and their families, swept along or thrust to one side in the maelstrom of intensive postwar development and redevelopment. To all the above contributors, I tender thanks and appreciation.\n\n1\n\nC.J.C. in Revd G.N. Wright and Thomas Allom, China Illustrated in a Series of Views (London and Paris, Fisher and Co., 1843), Vol. 1, p. 17 in my set, \"Harbour of Hong Kong”.\n\n2 Harley Farnsworth MacNair, Modern Chinese History Selected Readings (Shanghai, Commercial Press, Second edition, 1927), p. 169.\n\n3 W.L. Bales, Tso Tsungtang, Soldier and Statesman of Old China, (Shanghai, Kelly and Walsh, 1937), p. 69.\n\n4 The Letters of Queen Victoria, A Selection from Her Majesty's Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861, ed A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher, (London, John Murray, 1908), Vol. 1, p. 262.\n\n5 Following G.B. Endacott's History of Hong Kong (Oxford, University Press, 1958), p. 18.\n\n6\n\nSessional Papers (Papers laid before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong) 1884-85, p. 2.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216078, "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": 377, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "311\n\nZhenjiang city has grown beyond all recognition. Since the Communists came to power in 1949 Zhenjiang has suffered the same trials and tribulations as all other cities in China and only within the last decade or so of the 20th century did modernisation and development take off. Today it has wide streets, modern shops, drainage and factories as well as all the benefits, or otherwise, of westernisation. Also, three historical sites have been granted Asia-Pacific Heritage Protection Awards for 2001 by UNESCO. They are the Stone Pagoda, the Guan Yin Cave and a charitable association hall, all on Xijindu Street.\n\n1\n\nNOTES\n\nZhenjiang city walls were said by the British military to have been thirty feet high and five feet thick.\n\nAllom, Thomas (1844) China - in a series of views, displaying the Scenery, Architecture, and Social Habits of that Ancient Empire. London: Fisher, Son and Co Vol. IV p 41\n\n3 The area selected to be the foreign settlement was chosen in 1861 and divided into lots. Ground rent was paid to the Chinese government by leaseholders to whom titles for 99 years were issued through the British Consulate. They would have expired in 1960 had not the treaty port as a whole been formally surrendered [rendited in official parlance to avoid using the word surrendered] in 1929 after it had been decided that minor concessions were more trouble than they were worth.\n\nA\n\nCunynghame, Captain Arthur [1845] The Opium War: London\n\n\"Taot'ai [Daotai] was the term for a Qing dynasty Circuit Intendant.\n\n*Percival, William Spencer (1889) The Land of the Dragon-My Boating and Shooting Excursions to the Gorges of the Upper Yangtze. London: Hurst and Blackett, Ltd. [Percival was a member of H.B.M's Civil Service in China].\n\n'Clennell, WJ (June 1922) The Historical Setting of Chinkiang or a Bit of ‘Consular Bluff Shanghai: New China Review: Vol IV. No. 3 [Clennell provides much greater detail than is offered here].\n\n&\n\nSun Quan's city was built on Beigu Shan.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]