[
    {
        "id": 207742,
        "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-1976",
        "page_number": 130,
        "title": "RAS-1976",
        "content_text": "CHAN LAI-SUN AND HIS FAMILY\n\n115\n\nHe served as chief secretary at the Chefoo Convention in 1876, and until the time of his death assisted at the many transactions Viceroy Li had with foreign powers. He was to have joined Li in his mission to Japan after the Sino-Japanese War, but Li excused him saying, “You are old and so am I; but I have to go because there is no help for it.\"\n\nAt the time of his death Chan Lai-sun was survived by his widow, two sons and two daughters. He was predeceased by his son William and a daughter. The death notice of his widow, who died at the age of 92 on 17 Jan. 1917, was published in the Chinese Recorder (v. 58, p. 258). Her son Spencer T. Lai-sun had died only thirteen days before.\n\nSpencer had been educated at Queen's College, Hong Kong, before being taken to the United States by his father at the inauguration of the Chinese Educational Mission in 1872. He and his elder brother, Elijah, attended Yale. According to his obituary (South China Morning Post, 23 Jan. 1917), Spencer had an “extraordinary command of English” and was remarkably well informed on Chinese affairs, being one of the first to forecast the gravity of the Boxer Uprising. He was simultaneously on the staff of a Chinese language newspaper, the Hu Pao, and of an English language paper, the North China Daily News, both published at Shanghai. In 1911 he abandoned his newspaper career and as an expectant Taotai joined the staff of Viceroy Tuan Fang at Nanking. Early in his career in 1885 he undertook a special mission to India. When a reporter of the Times of India interviewed him, he was impressed with Spencer's European style clothing and the absence of a queue, for the latter he was said to have been given special permission by the Chinese authorities.\n\nDuring his school days in Hong Kong, Spencer had become acquainted with the family of the Reverend Ho Fuk-tong, being most likely a regular attendant of the Chinese congregation which met in the afternoons at Union Church. He married Ho Man-kwai, the daughter of the pastor. She died in Shanghai in 1894 at the young age of twenty-eight, leaving a young daughter, Daisy.\n\nThe other two daughters of Chan Lai-sun married Europeans. The husband of the eldest daughter was a Danish ship captain, N. P. Andersen. He had seen service in the Taiping Revolution and had a long career in the Coast Staff of the Chinese Customs. He was somewhat older than his wife and married in middle age.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210898,
        "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-1986",
        "page_number": 249,
        "title": "RAS-1986",
        "content_text": "232\n\nCARL SMITH\n\ntal to their people, and it will thus be in their power to cut off the supply altogether by a pecuniary sacrifice, far less than that voluntarily taken by England in the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies.\n\nA number of historians have regarded Li Hung-chang's attitude towards the opium problem as ambiguous. However that may be, he took a strong stand in a letter he addressed to the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade.\n\nHis statement was couched in a high moral tone.\n\n\"Opium is a subject of discussion of which England and China can never meet on common ground. China views the whole question from a moral standpoint; England from a fiscal. England would sustain a source of revenue in India, while China contends for the lives and prosperity of its people. The ruling motive of China is to repress opium by heavy taxation everywhere, whereas with England the manifest object is to make opium cheaper, and thus increase and stimulate the demand in China.”\n\nLi recognised that the crux of the issue was the importance of opium for the revenue of India, and thus indirectly of Britain. He contended that China did not tax opium because of the revenue it produced, but “the present import duty on opium was established, not from choice, but because China submitted to the adverse decision of arms. The war must be considered as China's standing protest against legalising such a revenue.\n\nA Shanghai paper did not believe the letter was composed by Viceroy Li. It stated: \"It bears the impression of foreign --- we had almost written missionary penmanship throughout.” It was perhaps the product of one of the Viceroy's advisers trained in a missionary school, such as Wu T’ing-fang (Ng Choy) or Chan Lai-sun. Whoever wrote it, it went out under Li's name and must have represented his opinions.\n\nThe letter became the subject of a question in Parliament to the Secretary of State for India as to whether the Indian Government was taking any steps to review Britain's position on the opium",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063",
        "rank": 0
    }
]