[ { "id": 205412, "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-1967", "page_number": 174, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n167 \n\nlittle farming, as the island has steep and rocky sides and there are only a few places where agriculture may be carried on. \n\nAs in other little towns of this sort whose existence was founded upon the business opportunities created by the presence of a fishing fleet, the population was mixed, consisting of Punti and Hakka people from a number of districts of the Kwangtung province.23 For the most part, it was recruited from among young men from the country districts bearing introductions to fellow clansmen and relatives already working or settled on Ap Lei Chau, or else following them back to Ap Lei Chau when they came on short visits to their native place. For most of its history, men outnumbered women residents. As late as 1911, the relative numbers of males and females, including children, were 1,041 to 396. In 1897, it had been 783 to 340.24 This was because many wives stayed behind in the village and were never taken to Ap Lei Chau. In this respect, Ap Lei Chau was like any other settlement of overseas Chinese living away from their native place and under alien rule. \n\nFollowing a pattern long established elsewhere, the local people established their own \"district associations\" (鄉會) on the island in the 19th century.25 There were three of these organisations, each under a fong or 'ward' name. Membership of the Fongs was automatically extended to all comers, whether temporary or permanent residents, and irrespective of status. The odd-job coolie and the established merchant were equal members, though having adequate means and more leisure, the latter would, of course, play the more important part in the Fong's affairs: it would, in any case, be expected of him. Only women and children were excluded from membership. \n\nAt a time when the Victorian colonial administration of the Colony saw its main function in the rural areas as keeping the peace, the leaders of the three Fongs, in effect, of the Ap Lei Chau community made themselves generally responsible for local affairs. However, the need to perform special duties was apparently intermittent and spasmodic, and their most regular function was to make adequate arrangements for celebrating the birthdays of the principal gods of the two local temples, Hung Shing, the God of the Southern Sea, and Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, and the occasion of the Yue Lan Festival (盂蘭節) in the 7th moon. Each Fong took its turn to be entirely responsi-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205786, "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-1969", "page_number": 92, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "86 \n\nR. BRUCE \n\nmonopolies abolished whilst levies on imports were to be limited, and vessels were to pay a tax on their size. But Burney failed to get permission for a British Consul to reside at Bangkok. Nor was he able to free British nationals from Siamese law. \n\nNext came the Americans. A merchant, Mr. Edmund Roberts, was commissioned by the President to secure a treaty at least as good as the British one. This was seven years later, in 1833. Although a President seemed to the Siamese a much less august personage than a King and America was both remote and less important, Roberts secured his treaty. It was almost exactly the same as the Burney agreement. \n\nIn the next two decades, especially in the \"forties, trade became more difficult. In fact the treaties with the British and the Americans gradually eroded away, and the old monopolies were taken back by the Court. Imports and exports were farmed to Chinese merchants by the King. Duties were arbitrary and heavy and trade dwindled. Everywhere else the British had greatly expanded their commerce by mid-century. Singapore was growing rapidly, the China trade had increased still further after the Opium War, the northern coast of Borneo was open to British commerce. It seemed only natural and civilised to the bold merchant princes and sea captains of Victorian England that Siam should, willy-nilly, share in the new prosperity, especially now that the first steamships had reached the Gulf of Siam. \n\nSir James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, was the next British envoy to sail up the Menam to Bangkok. He came in August 1850 on board H.M.S. Sphinx accompanied by a merchant vessel of the Company, the Nemesis, both steamers. Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, cautioned Sir James to be careful in his quest for better trade. \n\n\"In conducting these negotiations\", he directed, “you must be very careful not to get involved in any disputes or hostile proceedings which would render our position in Siam worse than it now is or which might compel Her Majesty's Government to have recourse to forcible measures in order to obtain redress. It is very important that if your efforts should not succeed they should at least leave things as they are and should not expose us to the alternative of submitting to fresh affront or of undertaking expensive operations to punish insult”.'", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205788, "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-1969", "page_number": 94, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "88\n\nR. BRUCE\n\nany case, he argued, trade had dwindled and it was in the interests of the Siamese to accept a new treaty which would expand trade.\n\nThe White Rajah never met the King. He sailed away with nothing but indignation. He had not openly threatened the Siamese with force but had hinted as much. The old King and his Ministers were not impressed but they must have harboured fears of reprisals as there were so many precedents. In October that year Brooke, addressing himself to Lord Palmerston, evoked high principles in the fine Victorian manner in support of his call for force:\n\n\"Justice — compassion — interest — dignity — and a consistent course of policy appear to me to call for decisive measures to be taken without delay.\"\n\nAnd in a letter to a friend:\n\n\"The Siamese must be taught a lesson... our policy should be commanding and our power exerted when necessary. My policy in Sarawak has been high-handed against evil-doers and there, and in England and in Siam, there are bad to be punished as well as good to be cared for.\"\n\nMercifully for Siam, Brooke's gun-boat policy was not accepted in London but he did perceive the solution in spite of his call for force. The old King, Rama III, must soon die and there was good prospect that his half-brother Prince Mongkut would succeed him. In that event, Brooke said, the prospect of a new relation with Britain was bright.\n\nThe Sphinx and the Nemesis had scarcely left the Menam in September, 1850 when an American mission arrived. It was led by a certain Joseph Balestier, a not very successful American merchant of Singapore who came with a letter from his President. If the Brooke mission was a failure, Balestier's was even worse. Bowring comments:\n\n\"Mr. Balestier had not been fortunate in his commercial operations as a merchant at Singapore and it may be doubted whether the nomination of a commercial gentleman whose history was well known to the King and nobles at Bangkok was judicious; it was certainly not deemed complimentary to the proud Siamese authorities.\"4", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205794, "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-1969", "page_number": 100, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "94\n\nR. BRUCE\n\nnecessary for the late King? He would be welcome then, that is in 1852. At the same time he took the initiative in improving trading conditions. Monopolies were partly removed and duties on imports and exports reduced. For a moment it seemed that Siam's foreign relations could be improved without formal treaty and the British Government did not press the matter. But in fact there was much to be done, and with a new British Plenipotentiary at Hong Kong it was opportune to resume discussions.\n\nSir John Bowring was a very different diplomat from his three British predecessors, Crawfurd, Burney and Brooke or the American envoys Roberts and Ballestier. He was an intellectual, a radical reformer, a disciple and editor of Jeremy Bentham, a linguist who could prattle in a dozen languages, an ex-Member of Parliament and a writer of hymns, an inveterate talker, a man with limitless energy and a Victorian capacity for pomposity and self-glory. After a career of business, politics, writing and self-appointed diplomacy in the courts of Europe, Bowring, being short of money, accepted public office as Consul at Canton. That was in 1849 when he was fifty-seven. Some five years later he became Governor of Hong Kong, Superintendent of Trade and, most glorious of all, Her Majesty's Plenipotentiary responsible for relations with China, Japan, Siam and all countries in the Far East.\n\nBowring's five years' Governorship of the island colony on the coast of China was anything but successful. Some of his senior officials were incompetent and even corrupt, and he was unpopular among the British merchants. Worst of all he precipitated the second Anglo-Chinese war by sending warships to bombard Canton over a quite unworthy incident. But he was completely successful when he sailed to Bangkok in March, 1855, to negotiate a treaty with the Siamese.\n\nMost of the detailed business of the negotiations was done by Bowring's young assistants, his son John C. Bowring, an employee of Jardine, Matheson and Co. in Hong Kong, and Harry Parkes, his secretary, who was later to have a distinguished career as Consul at several ports on the China coast, (Mongkut referred to the young men as \"Mr. Parkes and Your Excellency's upspring\".) But it was Bowring and King Mongkut who created the favourable atmosphere which allowed progress to be rapid and the discussions congenial. It was clear from the start that the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205853, "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-1969", "page_number": 159, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n153\n\nLand, labour and gold; or, Two years in Victoria, with visits to Sydney and Van Diemen's Land, by William Howitt, London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855. 2 vols.\n\nThe chop of the Victoria Library and Reading Rooms appears on the front end-paper of each volume, with the shelf-mark C244 written in ink. The transfer of this work to the City Hall Library in 1871 is evidenced by its chop on the half-title and title-page. It is interesting to speculate whether the selection of this book, the title of which on the spine is \"Two years in Victoria”, was due to a confusion between Victoria, Australia, and Victoria, Hong Kong. At least one user of the Victoria Library, or possibly the City Hall Library, got as far as p.57 of vol. 1, since a bookmark consisting of a strip from an old Hong Kong newspaper (not identified) is inserted there.\n\nSimilar marks of successive ownership appear on the other book, though here the Victoria Library chop appears on the title page and dedication leaf as well as on the front end-paper or fly-leaf. The shelf-mark on the fly-leaf appears to be F404. The title-page is reproduced at plate 18, to show the two ownership chops. The rectangular chop at the top is the processing chop of the University of Hong Kong Library, to which this book came as a gift from an unknown source in 1962; it is impressed on the back of the title-page, but shows through.\n\nAll three volumes are bound in a typical mid-Victorian style, brown polished calf with marbled paper. The shelf-marks do not appear on the spines, though they may have been on labels which have long since come off. The precise significance of the shelf-marks is not clear, though probably they were similar to those used in the Morrison Library, where the letter indicated a broad subject grouping (e.g. C for books of travel, D for natural history), each volume being given a running number within the appropriate group when added to the collection.\n\nIt is much to be regretted that no copies of the catalogues of any of the earlier Hong Kong libraries appear to have survived, other than the 1873 catalogue of the Morrison Library, when it was located in the old City Hall.\n\nHong Kong, 1969.\n\nH. A. RYDINGS", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205881, "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-1969", "page_number": 187, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "THE LIBRARY\n\nTaipei, Literature House, 1964.\n\nHENSMAN, Bertha, and MACK, Kwok-ping (AMA)\n\n181\n\nH52\n\nHong Kong tale-spinners; a collection of tales and ballads transcribed and translated from story-tellers in Hong Kong. Hong Kong, Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong, 1968.\n\nHILL, Dennis S.\n\nH645\n\nFigs (Ficus spp.) of Hong Kong. [Hong Kong] Hong Kong University Press, 1967.\n\n*KOLLARD, J. A.\n\nPAM K81\n\nEarly medical practice in Macao. Macao, Inspecção dos Serviços Economicos, Agencia de Turismo, 1935.\n\nMARTIN, W. A. P.\n\nM383\n\nA cycle of Cathay; or, China, South and North, with personal reminiscences. Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1966.\n\nMAYERS, William Frederick,\n\nM46\n\nThe Chinese reader's manual: a handbook of biographical, historical, mythological and general literary reference, Taipei, Literature House, 1964.\n\nMAYERS, William Frederick, ed.\n\nM46 t\n\nTreaties between the Empire of China and foreign powers; together with regulations for the conduct of foreign trade, etc. Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1966.\n\nMICHIE, Alexander.\n\nM624\n\nThe Englishman in China during the Victorian era, as illustrated in the career of Sir Rutherford Alcock many years consul and minister in China and Japan, Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1966.\n\nMORSE, Hosea Ballou.\n\nM88 t\n\nThe trade and administration of the Chinese Empire. Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1966.\n\nREMER, C. F.\n\nR38 f\n\nThe foreign trade of China. Taipei, Ch'eng-wen Publ. Co., 1967.\n\nWHISSON, Michael G.\n\nW576\n\nUnder the rug: the drug problem in Hong Kong. A study in applied sociology. [Hong Kong] Hong Kong Council of Social Service, 1965.\n\nWILLIAMS, S. Wells.\n\nW727\n\nThe Chinese commercial guide, containing treaties, tariffs, regulations, tables, etc., useful in the trade to China & Eastern", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206330, "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": 147, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "THE DISTRICT WATCH COMMITTEE\n\n141\n\nin the Colony. In 1948 they were taken over by the Medical and Health Department.\n\n58 G. W. Skinner, Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community of Thailand, Ithaca, New York, Yale University Press, 1958, p. 79.\n\n59 James Michie wrote: \"The means taken to conciliate the Chinese (in Hong Kong) must be deemed on the whole to have been successful. There was first police supervision, then official protection under a succession of qualified officers, then representation in the Colony Legislature and on the Commission of the Peace. The colonial executive has wisely left to the Chinese a large measure of a kind of self-government which is more effective than anything that could find its expression in votes of the Legislature. The administration of purely Chinese affairs by native committees, with a firm ruling hand over their proceedings, seems to fulfil every purpose of government.\" The Englishman in China during the Victorian Era, Edinburgh and London, William Blackwood, 1900, vol. 1, pp. 280-1.\n\n60 The Labour Advisory Board was established in 1937 and consisted of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, the Secretary and Cashier of His Majesty's Naval Yard, the Assistant Director of Supply and Transport of the China Command, a representative of the Public Works Department, the Manager of the Taikoo Sugar Refinery, the manager of the Hong Kong Electric Company, and the manager of the Taikoo Dockyard. The members consisted entirely of representatives of large government departments and employers of labour. The board rarely functioned.\n\n61 The Chinese General Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1896 principally by Ho Kai and Wei Yuk. It was called at first the Chinese Merchants Bureau. In 1913, after a period of decline, a new building costing $40,000 was erected in Connaught Road. After 1913 the Chamber became one of the most influential bodies in Hong Kong, and many members of the District Watch Committee served at one time or another on its executive committee. The Chinese Club was founded in 1899 by Sir Robert Ho Tung and modelled on the European Hong Kong Club. A description of the Club's premises is to be found in Mrs. Archibald Little, The Land of the Blue Gown, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1902, p. 323: \"We were taken by the Committee into an upper room, where European comforts of curtains and cushioned arm-chairs were judiciously intermingled with Cantonese elegances of black carved wood and landscape marble.\" Mrs. Little was a member of the Anti-Footbinding League or Natural Feet Society.\n\n62 See G. William Skinner for a detailed analysis of Chinese associations. See especially ch. 6 of his Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community of Thailand.\n\n63 For Overseas Chinese associations, see important works by the following: Maurice Freedman, \"Immigrants and Associations: Chinese in Nineteenth Century Singapore,\" Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 3, no. 1, 1960, and Chinese Family and Marriage in Singapore, London, H.M.S.O., 1957; G. W. Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1957, and Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community of Thailand, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1958; William E. Willmott, The Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Cambodia, London, The Athlone Press, 1970; and Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life 1850-1898, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1965.\n\n64 See Wilfred Blythe, The Impact of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya, London, Oxford University Press, 1969.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206357, "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": 174, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "158\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nundoubtedly due to the Volunteer Movement and to the succession of small imperial wars in the last 25 years of the 19th century which popularised the Army, and fed the emotional needs of imperial Britain in the Victorian age. Between 1902 and 1914 it was due to the sobering effect of the Boer War and the growing realisation by many of the need to reform and rearm against a possible European enemy. Soldiers, in short, were in the public eye, and Hong Kong was no exception to the general rule.\n\nHere, and in the treaty ports, another factor in the popularity of, and support given to, the volunteer corps was the pool of potential recruits provided by the employees of the major European firms, many of whom had attended public schools in Britain and were well suited by their education and sentiment to play a leading part in the volunteer movement.\n\n(b) 1914-41\n\nThe 1914-18 War saw many Volunteers go off to the War in Europe, and led to increased duties for the Corps due to the need to employ regular forces on active service elsewhere. Numbers dropped and compulsory service was introduced in 1917.18\n\nIn 1920, shortly after the War, a new Volunteer Ordinance was introduced to replace those of 1893 and 1910 which regulated the existing Volunteer Corps and Volunteer Reserve. When introduced into the Legislative Council, it was stated to closely follow the old Ordinance, but with a few changes to meet altered times. The Volunteer Force was now \"considered desirable for two reasons for defence against foreign enemies, and also in order to assist the Police and regular forces in case of any serious local disturbances'19 (my italics). We are coming nearer our own times in which the present Regiment was called upon in 1966 and again in 1967 to assist with “duties in aid of the civil power” i.e., internal security. The obligation to serve was also to become more serious. Every Volunteer was to be deemed to have engaged himself to serve for a period of three years and if he left before this without showing good cause he would henceforth have to\n\n18 For the war period see Vol, 1954, pp. 58-67 and Endacott, pp. 284-285. See also the Military Service Ordinance, No. 19 of 1917,\n\n19 Han., 1920, p. 15.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206495, "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-1972", "page_number": 43, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "RAJA JAMES BROOKE AND SARAWAK\n\n37\n\nFrance, and in 1859 he \"broke off\" relations with Britain, upon which the Foreign Secretary, Lord Russell commented,12\n\nTell Brooke that the people of Sarawak are welcome to any independence they can achieve and maintain but that a British subject cannot throw off his allegiance at pleasure.\n\nAnd Spencer St. John noted13 that \"the Raja's correspondence during this year with Her Majesty's Government was not pleasant, and ended, apparently, in complete estrangement”.\n\nOver the years Brooke had acquired a respectable following of supporters in Britain and Singapore, among whom were some influential figures such as Lord Grey, Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford, and the late Victorian philanthropist, Miss Angela Burdett-Coutts, later Baroness Burdett-Coutts. His friends now took up his cause and lobbied Whitehall from the Prime Minister's office down.\n\nBritain refused to extend a colonial or protectorate status to Sarawak on practical political grounds. Henry Layard, an under-secretary in the Foreign Office, wrote that a protectorate was declined because of the \"inconvenience of such relations between this country and a foreign territory\", because Sarawak “would not be of sufficient value politically and commercially\", and because Brooke's title was not \"sufficiently clear\"14\n\nBrooke's friends persuaded the Government to have another look at Sarawak, and in 1861 Lord Elgin, who was about to depart as the new viceroy of India, was instructed to investigate the prospects and potential of Sarawak. He delegated the task to Colonel Cavenagh, Governor of the Straits Settlements. In due course Cavenagh and Elgin provided an optimistic assessment of Raja Brooke's state and suggested making Sarawak a lieutenant-governorship under Singapore. \"I am disposed to think\", wrote Lord Elgin,15\n\nthat the acquisition of Saigon by the French and the persistent endeavor of the Dutch authorities to cripple British trade... give enhanced importance to the preservation of the independence of Sarawak as a matter affecting British interests.'\n\n12 See correspondence between the Foreign Office and Raja Brooke between 26 November and 17 December 1859, FO12/35.\n\n13 Spencer St. John, Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, (Edinburgh, 1879) p. 327.\n\n14 Layard memorandum to Lord Elgin, 2 January 1862, FO12/35.\n\n15 Elgin to Russell, 8 January 1863, FO12/35.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206530, "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-1972", "page_number": 78, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "72\n\nHENRY JAMES LETHBRIDGE\n\ntheir duties effectively. Of this latter group, student-interpreters in the Consular Corps probably made the greatest contribution — such names as Herbert A. Giles, E.H. Parker, E.D.H. Fraser, W.F. Mayers, Thomas Watters, G.M.H. Playfair, E.T.C. Werner,44 speak for themselves but Hong Kong cadets, although few in number (from 1861 to 1941 only eighty-five were appointed), also made a significant contribution and one should cite not only Lockhart but Sir Cecil Clementi45 and Sir R.F. Johnston. All these early British 'scholar-officials' helped to lay the foundations in Britain of Chinese studies and were among the first to staff and to head new departments of Chinese studies or to interest people in the study of a unique Asian civilisation and culture.\n\nLockhart, of course, was a busy, conscientious and efficient civil servant who could not spend his working hours brooding over knotty problems of translation or sinological conundrums; but he was always a remarkably energetic man and, according to his daughter, rose early in the morning and did his private work long before his Department was open officially.\n\nLockhart's studies appear to have extended into the evenings as well. There is an interesting reference to him, by T. Kirkman Dealy, in the Preface (1907) to his revised edition of Chambers' English-Cantonese Dictionary:\n\nI still vividly retain very clear recollection of a periodical after-dinner meeting which I was privileged to attend, in the middle eighties, at the former London Mission House, where, round a lamp-lighted table, under the personal presidency of the then venerable head of the London Mission [Dr. John Chalmers], sat the late Dr. Faber, Mr. J.H. Stewart Lockhart (now His Honour the Commissioner for Wei-hai-wei), Mr. (now Dr.) G.H. Bateson Wright, Head Master of Queen's College, Mr. Addys of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, the late Mr. A. Falconer, Second Master of the old Government Central School, and others, eagerly discussing, assiduously comparing, commenting on, and revising, translations of portions of a minor Chinese classic made, since the previous session, by individual members of the class.46\n\nThis very Victorian passion for work, which embraced not only his official duties but his private interest in sinology, allowed Lockhart to publish in 1893 his first book, a Manual of Chinese Quota-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206654, "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-1972", "page_number": 202, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\nThe following letter appeared in the South China Morning Post, 10th April, 1972. — Ed.\n\nWHO HOISTED THE UNION JACK?\n\nIn today's (April 7) issue on page 20 you publish an article headed \"The Hongkong Club decides to go back to Victorian Era”. In the article you state \"The Club was founded in 1846, five years after the Union Jack was hoisted on Possession Point by Captain Charles Elliot\".\n\nThe statement is not correct. It is true that Sir Charles Elliot issued a formal declaration of British sovereignty over Hongkong in January 1841 after the treaty of Chuenpi, but the Union Jack was hoisted on Possession Point by Captain Belcher commanding H.M. survey ship, Sulphur, on January 26, 1841.\n\nThe account is given in Captain Belcher's book \"Voyage round the World\" published 1843, Volume II page 157. The following is an extract:\n\n\"The only important point to which we became officially partners was the cession of the island of Hongkong, situated off the peninsula of Cow Loon within the island of Lama,\n\n\"On the return of the commodore on the 24th we were directed to proceed to Hongkong and commence its survey. We landed on Monday the 26th January at fifteen minutes past eight, and being 'bona fide' first possessors, her majesty's health was drank with three cheers on Possession Mount.\n\n\"On the 26th the squadron arrived; the marines were landed, the union hoisted on our post, and formal possession taken of the island by Commodore Sir J. G. Bremer, accompanied by the other officers of the squadron, under a feu de joie from the marines, and a royal salute from ships of war”.\n\nThere may be some uncertainty about the exact date. It is probable that the landing was on Monday, January 25 and that the more serious formalities took place on Tuesday, January 26.\n\nCaptain Belcher's history is preserved in the Colony in the names Belcher's Gardens, Belcher's Fort (and formerly Belcher's Creek)", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206881, "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-1973", "page_number": 158, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "152\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nThe making of verses was a gentlemanly pursuit in early Victorian days, encouraged of course by the system of classical education which emphasised translation from Latin and Greek and hence a detailed knowledge of the rules—or mechanics—of prosody. Mercer received such a traditional education: he was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he took a B.A. degree, and for a time was at the Inner Temple, though he did not take the Bar examination. When he came to Hong Kong as his uncle's private secretary, he sought solace from the chores of day-to-day colonial administration in his poetic exercises and the result was Under the Peak.\n\nThere are five poems in this book—‘a string of sonnets’—which refer specifically to Hong Kong. They are, respectively: The Peak; The Bay; The Triads' Cave; The Water Fall; The Temple on Taplichow; The Pic Nic Cottage at Heong-Kong; and The Chinaman's Grave on the Lonely Hill Side. According to Mercer's note on the poem, The Triads' Cave, ‘a cavern romantically situated, has now disappeared before the utilitarian demand for granite. It was long the chosen resort of the members of the infamous San hop hwai, or Triad Society', where:\n\nThe robber horde oath-bound to mutual aid\n\nWould plan foul murder and unpitying raid\n\nO'er midnight counsel in their secret den?\n\nThe gem among these sonnets is without doubt The Chinaman's Grave, and should be given in extenso:\n\nOh Chow, or Wong! or by whatever name\n\nMen call'd thee, or the Gods may call thee now,\n\nWhy so extravagantly vast thy claim\n\nTo mortuary earth upon the brow\n\nOf yon fair hill? If all men spread as thou\n\nNo room for things created would be found\n\nThroughout the Seric land, but all the ground\n\nWould teem with graves, and well might it be said\n\nThat living ones were push'd from off their stools\n\nBy men all useless, now that they are dead\n\nAnd vanish'd. Did Confucius leave no rules\n\nTo bind a soul's ambition by the tomb?\n\nThen let survivors show themselves no fools,\n\nBut dig thy bones up to make elbow-room", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206882, "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-1973", "page_number": 159, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n153\n\nFor once Hotten had backed a loser with the publication of Under the Peak; certainly no further edition or impression was called for by a panting public. We do not know whether Mercer continued to write verses until his death at Reading on 23 May, 1879, but it seems likely for Mercer had all the enthusiasm of the bad poet.11\n\nNOTES\n\n1 One would like to cite P. G. Wodehouse, the son of H. E. Wodehouse, a Hong Kong Cadet Officer; but P. G. Wodehouse was born at Guildford, Surrey, and did not spend much time in Hong Kong. After leaving Dulwich College he worked for two years at the London branch of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.\n\n2 London, 1930.\n\n3 For biographical information on Mercer see particularly G. B. Endacott, A Biographical Sketch-Book of Early Hong Kong, Singapore, 1962, pp. 79-83. J. W. Norton-Kyshe, The History of the Laws and Courts of Hong Kong, 2 vols., Hong Kong, 1898, provides many details about Mercer's official career.\n\n4 For information on Hotten see especially Ronald Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, London, 1969, pp. 387-90; and Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians, New York, 1966, pp. 68-75. Hotten was born in Clerkenwell, London, and showed an early interest in books and bookshops and achieved the dubious distinction of having been struck in a bookshop by the irate historian Macaulay. In 1848 Hotten went to America and there acquired a good knowledge of American literature. On his return to London he published the works of a number of American authors, including Bret Harte's 'heathen Chinee' poems.\n\n5 An account of Swinburne's dealings with Payne of Moxon's is given in Humphrey Hare's Swinburne, London, 1949, pp. 109-134.\n\n6 Written by Richard Payne Knight in 1786 but reprinted by Hotten in 1865.\n\n7 Written by John Davenport and published in 1873. In 1872 Hotten reprinted seven works on flagellation alone.\n\n* Copies of both Under the Peak and Addresses are in the British Museum. The Library of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London, has a copy of Under the Peak, now a very scarce book.\n\n9 p. 4. 10 p. 6.\n\n11 Several cadets maintained their interest in classical studies after reaching Hong Kong, notably (later Sir) Cecil Clementi (1875-1947). In 1911 Clementi published his translation, with apparatus criticus and explanatory notes, of the Pervigilium Veneris. In a preface to a later edition of this work, published by B. H. Blackwell of Oxford (3rd edition, 1936), Clementi tells us that he worked on his manuscript in Hong Kong and during periods of leave in England and Europe.\n\nHong Kong, March, 1973.\n\nHENRY JAMES LETHBRIDGE", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207347, "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": 115, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "EUROPEAN WORKING CLASS IN 19TH CENTURY\n\n107\n\nof the underdog Portuguese or Eurasian communities. The one social event that united—for one evening—all classes of European was that great Scots tribal festival, the St. Andrew's Day Ball. Celebrated on November 30, it ushered in the Hong Kong season, a season that closed with the Volunteer Ball.* The St. Andrew's Day Ball was open to any Scot or his friends who could afford the price of a ticket. Held in St. George's Hall, a spacious ball-room within the City Hall edifice, it was attended normally by over a thousand adults. Although an Army chaplain inquired plaintively: \"Why should pig-iron turn up its nose at ten-penny nails (in Hong Kong)?\" for one evening at least status distinctions between retailers and wholesalers were partially ignored, although the proceedings were always dominated by the chieftains of Jardine, Matheson and Co., the patriarchal Scottish hong,\n\nThe European lower orders were excluded not only from the more amusing social life of the colony, they also had little say in its government. In 1885, for example, the total number of ratepayers was eighty-two: from this small group the unofficial members of the Legislative Council normally were elected or chosen. The pong-paân were thus totally unrepresented in this, a British colony. Their names, moreover, are not found on the lists of Justices of the Peace, Special Jurors, and those of members of official and other important committees. They were of course sworn in on occasion as common jurors.\n\nWhy did the European lower orders experience such treatment from the well-to-do and influential? Partly, it was a consequence of social attitudes formed in the homeland: Victorian notions about the ordering of social classes and occupational groups, such as are analysed in Thackeray's The Book of Snobs. However, in early Hong Kong another notion was also prevalent: the view that there were 'dangerous classes', a term that connoted the lumpenproletariat, a class of persons spawned in the new industrial cities of Europe, 'those who had so miserable a share in the accumulating wealth of the industrial revolution that they might at any time break out in political revolt as in France'.32 Predictably enough, working-class Europeans were often viewed with some suspicion; there was fear that middle-class control over them would cease to prevail in certain\n\nFor the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Force see James Hayes' article in this Journal Vol 11, 1971: 151-171.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207814, "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": 202, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "THE ANCIENT MON--PAGAN, PERU & NAKORN PATHOM 187\n\nend of the last century. The iron shed that covers it exactly reproduces the architecture of railway stations at the turn of the century, and the quality of the decoration is likewise Burmese Victorian. The clumsiness of the feet, which are iconographically incorrect, does not however apparently disturb the local people in their veneration of the statue. The four-imaged Kyaikpan pagoda is much ruined; the Buddha's back on to a central solid square core. It was originally built by Dhammaceti (Damuazedi), a Mon king of great piety who reigned from 1472-1492. The images, of plaster on brick, have been much restored.\n\nRangoon was at first a Mon village called Dagon centred around the Shwedagon pagoda, the origins of which are lost in time. The shrine is said to cover a number of the Buddha's relics. The Mon king Binnya-U is recorded to have raised the height of the stupa to sixty-six feet in 1362. The present height of 326 feet was reached in 1774. The shape is that common in Burma, of a square base to the main terrace for the pradakshina, then the beginning of the bell after a square base with recessed edges: multiple mouldings, the bud and the hti follow. The whole is gilded where it is not actually covered with gold plates and the hti is gilded and encrusted in stones. Of perhaps greater interest are the innumerable baroque shrines round the bases of the stupa and the vast crowds of pilgrims coming for their devotions. By night the illuminated gold stupa is to be seen from the distance in impressive display.\n\nThere are no other monuments in Rangoon of interest; the Sule pagoda, reputed to be ancient, is a modern jumble. The bargaining in Scott's market or the buying in the diplomatic shop is more representative of the capital today. But the National Museum, consisting almost exclusively of the relics of Thibaw's regalia taken by the British and kept until quite recently in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, have now been returned and are well displayed. They have often been described before; the luxury of the jewel-encrusted objects, the ornamental hamsa, and the robes are in complete contrast with the austerity and constraints of present day Burma.\n\nIn Rangoon can be seen a 'cultural show' representing various traditional dance forms. The uncourtly little jumps and hops in the classical dances are as surprising as they are interesting. But the soul of Burmese dance and entertainment is not in this, nor in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207902, "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": 290, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n275 \n\n(Lethbridge, 1971, p. 147). It was only when a \"respectable\" class of rich Chinese merchants and compradores emerged that a group existed which the colonial authorities could properly recognize as speaking for the Chinese community. The Chinese account states that the two patrons of the Temple \"judge the people (there) in public assembly\". In 1851 a proper Temple Committee was elected. It met at the Kung Soh (Public Meeting Hall), attached to the Temple, where all cases of public interest were decided. This judicial function by a self-organized Chinese institution is confirmed by the British Magistrates sending complainants to the Temple authorities for their arbitration of the disputes. For instance, in 1870 a case is mentioned in which the Kai-fong had imposed a fine upon a coolie for breaking a pane of glass.\n\nA year after the opening of Tung Wah Hospital the judicial proceedings formerly held at the Kung Soh of the Temple were moved to the Hall of the Hospital. This is reported in an editorial comment in the Daily Press (Jan. 2, 1873):\n\nThe old Joss House Court the Kung Soh in the Hollywood Road has, we hear, been given up in favour of another building not far off, and it seems that there a vast number of disputes are settled, and that it is an understood rule that matters should be brought to the cognizance of the proper authorities only if they cannot be arranged in this manner. We understand the committee of the Chinese Hospital is the same body of men who head the Kaifong, and that they discuss municipal and semi-political matters in the hall of the Hospital.\n\nInasmuch as the two committees apparently overlapped and as the Hall of the new Hospital was more spacious and imposing than the Kung Soh, the transfer in Chinese eyes would seem appropriate. On a visit of the Governor to the Hall he remarked that it was a much better meeting place than the Council Chambers of the Hong Kong Government. Isabella Bird (Mrs. Bishop) the famous Victorian lady traveller who visited Hong Kong in 1879, describes the building:\n\nThe hall where the directors meet (has) one side open to the garden. It has a superb ebony table in the middle with a handsome chair for the chairman and six carved ebony chairs on each side -- a most stately \"board room\".*\n\n* Photocopy of original manuscript letter in possession of John Murray, publishers, London.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209497, "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": 154, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "132 \n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE \n\nLondon, on November 19-20, 1928. Miao's counsel (J. C. Jackson) withdrew from the case when Miao insisted on addressing the Court himself, but was allowed, should any question of law arise, to make a statement later as amicus curiae. Miao argued his case before the Court for over four hours and called three new witnesses who deposed that other Orientals had been seen near the scene of the crime on the day it took place. The Court, remarking that special indulgence had been shown to the applicant as he was a foreigner, dismissed the appeal. Dr. Miao Chung-yi was hanged at Manchester's Strangeways Gaol on December 6, 1928. Ironically, on that day his wife's body was shipped back to Hong Kong for re-burial in the Chinese Christian Cemetery, Hong Kong. No one has seriously disputed that Miao killed his wife, but the reason why he did so has baffled Sir Travers Humphreys and a number of other commentators. \n\nSir Travers Humphreys (1867-1956) was a product of late Victorian England, the era of British Imperialism. He was sixty-one when he presided over Miao's trial and eighty-six when he wrote an account in A Book of Trials (1953), a volume of legal reminiscence. Miao's story is to be found therein under the somewhat dramatic heading \"The Chinese Murder\". Travers Humphreys declares that \"The interesting feature of Miao's case is, perhaps, the fact that, in the absence of any direct proof against him, the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, while the suggested motive for the crime, though proved to some extent, seemed to many people absolutely inadequate\". He comments, later on, that the trial was \"quite the most puzzling I have ever come across, on the question, why did he do it?\" and concludes, \"I am satisfied that Miao murdered his wife and was rightly hanged, but I was and still am unable to answer to my own satisfaction the question, 'Why did he do it?'\" \n\n37 \n\nIt seems that Travers Humphreys' perplexity owed much to the fact that the accused was a Chinese, whose mind therefore must be extraordinarily difficult to fathom. (Even a noted sinologist like Dyer Ball had argued that Chinese do everything in reverse, or eccentrically, compared with Europeans). This is further suggested by the quatrain containing the line \"The Heathen Chinese is peculiar\", which heads Travers Humphreys' chapter on the trial. Mrs. Miao, as we already know, was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209505, "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": 162, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "140\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\n**Sax Rohmer, pseudonym of A.S. Ward (1886-1959). Rohmer's Chinese master-villain first appeared in Dr. Fu Manchu (1913), the start of a series of thrillers about Fu.\n\n27 His real name was Chang Wan but he was known as Brilliant Chang to police and public.\n\n**The Times for April 10 and 11, 1924. See also Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-end (London: Faber, 1941). One of Chang's clients was Brenda Dean Paul, a notorious upper-class drug-addict, daughter of Sir Aubrey Dean Paul, a former Lord Mayor of London.\n\n\"Some information about Miss Siu is given in the South China Morning Post on October 26, 1928. See also the Hongkong Telegraph for June 23, 1928.\n\n**Travers Humphreys, op. cit., p. 163.\n\n\"1 South China Morning Post, December 7, 1928.\n\nNecrophiliacs are rare but not unknown. The most famous was surely Sergent (Sergeant) Bertrand, whose activities are discussed in Marcel Montarron, Histoire des crimes sexuels (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1971) 113-13. Another extraordinary necrophiliac Henri Blot, 'Le vampire de Saint-Ouen'—is discussed in Daniel Riche, Histoires criminelles de Paris/Ile-de-France (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1980) 407-416.\n\n**The case is examined in Sir Travers Humphreys' A Book of Trials, op. cit. But see also Christmas Humphreys, Seven Murders (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1946); E. Spencer Shew, A Companion to Murder (London: Cassell, 1960); and C.E. Bechhofer-Roberts, Sir Travers Humphreys: His Career and Cases (London: John Lane, 1936).\n\n*Sir Travers Humphreys (1867-1956). Called to the Bar, 1889. He was a distinguished criminal lawyer before becoming a Judge of the King's Bench Division of the High Court, 1928-1951.\n\n*Joseph Cooksey Jackson K.C. (1879-1938) of the Northern Circuit. **Criminal Appeal Reports, vol. 21, 1930.\n\n**Travers Humphreys, op. cit, 162-163.\n\n06\n\n18 Ibid. 167.\n\n*Ibid, 168.\n\n40 J. Dyer Ball, Things Chinese; or, Notes Connected With China (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1925, fifth edition). Dyer Ball writes: \"The Chinese are not only remote from us as regards position on the globe, but they are our opposites in almost every action and thought\" (668).\n\n\"The late Victorians were much amused by Pidgin English. See Charles Godfrey Leland, Pidgin-English Sing-Song; or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect (London: Trubner, 1876).\n\n42 Op. cit., 164.\n\n\"Herbert John Bennett was accused of strangling his wife on Yarmouth Beach. The body was left in such a position as to suggest attempted rape. See Julian Symons, A Reasonable Doubt (London: Cresset Press, 1962).\n\n**Op. cit., 168.\n\n*A son and a daughter (Wai-sheung) were born to his primary wife. His other wives produced over ten children, two of whom were later returned students from the United States. See the South China Morning Post, June 25, 1928.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210721, "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": 72, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "55\n\nTHE HONG KONG BOTANICAL GARDENS, A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW\n\nD.A. GRIFFITHS AND S.P. LAU\n\nThe Victorian era in Europe was obsessed by the idea of cultivating exotic plants which had become more readily available as plant hunters explored more distant regions of the world. The culmination of this concept was the establishment of large botanic gardens where both local and exotic plants could be admired (often under unnatural conditions) by an incredulous populace eager to learn more of the distant parts of the Empire. In addition to this botanical zeal in Europe, the idea spread to various other areas of the British Commonwealth and botanical gardens soon sprang up in Rangoon, New Delhi, Madras, and Singapore, where for the first time local people were able to familiarize themselves with plants from their own as well as other regions of the world. In addition to this seemingly cosmetic role, botanical gardens also served other, more pragmatic, interests as the growth characteristics of more economically important plants could be examined for the first time under controlled conditions, enabling them to be exploited by commercial interests with an eye towards export trade.\n\nIn Hong Kong, the idea of establishing a Public Garden was mentioned officially for the first time in 1848, but even prior to that date, on March 27th, 1844, a letter of thanks from the Governor of Hong Kong was sent to the Deputy Governor of Bengal thanking him for a copy of the printed report of the Honorable Company's Botanic Gardens, indicating that the idea of a similar garden in Hong Kong had already been mooted. The first indication that Hong Kong was to be blessed with such a garden was made by Charles Gutzlaff in a statement to the Hong Kong branch of the\n\nAUTHORS' ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:\n\nThe authors wish to express their gratitude to the staff of the Library and Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England, the Public Records Office of Hong Kong, and the City Hall Public Library, Hong Kong, for their kind assistance.\n\nS.P. Lau wishes to acknowledge with thanks the permission given by the Director of Agriculture and Fisheries to pursue a Ph.D. project at the University of Hong Kong, this article being a section of the thesis under preparation.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210922, "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": 273, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "256\n\nCARL SMITH\n\nA festival demands she appear in her most precious ornaments and her most attractive gowns. Then there is nothing to do but to confess to her gambling addiction, or, as many did, seek escape from her predicament by suicide through use of “the opium pot or hempen rope.”\n\nThere was, however, a third way out, for according to Dr. Ho Kai \"some tread the path of infamy and dishonour.” adding that \"this may have been done with the connivance of their worst enemies, the gambling agents.\"\n\nAfter paraphrasing the ten suggestions for the suppression of gambling contained in the Chinese petition, he proceeds to remark on the next evil, sly brothels. These were brothels which operated without licence. In those days the Government licensed and inspected houses of prostitution.\n\nWith proper Victorian prudery, he said: \"I feel conscious that this is a subject that requires very delicate handling, and it is on that account and my sense of pain and disgust whenever the subject is approached that I desire to be excused from dwelling upon it at any length.”\n\nDr. Ho Kai advocated severe measures for the suppression of these evils. He proposed as penalties flogging and imprisonment with hard labour. An editorial suggested that Dr. Ho Kai was thus unintentionally advocating class legislation a topic we shall return to in a later article.\n\nWith some irony the editor suggests: “We do not suppose that this Chinese delegate wishes there to be one law in Hongkong for foreigners and another for Chinese; and yet, on the other hand, it seems as if he must have had some such idea, as it is scarcely credible he meant to suggest that foreigners who engaged in gambling should be flogged.\"\n\nThe editor asks Dr. Ho Kai some rhetorical questions: \"Are the gamblers on the Stock Exchange to be flogged and imprisoned with hard labour? Are the whist players in the various clubs and at numerous private houses, and the men who bet a few dollars at the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210956, "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-1987", "page_number": 18, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "June 24\n\nJuly 15\n\nProf. Alan Griffiths\n\n\"Victorian Flower Power'\n\nMr. Phillip Bruce\n\n\"The Bogue Forts'\n\nSeptember 29\n\nDr. Elizabeth Sinn\n\n'Kowloon Walled City' (repeat)\n\nOctober 17\n\nRev. Carl Smith\n\n\"History of the Wanchai District'\n\nOctober 28\n\nMr. Mitya New\n\n'Expatriates in Pre-Revolutionary China'\n\nNovember 27\n\nDr. Betty Wei Peh-T'i\n\n'Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China'\n\nFebruary 8\n\nMs. Veronica Pearson\n\n'Health and Welfare in Modern China'\n\nFebruary 27\n\nProf. Jean Chesneaux\n\n'China in the eyes of French intellectuals'\n\nLocal tours were made to the following places of interest: Wanchai and the Ruttonjee Sanitorium (7 November, led by Rev. Carl Smith and Dr. Elizabeth Sinn), Stonecutters Island (3 December, led by Phillip Bruce), the Hong Kong Bank Picture Collection (18 December, led by Mrs. Anita Wilson), Tai Po and Island House (9 January, led by Dr. Patrick Hase) and Sam Tung Uk Museum and Tin Hau Temple in Tsuen Wan (10 February, led by Dr. James Hayes).\n\nTours outside Hong Kong included two visits to Shekou, Humen and the Bogue Forts on 18/19 and 25/26 July organised and led by Phillip Bruce, and an eight-day visit to the Yangtse River Gorges starting 29 August led by Dr. Michael Lau.\n\nYou will, I am sure, agree that these activities have given a great deal of pleasure to members of the Society. Our thanks and appre-\n\nviii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211157, "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-1987", "page_number": 218, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "193\n\nThe new hall was a more impressive and comfortable meeting place for community leaders than the old Kung Soh which was not only rather small but was also beginning to show the marks of age.\n\nA famous Victorian lady traveller, Isabella Bird, has left an account of the Tung Wah hall which she visited in 1879;\n\n\"The building where the directors meet... (has) one side open to the garden. It has a superb ebony table in the middle with a handsome chair for the chairman and six carved ebony chairs on each side—a most stately 'board room'.”\n\nThe furniture was once owned by the wealthy Canton Co-Hong family of Poon. They had encountered financial difficulties and the Chinese Government had seized their property for debt and sold it at a public auction. In this manner it found its way to Hongkong.\n\nThe activities of the hospital committee in affairs affecting the Chinese community were viewed with suspicion by Europeans in Hongkong.\n\nEven before the hospital was opened, the committee came under attack for interfering in a scheme to recruit Chinese labour for the southern states of the United States.\n\nThe Daily Advertiser said that members of the board of the hospital \"appear to have constituted themselves the governing body in the Colony in all Chinese matters. This we predicted in reference to the hospital almost from the time it was founded; and on this point there will be much to say at some time in the future.” As indeed there was.\n\nThe committee which oversaw the affairs of Tung Wah Hospital was elected annually from the most prominent members of the community.\n\nOstensibly their duties were to manage the hospital. Its members, however, also served as temple and kaifong directors. The jurisdiction of these bodies was not sharply defined.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211673, "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": 88, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "63\n\nsinister-looking spherical objects used as buoys, lengths of rope, wooden spars, kegs of nails, bolts of canvas, and paint cans, required by the River Department of the Chinese Maritime Customs to maintain the charting and marking of the neighbouring reaches of the erratic Yangize.\n\nThere was a daring gentleman who, in Victorian days when it was against the rules, introduced a lady to the Club after midnight to play a game of billiards. The original of the letter subsequently sent him by an irate secretary, demanding an explanation of his extraordinary conduct, could be seen in the Club files, as also of the contumacious answer received in reply. It is on record that the offending person was suspended from membership, sine die, for his reprehensible conduct, and that this arbitrary penalty led to an acrimonious state of opinion wherein one half of the residents would no longer speak to the other half.\n\nWhen I myself was first appointed to Kiu Kiang (in 1924) the story was old, and the dissensions of that time had long since disappeared. But even so I found there was a local tradition of competition for precedence between the lady who was the wife of His Britannic Majesty's Consul, and the lady who had married the Commissioner of Customs. The newcomer was eagerly canvassed by the more active supporters of either party and must needs tread warily, if he wished to remain at his ease amongst all sections of the community.\n\nSometime later I foolishly allowed myself to be cajoled into performing the duties of honorary secretary to the Club. The Victorian days were now over, and ladies were admitted to the Club card room, though admittedly on a footing which with some of the older club members smacked more of sufferance than of welcome. A period of unusual affluence in the Club finances happening to intervene, it had been decided to colour-wash the walls, and in my capacity as secretary the choice of colours was left to me. It was that pleasant peaceful time in the heat of summer when the female of the species retires to the coolness of the nearby mountain resort. Only one elegant specimen had stayed behind. I thought it would be a good idea to ask this lady for her advice; after all, colour schemes are outside the scope of the average male. We held a conference, the colours were decided upon, and then I too left for the mountains.\n\nOn first re-entering the Club after my return in the autumn, I was faced by a crowd of indignant women, who demanded to know what", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211856, "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": 271, "title": "RAS-1989", "content_text": "246\n\nKing, F.H.H. and P. Clarke: “A Research Guide to China Coast Newspapers 1822-1911”, Cambridge (Mass), 1965.\n\nKosch, Wilhelm: \"Deutsches Theater Lexikon\", Klagenfurt, 1960.\n\nKounin, I.I.: \"The Diamond Jubilee of the International Settlement of Shanghai\", Shanghai, n.d. (c. 1939).\n\nKunitz, Stanley (Ed.): \"British Authors of the 19th Century\", N.Y., 1936.\n\nLang, H.: “Shanghai considered socially\", Shanghai, 1875.\n\nLanning, G. and S. Couling: \"The History of Shanghai\", Vol. I.; Shanghai, 1921. MacGuire, Paul: \"The Australian Theatre\", Melbourne, 1948.\n\nMacLellan, J.W.: \"The Story of Shanghai from the opening of the port to foreign trade\". Shanghai, 1889.\n\nMakepeace, Walter, Gilbert E. Brooke and R. St. J. Bradwell (Ed): 'One Hundred Years of Singapore\", 2 vols.; London, 1921.\n\nMaybon, Charles B. & J. Fredet: \"Histoire de la Concession Francaise de Changhai'', Paris, 1929.\n\nMaude, Cyril: \"The Haymarket Theatre, Some Records and Reminiscences\" London, 1903. Mullin Donald (Ed.): \"Victorian Actors and Actresses in Review\", Westport, 1983 National Union Catalogue.\n\n1\n\nNicoll, Allardyce: \"A History of English Drama 1660-1900\", 6 vols,; Cambridge 1952ff. Pal, John: \"Shanghai Saga\", London, 1963.\n\nPearsall, Ronald: \"Victorian Popular Music\", Newton Abbot, 1973.\n\n\"The Player's Library. A Catalogue of the Library of the British Drama League”, London, 1950.\n\nPope, W.J. Macqueen: \"Haymarket, Theatre of Perfection\", London, 1948. Reynolds, Ernest: \"Early Victorian Drama (1830-1870), New York, 1965 (reprint of 1936 edition).\n\nRiemann, Hugo: \"Musik Lexikon\", Berlin, 1916 (8th edition).\n\nRowell, George (Ed.): \"Nineteenth Century Plays”, Oxford, 1972.\n\n“Shanghai Alamanac” 1855, 1856, 1858, 1862; Shanghai, 1854ff years.\n\n**Shanghai t'ung yen-chiu tzu-liao (Shanghai Research Materials), Hong Kong 1972 (reprint of 1936 edition).\n\nSmith, C.; \"The Hong Kong Amateur Dramatic Club and its predecessors\" in: \"Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the R.A.S.\", Vol. 22 (1982), p. 217-251. Thomson, Peter: \"Plays by Dion Boucicault\", Cambridge, 1984.\n\nToll, Robert C.: 'Blacking Up. The Minstrel Show in 19th century America”, New York, 1974.\n\nTroubridge, St. Vincent: \"The Benefit System in the British Theatre”, London, 1967. Wearing, J.P.: \"American and British Theatrical Biography\", London, 1979. White, Walter: \"China Station 1859-1864\", London, 1972.\n\nWilliams, Harold S.: \"Tales of the Foreign Settlements in Japan\", Tokyo, 1972. Wright, Arnold and H.A. Cartwright: \"Twentieth Century Impressions of Hong Kong. Shanghai and other Treaty Ports of China\", London, 1908.\n\nAbbreviations:\n\nNOTES\n\nBGM: Boletim do Governo de Macao.\n\nNCH: North China Herald.\n\nSCR: Shanghai Commercial Record.\n\n1\n\nPerformance 6.5.1852. NCH 8.5.1852.\n\nOnly passing attention has been paid to the early theatre in Shanghai: Lanning & Couling. p. 429-430: MacLennan: p. 85-86.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212482, "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-1991", "page_number": 36, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "16 \n\nShunde \n\nDongguan \n\nSanshui \n\nGaoyiu \n\n2 \n\n3 \n\nI \n\nI \n\n1 \n\n1 \n\nN \n\n| \n\n10 \n\n2 \n\nOut of delta region \n\nNon-Cantonese \n\n5 \n\n& \n\n13 \n\n2 \n\n1 \n\n- \n\n1 \n\n4 \n\nHang Kong \n\n1 \n\n༣ \n\n2. \n\n3 \n\n1 \n\n8 \n\nUnidentified \n\n18 \n\n30 \n\n72 \n\n132 \n\n17 \n\n422 \n\nTotal \n\n20 \n\n46 \n\n105 \n\n186 \n\n193 \n\n550 \n\nSource: Hong Kong Record Series #144. The Supreme Court of Hong Kong. Probate Jurisdiction - Wills. \n\nFrom the 894 Chinese wills of the period between 1850-1906 deposited in the Hong Kong Public Records Office, 550 were believed to be held by merchants. Merchants were defined here as owning business, joining in partnership and holding properties. As indicated in table 1, there were 128 out of 550 who stated their native origins. Most of them came from the Pearl River Delta region, Xiangshan men being the largest in number, followed by Nanhai, Xinning, Xinhui, Shunde, Dongguan, Panyu and so on. More interesting, though they had been doing business in Hong Kong for a number of years, they did not claim they were Hong Kong people. Instead they identified with their native place. More frequently they were probably absent from Hong Kong and had resided in Canton and Macau. A puzzling question is that a large portion of these 442 persons had not told in their wills where they came from. Can we take it for granted they did not state it because there was no need to specify as they had identified with Hong Kong? Nevertheless, there were eight cases reported where they were definitely identified as Hong Kong persons. Some claimed “Victorians\", some were \"Hong Kong people\" and some identified with the place where they lived such as Kowloon, Shaukiwan, etc. \n\nIt is supposed that during the nineteenth century the majority of the Chinese in Hong Kong did not settle permanently but returned home or moved to other places in China. They retained ties with their home villages in China. As a scholar points out, wealthy Hong Kong Chinese usually held landed property in Hong Kong, but from the wills we know there were also frequent references to fields and houses in the home villages and houses in Canton, Foshan and Macau. The landed properties they held were mostly houses and land, and little were shares", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212606, "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-1991", "page_number": 160, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "140\n\ninhabitants got to know us better; they accepted our lack of dinner jackets, our effect on the drink stock at the Club, our — regrettable — neglect of the traffic signals, and our other little mannerisms, and treated us right royally.\n\nThere were two seasons in Maymyo, the second and briefer one, lasting several weeks, towards the end of the rains in October. The Club, a long rambling creeper-covered building, became gay with visitors. It looked out over a pleasance, cleared from the jungle, and spreading a mile towards the reservoir dam, built by Turkish prisoners in the last war. It goes without saying that a race course and golf links were laid out over the meadowland, very pleasant to behold. But here we were next door to India. The plumbing in the gentlemen's cloak room, consisted of a row of rusty and battered enamel utensils, set out at more or less even intervals on a long low shelf. Without the door, a shadow hovered, poised to dash in the moment he heard the rattle of a utensil returned to the board. No Americans visited Maymyo while I was there. It would have been interesting to hear their first reactions to these Arcadian simplicities.\n\nAfter all Burma was a rich enough country; it was not any lack of money that left it a Victorian remnant. Amongst the Burmese there is no caste, nor is there any desire to work. The house servants everywhere are Indians, of whom there were over a million in the country. Of the annual increase of 5,000,000 in India, a substantial proportion must be of the sweeper caste. Amidst a population with so abnormal a rate of procreation, the border line between a sufficiency and famine is a fine one, easily crossed; and any modernisation of sanitary installations would create serious unemployment: thus in India the vested interest in caste puts the brake, not only on plumbing, but on all progress; and Burma, until recently had been the backwater of India.\n\nI spent six months in Burma, but had little opportunity to learn much of the country. I saw very little of the Burmese, and never met one of those attractive country maids, who wait by the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking out to sea. Of the seventeen million inhabitants, only ten million are Burmans; besides the Indians, there are 300,000 Chinese, and the remainder are tribesmen from the hills.\n\nThe history of Burma is a bloody one; the country had seldom for long been united. The Chinese under Kublai Khan, the Mongol,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212753, "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-1992", "page_number": 62, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "47\n\n18\n\non the depth and interest of their writings. Some, like Archibald Colquhoun1 went into great detail describing the wealth of minerals, the scope for modernisation in communications and the economy, all subjects which Mesny too, at the same period if not earlier, had written about at length. Others like Mrs Scidmore2 list 'intrepid travellers to Szechuan3 and the far west,' with names like Richtofen, Pumpelly, Von Kreitner, Hosie, Baber, Blaikiston, Little, Gill, Hart, Parker, and Pratt, Mrs Little and Mrs Bishop, and Dr Morrison, but not one of these authors referred to Mesny whose travels and experiences outweigh most if not all of them. Was it because he was considered to have gone native or been more Chinese than ‘one of us\"? We shall never know but each time yet another book was published it must have been galling for Mesny to find only very rarely he had earned a mention. After his trip with Gill to Tibet and India in 1877 he was scarcely referred to in books on China; this together with his constant and repeated reference to his contacts with and closeness to Chinese friends and acquaintances, mostly in high places, suggests that he was ostracised or perhaps no more than ignored by the western social community in Chinese ports and in Shanghai in particular.\n\nDuring his later years when fortune seemed to elude him, when there was no caste lower than the impoverished European or American, a number of themes and points of view in Mesny's writings place him fairly firmly into a class and category of his time. A plague of self-importance swept late-Victorian Britain and spread through its colonies and dependencies. Mesny suffered a massive dose and never, as far as his Miscellany record, appears to have had his balloon pricked. He must have been seen by foreigners in Shanghai and, in particular by his fellow 'Old China Hands', during the latter years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this as a vulgar, low-born upstart, too fond of his own ideas, a self-centred braggart and an opinionated man, but let it be stressed that he would not be alone in this category in Shanghai or for that matter in all the other major western communities in the Orient. His own notes reflect the disdain with which he was regarded by people like Sir Thomas Wade and Sir Robert Hart. His name dropping in many of his writings, mostly in his personal relationships with Chinese viceroys, provincial governors and commanders in chief, suggests that he probably also dropped names to the same extent in everyday conversation. However, he knew the importance of patronage, especially in China, as one can see from his obituary of Tso, and his description of the momentary meeting with a Manchu hereditary prince.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212930, "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-1992", "page_number": 239, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "224\n\nP'i) mentioned in the main text. Anne Birrell's Chinese Mythology achieves such distinction that we can easily forgive its minor shortcomings. The book is a delight to read and a joy to give to others. I only hope that her editors see fit to issue a paperback version soon. My own hardbound copy is already rather dog-eared.\n\nMICHAEL NYLAN\n\nNOTE\n\nFor example, the apocrypha to the Documents give an amusing explanation of the white fish omen that appeared at the end of the Shang dynasty\n\nFrank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong, Harper Collins, 624 + xv pp. Appendices, notes, appendix, maps.\n\nThis review has been excerpted from The New York Review of Books (7 April, 1994) by kind permission of the reviewer, Dr Jonathan Mirsky, who is East Asia Editor of The Times.\n\nThe entire history of Hong Kong, as Frank Welsh shows in his magnificent, much needed, and compendious history of the colony, is filled with misunderstandings and cultural collisions. One hundred and fifty years of muddle and injured pride are what permits Peking's leaders to call Chris Patten, whom they perceive as the point-man for an international conspiracy to overthrow the entire Communist system in China, 'a whore.'\n\nWelsh, a former Hong Kong banker, starts his dense but wittily written history in the early nineteenth century, and just manages to include the accession of Mr Patten in 1992. He refers to Hong Kong as 'that natural child of Victorian Britain and Ch'ing China... a source of embarrassment and annoyance to its progenitors since it first appeared on the international scene in 1842.' More than an annoyance: for the Chinese, Hong Kong has been a perpetual symbol of national humiliation. There are many instances of mutual disregard, which Welsh understandably enjoys and quotes copiously. In 1831, James Matheson, one of the founders of the 'noble house' of Jardine Matheson, the trading firm whose history", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213152, "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-1993", "page_number": 220, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "202\n\nwas a full hour's walk further from the market than Tsat Muk Kiu\n\n75\n\nA contact from a mountainside village explained that they could not keep poultry: \"We lived in the mountains, where there were too many snakes, civet cats, wild cats, and other animals. Any poultry we kept would be killed. At best we could keep just one or two for our own consumption.\"\n\n76\n\nThe Basel missionaries said in 1853: \"They do not pay attention to fruit-trees, and fruit-trees do not seem to grow in this region. Thus, fruit like pineapples, oranges, and mangoes are not found here.\" See PH Hase, \"Sha Tau Kok in 1853\", op cit.\n\n77 Contact from Tsat Muk Kiu village\n\n78\n\nThe late Mr K.M.A. Barnett told of a village house in an exceptionally remote mountainside village which he visited in the late 1930s, and which sported a cast-iron Victorian wash-hand stand and a framed picture of the \"Shang at Bay\". A hawker had picked these up in Hong Kong in a second-hand sale, and thought it worth his while carrying these very cumbersome things around the mountain villages until he got a sale.\n\n79\n\nThis trade in imported vegetable seeds was noted by the District Officer in 1926, Administrative Reports for the Year 1926, App. J. \"Report on the New Territories for the Year 1926\", p. J4. \"It is noteworthy that nearly all the vegetable seed used comes from Chinese territory.\"\n\n80\n\nEastern no. 66, Extension of the Boundaries of the Colony, op. cit., Enclosure No. 12 in Item No. 204, 28 April 1899", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213324, "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-1994", "page_number": 146, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "127\n\n1\n\n# NOTES\n\nThe Manchus established the Ch'ing dynasty in AD 1644, having overthrown the native Chinese Ming rulers. The Manchus were related to the central Asian group speaking a language akin to Mongol who settled in Manchuria many centuries earlier. They were usually referred to by Europeans as Tatars.\n\n2. Lach garrison town, including Chapu, contained a Tatar walled city separate from the Chinese city.\n\nIn 1840 HMS bug Algerine paid a flying visit to Chapu and was fired upon from some batteries near the town. During the attack on Chapu in 1842, these batteries were quickly put out of action by the Royal Navy.\n\n4. Under command of Vice-Admiral Sir William Parker.\n\n*The Westmorland Regiment was granted the China Dragon superscribed “China” for service during the China War of 1840-42.\n\n*The Nemesis was the first iron steamer to round the Cape of Good Hope. She was never commissioned as one of HM's vessels of war, yet was generally commanded by Royal Navy officers. She was of the greatest use throughout the First China War and after the Treaty of Nanking returned to Bombay.\n\nA joss-house is the Victorian name for a Chinese temple or shrine, the house where the joss (god, from the Portuguese \"Deos\") was situated. From contemporary sketches and descriptions, the joss house in question would appear to have been a medium-sized Buddhist establishment, and although there were no references to priests, monks, or nuns, it had residential accommodation in addition to the usual altar halls.\n\nLung Fu was a company commander, Iso-ling (grade 4a), of one of the Eight Manchu Banners.\n\n*Parker, L. II. Chinese Account of the Opium War.\n\nA Tao-tai was an imperial Circuit Intendant, a member of the hierarchy controlling several prefectures.\n\nI-li-pu (1770-1847) was a member of the Manchu Bordered Yellow Banner and an Imperial Clansman. He was banished for disobedience in 1841 but recalled and appointed acting assistant military lieutenant-governor at Chapu in early 1842, his predecessor having died of wounds during the British attack. Chapu was still occupied by the British, and I-li-pu had to remain in Hangchou, where he received orders to move to Soochou as it was understood that he was respected by the British, and the Court wished him to be on hand to carry out negotiations.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213384, "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-1994", "page_number": 206, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "194\n\nBaddeley, John Frederick (1854-1940) ed, Russia, Mongolia, China, London Macmillan, 1919 (NY B Franklin 1967 mostly memoirs of Russian envoys from beginning of 17th century to end of reign of Alexander I).\n\nBaikov, Feodor Isakovich, An Account of Two Voyages. First of Feodor Isakovitz Backhoff to China, Second Zachary Wagener, a Native of Dresden also in China, in Churchill, Awnsham, compilers, A Collection of Voyages and Travels. London, 1744, v 2, 474-478\n\nBall, Benjamin Lincoln, Rambles in Eastern Asia, Including China During Several Years' Residence (1848-1850), Boston J French, 1856.\n\nBarnett, Eugene Epperson. As I Look Back, Recollections of Growing Up and Twenty-six Years in Pre-Communist China 1888-1936, typescript\n\nBarr, Patricia Miriam, To China with Love, the Lives and Times of Protestant Missionaries in China 1860-1900, London Secker and Warburg, 1972\n\nBarrow, Sir John, Travels in China, London T Cadell and W Davis, 1806 (Listed in Yale University Library catalog as Some Account of the Public Life, and Selection from the Unpublished Writings, of the Earl of Macartney and the date of publication is given as 1807)\n\nBarzini, Luigi, Pekin to Paris, An Account of Prince Borghese's Journey Across Two Continents in a Motor-Car, translated from the Italian, London, 1907,\n\nBates, Lincoln Wallace Jr, The Russian Road to China, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1910.\n\nBeattie, Hilary J, Protestant Missions and Opium in China, 1858-1895, Papers on China, 22A 115-156 (1969)\n\nBecker, C H, et al, The Reorganization of Education in China, Paris. League of Nations, 1932\n\nBell, John, A Journey From St Petersburg to Pekin 1719-22, edited with an Introduction by J L Stevenson, Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press. (NY Barnes and Noble reprint 1966)\n\nBennett, Adrian A, John Fryer the Introduction of Western Science and Technology into Nineteenth-Century China, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1967\n\nBergeron, Marie Ina, Letters a Yeou-wen, Souvenirs de Chine, Tours Mame, 1973\n\nBerry-Hart, Alice, Ching-a-Ring-a-Ring-Ching or Three Victorian Sisters in Shanghai, London. Rex Collins, 1977)\n\nBillingsley, Phil, Bandits in Republican China, Stanford Stanford University Press, 1988", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213398, "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-1994", "page_number": 220, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "208\n\nMichie, Alexander, The Englishman in China During the Victorian Era, As Illustrated in the Career of Sir Rutherford Alcock, Edinburgh, 1900 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen Publishing)\n\nMoges, Marquis de, Recollections of Baron Gros's Embassy to China and Japan in 1857-58, London: R Griffin, 1860\n\nMorrison, G E, An Australian in China, London: Horace Cox, 1895 (Hong Kong Reprint Oxford University Press)\n\nMorse, Edward Sylvester, Glimpses of China and Chinese Homes, Boston: Little Brown, 1902\n\nMorse, H B, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, London: Oxford University Press, 1925 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen Publishing)\n\n—, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, 1910 (Taipei reprint: Ch'eng-wen Publishing, 1978)\n\nMossman, Samuel (editor of North China Herald), General Gordon's Private Diary of His Exploits in China Amplified, London: Sampson et al., 1885\n\nMote, Frederick Wade, China in the Age of Columbus, in Art in the Age of Exploration edited by Jay A Levenson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, 337-350\n\nMoule, A C, Christians in China Before 1550, London and New York, 1930\n\n+\n\nMoule, Arthur Evans, City, Hill and Plain, Stories of Missionary Work in Mid-China 1861-1916, Guilford: printed privately, 1917\n\nMullins, James of St Columban's Missionary Society, Cheerful China, 1925\n\nMurphey, Rhoads, Shanghai, Key to Modern China, Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 1953\n\nThe Outsiders: the Western Experience in India and China, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976\n\nMyrdal, Jan, Report from a Chinese Village, London: Heinemann, 1965\n\nNagel's Encyclopedia-Guide to China, Geneva: Nagel, Third Edition, 1973\n\nNeedham, Joseph, Chinese Astronomy and the Jesuit Mission: An Encounter of Cultures, London: The China Society, 1958\n\n-, Science and Civilization in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960+\n\nNeil, Desmond, Elegant Flowers, First Steps in China, London: J Murray, 1956\n\n4", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213984, "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-1997", "page_number": 53, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "19\n\n# THE CRAFT OF THE BAMBOO SCAFFOLDER\n\nDAN WATERS\n\nAdmired by Taoists for its resilient beauty, tenacity and flexibility, bamboo symbolises endurance and the lifestyle of an upright, virtuous gentleman. It has rings marking, as it were, important events in a person's life. It is fast-growing and has great powers of survival. Not long after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945, bamboo on the devastated site was said to have sprouted new shoots.\n\nBamboo also, with classical, delicate leaves like painting on porcelain, bends but seldom breaks. The tender sprouts are a popular vegetable. With its unbounded usefulness it is employed to make waterpipes, poles for hanging out washing, mats, incense sticks, wide-brimmed hats to offer protection from the sun, shields used by riot police, chopsticks, pillows, divination blocks for temples, carved ornaments and countless other types of utensils. The elderly will have slept in bamboo cradles as children. Their coffins will be conveyed at their funerals by bearers using bamboo carrying poles.\n\nJames Stewart Lockhart, a senior Hong Kong civil servant who played a major part in the taking over of the New Territories by Britain from China at the end of the last century, described bamboo in a large, undated notebook, as follows:2\n\nTo start with, the bamboo has seven virtues of its very own: it is clean and unspotted in itself; a sheaf covers the stem as it pierces the dark earth, so the bamboo has protection from the world; being hollow it is symbolical...of a pure heart; it is strong and unyielding; the stem being divided into segments is orderly; the stalk is pure green without blemish; and is lastly eternal and enduring.\n\n3\n\nAlthough the Victorian naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace,3 described bamboo as one of nature's most valuable gifts, the main purpose of this paper is to look at bamboo as a material for scaffolding, together with the methods of training and the role of the bamboo scaffolder.\n\nA legendary sage named Yau Chao Shi is said to have lived 5,000", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214289, "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-1998", "page_number": 147, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "110\n\ndying which already barricaded the street. The head of the column fell literally \"like the Moor's swath at the close of day.\"\n\n# 11\n\nThe form of cannon termed a howitzer was intended for firing its projectiles in a high trajectory. In effect it is a compromised mortar, mounted on a carriage so as to be more easily transported. Because this lessened the effectiveness of shot or grape they were mainly used with shell, which they could lob over defensive walls.\n\nIn order to be effective it was, of course, necessary to correctly aim the cannon. The cannon barrel was mounted on a carriage that could be slewed sideways, but the larger pieces mounted on board ships were quite cumbersome, and were mainly aligned with the ship. Guns were elevated with a screw jack or wedges, to give the correct range. The aiming, or 'laying' of a gun was a skilled task, as indeed was the whole operation of a gun. This had led to artillery men being formed into the separate regiments of the Royal Artillery. Troops or batteries of artillery were then attached to infantry forces.\n\nFinally the European troops had Congreve rockets. These carried a cast hollow head allowing bursting charges and a fuse to be inserted, thus being a type of shell. They were relatively inaccurate as they had a tendency to veer off line, and many officers at the time considered them to be of doubtful use. However, they certainly had a psychological effect against unsophisticated natives in some of the Victorian wars, and there is no doubt that they did inflict casualties. There is one spectacular example of a rocket finding the magazine of a junk and blowing it up.12\n\n12\n\nAs for the Chinese, on the face of it their guns were similar to those of the European forces. They were muzzle loaders and smooth bored, however, the quality of the guns themselves was not good. The Chinese method of casting cannon was with the muzzle down. This meant that the quality of the metal at the breech was suspect and in spite of using more metal, the guns were more likely to burst.13 The extra metal also made them very heavy,14 and this would make them difficult to aim.\n\nMost of the Chinese guns were mounted in shore batteries, al-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214295, "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-1998", "page_number": 153, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "116\n\nThere was a gap of nearly twenty years between the first and second China Wars. It would have been expected that, in this period, the Chinese would have updated their arsenals and have been able to defend themselves more effectively. Whilst, as already seen, this was done to a degree, they were not able to overcome all the problems. The biggest problem was probably the attitude of those in charge, which is so often difficult to alter in any institution, particularly the armed forces. Hence, in the second war the story was much the same, although the batteries at the Pei Ho river were able to repel the European navies and delay the end of the war by a year.\n\nIn conclusion it can be seen that not only did the Chinese suffer a great disadvantage in the technology of their weaponry, but they also were behind in training and discipline, factors which turn brave men into efficient troops. Obviously there is more than fighting to any war, and political, economic and social factors all have an influence on events. However, in order to gain a full insight into the wars between China and the Western powers, it is necessary to understand the military aspects. Fortunately the military men, like so many Victorian travellers, have left records of their experiences. This paper draws on some of those records and aims to put them in context with the development of weapon technology that was taking place at the time. The range of weapons being used by the two sides spanned centuries of development and their coming together is, in itself, a fascinating story.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Keith Stewart Mackenzie, Narrative of the Second Campaign in China, London 1842, p. 92 notes \"the Tartars making a most determined resistance, standing by their guns till the sailors cut them down, hand to hand.\"\n\n2 Captain Granville G. Loch R.N., The Closing Events of the Campaign in China: The Operations in the Yang-Tze-Kiang and Treaty of Nanking, London 1843. P. 107. Loch is horrified by \"old men, women and children, cutting each other's throats, and drowning themselves by the dozen.\"\n\n3 Loch R.N., op. cit., p. 113.\n\n4 Mackenzie, op. cit., p. 62 notes \"for both (Admiral) Kwan and his second in command, fell by bayonet wounds received in their breasts, whilst gallantly", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214312, "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-1998", "page_number": 170, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "134\n\nhave therefore added it here for the record.\n\nThe Sowerbys were an old family of Saxon stock that can be traced back to the time of Edward the Confessor, and possibly earlier to the first kings of Kent in the fifth century AD.\n\nArthur de Carle Sowerby was the great grandson of James Sowerby, who died in 1822, the botanist who wrote English Botany and was one of the founder members of the Geological Society. His son in turn continued his work and helped organise the Royal Botanic Society and Gardens in Regent's Park.\n\nOn his mother's side Arthur was descended from Pierre Séguier, the Chancellor of France in the reign of Louis XIII; he was also the great grandson of Anthony Stuart, the miniature and portrait painter of the early Victorian period. Arthur's uncle was part-founder and first Keeper of the National Gallery of Portraits in Trafalgar Square.\n\nAt the end of his schooling he began his training to be an artist but soon left it for that of a scientist, working for his BSc. at Bristol. He returned to China having dropped out of College and after his arrival back in China he was appointed in 1906 in the double capacity of lecturer and curator on the staff of the Anglo-Chinese College in Tientsin.\n\nHe served in France during World War 1 as Technical Officer in the Chinese Labour Corps, and on his return to China made his headquarters in Shanghai where he remained until the end of the Second World War.\n\nHe developed an interest in Chinese Art and was impressed by the accuracy of ancient Chinese craftsmen in modelling pottery animals for the tomb, an accuracy that enabled him as a naturalist to identify the breeds of various domestic animals in use in ancient China. He wrote a series of articles for the China Journal on Birds in Chinese Art; the Owl in Chinese Art; The Flora in Chinese Art; Rocks, Mountains and Water in Chinese Art; Animals in Chinese Art; as well as Animals in the Myths, Legends and Fairy Tales of China. His interest in craftsmanship also led him to write a series of articles on Chinese arts and crafts, including four papers on the Chinese ivory industry.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214384, "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-1998", "page_number": 242, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "208\n\nnior Inspector of Nuisances' and the 'Instructions to Head Watchmen and Watchmen' are of importance in this current study and, since the duties of the Watchmen contained in these instructions are so different from those originally envisaged by the creators of the District Watch scheme, their relevant parts are reproduced at the end of this paper.\n\nBefore continuing with a discussion of the District Watchmen's role in sanitary inspections, some explanation of the word 'nuisance' is appropriate. In the context of Victorian Britain, the term 'nuisance' implied something much more than the modern milder meaning of 'pest' or 'irritant.' 'Nuisance' was a general term to describe anything noxious which would offend the senses, whether these were sight, sound, smell or touch. Brenda Yeoh, in her study of colonial Singapore, describes it as 'an elastic term which encompassed many possibilities from filthy premises to undesirable animals.' She further mentions the comprehensive list of nuisances in The Acts and Ordinances of the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements from 1st April 1867 to 1st June 1886 compiled by Mr C.G. Garrad which extended over two pages. Given the graver meaning of the term in the nineteenth century, it can be seen that the post of Inspector of Nuisances was much more important than might be regarded today from its title. Inspectors of Nuisances were found throughout the British Empire and also in the Treaty Port of Shanghai.\n\n14\n\nReturning to the removal of the District Watchmen to undertake sanitary duties, what we have here is the appropriation by the Hong Kong Government of the whole of an existing viable private security force to be used by the Government for a completely different function. Moreover, this change would incur the Government in only minimal additional expense since the bulk of the watchmen's wages would still be met by the Chinese merchants. There can be no doubt that the plan was put into operation since, in the Blue Books for 1883-85, a total of six Head District Watchmen and thirty-seven District Watchmen appeared under the heading of Sanitary (a sub-heading under Public Works Department) at an annual cost to the Government of $24 for each Head District Watchman and $12 for each District Watchman. During these three years the Chinese merchants continued to provide these men with an annual wage of $180, in the case of a Head District Watchmen, and $72 per annum for each District Watchman. The following year there appears to have been a change in policy because, in the 1886 Blue", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214582, "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-1998", "page_number": 440, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "409\n\nthe community as a shining example of a native son. He certainly helped bridge the vast gap between Victorian, colonial society and the Chinese community and he frequently presented - and clarified the often-misunderstood Chinese viewpoint. One gets the impression that, in spite of his western background he was still at heart very Chinese. In spite of having an eminent pastor father, the Reverend Ho Fuk Tong (Ho Tsun Shin), he was not opposed, for example, to concubinage.\n\nIn the same way that Sir Kai Ho Kai was a son of whom Hong Kong could be truly proud, so too the author's family has roots going back in the Territory for a number of generations. As a true Hongkongese, Choa has had a lifetime of experience as a physician, scholar and senior government administrator. He is a long-time, life member of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch. Such a background fits him admirably to write such a book. It has been well researched, contains a wealth of detail and is a good read. Understandably, with limited information in some areas, this account is often more about the times in which he lived than Ho Kai himself. But that does not detract from the value of the book.\n\nAs one of Hong Kong's true sons Sir Kai Ho Kai deserves to go down in history, during an important period, as one of the few Chinese who was able to leave his indelible mark. The book, together with its epilogue, bibliography and 11 appendices, should be on the shelves of every serious researcher of Hong Kong history.\n\nAt the same time the book is a good product, on good quality paper with clear print and a stout, attractive cover, unlike so many books published today. Although some of the 25 illustrations, which are mainly photographs, are more common, there are some the reviewer had not seen before.\n\nDAN WATERS\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Susanna Hoe, The Private Life of Old Hong Kong: Western Women in the British Colony 1841 - 1941, Oxford University Press (1991), pp. 293; and Univer-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214787, "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": 202, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "167\n\nvery nature of modernity, when one thinks of the fathers of modern anthropology who from the turn of the last century fled their modernising societies to search out and to prioritise, quintessential local communities whose traditions might be shown to be unchanging and invariant.\n\nAnd there is a deep nostalgia involved in this, a sense of the loss of the original referent, a separation from a source, which some have compared to those complex processes in which a child establishes a separate identity in relation to a maternal other. I'd intended to talk at this point about the historical role of the Hong Kong Anthropological Society, and its changing role in a post-colonial Hong Kong - but I am not sure that I dare. Let me just point out, as others have, that an interest in local traditions and customary folklore, local history and identity, is nothing very new. Certainly since the late Victorian era the informed interest in archaeological excavation of local pasts became embodied in a variety of academic societies, learned journals and individual scholarly activities; my own grandfather wrote several monographs on the local history of Surrey after a career as cavalry officer and stockbroker, when he was not collecting lepidoptera for the Museum of Natural History. But there were more serious impulses behind this obsessive curiosity about the past, the local and the quaint, which in Hong Kong one can also see reflected in the learned activities of the Royal Asiatic Society.\n\nIn regard to the Middle East it was these sorts of scholarly activities which Edward Said labelled 'Orientalism,' suggesting that considered as a whole they depicted an imaginary, passive Orient in such a way as to rob it of its own powers of self-representation, its own agency, or 'voice', and in this sense were in collusion with the colonial enterprise (Said 1978). While a mute Hong Kong may be a little difficult to imagine, we must remember that this has not always been so. For many years people regretted the apparent lack of political participation by the people of Hong Kong, and this was of course at a time when, under an authoritarian colonial administration, scholarly inquiries were taking place into the local traditions and customs of Hong Kong and its neighbouring regions. Chiu (1997) shows how this lack of political participation was largely an ideological effect achieved through the works of certain local social scientists which reflected colonial interests, yet he also charts a real muteness resulting from this. It was Said who,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214830, "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": 245, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "212\n\nSave for a small number of persons whose families had been associated with the China Trade, and others who derived their knowledge indirectly from their service in British India, very few individuals in the government in London possessed direct knowledge of the country, its officials and its people.\n\nWorse still, for prospects of a better comprehension, for most Britons, as for most Europeans, China was a country yet steeped in fantasy. The 18th century craze for \"Chinoiserie\" had left them with a vision of Cathay, rather than knowledge of the real China. The willow pattern provided exotic vistas, and a romantic tale to accompany them, but there was a hotchpotch of other impressions in the popular mind. One of the early Protestant missionaries to China, William C. Milne, told his readers that when he went there in 1839, he carried with him the following notions:\n\nOf ideas that most people in the West entertain about the Chinese, some of the elements may be said to be, odd manners, “pig-tails\", cramped feet, long nails, fans, paintings, rice-paper drawings, processions, concentric balls, lanterns, chopsticks, eating rats, mice, and bird's nest soup, popular infanticide, and an utter want of benevolence.2\n\nThis admission is apt, but it is surprising that there was anything at all. At the time the War began, there were few books readily available on China. Saving a few works by missionaries working there, or in Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, the first up to date accurate account of the Chinese Empire in English had only just been published (1836).\n\nIts author was John Francis Davis - later Sir John, and a future Governor of Hong Kong)3. His contribution to the wider knowledge of China is handsomely acknowledged in the Dedication of Sir Rutherford Alcock's celebrated book, The Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of Three Years' Residence in Japan, published in London in 1863. An eminent early Victorian China Consul and later H.B.M.'s Minister-Plenipotentiary in Japan, Alcock described Davis as \"the author of the best and only popular work we possess on the Chinese Empire; and the first who succeeded in making the subject familiar to [British] readers in general.\"", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214853, "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": 268, "title": "RAS-1999", "content_text": "236\n\nThese symposia were mostly held in the gracious old Hong Kong Club building, completed in 1897, which had a wonderful ambience. I fell in love with its splendid Victorian lavatories which, believe it or not, still actually flushed. In 1954 in England, a septuagenarian surveyor, Harold Palmer, said to me:\n\n'When you get to Hong Kong, Dan, see if some of the buildings designed by my architect grandfather, Clement Palmer, are still standing.'\n\nI reported back after I arrived here that the old Hong Kong Club building was still basking in its glory. Sadly, it was demolished in 1981. There, before World War Two, you had four waiters for a table of four guests. A fifth 'senior' waiter oversaw the four waiters.\n\nAn RAS member who lived in Hong Kong for approaching 30 years wrote a couple of years or so ago from his home in England:\n\n'No, I do not miss the present-day Hong Kong one little bit. But I do miss the Hong Kong of the 1950s and '60s.'\n\nTo what degree does nostalgia creep in? Let us take a wander down memory lane. What was the Colony really like when our Branch was re-constituted in 1960?\n\nOur first Patron was the then Governor, the late Sir Robert Brown Black, and he honoured us by chairing one of our RAS meetings. In his South China Morning Post obituary, on 7 November 1999, the heading read, 'Farewell to “Golden Days” Governor'.\n\nA few months before he left Hong Kong, in 1964, a petition signed by many Chinese was delivered to the Colonial Secretariat to try to get the 'powers-that-were', in Britain at the time, to grant Sir Robert an extension.\n\nA similar request for an extension had also been submitted in the case of his predecessor, Sir Alexander Grantham, Governor from 1947 to 1957, one of Hong Kong's early post-World War Two 'architects'. But certainly, in those days, everything was not rosy. After 1949 we had our 'backs to the wall' and entrepot trade with China had ceased.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215625, "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": 402, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "353\n\nA CONTENTIOUS CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY IN CENTRAL CHINA, 1887\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nChristian missionaries, especially Victorian, came in for much criticism and derision, as well as great praise for, amongst other things, their devotion to the Chinese man-in-the-street. During the years of bigoted and the blood and thunder Christianity of the Victorian era it was not uncommon for them to be mocked and lampooned by the expatriate business community, sometimes not without reason.\n\nWilliam Spencer Percival relates a hard-to-believe story in the late 1880s during one of his boating and shooting excursions to the Gorges of the Upper Yangzi. The description of Chinese reaction to such an aggressive missionary is probably reasonably accurate and possibly even moderate for the day; and from today's point of view not without some justification.\n\nHis story is related here in full, without comment. While up the river I met a gentleman who was a missionary. He was an Englishman; but belonged to an American-Scotch mission. This may appear to the uninitiated a little mixed, but it is substantially correct.\n\nAmong the various means adopted by the missionary body for Christianising the heathen, this gentleman chose the most curious and original method I ever heard of. Before he was appointed to the ------ mission he was stationed at one of the fortified towns some miles lower down the river. Here he resided in one of the strongholds of Buddha himself, among a people who were entirely ignorant of the first principles of Christianity. I cannot say he hit upon a very wise plan in his style of religious instruction.\n\nThis place, as I have said, was a fortified town, and a very stringent rule of the city - which was occupied by a detachment of troops - was, that the gates should, every night, be closed at ten o'clock. Our worthy Free-Lance of the Cross was very fond of rambling round the country in the cool of the evening, and on many occasions returned long after the gates had been closed. When he found that no entrance was to be", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215767, "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": 66, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "London: George G. Harrap, 1945.\n\nRitchie, Edmee Alice\n\nMy memoirs or good of its kind. [s.l.: s.n., n.d.].\n\nSecret notes on Japanese army\n\nNorth Melbourne: Victorian Railways Printing Works, 1942.\n\nThe Shanghai directory 1941: City supplementary edition to The China Hong List. Shanghai: The Office of the North-China Daily News & Herald, Ltd.\n\nShneider, Vladimir\n\nTraces of the ten. Beer-Sheva: V. Shneider, 2002.\n\nSmith, Arthur Henderson, 1845-1932.\n\nVillage life in China: a study in sociology. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1900.\n\nTicozzi, Sergio\n\nHistorical document of the Hong Kong Catholic Church. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Catholic Diocesan Archives, 1997\n\nVocational Training Council (Hong Kong) The Morrison Hill story [videorecording]. [Hong Kong: s.n., 199-.\n\nWaters, Dan.\n\nLunch beat [2 sound cassettes]. (Dr Dan Waters shares his in-depth knowledge and stories about Hong Kong's past in two episodes of radio programme The Lunch Beat.\n\n[Hong Kong: RTHK, 1998 - 2001].\n\nWay, Denis M. and Nield, Robert\n\nCounting house: the history of PricewaterhouseCoopers on the China Coast. Hong Kong: PricewaterhouseCoopers, c2002.\n\nWu, You-ru\n\nShen-jiang sheng jing tu. Shanghai: Hua bao zhai shu she, 1999.\n\nZhang, Yingjin\n\nlvii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215954, "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": 253, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "187\n\nTHE PROTO-MARTYR OF CHINESE PROTESTANTS: RECONSTRUCTING THE STORY\n\nOF\n\nCH’ÜA KAM-KWONG\n\nLAUREN PFISTER\n\nAs much as the writings of a person extrapolate and delimit their public presence after they die, so the deaths experienced around a person - perhaps we could call them the \"public absences\" they experience - these \"public absences\" often give form to that person's private world of meanings and influence the directions of their life's later years. Regularly, though probably not always, the public realm of writings and the private sphere of felt deaths intersect. In the life of a Scottish Victorian missionary-sinologist and pastor, these two dimensions often collided in scribbled correspondence, mission reports, literary reflections, and the biographical sketches others made from these sources about those public absences.\n\nJames Legge\n\nAcross the eight decades of James Legge's (1815-1897) active life it is not hard to identify the power and presence of this sphere of public absences, especially during his hyphenated missionary-scholar experience in Hong Kong from 1843 to 1873. He was indeed a \"pastor\" in the full sense of the Dissenter traditions he represented, not seldom found describing, in linguistic forms stereotyped across the Victorian era's professional clergy from many denominations, the deathbed scenes of missionary colleagues, their family members, and elderly members of the Chinese congregation he co-pastored with Ho Tsun-sheen (1817-1871). Colonial life led him also to the soldiers' barracks for occasional worship services, and to the jails, where death was calculated into the normal conditions of life far more frequently than among \"normal\" social settings. But the more personally felt deaths can also be numbered - there were fourteen which shook his consciousness with varying degrees of starkness, most coming from his large and extended family ties. Among the four", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215955, "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": 254, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "188\n\ndeaths of Chinese persons within these fourteen personal absences Legge experienced, one stood out over time because it became so formative in shaping Legge's public image in Hong Kong. The images of both Legge and this seminal Chinese figure were first promoted through extracted letters and reading literature of missionary journals where the story about Ch'ea Kam-Kwong first appeared. After Ch'ea's murder, however, it became a festering and frustrating element within the larger political scenario of the unequal treaties period in foreign policy between the Qing Manchurian empire in China and the newly established British ambassador. Legge made the issue all the more prominent in 1863 by publicly challenging British officials' complacence about the matter and condemning attempts by Sir Frederick Bruce (1814-1867), the first British ambassador to the Qing empire, to defuse the whole tragedy by general claims about missionary incompetence.\n\nThe period from 1861 to 1863 was pivotal in Legge's missionary-scholar career because of three books and two supremely “felt” public absences. In February and November 1861 he published the first two of the eight-tome-five-volume series he entitled the Chinese Classics. In October and at the very beginning of 1862 he faced news about the deaths of Ch'ea Kam-kwong and his eldest brother George respectively, writing special memorials to both men in the subsequent months. In the latter case, James Legge edited and introduced his brother George's selected lectures and sermons (an introduction of just over 100 pages!), an act of filial respect simultaneously Scottish Nonconformist, Ruist/Confucian, and Victorian in style and content.\n\n2\n\nYet Ch'ea's death in October 1861 and its consequences had a power over Legge's career he himself could not fully anticipate. So influential was it that in the balance of the decade of the 1860s Legge was regularly referred to in local Hong Kong and overseas missionary literature as \"James Legge of Hong-kong and Poklo.\" Here we will explore the meaning of Ch'ea's death for Legge's life, and the broader implications it had on a surprising range of “larger issues\" in the study of cross-cultural interactions during the later decades of the Manchurian Qing dynasty. Part of the significance is shown in a negative fashion in Paul Cohen's early work of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215988, "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": 287, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "221\n\nresearch and cross-cultural studies on an international scale. There is much of lasting value which has been gained here. For the light of this story is full of mottled shades, helping to expose the cultural complexities of the second generation of missionaries and indigenous Christians among Protestants in China as well as highlighting the work of one of their most creative and unexpected indigenous missionaries. Furthermore, it reveals a purposefully hidden event in the very early era of the post-Opium War treaty situation which has been all but forgotten. Now there is even more evidence to consider, far more than has previously been available, to indicate how and why the interacting forces of foreign military, local mandarin, Hong Kong missionary and Chinese local populations struggled through this very murky period in modern Chinese history.\n\nNOTES\n\n1. Further details about Legge's missionary-scholar career can be culled from my two-volume work entitled Striving for \"The Whole Duty of Man”: James Legge and the Scottish Protestant Encounter with China (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang), forthcoming in May or June 2003. Images of some of the other deaths surrounding Legge's later life while a professor in Chinese language and literature at Oxford can be culled from Norman J. Girardot's The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). An earlier version of this paper was read at the International Conference on James Legge held in the University of Aberdeen in April 1997.\n\n2. See George Legge, Lectures on Theology, Science, and Revelation, eds. James Legge and John Legge, with introduction by James Legge (London: 1863).\n\n3. In the five-volume set of William Canton's A History of the British and Foreign Bible Society (London: John Murray, 1904-1910), only two pages are devoted to recounting the basic elements of Ch'ea's Christian life and martyrdom, all being completely dependent on previous published sources in English. While a full chapter is devoted to Ch'ea in Helen Edith Legge's James Legge: Missionary and Scholar (London: Religious Tract Society, 1905), her account suffers from a lack of chronological consistency, some misrepresentation of facts, and a lack of understanding of the broader circumstances influencing the events leading to his murder.\n\n4. An immense amount of literature in the general area of Protestant missionary studies, for example, and two monumental works on Legge's two distinct careers as a missionary for the London Missionary Society in Hong Kong and as the first professor of Chinese language and literature at Corpus Christi College in Oxford (by Pfister and Girardot respectively), have highlighted these matters. For those interested in the more general trends of missionary studies", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215998, "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": 297, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "231\n\nHenan province to Legge in Hong Kong. It is very unclear who that might be, since the London Missionary Society did not have regular workers in inland China, or even more north along the eastern coast of China, until after the settlement of the second Opium War in 1860. Nevertheless, the writer speaks about \"old Chow\" (lǎo Zhōu, accepted as an intimate expression between friends and not merely descriptive of age), an elder Chinese Christian in their church, who became so interested in the Poklo movement that he visited Ch'ëa independently in 1858 and found what had been said to be the case.\n\n54. For further comments on Hannah Mary Legge's life as a missionary wife and spouse of an Oxford University professor, see Lauren Pfister, Striving for the \"Whole Duty of Man\": James Legge and the Scottish Protestant Encounter with China (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2003), vol. 2, chapters 5 and 6 in passim, and Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 55-56, 62, 84-87, 150-151, 194-196, 455-456, 506-509.\n\n55. Legge wrote, “Since his baptism in 1856, Ch'ëa has spent a large portion of his time in travelling, and making known the things which he believes, entirely without fee or reward. Our Church came to the conclusion that we ought, in accordance with the principle that the labourer is worthy of his hire, to do something for him; and he has gone back home the Agent or Missionary of our Chinese brethren here, for a period of three months. At the end of that time we are to see him again, when it may be advisable to take measures to prosecute the work in Pok-lo on a larger scale than the small means of my people can attain to.\" EMMC/MM 24 (February 1860), p. 39.\n\n56. These statistics are summarized from the annual report of Legge and Chalmers written on January 14, 1861 (CWM/South China/Box 6/Jacket B/Folder 3) and Legge's \"Journey of a Missionary Tour\".\n\n57. The subtleties of translation here are also important. Did Ch'ea actually use a word for \"Papists,\" or was this derogatory term the European translators' replacement for a more neutral phrase for \"Catholics\" like Tiānzhǔjiào tú?\n\n58. See EMMC/MM (September 1857), p. 207 for details. It should be mentioned, though it may be obvious to some, that the previously described persecutions of 1856 when Ch'ea self-consciously remained silent before his \"persecutors\" in the government was also an imitation of Christ's silence before the Sanhedrin.\n\n59. Selected from EMMC/MM (September 1857), p. 208.\n\n60. This scene and the subsequent information from Mr. Kot appear in the translation of the dictated account of his conversion published in EMMC/MM (September 1857), pp. 208-209.\n\n61. There are later examples of sermons dealing with the topic of providence, for example, which probably reflect earlier teachings at Union Chapel. For Legge's sermons touching themes of divine providence see \"The Review and Meaning of the Past\" (on Deuteronomy 8:2, dated January 1, 1871, found in CWM/South China/Personal/Legge/Box 4), \"The Rationale of the Divine Judgments\" (on Psalm 119:75, dated September 17, 1871), and \"The Doctrine of a Particular Providence\" (on Psalm 37:38-40, dated January 28, 1872, both this and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216023, "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": 322, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "256\n\nMountain, a former small island now joined to the mainland by alluvium, referred to by Victorian travellers as a 'pyramidal rock'. This used to stand out in the Yangzi a mile or so upstream from the city of Zhenjiang, hence their use of its name generically for the city. There is a further island, Jiao Shan Scorched Island, an islet some mile or so downstream from the city with its own ancient temple, Dinghui Si concealed within its tree-covered slopes. It too has its own memorials from the era of the Six Dynasties - two or three ancient cypress trees, whose storm-riven and almost barkless trunks were in the 1920s still held together by iron bands. According to Allom, Silver Island [Mountain], the name formerly given by foreigners to Jiao Shan, is to the westward of Zhenjiang, within sight of the Gold Island [Mountain] [see illustration]. Legend has it that Jin Shan, Gold Mountain takes its name from the time during the Tang dynasty when a certain Bei Totuo was digging into the hill and found a pot of gold; this has long been denied by Buddhists who believe that the name of the hill has a Buddhist symbolic meaning. Although the British Concession was originally laid out with intervening ground between it and the old walled city it did not take many years for the new native city to encroach and reach the Concession boundary. This meant that foreigners wishing to leave the Concession had to battle their way through the main street of the new native city, facing filthy and disease-ridden beggars, open drains and past open spaces which were used as public conveniences, constantly patronised by squatting men.\n\nCaptain Cunynghame, serving with the British force sailing up the Yangzi and about to mount an assault on Zhenjiang, arrived off the city on the 18th of July 1842. The force had been proceeding with great care as it was the first opportunity that western warships had had to penetrate as far inland up the Great River. He described his first sighting of Golden Island as 'the most beautiful little fairy isle imaginable, covered with temples, whose gilt-topped pagodas shone brilliantly in the evening sun'. A week or so later, once the city had been stormed and he was able to walk through it and wrote that \"the walled portion of the town was reckoned about four miles in circumference. The suburbs, extending a long distance to the west, probably occupied an equal extent of ground. The former space was chiefly occupied by streets containing shops, with an occasional blank space of wall within which were the houses of the most wealthy inhabitants. A very large portion, however, was occupied by gardens", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216024, "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": 323, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "257\n\nand pleasure-grounds, all of which showed evident signs of great neglect. The suburbs were one dense mass of habitations of two stories in height; the lower portions of which were devoted to the handicraftsmen, who employed themselves in them, or to store rooms, in which merchandise was deposited. There were numerous public buildings, most of them appearing to be of a religious character, either dedicated to Buddha or Confucius.\n\nMainly for safety reasons ships passing up and down the Yangzi tended to use the main channel which ran along the north bank of the Great River opposite Zhenjiang. Down the years spits have formed close to Zhenjiang, mainly off Ganlu Si [Consular Bluff] and Xiang Shan Bluff, whilst the Zhengrenzhou spit steadily advanced downstream from the west blocking off the approaches to the harbour. The flat sandy bottom, so the Admiralty Guide tells us, does not provide good holding ground, especially during autumn gales.\n\nThe channel of the Great River at Zhenjiang is some two miles in breadth and had long been a ferry crossing point over the Yangzi, linking Zhenjiang with the major city of Yangzhou, a short distance upstream of the northern section of the Grand Canal. The long-mooted bridge over the River has still to be built. In the early days of the opening up of China by the West the city was believed to be the furthest point upstream on the Yangzi which seagoing vessels of the heaviest burden could reach with comparative ease. When Hankou, over five hundred miles further upstream, was opened to foreign trade it soon became apparent that trade at Zhenjiang consisted of little more than being an agency for steamers using the port as a stopping point, and for the Customs House for Chinese merchants. So it was that when vessels had access to the fountainhead of trade at Hankou, together with the fact that the harbour at Zhenjiang having silted up, the importance of the port became in great measure superseded. Sadly, the dolphins which not too long ago frolicked in the Great River and were commonly seen off Zhenjiang have been fished into extinction with today's oily pollution preventing any return, though a very occasional porpoise may still be seen.\n\nA Victorian writer described the climate and temperature of Zhenjiang as 'little different from that in Shanghai, whereas the varied scenery and hilly surroundings of Zhenjiang were an advantage which", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216056, "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": 355, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "289\n\nThere has been many an article printed in Britain and the US both for and against their nationals whose activities as missionaries in China varied from the mild and mediocre to the wild, bigoted and in a number of instances weird and incomprehensible. There were those whose lonely lives drove them to despair, to insanity and even to suicide. Others caused untold harm to the cause by their intemperate sermons, lectures and even actions. Their success rate in China was abysmal and The Times even wrote that missionaries in general were not very well educated and not gentlemen.\" This was not always so and their social origins did not matter, but with a number taking the Bible literally, their grasp\n\nof the accepted meaning of biblical scriptures and of language, both English and Chinese, was inadequate leading not only to blinkered bigotry but also to an inability to 'sell' their ideals. There were a great many good, well-intentioned missionaries but with the general evangelising attitude of the Victorian era most Chinese found any spiritual message out of step with their personal religious experience and their own culture. Christianity as taught during the 19th and early 20th centuries failed to appeal to or attract contemporary Chinese who were possibly no more than mildly intrigued to hear what a foreigner might have to say. The multiplicity of sects, teachings and churches, as well as different terms for God, confused Chinese. The Roman Catholics had a far higher conversion rate primarily due to their sympathetic attitudes and policy of getting as near to being one of the community, in dress and living conditions [apart, that is, from the very rare luxuries of wine and cigars].\n\nMissionaries had first seen the Taiping Rebellion as the outcome of missionary enterprise. This view changed when it became apparent that the Taiping leadership had revised and interpreted Christianity. The Taiping leaders had, for example, adopted polygamy for themselves whilst banning it for their followers, and lived in luxury having misappropriated untold wealth.\n\nThe notable early Protestant missionary, Griffith John, made a sweeping reconnaissance across the Yangzi basin in June of 1858 but when visiting Zhenjiang he decided that it was too close to the Taipings at Nanjing and moved on.27\n\nThe London Mission eventually commenced work in Zhenjiang in 1868, and regarding the city as an outstation of Shanghai they rented", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]