[ { "id": 206869, "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": 146, "title": "RAS-1973", "content_text": "140 \n\nNOTES AND QUERIES \n\n“LING CH’IH” AT CANTON, 27th MAY, 1886. \n\nThe following account of a visit to the execution ground at Canton is taken from a type-script copy belonging to two of our Members, through whose courtesy it is reproduced here. \n\nThe visit was made from Hong Kong by a party of 6 as yet un-identified persons, referred to in part and only by the initials of their surnames, \n\nFor \"Ling Ch'ih\" (J) see Giles' Dictionary (1912 edition) under characters No. 7228 and 1986. Under No. 7228 he comments on 'the ignominious or so-called “lingering death\" which properly consists of dismemberment by twenty-four cuts before the coup de grâce, but is practically confined to a few slashes followed quickly by decapitation'. Under No. 1986 he states that 'strictly speaking [it] should consist in mutilation of the limbs before giving the coup de grâce'. Ed. \n\nWe left the \"Vigilant\" at 7 a.m.—there being six of us in the party. We found on landing Ah Cum, the guide, waiting for us with the necessary chairs and coolies which we had previously ordered. After calling at Jardine's Hong for A. and C.* we went on over the Bridge and through the City until we reached the Execution Ground at about 7.45. Very few people had assembled when we arrived, and there was nothing to show that anything unusual was expected to take place. We soon, however, had a considerable crowd round us, and on the guide making enquiries we heard that for certain there would be two executions to-day but at what time was not known—probably some time in the forenoon. As the crowd began to get oppressive we tried to get away from it and eventually found refuge in a \"Tea-house\" where we went upstairs to a large room having in it a number of small tables at which Chinese of different classes, from the coolie upwards, were drinking tea and eating sweets, to whom our advent caused some amusement. We ordered some tea for the good of the house but I don't think many of us drank it. I tried it and found it bitterly nasty. \n\nWe waited wearily at this Tea House trying to pass away the time by pestering the guide with questions that he could not answer \n\nnot identified.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1973.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207721, "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": 109, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "94\n\nTIN-YUKE CHAR\n\nThe 1876 Reciprocity Treaty with the United States increased the demand for labor. The 1876 biennial report of the Hawaiian Minister of Finance furnished some data of government expenditures for its active assistance in importation of Chinese labor. The expenditures for the aid of immigration during that past fiscal period was $8,850; of which $3,850 was to pay the passages for 154 arriving Chinese laborers and $5,000 was advanced to a firm of rice planters, Chulan and Company, who had 210 Chinese laborers on their way from Hong Kong.\n\n3\n\nLetters of credit were also given to Afong and Achuck and to Luke Asiu to assist passages of 400 laborers to come to Hawaii's sugar plantations. The Hawaiian government expected return of the money advanced by an arrangement with the plantations through payroll deductions.\n\nLabor conditions in Hawaii were strongly influenced by Christian missionary presence in Hawaii. In the 1882 report of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, it was said that missionaries kept vigilant watch on the treatment of laborers. \"A responsibility rests upon the plantations and the Christian public for the moral and spiritual welfare of the Chinese laborers who are not mere chattels but as human beings possessing rational and immortal souls and having the same natural rights as all others.\n\nThe labor supply problem was one of the concerns that led King Kalakaua to make his historic voyage.\n\nWith the affairs of his Kingdom in good order, King Kalakaua started on his world trip on January 20, 1881, on the City of Sydney which was then northbound from Australia to San Francisco. Accompanying him were Attorney General William Armstrong and the Royal Chamberlain, Colonel Charles H. Judd. Armstrong was commissioned as Minister of State, which would place him in the same rank as the Cabinet Ministers of any sovereign and entitle him to the respect and courtesies due to that rank. He was also made Royal Commissioner of Immigration to look for \"cognate\" sources of labor to solve the problem of a depleted native population. Colonel Judd, also from an American missionary family and an 1849 schoolmate of David Kalakaua at the Royal School, joined the Royal party to advise and guide the King on protocol and etiquette. Robert von Oehlhoffen, former German baron and an...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210881, "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": 232, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "215\n\nsmall party of 12 practical miners to join me.”\n\nA-mei says he expended about £20 on each of his party. The sum included their passage, provisions and outfits. The group, accompanied by A-mei, arrived at Dunedin early in 1866; a few days later they set out for the fields at Taupeka, where, according to A-mei, \"they were received by all classes with quite an enthusiasm.”\n\nHe had also arranged for another group of a dozen or so to follow in a few days. After their arrival, he sent them off to a different area.\n\nHe did not accompany either group but remained in Dunedin, where he waited for reports from the miners so that when he returned to Melbourne he could spread the news of riches to be gained in New Zealand by Chinese labourers. However, no news reached him.\n\nThere did appear a lone Chinese whom he had met in Australia. He was a gold counterfeiter. Finding the law closing in on him in Australia, he intended to ply his craft in a new place. Unfortunately for his plans to fleece the gullible, A-mei recognised him.\n\n\"This nefarious speculator, however, had come to grief, as at my request... he was searched. Apparatus adapted for the manufacture of the spurious precious metal, as also a parcel of already manufactured gold, were found in one of his baskets. He was, of course apprehended, and at my request he was again transported to the place whence he came, under my vigilant escort at my expense. Thus the object of his villainy was cut short without spreading any injury to the country.”\n\nA-mei, of course, had financial as well as patriotic interest in protecting the good name of the Chinese in New Zealand.\n\nReceiving no news from his miners, A-mei finally decided to return to Australia. Here he continued to wait for news. He finally gave up hope. \"I certainly felt sick of the delay, and naturally became low spirited from disappointment.”", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214978, "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-2000", "page_number": 74, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "30\n\nAfter the First World War and the return to China of the Powers, a movement to finance a new westernized Chinese élite began among the Powers. Each country hoped that the Chinese educated by them would naturally favour their country of education; gratitude, ties of friendship, as well as cultural and emotional orientations, would see to that. This also Leopold, the astute King of the Belgians, had foreseen. He had spoken of it urging that young men be sent to Belgium for training. \"Ils seront des nôtres,\" they will be ours.\n\nAbout her own Western studies, she wrote the following equitable lines:\n\nI myself was, in 1935, a recipient of a scholarship derived from the Belgian Boxer indemnity fund; I went to study in Belgium, following in my father's footsteps. But it was, in the end, China's money which was being spent to educate me, it was the Chinese people paying the Boxer Indemnity of 1900 who paid for my years in Belgium. And so my gratitude must go to them, for making me in turn, as they made my father, a privileged person, a returned student from abroad. Later I was to study in England, on a British Council scholarship, and also be grateful to England. But this has not influenced me in the end. For truth is truth and it cannot be bought at any price.\n\nVigilant yet dispassionate, non-compromising yet lacking even the slightest urge for revenge, always eager to unveil painful truths about enslavement of one people by another, Han Suyin is a born defender of human dignity and human rights. In the pages of her autobiographical/historical cycle, multiple shrewd remarks about interference of indigenous Chinese and foreign powers' interests in Old China are a most natural and therefore a matter-of-factly element, masterly interwoven in a vast political and economic panorama of Chinese life in that pre-1949 epoch. After all, the so-called 'gunboat diplomacy' and also the other forms of political blackmail, extensively practised by the white powers to threaten feudal, backward and corrupt society in order to press even more lucrative concessions out of it, had directly affected Han Suyin's and her family clan's existence on an everyday basis. Surprisingly enough and in the circumstances incomparably more neutral (or even favourable) for her, Han Suyin wrote a stunning and remarkable book - And the Rain My Drink - devoted entirely to the declining post-World War II period of the British", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215714, "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": 13, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "1861) is both a tour de force and riveting, to boot. Ch'ëa was the keeper of a temple at Poklo. He was visited in 1856 by two colporteurs from Hong Kong who left him with a bible. On reading it, he was almost immediately converted to Christianity and was later baptised in Hong Kong becoming, essentially, a disciple of James Legge. He returned to Poklo where he pursued his faith with great, if not excessive, zeal, becoming an object of suspicion and hatred in many quarters. In October 1861 he was seized by a local vigilante squad, tortured, ordered to renounce his faith - which he refused to do - and was ultimately beheaded.\n\nStephen Selby's interesting account of archery in China from the pre-Shang period to the end of the 19th century mirrors the excellent address that he recently gave to the Society.\n\nThe indefatigable Keith Stevens takes us on a voyage of discovery into the history of Zhenjiang. As always the illustrations are wonderful.\n\nAnd Dan Waters reminisces about Hong Kong in the post-War years.\n\nThere are a total of 18 NOTES AND QUERIES on a wide variety of subjects. Paul Bolding gives us some insights into the life of the intrepid Belgium aviator, Louis de San - who he ultimately met in 1988 with some interesting photographs. There is an amusing 1905 Christmas card from Arnold Graham - that great benefactor of the HKBRAS Library - and an account of the Library by our Hon. Librarian, Julia Chan. Peter Hansell discusses the famous clock maker Douglas Lapraik. Paul Harrison writes penetratingly on the highly unusual subject of restoring artefacts for display in Hong Kong's museums. Bob Horsnell continues his highly interesting pieces on old military installations. David Mahoney provides further insights into the Chinese Labour Corps in France during World War I. Martin Merz adds another follow up to Solomon's Bard's TEA AND OPIUM advising that Chinese and Indian teas are, essentially, the same (we live and learn!). Robert Nield's beautiful photographs of Bhutan which I messed up in Volume 41 are now reproduced in all their glory. I'll leave you to read The wrestling princes by Keith Stevens (a little suspense will do no harm). Peter Stuckey and Chris Bailey take us to St. John's (Shangchuan) Island to the southwest of Hong Kong where St. Francis Xavier died in 1552 (not, as I originally thought when skimming through the article,\n\niv", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215958, "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": 257, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "191\n\n11\n\n12\n\ncapable apprentice Hóng Réngan (1828-1864) who later died as the Shield King among the Taiping insurgents, and Legge's co-pastor of the Chinese congregation at Union Chapel (later Union Church) for twenty-five years, the first modern Chinese theologian, Ho Tsun-sheen (P. Hé Jinshan, known in the 20th century by his sobriquet among Chinese Christians, \"Ho Fuk-tong,\" 1817-1871). Among the many forgotten persons whom Legge knew in his role as a missionary-pastor is a Cantonese resident more than 20 years Legge's elder, Ch'ëa Kam-Kwong (P. Che Jinguang, c. 1800-1861). In the Hong Kong newspapers of the early 1860s it was Ch'ea's life and fate which catapulted Legge into the status of a folk hero among the expatriate and Chinese Christian communities. Yet Ch'ëa's own unusual conversion, his subsequent career as a self-determined missionary, and his tragic murder years later by a local Chinese vigilante squad have been almost completely overlooked in English and Chinese sources. To Legge's credit Ch'ea was the subject of many letters and reflections in various places, so that it became one of three post-mortem memorials for notable Christians associated with his missionary career. Consequently, it is largely on account of the Scottish missionary's writings that Ch'ëa's name and story can be rescued from the dustbins of forgotten Chinese history.\n\n14\n\n13\n\n## PART TWO: Walking through shadowlands: Ch’ea's transition across major traditions\n\nThe town of Poklo (P. Bóluó) was the leading city in a district of the same name, about 40 miles east of the capital city of Canton (Guǎngzhōu) and about 20 miles southeast of the impressive mountains of Lo-fow (or Laufu, P. Liúfú or Luófú) range. Those mountains were already made famous after the end of the Han dynasty (4th century A.D.) by Gé Hóng (283-363), a famous Daoist priest who made his retreat on the slopes of Mount Lo-fow when in search of special materials for an immortality elixir. Four or five temples of both Daoist and Buddhist traditions were well established on its slopes in the 19th century, and were visited by Legge and his younger Scottish colleague, John", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215982, "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": 281, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "215\n\n \nreject the Christian form of life and its teachings he had followed for five years, proving it by \"go[ing] to a temple and burn[ing] incense before some idols,\" would he be spared further torture. Refusing to bend to their manhandling, the patience of his enemies grew thin.8\n\n \n87\n\n \nOther letters tell that as he still refused to give up Christianity, his persecutors carried him to the banks of a river [near the village of Kong Tung on the evening of October 16th] and swore that if he would not then and there deny Christ, they would put him to death. He only answered, \"How can I deny Him who died for me?\" Infuriated by his steadfastness they rushed on him, struck him down, cut off his head and threw his body into the river.\n\n \nFor a number of weeks after this murder the rioters continued to rampage the district of Poklo, but gradually the vigilante dream faded, and the seriousness of their offences weighed on the leaders' minds. Attempts at compromise were offered, asking for clemency in return for the mission society's free use of the house in Poklo. To this Legge is claimed to have responded that the missionaries \"would take no measures to bring them to justice,\" but as missionaries they could not interfere if the Chinese government itself charged them with serious offences.$8\n\n \nPART SIX: Confused lights in the dark halls of foreign affairs\n\n \nBy the end of October, two weeks after Ch'ea's murder, Legge wrote not only about the limited details he had heard regarding Ch'ea's sufferings, but also characterized the vigilantes themselves. For him and others there was much \"not easy to understand.\" On the surface, they seemed to be supporting the Qing empire, and even carried a flag with the inscription, \"Security to the Government, and Extermination for Barbarians\" (possibly using the derogatory term, fanyi). But from the extensive description of the larger picture given here it is undeniable that they acted \"in defiance of the authorities,\" even taking prisoner a number of the local Qing officials (whose fate was never clarified). During this same period the occupation", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216037, "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": 336, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "270\n\nwriting home in October 1861, four years after the Taiping evacuation of Zhenjiang wrote 'it gives me the blue devils to walk in the neighbourhood of this wretched city. Thousands of acres of rich land lie uncultivated and overgrown with rank grass. The cottages are all destroyed and a very few old men and women represent a tottering population. Not a junk moored off the city wall and only one very dirty street remains of what was once a large and haughty town. I don't think the rebels will be back this year. They have lost a very important post up the river and their head den [Nanjing] will soon be threatened by the Imperialists'.\n\nIn 1854 a new American Commissioner arrived en poste in Shanghai and decided to visit the Taiping headquarters in Nanjing as a US diplomatic representative. He sailed up the Yangzi in the USS Susquehanna but as they passed the Taiping fort at Zhenjiang a shot across their bows caused him to send a small party ashore to demand a reason for the 'insult' and an apology. The Zhenjiang Taiping commander explained that they were keeping a vigilant eye on traffic on the Yangzi and required all vessels to hove to until permission to proceed was received from Nanjing. The US representative repeated his demand for an apology and threatened to sail on on the morrow come what may. He also provided a sketch of the US flag so that such an insult may never be repeated. They sailed on as planned and having had many meetings with Taiping commanders at various levels, including one with the Eastern King, the US Commissioner realised that in view of the tone of the Eastern King's written response, amongst other things requiring Tribute from the Americans, any continued attempt to institute diplomatic relations with the Taiping was a waste of time. Whereupon they returned to Shanghai, wiser but no further forward. However, they did take the opportunity before returning of sailing a hundred or so miles further up stream to areas not before visited by US or British expeditions. The Americans, sad to say, appear to have obtained little new about the Taipings to add to what was already known,\n\n13\n\nZhenjiang temples\n\nThe four major temples were the Jin Shan Temple with its pagoda, the Ganlu Si [Sweet Dew Temple] on the Beigu Shan, the Dinghui Si on Jiao Shan and the City God temple. There were also a number of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]