[ { "id": 211052, "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": 113, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "88\n\nOur principal concern has been to document and explain the rapid growth in popularity in Hong Kong since the 1940's of the cult of Huang Daxian (on which, see Lang and Ragvald, \"Upward mobility of a refugee god\"). However, we have also been trying to trace the origins of the cult in Guangdong province, hence the research trip to the village. A report on this visit, and on the first author's initial visit to the village in 1985, has also been prepared. We are now working on a book on the history of the cult in Guangdong and Hong Kong.\n\nProbable cases of the mergings of deities include, from ancient Greece, the merging of two incarnations of Zeus (Gilbert, Murray, Five stages of Greek Religion, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday Anchor Books, 1951, p. 48; H.J. Rose, Religion in Greece and Rome, N.Y., Harper and Row, 1959, pp. 48-49), and of various female deities in Aphrodite (Paul Friedrich, The Meaning of Aphrodite, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1978, ch. 2); from Rome, the blending of Roman with Greek deities, and the subsequent apparent merging of some Roman deities with Celtic deities (John Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1970, pp. 211-220); from the early Christian era, the probable absorption of elements of the cult of Diana into the cult of Mary (Herbert Muller, The Loom of History, N.Y. New American Library, 1958 p. 173; Durant, 1939: 183); from Mexico, the absorption of elements of the Indian goddess Tonantsi into the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Ena Campbell, “The Virgin of Guadalupe and the female self-image: a Mexican case history\", in Mother Worship: Themes and Variations, ed. by Richard Preston, University of North Carolina Press, 1982).\n\n9 This translation strangely enough contains one serious (the failure to recognize Dongtian Fudi [Cavern-heavens and blessed spots] as a general Taoist concept) and a few smaller mistakes. These, however, do not affect the arguments made in this paper.\n\n10 This probable origin of the autobiography was pointed out to us by Dr. S.H. Wong of the Department of Chinese, Hong Kong University (see Wong, \"A study of Huang Ta-hsien\").\n\nThere are several slightly different versions of Shenxian Zhuan. For this translation we have used the relatively early (Song dynasty) version in Biji Xiaoshuo Daguan (A Parade of Note-form Fiction), Taibei, Xinxing Shuju, volume 4. 12 Essentially the same story is related in Huitu Liexian Quanzhuan, compiled in the 16th century by Wang Shizhen (reprinted by Zhongwen Chubanshe in 1971 on Taiwan). This is one of the major reference works on Taoist saints, with capsule biographies on some 500 of them, and covers the entire period from the beginning of Taoism until the last year of the reign of Hongzhi (1506 A.D.). This source adds only the information that during the Song and Yuan dynasties, both Huang Chuping and his brother were awarded honorary titles by the state. The story of Huang Chuping also appears in Jinhua Fuzhi (the prefectural gazetteer of Jinhua), volume no. 22 in the subsection \"xian shi\" (on fairies).\n\n13\n\nGe Hong was a native of Jurong in Danyang (present day Jiangsu province). His career included service as assistant to prime minister Sima Rui, and as counsellor and military staff officer. He was honoured by the state for his services in the suppression of the peasant revolt led by Shi Bing. However, he was also very interested in Taoist alchemy. He was a grandson, on the fraternal line, of the famous necromancer and alchemist Ge Xuan (164-244), and from a disciple of Ge Xuan's, he learned the art of refining cinnabar. When word spread that cinnabar sand had been found in Jiaozhi (the ancient name for part of Guangdong and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212125, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 67, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "THE 'SYRIAN BRILLIANT TEACHING’\n\nDAVID WILMSHURST\n\nIntroduction\n\nFew Christians nowadays outside the Middle East are familiar with the name, let alone the history, of the Nestorian church of Persia, yet between the ninth and fourteenth centuries it was in some respects perhaps the largest Christian church in the world, with bishoprics stretching from the Mediterranean right across Asia to China. The church took its name from Nestorius, who became archbishop of Constantinople in 428 and was deposed not long afterwards for holding heretical views on the nature of Christ. Nestorius placed great stress on the human nature of Jesus, and tried to discourage the use in the churches under his jurisdiction of the title Theotokos, 'mother of God', a term which had long been applied to the Virgin Mary. To his enemies, he appeared to be denying the divinity of Christ, and regarding him as a mere man who had been adopted by God as his son, though it is now clear that his views were considerably closer to the orthodox position than he was given credit for at the time. A heated controversy ensued, and both sides in the dispute supported their arguments with bribery and intimidation. The opposition to Nestorius was led by Cyril, archbishop of Alexandria, who was motivated partly by a genuine distaste for his opponent's theology and partly by jealousy of his ecclesiastical status. Cyril finally procured the deposition and banishment of Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus in 431.\n\nIn the next century and a half the Nestorian heresy was stamped out within the territories of the Roman empire, and its adherents fled to neighbouring Persia. Although the state religion of Sassanian Persia was Zoroastrianism, Christianity had firmly established itself in the western provinces of the Persian empire, particularly among the mainly Syrian population of northern Mesopotamia and in Khuzistan and Fars, and Persia's Christian minority by and large sympathised with the theological position which Nestorius had taken. The influx of Christian refugees from the Roman empire strengthened the native Persian church, and after the Persian empire was conquered by the Moslem Arabs in the seventh century the Nestorian church enjoyed a period of rapid expansion. Syrian and Persian Christians were tolerated by their Moslem rulers and organised into a melet, or official minority", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213272, "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": 94, "title": "RAS-1994", "content_text": "74\n\nthere are many forms of geomancy some of which are linked to their Four Elements* namely Air, Fire, Earth and Water, which, in turn, are linked to the four corners of the earth. North American Indians also have their forms of geomancy.\n\nLey Lines in Britain\n\nThere are also aspects of Chinese geomancy that bear comparison with European beliefs. 'Dragon veins' for instance, are similar in some ways, to the invisible 'ley lines' that crisscross Britain (see Oxford English Dictionary, vol. VIII, 2nd Edition). This pre-Christian network, 'woven' across the countryside, crosses bogs and mountains, links salient points such as hilltops, and, in some cases, follows ancient tracks which were once trodden by merchants when transporting commodities like salt and flint. Ley lines embrace, symbolically, rich identifying features like sacred sites, stone circles, menhirs, encampments, watchtowers, earthen mounds, wishing and holy wells associated with saints, moats and ponds, and graveyards (Miller, 1989). Key positions, often at crossroads, were formed at intersections of the 'ley' (or lay) which included sites like Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge. From the latter, various astronomical observations can be conducted. Like watching the sun rise at mid-summer from the centre of the stone circle over the heel-stone.\n\nThe first stone churches were often built on pre-Christian sites, where symbolic rites had been performed, such as in the old 'Serpent Temples'. Some believe Saint Mary (the Virgin Mary) Churches are really Christianised versions of the old 'Shining Earth Goddess'. With the importance of life-giving solar energy and its involvement in everyday life, such events as the fire festival were important in ancient Britain.\n\nThis network of ley lines (Saxon 'leye'; an obsolete word for fire) which can be traced across the English landscape, is visible only to those who have 'eyes' to see it. Prehistoric tracks, sometimes pilgrimage routes, often followed ley lines. Roman or medieval roads were frequently not primary arteries but simply followed the ley. The Icknield Way running from the Wash down to the Thames, and on to the Berkshire Downs, is an example of a pre-Roman Track. There is also the famous Saint Michael Ley Line, with the Michael and Mary currents, which serpentines from the tip of Cornwall to the coast of East Anglia (Miller, 1989). Such lines are really 'routes' or 'corridors' rather than straight lines.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1994.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214975, "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": 71, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "27\n\nTungtang):\n\nPapa gave in, and Rosalie [Suyin] and Tiza [her younger sister] went to the Catholic Chinese school; every morning there was half an hour of Bible story, and in this version St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary were Chinese, born in Shantung province.\n\nRosalie asked: “How can this be? The Western School says born in Judea, and the family were all Jews.\"\n\n\"That's what they say, but we here believe it is in Shantung,” replied the Chinese lay-sister who taught Catechism.\n\nRosalie was not happy, and talked to the other children about it, and three days later Mother Superior sent for her after school and told her to stop asking questions.\n\n“You must understand, my child, that the others don't know any better. They are Chinese.'\n\nThe devastating atmosphere of her childhood years made Han Suyin write a bitter paragraph in Chapter 11 (The End and the Beginning), taken from volume five, Phoenix Harvest. In this episode, she describes the family's difficult life in pre-revolutionary China:\n\nTheir [Han Suyin's parents'] decades together were of sorrow and pain and insecurity, of war and running away and making do; and seeing their children despised for being Eurasians. Only I had the courage (or the foolishness) to scream against the general contempt for Eurasians, \"But we are the future.\"\n\nIn her early teens, Han Suyin had the courage to think of a sky-high virtually impossible dream for a female Eurasian in pre-revolutionary China, namely of becoming a medical doctor. In order to at least partially finance these very costly studies, she first had to learn typing and shorthand writing, and then got a secretarial job with P.U.M.C. (Peking Union Medical College). At P.U.M.C., this child of barely fourteen was immediately confronted with inequality in payment for equal accomplishment, depending on the employee's racial status, white, Eurasian in various different proportions, or simply Chinese. In Chapter", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215427, "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": 204, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "153\n\nTrue, the originality and beauty of carvings and images constituted an aesthetic experience aimed at everyone in the city. But one cannot help thinking that this complex text, with its erudite cross-referencing, was partly conceived with the more literate and bookish administrative and literati class in mind. After all, attracting the upper and educated classes had recently evolved as a novel Jesuit method of missionization that had borne rich fruit for Matteo Ricci and his confreres in the Chinese mainland.\n\nOne of the Chinese inscriptions states: 'The Holy Mother tramples on the dragon's head,' a reference to the Book of Genesis (Fig. 19). Both the left and the right scrolls have carved inscriptions in relief (as opposed to those explaining the dragon, which are incised), consisting of six large vertical characters. Like those on the dragon, they explain the two images spreading horizontally across the scroll inside a frame. The ones on the left, before the claws of another strange monster, with tail, short antlers, a snout, large bat's wings, breasts and shot through with an arrow, read: \"The Devil tempts mankind to do evil things\" (Fig. 20).\n\nOn the right we read: 'Remember Death and do not sin,' a kind of memento mori epigram at the bony feet of a grimacing skeleton also shot through with an arrow (Fig. 19).\n\nMain Image\n\nReferences to the Devil, who tempts humanity to sin (whose wages is death), form part of the complicated iconography of the façade. Directly or indirectly the entire iconographic programme revolves around its titular image depicting the Assumption of Mary (Fig. 21).\n\nIt is the largest bronze in the frontispiece, measuring practically six feet in height, and like all the bronzes of the façade of rather shallow 3-D casting and flat at the base. It is surrounded by reliefs of music-playing and incense-burning angels, amongst the finest in colonial religious imagery by East Asian artists (Fig. 22). The Assumption is combined with an Infant Salvator Mundi in the attic above, and with the Dove of the Holy Spirit in the pediment (Fig. 23).\n\nThe Virgin's Assumption in bodily form into heaven is one of the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215428, "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": 205, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "154\n\nmost inscrutable of Roman Catholic mysteries. Of Eastern European origin, it was popularised in large numbers of altarpieces throughout Europe from the Late Gothic onwards.\n\nWhat made it so specific to Roman-Catholic ritual is the powerfully Eucharistic connotations given to it by Counter-Reformation theologians and retable programmers. From retables the theme passed to retable-façades, as seen in Santa Maria A Grande in Pontevedra.\n\nToday there are no angels crowning the head of the image of Mary as she soars to heaven, nor is there a half moon beneath her feet. But the impressive array of symbols carved on the bays, bases and end-volutes of the third storey show that many are attributes related not so much to the Assumption, as to a type of the Virgin known as the Tota Pulchra. Moreover, there is a closer correspondence between the latter and the image of Mary as the Immaculate Conception (Mary conceived by God without original sin, a controversial religious belief, at the time bitterly contested by the Dominicans). The name Tota Pulchra, by which this image is known to art historians is closely linked to the concept of immaculate. It is derived from a passage in the Canticle of Canticles singing the virtues of the beloved, in which King Solomon, the reputed author, proclaims: \"Tota pulchra es amica mea, et macula non est in te” (“You are wholly beautiful, beloved, and there is no stain in you”), (translation mine).\n\nIn all likelihood the artists of the frontispiece created their masterpiece from prints illustrating the attributes of the Tota Pulchra following a complex theological programme. Typical are the pediment reliefs of St. Paul's showing a sun and a moon, referring to the woman pulchra ut luna and electa ut sol, derived from The Canticle of Canticles and very similar to those depicted in contemporary prints (Fig. 24).\n\nA good indication that the artists copied or derived their images from such prints is the fact that not all the symbols of the Tota Pulchra originate in The Canticle of Canticles. Some evolved from the Litanies of the Virgin (including the more popular Litany of Loreto) and a number of Old Testament sources, such as Genesis, Ezekiel and the Book of Proverbs. These are also present in the decoration of the façade.\n\nWhat makes this supposition reasonable is that numerous", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216203, "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": 502, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "436\n\nAfter a good Chinese lunch at the Lai Yue Mun Restaurant in Xin Hui we took a taxi (RMB250) through the County city of Tai Shan and past some interesting old Chinese villages, including Yeung Do. We arrived at the Guang Hai Bay port of Shen Ju in good time to catch the 4:00 pm public ferry to Shang Chuan Island. The timetable shows ferries leave daily at 9:30 am, 11 am, 2 pm, and at 4 pm, for the crossing that took us just over an hour. They are scheduled for the Shang Chuan to Shen Ju crossing at 7:30 am, 9:30 am, 12:00 and 2:00 pm. A group could otherwise hire a speedboat.\n\nWe were told that the island had been closed to visitors until 1983 and that there was still a sizeable PLA naval base there. As we entered the fishing harbour at the NW side of the island we passed some naval vessels and fishing boats. We also had our first view of the St Francis Xavier Church on the hillside. There were several modern large tourist hotels in the Fei Sha Tan Tourist Resort at the eastern side of the island. We took a public minibus from the port to the Resort. Probably the best of the hotels was the Biyun Tian Hotel (Eastern Harbour View Hotel), though we chose a smaller one. Both faced the beach, with a pleasant esplanade packed with plenty of hawkers in the evening. The choice of restaurants was uninspiring. In the morning we hired a minibus with driver for a half day (RMB150) to show us around the island. He took us to the fishing village, purpose-built in 1992, and over the Cheung Po Chai pirate pass with the Twin Treasure Rocks. He also took us to a grotesque Laughing Buddha cave with little figurines representing the Journey to the West.\n\nSuch were the delights the driver thought we should enjoy, but for us the highlight was the visit to the Church of St Francis Xavier at the NW side of the Island. The church was a simple white tiled building with a plaque above the porch dating the church at 1869. There was reported to have been a church at the spot since 1700 with various restorations from 1813 to 1932. The caretaker unlocked the church for us. There are several rows of pews facing a large wooden cross. On the altar stands a statue of a bearded priest in front of which is a statue of the Virgin Mary. Religious paintings were hanging on the walls. In the centre of the church lay a stone sarcophagus with some Chinese inscriptions.\n\nOutside, a modernist sculpture had been erected by the Yamaguchi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]