[ { "id": 210975, "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": 37, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "To be invited to give this lecture in memory of George Ernest Morrison, that remarkable Australian, is not only a pleasure and an honour; it provides a very appropriate occasion to review the unique position China has held for more than three centuries in the eyes of French intellectuals. Morrison, himself quite fluent in French and well versed in French literature, was very familiar with some distinguished members of the French intelligentsia who visited China during those ‘Morrison years', such as Loti, Segalen and Claudel. He also knew well how prestigious China had been in the eyes of French intellectuals of an earlier period, namely French Jesuits and French Philosophes of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Their writings occupy a distinctive position on the shelves of Morrison's own library, once in Peking and later transferred to Japan. These early French books with their old-fashioned print and leather binding indicated, and Morrison was fully aware of it, that a major intellectual encounter had taken place between France and China. For the Philosophes, for Voltaire, Diderot and other contributors to the Great Encyclopedia, China was a powerful war machine which they directed against the backwardness, the tyranny, the impotence of the Versailles monarchy. As seen in the very title of a well-known French Ph.D. dissertation, China played an essential role in the formation and growth of the esprit philosophique in eighteenth century France.\n\nChina, in the view of these philosophes, was an empire ruled by an intellectual elite, namely the Confucian literati. In our subsequent Western political culture, our universities being no exception, ‘mandarin' has become a symbol of bureaucratic rigidity, almost a dirty word. But such was not the case in the eighteenth century. Voltaire praised very highly the Confucian degree holders he called Talapoints, a strange word which has since vanished entirely. China was seen as being ruled by men of wisdom, and this was an obvious contrast to the practices of the French monarchy and its corrupt, incompetent, uneducated officials. China was supposed to be at least as advanced as France, on the way towards Enlightenment, towards l'Age des Lumières.\n\nThese peoples [said Diderot], gifted with a 'consentement unanime, are superior to all other Asiatics in antiquity, intellect, art, wisdom, policy, and in their", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210977, "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": 39, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "14\n\nearly Manchu emperors. The Jesuits' basic strategy was to establish the compatibility of a conversion to Christianity with the continuation of the Confucian ceremonies of respect to the Emperor and to family ancestors. They had to defend this strategy against other influential church lobbies in Rome, especially the Dominicans. The Jesuits were defeated, eventually, but they had produced in the course of this epoch-making controversy La Querelle des Cérémonies Chinoises an enormous wealth of material highly favourable to Chinese culture and society, among which the standard collections of Father Lecomte and Father Du Halde are best known. After these Jesuits' memoirs had lost their polemical value within the Church, they found a new lease of life with the Philosophes, who turned them against the whole ancien régime.\n\nChina's position in this Age of Enlightenment is well-known. Rather than chart it in greater detail, I should like to emphasise that for the French Philosophe, China was a perfectly abstract entity, an ideological construct, an intellectual artefact. Needless to say, almost none of them had ever visited China or had contemplated doing so. The Philosophes, and the Jesuits before them, knew nothing of the deeply rooted dissatisfaction of the Chinese people with foreign Manchu rule, of the rampant peasant unrest, the bureaucratic control of the economy, the atmosphere of intellectual rigidity, or the repression against dissidents. In their eyes, China was not so much idealised, but rather completely reprocessed, reconstructed so as to fit into French intellectual and political controversies.\n\nYes, China was an abstraction, and this was not considered a handicap. For China as reconstructed by the Philosophes was an essential prerequisite for the achievement of a genuine philosophical universality, for a universal and world-wide approach to human nature and human society. China enabled these Philosophes to break away from a Eurocentric view of world history, founded only on Greek and Roman cultures and on earlier Hebrew traditions. To include China in their views on modern progress, to appeal to China as much as to Greece and Rome, was a major intellectual and philosophical advance towards universality. Voltaire was most concerned with this generalising approach to world", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210978, "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": 40, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "15\n\nhistory. His famous essay, 'The Century of Louis the Fourteenth', concludes — and this was a logical step — not with an assessment of the state of French affairs, but with a chapter which had apparently nothing to do with France, a chapter entirely devoted to the Manchu Emperor Kangxi, whose reign almost exactly corresponds in China to the equally long years of Louis XIV in France. Long before UNESCO, Voltaire compiled under the misleading title Essai sur les Moeurs — an essay on human manners and ways\n\na long and detailed comparative history of the world as it was known to him, making a point of keeping a proper balance between the chapters dealing with Europe, the Arab civilisations, India and of course China.\n\nChina had enabled the French Philosophe to approach the problems of mankind at the highest possible level, and in most general terms. China had indeed been the occasion of a major intellectual advance, but probably at the expense of China itself. One should wonder whether the Westerner ever gave up this attitude, namely dealing with China as an abstraction, almost as Utopia. The French eighteenth-century intellectuals may well have a responsibility for this major incapacity of ours, even today, to face China as a more complex and more concrete reality, not an abstract construction.\n\n8\n\nFor French intellectuals, China was indeed a philosophical abstraction. But it was also a cultural fashion, almost a cultural gadget. Chinoiseries were very popular, through tapestries, lacquers and silks, porcelains and ceramics. Pagodas were built in many aristocratic gardens and parks. China was a popular theme for aquatint engravings. The success of the rococo style in architecture and decoration had a distinct Chinese flavour, the shady and gracefully vanishing colours and shapes of Watteau's landscapes displayed a remote but definite Chinese influence. China was everywhere, even on the stage with a play by Voltaire, L'Orphelin de la Chine. The monarchy itself had engaged in the Chinese fashions. The ageing Louis XIV celebrated the first New Year of the eighteenth century with refined, if fake, Chinese-style festivities. Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress and a declared supporter of Voltaire and Diderot, was keen to give the Chinese touch to her banquets, feasts and dances à la chinoise. This Chinese", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210979, "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": 41, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "affectation is a well-known chapter of our eighteenth-century cultural history, and it is also a political paradox. For those aristocrats and nobility who had been indulging in Chinese art and Chinese festivities were to meet their fate in 1789 and 1793. They were to be crushed by a major revolution to which China had contributed through the intellectual battles waged by the Philosophes against the monarchy. And this was no longer a dinner party à la chinoise.\n\nA major intellectual and cultural encounter had definitely taken place between China and France. But was it France alone? The addiction to chinoiseries was equally popular with the English nobility and gentry. German Philosophes were as keen as their fellow Frenchmen to achieve genuine universality through China. Such was the message of Leibniz's 'Chinese latest news' (Novissima Sinica), an essay advocating the dispatch to Europe of Chinese Confucian missionaries so as to balance the impact of Christian missionaries to China. Yes, China was then valued as a model for the whole of Europe, to quote the title of a suggestive essay by Louis Maverick.\n\nNevertheless, there is something definitely French in the magnitude, in the style, in the rhetoric of France's encounter with China. France was more deeply committed to China than any other European country in the eighteenth century, and this reflects the specifically acute crisis of French society and the French political regime at that time: a crisis in which French intellectuals were most actively involved. The attraction of China, eccentric and artificial as it was, was part of the French ideological upheaval which contributed so decisively to the French Revolution.\n\nThe concern for China was also very French in its claim to achieve theoretical universalism, to think and to reason for the whole of humankind in the grand Cartesian tradition. From fashionable chinoiseries to high-level intellectual achievements, such as those of Voltaire, Diderot and Gournay, the whole thing was conducted with a typical French sense of sensationalism; it was a well-staged intellectual play lasting for almost a century, with the whole cultural elite in the cast. Other peoples simply act; the French always like to perform, and to find a public for it.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210988, "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": 50, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "in much broader terms, a crisis about France itself and not only its intellectuals, it is an ideological dilemma about the validity of our privileged position in the world of today. And at both levels, China is still part of our intellectual horizon.\n\nHow should intellectuals stand in relation to politics? Should they be involved? The prevailing trend in today's France is almost total rejection of the intellectuel engagé figure, of the politically committed intellectual in the tradition of Voltaire and Hugo, of Emile Zola, Romain Rolland and Jean-Paul Sartre. Here China has certainly played an indirect yet influential role; for the simplistic excesses of the pro-Maoist rhetoric of yesterday and the bitter, almost overnight realisation that the Maoist mirage was just a mirage, greatly contributed to the discredit of the intellectuel engagé. Ironically enough, the same ex-radicals who are presently disavowing their Maoist past have not altogether given up their incorrigible tendency to look abroad for an ideal society. The New Philosophers have turned far away from China to a completely new direction, namely the United States and Reaganism. This is the New Libertarian Right, campaigning in France for economic deregulation and military solidarity with Washington.\n\nAnother critical question for present-day French intellectuals deals with their own position in society at large. With the present-day tendency towards elitist professionalisation of academics, doctors, architects and engineers, the ‘barefoot doctor' of the Maoist era appears more and more remote. But did the barefoot doctor just represent a Utopian dream, a Rousseauistic image? Interestingly enough, in many developing countries of Asia and Africa, people who probably never read a line of Mao Zedong in their lives commonly refer to ‘barefoot architects', more familiar with local building materials than with reinforced concrete, and more concerned with the needs of the ordinary people than with the tastes of high-ranking business executives in their luxury hotels.\n\nMore generally, the relevance of the Western model of development for most African, Asian, South American and also Pacific countries is vigorously debated today among French and other Western intellectuals, and this brings us back to China. How to balance heavily centralised technologies, \"white elephants' such as", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212701, "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": 10, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "'History can be well written only in a free country,' Voltaire once wrote in a letter to Frederick the Great in the early part of the 18th century. I am sure we all agree with these sentiments and objectives and we will attempt to continue to do what we are best at in order to achieve them.\n\nAnd what do we do from a practical point of view in order to achieve our objectives? There are four basic areas of activity; visits and expeditions to areas of historical interest, public lectures, the publication of the journal and increasing our library collection, and being a gentle pressure group and of assistance in improving Hong Kong's image when and where needed. I shall deal with each in turn and end with some facts and figures.\n\nI think it is safe to say that we have had one of the most active and interesting years in the history of the Society, and for that we need to thank the great efforts put in by the Programme Committee and particularly its chairman, Mr. Peter Leeds. When the organisation of this Society was put under the microscope of a management consultant a few years ago, one of its main recommendations was to form a number of committees each to look after an area of activity. Not all committees recommended really got off the ground in a very effective way but one of them that did was the Programme Committee. And over the last year the results are for all to see. I would like to inform you of those visits and expeditions and they are as follows:\n\nVisit\n\nHelena May / R.A.S. Quiz\n\nVisit to Fung Ping Shan Museum\n\nH.K. Park Aviary\n\nVisit to University Hall,\n\nBethany & Pok Fu Lam\n\nTea Ceremony\n\nFilms\n\n-\n\nHong Kong life\n\nTour to China\n\nArranger\n\nAnita Wilson & Rosemary Lee\n\nMichael Lau\n\nKen Searle (Rosemary Lee)\n\nPeter Leeds / Des Robinson\n\nMichael Lau\n\nElizabeth Sinn\n\nPeter & Rosemary Lee\n\nviii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 } ]