[ { "id": 215235, "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": 12, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "CONTENTS\n\nPRESIDENT'S REPORT\n\nFRIENDS OF THE HKBRAS (UK) REPORT\n\nHON. AUDITOR'S REPORT\n\nHON. LIBRARIAN'S REPORT\n\nARTICLES\n\npage\n\nxiv\n\nxxix\n\nxxxii\n\nxlii\n\nNorman Miners - Industrial Development in the Colonial Empire and the Imperial Economic Conference at Ottawa 1932...\n\n1\n\nGöran Aijmer - Earth God Wine and the Meeting of the Fluttering Butterflies: Local Customs of Early Spring in Late Imperial Central China...\n\n25\n\nKeith Stevens - The Popular Religion Gods of the Hainanese ...........\n\n43\n\nValery Garrett - Chinese Baby Carriers: A Hong Kong Tradition Now Gone\n\n95\n\nAnthony Hedley and Alfred Lin - The Lugard Tribute...............\n\n109\n\nCésar Guillén-Nuñez - The Façade of St. Paul's, Macao: A Retable-Façade?\n\nRobert Nield - Bhutan - Why Not?\n\n131\n\n189\n\nKo Tim-keung - A Review of Development of Cemeteries in Hong: 1841-1950........\n\n241\n\nLouis Ha and Dan Waters - Hong Kong's Lighthouses and the Men Who Manned Them\n\n281\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nKeith Stevens - A Tale of Sour Grapes: Messrs. Little and Mesny and the First Steamship Through the Yangzi Gorges\n\n321\n\nix", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215594, "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": 371, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "321\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nA TALE OF SOUR GRAPES: MESSRS. LITTLE AND MESNY AND\n\nTHE FIRST STEAMSHIP THROUGH THE YANGZI GORGES\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\nIn 1898 Archibald Little was the first man to take a steam-vessel up through the dangerous Yangzi Gorges amidst great acclaim. This was a red-rag to William Mesny who, in 1905 in his Shanghai periodical Mesny's Chinese Miscellany, furiously wrote that had he been listened to in 1875, a steamboat could have completed the journey up the Gorges within a year or so of that date.\n\nThe 3,200-mile long river, referred to by westerners as the Yangzi is known to the Chinese as Changjiang, Long River, or Da Jiang, the Great River. The foreigner name, Yangzi, is a misnomer from the Chinese reference to the first stretch from the Yellow Sea, approximately a day or so sail up from Shanghai to Yangzhou, hence Yang.\n\nThe River can be divided into four sections. The first stretch from the sea to Wuhan [Hankou and Wuchang], some 600 miles upstream, is navigable for blue water vessels during the summer and small draught steamers at all times of the year. It may come as a surprise to read of the emergency run in September of 1931 of the British aircraft carrier, H.M.S. Hermes to Hankou during major floods. The Chairman of the Nationalist Flood Relief Commission, T.V. Soong, requested the British C-in-C for assistance using RAF reconnaissance aircraft from H.M.S. Hermes to assist the Chinese in flood survey patrol work.\n\nThe second stretch upstream from Wuhan to Yichang is always navigable to small draught vessels and is a very boring run passing, as it does, through a flat plain with many dykes.\n\nThe third stretch from Yichang to Chongqing is fast flowing downstream through the narrow and dangerous succession of Gorges, so popular with foreign tourists. The great variations in water level", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215595, "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": 372, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "322\n\nracing through the Gorges make this section difficult and dangerous both at low and high water. Chongqing, the chief commercial port of western China and an important distribution centre, was opened to foreign trade by an Additional Article [1890] to the Chefoo Agreement of 1876. This stretch also includes the River down to Chongqing from its junction with the Min River at Yibin [Suifu].\n\nThe fourth and final stretch, the Upper Yangzi of 1,600 miles, is torrential almost from its source in Eastern Tibet far to the west, down to Yibin. It has several major tributaries.\n\nWe, however, are interested in the Gorges. They have long been regarded by Chinese junkmen and especially foreigners who had travelled through them as passengers on river junks, as one of the most difficult stretches of river navigation on earth, with a current in places running at 13 knots.\n\nOur story concerns two British expatriates in China who, as far as we know, never met as they were of different social circles. One is Archibald Little, a British Shanghai merchant, married to a British lady and William Mesny, a struggling entrepreneur also in Shanghai but married to a Chinese. Paul King wrote that 'One of the foreign tea-tasters who each year visited Kiukiang [Jiujiang] was Archibald Little, who was never very successful in business but found himself in Yichang in the uphill work of establishing as a fact that the rapids in the upper reaches of the Yangtze could be negotiated by steam craft. In my [King] time the Navy was represented in Yichang by H.M.S. Kinsha - the famous pioneer merchant steamer on the Upper Yangtze owned and operated by the late Archibald Little.'\n\nThe first steamer to ascend the upper waters of the Great River, the Yangzi, through the Gorges above Yichang and as far as Chongqing during the low water season in the month of March 1898 was the 9-ton steam launch, Leechuen [Li Chuan], the property of Mr. Archibald Little who travelled aboard the steamer with his wife.\n\nArchibald John Little was born in London in 1838, and arrived in China in 1859 where he remained, apart from short visits back to Britain, until 1907 when he returned there and died the following year. He was a merchant, traveller and writer and is as well known to some as the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215596, "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": 373, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "323\n\nhusband of Mrs. Archibald Little who was a traveller and writer in her own right and who in 1895 founded the Heavenly Foot Society for the suppression of the cruel practice of binding and spoiling the natural feet of Chinese girls.\n\nThe story now goes back thirteen years. In 1885 Little planned to set up a company to build a couple of steamers after his own design to sail up to Chongqing to open up the vast and fertile province of Sichuan. This led him first to spend six months in one of the ordinary boats of the river learning all he could about the rapids, swirls, currents, depth and other details of the upper waters of the river.\n\nHe went back to London where he soon formed a company, and an experimental steamer of five hundred tons burden was put on the stocks in Glasgow from designs drawn by Mr. J McGregor, the chairman of the company, conforming to the designs furnished by Archibald Little. The steamer was completed during the summer of 1887, and shipped in sections to Shanghai, where she was put together by one of the local ship-builders and launched towards the end of 1887.\n\nShe was christened the Kuling, and was about five hundred tons burden, one hundred and seventy-five feet long and twenty-eight broad. She was eight feet deep, perfectly flat-bottomed and drew only two feet four inches of water empty, a mere trifle over four feet with a full cargo, and was especially adapted for navigating rocky and dangerous rapids. The boilers and engines were amidships. She was driven by two sets of compound engines, with a stroke of five feet, and worked with a pressure of one hundred and sixty pounds of steam. She had two stern wheels and a balanced rudder astern of the wheels.\n\nThe Kuling reached Yichang at the end of February 1889 and all was ready for the passage through the Gorges, when Mr Gregory, the British consul, backed by the Chinese authorities, refused to allow the steamer to proceed, as no permit had been received from either the Zongli Yamen [Chinese Department of Foreign Affairs], or Sir John Walsham, the British Minister at Peking.\n\nThe rest of the story was so characteristic of Chinese procrastination and delay. To put it simply and bluntly, the British Minister refused to coerce the Chinese in any way, and so the Kuling was eventually sold and the scheme abandoned.\n\nThe matter of the Upper Yangzi navigation remained in abeyance until the Chinese defeat by the Japanese in the war of 1895 when the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215597, "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": 374, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "324\n\nJapanese were able to demand the formal opening of Chongqing to steamers, and a clause to this effect was embodied in the Treaty of Shiminoseki. By this treaty, under the favoured nation clause, the Chongqing and the Upper Yangzi became open to the world and Little immediately applied to the then British Minister, Sir Claude Macdonald [of the later Boxer Siege fame], who encouraged Little to proceed and promised energetic support. Little ordered a twin-screw steamer to be built in Shanghai, fifty-five feet long and ten feet beam. It steamed at nine knots, and though he would have preferred a larger and more powerful vessel he had to cut his coat according to his cloth. This was the Leechuen.\n\nHe left Yichang on 15th February 1898 for the 500-mile voyage through the Gorges, ascending some 500 feet during the journey to Chongqing. The story, told by Archibald Little in his Through the Yangtse Gorges,2 describes the most frightening moment when at dusk in the Scissors Gorge, making about six knots they bumped over a sharp rock that cut through the inch planking, broke two hardwood frames and sent water spouting up over the saloon floor. Fortunately they soon spotted a steep patch of sand on to which they ran the boat. Then, overnight, they stuffed cotton, white lead and tallow into the cracks; nailed blankets down with planks all over and by dawn had stopped the leak sufficiently to be able to get under way again. The rock had only newly fallen from the cliff above and had been unknown to the pilot. They reached Chongqing eleven days up from Yichang and the only photograph I have seen of the Leechuen during her epic journey is a very fuzzy snap of high cliffs with the Leechuen amidstream, a not so large speck, her billowing smoke being almost twice her size.3\n\nTwo British gunboats, H.M.S. Woodcock and H.M.S. Woodlark, made the same journey fifteen months later in May 1899, and then, in June, the first merchant steamer, Pioneer, followed them up to Chongqing.\n\nWe now turn to William Mesny. In 1878 and 1879 he travelled across south-west and central China calling on the most powerful and influential officials and gentry, advising them to adopt modern means for developing the riches of the country and bettering their conditions.* Mesny was a Jerseyman who spent most of his life, from first setting foot in China in 1861 until his death in Hankou in 1919 endeavouring to make his fortune. He was never backward in relating how he had the ears of many of the most influential Chinese of the day and although", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215598, "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": 375, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "بلد\n\n325\n\nthey listened to his plans to modernise China and how he could raise the capital to assist them succeed in doing so, they always went their own ways, often adapting his plans but - as he stressed - without his guiding hand they were never the success they could have been had he been permitted to supervise them.\n\nIn 1905 he described how back in 1879 he had travelled to Sichuan from Guiyang where he had been trying to persuade the Guizhou Provincial Governor, Chen Yuying, to develop the resources of the province by means of a railway from Guiyang to Yongxian in Guangxi province, connecting that city with Canton by a line of steamers on the Yun and West Rivers. He then spent over six months in Chongqing, again offering to supply funds and plans for building suitable steamers to navigate the upper waters of the Yangzi, through the Gorges as far as Chongqing and beyond to Yibin. He added that he was able to speak with authority on the navigation of the upper Yangzi by steamers, \"but no one would listen to me, and even intelligent foreigners, when consulted on the subject, declared I was a visionary and an imaginator of many impractical plans. Some ten days later in a subsequent issue of his Miscellany he wrote 'Whilst here in Shanghai in November 1875, I offered to superintend the construction of a suitable steam-boat for navigation on the upper Yangzi, as far up as Yibin and Chengdu, but the wise Britishers of those days declared that was an impossibility, because British naval officers had studied the subject and declared it to be impossible. I proved to be a good quarter of a century ahead of the progressive age.' Steam-boats now navigate the Upper Yangzi for all that, though they are not as useful as they might have been, had they been devised and constructed under the guidance of a mastermind!\n\n3\n\nPaul King : In the Chinese Customs Service: Heath and Cranton Ltd : London : 1924.\n\nArchibald John Little : Through the Yang-tse Gorges or Trade and Travel in Western China: Sampson Low, Marston & Co.: London : 1898 [Third and Revised Edition].\n\nFacing p. 288 of Little's book, Through the Yang-tse Gorges or Trade and Travel in Western China.\n\nWilliam Mesny: Mesny's Chinese Miscellany : Shanghai : 1st January\n\nPage 375\n\nPage 376", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "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": 216027, "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": 326, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "260\n\none of the ports of call on the routine and customary journey up the Yangzi. It was also within easy reach from Shanghai, no more than a night's sail, with the more adventurous and especially the sportsmen spending a short vacation there. The game varied from wild boar to pheasants and a typical excursion was described by Percival1 who, in April of 1887, was invited by Sir Roderick Runnimede to join him in a voyage up through the Yangzi gorges. Percival wrote that 'it was not a scientific excursion, there were no new countries to discover, no new people to trot out before the world, no new trade routes to open up; it was simply an excursion for health and pleasure combined. In a short time we arrived at the city of Chinkiang [Zhenjiang] itself, the place never having recovered its prosperity since it was burned by the [Taiping] Rebels about 1860. Not more than four or five years earlier [i.e. 1882-3] the shooting around Zhenjiang was all that could be desired; game (principally birds) of every description was most abundant. Sportsmen made Zhenjiang their headquarters. Feathers and fur - everything, in fact, between snipe and leopard - could be found within easy distance. Each year as cultivation advances, population increases, and villages, destroyed by the rebels are gradually being rebuilt, so game is being driven farther and farther into wilder and more remote regions∗. Percival went on to describe how one winter afternoon some years earlier he had joined W. De St. Croix, an old friend, stationed in Zhenjiang in the service of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, and using Zhenjiang as a base they had sailed in the Custom's cruiser up stream to shoot wild fowl. After several days shooting they returned and, on the following day, set off on ponies for the Wu-chow-shang [Wuzhou Shan] Hills, about ten miles south of Zhenjiang to round off the trip with three or four days among the boars and deer.\n\nFrom the early 1890s and for about six years local post offices existed in eleven of the treaty ports issuing their own stamps, one of which was Zhenjiang. A contemporary comment noted that just as many of the stamps were sold to tourists and collectors as were used postally.\n\nZhenjiang down the centuries\n\nZhenjiang has been a place of great importance for a great many centuries. In the beginning, no more than a crossing point for boatmen plying their ferries across the Yangzi, it was known in much earlier times first as Dantu and then as Runzhou. Local historians", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216257, "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-2003", "page_number": 16, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "Gillian Bickley, Ph.D., is an English writer, teacher, and speaker, who has lived in Hong Kong for over thirty years, teaching at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Baptist University. She taught previously at Universities in Nigeria and New Zealand, and has lectured throughout Britain, the USA and Asia (gbickley@hkbu.edu.hk).\n\nSidney C. H. Cheung, is Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include visual anthropology, heritage and tourism, indigenous people, food and identity. His published books include On the South China Track: Perspectives on Anthropological Research and Teaching (Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, 1998), Tourism, Anthropology, and China (White Lotus, 2001), and The Globalization of Chinese Food (Curzon Press and University of Hawaii Press, 2002) (sidneycheung@cuhk.edu.hk).\n\nEric N. Danielson, studied modern Chinese history under the guidance of Professor Kent Guy at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned his History B.A. in 1988. Later, in 1994 he earned his History M.A. from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He has previously published works on Kurdistan, Yugoslavia, and China. He was the co-author of The Yangzi River and the Three Gorges, sixth edition published by Odyssey Guidebooks of Hong Kong in August 2001. For the past six years he has lived in Shanghai, where he has worked as an education consultant and academic manager in China's rapidly growing private education industry (ShangConsultant@netscape.net).\n\nMichael Gillam, joined Dartmouth Naval College in 1945 at the age of 13 and continued his service in the Royal Navy specialising in Minewarfare and Diving. The first of his many visits to Hong Kong was in 1952 as a midshipman en route for the Korean War. Among his subsequent appointments was a year in Iran setting up a diving school in the Caspian Sea for the Imperial Iranian Navy and two and a half years in Singapore with responsibility for diving throughout the Far East Fleet. He returned to Singapore at the end of the 60's as Staff Operations Officer to the Inshore Flotilla that included responsibility for providing Coastal Minesweepers to act as the Hong Kong guard ship.\n\nxvi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]