[
    {
        "id": 215305,
        "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": 82,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "30\n\nspring within the wider New Year duration.\" At Li Chun ritual acts signalled various agricultural tasks. The She festival was more timely in relation to actual agrarian operations starting up at this season, but rituals did not directly depict the cultivation of the earth.\n\nShamanistic activities were common at several ritual celebrations in the area under scrutiny here. A chronicler from Hanzhou Magistracy in Hanyang Prefecture says that the people along the Jiang and the Han18 love wu sorcerers and regard demons as important.19 Singing, dancing and drumming wu and xi contributed to the efficacy of the rituals in that they summoned the shen spirits. The mention here of both wu and xi is best understood as indicating that the shamanistic acts were performed by officiants recruited from both genders—but we cannot be sure. What kind of shen spirits were invited by their activities is, again, not clear. If in the singular, the word might refer to the She, if in the plural, it might have been spirits in general, or, perhaps, the spirits of the dead. We have seen above that sometimes the She was connoted with death and the dead. Invoking and inviting the dead—should that be the correct understanding—would then, no doubt, have had further agricultural connotations.20\n\nWhat speaks in favour of the former interpretation is a note deriving from Yiyang Magistracy (in Changsha Prefecture), but which actually refers to a practice of the third day of the third moon, a day called Shang Si E or 'Upper Si'. On this day there were splendid processions in the country villages by the She altars where people sacrificed to the du shen 'the earth spirit(s)'. Droning drums were prominent instruments in these processions. This was called qi nian—'to pray for the year'.21 A similar report, already mentioned and referring to the same day, is found in the records of Yingshan where it is said that people worshipped the She by jiao libations.\n\n17\n\nWe may note that there was another occasion for celebrating the\n\nAijmer 2002, Chapter. 15.\n\n18 Hanzhou is situated by the confluence of the River Yangzi (the Jiang) and the River Han.\n\n19 古今圖書集成. 1888. VI, 1130: 風俗考 1b\n\n20 古今圖書集成, 1888. VI, 1142: 風俗考 2a\n\n21 益陽縣志. 1874. 卷 24b.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
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    {
        "id": 216040,
        "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": 339,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "273\n\nsince sought his assistance to calm storms. In yet another legend Yan Gong is claimed to have saved the life of the first emperor of the Ming during a crossing of the Yangzi; and Werner, after relating a complicated story about the presence of a mythical creature being found, noted that Ming Hong Wu, having realized that he had been saved by a spirit called Yan, bestowed the title of Marshal of the Metropolis upon him and ordered a temple to be built in his honour.\n\nImages of Yan Gong have been only noted on altars in the area of Nanchang in Jiangxi, and in the southern maritime provinces of China including Taiwan and Hong Kong, but not within Chinese communities in South-east Asia.\n\nJiang Shen, literally the spirit of the river, is the generic title for a nameless deity on the Yangzi about whom little is known. She is said to have taken on human form and been bathing in the nude when she was stranded by the low tide. A fisherman caught and raped her, and died! The image of the deity seen in the temple near Wuhan on the Yangzi was that of a fish.\n\nJin Shan Si\n\nThe Song emperor Zhen Cong [998-1022] first gave the name of Longyou Dao, the Island of the Imperial Swim, to Jin Shan island after he had had a dream that he had been swimming in the Yangzi from it and then some ten years later gave permission to the monastery on the island to take the name Longyou Chan Si, which indicates that the temple was of the Buddhist Amitabha School of Meditation. It was restored to prominence and imperial patronage in about 1323 following several annual religious congresses.\n\nVisitors nowadays see a hillock, Jin Shan, Gold or Golden Hill, on which the temple stands with its tall octagonal pagoda with galleries marking each of the seven storeys outlined against the sky. This pagoda crowns the buildings and dominates the River and for a small gratuity permission to ascend the spiral staircase may be obtained. Today's pagoda, known as the Cishou Ta, was built in 1900, though according to historical texts there used to be two pagodas. These stood one at each end of the temple, and were first built during the Tang, though reconstructed several times down the centuries.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
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    },
    {
        "id": 216041,
        "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": 340,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "274\n\nThere also used to be an early Buddhist shrine dedicated to the former abbot of renown, Fa Hai, concealed in a cave on the hillock. In recent times the few foreign tourists visiting Zhenjiang have been perplexed by the description of Jin Shan being an island when it is so obviously part of the mainland. The reason is all too obvious. Alluvial silt left by the Yangzi floods down the past hundred and fifty years has not only completely joined the island to the mainland but also reclaimed part of the River, land now used for agriculture. 19th century western accounts of the town usually tended to begin with a description of the view from the Yangzi of the pagoda of the temple on the island of Jin Shan or, during the storming of the town by British forces in 1842, of troops being disembarked on the mainland across the strip of water at that time still separating Jin Shan from the mainland.\n\nAccording to Doré's description of the Jin Shan temple following his visit during the early days of the twentieth century, \"the visitor was confronted on entering with the Falstaffian figure of the Buddha Maitreya [Mile Fo], the Buddha of the Future, squatting in his turret as guardian of the precincts. Behind him opens out a vast vestibule at the sides of which are four gigantic statues - about fifteen feet in height - of the Four Heavenly Kings, Si Da Jingang, inner guardians of the monks and the monastery. Crossing the inner court, one entered the great Hall. On the altar were two Buddhist triads. Facing North are gigantic statues of Sakyamuni, Yao Shi Fo and Mile Fo, the Buddhas of the Present, Past and Future. Beside Sakyamuni in the centre, stand his two disciples, the old Kasyapa and the young Ananda. Right and left of the altar are the two guardians Li, the Pagoda-bearer and Wei Tuo. Facing South is the Triad San Da Shi: Guan Yin, Wen Shu and Pu Xian. Guan Yin rides over the waves on a sea monster; near by are the rocks of her sacred isle, Pu Tuo and, in between these, sundry immortals and Buddhas were housed. The Golden Boy, Shan Cai and the Naga Maiden, Long Nu are conventionally in attendance on Guan Yin whom the authorities in the temple recognise as formerly having been a god - not a goddess\".\n\nThe second large Hall was the Hall of the Yangzi Spirit, Jiang Shen [Spirit of the River]. Serving as a military barracks at the time of Doré's visit “it retained of its former glories only one ordinary-sized statue of the god, in a lateral niche, viz. a fish about three metres in length carved in wood with a copper plaque providing the honorific",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
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    },
    {
        "id": 216058,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 357,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "291\n\n+\n\nIn early December 1881 Hudson Taylor convened an informal missionary conference at Zhenjiang to discuss the crucial and imperative need to increase their numbers in order to accelerate the pace of converting China. This was an on-going problem raised and discussed by Protestant missionaries across China down the years. The staff and language students from the Missionary Language School at Anqing, another city on the Yangzi, were invited to attend the Zhenjiang conference as were missionaries of the American Episcopal Church.\n\nIn 1900 Mr Absolom Sydenstricker and his wife were both Presbyterian missionaries living in Zhenjiang, together with their daughter Pearl who was eight. During the first months of the Boxer troubles they refused to flee, then in July of that year when conditions had worsened they were compelled to escape to Shanghai, to return a year later. Life for a growing young woman was fairly circumscribed with the white population limited to the few in the consulates, other missionaries and a dozen or so men working with British and American companies. Pearl left in 1917 to marry Mr Buck, an American missionary and academic interested in China's rural economy, at Nan Suzhou in Anhui. Pearl's mother died in Zhenjiang several years later and was buried in what was then known as Zhenjiang's foreign cemetery. In 1920 Pearl's father sold their house and moved to Nanjing. Pearl Buck spent in all some forty-three years in China, and her writings brought Chinese social inter-relationships, especially those of the peasants, to western readers, possibly the first to achieve a world-wide circulation leading to many a westerner's first fascination about China. She wrote many a book and chaired many a public meeting telling people, mainly in the US, of the enduring spirit and resilience as well as the wretched lives lived by Chinese peasants and of the threat from Japanese Imperialism. Her best known works include The Good Earth, and a translation of the Shuihu Ji, 'All Men are Brothers', one of China's most popular pieces of literature. Her parents' family house in Zhenjiang, at the present day address of 6 Runzhou Shan Lu, is now one of the leading tourist attractions, for Americans in particular, despite being part of a semiconductor factory.\n\nIn May 1905 Hudson Taylor, freshly back from recuperation in Europe, stopped by Zhenjiang on his way to Changsha, where he visited the graves of Maria [his first wife who had died there in July 1870] and his children in the little cemetery among the hills. He, himself,",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]