[ { "id": 209498, "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-1982", "page_number": 155, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "133\n\nstrangled by three pieces of string or cord. Travers Humphreys asserts: 'The method is peculiarly Oriental, and indicated that she had been sitting on the ground when someone, with the string held in both hands, had suddenly drawn it tightly round her throat and knotted it behind'.42 Strangulation by this method — a ligature — is not, surely, 'peculiarly Oriental'? It was adopted, for example, by the murderer in the celebrated Yarmouth case of 1900, where the victim was strangled by a mohair bootlace.4 Another source of perplexity, to repeat, was language: people who do not speak your language are apt to be regarded as dense or odd. Miao often declared he had been misunderstood. Thus at first he believed his wife's body had been found by Miss Crossley, and he is alleged to have asked 'Did she go to the place where they bathe?' (indicating that he knew where she had been murdered). Later, Miao's counsel urged that what he really said was, 'Had she gone to look for his wife at the place where people take the bus'.\n\nThe three pieces of paper, with the cabbalistic or arcane questions on them, also worried Travers Humphreys. One of the statements made by Miao, he relates, 'to the Appeal Court was that he was in the habit of asking God which of two or more courses he should take, when he would put the alternatives on separate pieces of paper, would then pray for guidance and decide by drawing a lot. Does not that statement indicate a confusion of mind sufficient to account for almost any action?'44 But the art of divination — the drawing of lots — has a long history in China; so, too, has fortune-telling, once a normal custom when a marriage was projected between families. The mysterious I Ching has also been widely used by Chinese for centuries as a means of grasping the future. One should also refer to a widely-held belief in the efficacy of feng-shui, certainly in the 1920s. The rational Travers Humphreys, in the quotation given above, was suggesting, of course, that Miao was suffering from religious mania or acute superstition; but, if so, why should this provide a motive for the crime unless he believed his wife was the Antichrist?\n\nOn balance, it seems obvious that Miao's crime was a murder for profit. He had little money in his possession when he married; the planned two-months vacation appears to have been financed", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209505, "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-1982", "page_number": 162, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "140\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\n**Sax Rohmer, pseudonym of A.S. Ward (1886-1959). Rohmer's Chinese master-villain first appeared in Dr. Fu Manchu (1913), the start of a series of thrillers about Fu.\n\n27 His real name was Chang Wan but he was known as Brilliant Chang to police and public.\n\n**The Times for April 10 and 11, 1924. See also Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-end (London: Faber, 1941). One of Chang's clients was Brenda Dean Paul, a notorious upper-class drug-addict, daughter of Sir Aubrey Dean Paul, a former Lord Mayor of London.\n\n\"Some information about Miss Siu is given in the South China Morning Post on October 26, 1928. See also the Hongkong Telegraph for June 23, 1928.\n\n**Travers Humphreys, op. cit., p. 163.\n\n\"1 South China Morning Post, December 7, 1928.\n\nNecrophiliacs are rare but not unknown. The most famous was surely Sergent (Sergeant) Bertrand, whose activities are discussed in Marcel Montarron, Histoire des crimes sexuels (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1971) 113-13. Another extraordinary necrophiliac Henri Blot, 'Le vampire de Saint-Ouen'—is discussed in Daniel Riche, Histoires criminelles de Paris/Ile-de-France (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1980) 407-416.\n\n**The case is examined in Sir Travers Humphreys' A Book of Trials, op. cit. But see also Christmas Humphreys, Seven Murders (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1946); E. Spencer Shew, A Companion to Murder (London: Cassell, 1960); and C.E. Bechhofer-Roberts, Sir Travers Humphreys: His Career and Cases (London: John Lane, 1936).\n\n*Sir Travers Humphreys (1867-1956). Called to the Bar, 1889. He was a distinguished criminal lawyer before becoming a Judge of the King's Bench Division of the High Court, 1928-1951.\n\n*Joseph Cooksey Jackson K.C. (1879-1938) of the Northern Circuit. **Criminal Appeal Reports, vol. 21, 1930.\n\n**Travers Humphreys, op. cit, 162-163.\n\n06\n\n18 Ibid. 167.\n\n*Ibid, 168.\n\n40 J. Dyer Ball, Things Chinese; or, Notes Connected With China (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1925, fifth edition). Dyer Ball writes: \"The Chinese are not only remote from us as regards position on the globe, but they are our opposites in almost every action and thought\" (668).\n\n\"The late Victorians were much amused by Pidgin English. See Charles Godfrey Leland, Pidgin-English Sing-Song; or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect (London: Trubner, 1876).\n\n42 Op. cit., 164.\n\n\"Herbert John Bennett was accused of strangling his wife on Yarmouth Beach. The body was left in such a position as to suggest attempted rape. See Julian Symons, A Reasonable Doubt (London: Cresset Press, 1962).\n\n**Op. cit., 168.\n\n*A son and a daughter (Wai-sheung) were born to his primary wife. His other wives produced over ten children, two of whom were later returned students from the United States. See the South China Morning Post, June 25, 1928.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210819, "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": 170, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "153\n\nwondered how much of that soft musical quality was due to him and how much inherent in that unknown tongue.\n\nWilliam Hunter wrote two books on his China days, Bits of Old China published in 1855, and The Fan Kwai at Canton, in 1882. Both contain valuable and interesting information on the relationship between Chinese and foreign traders at Canton in the first half of the 19th century.\n\nW. C. Hunter was married twice. His first wife was of a Virginia family noted for its high-spirited and beautiful girls, or at least this is the impression drawn from remarks made by Lieutenant (later Rear-Admiral) G. H. Preble. Preble was a frequent guest of the Hunter family at Canton. One sister, Preble states, gained notoriety by eloping, which so devastated a former lover that he committed suicide. Another sister also eloped but with less tragic consequences.\n\nPreble in repeating this gossip said that Mrs. Hunter was “quite a different person” from her sisters, and though she had had five or six children by the time he had met her \"no one would have guessed it.\" After her death, her husband married an American woman in Paris in 1876.\n\nThe homesick American lieutenant enjoyed his visits in the Hunter home and wrote to his wife about them. In 1854 he mentioned the international gastronomic delicacies he enjoyed at one of their small dinner parties—shark's fin soup, and beche de mer stew, fresh pineapple, baked mango tarts and English Yarmouth bloaters.\n\nOn another evening he was much impressed with the new-fangled stereopticon kept in the Hunter's parlour for the amusement of their guests. He described it to his wife as \"a couple of daguerreotypes fitted or mounted with a stereoscope attachment so that seen through it only one image was shown, and every part stood out with the fulness of a statue, and the perfection of life petrified.\"\n\nDuring the 1840s and 1850s Hunter divided his time between", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 } ]