[
    {
        "id": 212467,
        "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-1991",
        "page_number": 21,
        "title": "RAS-1991",
        "content_text": "BUSINESS NETWORKS AND PATTERNS OF CANTONESE COMPRADORS AND MERCHANTS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY HONG KONG*\n\nPUI TAK LEE\n\nTo trace and account for the role of Cantonese in modern Chinese economic history is an interesting study topic. Actually, under what specific socio-economic and historical conditions did the Cantonese contribute to the formation of Chinese capitalism? Cantonese are outstanding in business not only in mainland China but also amongst overseas Chinese scattered around the world. The Cantonese were the earliest and largest group of Chinese to go to Southeast Asia. Moreover, in the 1850s, after the Taiping Rebellion, Chinese immigrated to Hong Kong or transited through Hong Kong to the west coast of North America and to Australia. This movement reached its peak in the 1880s. Overseas Chinese are always hardworking, hoping to save enough money to ensure them a good quality of life after they return to China. They usually accumulated capital and modern business know-how when they were in foreign countries and then returned to start their own business in China. An obvious example is the Australian Cantonese who started the first modern department store in Hong Kong, which marked a revolution in modern Chinese retailing business practice. Furthermore, the four biggest department stores in Shanghai were also opened by Cantonese, and all of them came from the Heung Shan (Zhongshan) prefecture, which is strategically located near Macau and Canton, the two centres of early European commerce in China. Simultaneously, in the mid-nineteenth century, Cantonese compradors from Zhongshan prefecture, namely Xu Run, Tang Tingshu, and Zheng Guanying, were pioneers in establishing modern Chinese businesses. This article will assess the mechanism of Cantonese immigration in the nineteenth century and also examine emigrant Cantonese business ethics.\n\nEmigration and Chinese Ethnic Groups\n\nEmigration from China gave rise to the concept of native place identity. Historically, Chinese have always distinguished their place of\n\n* The first annual lecture on local history, jointly organised by the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society & South China Research Circle, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, 10 December, 1994",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215610,
        "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": 387,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "337\n\nThe paper began as a collection of notes squirreled from all sorts of sources, and as other information arose it grew almost on its own. For example, when I was in New Zealand for some months teaching at the University of Canterbury in 2001, a postgraduate student popped a just-published newspaper article on my desk about a shipload of Chinese coffins that had foundered on its way to China in 1902. Maori villagers had buried some beached remains with due respect.\n\nThe house where I'd lived in Dunedin for ten years had been close to a big cemetery, but I'd lived there in ignorance of the fact that there were Chinese graves there. By 2001 I had met Les Wong, a Kiwi Chinese who has made it his business to restore those graves and other Chinese graves in cemeteries close to the old gold-mining centres of Central Otago. Dunedin's Dr James Ng, who came to Otago as a child from Guangdong Province, sent me in late 2001 a copy of an autobiographical article which vividly brought to life the familial links (and breaks in links between 1949 and 1979) between Chinese family members in New Zealand and their home villages in Guangdong. I have appreciated the encouragement of both Les and James.\n\nTeather, E.K. (2001). The case of the disorderly graves: contemporary deathscapes in Guangzhou, Journal of Social and Cultural Geography 2(2): 185-202.\n\nThis paper describes three agendas that are shaping contemporary deathscapes in Guangzhou: the modernist planning agenda, the market economy, and the Chinese Communist Party ideology and resistance to it. It develops the concept of deathscapes into deathspace, \"a symbolic system that represents a stage in the ongoing process of conflict and compromise involving the traditional and the modern, the personal and political, and the sacred and the secular'.\n\nPreparing for this research was quite a challenge and I can't imagine how I ever thought I'd find out what I wanted to know. An introduction from James Hayes led to my meeting Dr. May Bo Chan, from the Department of History at Zhongshan University. This department generously hosted my second week in Guangzhou and invited me to give a seminar. Existing links between Hong Kong Baptist University and Zhongshan University were invaluable.\n\nAn enormous stroke of luck was finding a superb and energetic",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    }
]