RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1970 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241 THE BEGINNINGS OF TAIPINGSHAN 71 which the European had no place and was not really expected to penetrate. Two Europeans (Richard Oswald and F. J. Porter) did apparently have lots there though how they came by them is not recorded, and the American Baptist Mission Board had a school house and small chapel. A third area was Tai Ping Shan where many Chinese lived in matsheds, but it is not known how many lived there in these early days. But one inconvenient feature soon revealed itself as the demand for building land increased in the Colony on the establishment of regular government in the middle of 1843. The town was restricted in its possibilities of development to the east by the reservation of 'Government Hill' (the area on which the Government Offices now stand) for Government purposes only. Beyond Government Hill to the east lay the military cantonment and, since the main part of the town was now inevitably fixed where the present central district stands, the only possible direction which expansion could take, other, that is, than up the mountainside, was to the west. But, between Inland Lots 43 and 10 on the Queen's Road lay the Upper Bazaar, an uncomfortable fact which not only meant that there would be a large number of Chinese-type houses in the middle of the 'European' town (with their attendant rather greater risk of fire) but that their presence would interfere with the proper development of the area with drainage and streets and so on. In terms of extent, the Upper Bazaar was occupying almost 11 acres of valuable building land for which speculators would be willing to offer far higher Crown Rents than those which the then inhabitants were paying. So almost inevitably, the suggestion came to move the Upper Bazaar lot-holders away to another location. The story of the removal of the Upper Bazaar is of interest on several counts: it is the first 'resumption' of land for public purposes in the history of Hong Kong, a process since employed on an ever increasing scale by the Government for the improvement and redevelopment of the environment. It provides us with an insight into government practices of the day and the cumbersome manner in which decisions could be taken and implemented, and also of the role of the Press at that time. Finally, it led to the establishment, as a matter of deliberate Government policy, of a ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q 128 CARL T. SMITH later to Lilong, where he served under Brother Bellon in the boy's school. Because of his relation to the Rebel King, it was difficult on the mainland so he came to Hongkong until 1878, when he emigrated with those of Shaukiwan. 14 A search of the records of British Guiana might provide details of his later career. Lechler's Day Book under date 12 January, 1871, mentions a visit from Tsau-phoi, a member of the Fung family of Tsim Sha Tsui, and on 18 February, 1871, he notes that Fung A-lin from Tsim Sha Tsui returned to the Girl's School at Sai Ying Poon. It is probable that Fung Tsau-phoi and Fung A-lin were the son and daughter of "a former Rebel King", who is referred to in the records of the Girl's Boarding School of the Basel Mission at Sai Ying Poon. A report dated 10 July, 1866, lists as a student Lyu Tsya, aged eighteen years, "betrothed to a son of a former Rebel King, who long has put away the crown, baptized by the Berlin Missionary Hanspach in her home." Also listed is Fung A-lin, the small sister of the young man. She had been enrolled in 1865, aged seven years. Her mother was a widow and a Christian. Keeping in mind that the Hakka version of the surname Hung was written Fung, and that the entries in Lechler's Day Book were written in a very illegible script, it may be that Fung Tsau-phoi is the same as Hung Tsun Fooi mentioned in T’ai-p’ing t'ien-kuo shih-shih jih-chih Appendix, p.24, as present in Hong Kong after the fall of the Taiping government. Two relatives of Feng Yün-shan, a twenty-one year old nephew A-sou and his fourteen-year old cousin, accompanied the Rev. Issachar J. Roberts to Shanghai in 1853, in an attempt to reach Nanking. A-sou was baptized by Roberts at Shanghai. The Baptist Missionary Rev. Matthew T. Yates became acquainted with the two boys, but in his book The Tai Ping Rebellion, he mistakenly states that they were brothers of Feng Yün-shan. Fung A-sou found it impossible to reach Nanking, so he came down to Hong Kong. From here he went up to Canton where he became a teacher to an American missionary. But he became ill, and returned to Hong Kong where he died on the 21 August, 1855. These accounts of some of the events in the lives of friends and relatives of Taiping leaders and their association with the missionary ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1979 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938 28 REVS. J. SMITH AND WM. DOWNS PART I: JANUARY — NOVEMBER 1941 1: JANUARY Reports coming in from our South China missions indicate almost a "rush" on the part of the people to enroll in Doctrine courses leading to Baptism—we learn that Father Regan in Kweilin has baptized over a hundred in the past six months. Father Sandy Cairns, sojourning at Stanley during January, introduced deck tennis and badminton, to keep us in shape during the winter months—and overcame his hereditary inhibitions to the extent of paying for the equipment. Father Sandy is awaiting favourable winds, and a slackening of pirate activity, to take him back to his mission in Sancian Island after his relief work in Canton. Dr. Baker of the American Red Cross, spent an evening with us. He told of the arrival of several hundred tons of cracked wheat for the East River area. Since all the people of that area speak Hakka, he is hoping Bishop Ford will lend him two priests to act as inspectors to see that the wheat is properly distributed. FEBRUARY Father O'Melia has been invited to sit on the Government Board of Examiners, to pass on the Chinese qualifications of all Government servants who require a knowledge of Cantonese in their work. This is fine recognition of Father O'Melia's stature as a Chinese scholar. On the 13th, Dr. Wong-Man, Commissioner of Public Health for Kwangtung Province and Dean of Lingnam University Medical School in Canton, had dinner with us, gave us a talk on the Provincial Health Program, learned of the Maryknoll Fathers dispensary work in the Province, and promised to work out a plan of cooperation between the Government and Maryknoll. Bishop Paschang received a pass from the occupation forces to visit Hong Kong but his purpose for coming here was only to leapfrog to the unoccupied areas of his Diocese to visit the priests and Sisters. While he was here, Father Joe Sweeney arrived, describing the exciting trip he had just made: the motor launch carrying himself and other passengers was attacked by a Japanese patrol boat as evening was coming on, but escaped capture when darkness ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1980 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207 162 NOTES AND QUERIES American Baptist Foreign Mission Society and the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church in trust, to invest, reinvest, and keep invested for the upkeep of the rest home at "The Barrens." [the Geil property at Doylestown] The trustees are directed to sell any other real estate necessary for funds for the upkeep of the rest home and the inmates. MARYKNOLL IN CHINA Those readers who enjoyed reading the long extract from the unpublished history of the Maryknoll Mission which appeared in the last issue of the Journal may wish to know of three books which through the lives they record, provide more information on its work in China. The first, Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll, by Raymond Kerrison, published by Putnam's of New York in 1962, deals with one of the first six students to enroll in the Maryknoll Society in 1912, a newly founded order devoted to training foreign missionaries. From 1918 to 1936 he served in South China, returning to the United States to become superior-general of the Order for the next ten years. The second, entitled The Pagoda and the Cross, The Life of Bishop Ford of Maryknoll, is by a fellow Maryknoll priest, John F. Donovan, M.M., who served in China with Bishop Ford for ten years. Father Donovan, whose account of Bishop Ford was published by Scribner's, New York, in 1967, is also the author of the third book, a life of Father Bernard Meyer, M.M., under the title A Priest Named Horse (a reference to his Chinese surname of Ma) which was published for the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America in 1977. All three men were among the party of five priests who arrived in Yeung Kong, Kwangtung, at midnight one week before Christmas, 1918. They came to this area because, the year before, the French Roman Catholic bishop of Canton had agreed to cut off the southern portion of his vast South China vicariate and give it to the new, untried American missionary society. In 1921 this mission area was extended to take in a large section of north-east Kwangsi, with the city of Wuchow as a centre, and in 1925 to include half the former Swatow vicariate of the Paris Foreign Missionary Society. This was the body which had decided in 1917, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 111 Another Ip (Yip), a man of 60 who was a Lukong or Chinese policeman and owned two houses, said he was 10 years of age when the Colony was annexed and that "the village was the same when I was a boy as it is now. All the families mentioned in this paragraph were Cantonese. +20 As already stated above, it would seem that the inhabitants of the market towns were of mixed origin. The American Baptist missionary, Revd. Issacher J. Roberts of the Hong Kong Mission, reported from “Check Chu” on January 1st 1843 that the village contained "eight or ten hundred Chinese who are divided among the Canton, Kek [Hakka] and Teichau [Chiu Chow] dialects.”21 In an earlier report, undated save “1842", he gave a fuller account which, however, placed the population at a considerably lower figure: “Have gone around and counted families of Check Chu (note: present Stanley) three kinds of inhabitants 1) Punti, the dialect I learned 2) Hoklo [probably the Teichau dialect spoken of in 1843], dialect of Dean [another Baptist missionary] 3) the Hak-kah Check Chu including all the shops without families and hence not reckoned as citizens and some scattered families in the suburbs has: Punti, 63 families and shops at an average of 4 to each 252 Hoklo, 27 families and shops at an average of 4 to each 108 Hak-kah, 55 families and shops at an average of 4 to each 220 Total 145 families 580 persons Half or more of the 145 are shops leaving less than a hundred citizens families. Of the 580 perhaps 100 can read. The wom- ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 136 JAMES HAYES p. 78. There was a custom-made school building on the edge of Wong Nei Chung village which is shown on maps from Collinson's survey onwards. 13 By "town", Collinson means village. 14 The Last Year in China by a Field Officer actually employed in that Country (London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 2nd edition 1843) p. 75. 15 Cited from the Canton Press for January 1842 by G.R. Sayer op. cit., p. 121. For information on present day So Kon Po, see the Notes by Revd Carl T. Smith and myself in JHKBRAS, Vol. 23 (1983) p. 7-77. 16 Wright and Allom, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 17 and again at p. 33, "Bamboo Aqueduct at Hong Kong". For a fuller account see J.W. Hayes The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911, Land and Leadership in Town and Countryside. (Hamden, Conn., Anchor Books, 1977) pp. 25-32. E A copy of this letter from Mr. Chow Yat-kwong, JP, dated 30 March 1967, is now in the Public Records Office, Hong Kong, 19 This statement can be found in the manuscript volume Summary Report of the Squatters Commission 1891-1906 in the Public Records Office, Hong Kong, under the date of hearing 6 July 1893. By "100 years" is meant "from before anyone now alive can remember," as normally in local village usage. 20 21 Ibid, hearing of 26 January 1891 of claims at Wong Nei Chung. Report of the Hong Kong Mission, Vol. 23, June 1843, November 6, p. 157, in American Baptist Board of Foreign Missions Archives, Valley Forge, Pa., by courtesy of Revd Carl T. Smith. 22 American Baptist Mission Archives, folder of Revd I.J. Roberts, No. 1 — China, also by courtesy of Revd Smith. 23 Captain A.A.T. Cunynghame, quoted in Sayer, op. cit., p. 104. 24 Stanley and Aberdeen in 1841 would seem to have been very similar in size and composition to the New Territories Market Towns in 1898 and earlier. Thus, Sai Kung had 50 shops and 150 houses in 1898 with a population of 512 (cf. C. Fred Blake Ethnic Groups and Social Change in a Chinese Market Town. (Hawaii, 1981 p. 27-28), Tai Po New Market had 38 shops within eight years of its foundation (J.W. Hayes The Hong Kong Region, op. cit. p. 36 and n. 78), and Yuen Long Old Market had about 160 buildings of which at least 100 were shops (see unpublished Report 24 (Yuen Long Kau Hui) produced by Antiquities and Monuments Section, Hong Kong Government). 100 shops specifically noted as being from the Yuen Long Old Market donated to the restoration of the Tai Wong Temple there in 1837. At the Yuen Long Old Market many of the families working in the Market lived in the adjacent villages of Nam Pin Wai and Sai Pin Wai. As well as the 100 shops donating in 1837, 7 residents in the Market, 52 in Nam Pin Wai, and 22 in Sai Pin Wai donated, suggesting a total community of about 200 families, about half of which had shops. Tai O must have had more than 100 shops: 119 shops donated to the restoration of the Tin Hau temple there in 1838, 98 to the restoration of the Hung Shing temple there in 1841, and between 105 and 126 to the restoration of the Man Mo temple there in 1852 (in each case counting "workshops" and "ferries" as shops). 科大衛,陳總集,吳倫電位,合術 香港碑靠藥衚 MOMSKOM * (D. Faure, B. Luk, A. Ng The Historical Inscriptions of Hong Kong) (Hong Kong Urban Council 1986), pp. 86-90, 90-93, 95-97, 103-107, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1985 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x 154 WEI PEH TI teachers and preachers in China. Jane Hunter, in her research on women missionaries of that era, found that women who went to China under the auspices of one of the forty-one American women's missionary boards had come from humbler background than those heading for the settlement houses at home." Perhaps that was why Edith had joined the China Inland Mission founded by an Englishman instead of a local Baptist mission. Philadelphia, despite being the seat of the Continental Congress that renounced king and country in 1776, had retained the British mystique. Perhaps it was this snobbish preference for things British that led Edith to the China Inland Mission, which, by that time, had established a recruitment centre in the United States. Apparently both Edith and Louese had toyed with the idea of becoming missionaries while at school. In one of the letters, Edith asked Louese, “Do you remember your desire to be a missionary? Can't you spare one of these darlings (Louese's children) and consecrate one for Foreign Service?” J. Hudson Taylor, who had worked in China under the China Evangelization Society during the 1850s, had become concerned that Protestant missionaries were more interested in establishing hospitals and introducing educational and social changes than in spreading the Gospel. He organized the China Inland Mission in London and brought the first group of twenty-four men and women missionaries under its auspices to China in 1866. As the name indicates, work of this organization was to be concentrated in the interior provinces, away from the treaty ports. The centre of the mission was located at Shanghai, with stations in the capital of each province and sub-stations in various towns. Despite hostilities shown by the local populace during the last decades of the nineteenth century and ravages on the missionaries and Chinese Christians during the Boxer Rebellion, the work of the China Inland Mission continued. By the time Edith arrived at Taiho in March 1903, a sub-station of the Anhui Mission at Wuhu, work in the vicinity had already begun. In 1905, there were 828 missionaries working in China under the umbrella of the China Inland Mission." Taiho was a market town at the juncture of the Sha and the Ying Rivers in the northwestern corner of Anhui. Even the most ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1986 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063 159 of school age. In addition, two sons of a printer, who had come to Hongkong with the mission press, were available as students. These four formed the first class. They met in quarters rented by Legge for his family residence. There was little prospect of growth until more accommodation could be found. The London Missionary Society applied to the Hongkong Government for a free grant of land on which to build a school. Already grants for schools, chapels and hospitals had been made to the Morrison Education Society, the China Medical Missionary Society, the American Baptist Mission, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission, the Roman Catholic Society for the Propagation of Faith and the Church of England. Since these grants had been made, however, no further land was to be allocated until definite instructions regarding the future of Hongkong and its land policy were received from the Home Government. In spite of this, the mission applied for the hill east of Wanchai where presently stands Wah Yan College. In presenting their case, it was stated that of the several hundred students who had been educated by the school at Malacca, "some acted as interpreters to the courts of the several settlements, others are among the wealthiest native merchants." The petition mentioned somewhat apologetically that, “the location... was unfortunate as the native tongue of the Chinese there was Malay so their progress in Chinese was slow and they in turn were slowed down in mastering English.” These remarks may have been included because of the Governor's known unfavourable view of the school's achievement. In reply, the Governor not only rejected the request for a grant of land, but also expressed his view that the location of the school in Hongkong was unnecessary as the Morrison Education Society School was already in operation. He wrote: "Two institutions of the sort in a small place like Hongkong, where I conceive it to be extremely doubtful any respectable Chinese will ever voluntarily ...... ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1992 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x 145 and probably compelled them to increase the area of opium cultivation. Obviously the crop was being passed on through the Chinese officers at the Puppet's headquarters. I had found there that they used his office as if it were their own. This may have been another reason for the grip the Chinese had taken of this small state. When Allied government is re-established in Burma it is to be hoped that serious attention will be paid to the question of opium. On the barren slopes of Kokang it is one of the only crops which grow, and so the problem is chiefly economic, the finding of a substitute crop. I noticed that no opium was planted in the Lihsaw villages; they were all Christians, converted by the American Baptist Mission—a mission which does the same as Dr. Seagrave's very excellent work in Burma, and they had been taught to grow potatoes instead. But the Lihsaws are not numerous, there are limits to the demand for potatoes, and further alternatives will be required. Kokang was not self-supporting in rice. The normal flow of commerce is along the motor road from Kunlong to Hsenwi and Burma; that road was now cut by Japanese occupation, and Kokang had to depend on China for additional supplies. I believe the Puppet did his best to exchange part of his opium for rice, but not very successfully. Yunnan itself had inadequate supplies to feed the large forces of the C.E.F. for whom quantities of rice had to be imported from further afield. It was a difficult situation for the Puppet and one which put him the more under Chinese obligation. I got to know many of the headmen personally and well; with two exceptions, men recently appointed by the Puppet, they were hostile to him, and anxiously awaited the return of the Myosa, whose fair and just administration had left happy memories. I did not fathom the system of appointing circle and village headmen. The Myosa appeared to have the authority to make appointments, but I found in many places that the post was hereditary; many of the headmen too were of the Myosa's family. They often had managers, or Prime Ministers, who managed their affairs for them; and in at least some instances the function of manager to a circle headman was hereditary too. I returned from Sincheng to Lunghtang with a baffled feeling; the Bren gun teams were sent for training, but I felt they were the last the Chinese would allow to come, and the event was to prove my doubts justified. The despatch of further men was delayed on one pretext after ================================================================================