RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 24 30 Sir George Thomas Staunton, a member of the 1793-94 Macartney Embassy, whose translation of Ch'ing Law was the first published in Britain, had been at pains to emphasize this: Ta Tsing Leu Lee, Being the Fundamental Laws... of the Penal Code of China (London, Cadell and Davies, 1801), p. 185. For its application in practice see the cases translated with commentary in Derk Bodde and Clarence Morris, Law in Imperial China, Exemplified by 190 Ch'ing Dynasty Cases (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1967).21 Cited in Corinne K. Hoexter, From Canton to California, The Epic of Chinese Immigration (New York, Four Winds Press, 1976), p. 136. 11 Dr. William Lockhart of the London Missionary Society, writing in 1861, cites the case of the old scholar who so greatly assisted Dr. W.H. Medhurst with his translations and researches. See his The Medical Missionary in China (London, Hurst and Blackett. 2nd edition, 1861), pp. 21-22. "He was a living concordance of the entire range of Chinese literature. He could find any passage without hesitation, repeat page after page of most of the works, and could easily take up any citation which had been begun in his hearing, and finish it without hesitation. This is not an uncommon thing amongst the educated Chinese, but this man possessed the faculty in a remarkable degree". 23 Arthur Evans Moule, The Chinese People, A Handbook on China (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1941), p. 262. See also his New China and Old, Personal Recollections and Observations of Thirty Years (London, Seeley and Co., 1891), p. 271.24 Some of the literary material to be found in villages of the Hong Kong region is described in Dr. Patrick Hase's most useful paper. "Research Materials for Village Studies", Chapter 4 of Alan Birch, Y.C. Jao and Elizabeth Sinn (eds.) Research Materials for Hong Kong Studies (Hong Kong. Centre of Asian Studies. University of Hong Kong, 1984), pp. 31-46, especially between pp. 32-37. 25 — By great good fortune, some of their libraries have survived and are in safe keeping. One of them came from Hoi Pa Village, Tsuen Wan, and had belonged to the builder of the traditional village house there which is now a listed monument. He lived between 1865 and 1937, and after his return from Jamaica engaged in educational pursuits in a literary club and at the Luen Fong School in Hoi Pa Kwan Mun Hau. When what had survived of his library was presented to the Urban Services Department in 1982, it consisted of some 200 books of various kinds, as well as manuscript essays and poems, including some of the famed "eight-legged essays" written in preparation for the imperial examination; all providing valuable documentation for the educational, social and intellectual activities of their period. South China Morning Post, 26 May 1982. See also the Chinese press of that date. 16 What Francis C.M. Wei calls the operation of the principle of retributive justice" featured prominently in Chinese stories. See his The Spirit of Chinese Culture (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947), p. 151. See also Yao Chin-nung, "The Theme and Structure of the Yuan Drama", in Tien Hsia Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4 (November 1935), p. 392.27 The Tsuen Wan experience is echoed in the fine description of what it meant to be a village boy in late 19th century Kwangtung, contained in the memoirs of a successful Hawaiian Chinese, born in a village near Macau in 1865. In them, he describes what one might call the "extra-curricular" part of education. This included the telling of traditional stories by the family elders and by itinerant minstrels and story-tellers, and through the plays performed by visiting opera troupes, as well as in literary pastimes: Chung Kun Ai, My Seventy Nine Years in Hawaii (1879-1958) (Hong Kong, Cosmorama Pictorial Publisher, 1960), pp. 6, 26-29. 28 Francis C.M. Wei, The Spirit of Chinese Culture (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947) p. 149. 24 For the former, see the chapter "Symbol and Tradition" between pp. 50-75 of Ronald ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g 208 Michie, Alexander, The Englishman in China During the Victorian Era, As Illustrated in the Career of Sir Rutherford Alcock, Edinburgh, 1900 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen Publishing) Moges, Marquis de, Recollections of Baron Gros's Embassy to China and Japan in 1857-58, London: R Griffin, 1860 Morrison, G E, An Australian in China, London: Horace Cox, 1895 (Hong Kong Reprint Oxford University Press) Morse, Edward Sylvester, Glimpses of China and Chinese Homes, Boston: Little Brown, 1902 Morse, H B, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, London: Oxford University Press, 1925 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen Publishing) —, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, 1910 (Taipei reprint: Ch'eng-wen Publishing, 1978) Mossman, Samuel (editor of North China Herald), General Gordon's Private Diary of His Exploits in China Amplified, London: Sampson et al., 1885 Mote, Frederick Wade, China in the Age of Columbus, in Art in the Age of Exploration edited by Jay A Levenson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, 337-350 Moule, A C, Christians in China Before 1550, London and New York, 1930 + Moule, Arthur Evans, City, Hill and Plain, Stories of Missionary Work in Mid-China 1861-1916, Guilford: printed privately, 1917 Mullins, James of St Columban's Missionary Society, Cheerful China, 1925 Murphey, Rhoads, Shanghai, Key to Modern China, Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 1953 The Outsiders: the Western Experience in India and China, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976 Myrdal, Jan, Report from a Chinese Village, London: Heinemann, 1965 Nagel's Encyclopedia-Guide to China, Geneva: Nagel, Third Edition, 1973 Needham, Joseph, Chinese Astronomy and the Jesuit Mission: An Encounter of Cultures, London: The China Society, 1958 -, Science and Civilization in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960+ Neil, Desmond, Elegant Flowers, First Steps in China, London: J Murray, 1956 4 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1999 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x 205 philosophy and ethics among the Chinese", p.298. 2 A convenient modern summary of all Chinese religions, past and present, is provided by D. Howard Smith in his Chinese Religions (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968). Useful summaries are also contained in the relevant sections of Trevor Ling's A History of Religion: East and West; An Introduction and Interpretation (London, Macmillan, 1968). 3 Arthur H. Smith, The Uplift of China (London, Church Missionary Society, 1908 and revised new edition 1914). Both are used in this paragraph, pp.83-4 and 41 respectively. 4 Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1934), p.79. 5 Smith, op.cit., 1908, p.84. Professor Latourette adds one more element: "The average Chinese has long been and still is an animist, a Buddhist, a Confucianist and a Taoist with no sense of incongruity or inconsistency", he wrote, in the first edition of his survey The Chinese, Their History and Culture (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1934), Vol.II, p.125. 6 However, this "intertwining", as Smith called it, did not extend to the temples and monasteries of the three religions. As the 19th century English missionary cleric Archdeacon Moule observed, they were each characterized by a different atmosphere and possessed a different significance, which he summarized as follows: "Confucian and ancestral temples generally are for the commemoration and reverence and cultus of the great departed. Buddhist and Taoist temples and monasteries are open for the worship singly or in company of the people generally, addressed to images representing deities of living and present power". Ven. Arthur Evans Moule, The Chinese People, A Handbook on China (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1914), p.212. Rev. F.W.S. O'Neill, The Quest for God in China (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1925), p.33. 7 This was a truly enormous field of endeavour, as practically every woman in every household in China and its Dependencies would have recourse to Taoist magic in one form or another to ward off evil from the home. The propensity was so marked that it could extend to converts to Christianity who, used to pasting up protective words and phrases, could include “Emmanuel” and “Trust in God” above the doorways and windows where hitherto Taoist charms had ================================================================================