RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1981 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m CONTENTS PRESIDENT'S REPORT ... 1 HON. TREASURER'S REPORT 6 HON. LIBRARIAN'S REPORT. TRANSACTIONS: Folk Medicine in Borneo: Diagnosis and Cure-Stephen Morris 10 Another Look at Land and Lineage in the New Territories, c. 1900-Edgar Wickberg 25 ARTICLES: Religious Response to Modernization in Taiwan: the Case of I-kuan Tao-Hubert Seiwert 43 The Public Records Office of Hong Kong-A.I. Diamond 71 Hong Kong and China in the village World-David Faure 75 The Chinese Church, Labour and Elites and the Mui Tsai Question in the 1920's-Carl T. Smith 91 Residential Mobility and Kinship Ties among Urban Chinese Families in Hong Kong-Lee Ming-kwan 114 Education as a By-product of Fish Marketing-T.A. Acton 120 Juan Yuan's Management of Sino-British Relations in Canton, 1817-1826-Wei Peh-t'i 144 The Hong Kong Origins of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Address to Li Hung-chang-Alice Ng Lun Ngai-ha 168 REPRINT: Bro. Tsung Lai Shun in Massachusetts 179 NOTES AND QUERIES: The Yung Muk Tong Factories in Macau-David Faure 185 Letters from World War II-David Faure 187 Traditional Funerals-Patrick Hase 192 Notes on Rice Farming in Shatin-Patrick Hase 196 Funeral pots from an Ancestral Grave-David Faure 206 BOOK REVIEWS 207 MEMBERSHIP AS AT 31ST DECEMBER, 1981 211 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1981 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m FOLK MEDICINE IN BORNEO: DIAGNOSIS AND CURE STEPHEN MORRIS* Introduction Despite the rather grandiloquent title of this paper, its aim is less pretentious than it sounds; it is concerned with the ideas held by the Melanau people of Sarawak on illness and what to do about it. How far anything in the Melanau vocabulary corresponds with European notions of medicine, diagnosis or cure is in a sense incidental. The main purpose of the paper is to make clear the Melanau notions. The Melanau The Melanau are a people who live on the northwest coast of Borneo. They speak a language that is distantly related to Malay, and today there are about 50,000 of them. They live in a rather specialised environment on the banks of slow, meandering rivers that wind through dense and swampy tropical jungles and flow into the South China Sea. The swamp land is often a little below sea level, and when the raised banks are breached by floods (as happens quite often), the terrain becomes very difficult to cope with. It is also unhealthy — fevers, mosquitoes, snakes, crocodiles, bears, and all kinds of creatures are common and are not really on the side of human beings. The environment also imposes a number of limits on the economic and social life of the people who inhabit it; this is not the place or the time to discuss those limits, but a little does need to be said about the social system because it is so closely bound up in Melanau thought with their view of the environment and the beings who inhabit it. Correct relations with the environment and all other creatures in it are essential, the Melanau say, if men are to prosper and be healthy.2 A hundred years ago a Melanau village (usually separated from its neighbours by two or three miles along the river) consisted of one or * Dr. Morris spent many years studying the Melanau people of Sarawak, and has just retired from a Readership in Anthropology at the London School of Economics. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1985 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x KAU SAI, AN UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPT BARBARA E. WARD* 27 1. INTRODUCTION Every traveller to Hong Kong remembers the junks. They swarm in the harbour: fishermen, cargo boats, pilot craft, countless small passenger sampans, wooden lighters clustering around the ocean-going ships like suckling pigs around their dams, Chinese boats of every shape and size. The men and women aboard them are the Boat People. Traditionally they were born, married, died on their boats. They went ashore permanently only after death, for it is unchancy to be buried at sea. In the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong today they number about 250,000. Their counterparts (perhaps two or three million) are spread all along the Pearl River and its branches, throughout the intricate network of navigable inland waterways in Kwangtung and Kwangsi, and all along the Chinese coast southeast from Fukien. 2 3 Water dwelling is not unusual in China (or Japan, or, indeed, most of South East Asia) but the Boat People of Kwangtung and Kwangsi seem to have acquired a special notoriety from at least the Sung dynasty onwards. Known as Tanka, a name rightly resented by them as a term of derision and disrepute, they have been despised, placed at the bottom of local systems of social stratification, and often referred to as exemplars of loose sexual morality and other un-Chinese characteristics. They are still frequently explained away as being not really Chinese, or even not really human. I have heard well-educated landsmen expatiating upon their non-Han descent, their non-Chinese language, their utterly alien customs (which are often alleged to include matriliny), and the special biological distinction which gives them all six toes on each foot. * Barbara E. Ward passed away in 1982 before completing this manuscript, obviously an early draft for a full-length book. It is published here by kind permission of her husband, Dr. Stephen Morris, who has also supplied the plates. Miss Ward was, for many years, a member of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. ================================================================================