RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f 68 HEROLD J. WIENS people of tribal ancestry often have been registered as Han rather than as Miao, Yao or Yi.17 On the other hand, from the viewpoint of livelihood of traditional type, the mountain dwellers' habitat has been shrinking with time. Since the shifting fire-field mountain farmer requires a forest of some sort to burn to provide the necessary ashes to fertilize the sterile and thin soils of mountain slopes, the destruction of forests on an increasing scale necessarily shrinks the space for his cycle of operation. As Han Chinese population has increased, it has moved deeper and deeper into the mountain ravines, forcing the non-Han mountaineer into lesser space. This would tend to accelerate the re-use of land in shifting cultivation abandoned during an earlier part of the cycle and leaves less time for new forests to regrow. Ultimately, mature trees for restocking the mountains become depleted so that only coarse grass, ferns and shrubs cover the slopes. Today, some ninety to ninety-five per cent of south China hill lands are denuded of forests and are unsuitable for the mountain farmers' type of shifting cultivation. The basis for support of tribal peoples such as the Miao and Yao would have decreased with time, and so, presumably, has affected the size of their populations. This restriction of their habitat no doubt has had its influence in causing the Miao and Yao as well as other mountain peoples of south China to cross the southern frontiers into adjoining countries of Southeast Asia where forests are still abundant in the mountains. Table I lists the populations of the fifty ethnic groups listed by the 1953 census on mainland China as reported by Fang Jen.18 These groups together with later revisions have been analyzed by S. I. Bruk, a Soviet ethnographer, in a short monograph accompanying a two-sheet map of ethnographic groups in China on a scale of 1:5,000,000. The following account is largely based upon this map and accompanying monograph. 17 Kuei-yang Chung-yang Jih-pao, Hsin Kuei-chou kai-k'uang (The development of new Kuei-chou), Kuei-yang, 1944, 280. 18 Fang Jen, Wo-kuo shao-su-min-tsu ti jen-k'ou yü fen-pu (The populations and distribution of our national minorities), Ti-li chih-shih (Geographical Knowledge), Vol. 9, No. 6, (July, 1958), 258-259. 19 Solomon I. Bruk, Naseleniye Kitaya, MNR i Korei (Peoples of China, Mongolian People's Republic and Korea) Moscow, 1959, (as translated by the United States Joint Publications Research Service, No. 3710, 16 August, 1960, Washington, D.C.). ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1963 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v 106 J. W. HAYES 30 The Tung Kwun association note book says that there was a Po On Wui Sor ★ ★ ƒ in the Ch'ing dynasty, but since this had always led to confusion their association (the Po On Shuc Shat) was renamed the Tung Kwun Wui Sor in the 12th year of the Chinese Republic (1923). 31 A tablet (1953) in the Free School says that this institution dates back to 1921 and local leaders say that the kung sor was rebuilt at this time. The old kung sor was also known as the hon kaam lau ★ ★# or watchmen's building. ** On the other hand it is unlikely that it predates the defence bureau (1863-70) as this would have been a suitable subject for the Kaifong to organise (there is no mention of it on the tablet). 33 Mr. LEUNG Yau recalls that there were two Kaifong junks operating a daily service between Cheung Chau and Hong Kong before the lease (1898). One left Hong Kong (Sai Ying Pun) at 11 a.m., whilst the other left Cheung Chau at the same time. Both were sailing junks and took three hours to make the journey under good conditions and the whole day if otherwise. They were subscribed and run by a number of local gentlemen for public use. A steam Kaifong vessel was bought with public subscriptions in 1910. Administrative Reports, District Officer, New Territories, 1910. & 34 There are now eight district associations on the island for natives of the districts of Po On; Tung Kwun; Wai-Chiu combined ✰✰ *#; Sei Yap ("The Four Towns') i.e. Toi Shan 4, Sun Wui. Hoi Ping, Yan Ping; Ng Yap ♣ (“The Five Towns") i.e. Hok Shan plus the towns of Sei Yap, Shun Tak: Chung Shan ✈ and Chiu Chau (separate), the four last named formed since 1945, all offering a variety of social, educational and charitable services to members. 35 HSIAO, in his interesting and lengthy study of rural China in the 19th Century, does not deal specifically with the internal organisation of the market towns. The market town of Tai O at the south west end of Lantau island (land population 2248 in 1911) would provide an interesting local comparison, though material is not so readily available as for Cheung Chau. I hope to write a similar outline account at a later date. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1964 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r 58 K. M. A. BARNETT from the point of view of my present subject, the event which ushered in the new age is the capture of Canton in +878 by the Huang Chao146 rebels. Between this event and the re-incorporation of Canton's territory into China in +971, by which time the earliest Chinese had already a firm grip on what is now Hong Kong, the Liu76 family gave five emperors to the Nan Han99 Dynasty at Canton. This family was allied by marriage with the Cheng163 and Tuen families which successively at this period ruled the powerful kingdom of Nan Chao;100 with the Ma89 family which ruled the kingdom of Tsu1 and no doubt, if the evidence could be pieced together, with many other peoples. For we are told that the emperor Liu Chang78 had a Persian princess in his harem, and among the many Arab travellers who visited Canton there must be some who left a description of these flamboyant half-Chinese rulers, with their eighty or more palaces, the walls of which were encrusted with pearls, their bloodthirsty exuberance and, what shines even through the disapproving accounts of the Chinese historians, their courage and administrative skill. The name Po On3 revived by the Republic of China as the name for the district of which geographically, Hong Kong is a part, was adopted by the Canton rulers in obvious reference to the pearls for which this district was at that period famous. The statement in the San On Yuen Chi123 that the name comes from the hill called Po Shan north of Nam Tau8 city is the "cart before the horse". The pearls were fished in great numbers somewhere near Tolo Channel, probably in Double Haven where the name Chue Tong Wat162 survives as a bay on Kar O Island." They were then transported overland along the route marked by a chain of forts over the pass northeast of Tai Po Tau34 village, through Kau Lung Hang, over the present golf course and skirting the Pat Heung2 marshes to the present Ping Shan, and across the creek to the fort of Tuen Mun4 which I mentioned earlier in this paper. The route, I would have you observe, almost at every point passes one of the chief settlements of the Tang44 clan who are, I believe, together with all the old Cantonese-speaking clans of this territory, the descendants of the soldiers stationed here in the Nan Han Dynasty and its successors for the express purpose of guarding these precious pearls. They were as I have said encouraged, when too old to serve with their arms, to settle down ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1966 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811 BOOK REVIEWS 151 The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution is a worthy companion to the earlier volume by Marion J. Levy, The Family Revolution in Modern China, Cambridge, Mass., 1949. Levy analyzed the traditional Chinese family as a status-role system, and noted the disruptive tensions and the controls which had maintained the system until modern times. He related changes that were occurring in urban areas to the anti-traditionalist movements of the first three decades of this century, and to the weakening of the traditional controls. Yang gives a brief description of the traditional family, and discusses in detail the movements for change beginning with Kang Yu-wei in 1898 and continuing up to the end of Nationalist rule in 1949. The Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China promulgated in 1950 is contained in an appendix. The author discusses the theoretical origins of the law, and the implications of its implementation are traced through discussions of marriage, widow remarriage, divorce, and inheritance. He goes on to discuss the interrelationships of changes in the family, changes in the economy, secularization, clan disorganization, and the promotion of the state as the new focus of the individual's loyalty. The second study, A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition, is based upon field work (1948 to 1951) by Yang and his students in Nanching, a suburban village near Canton. Information on developments after 1951 came from articles in the China and Hong Kong press. Yang had to leave his field records in China, and the village study was written from memory in 1952. The author carefully distinguishes what could be recalled exactly, what data are approximations, and what press information from other areas of China is used as a basis for conjecture on later developments in Nanching. The study is divided into three parts. Part I describes the village during the pre-Communist period, with particular attention given to the family, the economy, and the decentralized village power structure. Part II describes the early impact of Communist rule, through the land reform program, on the economy, on the family, and in the formation of a new power structure in the village. Part III is based upon press reports of collectivization in various parts of China, with conjecture as to the further changes which probably occurred in Nanching after the author's departure. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1967 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g 54 L. G. AUMER from piracy there. The mountains offered more security and this group established themselves in the remote Grass Field Village. In fact, this spot in the valley was then already occupied by people bearing the surname Ng. What form the contact between these original settlers and the intruders took is not clear, but evidently, as time passed by, the Ng were pushed off, and resettled themselves on an island in the Rocky Harbour area.11 The first Lau group in Grass Field Village seems to have constituted an extended family — one particular man is referred to as the founder of the village. He was of the 15th generation.12 The founder had two sons, one of whom moved out of the place and settled at Clear Water Bay. The progeny of the remaining son ramified in several offshoots. The village now consists of four hamlets inhabited by distinct lines of descent. Two branches have moved away to other areas; to Three Fathoms Cove in a northerly direction, and to the Yuen Long area in another part of the New Territories. The Grass Field people, then, constitute a localized major lineage. As such they form part of a kin unit of a higher order, for which I would propose the designation 'clan'. In fact, a Grass Field villager is not usually able to establish his proper kinship relations with other villagers, at least not with those who are members of other main segments. In order to do this, he has to consult a kinsman with special knowledge or a genealogy book, which used to be kept in most villages. By these means he has a theoretical possibility to trace his actual relations through the genealogical links in the patrilineal line of descent. This will motivate the use of the term 'lineage'. The greater kin unit will, besides the Grass Field people, comprise the segments that resettled in other areas as well as the people living in the village of origin in Sai Kung, and the relatives, in all respects distant, in Mui Yuen in Kwangtung. Theoretically, other Lau descent lines, unknown to Grass Field people, would be included. Before the Japanese Occupation fairly regular demonstration of kinship bonds took place when people from the Three Fathoms Cove and Clear Water Bay branches returned to Grass Field for common ancestor worship. There were, too, frequent contacts with the village of origin in China before the establishment of the People's Republic; delegates took part in ancestor worship ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1967 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g 102 JAMES HAYES 2 This figure is given in the table at p. 145 in Sessional Papers, i.e. Papers laid before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, for 1906 (Hong Kong, Noronha & Co., Government Printers) included in "New Territories: Land Court, Report on Work from 1900 to 1905". The figure is for all private lots demarcated, and includes house lots as well as agricultural land. 3 Colony Census of 1911 in Sessional Papers 1911, pp. 103 (22, 26 and 37-38). 4 See Extracts from a Report by Mr. Stewart Lockhart on the Extension of the Colony of Hong Kong in The Hong Kong Government Gazette, 8 April 1899 at p. 541. Also Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JHKBRAS), Vol. 3 (1963), pp. 144-145 and Vol. 4 (1964), pp. 146-150. 5 This information is based on my own extensive enquiries in the Hong Kong region. They corroborate the usual accounts given in many books, among them E. T. Williams, China Yesterday and Today (London etc., Harrap & Co., 1923) pp. 118-136, Chapter VI, "The Village Republic" and E. T. C. Werner, China of the Chinese (London, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1920), pp. 161-165, "Local Government”. 6 See p. 12 and notes 15-17 of my "The Settlement and Development of a Multiple-Clan Village" (Shek Pik on Lantau Island) in Aspects of Social Organisation in the New Territories (Hong Kong, Hong Kong Branch of Royal Asiatic Society, n.d. but 1965), 7 See also my note "Village Credit at Shek Pik, 1879-1895" in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch, Royal Asiatic Society, No. 5 (1965), pp. 119-122, for interest rates of 50% of principal per annum, simple interest, from a money loaning Tong in the same area. This Tong's varied means of doing business are paralleled in the surviving papers showing Cheung Kwong-chuen's agreements with local farmers, * See Ping-ti Ho, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China, Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368-1911 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 33-38, "It would not be an exaggeration to say that in Ch'ing times practically anybody who could afford a little over 100 taels could obtain the chien-sheng title and the right to wear the scholar's gown and cap", p. 34. * For more details of the area see my article "A Mixed Community of Cantonese and Hakka on Lantau Island" in Aspects of Social Organisation in the New Territories, cited at note 6 above. 10 His name heads the list of twenty-six persons who presented a commemorative red and gilt board on the occasion of the last major repair to the Tin Hau temple at Ham Tin, Pui O dated the equivalent of 15 January 13 February 1915. 11 For a brief account of this village see the article referred to in note 6 above. 12 The Census of 1911 lists 5,694 Cantonese and only 944 Hakka out of an estimated land population of 6,710. See Sessional Papers 1911, p. 103 (22). I have my suspicions about the Hakka figure but have not yet counter-checked by other means. For alleged Cantonese domination see inter alia K. M. A. Barnett, "The Peoples of the New Territories" in J. M. Braga (ed) The Hong Kong Business Symposium (Hong Kong, South China Morning Post, 1957), pp. 261-265, and G. N. Orme's "Report on the New Territories 1899-1912" in Sessional Papers 1912, p. 44 where he says that the imposition of British rule led to the freeing of the neighbours of ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1967 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g NOTES AND QUERIES 169 NOTES I am most grateful to Mr. Yuen Chun-fang, Liaison Officer, Secretariat for Chinese Affairs for help with the interviews which yielded part of the information given above. 1 Reports on the Past and Present State of Her Majesty's Colonial Possessions, 1845 (London, W. Clowes & Sons, for H.M.S.O., 1846) p. 147 and the same for 1846, p. 230. 2 G. R. Sayer, Hong Kong, Birth Adolescence and Coming of Age (Oxford, University Press, 1937) p. 208, quoting from the Canton Press, February 1842. 3 Sayer, p. 91. 4 Sayer, p. 30. 5 A. R. Johnston (H.M. Deputy Superintendent of Trade) "Note on the Island of Hong Kong" first published in the London Geographical Journal Vol. XIV, and reprinted in the Hong Kong Almanack and Directory for 1846. 6 Hong Kong Government Gazette for 28 March 1857 p. 4, Table No. 4. 7 The Last Year in China......by a Field Officer actually employed in that Country. 2nd edition (London, Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1843) p. 75. 8 K. S. MacKenzie, Narrative of the Second Campaign in China (London, R. Bentley, 1842) p. 160. 9 See Hong Kong Administrative Reports for 1934, 1935 and 1936 at pp. Q.86, Q.84 and Q.81 respectively. 10 This information, like any other for which no specific source is quoted, comes from Mr. CHOW Chik-san of Kau Wai, aged 77 and Madam CHAN CHOW Ping of San Wai, aged 81. 11 Rev. W. Lobscheidt, A Few Notices on the Extent of Chinese Education and the Government Schools of Hong Kong (Hong Kong, China Mail office, 1859). 12 See Summary of Report of Squatters Commission 1891-1906, pp. 97-103. This volume of MSS. is kept in the Library, Colonial Secretariat, Hong Kong. 13 For accounts of Cantonese and Hakka see J. Dyer Ball, Things Chinese (Hong Kong etc., Kelly and Walsh Ltd., 4th edition, 1903) pp. 202, 211 and 323-326. 14 LO Hsiang-lin and others, Hong Kong and its External Communications before 1842 (Hong Kong, Institute of Chinese Culture, 1963) pp. 80-88. This is the English translation of the text, but not the notes, of their work published in Hong Kong in 1959. 15 This information is taken from the accounts given at p. 5 of Prof. Woo Sing-lim's The Prominent Chinese in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, The Five Continents Book Co., 26th year of the Chinese Republic, 1937) published in Chinese and English and at pp. 578-579, under the name CHOW Cheong-ling, of Present Day Impressions of the Far East and Prominent and Progressive Chinese at Home and Abroad, published in London, Shanghai etc. by The Globe Encyclopedia Company, 1917. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1967 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g 178 BOOK REVIEWS meaning in Chinese because they are Chinese transliterations of foreign names of musical tunes. This book helps to dispel this illusory legend. Chinese have not been impervious to foreign culture but have been inclined to digest and modify it to suit their own needs. Buddhism was at first studied under the aegis of Taoism; but when Buddhism was domesticated, then it started not only to influence Taoism but even Confucianism. Chinese culture is not so monolithic and static as many think or wish it to be. Another significant point is that the Chinese know how and what to introduce, adopt and develop. Both Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism were introduced. But Mahayana had a greater appeal to the Chinese mentality and the Chinese developed the Mahayana, almost to the exclusion of Hinayana. Hence Mahayana has been best and most brilliantly developed in China, of all the Buddhistic countries. Tantrayana was introduced but it never flourished and, being frowned upon, soon died out. We can say that the Chinese developed Buddhism along the philosophical and intellectual line and kept to its 'sound and pristine health' without aberrations. Of course, there are ignorant, superstitious believers, and unscrupulous, crafty superstition-mongers who exploit the stupid and credulous, but they are not true Buddhists and even they never degenerate into Sivaism. China in this discussion refers, of course, to China Proper. Our author, using China to mean the Chinese Empire (and later, Republic), includes an account of Buddhism in Tibet and Mongolia where Tantrism and even Sivaism flourished and Mahayana was non-existent. The book is specially recommended to all cultured readers who wish to get acquainted with a fascinating subject and the interesting and instructive cultural and historical phenomena of an extensive area over a period of 2000 years. TSUNG-HAN YANG ANNUAL CUSTOMS AND FESTIVALS IN PEKING as recorded in the Yen-ching Sui-shih-chi, by TUN LI-CHEN, translated and annotated by Derk Bodde (Professor of Chinese, University of Pennsylvania). Second Edition (revised) of the first edition published by Henri Vetch, Peiping 1936. Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong 1965, pp. xxviii, 147, HK$35. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1967 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g BOOK REVIEWS 179 The reprint, in so attractive an edition, of Derk Bodde's translation of the Annual Customs and Festivals of Peking by Tun Li-ch'en is most welcome. In setting himself the task of compiling information on the day to day life of the capital the Manchu author must have had a premonition of change, and that much that he recorded would be forgotten. The disastrous war with Japan in 1894 had laid bare China's shortcomings, and the efforts of K'ang Yu-wei to reform the structure of the Empire by modernisation had been thwarted by the old Empress Dowager. The country was seething with discontent at foreign encroachment, and the Boxer movement threatened to provoke the "carving of the melon" by the European powers and the loss of independence. The decay of the dynasty was accompanied by the disintegration of temples and architectural monuments for want of funds for maintenance, a process much accelerated by the advent of the Republic in 1912. Within a few years only the renting of the famous monasteries in the Western Hills as week-end residences by foreigners saved them from ruin, whilst many centres of pilgrimage mentioned by the author have since completely disappeared. Though the archaeologist may throw light on a vanished civilisation by the study of inscriptions and works of art, he cannot reveal its day to day life in the way that Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims depict mediaeval English society. Tun's record has a similar value since, though it is just over sixty years, or a 'Cycle of Cathay', since he recorded the highlights of each lunar month, there would be little he would recognise were he to revisit the scene of his life's activities. In the original preface to Tun's book, written by his friend and fellow student Jun-fang Shu-t'ien, his wide interest in, and knowledge of, ancient customs is cited in commendation of the work, and the reader will be struck by the thoroughness with which the subject is treated. Beginning with New Year's eve the author describes the ceremonies for celebrating the coming season, and all the festivities appropriate to the Holiday Moon. The great temples, within and in the vicinity of the capital, are described as the annual festival of their patron saint comes round, and the appropriate dishes for the feast are invariably given. Even the belief that the consumption of candied crab apples is a prophylactic for coal-gas poisoning is recorded. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1968 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d 138 NOTES AND QUERIES said to have been of the Buddhist faith and to have lived in China in the early part of the eighth century; or to one of their patriarch-successors. These sects share a common ideology, have the same goals, and some have a similar system of rank and appointments, even possessing the same rank-names and terms of address. Some of these sects are, like Hsien-t'ien Tao, vegetarian, that is to say they demand a permanent vegetarian diet (and also sexual abstinence) from their rank-holders; and some, generally speaking the more recent off-shoots, are non-vegetarian. It is only the vegetarian sects which are organized through vegetarian halls. Some of the other sects operating in Hong Kong today and recognised by Hsien-t'ien Tao to be related to it are P'u-tu Men: "The Salvation Sect" and Kuei-ken Men: "The Sect of Reverting to the Root [of Things]," which are both vegetarian; and T'ung-shan She: “The Fellowship of Goodness", which is non-vegetarian and was particularly active in the period leading up to the founding of the Chinese Republic and immediately afterwards. The ideology of these sects is known by Hsien-t'ien Tao rather confusingly as Hsien-t'ien Ta-tao: "The Great Way of Former Heaven". It is syncretic, incorporating elements from a number of sources but most importantly from Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism, and from Taoism, and the Yin-Yang cosmology which received general acceptance by the Chinese in traditional times. In combining all these elements however Great Way ideology, as we will refer to it here, produces an original synthesis: a system of ideas distinct from any other. The religion divides time into three major epochs, or cyclical periods, during each of which it is supposed that Absolute Truth comes into the world, is taught by a major Buddha and other distinguished sages, and then, unless men have made efforts to prevent it, becomes distorted and finally disappears. The disappearance of Truth from the world is followed by a major catastrophe (there might also be minor, localised disasters during each period due to minor Truth distortions). All sects in the group believe we have already passed through the first of these periods which was followed by a great flood; some believe we are in the second period now (dominated by Sakyamuni Buddha) which will be followed by a great fire unless we act to prevent it; and a few believe we are actually in the third period which will be followed by a wind catastrophe (interpreted by the sect Kuei-ken Men as an atomic war). It is in this final period that the ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1968 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d 144 NOTES AND QUERIES held the third highest of six ranks which may be taken by members of the sect (the two highest are reserved for men only). This rank is known as Yin-ên (314) “Conducting (or Guiding) Grace" and entitles the holder to the middle name of Ch'ang (g). For a full list of ranks in various of the sects see "The Great Way of Former Heaven......" by Marjorie Topley, cited below. This lady's father, said to have been an ordinary tenant farmer, and a native of Fa Yuan district, Kwangtung, had held the Chêng-ên rank in the sect, one below his daughter's. He died in the second year of the Republic (1913-14) and the daughter, his only child, followed him into the religion. Photographs of both these persons can be seen at the hall. The founder of this hall was also said to have been in charge of the YEE WOH hall (*) in Canton, but on the Japanese occupation of South China in 1937-39 she and a body of her followers removed permanently to the WING LOK T’UNG in Ngau Chi Wan. One of the present inmates of this hall was previously with the founder in Canton, having followed her into the sect at the age of 9 (she is now over 60 years of age). Her mother was said to be a cousin of the founder. 2. Kam Ha Ching She (#4) This hall was built in the 16th year of the Chinese Republic (1927-28). The founding lady was of the same rank as the founder of the above hall and like her had previously been in charge of a vegetarian hall in Canton, the SHUI WOH T’ONG (#) before coming to Hong Kong. The SHUI WOH T'ONG and the YEE WOH T'ONG above, form part of a group of halls of the sect known to members as the “WOH groups", because they each have WOH as part of their name. They are not to be confused with the secret society of this name. The establishment of the KAM HA CHING SHE was said to have been a result of an increasing following among women from Hong Kong who visited the founder in Canton. Deciding to establish a hall in the Colony she set up the MAN YUAN T’ONG (*) on a floor in rented premises in Third Street, Hong Kong island, probably about the year 1910. The growing number of ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1968 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d 198 WILLIAMS, C. A. S. THE LIBRARY Outlines of Chinese symbolism: an alphabetical compendium of antique legends and beliefs... Peiping, Customs College Press, 1931. Limited ed. of 250 signed copies. WINSTEDT, Richard. The Malays: a cultural history. Singapore, Kelly & Walsh, 1947. WOODHEAD, H. G. W. The truth about the Chinese Republic. London, Hurst and Blackett, 1925. WOOLF, Bella Sidney, afterwards Mrs. Lock, afterwards Lady Southorn. Chips of China. Hong Kong, Kelly & Walsh, 1930. WRIGHT, Arthur F. Buddhism in Chinese history. Stanford, Calif., Stanford U.P., 1959. (Stanford studies in the civilizations of eastern Asia) WRIGHT, Leigh R. Historical notes on the North Borneo dispute. Ann Arbor, Mich., Association for Asian Studies, 1966. 484. Reprinted from Journal of Asian studies, v. 25, 1966, pp. 471- WRIGHT, Leigh R. Sarawak's relations with Britain, 1858 to 1870. Kuching, Government Printing Office, 1964. Reprinted from Sarawak Museum, Journal, v. 40, 1964, pp. 628-648. WRIGHT, Stanley F. Hart and the Chinese customs. Publ. for the Queen's University, Belfast. Belfast, Mullan, 1950. WU, Chiêng-ên (E) Monkey; tr. from the Chinese by Arthur Waley. London, Allen & Unwin, 1942 reprinted 1945. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1969 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d CHINESE UNOFFICIAL MEMBERS OF COUNCILS As things turned out, Gibb did not return to Hong Kong, and Ng Choy was therefore appointed on a three-year term. This appointment was unfortunately interpreted by some members of the British community as an attempt to create an anti-English party feeling in Hong Kong. In May 1880 when one of the magistrates went on leave, the Governor replaced him temporarily by Ng Choy who thus became the first Chinese to hold a senior appointment in the Hong Kong Government. This led to a question in the House of Commons as to why Ng Choy should combine a paid official post with an unofficial seat in the Legislative Council; but by the time these explanations were required the original holder of the post had returned to the Colony. The attitude of the British community towards him and the Governor as a result of his appointment to the Legislative Council as well as this parliamentary question must have embarrassed Ng Choy very much. During this time, China having suffered repeated defeats from the hands of foreign powers, there was a movement in China to promote western technology and to modernize China, and any Chinese who had been trained or educated abroad would be welcome back to China. Thus when an invitation came from China for him to serve China, Ng Choy accepted it gladly. He left Hong Kong in 1882 before the expiry of the 3-year term in the Legislative Council, and later sent in his resignation from Tientsin. Ng Choy became Secretary and Legal Adviser to Viceroy Li Hung-chang, one of the most important Chinese political figures of the time. Now known as Wu Ting-fang, he soon rose to become Chief Director of Railways and later Ambassador to the U.S.A. After the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, he held important appointments respectively as Minister of Judicial Affairs, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Financial Affairs. In 1917, when China entered the First World War, he was for a short time nominated as Premier. In 1922 he became Governor of Kwangtung and died the same year in office, soon after General Chan Kwing-ming's revolt in Canton.* * In his The Chinese (Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1909) p. 196, John Stuart Thomson praises Wu and styles him "the Chesterfield of China in all the graces of speech and manners." Ed. Page 15 Page 16 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1969 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d CHINESE UNOFFICIAL MEMBERS OF COUNCILS 15 including a big reclamation project.14 The name of the company contained the names of the partners, "Kai" from Ho Kai and "Tak" from Au Tak. Hence the name of our airport may be taken as a name in commemoration of both Ho Kai and Au Tak. Although very westernized himself, Dr. Ho Kai always entertained a very sympathetic understanding of the Chinese masses. In May 1887 when the Government introduced the Public Health Bill, Dr. Ho Kai, to the surprise of his European friends, opposed it strongly as a member of the Sanitary Board. He accused the Bill of making the "mistake of treating Chinese as if they were Europeans" and argued that to improve standards indiscriminately would mean cutting down the available building space, and forcing rentals to go up,15 thereby causing great hardship to the poorer Chinese. Because of his opposition the Bill had to be amended substantially. This is only one example of why Ho Kai was so much respected by the Chinese community as its leader and forthright spokesman. In addition to his interest in Hong Kong affairs, Ho Kai, like many educated Chinese of his time, was very much concerned with the modernization and reformation movements that were going on in China. On 8th February 1887, the China Mail carried a reprint of an article by Marquis Tseng Chi-tze, Chinese Minister to Great Britain and Russia, entitled "China, the Sleep and the Awakening". On 16th February 1887, Ho Kai published, under the pen-name "Sinensis", a long article in the China Mail refuting many points raised by Marquis Tseng. In subsequent years he wrote quite a number of articles, voicing his ideas on political and economic reforms in China, and refuting the views of such Chinese personages as Viceroy Chang Chi-tung and Kang Yu-wei, the reformer who aroused the ire of the formidable Empress Dowager. In 1897 he was offered a post in China by his brother-in-law, Wu Ting-fang.16 However, he went to Shanghai to have a look at things for himself and he decided to return to Hong Kong. In 1895, when Dr. Sun Yat-sen, one of his students in the Hong Kong College of Medicine and founder of the Chinese Republic, started the Hsing Chung Hui, a revolutionary organization, in Hong Kong, he had the assistance and support of Dr. Ho Kai. Indeed Dr. Ho took an active part in planning some of the early abortive attempts in Canton to overthrow the Manchu Government. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1969 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d CHINESE UNOFFICIAL MEMBERS OF COUNCILS 21 On Ho Fook's retirement from the Legislative Council in 1921, he was succeeded by Chow Shou-son (later Sir Shouson Chow) who, together with Sir Robert Hotung, were often referred to as the two grand old men of Hong Kong in the 1940's and 1950's. Chow was born in 1862.* In 1874, he was sent, together with 29 other Chinese boys, by the Manchu Government to the United States to pursue higher western studies. This was the third of four batches of young Chinese scholars who, through the efforts of Yung Wing, were sent to America by the Manchu Government in the years 1872 to 1875.25 Young Chow was eventually admitted to Columbia University where he remained until 1881 when the Chinese Educational Mission in the United States was disbanded and all the boys were brought back to China. While in North America the Chinese boys, totalling 120, were under the supervision of some ignorant and stupid Manchu officials who did not understand what the boys were learning and who were not in sympathy with their activities. These officials sent back to China reports saying that instead of concentrating on their academic studies, the boys were taking part in all sorts of barbarian games and athletic activities. Worst of all, some of the boys were going out with American girls and were being converted into Christians. A report ended by a recommendation that they must be returned to China immediately, otherwise they would lose all interest and patriotic feelings towards China. This recommendation was readily accepted and the boys were back in China in 1881. Many of the boys made good use of the knowledge they acquired and turned out later to be leading engineers, railway builders, diplomats and admirals in China. Chow Shou-son was at first assigned to the Chinese Customs but later became, at various times, Manager of the China Merchant Steamship Navigation Company in Tientsin and Managing Director of the Peking-Mukden Railway. He also held appointments in the Foreign Ministry and was at one time a Chinese consul in Korea. After the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, he came to Hong Kong to engage in business and later became Chairman of the Boards of Directors of the Bank of East Asia, the China Entertainment and Land Development Company and the China Emporium. His family had been settled in one of the Hong Kong villages for nearly two hundred years. See JHKBRAS vol.7(1967), pp.164-166. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1969 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d 22 T. C. CHENG In May 1915, Japan forced the Republic of China, then under the premiership of Yuan Shih-kai, to accept the "Twenty-one Demands". Four years later, in 1919, the Chinese delegation failed at the Peace Conference in Paris to prevent the "transfer" of Germany's "rights and privileges" in the Shantung Province to Japan. As a result of this complete disregard of China's sovereignty by the foreign powers, thousands of students took part in processions demonstrating against foreign militarism and oppression in China on 4 May 1919. In response, students, merchants, and workers throughout China also staged demonstrations and strikes, thereby sparking off in China the "May 4 Movement". Chinese national feelings were also stirred by the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (or K.M.T.), who now pressed for the abolition of extra-territorial rights and unequal treaties and the retrocession of foreign concessions. All these had serious repercussions in Hong Kong, and in 1922 the first of a series of seamen's strikes began. On 30th May 1925, certain Chinese demonstrators were shot and killed by British policemen in the International Settlements in Shanghai. This led to more serious strikes and demonstrations in Shanghai, Canton, and Hong Kong, culminating in an economic boycott which paralysed Hong Kong. During this period, the Chinese unofficials, viz., Chow Shou-son, Ng Hon-tsz (who died in May 1923) and Robert Kotewall (who succeeded Ng Hon-tsz), and other prominent Chinese leaders, including Sir Robert Hotung and the directors of Tung Wah Hospital, stood solidly by the Government. Some of them actually acted as unofficial middlemen in negotiations between Hong Kong and the seamen's representatives in Canton. The services rendered by Chow Shou-son and Robert Kotewall during this crisis were so valuable and outstanding that speedy recognition was accorded to them. In 1926, Chow was created a knight. Kotewall was given the honorary degree of LL.D. by the University of Hong Kong, and the following year was awarded the C.M.G. It may be of interest to quote here the Governor Sir Cecil Clementi's remarks made in early 1926 at a Legislative Council meeting about the big strike of 1925 and the boycott that followed: "We are determined to give full protection to the people of Hong Kong, and to put down with a firm hand any conspiracy to intimidate or otherwise to cause trouble among labourers and ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1971 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g 212 BOOK REVIEWS in China." As events have turned out, this work is of more use to us now, during the renaissance of interest in the study of the law of the mainland of China than it was in the education of practising lawyers. It came at an interesting period in Chinese legal history, at a time when the lawyers and politicians of the Republic were busy throwing off the shackles of the old imperial law and searching for new, modern concepts and a viable way in which to express them. Jamieson's work may, therefore, be viewed to a certain extent in the same light as the great pioneering textbooks on Anglo-American law of the nineteenth century in that the mode of classification and presentation might have influenced the thinking of generations of lawyers. But the history of China in the years following publication of his book excluded that possibility and we now approach it, not as a work of reference, but as a source of information on historical attitudes towards the modernisation of Chinese Law during the nineteenth century and on the fruits of the cultural interchange between Chinese and western law which occurred in Shanghai. George Jamieson's career followed a well-known late nineteenth century pattern and his educational and intellectual limitations are apparent in his approach to his subject. Chinese Family and Commercial Law is, to our eyes, old-fashioned and didactic. He was a "scholar" of the old school and, though he acquired his knowledge and experience of Chinese law from the 'inside' in his involvement in dispute-settling processes, he followed the convention of nineteenth century jurisprudential thought in that he cast his work in a pre-conceived mould. Since the great Maine himself showed great skill in analysing legal systems in terms of concepts which enabled him to demonstrate similarities between those systems rather than to build up a set of concepts which worked adequately within any one system, we can scarcely criticise Jamieson when, in his introductory chapter, he sets out to discover to which legal system familiar in the west is the Chinese legal system most similar. That he should inevitably draw comparisons with the Roman legal system is both a commentary on the extent to which formal Legal education in the past depended overly on Roman Law and on the extent to which our approach to the comparative study of law has changed. Thus, by trying to be "scholarly," he appears to have eschewed the practicality which must have been familiar to him after a lifetime of activity in China. In consequence, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1971 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g 218 BOOK REVIEWS In answer to the review in the Journal of the previous book, one of the authors wrote "I am impelled to emphasize that we wrote avowedly as dealers. Our objective has been achieved and the work has brought us a substantial volume of business". Where desire for success prevails over truth, accuracy and scholarship, one gets only gallery patter. The present volume has all the bad points of its predecessor. Peabody Museum Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 1971. F. B. LOTHROP J FAMILY AND KINSHIP IN CHINESE SOCIETY, edited by Maurice Freedman. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1970., pp. XV, 269. Students of Chinese society are not able at present to undertake field studies in the Chinese homeland, the People's Republic of China. The last major social investigation was carried out in the vicinity of Canton by Professor C.K. Yang over twenty years ago. Despite this formidable obstacle - the fact that China is closed to direct sociological observation - the study of Chinese domestic institutions by Western and other scholars has quickened rather than slackened. A small group of dedicated social scientists have been active since 1949 in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other areas of Overseas Chinese settlement. Paradoxically, since 1949 much data have been collected, some important hypotheses formulated, and some parts of theory tested. As this volume makes clear, we have learned much about Chinese society since 1949 - at least about the older China now being transformed by political, social and economic developments. It is natural, I feel, that the editor of this volume should be Professor Maurice Freedman, whose two major studies of this area - Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (1958) and Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (1966) — have deeply influenced many other researchers in the same field. Professor Freedman, as the bibliographies appended to his works amply * A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition and The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution (both M.LT., 1959), ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1972 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h 108 E. G. PRYOR reduce overcrowding it was essential to provide more and better designed houses, to decentralise the population into new self-contained communities and to reduce building density. The commission also recommended the setting up of a permanent town planning and housing committee and the provision of more public parks. It made the further suggestions that the provision of adequate housing for the poorer classes should not be left to private enterprise without assistance and that consideration should be given to the financing of slum clearance and subsidised housing by means of a special tax, loan or issue of housing shares. The tide of events again overwhelmed any intentions the government had for implementing the findings of the commission for in 1937 the Japanese declared war against China and this brought 750,000 refugees into the Colony. However, a Town Planning Ordinance was passed in 1939 to provide for the layout of new urban areas and the replanning of districts already developed although nothing was immediately achieved under this Ordinance as the Colony was engulfed in December 1940 by the Japanese conquest of South-East Asia. The Past Meets the Present: 1945-1971 There was considerable damage to property during the war and a survey carried out in 1946 showed that almost 8,700 domestic units had been destroyed and some 10,300 damaged.23 The number of persons displaced as a result totalled 161,000 of whom 154,000 were Chinese. Although the population of the Colony had been reduced to 600,000 persons by 1945 as a result of Japanese deportations and voluntary movements back to China, large numbers of displaced people came back with the return of peace so that by 1947 there were some 1.8 million persons in Hong Kong. It is not hard to imagine the circumstances under which most families had to live in view of the depleted stock of housing and the limited availability of public services during the immediate post-war years. The housing problem became even worse as a consequence of the establishment of the People's Republic in China during 1948-49 which motivated yet more refugees to seek shelter in the Colony. 23 Building Reconstruction Advisory Committee, Final Report, Hong Kong, 1946, Appendix 2, p. 13. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1972 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h 144 LINDA F. SULLIVAN must build a shelter from the natural world. Yet as he builds, he is always careful to consider the way in which nature will affect his life and is careful to bring a little bit of it into his home. Finally, there is a persistent desire to maintain the privacy of his family, and of his inner thoughts. NOTES 1 George B. Cressey, China's Geographic Foundations, A Survey of the Land and Its People, (New York: McGraw-Hill Co., Inc., 1934), p. 12. 2 T. R. Tregear, A Geography of China, (London: University of London Press, 1965), p. 31. 3 Ibid., p. 211. 4 The reasons for vertical cleavage in the loess region are as yet only hypotheses. Tregear (p. 212.) states that the most probable theory is that originally the region was covered with steppe grass which was successively buried by the loess dust storms from the Northwest and then fresh grass would grow. The decayed grass left minute vertical hollow tubes in the soil along which cleavages were formed. 5 Ibid., p. 61. 6 Liu Tun-chen, A General Discussion of Chinese Houses, (People's Republic of China: Architectural Engineering Publishing Company, 1957), plate No. 1-8, p. 11-16. 7 Bulletin of the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture, (V, 1). * Liu, Op. cit., plate No. 56, p. 29. 9 Ibid., plate No. 93, p. 42. 10 Ibid., plate No. 73, p. 36. 11 Ibid., plate No. 45, p. 25. 12 Ibid., plate No. 44, p. 25. 13 Ibid., plate No. 69, p. 35. 14 Ibid., plate No. 71, p. 36. 15 Colin Penn, "Chinese Vernacular Architecture," Royal Institute of British Architects, October, 1965. 16 Ibid. 17 Hsieh T'ing-yu and Kuo Ch'ang-ch'eng, The Hakka Chinese Origin and Folk Songs, (San Francisco: Jade Mountain Press, 1969). Their 18 Chinese Architecture: A Simple History, Volume 1, The Old Architecture of China: A Simple History, (China Industrial Publishing Company, 1963). 19 Ibid., plate No. 105, p. 45. 20 Ibid., plate No. 118, p. 48ff. 21 Ibid., plate No. 119 & 120, p. 48ff. 22 Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwang-tung, (New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1966), p. 1. Jaco 23 Wong Chung Hong, "Walled and Moated A Hong Kong Village," Arts of Asia, Vol. No. 4, July-August 1971, p. 22. 24 Ibid., p. 26. 25 Ibid. Page 150 Page 151 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1972 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h TRADITIONAL CHINESE REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE BIBLIOGRAPHY 145 Bulletin of the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture. V, 1. Chinese Architecture: A Simple History. Volume 1: The Old Architecture of China: A Simple History. China Industrial Publishing Company, 1963. Boyd, Andrew. Chinese Architecture and Town Planning (1500 B.C. · A.D. 1911). London, 1962. Cressey, George Babcock. China's Geographic Foundations: A Survey of the Land and Its People, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1934. Freedman, Maurice. Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung. New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1966. Gutkind, E. A. Revolution of Environment. London: Broadway House, 1946. Hsieh, Ting-yu and Kuo, Ch'ang-ch'eng. The Hakka Chinese-Their Origin and Folk Songs. San Francisco: Jade Mountain Press, 1969. Kulp, Daniel H. Country Life in South China: The Society of Familism. Volume 1: Phenix Village, Kwangtung, China, New York: 1925, Liu Tun-chen. A General Discussion of Chinese Houses. (PAREMM). People's Republic of China: Architectural Engineering Publishing Company, 1957. Penn, Colin. "Chinese Vernacular Architecture." Royal Institute of British Architects. October, 1965. Skinner, William. "Chinese Domestic Architecture." Review of Liu Tun-chen, A Short Study of the Chinese House. Royal Institute of British Architects. November, 1957. Smith, Arthur H. Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology. Fleming H. Revell, Co., 1899. Ta Chen, Emigrant Communities in South China: A Study of Overseas Migration and Its Influence on Standards of Living and Social Change. New York: 1940. Tregear, T. R. A Geography of China. London: University of London Press, 1965. Wong Chung Hong. "Walled and Moated-A Hong Kong Village." Arts of Asia. Vol. I, No. 4, July-August 1971. Wu, Nelson I. Chinese and Indian Architecture. New York: George Braziller, 1967. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1972 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h NOTES AND QUERIES 205 New Territories villages. It is well known that Chinese-style restaurants have mushroomed in Britain since the 1950s. By and large, the people in this catering business are former rice peasants who have switched over to culinary activities. Rising costs of living, falling prices of rice, lack of arable land and population growth are factors which created a situation characterized by the feminization of the farm work process, and an increasing abandonment of land. In some instances, villagers have sold off their inherited land holdings to urban speculators and deposited the money in a bank. They claim that the interest gained surpasses the value of the yield of rice of their former holdings. Accompanying this decline in traditional farming is the increasing financing of households by remittances from Britain. The other macro process is the chain of major political events in the People's Republic of China. I shall not discuss these here. For our present purpose, it is important, however, to note that one aspect of this drama is a strong immigration from China into the Crown Colony of Hong Kong. In Sha Tin, there had been an increase in population of 345% between 1931 and 1961. Today, there are about 35,000 people in the valley as compared with 4,346 persons counted in the last pre-war census. It was in the situation I have just described that the immigrants from China appeared on the scene asking for tenancy rights. By letting land to tenants, the owner makes more money from his holdings than he can by maintaining the traditional rice farming. This simple fact underlies the predominant pattern of land tenure in Sha Tin; native villagers let land to outsiders at rents that equal or surpass the gains from two crops of rice on that land. At the same time, their own energy is directed to other tasks, varying from overseas or urban work and cottage industry to long tea house conversations or gambling. Thus, the native villager's answer to the explosive city development was, in the first place, not an adjustment in his agricultural production to meet the emerging urban demands; instead, he converted the traditional two rice crops into two crops of cash, and reoriented his own efforts towards urban or suburban occupations which provide new external incomes. The change in land use was brought about by the immigrant tenants. A great many of the newcomers to Sha Tin are people of a definite urban background. Those who are not urbanites are generally influenced by men of urban experience. The vegetable market garden is in many ways ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1972 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h 232 BOOK REVIEWS So much for the contents; the background is in many ways even more interesting. As Korea is a peninsula, it is a natural junction of migration routes from the North. Some species cross the north of the peninsula to continue down the coast of China, and these are rare in the Republic of Korea. Others pass through Korea, and then go either south-east to Japan and the Ryukyus, or south-west to rejoin the coast of China lower down. This has been the subject of many years of study by Professor Won, who ringed over 185,000 birds in seven years between 1964 and 1970. Migration in Asia is still comparatively little known, although an intensive programme run by the U.S. Government Migratory Animals Pathological Survey over this period, involving the ringing of several million birds in many countries in Asia, has begun to scratch the surface of our vast ignorance of this subject. The conservation of wildlife is in most parts of Asia merely a pipedream for the future; though National Parks are being established in a few countries, and in a few isolated instances, particularly in Japan, special attention has been paid to the preservation of endangered species of birds, such as the Japanese Crested Ibis. The Republic of Korea shows an utter disregard for the welfare of the 'commoner' birds, to the extent that very few can be seen near the cities, and those in the remoter agricultural areas are more and more affected by pesticides. On the other hand, fifteen species are designated as National Treasures, and are protected at all times, and a number of areas are designated as nature reserves. The authors express the hope "that in future the law will not be flaunted to the point where a mounted specimen of a 'National Treasure' may be seen openly for sale in a shop in the centre of Seoul!” Their hope was fulfilled rather sooner than they might have wished. In April 1971, a nest of the Oriental White Stork was discovered for the first time for at least ten years; this is a species, or subspecies, in grave danger of extinction. Four days after the nest was found, the male was shot a mile and a half away. The offender was caught, and prosecuted, and subsequently given six months in jail for the offence. With this kind of encouragement, and with the help of Gore and Won's book, let us hope that the future of Korean ornithology will be brighter than the past. This book was, I know, a costly venture, and the enterprise of the two authors and of its publishers, the ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1973 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r 76 HELGA WERLE The hands are made of wire (Plate VII) which facilitates the fastening of the sticks or arms, but their appearance is ugly. The sticks have the length of chopsticks. Made of iron, they form a small ring at one end and have a wooden handle on the other, to prevent the sticks from slipping out of the hands. The third stick is thicker and is hooked into a hole at the puppet's back from below. The puppeteers tell that in Ch'aochow some puppets were considered so precious that they were handled with sticks made of pure gold. Neither the waist nor the stick is movable. The Historical Background in Ch'aochow Although well proportioned and even beautiful, this puppet has many technical disadvantages compared to the Cantonese rod-puppet or the Fukienese string or glove-puppet. The reason for this incongruousness can be found in the dominance of Ch'aochow's ancient leather shadow-puppet tradition, which was definitely well established in the Ming dynasty in that area. One can assume that it existed earlier but any proof is lacking so far. In Ch'aochow these shadow-puppets were cut out of cowhide (which is very rough when compared to the donkey-hide used in North China or Szechuan) which was coloured. They have two-jointed arms and legs and are handled with three sticks attached to the hands and the back of the two-dimensional puppet. The author has seen such Min-nan shadow-puppets in Taiwan, and some old Ch'aochowese confirmed that the Ch'aochow ones had exactly these features. By the end of the last century, supposedly under the strong influence of the extraordinary perfection of the string and glove puppets of Ch'uan-chou, Fukien, a new type of puppet evolved, a hybrid with the beauty of a Ch'uan-chou puppet, but handicapped in movement by the technique of a two-dimensional puppet. The name paper-shadow-theatre chih-ying-hsi was also applied to the new puppet. These two kinds of puppets existed side by side for one generation, and according to witnesses the leather shadow-puppets disappeared in the 1920s. It is yet possible to receive first-hand accounts of the time when puppets were much used. An educated elderly Ch'aochow gentleman, Mr. Su related that in his childhood, at the beginning of the Republic, there were still 3 different kinds of puppets: shadow, horizontal stick-puppets and a third kind which he describes as... ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1973 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r SWATOW HORIZONTAL STICK PUPPETS Ch'aochow Puppets in contemporary China and overseas 83 Liu Fu-kuang §✯ an educated person of about 40, who is the most outstanding Ch'aochow orchestra-leader here, is closely connected with the Hsin-shun-hsiang puppet-troupe. He came to Hong Kong in 1959. According to him, puppet-troupes completely disappeared in Ch'aochow after the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. This is probably because their performances were intimately connected with the festivals of the myriads of local deities, the worship of which was strongly discouraged by the Communists. In 1957, Liu Fu-kuang saw the last troupe, called Shant'ou Ying-hsi-t'uan 4⇓✯D (Shadow-play-troupe of Shant'ou) perform in Swatow. He believes that not even one troupe is now left in Ch'aochow, after a history of about one thousand years and a hundred active troupes fifty years ago. People from Ch'aochow make up a large percentage of the Overseas Chinese population of South East Asia and Ch'aochow opera flourishes there; but there is said not to be one single "paper-shadow-play" troupe overseas. This shows that from the great tradition of puppet-theatre, only the two troupes in Hong Kong are left. It is therefore the last chance to savour and study this tradition before its extinction which, at least at the moment, appears to be inevitable. BIBLIOGRAPHY Batchelder, Marjorie H.: Rod-puppets and the Human Theatre, Columbus, The Ohio State University Press, 1947. Huang Chun-ming: The Forbidden Puppets' in Echo of Things Chinese, Taiwan, October 1972, pp. 24-34. Jacob & Jensen: Das Chinesische Schattentheater, Stuttgart, 1933. Margareta Niculescu: The Puppet Theatre in the Modern World compiled by Union Internationale des Marionettes under Margareta Niculescu, George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., London, Toronto, Wellington, Sidney, 1967. Tsim Tak-lung (compiler): Puppet-demonstration on pages 45-47 of ‘Chinese Theatre in Hong Kong', Proceedings of a Symposium, Nov. 22-23, 1968, Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1968. Burger, Helga: 'The Cantonese Stick-puppets', in Kaleidoscope, Hong Kong, March/April 1973. "The Far Eastern Puppet Theatre' in Souvenir Book of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, 1974. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1973 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r NOTES AND QUERIES 145 ning among other matters the subjugation of the non-Chinese tribes of the interior.* At the age of 71 he was appointed Vice-President of the Board of Civil Affairs in Nanking and later Vice-President of the Censorate. He died in great poverty in 1587 aged 74, his friends defraying the cost of his burial. In November 1965 the editor of the Shanghai Wen Wei Pao, Yao Wen-yuan, who was also a left-inclined literary and theatre critic, published an article in which he criticised an historical drama "The dismissal of Hai Jui" written by the then Deputy Mayor of Peking, Wu Han. Yao's article was the opening volley in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which created such turmoil in China and purged so many of the senior communist cadres including Wu Han himself. Yao rose quickly and by 1969 was sixth in the leadership of the Chinese People's Republic only to slip to a lower position at the 10th Party Congress in August 1973. Yao, still a member of the Politbureau, is reported to be the son-in-law of Chairman Mao and a close associate of the radical Madame Mao. Wu Han's historical play which cost him so dearly was criticised by Yao as an analogy of Mao's treatment of his "loyal minister” Peng Te-huai, the Minister of National Defence purged by Mao in 1959. P'eng had been very outspoken in his opposition to two of the things closest to Mao's heart, the Great Leap Forward and the establishment of the People's Communes. Hai Jui is well known to many Chinese as the minister who steadfastly opposed corruption. A legend told to me in Singapore by an elderly Buddhist nun recounted how Hai Jui as a very young junior official had been posted to the Swatow region (Ch'aochow) where a group of tyrannical landowners together with the local magistrate's police runners were terrorizing the people. The legend then told of Hai Jui's fight, first against his local superiors in support of the poor, later against the Prime Minister and finally against the Emperor himself. Hai Jui was forced to commit suicide, she said, to compel the Emperor to take notice of the problems of the masses and for this he was deified by the subsequent Emperor and is now one of the patrons of the Ch'aochow people. See, in part, Herbert A. Giles, A Chinese Biographical Dictionary (London and Shanghai, Bernard Quaritch and Kelly and Walsh, 1898) pp. 242-243. Also W. F. Mayers, The Chinese Reader's Manual (Shanghai, American Presbyterian Mission Press, and London, Trübner and Co., 1874) pp. 45-46. Ed. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 200 NOTES AND QUERIES 1885), records the establishment of the temple about that time. It consists mostly of the names of the many contributors to the building fund, spread over several tablets. The tablet shows that a large number of persons contributed to the building fund, many of them presumably connected with the construction industry in Hong Kong in one way or another. They are grouped according to their home districts and include persons from no less than 22 districts (hsien) of the Kwangtung province including many from the districts round Canton, adjoining Hong Kong. A group from what may be Mangalore in India (????) is also listed among the subscribers. Besides the inscriptions inside the temple, there are 2 outside the building. One commemorates the establishment of a school premises by the Kwong Yut Tong in the 38th year of the Chinese Republic (1949-50). Another, earlier, one dated in the year (1924-25) explains the ownership of the land on which both temple and school stand. It appears that, as Carl Smith relates above, the temple had been built on the land bought by the Chinese consortium in 1883, but that no deed had been drawn up between it and the temple's managers, then or later known as the Kwong Yut Tong. After Li Po Lung (son of the leading member of the consortium) sold most of his local property interests in 1921, the Tong's managers discovered that the temple site had been included in the sale. After discussion with the new owners the latter agreed to make over the land to the temple; that is, to the Tong. This satisfactory outcome is recorded in the tablet. The only point of difference between the tablet and the official records consulted by Carl Smith is that the records state that the new owners sold to the Tong for $4,222.40 whereas the tablet indicates it to have been a gift with a then market value of about $40,000! Lu Pan (in the Northern romanisation) (??) As is usually the case in China, Lu Pan was a mortal man become a god; and as is equally common, there are different versions of his origin. E.T.C. Werner in his Dictionary of Chinese Mythology (1961 reprint with introduction by Hyman Kublin; pp 281-282) gives the following account which, in its essentials, may be taken as typical of the life stories and miracles attributed to many Chinese deities. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 BOOK REVIEWS 239 However, none of the above-cited translations deal with any original work of the Chin period (1115-1234). Amongst various branches of Chinese literature developed during the Chin period, the Chu-kung-tiao3, (literally, the "various moods", hereafter to be abbreviated as CKT), a kind of popular literature of this period, seem to be among the more important.2 To quote from the introduction of the Ballad of the Hidden Dragon, "The Chu-kung-tiao belongs to that large group of 'story-tellers' ballads in which prose and verse alternate, but its verse was sung, while its prose was narrated! The sung part of any chu-kung-tiao consists of a large number of tunes (ch’ü-tiao #8) succeeding each other according to fixed musical rules. Groups of tunes belonging to the same mode (kung-tiao) were assembled into a suite (t'ao-shu) to make a musical unit for which different words were supplied by each story-teller." (p. 3) Although popular during the Chin period, yet few original texts of the chu-kung-tiao literature remain today. A woodblock print edition of the Liu Chih-yüan CKT✰✰✰ was found in a 1907-1808 excavation by Peter Kuzmitch Kozlov (1863-1935). It remained in the Leningrad Oriental Institute, as the introduction of the Ballad of the Hidden Dragon has pointed out, “until April 1958 when the Soviet Government made the People's Republic of China a gift of this priceless volume and it is now kept in the Peking National Library" (p. 5). The original text of Liu Chih-yüan CKT is divided into 12 sections. But only 5 sections (1-3 and 11-12) have survived. The main body of the Ballad of the Hidden Dragon by M. Dolezelova-Velingerova, a Czech Sinologist, and his collaborator, J. I. Crump, an American professor in Michigan University is in fact, their full English translation of these 5 sections. This book is the first work about Chinese folk literature of this kind ever written in English. Yet this main source of satisfaction is marred in several respects. First of all, the author's knowledge concerning the beginning about the CKT study in China is not complete. pp. 123-125 are devoted to bibliography of Chu-kung-tiao studies, in which Crump and Dolezelova-Velingerova have selected 30 articles contributed by 20 Sinologists from various countries (17 articles by 12 Chinese 静農 2 See T'ai Ching-nung £#£ : "Chu-kung-tiao-Chinese literature under the rule of the Nüchen Tartars" ƒÆŒ%TO**£*—*?* in Chung-wai Literature †±‡, Vol. I, No. 1, (1971, Taipei): 6-20. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 BOOK REVIEWS 241 Yuan CKT Cheng Ch'en-to has also analysed the chu-kung-tiao literature of three different dynasties in great detail. Furthermore, Cheng again devoted a special chapter to CKT literature in the second volume of his Chung-kuo su-wen-hsüeh shih (i.e. History of Popular Literature in China), at pp. 63-154. This work was first printed in 1938 in Shanghai, and reprinted in 1953 in Peking. As to Liu Chih-yüan CKT in particular, Cheng Ch'en-to has also edited it into his Shih-chiai wen-ku (Library of Literature of the world) volume II (1935, Shanghai) pp. 483-508. Regrettably, just as Aoki's article in Japanese and its Chinese translation was omitted from Grump and Dolezelova-Velingerova's bibliography, so Cheng's contributions were also ignored. Second, the authors' knowledge of the Liu Chih-yüan CKT is not complete. Whilst the edition of this CKT has been correctly regarded by the authors of this book as “a woodblock print which came from a workshop in the region of P'ing-yang in Shansi province" (p. 5), such an identification would have been far more authoritative and scholarly if the authors had referred to an article written in Chinese by Chao Wan-li, a specialist on Chinese rare books who has served the National Peking Library since the 1930's. The title here referred to is Ch'ung-kao ti yu-i (On the Sublime Friendship). Its subtitle reads chi su-lien cheng-fu tsang-sung ti Liu Chih-yüan chu-kung-tiao ho liao-tsai tu-shuo (Notes on the various-mode of Liu Chih-yüan and the Illustrations of Strange Tales from a Chinese studio as being donated by the Government of the Republic of Soviet). This article appeared in Wen-wu tsan-kao tzu-liao No. 7 (1958, Peking) pp. 15-16, and p. 22. In it Chao Wan-li has not only firmly stated that the printing of the Liu Chih-yüan CKT was woodblocked around the P'ing-yang region at the Shansi province during the Chin period but also specified that the print of this chu-kung-tiao should be identified as the "P'ing-shui edition" since the quality of paper, the format of the block, the style of the carving as well as the forms of the blocked characters of this particular chu-kung-tiao are all in conformity to some other books of the Chin period woodblocked at the P'ing-shui area. 3 The title Liao Tsai here referred to follows that of the annotated edition of a selected English translation made by Herbert A. Giles in 1880 (London, Thos de la rue & Co.), and since reprinted in many editions. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1975 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d CHINA'S ECONOMIC PLANNING & CHANGING GEOGRAPHY 45 the present regime is making efforts to convey water from the Yangtze River in the south to the Yellow River in the north. Since 1958, several survey parties in western Szechuan and southern Kansu have studied the possibility of transferring superfluous water to the Yellow River from the Gold Sand River, the Taito River, and other tributaries of the Yangtze. There are, of course, many difficulties to be encountered in carrying out this plan. For example, the northwestern region is so sparsely settled that a tremendous number of workers must be brought in to construct the necessary canals and locks. The area has a serious problem of seepage and evaporation, and it experiences violent earthquakes. If the plan is successful, however, it will provide ample compensation for the effort required. It will lessen the threat of flood in the southeast part of China, and will prevent drought in the northwest. It will improve the use of the region for pasture land, and increase its agricultural production. It can also develop electric power, which will make up for the shortage of coal in the region. It will modify the dry climate to some extent; this in turn will encourage forest growth. It will form a system of waterways that will facilitate navigation throughout the country. The building of Railroads—For the sake of political coherence and the furtherance of economic development, the present government has paid great attention to the building of railroad systems. The length of the main line built since 1949 was 16,000 miles. Of the many completed systems of railroads, three have geopolitical significance. They reflect the determination of the present regime to unify the state and to open up the frontier border by connecting it with the inner areas. 1. Along the east coast, five ports—Yentai, Ningpo, Foochow, Amoy, and Chiankiang—have been linked to the interior by short lines. The military intention of the railroads built in the areas around Foochow and Amoy apparently is that of “liberating” Taiwan. 2. Two long railroads have been built for the purpose of connecting China with the Soviet Union. One, which was built in 1954, runs from Tsining to Ulan Bator in Outer Mongolia, and then to the Soviet Union. With the completion of this railroad, China was joined to the Mongolian People's Republic. The other, which is ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q The Teochiu; Ethnicity in Urban Hong Kong Variation and Solidarity within Teochiu Population1 41 As noted above, there were sufficiently large numbers of Teochiu immigrants coming to Hong Kong after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 to enable Teochiu to reside and work together in fairly large concentrations. The initial contact period between non-Teochiu and the new immigrants was generally marked by ethnic hostility, at times erupting into physical violence between individuals or groups at places of work. Interethnic rivalry and violence was particularly common among coolies. Recently arrived Teochiu could not, of course, speak or understand Cantonese and were often forced to work in the most physically demanding and lowest paid occupations. Informants have indicated that it required a period of up to one year in some cases for Teochiu to learn sufficient Cantonese to enable limited communication with non-Teochiu. Communication difficulties and concomitant mis-understandings were undoubtedly one cause of inter-ethnic hostility and have contributed to the widely held belief among non-Teochiu that Teochiu are loud spoken and quarrelsome. Teochiu who were born in China and learned Cantonese after immigrating to Hong Kong speak Cantonese with a distinct accent and can be easily identified as Teochiu by others. The fact that many Teochiu could initially find work only in low status occupations reinforced the opinions of others that Teochiu were rough and coarse menial laborers. Teochiu were widely discriminated against and treated with fear and disrespect in this early period. They found it difficult to obtain jobs from non-Teochiu and were considered by many to be too violent and aggressive to function well in some jobs. The belief that Teochiu are violent in nature is largely derived from the very real tendency for Teochiu to go to the aid of other Teochiu in a fight, even if they are complete strangers. This norm, involving mutual assistance on the street, was a reflection of the struggles involved in survival and adaptation. It is thus not surprising that most initially relied on Teochiu sources of assistance and that many remained heavily involved in primarily Teochiu networks and committed to a Teochiu identity as they grew older. The greater part of my research was concerned with an intensive analysis of Teochiu social networks and several formal and informal religious organizations in one resettlement estate. The Teochiu 1 The discussion that follows, unless stated otherwise, refers to Teochiu living in urban areas of the Colony. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q A HAWAIIAN KING VISITS HONG KONG, 1881 103 To place medicines on board and every necessary article as required by the Hong Kong Emigration law, also to pay all fees for clearing the passengers from their port, bearing all the expenses to bring them from the interior, to victual them until their departure, to erect a hospital on deck and everything in accordance with the Hong Kong Law for the consideration of Twenty-five Dollars ($25) payable as required, (balance to be settled before departure of the ship) for every passenger over 15 years of age and twelve dollars and a half ($12.5) for every child under 15 years of age and over one year old, nothing being paid for babies under one year. If an English doctor be engaged Wohang allows one dollar per head and the Hon. W. Hillebrand to find the necessary medicines. Wohang agrees also to engage a competent interpreter and a Chinese doctor if required at the rate of twenty-five dollars ($25) each per month. On arrival in Honolulu the Hon. W. Hillebrand's agent to have the option of keeping the interpreter and doctor at the before-named rate of wages or to dismiss them in paying them a present of ($50) fifty dollars each.... Twenty of the passengers have to act as cooks as required by the local law...six have also to act as overseers and two as stewards on board during the passage.... Wohang is bound to put up a rail partition to separate male and female passengers on board.... In witness whereof... 3rd day of June, 1865. APPENDIX B W. Hillebrand Wohang See Plate 17 of this Journal at rear of the volume. APPENDIX C Labor Contract, 1890* THIS MEMORANDUM OF AGREEMENT, Made and entered into at Honolulu, and by and between ... hereinafter called the Employer, hereinafter called the Laborer- MT WITNESSETH THAT: WHEREAS, the Laborer has arrived at the Hawaiian Islands, upon the understanding that he be there employed as an Agricultural Laborer, under the laws of the Republic of Hawaii; and in consideration of the sum of $54 in U.S. Gold Coin, advanced and lent to him by his said Employer for defraying passage money and expenses from his home in China to the Hawaiian Islands, and for clothes, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged, * Interior Dept., Misc.: Immigration-Contract Forms (Archives of Hawaii). The Chinese text is at p. 106 following. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q 136 W. A. REYNOLDS port for the work came from American United China Relief (UCR) funds through the American Friends Service Council (AFSC); there were members from Canada, U.S.A., New Zealand, as well as China itself; and the self-sufficiency required was much greater than that of other FAU groups. The original plan, worked out in late 1940 and early 1941, was for a group of forty men, equipped with 20 trucks, a mobile operating theatre and mobile workshop, to undertake two tasks. The first was the transport of medical supplies into China from Burma and the second provision of medical teams to work with civilian and military hospitals. The proposals had the support of the British Fund for the Relief of Distress in China under Dr. H. Gordon Thompson, the Foreign Office, the U.C.R. and the AFSC. The trucks and equipment were purchased in the US and shipped to Rangoon where they were assembled and driven up to China. Dr. R. B. McClure, a Canadian medical missionary born in China, was appointed to lead the Unit. It will be remembered that in 1941 Japan occupied all the coast of China, transport up the railway to Kunming from Hanoi had ceased and the only land routes into the western provinces still held by the Government of the Republic of China under Marshal Chiang Kai Shek were the Burma Road and the road from the USSR via Sinkiang. When the Sino-Japanese war widened into the Pacific War on December 8, 1941, about half of the FAU group had arrived in Burma and China, the first trucks were being assembled in Rangoon and the rest of the party and equipment were on the high seas. All arrived safely and the Unit undertook a number of interesting tasks during the Burma fighting of 1942.1 Medical Services and Supplies in China Despite the diversion of manpower and loss of trucks and fuel in Burma the work of transporting medical supplies in China got underway in 1942. In 1941 there were four organizations concerned with military and civilian medical services:— 1) the Army Medical Administration (AMA) 2) the Chinese Red Cross (CRC) 3) National Health Administration (NHA) Weishengshu (衛 生 署) with its civilian hospitals and clinics. 4) Over 100 mission hospitals, responsible to their own Mission Boards. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q 138 W. A. REYNOLDS The first two of these had their own transport fleets, the NHA had a few worn-out trucks, while the mission hospitals were partially serviced by the International Relief Committee (IRC) which also had some worse-for-wear trucks. It was decided that the best service the Unit could render was to take over responsibility for transport and distribution of medical supplies within China for the NHA and the IRC. The immediate task was transporting about 140 tons of medical supplies which had accumulated in Kunming to Kweiyang and Chungking. Thus the Unit became the major civilian medical and relief transport organization with a series of routes totalling about 6,000 km, and shown on the map in Fig. 1. For the next four years the pattern remained much the same; the supplies came by air over the "Hump" to Kunming where the Unit took delivery and transported them by road, rail and boat to all areas of China under the control of the Government in Chungking. It was not possible to take supplies to the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region controlled by the Eighth Route Army or to the New Fourth Army areas. The first medical supplies reached Yenan in Feb, 1946 at the time of the Marshall negotiations when the writer arrived with 3 truck loads; an interesting trip but outside the scope of this paper.2 Transport Routes and Operation The tonnage of goods moved on the different routes (See Fig. 1) varied but throughout the 4 year period 1942-45, three routes carried the major portion. These were: 1) Kutsing-Luhsien (✰★-✯⇓) 742 kilometres. This ran from the Kunming-Chanyi railhead 170 kilometres to the west of Kunming to Luhsien on the Yangtse Kiang. 2) Kutsing to Kweiyang (-) 500 kilometres. This is the capital of Kweichow province and site of the IRC distribution operations, especially to Kwangsi, Kwangtung and Kiangsi. 3) Kweiyang to Chungking (†-1A) 490 kilometres. Chungking was, of course, the war time capital of the Republic and is at the confluence of the Yangtse and Kialing Rivers. A diagram map and profile of the first route is given in Fig. 2. The other routes are included in Table III. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1977 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n A JOURNEY TO YENAN, 1946 W. A. REYNOLDS* Introduction The purpose of this paper is to record some experiences of a truck journey in early 1946 from Chungking, the wartime capital of the Republic of China, to Yenan, the Headquarters of the 18th Group Army, the Chinese Communist Party and capital of the Kansu-Ninghsia-Shensi Border Region, and back. This three-truck convoy carrying medical supplies was the first delivery to take place for a period of about four years, and a very brief review of the political background is perhaps required to set the scene. Following the Sian incident of December 1936, there were moves towards a united anti-Japanese front between the Nationalist Government (Kuomintang) under Marshal Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists (Kungchangtang). This was followed on July 7, 1937, by the Marco Polo Bridge fighting and the start of the Japanese invasion of the heartland of China. In this period, there was a nominal united command of Kuomintang and Kungchangtang with Marshal Chiang Kai-shek as Supreme Commander. The New Fourth Army, based in Anhwei, had been formed from the Communist guerilla groups left behind in Central China, but friction developed between this and the Kuomintang forces, and in January 1941, it was attacked in South Anhwei and partly destroyed. This marked the end of the united front, and the Kuomintang re-introduced the blockade of the Liberated Areas under 18th Group Army control. These Liberated Areas were basically the provinces of Kansu, Ninghsia, Shensi, Suiyuan, Honan, Hupeh, Hopeh, Shantung, Anhwei, Kiangsu, and Jehol. Much of these areas were also under Japanese occupation of the cities, railways, and roads, but the countryside was effectively under the control of the Liberated Areas Regional Councils. The reintroduction of the blockade meant that a proportion of the Kuomintang troops were engaged in this exercise rather than * Paper delivered to a meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch on 31st May, 1977. Mr. Reynolds is head of the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Hong Kong. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1977 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n VICTORIA HARBOUR VDLVES PASSENGER FI TONG SHUI RE HORN FELT ÅD. 園 177 remittances to supplement inadequate income sources at home, for these Southern Fujianese there were generations-old connections with the Nanyang (Southeast Asia) and it was near the shipping companies that both serviced and profited by these connections that the early Fujianese residents of Hong Kong made their home. The overseas tie of the Southern Fujianese to the Nanyang, however, was badly disrupted after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and the subsequent Cold War VICTORIA PARK BRAEMAL RESERVOIR "LITTLE FUJIAN (FUKIEN)" 2s#wife #€$ 1 KEYA[]% Fujianese E 5-15% Shanghaics Hifil 14-24% Shangherese | YA MI Fig. 1 North Point Blocks by % of Fujianese and Shanghaiese3 115 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 32 RICHARD J. SMITH practice of "interchangeable commanders"--a striking departure from the personalistic command structure of yung-ying armies such as Chou's. Moreover, the Tientsin academy provided a large pool of new talent for modernizing purposes, men whose "careers were grounded in change" and whose "qualifying education and . . . prominence were owed to reform."112 Many Tientsin Military Academy graduates became instructors in other military schools established after 1895;113 several prominent engineers were produced by the academy;114 and of course many of the most famous political and military leaders of the early Republic—including Tuan Ch'i-jui, Feng Juo-chang, Wang Shih-chen, Ts'ao K'un, Chang Huai-chih and many others—were Tientsin Military Academy graduates. In short, significant changes in Chinese military education took place prior to 1895, despite the absence of meaningful reform in either the civil or military examinations and numerous other problems.116 Nonetheless, it took the successive humiliations of the Sino-Japanese War, the "Scramble for Concessions," and the Boxer fiasco to prompt the Ch'ing dynasty into fundamental military reform,117 And even then, "national" policies were often implemented piecemeal at the local level.118 In retrospect, it seems evident that the obstacles to meaningful reform in Chinese military education were less ideological than institutional. To be certain, Confucian critics of new-style training programs could always be found, especially after the establishment of modern military academies in China during the 1880's.120 But the throne's lack of enthusiasm for military reform along Western lines certainly cannot be explained in terms of ideology alone. In the first place, it must be remembered that little if anything in the way of Confucian learning had ever been expected of regular Ch'ing military officers. Paradoxically, it was in the innovative yung-ying armies, about which the throne had very mixed feelings, rather than the Green Standard and Banner forces of the empire, that the inculcation of Confucian virtues received special stress. Moreover, officials such as Chang Chih-tung, and even the pragmatic Li Hung-chang, emphasized the importance of Confucian education not only in their own "personal" armies but also in their new-style military academies.12 Surely, the subordinate officers of Chang and Li were no less "Confucian" than their Green Standard and Banner counterparts. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 MILITARY EDUCATION IN CHINA, 1842-1895 100 Powell, 56-59; Peake, 20-22; Wang, Huai-ch'in, 363; etc. 39 101 Wang Chia-chien, "Pei-yang wu-pei hsüeh-tang," 1, 8; Powell, 235-236. 102 Chinese Times, April 30, 1887; Ayers, 118. 103 See Ernest Young, "Nationalism, Reform and Republican Revolution," in James Crowley, ed., Modern East Asia: Essays in Interpretation (New York, etc., 1971), 160-162; Yoshihiro Hatano, "The New Armies,” in Mary Wright, ed., China in Revolution (New Haven and London, 1968), and Powell, passim. 104 For abundant documentation on the dilution of traditional values and loyalties at the Tientsin Military Academy, see Wang, "Pei-yang wu-pei hsüeh-tang," 9, 11-12, 19-20, and notes, Li Hung-chang had pointed out the need to study the Classics and History "in order to strengthen the root," but Wang claims that the students tended to adopt a foreign-worship mentality, ignored China's legendary heroes, and (in the words of a contemporary critic) neither discussed the virtues of integrity (chih) and duty (i), nor knew of honesty (lien) and shame (ch'ih). Cf. Chou Sheng-ch'uan's army song (Sheng-chün hsün-yung ko), CWCK, "supplement," 1: 50-52b. 105 The evidence, contained in CWCK, remains to be gathered systematically, but even a brief glance at Chou's nien-p'u and his extensive writings suggests these conflicts. 106 CWCK, 1.4: 30-47b, esp. 33b and 37. 107 Ibid., 1.1: 20a-b; 1.1.1: 10a-b; 1.1.2: 15b, 19b-20, 23b (on bullets and rations), 40b-41; etc. 108 CWCK, "introductory chuan (Chou's nien-p'u)" 31b-56 passim. Ironically, after Chou's death, the Sheng-chün was employed in work on the grounds of the Tientsin Military Academy. Chinese Times, May 28, 1887. 109 For Chou's concern with positive attitudes toward the military, see CWCK, "supplement," 1: 20b-21, 22b-23, 50-52b. For Chou's esteem for civil status, see CWCK, "introductory chuan," 57n. Cf. sources cited in note 72. 110 These tensions were not, of course, fully resolved — but neither were such tensions in the West. See Barnett, "The Education of Military Elites," esp. 21, 27, etc. On the emphasis on technical education at the Tientsin Military Academy, see the sources cited in note 104. 111 Ernest Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k'ai (Ann Arbor, 1977), 58-59. 112 Ibid., 56. 113 Powell, 160. 114 Wang, "Pei-yang wu-pei hsüeh-tang," 8; Biggerstaff, 63. 115 Young, Yuan Shih-k'ai, 56-64; Powell, 79-81; Jerome Ch'en, "Defining Chinese Warlords and Their Factions," Bulletin of the London School of Oriental and African Studies, 31.3 (1966), and especially Wang, "Pei-yang wu-pei hsüeh-tang," 12-19, which discusses the careers of over 60 individuals from the academy. Young, 56, notes that of thirty "leading military participants" singled out by Liu Feng-han for "their subsequent prominence in the early republic," twenty-five had attended the Tientsin Military Academy before joining Yuan Shih-k'ai at Hsiao-chan (in the period 1895-1899). See Liu Feng-han, Hsin-chien lu-chün, 113-125. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 88 EUGENE COOPER it were triggered initially by a lockout at a plastic flowers factory in Kowloon and fanned by some arbitrary police action taken against demonstrating workers and students. Anti-colonial demonstrations occurred and anti-British sentiment ran high, fueled by stepped up anti-imperialist propaganda radiating from the mainland then in the midst of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. While most carved wood furniture factory and shop proprietors were unlikely targets for anti-imperialist attack, the Woodwork Carvers' Union seems to have taken advantage of the widespread unrest to extract a wage increase from the Merchants' Association at the time. One school of thought (with its locus in the Far Eastern Economic Review) maintains that the Peking government was dissatisfied with its compatriots' handling of the 1967 disturbances and called a halt thereafter to revolutionary activity in the Crown Colony. While these claims are difficult to substantiate with any certainty, it is widely admitted in the Hong Kong pro-communist community that Peking was desirous of a stable situation in post-1967 Hong Kong so that it could actively pursue, from its viewpoint, more pressing diplomatic questions like its entry into the United Nations and the liberation of Taiwan. "Hong Kong is a historical problem that will be solved at the appropriate time" goes the refrain. The Hong Kong "problem" does not have the status of a "principle contradiction" for the People's Republic. Hong Kong continues to remain valuable to the Communist government in terms of the significant amounts of foreign exchange which China earns by marketing its products in and through the port, and also as a place in which trade and diplomatic contacts are still pursued. While such functions may decline as China continues to open up diplomatically and economically, they are still a factor in Hong Kong's historical viability as a colony. In any event, in the post-1967 period, industrial peace in Hong Kong was the common desire of the British colonial government and the communist government in Peking. This led to the assumption on the part of the communist Federation of Trade Unions of some rather odd poses in the local adaptation of Mao Tse-tung thought to the Hong Kong scene. This was particularly so in so far as the implementation of Mao's thought has entailed a disciplined adherence to a policy of delayed ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 90 EUGENE COOPER also keeps them closely informed of events on the Mainland. Membership in an affiliated union may also facilitate return trips to one's native village in China during New Years and at other times as well, since the Federation provides a link up with Chinese representatives and bureaucracy in Hong Kong. The contradiction between the interest of the Hong Kong worker in his own material well being, and the requirement that he subordinate his immediate interests to the long run national interests of Peking, has surely not made life easy for the constituent unions of the pro-communist Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions in their organizing efforts in the post-war Hong Kong setting. Nevertheless, in more recent years, as Peking pursued the resolution of what it took to be "principle contradictions", namely admission to the U.N. and the liberation of Taiwan, developments in Hong Kong tended to bear out the appropriateness of their strategy. In 1971, when the Peking government displaced the Taiwan government as the sole legitimate representative of the Chinese people at the United Nations, the political influence that Peking was able to exercise in the political balance of Hong Kong grew enormously at the expense of the Nationalists. Organs of Peking power like the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions gained an enormous legitimacy in the new aura that came to surround the Peking government. Allegiance to the People's Republic, long an obstacle to effective organizing among Hong Kong's largely political-refugee population, became somewhat more of an asset for groups like the Woodwork Carvers' Union. 1971 marked a turning point in the fortunes of their organizing. Indeed one could argue that the relegation of the "Hong Kong problem" to the status of a secondary contradiction made a great deal of sense, as the political balance tipped noticeably in favor of the Peking government after 1971 with the resolution of a higher order contradiction, i.e. the seating of the Peking government at the U.N. These developments have helped the Woodwork Carvers' Union immeasurably in its attempt to organize an increasingly proletarianized work force according to principles consistent with Maoist ideology, although the apparent contradiction between genuinely class oriented, as opposed to nation oriented, loyalties and its peculiar configuration in Hong Kong remains. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 POLITICIZATION OF CHINESE CRAFT ORGANIZATION 91 The policy of the People's Republic with respect to Hong Kong residents continues to involve encouraging individual Chinese to declare the People's Republic of China as the object of their national loyalty, of their "patriotism", and a steady stream of news concerning the accomplishments of the People's Republic is filtered down through the Federation and other organs of Peking bureaucracy designed to instill pride in the socialist motherland. This nationalist component of Chinese policy toward Hong Kong is manifest in preferential treatment accorded China's "national" as opposed to "compradore" bourgeoisie in Hong Kong. The pro-Peking "patriotic" community in Hong Kong includes some rather wealthy businessmen who deal in Chinese commodities either exclusively, or in part, or who rely on Communist China for raw materials or equipment for their businesses. This can sometimes lead to the seemingly bizarre configuration of a pro-Peking employers' association negotiating with a pro-Taipei union of workers over wage demands, as was the case in the ivory carving industry. In any event, a somewhat less bizarre array of forces obtained in the carved furniture industry, with the left wing Woodwork Carvers' Union emerging in the 1970's in the aura of a legitimized People's Republic as the dominant voice of the workers in the carved furniture industry. While many of the union's pre-1971 efforts may have fallen on deaf ears, the international recognition of communist China, the increasing concentration of capital and increasingly proletarianized production, and the decreasing significance of place of origin have helped make the proletarian message of the Woodwork Carvers' Union more acceptable to its potential constituents on the one hand, and have provided a context conducive to the creative transformation of traditional craft practice and organizational structure on the other. The union is more than simply the object of the larger forces, and its activities have had an important contribution to make in its emergence as the dominant force in the industry. These activities may be grouped into two not quite mutually exclusive categories: 1. activity designed to promote proletarian/pro-Peking consciousness and workers' welfare 2. conscious adaptation and incorporation of traditional craft practice and guild-like institutions into its organizational repertoire, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 POLITICIZATION OF CHINESE CRAFT ORGANIZATION 99 171). The Woodwork Carvers' Union preserves the form of these presentations, substituting an updated political content more consistent with its pro-communist ideology. Indeed, apart from the infusion of such political themes into the proceedings of the Woodwork Carvers' Union yearly meeting, one would be hard pressed to distinguish it from the guild meetings of early twentieth century Chinese guilds as described by Gamble. Clearly the Woodwork Carvers' Union has seen fit to make use of this traditional niche in the social structure of craft production to promote a somewhat different collection of values. The second occasion, which highlights how gracefully the union has stepped into the traditional milieux of craft production, is its observance of the lunar calendar birthday of the founder of the carpentry and woodcarving crafts, Lupan. On this day the industry still closes down and signs are posted on factory doors explaining the reason. The Woodwork Carvers' Union, being of communist persuasion, does not go in big for such "feudal" customs as temple worship or offerings to Lupan, although a Lupan temple does exist on Hong Kong island, maintained in part from contributions from unions in other construction trades, and in small measure by the Merchants Association in the art carved furniture industry. The members of the Woodwork Carvers' Union take the occasion of their founder's birthday to enjoy themselves in more secular fashion. In 1973 the union organized a picnic and hired a boat to Cheung Chau (one of the outlying islands which together with Hong Kong island, Kowloon and the New Territories make up the Crown Colony of Hong Kong) where a day was spent swimming, hiking, playing basketball and engaging in other kinds of secular sport. Many tables of mah jong were in evidence. Wives and kids were in abundance. The boatride back was spent with organized games for the kids; anagrams of Chinese characters to be arranged into pro-communist slogans; answering riddles that implied the names of Chinese leaders, cities, etc.; guessing the number of plums in a bag; with small prizes being awarded to the winners. The union makes the traditional observation of the founder's birthday its own, but it does so very much on its own terms, and the celebration is governed in practice, generally speaking, by an ideology consistent with support of the People's Republic of China. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 VILLAGE GOVERNMENT IN CHINA, 1933 from the right to own property. 119 A recognition of these evils by modern, educated Chinese has led to a vigorous and disruptive attack upon the whole traditional system. Sun Yat-sen recognized these evils, and the new civil code of the Republic aims to break the grip of the family system by altering its legal basis.1 II An interesting outcome of this family unity is the theory of mutual responsibility. This theory is of the utmost importance both in family life and in village government, of which it is a cornerstone in legal theory and in practice. The family is collectively and directly responsible for the crimes of each member. Indeed, one of the postulates of Chinese law seems to have been this principle.2 Under the Ch'ing dynasty punishment for the crimes committed by an individual might sometimes be visited upon any or all the members of his family, even to the extent of death for the whole group in serious cases.3 In customary practice this phenomenon of mutual responsibility is very active. The deeds of each member of the family are the intimate concern of all. Strong pressure will be brought to bear upon an individual to prevent or to correct breaches which might impair the reputation of the family or entangle it in quarrels and law suits. Kulp, in his study of Familism in South China, finds that all offenses except failure to pay taxes are in reality against the family, and are subject to judgment in the first place by the family and its leaders. The extreme inquisitiveness of the typical Chinese villager is but one aspect of this feeling of responsibility for all that 1 China. National Government; The Civil Code of the Republic of China. Vol. II, p. vii. For particular examples see below p. 14, 15. 2 On this point see: Alabaster, Ernest; Notes and Commentaries on Chinese Criminal Law, p. lxx-lxxii, 151, 152, 193-196. On the evils of mutual responsibility, from the legal point of view, ibid., p. lxxi-lxxii, 3 Ta Ch'ing Lu Li, (****), (Sixth Division: Criminal Law, Book I, Sec. 254) translated by Staunton, George T.; Ta Tsing Leu Lee, Being the Fundamental Laws, and a Selection from the Supplementary Statutes of the Penal Code of China, p. 269-270. See also: Alabaster; op. cit., p. lxvi, 466-467; Boulais, Guy; Manuel du Code Chinois, p. 464-466. 4 Kulp, Daniel Harrison; Country Life in South China, Vol. I: Phenix Village, p. XXVIII. (This work will hereafter be referred to as Phenix Village.) Page 135 Page 136 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 VILLAGE GOVERNMENT IN CHINA, 1933 121 The new civil code, while it gives no such specific order for succession, does not vary greatly from the traditional system. The Chia-chang is supposed to be elected from among the body of relatives living in the common household. But if there is no such election, the position "shall fall upon the person who is highest in rank (of relationship) or where ranks are equal, on the person who is senior in age." Except in providing for an election there is nothing new here. The Chia-chang is the general manager of the family. His authority is of several sorts: administrative and financial, moral, ethical and religious. In the first field his responsibilities cover funds brought in by all members of the group, for it is a distinctive feature of familism in China that incomes are pooled and expenditures made with reference to the needs of the entire family. Lands and properties are owned in his name, but this is only a matter of legal convenience. The property belongs to the family as long as the group holds together, and the Chia-chang's possession is merely a stewardship. He has received the property from his forefathers, and after his death it will remain with the family under a succession of managers. In the disciplinary field the Chia-chang enjoys great powers, both by law and by custom, over the members of his direct family.2 This seems to have extended, in practice, to the right of taking the life of a disobedient child.3 At least in some circumstances such a crime would pass unpunished. Certainly in the fields of correction and discipline the law accords him great authority, as does customary practice. The new civil code of the Republic attempts to decrease the disciplinary authority of parents over their children, but does so only negatively by referring only to the "right and duty of parents to protect, educate and maintain their children.”4 1 China. National Government; op. cit., p. 43, art. 1124. 2 On the legal aspects see Alabaster; op. cit., p. 153-158, 186, 243-244. It should be noted that the rights of a husband over his wife are by no means as great as those over his children. Ibid., p. 186-189. 3 Su disputes the legality of this, and quotes sources from law as proof. Op. cit., p. 77. On the other hand, for circumstances in which it seems to be allowed, see Staunton; op. cit., (Ta Ch'ing Li Li, Sixth Division, Book III, sec. 319.) p. 348-349; Alabaster; op. cit., p. 155-157. 4 China. National Government; op. cit., p. 27-32, articles 1059-1090. Specifically, p. 31, art. 1084. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 VILLAGE GOVERNMENT IN CHINA, 1933 153 crimes or disturbances in the village. Williams believes that this system of mutual and integrated responsibility does tend to check serious offenses, but he adds that if a general sentiment opposes a government regulation the probability is that neighbors would shield rather than expose one another.1 IV There are two sides to the relations between the village and the government. The relations of the government toward the village have been discussed; what of the attitude of the village toward the government? The characteristic attitude is one of avoidance. It is hard to say what has been responsible for this vigorous shunning of any actual contact with the central government. The phenomenon may have arisen only during the corrupt last century of the Manchu dynasty, and notice of this by Westerners may be the only basis of the opinion. For the general impression one receives of the Chinese government throughout its history is certainly not of tyranny and ruthless oppression, even if the economic history of the people shows their condition frequently to have been wretched. It is true that rebellions were common and often started among the people themselves, but this cannot be considered as the normal relationship between the two. The immediate causes for the avoidance of government by the people during the Ch'ing dynasty (which is the only period we can safely discuss) may have been the generally corrupt nature of the Hsien government. Whether the magistrate were good or evil did not necessarily affect the government which the people felt. Their relations were almost entirely with a group of professional underlings, "rats under the altar", as they are called, who were fixed to the Yamen irrespective of the triannual change of magistrate. These individuals seem to have been grasping and corrupt to the extreme, 1 Williams, Edward T.; China Yesterday and Today, p. 122. 2 A statement with regard to the corruption of the Ch'ing government, while it seems perfectly safe, needs to be made with caution considering that most of our information comes from two highly prejudiced sources. Most foreigners writing at the time were eager to have extraterritoriality enforced by their government, and naturally sought to paint a black picture of conditions. Secondly, most of the Chinese who have written in Western languages of conditions at that time are spokesmen of the Republic, and take every opportunity to stress the evils of the Ch'ing dynasty. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 VILLAGE GOVERNMENT IN CHINA, 1933 155 judged according to the intrinsic moral value which it has, measured by the supposedly-known natural law. Government measures are therefore obeyed, in so far as they correspond with this popular sense of rightness, not merely because it is positive law. A partial explanation of the situation may also be found in the philosophy of Taoism, which stresses an indifference to government. Several factors make this hypothesis seem correct. Taoism is strongest in rural districts; in fact, it arose out of the conditions of rural life. Its doctrines, moreover, apply to the life of the village more than do those of Confucianism, which better fit the urban and ruling classes. One of the central doctrines of Taoism is Wu Wei (§) “inaction”, and one of its precepts is that the best government is no government. But such a force is entirely unmeasurable, and the hypothesis can only be advanced for what it is worth.2 Times occur, it is true, when Hsien government becomes intolerable to the people. In such cases, the first impulse with the Chinese villager is not, as with us, to elect representatives to go as a delegation to make complaint. Rather, the whole village is liable to rise up to a man, armed with what weapons and implements are at hand, and to descend upon the Yamen to demand redress. Demonstrations of this sort are quite embarrassing to the magistrate, for if wind is gotten of them by his superiors, he is liable to be heavily punished. This direct method of self-assertion on the part of the people is therefore often quite effective. These two attitudes, on the one hand a positive avoidance, and on the other a profound indifference to the central government, are basic in the relations of the people toward any government greater than their own village polity. And it is these two attitudes, inherited from the Ch'ing dynasty, which will be among the chief obstacles to any form of democratic and representative government which the Republic may attempt to establish. V As a conclusion to this chapter, it seems appropriate to outline the most recent developments in rural government under the Republic, and to indicate something of what the future may bring. 1 Duyvendak, J. J. L.; The Book of Lord Shang, p. 129-130. 2 For this idea, the writer is indebted to Dr. D. W. Lyon, in a conversation on Dec. 12, 1932. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 VILLAGE GOVERNMENT IN CHINA, 1933 159 attempts to force a new type of political organization in rural districts. As a matter of fact, Ching Ho was probably a more fertile ground for innovations than a typical rural area would be. How slow the process of change and development will be, therefore, is not hard to guess. The study of Ching Ho seems to indicate that when changes come they will be successful only when they are built upon the already established system, and that innovations will not succeed well when the changes are too radical, or when entirely new organizations are introduced in an attempt to displace traditional ones. The most hopeful sign in the whole scheme of reform is the interest which the National Government, the Kuomintang and other organizations have taken in the training and education of the rural citizenry. Training schools for rural leaders, and lecture bureaus for the teaching of citizenship are part of the plan of both the government and the party. The Mass Education Movement likewise is strongly marked by the desire not only to give the common people the rudiments of education, especially in the written character, but also to make them effective citizens for a democratic state. The textbooks used by the movement emphasize good citizenship, and the leaders of the movement seem to realize, what the leaders of the Kuomintang party, at least, do not seem to have grasped, that in the system of village government of the traditional sort are to be found all the essentials for a successful form of democratic, representative government. As the leader of the movement reports, "The main work of the Movement in the field of training citizens is the extension of the noble moral practices prevailing in the clan and the family unit, and of the political institutions operating for centuries in the 'village republic', to the larger units of the district community and the nation, so that there may be active and intelligent participation on the part of the people in national and international issues." The task of training between three and four hundred millions of people in the duties of citizenship, which today faces the leaders of China, is a stupendous and appalling one. But without this foundation of an educated citizenry no truly representative demo- 1 Yen, James Y. C.; New Citizens for China, p. 14. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 VILLAGE GOVERNMENT IN CHINA, 1933 165 any contingency of administration which faced the small and self-contained villages of the rural districts in which the great mass of the Chinese people dwelt. Author's note: On rereading this effort of an aspiring young Sinologue in Peking some 45 years ago, the author realizes how quaint it must seem today for the "state of the art" is far advanced since then, with a proliferation of on-the-ground studies of Chinese rural life done by sociologists and social anthropologists in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They provide concrete information on village governance richer than all one could find in 1933, C.M.W., 15 October 1979. BIBLIOGRAPHY I. WORKS CITED IN THIS PAPER. Addison, James T.; Chinese Ancestor Worship: a Study of its Meaning and its Relations with Christianity. No place, Chung Hua Shen Kung Hui, 1925. Alabaster, Ernest; Notes and Commentaries on Chinese Criminal Law and Cognate Topics, London, Luzac, 1899, Bazin; "Recherches sur les Institutions Administratives et Municipales de la Chine" (Journal Asiatique. 5th Series, vol. 3, 1854, p. 6-66; vol. 4, 1854, p. 249-348), (The two papers are differentiated by the Roman numerals I and II.) Bishop, Carl W. Man from the Farthest Past. New York Smithsonian Institution, 1930. (Smithsonian Scientific Series, vol. 7.) Bishop, C. W.; "Prefatory Note on the Worship of Earth in Ancient China." (Excavation of a West Han Site. Shanghai, no pub., 1932, p. 1-20.) Bishop, Carl W.; "The Rise of Civilization in China with Reference to its Geographical Aspects" (Geographical Review, Oct. 1932, p. 617-631.) Boulais, Guy; Manuel du Code Chinois. Shanghai, Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1924. (Variétés Sinologiques 55.) Buck, John L.; Chinese Farm Economy; a Study of 2866 Farms in Seventeen Localities and Seven Provinces in China. Shanghai, Commercial Press, 1930. Chen Huan-chang; The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School, 2 vols. New York, Columbia, 1911. China National Government. The Civil Code of the Republic of China. Translated into English by Hsia, Ching-lin: Chow, James L. E.; Chang, Yukon, 2 vols. Shanghai, Kelly and Walsh, 1930-31. vol. 2. China Year Book 1932. (Woodhead, H. G. W. Ed.) Shanghai, North-China, 1932. Chinese Repository. See: "Clanship Among the Chinese." ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 VILLAGE GOVERNMENT IN CHINA, 1933 171 Practical Application of the Theories of Village Government (**). Peiping, Fu Wen Chai Book Dealers (EMG). 實施 $0.80. Shansi Village Government Series (††*). Shansi Rural Government Bureau (4&H¤Å). Shao Yuan-ch'ung (***); Plans for Local Government During the Period of Political Tutelage (*********). Shanghai, Min Chih Book Store (E4A§). $0.10. Sun Hung-ych (***); Local Self-Government During the Period of Tutelage (‡$45 107 § 1). Shanghai, Kuang Yi Book Store (上海廣益書局), 1929. Ts'ai Ping-chang (*); New Village Government (#1). Shanghai, Yu Yi Book Store (EAA#5). Wang Tao (1); Historical Development of the Chinese System of Local Government (+E***£<*). Peiping, Board of Internal Affairs (46*A**), 1918. Wang Tsung-p'ei (1##); Chinese Rural Assemblies (+@<"%#"). Shanghai, Li Ming Book Store (±***$6). $1.40. What Village Elders Should Know (#±NM). Peiping, Ching Chao Yin Kung Shu (北京,京兆尹公署), 1925. Yang K'ai-tao (M); Policies of Village Governments (*#**). Shanghai, The World Book Company (L**H), 1930, $0.60. Rural Sociology (£#*#*). Shanghai, The World Book Company (###5), 1930. $0.60. Village Leadership (★ #† 41). Shanghai, The World Book Company (#5), 1930. $0.60. Village Organization (AH). Shanghai, The World Book Company (*****), 1930. $0.60. Village Self-Government (B). Shanghai, The World Book Company (****), 1930. $0.60. Yin Chung-ts'ai (*#*); General Discussions on Village Government (†† *****). Hunan, Sha Ni Chih Book Store (V£%#4). $2.50. Lectures on the Study of Village Government (#*#A). Shanghai, Ta Chung Book Store (#5). $1.80. The Study of Village Government (###). Shanghai, Ta Chung Book Store (£*£†#5). II. LAWS (**) Hu Hsing-chih (#42); Most Recent Laws for District, Village and Hamlet Local Self-Government (A*#*). Shanghai, Hsin Hsueh Hui Shê (1*****). Laws and Privileges of Village Government (###). Central Rural Government Research Bureau (★★#*#✯). Laws for Local Self-Government Now in Force in the Republic of China (P*AMÚGE* •**^ [*1]). Shanghai, The Commercial Press (*$$Y$*), 1922. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1979 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938 180 JULIAN F. PAS by nearly 7,500 monks and nuns.” (A study published in 1971 says that between 40 and 46 percent of Taiwan's population affiliated themselves with Buddhism.)6 As usually these statistics have to be handled with care and as the word "Taoist" has become a "source of perplexity", so are the words "Buddhism" and “Buddhists” often used in a very unorthodox manner. Buddhism is most easily to be recognized as such in the monastic institutions: Buddhist temples, monasteries and pagodas (sometimes built as storage places for urns or so-called "bone-temples") are clearly distinct from all other temples and shrines with some exceptions. Monks and nuns are living a celibate life; most of them are engaged in making a living by performing rituals for the dead, either at private homes (funeral rites) or at their own temple. Apparently very few are practicing ch'an-meditation. Some informants told me that there is no exclusive ch'an-center in the whole of Taiwan. An important distinction seems to be necessary when discussing Buddhism in Taiwan: clerical vs. lay Buddhism. The former is related to the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China and is well organized. Visually it is very flourishing with many recent constructions of new temples. But, according to serious lay Buddhists, this whole movement is rather external: it emphasizes superficial rituals and often caters to the needs of the folk religion. An example is the performance of p'u-tu rituals (rites of ‘universal salvation') now almost identified with folk religion and equally performed by Taoist priests. Lay Buddhism, on the other hand, is a smaller movement but makes great efforts to deepen the understanding of the orthodox principles of Buddhism; instead of being devotional, it tends to be more philosophical. It attracts a great number of university students: each campus in Taiwan has a local Buddhist association with regular study and discussion sessions. Some important centers of clerical Buddhism are: Kaohsiung, Fo-kuang shan, and Yang-ming-shan; Institute of Buddhist Studies (established in 1965 by the Institute of Chinese Culture). A very active center of lay-Buddhism is located in Tai-chung directed by a 90-year-old lay-Buddhist, Li Ping-nan. These two types of Buddhism try in different degrees to dissociate themselves from the folk-religion and should therefore be seen as a distinct religious system. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1979 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938 190 JULIAN F. PAS be followed. In other words, for the average Chinese, religion is a socially important value system to make for a smooth functioning of human relationships as much as it is a method to obtain divine favours to increase the effectiveness of human efforts toward the realization of a happy life. END-NOTES 1 This paper was first presented at the joint panel of the CASA and the CSSR on Chinese Religion at the Conference of the Learned Societies in Saskatoon, May 1979. 2 Compare the five-volume work written by J. J. M. de Groot: The Religious System of China; although it is mainly based on his field work done in Amoy, it is considered to be a standard work on Chinese religion in general. 3 See P. C. Baity, Religion in a Chinese Town (Asian Folklore and Social Life Monographs, no. 64), Taipei: The Orient Cultural Service, 1975. (See my review article pp. of this issue). 4 See various ceremonial and memorial booklets issued by the Municipal Government of Taipei, Tainan and Taichung, e.g., Ta-ch'eng chih-sheng hsien-shih K'ung-tzu shih-tsun chien-shuo, Taipei, 1974, Ta-ch'eng chih-sheng hsien-shih K'ung-tzu shih-tsun chien-chieh (Memorial Service for Confucius on his Birthday), Taichung, 1977. 5 See Y. Raguin, S.J., "Buddhism in Taiwan", pp. 179-185 in H. Dumoulin, ed. Buddhism in the Modern World, London, New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1976. 6 Questions and Answers about the Republic of China (Taipei: Chung-hua Information Service, 1978), p. 17. 7 W. L. Grichting, The Value System in Taiwan 1970: A Preliminary Report. Taipei, 1971. (Quoted by Y. Raguin). 8 See for example Taiwan Tzu-miao ch'uan-chi, Ed. by Wang I-han, Taichung Luan-yu Journal Society, 1977. Lists of local temples issued by municipal governments follow the same pattern. However, the more scholarly but antiquated list published in the Taiwan Gazetteer and adopted by Lin Heng-tao divides the temples into three main groups: Taoist, Buddhist, folk-religion (t'ung-su). 9 See Lin Heng-tao, Taiwan Szu-miao Ta-ch'uan, Taipei: Ch'ing-wen Publishing Company, 1974. 10 See M. Saso "The Taoist Tradition in Taiwan", China Quarterly No. 41 (1970), 83-102. 11 M. Saso, "Red-Head and Black-Head: the Classification of the Taoists of Taiwan according to the Documents of the 61st Heavenly Master," Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica (Taipei), 30 (1970). 12 See H. Welch, "The Chang T'ien-shih and Taoism in China", Journal of the Oriental Society 4 (1957-58), 188-212. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1980 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207 NOTES AND QUERIES 165 Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and other Western-language books from the former Haiguang tushuguan. In the 1950s catalogs were published of certain holdings in some of the constituent libraries.* With over 6.7 million volumes, subscriptions to 5,000 foreign journals (predominantly in the natural sciences), and an estimated daily clientele of 3,000 readers, the library operates several specialized branches in various parts of the city. Its central facility, located in the former administrative building of the Shanghai race track, is maintained primarily to serve research needs. [This extract is taken from Frederic Wakeman Jr's Ming and Qing historical studies in the People's Republic of China. Berkeley, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. 1980] * Xujiahui cangshulou suocang difangzhi mulu chubian [First list compiled of books held in the Xujiahui Repository] (n.p., 1957); Shanghai tushuguan cang qian Haiguang tushuguan shumu [Catalog of books from the former Haiguang Library now held in the Shanghai Library], 2 vols. (n.p., 1959); Qian Yazhou Wenhui tushuguan tushu mulu [Library catalog of the former Asia Literary Association], 2 vols. (n.p., 1955). ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1981 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m convey his apologies for the delay in getting the 1980 issue out, which has been due to considerable pressure of work in his public life and a recent transfer to a new job. Dr. Hayes worked as our editor for over fourteen years and this is an appropriate point, perhaps, for me to pause for a presentation we wish to make to him on behalf of the Society for his many efforts on our behalf. Dr. Hayes, who is an historian of Hong Kong Chinese society, is also a keen follower of archeological progress in the China field. We thought therefore it would be appropriate to present him with this illustrated account of The Great Bronze Age of China, which was based on an exhibition from the People's Republic held in the U.S.A. in 1980-81. The 1980 Journal will probably be the last to be printed under the personal supervision of Mr. Y.F. Lam of Ye Olde Printerie. Mr. Lam has been a member of the Society for many years also. I would like to take this opportunity of extending our warmest thanks to Mr. Lam, who is now semi-retired, for his patience and kind advice in all matters of printing. They have contributed so much to the smooth production of the Journal and our other occasional publications. Photographic Survey I turn now to the photographic survey. The Council is again calling for volunteers to continue the work connected with this survey which began in the early 'seventies and has been mainly in the competent hands of Messrs. Tony Rydings and Ian Diamond. The object of the survey has been to compile a photographic record of Hong Kong's street scenes - with its people and variety of occupations -- and Hong Kong buildings. The local scene is changing so rapidly that we felt we should try to capture a visual impression of the city and rural areas, in their older more traditional aspects particularly, before all is swept away. The object is not just to take numerous photographs but to compile a fully documented visual record in which every photograph is dated, each photographer's name noted, and every building, architectural feature and so forth recorded, is identified. Briefly this has meant the compiling of schedules of sites to be photographed, followed by expeditions to carry out the work, and finally the identification and cataloguing of the results. Our appeal is now urgent. Tony Rydings and Ian Diamond have carried the main burden for many years and now feel, I think quite justifiably, that it is time others came forward to do the main work. If you want this work to continue, it is up to you to come forward and ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1981 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m 22 STEPHEN MORRIS ship. He may resist for a time and continue to be ill, or the spirit, in order to make his point doubly clear, may not reveal his intentions at a simple domestic caring for the sick ceremony; and so the patient goes on being ill. But sooner or later he has to undertake the next curing ceremony called escorting the spirits. This ceremony lasts three nights, and is a considerably more elaborate and expensive affair than a simple caring for the sick; and a household is unwilling to go to the expense unless it is very necessary. In its essentials, however, the procedures are the same as in the caring for the sick, except that in three nights a great many more spirits can be summoned to advise and help than can be done in one night, especially if more than one shaman is employed. In most cases the curing of an illness stops at an escorting of the spirits ceremony. If, however, the condition is serious or persistent, or if the attacking spirit really means to establish a permanent relationship of friendship with the patient and so turn him into a shaman, then the sick person has to go on to the third and the last ceremony, the cradling ceremony. But before doing that, a man will do everything else he can to cure himself because the ritual is expensive, and, as the Melanau say, 'it is the end of our medicine'. If it fails there is no more to do but die. Indeed in the two previous ceremonies spirits may well have advised him to try more Malay herbal medicine, to see what a Chinese doctor can do, or even go to one of the European dressing stations, which are not unlike the barefoot doctors of the Republic of China, and which in Malaya and Sarawak have existed for seventy or eighty years, But to return to the cradling ceremony. It lasts five days and nights and can go on for seven or nine. Except for the annual cleansing of the village itself, a cradling ceremony is the most festive occasion on which humans and spirits meet. It is called 'cradling' because the patient is placed on a swing made of rattan rope hung from the rafters of the house, and is swung backwards and forwards to be possessed by the spirit who is attacking him and who wants him for a friend. If this is the cause of the illness the fact that the patient is willing to sit on the swing is a sign that he has surrendered and is willing to accept the friendship, and even to become a practising shaman if that is what the spirit wants. Whether the spirit will insist on the patient's becoming a practitioner is an open question; for even spirits are not wholly unreasonable, and will not often insist on an aristocrat's undergoing the indignity and loss of all good manners involved in frequent possession and trance in public. Besides, to be really effective, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1981 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m 44 HUBERT SEIWERT in the political and social structure which eroded the social base of many traditional forms of religion. This is true especially for those forms which C. K. Yang called “diffused religion”, i.e. cults intimately connected with traditional social institutions. The best-known examples are the ancestor-worship whose social base was the traditional Chinese family, and the state cult which had its raison d'être in the traditional monarchy. It is convenient to name the complex process of social, economic, political and intellectual changes which took place since the last century modernization. “Modernization” could then be defined as that process which leads to the formation of a new social structure and new cultural values. “New” here only means “other than traditional”, it being assumed that it is sufficiently clear what “traditional social structure” and “traditional cultural values” in the case of China mean. This definition might appear too vague and, therefore, unsatisfactory but we have to leave it this way since any attempt to define it positively seems to be doomed to failure. For modernization is essentially an open-ended process which makes it impossible to determine what the “new” social structure and the “new” cultural values will be. We have to avoid the quasi-evolutionary assumption that the transformation into a modern society necessarily produces a Western-style industrial society. While we cannot say to which end-result the process of modernization in China will eventually lead, it is possible to name some of the elements of this process. I would like to mention only three which seem to have rather obvious consequences for traditional forms of religion: industrialization, urbanization and cultural contact. This characterization applies to Taiwan as well as to Communist China even though the degree of industrialization, urbanization and cultural contact differs widely in these two societies. It goes without saying that there are many additional elements of modernization in China, some of which are more or less confined to one of these two societies. In what follows I deal only with the Taiwanese case, primarily because I had the opportunity to do field research there. We should observe, however, that the extent of industrialization, urbanization and cultural contact since 1949 has been much greater in Taiwan than in the People's Republic. The impact of these factors on religious life has therefore been stronger, too. It is not surprising that the thoroughgoing changes in social and ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1981 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m RELIGIOUS RESPONSE TO MODERNIZATION IN TAIWAN THE CASE OF I-KUAN TAO 67 changed reality than were the old religious symbol systems. The adoption of Western science and philosophy and Western religion can be interpreted as a means of finding legitimation systems which are compatible with the new conditions created by modernization. They have the advantage of reconciling the consciousness to the reality of modern society, at least they do it better than the traditional legitimation systems. But they have one crucial shortcoming: they are not able to symbolize the Chinese cultural identity. At this point we come back to the role of traditional religions. In so far as they are traditional they express continuity and identity. But, on the other side, in so far as they are traditional they contain many elements which do not harmonize with the changed reality. However, only dead traditions are unchangeable. There are many signs that religions in Taiwan today are changing. This is obviously true of Buddhism. In the case of Taoism it is more difficult to demonstrate since recent research has put the emphasis on the revival of the Taoist tradition and not on changes in this tradition. As to popular religions, I have tried to give some hints as to what is going on. The tendency towards universalism is just one element. There are others which could not be dealt with here, and many which await further research. In any case we should be aware that traditional religions in present-day Taiwan may not just be survivals of a bygone age doomed to extinction, but living traditions which could even gain importance in the future. NOTES 1 Cf. C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967) pp 294–340 2 Cf. Chin Yao-chi, Ts'ung Ch'uan-t'ung tao hsien-tai (Taipei, 1979, third edition). 3 Of course, in the People's Republic there were other factors which made a great impact on the religious life, esp. the official anti-religious propaganda and the suppression of religious activities. Yang, op. cit., pp 363–377 • "As a result of industrial development, farm population has gradually moved to urban areas. The share of employment in agriculture decreased from 59.3 per cent in 1952 to 27.3 per cent in 1977, while that in industry increased from 14.5 per cent to 37.6 per cent in the same period." (China Yearbook 1978, p 165) ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1981 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m 68 1968).   HUBERT SEIWART Cf. Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China. (Cambridge, Mass. Cf. Y. Raguin, "Buddhismus auf Taiwan", in Buddhismus der Gegenwart, ed. by H. Dumoulin (Freiburg 1970) pp 113 – 116. a "Taoism' (by A. K. Seidel), in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, p 1042. For example, the Taoist Association of the Republic of China is run mostly by laymen who try to get rid of many of the more "vulgar" practices of religious Taoism and to restore the intellectual tradition of former times. These efforts seem not to be supported by many of the Taoist priests, possibly since they make their living by performing these practices. 10   See for example G. G. H. Dunstheimer, “Religion et magie dans le mouvement des Boxeurs”, in T’oung Pao, 47 (1959) pp 323 - 367; G. Miles, "Vegetarian Sects", in The Chinese Recorder, 33 (1902) pp 110; D. H. Porter, "Secret Sects in Shantung", in The Chinese Recorder, 17 (1886) pp 1 – 10, 64 – 73; M. Topley, "Chinese Religion and Rural Cohesion in the Nineteenth Century", in JHKBRAS 8 (1968), pp 9 - 43. 11 Cf. Wing-tsit Chan, Religioses Leben im heutigen China, (München, 1955) pp 109-156. T'ai-pei-shih 12 Such a healing-cult is treated by Wang Chih-ming Chi-lung-lu ti i-ko min-su i-sheng he t'a-ti hsin-t'u-men (unpublished B.A. thesis, National Taiwan University, Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1971) 13 An example of this is the Sheng-hsien-t’ang community in Taichung. The publications of the revelations of the mediums of this temple are distributed and read everywhere in Taiwan. 14 Some sects (e.g. Li-chiao), however, are copying Buddhist or Taoist ceremonies and dress so that it is difficult to decide whether the performers are priests or laymen. 16 Some of the "new religions” are treated in Hsiao Ching-fen, “The current situation of new religions in Taiwan", Theology and the Church, 10:2 – 3 (Tainan, 1971) pp 1 -- 28; 10 I-kuan is actually derived from a passage in the Confucian Analects (IV, 15). 17 The popular name is Ya-tan chiao. Other names are Tien Tao chiao, K'ung-tzu chiao, Ta Tao chiao, Lao-mu chiao 4. Cf. Tung Fang-yüan, Tai-wan min-chien tsung-chiao hsin-yang (Taipei 1976) p 123. 18 Tung, op. cit., p 123f. According to Su Ming-tung, T'ien-tao kai-lun (Kaohsiung, 1979) p 197, there are more than 300,000 followers of I-kuan Tao in Taiwan today. Li Shih-yü, Hsien-tsai Hua-pei mi-mi-tsung-chiao (Chengtu, 1948, repr. Taipei, 1975) p 32. 20 It seems certain, however, that the I-kuan Tao has followers outside Taiwan, esp. in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. In contrast to Taiwan, in these places the sect is not forbidden by the government and can operate openly (cf. Su Ming-tung, op. cit., p 198f). For the propaganda of the Communist government ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1981 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m THE CHINESE CHURCH, LABOUR AND ELITES AND THE MUI TSAI QUESTION IN THE 1920's 97 large number of coolies and members of local labour guilds. An unusual feature was a group of interested Chinese ladies. The Chairman, Mr. Lau, listed a number of questions that had been put by various individuals. He and Mr. Ho Fook put the following before the meeting: 1. Is it a fact that servant girls are brought up for prostitution? 2. Are servant girls slaves? 3. Are servant girls kept for the sexual purposes of their masters, who, when tired of them, sell them? 4. Has the Chinese Government passed any law to abolish the practice of keeping servant girls? 5. Can owners of servant girls ill-treat them as they please? The Chairman proceeded to comment on the questions. The first concerned purchase of girls, to be trained as prostitutes. A distinction should be made between two kinds of purchasers of girls; one bought them for domestic service, the other for prostitution. The first group are respectable people who are jealous of their good name and do not wish to be linked with those who purchase girls for prostitution. As to mui tsai being slaves, slavery does not exist in China, furthermore these girls have never been regarded as slaves by the Chinese. The speaker put forth the thesis that there are safeguards in the system to prevent the girls being sexually exploited. Parents are allowed to visit them periodically and thus would know if the child had been misused. If a master wishes to take his servant girl as concubine he must obtain the consent of his wife, the girl and her parents. If the girl had been seduced by her master and then married out, and the husband of the girl finds out her virginity has been taken by her former master, the old master would lose face before his relatives and friends, to say nothing of the views of his wife and concubines. Some masters secretly took on a servant girl as a concubine setting her up in her own establishment and later recognizing any children she bore as legal heirs. In other cases when the wife discovered what had happened, she often made it so miserable for her husband that he was forced to return the girl to her parents accompanied by a liberal bribe for silence. The only attempt of the Chinese Government to abolish the system was an effort by the Canton Commissioner of Police Chan King-wa soon after the establishment of the Republic. The girls were ordered to be handed over and were placed in a large hostel especially built for the purpose. Mr. Lau Chu-pak said the scheme failed because the ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1981 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m 126 TA ACTON + an oppressed and pariah people without social status. 20 It must be emphasized that this picture of an ethnic group with a long history was not the image of a few scholars only. It was the socially constructed reality of pre-1939 China. Even though since the mid-1950s modern scholarship and the views of the officials most directly concerned, both in the People's Republic of China21 and in Hong Kong have demolished it as though it had never been, it lingers among ordinary people and even some British officials not directly concerned. 22 23 26 From the early 1950s one British social-anthropologist, Barbara Ward, has carried out recurrent field-work on a community of the kind that used to be called 'Tanka', on the little island of Kau Sai.29 She found that with minor exceptions they were ethnically Cantonese, with similar models of the world, marriage and death practices, and religious beliefs to other Han Chinese.24 Other scholars endorsed her view; even their language, apart from an enormous, specialised fishing vocabulary was said to be virtually the same as ordinary Cantonese. In fact, Hong Kong fishing people in the larger ports can tell each others' origins partly by the fact that they speak with different, local coastal accents - for example, a 'Yeung Kong' accent.; 26 27 Official policy in Hong Kong also now sees the boat-people as an occupational, and not an ethnic group, whereas the British Government in Britain sees the Gypsies now as an ethnic and not an occupational group, both viewpoints having reversed themselves over the past thirty years. 28 It should be emphasized, though, that these perceptions of ethnicity, whatever relation they may have to the form and organisation of education (and the vigour with which it is pursued), do not usually affect the content of special educational provision by the state, for either group. Both the curriculum and language remains that of the ordinary school, and the amount of exotic cultural material included is meagre. Despite some pioneering work by voluntary projects, the Gypsy dialects are not used in the West Midlands Local Authority projects, and "Gypsy material" is limited to commercially published books featuring Gypsies, and the occasional pasted cardboard caravan. Equally, in the F.MO. schools in Hong Kong, one might find general readers, with a carefully laudatory couple of pages on the brave fishermen, or, once or twice, beautiful collections of strange fish and other marine creatures in jars, that have been contributed by parents; but the main task was to give them the same education other Chinese children received. 29 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p THE NEW CONSTITUTION AND CHINA'S EMERGING LEGAL SYSTEM IN PERSPECTIVE W. ALLYN RICKETT* On December 4, 1982, China's National People's Congress (NPC) adopted the fourth and perhaps most favourable constitution since 1949 in terms of paper guarantees for the protection of individual citizens against the arbitrary abuse of Party and state power. When coupled with such laws as the Criminal Code and Criminal Code of Procedure, promulgated in July 1979 and implemented in January 1980, there is some room for optimism that China has embarked on a path toward a stable legal system and the provision of basic guarantees for the rights of its citizens. However, given China's traditional disregard of individual rights and the almost constant state of political turmoil prevailing throughout this century, not to mention the Chinese Communists' generally negative attitude toward jural or formal law in the past, such optimism may well prove to have been undeserved. It might be worthwhile to look briefly at previous efforts on the part of the Chinese Communists to establish some semblance of a stable legal system before trying to reach any conclusions about the future. The early judicial experience of the Chinese Communists, which began with the special tribunals set up in Hunan in 1926-27 to try "bad elements," can at best be described by Mao Zedong's own words "zao de hen" [extremely crude]. It was not until November 1931 with the founding of the Chinese Soviet Republic in Jiangxi that any real attempt was made by the Communists to establish a formal body of law and judicial procedure. During this and the following Yenan period, laws were promulgated and legal institutions established, but this took place within the context of violent revolutionary struggle and the war of resistance against Japan. Moreover, judicial personnel * Professor Rickett is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 100 W. ALLYN RICKETT at the operations level consisted almost entirely of hastily trained students or political cadres, amateur in approach and guerrilla in methods of work. Thus, while the Chinese Communists may have had some intellectual appreciation of the need for formal laws and institutions, the slightest excuse in the name of survival was sufficient for a reversion to revolutionary expediency.3 Moreover, Mao Zedong himself, with his hatred for bureaucratization and emphasis on the mass line, was never willing to consider law any more than a mere tool of the revolution, to be used or rejected as changes in the political scene dictated. The basic guidelines for the new China were set out in a series of Mao's speeches and writings involving his concept of "New Democracy," culminating in his essay "On the People's Democratic Dictatorship" released on June 30, 1949 just before the founding of the new People's Republic. In this latter document in particular, Mao does not mince words; good people belonging to the four classes of the New Democracy (workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie) would be entitled to democratic rights, people belonging to the enemy classes (landlords and bureaucratic capitalists) would be subjected to repression and dictatorship. When Communist forces took over the country in 1948-49, local areas first came under military control commissions. In the cities these brought together "conferences of all circles" which formed people's governments beginning at the local level and then expanding upwards. In the countryside peasant associations formed the basic units which were to conduct land reform and form the bases for local governments. As local people's governments developed, powers were increasingly turned over to them by the military control commissions. However, the military control commissions retained power in all cases affecting security through their public security forces. The military control commissions also continued to maintain military tribunals in some areas for trying counter-revolutionary cases as late as 1954. People's Courts were formed immediately following 1949, largely in accordance with the demands of the situation and types of personnel available. In Shanghai, for example, a new People's Court was constituted by giving some 200 former judicial personnel and ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 102 W. ALLYN RICKETT Judicial Conference was held for the primary purpose of regulating local courts and local court-affiliated organizations such as neighbourhood mediation and factory-based comrade adjudication committees. By the end of 1953, the Chinese Communists announced that the period of reconstruction was coming to an end, the "New Democratic" phase of the revolution was complete, and it was time to start the building of socialism. In September 1954, a new constitution was promulgated which established a new government under a National People's Congress (NPC) and provided the basis for a judicial system, which in administering justice, was supposed to be independent, subject only to law. There was a standard list of rights for citizens including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press. Although this did not prevent a repressive campaign against intellectuals and the arrest of the writer Hu Feng in 1955, in general the 1954 Constitution set the stage for what was to be the most constructive period for legal development in China during the first 30 years of the People's Republic. Provision was made for a Ministry of Justice responsible for the general administration of justice and the training of judicial cadres, and for a procuratorate which was to review recommendations from public security offices concerning the arrest of suspected criminals, and which would also prosecute cases before the court. The procuratorate was also charged with ensuring that the activities of government complied with the law, and investigating and prosecuting serious crimes committed by state officials. Malfeasance involving officials was also investigated by a Ministry of Supervision, an organ which was later eliminated. However, the investigation of Party members was the prerogative of Party control commissions. "The Organic Law of the People's Courts," adopted by the NPC at the same time as the Constitution, spelled out in more detail some of the basic provisions of the Constitution, providing, for example, that in "adjudicating cases the people's courts shall apply the law equally to all citizens irrespective of their nationality, race, sex, occupation, social origin, religious belief, educational standard, property status, and length of residence." It also stated that cases "shall be heard in public unless otherwise provided for ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 106 W. ALLYN RICKETT 6) The Rightists maintain that the Constitution provides for judicial independence. Answer: This simply means that their work is not to be subjected to illegal interference on the part of other government organizations, people's bodies, or individuals. However, the courts are created by the country's organ of state power and ought to be responsible to it. Since the Party is the heart of the leadership of the state and the people's courts are only one of its organizations, naturally the courts cannot be independent of the Party. 7) The Rightists say the courts are to administer law, not policy, Answer: This is wrong because political policy is the soul of law, and law is but the formulation of policy into articles. The two are inseparable. Thus in some cases, in order to seek a correct judgment which fits the needs of the struggle of the moment, the courts should consult the Party committees because they have a better grasp of the political situation and current policy. I have gone to some length in citing Wu Defeng because his arguments present the position of China's ideological leadership throughout most of the history of the People's Republic, and, in spite of the changes that have taken place since the fall of the Gang of Four in late 1976, such arguments are by no means dead. Should China be faced with a real crisis or the present leadership be seriously threatened, these arguments could well be heard again. The Anti-Rightist Movement proved to be a disaster for China's budding judicial profession and its concern for civil rights. Legal publications dried up, and although Zhengfa yanjiu continued to be published for a while longer, its contents were limited to articles of a general propaganda nature. Judicial personnel who had been going abroad in great numbers were required to stay home, and less and less was heard of people's lawyers. The blow dealt to Chinese intellectuals and professionalism in general was of course not limited to the legal profession. Throughout the entire society there was a general ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 108 W. ALLYN RICKETT were usually removed and their activities closely controlled by whatever leftist faction happened to be in control at the moment. At this time, the procuratorate was eliminated, as had been the Ministry of Justice in 1959. One of the most important developments during this period was the expansion in the cities of so-called non-criminal sanctions, generally ranging from warnings to three years reform through labour, imposed by local mediation or residents' committees in conjunction with the local police station. The mediation of neighbourhood disputes and the handling of petty local crime and anti-social behaviour by properly supervised local institutions has been, in principle, one of the more constructive developments in China since the Revolution. However, during the Cultural Revolution a vast expansion of informal and arbitrary punishment, including beatings and long-term imprisonment or deportation to the countryside, was instituted by Red Guard and other leftist groups operating in such places as schools, factories, government organizations. These leftist groups merely charged their victims with being "rightists" and then proceeded to take any suppressive action that seemed desirable to them. Violence and factionalism reached such proportions that in September 1967 the Army was ordered to restore order, but major outbreaks continued to occur throughout 1968 and into 1969. In April 1969 the Ninth Party Congress was held, this marking the official end of the Cultural Revolution, and though some semblance of stability began to emerge thereafter, tension throughout the society continued, especially as many purged Party officials were returned to office and the split between Mao and Lin Biao intensified. During the early 1970s, the Party machinery was restored and under the leadership of Zhou En-lai the country seemed to be entering a new period of stability. However, even after the death of Lin Biao, the leadership remained divided, with the Cultural Revolution forces now being represented by what was later to be called the Gang of Four. It was not until January 1975 that the NPC met to pass a new Constitution designed to formalize the changes in China's political and social life over the past twenty years. According to the new Constitution, the People's Republic was no longer a "people's democratic state," but a "socialist state of the dictatorship of the ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 111 Work of Lawyers of the People's Republic of China” adopted by the Standing Committee of the NPC in August 1980. Their duties are to give help to government organizations, enterprises and other undertakings, social bodies, people's communes, and ordinary citizens so as to ensure the just implementation of the law, and to defend the interests of the state and the collective and legitimate rights and interests of citizens. As pointed out in an article appearing in the Beijing Review: Lawyers are state legal workers who work in legal advisory offices which provide their leadership and pay their salaries. Unlike lawyers in capitalist countries who work for their clients, lawyers in China proceed from the stand of the people and safeguard the correct implementation of the law and the legitimate rights of litigants.15 Other protections are provided by the Criminal Code and Criminal Code of Procedure: Articles 136 and 137 of the former forbid the use of torture to extract confessions and gathering a crowd for purposes of "beating, smashing, and looting," while article 32 of the latter forbids the extortion of confessions by torture or duress and the collection of evidence by threat, enticement, deceit or other illegal means. Article 35 of the Criminal Code of Procedure goes on to state that in handing down judgments stress shall be laid on the weight of the evidence, and "when there is only a statement by the accused and no other evidence available, the accused shall not be considered guilty and sentenced." The Criminal Code also attempts to deal with two serious problems of the past: Article 9 provides that the law shall not be applied retroactively, and Article 135 prescribes severe punishment for state functionaries who intentionally bring false charges against people. The Criminal Code of Procedure (Articles 43-52) further establishes detailed procedures governing arrest and detention, requiring warrants for arrests, eliminating secret arrests, and setting strict conditions and time limits under which a person may be held without a proper warrant authorized by the procuratorate. The Criminal Code is based on drafts prepared in the mid-1950s which in turn appear to have been based on the 1926 Soviet RSFSR Criminal Code. This later Code, replaced in the Soviet Union in 1958, was severely criticised in its day, and it is ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 112 W. ALLYN RICKETT unfortunate that some of its worst features have been incorporated into the Chinese Code, including the use of analogy (Article 79) and a broad classification of "counter-revolutionary offenses.” Articles 90 to 104, dealing with such offenses require the court to determine the motive for a range of acts which might or might not have as their purpose "overthrowing the political power of the dictatorship of the proletariat." For example, Article 102 stipulates that "using counter-revolutionary slogans, leaflets or other means to spread propaganda inciting the overthrow of the political power of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist system" is to be punished by a fixed-term imprisonment, detention, surveillance, or deprivation of political rights for not less than five years. Since the classification of a presumed offense as counter-revolutionary then depends on a subjective interpretation of motive in this type of case, it is difficult to know when the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech and press become counter-revolutionary. It is understandable that since this is their first attempt to produce a general criminal code, the compilers were reluctant to give up the useful tool of analogy to cover any gaps in the law that might appear later on. The drafters of the Code were, however, not oblivious to the dangers inherent in the application of analogy and therefore stipulated that its use had to have the approval of a Higher People's Court. The articles dealing with counter-revolution are a far more serious matter. Again they are understandable given the turbulent history of modern China, the on-going civil war with the Kuomintang on Taiwan, and the hostile treatment accorded the People's Republic by most of the world throughout most of its history, not to mention the general paranoia which seems to take hold of most societies going through a revolution. However, it is precisely because of these articles and the psychological condition which produced them, that one continues to feel some concern for the future in spite of all the positive steps that have been taken since the fall of the Gang of Four. This concern is further strengthened by another disturbing factor. I mentioned earlier that one of the characteristics of the period following the Anti-Rightist Movement was the development ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 114 W. ALLYN RICKETT new laws, can it be said that that there is any more hope now than existed in 1956 that the paper guarantees of the new legal system will prevail? I think there is. This optimism rests primarily on some major changes taking place in the society and in the thinking of the top leadership in the Communist Party. Unlike the earlier reforms, which in respect of the 1954 Constitution were more formal than real and pushed primarily by a small group of profession-oriented intellectuals, the new reforms come from the top and are based on the disastrous experience of the Cultural Revolution. Most of China's present leadership personally suffered from the arbitrary abuse of power at that time and have come to realize the need for a stable legal system. Furthermore, post-Gang of Four China is no longer the China of the past. The prestige of the Party has diminished greatly, the general population is no longer as malleable as it was in the past, and, perhaps most important of all, the rapid modernization and internationalization of the economy require a stable legal system. Indicative of some of the change taking place in China is the new Constitution adopted on December 4, 1982. In the 1975 and 1978 Constitutions, the Party is clearly recognized as having a special position of power. The 1978 Constitution begins by stating: The People's Republic of China is a socialist state of the dictatorship of the proletariat led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. (Article 1) The Communist Party of China is the core of leadership of the whole Chinese people. The working class exercises leadership over the state through its vanguard the Communist Party of China. The guiding ideology of the People's Republic of China is Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. (Article 2) Although Article 3 goes on to say that all power belongs to the people and is to be exercised through the National People's Congress and local people's congresses, in point of fact the first two articles clearly give that power to the Communist Party and ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 117 Li Yunchang, "The Role of Chinese Lawyers," Beijing Review, 1980, 46 (Nov. 27) 24-25. For a translation of the original Decision see Jerome Cohen, The Criminal Process in the People's Republic of China, 1949-63 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 249-50. For a translation of the 1979 resolution see "Supplementary Regulations of the State Council on Rehabilitation Through Labor," Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report: PRC, Nov. 30, 1979. 15 For a rather favorable report on one aspect of the programme, see Wei Min, “Reforming Criminals,” Beijing Review, 1981, No. 8 (Feb. 23), 22-29. 16 See Bryan Johnson, "China Dissidents Fall through Crack in New Legal Code," Christian Science Monitor, Jun. 18, 1979: 1, Jay Mathews, "Chinese revive labor camps for youthful dissidents," Washington Post, Jun. 1, 1980, Al and Fox Butterfield, "Hundreds of Thousands Toil in Chinese Labor Camps," New York Times, Jan. 3, 1981, 1,4. 17 According to a New China News Agency report at the time of the conviction of the dissident Wei Jingsheng in October 1979, one of the charges levelled against him is that he had violated these specific provisions of the Constitution. See US, China Review, 4.2 (Mar-Apr. 1980), 8. 18 The Chinese text of the new Constitution was published in the Renmin ribao, Dec. 5, 1982. For a translation see Beijing Review, 1982, 50 (Dec. 27), 10-29. 20 Peng Zhen, "Report on the Draft of the Revised Constitution of the People's Republic of China," Beijing Review, 1982, 50 (Dec. 13), 10-11. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 119 it should be remembered, travellers to England needed no passport or travel document, so that Lock had no problems about residence or work. Liverpool, as a great port, had a long-established Chinese colony — a small 'China-town' as it would now be termed — so one infers the young Lock did not feel too cut off from his homeland. Because of his maritime experience, he became the European representative of the Chinese Seamen's Mutual Benefit Society, formed in 1914 among Chinese seamen on ocean-going vessels.* This society was registered in Hong Kong under the name of the 'Seamen's Philanthropic Society'. It was more than a mutual-aid society; it had political aims. Lock was also a member of the T'ung-meng-hui (Sworn League), the secret revolutionary party organised by Sun Yat-sen and others in 1905, which later became the Kuo-min-tang. Sun used seamen as couriers in his revolutionary activities and, it is claimed, Lock worked for Sun as a secret service agent in England. Lock also founded the Chinese Republic Progress Club (a significant designation) in Liverpool in 1918 and became the leading figure in the Liverpool Chinese community. At his trial it became known he had convened a secret court to punish a Chinese for beating his English wife (but we do not know what punishment, if any, was meted out to the callous husband). Lock was thus highly respected in both the English and Chinese communities and was a spokesman for his compatriots. He became that well-known figure: a Chinese community leader. He was also a British subject: a naturalised Englishman. Edward Marjoribanks affirms that ‘... he was not the sinister "King of Chinatown" of detective romance; a kindly, gentle person, he distributed much in charity and hospitality, giving Christmas treats to the poor children of Birkenhead and Liverpool, and renting a shoot where he entertained his English friends'.5 All his affairs prospered until 1923 when he launched out on a large commercial undertaking and lost most of his investment. As a consequence, he was forced to file his own petition in bankruptcy, although he continued to live with his wife and children in some style. Friends said that after these events he became moody and his behaviour erratic, flying into sudden rages and weeping uncontrollably. He also began to drink heavily, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 322 BOOK REVIEWS up the experience of the 32 years since the founding of our People's Republic and has made an evaluation of the Cultural Revolution in particular. Regrettably, it has not said a word on the "May 7 cadre schools" that involved hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and their families. The experience is still fresh in our minds. No doubt we can have fragments of this history written down in books like this (which are necessary and valuable). But if there were no objective work done by historians on the background and influence of cadre schools, then a void would be created for this 'earth-shaking' era of Chinese history. We've paid a high price for it. And it would be more and more difficult to fill up the void with the lapse of time. How can we account for ourselves before the people if we pay our fees but leave behind nothing but a blank? I would like to give my humble opinions and offer some simple clues to those interested in this episode of history. Mdm. Yang was sent down to a cadre school in July, 1970, about one year after I was so transferred. As far back as 1968, the Cultural Revolution saw an end to the power struggle that was raging all over the country. Except Taiwan, all provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions replaced their Party committees with the newly-established "revolutionary committees". The Heilongjiang provincial revolutionary committee, which was set up as early as the beginning of 1967, had those cadres who had not been absorbed into the new organ of political power transferred to the Liuhe county to be engaged in the so-called "struggle-criticism-transformation" campaign following Mao Zedong's "May 7 Directive" of 1966, after which the cadre schools were named. Mao highly commended the practice and written instructions were circulated all over the country. In the summer of that year, a struggle to seize power broke out between two student groups in Qinghua University, Mao despatched troops and workers' propaganda teams to schools and later workers' teams were also ordered to be stationed in cultural and educational organisations throughout China. Mao called upon the educated class to receive "re-education" and also launched a campaign to "purify the class ranks", which was in ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1982 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p 344 BOOK REVIEWS began to develop around 4000 B.C., that iron metallurgy was practiced in the Shang dynasty, and that the Hsia dynasty existed as described in much later texts—all highly controversial views—but the reader does not glean this information from the essay. Cheng's concluding sentence typifies his approach, with confident optimism and will to believe displacing scholarly caution: "and what an exciting day it will be when the discovery of a Hsia capital site is announced to the world!!" (emphasis added). WILLIAM MEACHAM + Oxford Reprint Series: Things Chinese J. Dyer Ball (reprint of Kelly and Walsh 1925 Edition, Shanghai) 766pp inc. index, Peking J. Bredon (reprint of Kelly and Walsh 1931 Edition, Shanghai) 571pp inc. index, The Moon Year J. Bredon and I. Mitrophanow (reprint of Kelly and Walsh 1927 Edition, Shanghai) 514pp + index, The Hong Kong Guide 1893 (reprint of Kelly and Walsh 1893 Edition, Shanghai) 137pp + 36pp of advertisements, Kwang Tung, or Five Years in South China J. A. Turner (reprint of S. W. Partridge and Co. 1894 Edition, London) 194pp inc. index. All Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 1982, all with introduction by H. J. Lethbridge. The Oxford University Press is to be wholeheartedly congratulated on their courage in deciding to reprint many of the classic western texts on China dating from the last decades of the Ch'ing and the first years of the Republic. These works have become increasingly difficult to buy in recent years, and their reappearance on the market is most welcome. The reprints of this year do not represent the end of OUP's hopes in this field; also under consideration for reprinting are, it is understood, among others, Couling's Encyclopedia Sinica, Eitel's Europe in China, and Montalto de Jesus' Historic Macau. The last decades of the last century and the first years of this are usually considered a period when Europeans either merely had contempt for the Chinese or else, at best, regarded them with patronising condescension. Surely, it will be thought, books on Chinese religion, society, or customs written by Europeans in China in this period would have nothing of value to tell us today. There are, certainly, remarks in almost all these books which ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1983 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v 85 Loan Word Chinese Characters *Choy sum 蔡心 Confucius 孔夫子 Congou 工夫 Cumshaw 感謝 *Chung Young 重陽 *Dimsum 點心 *Ding how 真好 *Fanqui, 番鬼 fankwei 番鬼 Fan-tan 番攤 Fen 分 Feng shui, fung shui 風水 Fo 佛 *Foki 伙計 Foo yong, fu yung 芙蓉 Galingale 高良薑 Ginseng 人蔘 Meaning A species of leafy Chinese vegetable, with yellow flowers. K'ung Fu-tse n. the Chinese name of Confucius. A kind of black tea imported from China. In the Chinese ports: A gratuity. A Chinese festival falling on the ninth day of the ninth moon on which according to traditional belief people have to go up to high places to avoid calamity. Also a day for sweeping ancestral graves. Tidbits eaten at a Cantonese repast taken either in the early morning or at lunch time known as yum cha or 'drinking tea'. Literally meaning 'the most excellent best'. Literally 'barbarian ghost', used to refer to westerners in the early days of contact between China and the west. A Chinese gambling game in which a random number of counters are placed under a bowl and wagers laid on how many will remain after they have been divided by four. A monetary unit of the People's Republic of China worth one hundredth of a yuan. In Chinese mythology, a system of spirit influences, good and evil, which inhabit the natural features of landscapes; hence, a kind of geomancy for dealing with these influences in determining sites for houses and graves. Chinese Buddha. A term used to refer to waiters in restaurants, but sometimes also used in the wider sense of people who work in the same organization, i.e., 'colleagues'. Fu yung, lit. hibiscus: a Chinese omelet made with bean sprouts, green pepper, and onion and fried in deep fat. Lit. 'mild ginger from Ko'. Either of two arallaceous plants, Panax Ginseng (Schinseng), of China, Korea, etc., or P. quinquefolium, of North America, having an aromatic root used in medicine by the Chinese. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1983 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v Chinese 87 Loan Word Kumquat, comquat Characters Kung fu 功夫 Kuomingtang 國民黨 Kuoyu 國語 Kwan-yin 觀音 kylin 麒麟 Lama 喇嘛 *laisee 利是 DEP ** *Lap sap 垃圾 *Lap sap chung 垃圾蟲 Li 里 WW D 里/座 Loquat 枇杷 Lychee 荔枝 Mafoo 馬夫 Mahjong, 麻將 249 2011 mah-jong (g) Manchu 滿洲 Mao 毛 *Maotai 茅台 Nankeen 南京棉 Oolong 烏龍茶 Meaning The small round orange fruit of such a tree, with a sweet rind, used in preserves and confections. A Chinese martial art combining principles of karate and judo. The main political party of the Republic of China, founded chiefly by Sun Yat-sen in 1911 and led since 1925 by Chiang Kai-shek; the dominant party in mainland China until 1948. The name given to the Chinese "national tongue", form of Mandarin adopted for official use. One of the Chinese female Bodhisattvas, noted for her kindness. A fabulous animal of composite form, figured on Chinese and Japanese pottery. A Buddhist priest of Mongolia or Tibet. The red packets containing money meant to bring luck given on birthdays and festivals, especially at Chinese New Year. Rubbish, Literally 'rubbish worm', meaning a litter-bug. A Chinese measure of distance 27-4/5 li = 10 miles. or a Chinese weight, one-thousandth part of liang. A small evergreen tree of the rose family, native to China and Japan; the small yellow, edible plum-like fruit of this tree. The fruit of the nephelium litchi. A Chinese stable boy or groom. An old Chinese game, played usually by four persons with 136 or 144 "tiles". (One) of the native Mongolian race of Manchuria which formed the ruling class in China from 1644 to 1912. Adjective from Mao Tse-tung. Strong Chinese alcoholic drink, Kind of cotton cloth originally made of naturally yellow cotton. A dark variety of cured tea. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1983 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v 88 Chinese Loan Word Characters Meaning Pak-choi 白菜 Another name for Chinese cabbage, *Pak pai 白牌 Literally 'white label', meaning hire cars which are in fact operating illegally because they are not licenced to carry passengers for a fee. Pekingese 北京(狗) A small long-haired dog, of the pug type, orig. brought from the Imperial Palace at Pekin. Pekoe 白毫 A superior kind of black tea, so called from the leaves being picked young with the down still on them. *Pinyin 拼音 Literally 'to write according to sound' referring to the romanization system used to write Chinese rather than the traditional Chinese characters. Petuntse, 白墩子 A white earth, consisting of pulverized granite; used in combination with kaolin in the manufacture of Chinese porcelain, Petuntze A 4-stringed Chinese musical instrument plucked like a guitar and having a large body resembling a lute and a neck with 12 or more frets that leads into the body. Pipa 琵琶 *Putonghua 普通話 Literally 'ordinary speech', the standard dialect of China. *Renminbi 人民幣 Literally 'the people's currency', referring to the currency of the People's Republic of China. Samfoo 衫褲 A style of casual dress worn by Chinese women, consisting of waisted blouse and trousers, Sampan 舢舨 Applied by Europeans in the China seas to any small boat of Chinese pattern. Samshu 三燒 An alcoholic liquor distilled in China from boiled and fermented rice. *Sharpei, 沙皮 Literally 'sand-skinned', referring to the rough and loose skin of this breed of dog, formerly known as the 'Chinese Fighting Dog'. sharpi To drug or otherwise render insensible, and ship on board a vessel wanting hands. Shanghai 上海 A soft undressed Chinese silk. Shantung 山東 A Chinese breed of small dog similar to a Pekingese. Shih tzu 獅子 One of the finer varieties of black tea. Souchong 小種 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1983 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v 92 3. 4. These speak a different language from the other three races. They have a history of having migrated ages ago from the Yangtse valley, and economically are pioneers, opening up inferior lands, and doing all quarry work. They occupy the eastern and northern islands, and are often called "Chinese Scotchmen”. For this reason Scottish regiments here are called “Hakka ping" (Hakka soldiers). Nearly all regimental servants here, I believe, are Hakkas: formerly the Hakkas were anti-Manchu and often joined Triad Societies. As such, they gave vigorous assistance to the British in 1857-61, and the connection with the Army has been kept up. Hoklos, a Cantonese nickname for the coast peoples of Northeast Kwangtung; it means "men of Hok1", meaning Fukien. Most come from the area around Swatow and Swabue. Their language is very widely different from both Cantonese and Hakka: as different as German from English. They are fishermen, grasscutters, limekiln and saltpan workers. Their major settlements are at Tai O, Pingchau, Cheung Chau, Taipo (by the District Officer's island), and probably others. They are migrating here steadily, and many appear in court for offences of all sorts. A major reason behind the migration is probably that the coastal areas from which they come are suffering erosion and losing soil: the collapse of the Hoi Luk Fung Soviet Republic is another factor: finally, piracy is no longer as profitable as it was. Political divisions The Ladrones or "Pirate Islands" of which Hong Kong and its outlying islands are part were so named by the Portuguese pioneers of sea trade to the East. They are shared unequally between China, Britain and Portugal. In China they are administered by the nearest district magistrates, of Hoifung, Po On, Chungshan, Sanwui, and Toishan districts. Macao has only two or three nearby isles. The British Islands are divided between the District Officer, North, and the District Officer, South, so that the latter is sometimes called "Lord of the Isles". I had that job for nearly 3 1/2 years. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1983 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v 154 'There will be hard negotiations. But we do not believe in voting. It is not a good way as it would create a split among directors. If you and I were in the minority, it was human nature for us to find faults [with the majority]. If we could not compromise, we would leave it to next week. Within three or four months, we were bound to have a solution. Not everybody would be happy at the end, but at least there is no bitterness.' The specific method of reaching a compromise might vary from mill to mill, but the direct confrontation integral to the voting process was generally avoided. The emphasis was on persuasion, or as A22 expressed it, 'it is always one party educating the other'. Thus far, the spinners were only reacting to the general idea of dissent and conflict. To make the discussion more concrete, I raised the issue of trade unionism. They were given the following alternatives to show their preferences: there is no need for employees to form unions when management implements fair policies; it is the workers' right to organize themselves; or that joint consultation between management and labour is necessary for workers' opinions to be heard. Table 6 indicates that two-thirds of them preferred some form of joint consultation. Their justification for this preference was two-fold. First and foremost, it was because 'pure, independent, innocent labour unions' were not to be found in Hong Kong. This argument had some factual basis. Many unions in the Colony were politically motivated and owed allegiance to either the People's Republic of China or the Choice Number Percentage Unions not needed 3 9 Workers' right to organize 5 16 Joint consultation desirable 24 85 No answer 3 TOTAL 35 100 Source: Interviews, 1978. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 I shall first address the problem of membership and promotion of the Society and its publications, with their importance for healthy growth and a steady recurrent income. When so many of our members moved to life membership some years ago, albeit showing their strong support for the Society thereby, there was resultant loss of recurrent income. New members are important to keep up annual income. Thus, promotion and publicity of our work and activities to increase membership and boost income are pretty vital. The big question has always been, who will do the work? Hong Kong has always been a very busy place. Unless retired, and sometimes not even then, most Councillors have full-time, demanding jobs which leave little time or energy for other pursuits. Whilst we have never found it difficult to recruit council members, there has always been a limit to the amount each of us can do for the Society. Councillors are either librarians, editors, secretaries and the like, but no-one yet has been able to combine several posts or take up additional duties. This has hit us particularly hard with regard to promotion and publicity. We find it very difficult to deal with this kind of situation, which nevertheless results in a fundamental dilemma; for until we do more promotion and publicity, our membership will remain low and our publications will not sell as well as they ought to reach their potential public. We have addressed these problems again recently and are trying to improve the position, short of using the services of public relations firms. Turning to our future, now is also the time for the Society to look ahead, especially in anticipation of severing the link Hong Kong has with Britain and the establishment of a highly autonomous Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. There are those who conclude that the Royal Asiatic Society has no place in the new situation. Its name alone, they say, however honourable in itself, is sufficient indication that we cannot expect to continue after 1997 when Hong Kong is no longer a colonial appendage of Great Britain and the whole emphasis and outlook of the territory will have changed and, in the words of Chairman Deng Xiao-ping, "Hong Kong people will govern Hong Kong". ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 162 THE PEARL RIVER ESTUARY OYSTER INDUSTRY IN AND AROUND DEEP BAY R.A. BOWLER, D.S.C. YANG, A.J.E. SMITH* Introduction An environmental impact assessment (EIA) has recently been made of the dredging and land formation aspects of a proposed reclamation for a new town development at Tin Shui Wai located in the north-west New Territories of Hong Kong as shown in Figure 1 (Binnie & Partners, 1984). Some of the activities considered in the EIA may have an effect on the commercial oyster industry located in nearby Deep Bay (also called Shenzhen Bay) and, accordingly, information was sought as to the structure of the industry, its productivity and the cultivation techniques used. The information was obtained by many interviews with oyster farmers and related organisations both in Hong Kong (HK) and in the People's Republic of China and supplements an earlier review by Morton and Wong in 1975. Figure 1 shows the extent of the oyster beds in Deep Bay and the locations referred to in the paper. The Pearl River estuary The Pearl River system drains a catchment of 450,000 km2 of which 50% is above 500 m elevation and only 5% consists of lowland delta areas. The catchment is drained by three principal rivers: the Bei Jiang (North River), the Dong Jiang (East River) and the Xi Jiang (West River). The Xi Jiang is the largest, having an estimated length of 2200 km. About 54 million tonnes per year of sediment are released into the estuary and about 20% of this is retained by density-induced water circulation. A net northerly movement of sand up the estuary past the mouth of Deep Bay has been suggested (Binnie & Partners, 1984). Deep Bay is a large shallow bay on the eastern side of the Pearl River estuary adjacent to the deep flood channel of Urmston Road. The Bay has a surface * The authors work for Binnie & Partners, Hong Kong. See Plates 4-6. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 163 area of about 115 km2 and contains 330 Mm3 of water at mean sea level (about 1.3 m above Hong Kong principal datum (PD)). Sand is brought into Deep Bay close to Black Point on the flood current and moved along the Hong Kong coast by wave action during storms. Silts and clays appear to be largely derived from the catchment draining to the inner part of Deep Bay. The tides are complex, with a strong diurnal component superimposed on a semi-diurnal pattern. The usual sequence is thus two high waters and two low waters in just over 24 hours, with one high and one low significantly higher or lower respectively than the other. On certain occasions (14 in 1984) the diurnal component completely dominates and only one high and one low occur in a day. The maximum tidal range is about 2.8 m. Historical background Oyster cultivation is traditional and has been practised in the Pearl River estuary for several hundred years. The coastal town of Shajing (JP) has long been associated with oyster fattening. Oyster cultivation has been practised in Deep Bay since at least 1800 (Bromhall, 1958; Mok, 1973). Disputes over the ownership of Deep Bay oyster beds led to short term leases being granted in 1909 to those organisations, both those based in Hong Kong and those based in China, who could prove good claim to ownership prior to 1898 when the Crown Lease of the New Territories commenced. One oyster bed was reclaimed from the sea around 1915/16 and now forms part of the Tin Shui Wai area. Additional oyster beds were leased, mainly in the mouth of the Shenzhen River, during the period 1909 to 1933. The original 1909 leases were extended from 1931 to 1952. During the early part of World War II many oyster farmers with much traditional expertise moved from Shajing to settle in the Lau Fau Shan area, but the majority of the beds were either ruined or fell into disuse by 1945. Reorganisation of the industry in the immediately post-war era was influenced by events within China culminating with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Further leases were granted to some oyster farmers ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 177 No organised marketing systems exist, but advance orders of 2 to 3 days lead time are normal. The current wholesale price is HK$11/kg and retail price around 25% higher, although prices vary according to supply and demand and like most seafoods are very weather dependent. Oysters sold in the market are normally shucked. Industry sources estimate 70% of oysters go to restaurants. The remainder go to seafood stalls or are processed into dried oysters and oyster sauce. Conclusions Oyster cultivation has been carried out for several hundred years despite political and social upheavals. Deep Bay oyster beds were leased by the Hong Kong Government between 1909 and 1977. Strong family ties exist between oyster farmers in Hong Kong and China. The industry is a typical artisan fishery with low capital investment. The official Hong Kong Government figures show that production tonnage of Hong Kong grown oysters is declining. However imports from China, using official and unofficial routes, and production tonnages claimed by the Hong Kong oyster farmers indicate that total production remains substantial and this presumably reflects an appreciable demand. The Chinese oyster industry directly employs more than 20,000 people in the area, whereas the Hong Kong industry has probably less than 5,000 including those indirectly employed. Hong Kong is however the main export market for the Peoples Republic of China. The commercial oyster's life cycle can be examined in three stages: spawning with spatfall, growth, and fattening. The conditions of temperature and salinity for spat collection correspond with earlier reports. Longer growth periods (up to 7 years) from spat to marketable size are reported in some areas allegedly as a result of pollution, but the average growth period is 4 years with as little as 2 1/2 years claimed where raft culture is used. The Shajing area is used only as a fattening and distribution centre for oysters from various areas along the South China coast adjacent to the ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 308 JAMES HAYES them, this title was given to persons who would later be called the headman (†) or village representative (††). Their main job was to stop or settle petty squabbles and secure the adjustment and payment of compensation for damage to crops caused by straying cows and pigs. These leaders consulted each other by mutual visiting, and by occasional meetings in the Hau Wong temple (i) when the occasion was serious enough to warrant this. Even persons of 30-40 years of age could serve, if they were capable and had the time. Written proof for the Sha Kok Mei wai cheung comes from a sale of land recorded in 1942 during the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong. The buyer and seller and wai cheung were all from the village (local testimony) and the fact that the post was, as stated above, held on a yearly term of office is confirmed by the expression ... . The deed reads as follows, in translation: 2 I, CHU Hei, executor of this sale of paddy field for want of money at home, hereby sell of my own free will thirteen pieces of paddy land that have come down to me from my ancestors. Of different sizes, they total two tau chung, and they are situated at Kang Lau Ha. Sold for the sum of Two Hundred and Fifty Dollars, they pass into the perpetual ownership of TSANG HO Sze as of this day without possibility of redemption. This deed is final and binding between the two parties. The hand of seller of land; CHU Hei Witnessed by: CHU Kat-hing LAU Kei-yau, Wai cheung of current-year. Dated the 8th day of the first lunar month in the 31st year of the Republic of China (1942) The fact that the wai cheung who witnessed the transaction was not of the seller's clan is probably accounted for by the fact that the CHUs were among the smaller clans in this large, multi-clan village. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1985 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x 14 BARTHOLOMEW P.M. TSUI that the spirit world is just an exact copy of the administrative world in Chinese popular religion or in Taoism, and worshippers carry on transactions with the gods just as they would have dealt with bureaucrats. Their offerings to the various gods are just like bribes to officials. In contrast to this, the veneration of the Supreme Deity is of a different nature. The praise of the deity and the acknowledgement of his greatness are the predominant sentiments. The only offerings made are one stick of incense and some flowers. No other gods are venerated. The holy shrine contains no images of any gods, thus giving an impression of austere reverence and an attempt to root out extravagant expressions which might be taken to indicate something superstitious. The exclusive veneration of the Supreme Deity follows logically from the history and teaching of the sect, but outside observers cannot help speculating just how much this is due to Patriarch Lo's early Protestant background. Out of deference to the founder who has transliterated (Tien Chi Tao) as Tan Tse Tao, the latter title will be retained in this paper. Source material for this paper consists of the books FBIEZ, which contains Patriarch Lo's most important writings, the 太玄真言 and the 太玄漫言, 天昏道神靈治療釋義 and interviews with Mr. Alfred Lo, son of the founder and an Elder of the sect and Mr. Law Ping Chi (MM), current Person-in-Charge (E) of the sect. Responsibility for the accuracy of this paper is entirely mine. 2 The title 尊師 (tsung-shih) has been used to address the founder, whose Taoist sobriquet (道號) is T'ai-hsüan (太玄). 3 was later changed to 孫, in memory of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Republic of China. In fact, the Lo family is related to the Sun family. 4 Among these, the 少林拳, reputed to have originated from Bodhidharma and the Shao-lin (†) school. This account is taken from ZE › XL. 6 September 15, 1935, when Lo was forty-one years old. 7 經嘯。廣州東平路萬芳園內。 9 • Another account placed the second attempt at exercise on the following day. XILE · 1-This account also records that these events happened in the presence of family members who thought he was going crazy. 10 Is "the burning of incense" a matter of style of the Chinese language? It is inconceivable for Christians at that period to keep incense. None of my informants could answer this question satisfactorily. 11 The interpretation of this is that God uses Lo's own hand and words to convey His displeasure over Lo's unbelief. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1985 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x 146 JOHN KARL EVANS outset that, “since our sources are so limited, I have used evidence from earlier or later periods where it seems reasonable to suppose that the thoughts or ceremonies which they report were also typical of the Augustan age” (p. 1). 12 A survey of the more than 100 titles in the Etudes préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l'Empire romain (see n. 6 above) will convince the reader of this point. I cite L. Zotović, Les cultes orientaux sur le territoire de la Mésie Supérieure (Leiden, 1966); and M. Tacheva-Hitova, Eastern Cults in Moesia Inferior and Thracia (5th Century BC — 4th Century AD) (Leiden, 1983), merely as representative of this tendency. 13 A.D. Nock, Conversion. The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford, 1933). One should also mention in this context the classic work of T.R. Glover, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire (London, 1909). 14 de Groot (1892-1910); and The Religion of the Chinese (New York, 1910); M. Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People, trans. M. Freedman (Oxford, 1975); and C.K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society: a Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of Their Historical Factors (Berkeley, 1961). 15 M. Freedman, “On the Sociological Study of Chinese Religion”, in Rel. & Rit., 20. 16 A.P. Wolf, “Introduction”, in Rel. & Rit., 17. 17 K. Hopkins, Death and Renewal (Cambridge, 1983), xv. 18 For the view that the structure of the imperial bureaucracy has been superimposed upon the Chinese pantheon, cf., inter alia, Wolf, “Introduction”, in Rel. & Rit., 5, 7; Feuchtwang (1974), 124, 127; and Wolf (1974), 138-145, 176-178 et passim. 19 For demonology, witchcraft and shamanism in the Roman Empire, one may begin with R. MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order. Treason, Unrest and Alienation in the Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 95-162; or Ferguson, Religions Rom. Empire, 150-189. The fifth volume of de Groot (1892-1910) is devoted to demonology and sorcery in China. For shamanism, cf. A.J.A. Elliott, Chinese Spirit Medium Cults in Singapore (London, 1955); and J.M. Potter, "Cantonese Shamanism”, Rel. & Rit., 207-231. The popularization of Ceres: H. Le Bonniec, Le culte de Cérès à Rome (Paris, 1958), especially pp. 342-378; the official and Taoist cults of the gods of walls and moats: G.F. Moore, History of Religions, I (New York, 1948), 62-63. 20 Christianity was by no means the only foreign cult to suffer persecution at the hands of the Roman government; cf. G. La Piana, “Foreign Groups in Rome during the First Centuries of the Empire", HTR, 20 (1927), 183-403; L.R. Taylor, "Foreign Groups in Roman Politics of the Late Republic”, in M. Renard and R. Schilling (eds.), Hommages à Joseph Bidez et à Franz Cumont, 2 (Brussels, 1948), 323-330; J.A. North, "Religious Toleration in Republican Rome", PCPhS, 25 (1979), 85-103, de Groot, Religion of the Chinese, 190-223, is a colourful description of the history of Buddhist persecution in China; briefer and more balanced, K.S. Ch'en, Buddhism in China. A Historical Survey (Princeton, 1964), 147-151, 184-194, and 226-233. 21 I am indebted to Patrick Hase for reminding me of this important methodological consideration. T Page 165 Page 166 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1986 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063 them as Hon. Secretary to our Society. The departure of both ladies was suitably marked by a cocktail reception and presentations on behalf of our membership. I am relieved and thankful to report that both posts were immediately filled by two other ladies who are contributing in the same dedicated manner. Mrs. Anita Wilson, who with her husband John is a current member of the Society, took over from Mrs. McLean as Hon. Secretary, whilst Mrs. Sharon Bruce took up the Assistant Secretaryship. Both she and her husband Phillip are long standing members. Symposium on the Future of the Society In my past two annual reports I touched on the possibility of holding a seminar to discuss the present and future of the Society in Hong Kong. We, as well as other local groups, will be affected in one way or another by the Sino-British Agreement ratified in December 1984 which arranges for the return of Hong Kong in June 1997 and its establishment as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. It is, in any case, desirable to take stock of our position now, to ensure that we are organized to meet the needs of the present transitional period and the changes which are evolving in this vibrant and progressive city. The seminar has taken time to arrange because Councillors have been more than usually busy in the interim, but preparations are now well in hand, and it will now be held on Saturday 9th May, 1987. Our member, Mr. Ian Deane, with some assistance from myself and others, has nearly completed the arrangements for this important event. A special feature of the preparations has been a detailed questionnaire to which over 120 members responded, giving many valuable comments and suggestions. The Vice-Chancellor of Hong Kong University, Dr. Wang Gungwu, has kindly agreed to give the keynote address and other prominent speakers are likely to assist. Background papers will be distributed to members before the meeting in order to make the best use of the time available. They will cover such subjects as our organization, programmes and financing, the possibility of a bi-lingual operation, whether a change in the name of our Society is in order in preparation... ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1986 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063 HAINAN ISLAND: A BRIEF HISTORICAL SKETCH D.L. MICHALK* 115 Introduction Hainan Island forms the extreme southern limit of the People's Republic of China, save for the Paracel Reefs. Sometimes referred to as the Tail of the Dragon, Hainan lies between longitudes 108°30′ and 111° east and latitudes 18° and 20°31' north. It is separated from the mainland by the 25 km Qiongzhou Straits, and is part of Guangdong, accounting for 15 percent of the Province's area. Located in the South China Sea, Hainan is about 300 km east of Vietnam across the Gulf of Tonkin, some 500 km southwest of Hong Kong, and a similar distance from the provincial capital, Guangzhou. Hainan is oval-shaped with the longest NE to SW axis measuring 309 km and the shorter NW to SE axis, 221 km. With an area of 34,077 km2 (Anon., 1982b), Hainan is about half the size of Tasmania and ranks as the world's twenty-sixth largest island. Although it accounts for less than 1 per cent of China's land area, its tropical climate, rich mineral and petroleum resources and strategic location make it an important, yet undeveloped region of China. Hainan has always been regarded as a backwater by successive Chinese dynasties and a mystery to foreigners. Indeed, had it not been for a handful of inquisitive academics and devoted missionaries who "found Hainan" around the turn of the century, our knowledge of the island would have amounted to little more than folklore. Using these western sources, the aim of this paper is to provide a brief insight into the history of Hainan, particularly the role played by foreigners in its development. * Senior research agronomist, Agricultural Research and Veterinary Centre, New South Wales Department of Agriculture. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1986 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063 126 D.L. MICHALK by governors and generals striving to grasp independent power, and China was plunged into bloody civil war. Guangdong Province, the birth-place of the republican movement, immediately proclaimed itself independent. Sun Yat-sen, the "Father of the Republic", was elected generalissimo, and in 1924 the Kuomintang (the People's Party) was formed. Upon the death of Dr. Sun in 1925, Chiang Kai-shek, backed by his modernized army, emerged as the Kuomintang (KMT) leader, and with assistance from Communist factions began campaigns against the north which culminated in the fall of Shanghai in 1927. Choosing not to expropriate the capitalist bankers in Shanghai as demanded by the Communists, the KMT and Communists became bitter rivals which re-ignited armed struggle in south China. Fuelled by Communist propaganda, there came a genuine uprising of the peasantry against the KMT for failure to deliver promised tax and land reforms throughout the southern provinces. As part of this general uprising, the first group of “freedom fighters" appeared on Hainan in 1927 and staged guerilla warfare on the island until Liberation, twenty-three years later (Fairfax-Cholmeley, 1963). Although armed conflicts between Peking and southern forces had occurred previously on Hainan such as those which led to the capitulation of General Lung's army in 1918 (Moninger, 1919), fighting was confined to the soldiery. However, the Communist tactics brought the conflict to the common citizens by inciting peasants to take up arms against the oppressive gentry and greedy merchants. The effects of lightning raids caused havoc in northern Hainan: numerous villages were abandoned, others sacked and reduced to ash-strewn rubble, and large tracts of farming land were deserted (McClure, 1934b). In fact, the revolutionary play, Red Detachment of Women, was loosely based on incidents which occurred in Hainan in 1931. At a bridge about one kilometre south of the present Xinglong Overseas Chinese State Farm, a guerilla band led by Hong Chang-qing assassinated Nan Ba-tian, a cruel landlord. In reprisal, the landlord's forces captured and executed the guerilla leader. However, a slave girl, Wu Qing-hua, took his place as commander and ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522 Yet I have no regrets whatsoever for the basic motivations which led so many French radical intellectuals to side with Mao-ism in the turbulent 1970s. Some of the trendy Maoists may have been concerned most of all with the image of China they were propagating for their own satisfaction and prestige. Yet others, as I can testify, had more sincere and far-reaching motivations. We took seriously the 'mass line', in contrast to politics set at the top. People's communes appealed all the more to us, since uncontrolled urban growth had become a cornerstone of the French Fifth Republic's overall economic strategies. "To rely on one's own strength,' zili gengsheng, made sense to us, against the prevailing trends towards cultural banalisation of French daily life on the American model. 'Bombard the headquarters' was a slogan well-received among those who, after the failure of the May '68 movement, had experienced the backlash of the established political parties regaining their monopoly over French political life. We were certainly wrong in our simplified approach to the complex realities of Chinese politics and Chinese society. But looking at it from a distance, we were not necessarily wrong in advocating Maoist analyses and Maoist thinking so as to approach critically what we probably knew better than China, namely France itself. The major intellectual encounter between China and France in the eighteenth century belongs to the past; the solitary French sinophiles of the nineteenth century have remained marginal in French literary history, and the Maoist love affair of the 1960s and early 1970s has ended pathetically, as most love affairs do. What next? One should perhaps consider, by way of conclusion, the relevance China may still have, in relation to the French intellectual crisis of the 1980s. To describe present-day France in terms of an intellectual crisis may just be too easy, for genuine intellectual life is by nature a crisis in itself, a clash between the world of ideas and the real world, a clash between the old and the new. Every generation is involved in such crises. But the problems French intellectuals are facing in the 1980s go much deeper and much further, they encompass our very model of development all over the world, namely modernity. The present-day French intellectual crisis accordingly develops at two distinct levels. It still concerns French intellectuals and their role in their own society. But our French crisis is also, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522 64 the need to make the record appear to indicate a full three years' participation in such a scheme. This is slightly more convincing as an explanation. A final possibility is that Mok wished to draw attention away from the fact that he was a teacher at the Central School from 1884 to 1887. It is interesting to speculate about the reasons for this desire. Is it a coincidence, for example, that these were precisely the years during which Sun Yat Sen, the future revolutionary leader and President of the Republic of China, then known as Sun Tai Tseung, attended the Central School? It is possible that the young assistant teacher and the new pupil became friends. It is also possible that, in 1906, it struck Mok Man Cheung that public knowledge of this attachment would have been inconvenient and, therefore, he post-dated his teaching career's commencement to 1888, the year after Sun Yat Sen left the Central School for the newly formed Hong Kong College of Medicine for the Chinese. In 1906, the Empress Dowager was still alive. A belated Reform Movement was in operation in a last desperate, but vain, attempt to save the Qing dynasty and the Imperial system. As mentioned above, only two years earlier, in the first edition of his English Made Easy, Mok Man Cheung had given precedence to words like Emperor and Crown Prince. He had referred to queues and queue-strings as normal items, at the very time when for revolutionaries and even reformers they were regarded as symbols of Manchu oppression. There is no doubt that at this particular time open evidence of an affiliation with Sun Yat Sen would have been commercially, socially and politically undesirable, though, like several other middlemen of the period, Mok might have been quietly keeping his connections open with all sides. Discussion of the significance of Mok Man Cheung's career So much then for the worldly successes and possible problems of Mok Man Cheung. Whatever his innermost thoughts may have been, there can be little doubt that he strove outwardly to take advantage of the colonial, commercial, and social establishment of his time. Significantly, his book, English Made Easy, attempted to bridge the enormous gap between the Chinese and British communities in Hong Kong at the beginning of the twentieth century. As mentioned above, this was a period which was not ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522 294 enced in colonial administration. They were also blessed with long tenures. J. H. Stewart Lockhart, who had advised the Hong Kong Government on the administration of the New Territories, was British Commissioner at Weihaiwei for nineteen years, and R. F. Johnston for sixteen. Weihaiwei was not a major port boasting access to other areas of China. Despite efforts at cultivation, except for ground-nuts, its lack of a marketable product meant the absence of a powerful foreign business community like those that challenged authority and policies of British officials at the treaty ports. The British administrators, therefore, could establish and carry out policies without having to consider other vested interests. As a rule, they were free to work within the framework of traditional Chinese institutions. Conservatism of the local gentry and absence of a strong Chinese middle class meant that there was no pressure on British administrators to bow to forces that clamoured for reform and modernization. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Chinese institutions were undergoing changes. Certain constitutional features were being introduced to the Chinese government, and, with the abolition of the civil service examination system in 1905, education based on Confucian classics was being replaced by a more modern, westernized curriculum. At Weihaiwei, however, neither the local elders nor the British administration sought to change the status quo. With the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912, demands for ending foreign privileges increased. Subsequent civil war among various warlord factions meant hardship for the people of Weihaiwei, but, until the formation of the National Government under Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, Britain did not have to give serious thought to returning Weihaiwei to Chinese rule. Meanwhile, administrators kept expenditures below revenue, partly because they wanted to make sure "that sufficient funds were available for staff pensions and other expenses when the British withdrew." (p. 168) The actual transfer of administration to the Chinese took place ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1988 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q 113 at MIT, he travelled around the country to observe and learn more before returning to the University of Washington, where, after another year of study, he received a M.S. degree in 1925, specializing in Aquaculture. He returned to China, becoming Director of the Kwangtung Fisheries Experiment Station in 1929, and later Director of the Chekiang Fisheries Experiment Station. In 1946, he became President of the Taiwan Fisheries Corporation. His comprehensive knowledge and experience in the field of aquaculture made him a leading and respected authority of national and international renown, In Canton on March 1928, Toby married Louise Dung Yuk Bow, a vivacious beauty from Grass Valley, California. Stricken with Parkinson's Disease and gradually weakened by it, she died on 27 January 1971. While I was teaching in Canton, Toby and Louise welcomed me as an immediate member of their family and I spent many weekends in their home - I am grateful for this hospitality to this day. They had six children, five daughters and one son: Melody Wil married Johnson C. J. Chen Carol Kit married John Lee Sonia Cíl married Tai Min Wan Jade Ef married Eddy Lin Lloyd married Deborah Lena ft married Jeffrey Lo The girls leaned towards the arts like their mother, and Lloyd, an ichthyologist, towards science like his father. Cousin Helen Moo Ching married a nephew of Tong Siu Yee (T'ang Shao-i) Hill, a Chinese diplomat during the late Ch'ing and one time Prime Minister of the Republic of China. Her married life was spent in Peking where her husband was head of the Postal Savings Bureau. After his death she moved south and finally retreated to Taiwan where she died in 1974 of cancer. Charles Ting Hing began his career in banking but switched to dentistry. He was married twice, both times to non-Chinese girls, and had children by both of them. He died in Shanghai in 1978. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1988 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q 239 that the question stunned him. He did not really answer it. Like Qian, Dennerline was non-partisan, at least in this instance. However, he enumerated some instances of social changes in Qian's home village in Wuxi in recent years and made it very clear that these were changes that Qian had neither allowed for nor understood as he asked the question. As Dennerline explains, there was in Qian's appeal to Chinese culture an appreciation of the Chinese people as he might have found them in his home village, but the future that Qian sought for China was one that expressed more the yearning of the generation of the 1911 Revolution. That generation, one may say, was inspired by the brave new world of the early Chinese republic. The scholars of that generation realised that China had to change to adapt to a modern world, embraced the change and sought to understand their culture as it changed, fully confident that there was hope in the future. They went back to China's past in a sense of optimism, and produced the learning that inspired their students. The generation that came after 1911 had less reason to be so hopeful about Chinese culture. Those who adhered to the same aspirations would have to want to hold the world still so that the culture that it treasured might continue to be meaningful. They would have to turn inwards, so to speak, and let their faith in their culture take over their ability to adapt it to the changing world. Qian Mu, in this sense, was a herald of the modern world, but that was the modern world of the 1910s. No doubt, Chinese scholars have much of value to say to the world, but it is unlikely that they will do it without accepting that the world is necessarily changing and without learning about some of these changes. Dennerline reads this message in Qian Mu's writing. It would be gratifying if Qian's students can also rise up to it. David Faure ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1989 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h Kong to be so), and it had a beautiful mosaic ceiling in the banking hall which was designed by Podgoursky, a Russian." The building was ahead of its time. In 1954 a business associate, the late Harold Palmer, a surveyor and auctioneer in England, said to the author, "When you get to Hong Kong see if the architectural practice started by my grandfather is still in existence". In fact, Palmer and Turner designed the Hong Kong Bank building which was completed in 1935. However Clement Palmer, an early partner, worked with the firm in Hong Kong from about 1882 to 1909. He was responsible for such buildings as the Hong Kong Club (demolished and replaced in the 1980s) which was completed in 1897,9 Victoria Hospital (1903), and Rosary Church (1905), Chatham Road. According to Harold Palmer, his grandfather used to go from his home to his office everyday by boat (he lived in Kowloon perhaps?), and he retired to England in his later forties a rich man. He made his money by land sales rather than as an architect and he was in his nineties when he died. After the People's Republic came to power, in 1949, it gained in prestige locally when the new 17-storey Bank of China, completed in 1950, slightly overtopped the Hong Kong Bank. The Hong Kong Bank then erected a flagpole which gave it the necessary extra few feet!21 In 1959, however, the newly completed Chartered Bank rose about three metres above the Bank of China. Now, in the 1990s, history has partly repeated itself. The 40-storey Standard Chartered Bank looks down once again on the Hong Kong Bank, although the new 70-floor Bank of China is the tallest structure in Southeast Asia. Perhaps, with China taking over Hong Kong in 1997, this dominance is fitting. Nevertheless the new, 52-storey Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters, with its striking prefabricated tubular design and its "aeronautic" technology, has made a major contribution to the skyline, and it has been described as the most innovative bank building in the world. It graced a recent Hong Kong postage stamp. While most of Hong Kong consists of standard, nondescript, concrete-framed buildings, occasionally you come across the unusual, such as the large external concrete trusses from which the roof of the State ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1989 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h 401 connections between the local guilds, membership on the committee and the emergence of a Chinese business elite, the importance of a Chinese alternative to the colonial government which the Tung Wah essentially represented, and the links between traditional Chinese political culture and the symbols and trappings of authority with which committee members sought to enhance their status. It would be interesting to see how these patterns of social control changed after the colonial government introduced more controls over the hospital in 1896. But that is another story. Dr. Sinn's book will stand as the definitive study of the early history of the hospital and it is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Hong Kong society and politics in the nineteenth century. IAN SCOTT, University of Hong Kong Paul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays On Chinese Thought In Honor of Benjamin I. Schwartz. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. xi + 400 pp. Index. This Festschrift for the recently retired Harvard professor of Chinese history and political science, after nearly four decades of teaching and writing, is a genuine tribute to the iconoclastic Schwartzian tradition. All ten articles, written by former students of the last three decades, address questions in Chinese studies which engage broad ranges of comparison with other Asian and Western expressions, in search of Schwartz's 'possibility of a universal human discourse', (p. 314). In every case, the thematic questions take Schwartz's previous work as a starting point from which to embellish, extrapolate or challenge academic evaluations of China. Raising issues from such diverse fields as Shang oracular bones, Mo-ist and Confucian utilitarianism, medieval metaphysics, folk-opera in the 1920s, non-Eurocentric Marxist theory and recent democratic overtures in the People's Republic, the authors create a literary monument to the probing and sensitive studies of their teacher. Precisely because of these varying degrees of reference to the Schwartzian corpus and the unusual breadth of themes, the lack of an exhaustive bibliography related to the honored scholar and the absence of a Chinese glossary are regrettable. The first and ninth articles, by Hao Chang and Thomas Metzger, pinpoint their correctives to Schwartz's claims. Chang repeats a claim already made in 1985 that the ‘axial age' (qua Karl Jaspers) of Chinese ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1989 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h 403 is starkly countered by David Arkush's study of Hebei village opera in the twenties. Concluding his perceptive study of the underside of China's recent history, Arkush observes that, at least in rural northern China, 'the moral categories and values of the ruling elites did not totally dominate the thinking of the subordinate classes', (p. 105). The illustrations presented to support this claim reveal not only a rupture in thought but also in language. How true was this of the pre-Republican period? Do these folk themes reflect a popular contrapuntal, an unprinted Zhuangziese, which actually questioned the values and concepts inherent in Confucian discourse? The ‘optimistic this-worldliness' Metzger discovers as a continuous element of Chinese scholars' historiography and cultural analysis tends to bypass Wyatt's identification of metaphysical themes which, though 'premodern', are still approached without intellectual incredulity by some of these same scholars. Metzger recognizes this fact, but believes that an issue more important than general philosophical discussions of human nature is the actual production of ‘self-propelled adults' in Chinese society, (p. 284). These morally autonomous leaders are in fact the reason why China could maintain its cultural continuity as well as uphold a normative vision of culture for her future generations. Whether in premodern China or in Mao's Republic, this salient feature of the morally autonomous individual can be observed. Metzger draws this to a point by announcing that modern China has 'fully merged with liberalism and humanism', (p. 288). This evaluation is explicitly denied by Leo Ou-Fan Lee, who carefully distinguishes between the adoption of 'historical modernism' by Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century (i.e. progressive history) and their general irresponsiveness to Western 'esthetic modernism', (pp. 109 ff). Examples of the latter are few and far between, as Jeffrey Kinkey's study of a young writer in the eighties affirms. Metzger was more reserved in his judgement earlier in his essay, admitting that China, following Alistair McIntyre's criteria for modernity, had only committed herself to socialism and not to existentialism or some form of ethical scepticism, (pp. 269, 279). Metzger's promotion of an ‘anti-teleological' historical methodology as the proper tool for more critical studies of China by Chinese intellectuals flies in the face of Lee's awareness of the salient historically progressive element in China's modern consciousness. The suggestion may well be beneficial, but it sets up a tension between Chinese and non-Chinese forms of modernity. It seems a poignant truth that ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1989 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h 415 community elders and magistrates who represented the central government in these localities. Early conflicts over such issues as taxes and militia were resolved when Britain began to send civilian commissioners experienced in colonial administration. They were also blessed with long tenures — J. H. Stewart Lockhart, who had advised the Hong Kong Government on administration of the New Territories, was British Commissioner at Weihaiwei for nineteen years, and R. F. Johnston for sixteen. Weihaiwei was not a major port boasting access to other areas of China. Despite efforts at cultivation - ineffective except for ground nuts — its lack of a marketable product meant the absence of a powerful foreign business community like those that challenged the authority and policies of British officials at the treaty ports. The British administrators, therefore, could establish and carry out policies without having to consider other vested interests. As a rule, they were free to work within the framework of traditional Chinese institutions. The conservatism of the local gentry and the absence of a strong Chinese middle class meant that there was no pressure on British administrators to bow to forces that clamoured for reform and modernization. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Chinese institutions were undergoing changes. Certain constitutional features were being introduced into the Chinese government, and, with the abolition of the civil service examination system in 1905, education based on Confucian classics was being replaced by a more modern, westernized curriculum. At Weihaiwei, however, neither the local elders nor the British administration sought to change the status quo. With the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912 demands for ending foreign privileges increased. Subsequent civil war among various warlord factions meant hardship for the people of Weihaiwei, but, until the formation of the National Government under Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, Britain did not have to give serious thought to returning Weihaiwei to Chinese rule. Meanwhile, administrators kept expenditures below revenue, partly because they wanted to make sure that sufficient funds were available for staff pensions and other expenses when the British withdrew, (p. 168). The actual transfer of administration to the Chinese took place on 1 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 77 exalt the magical power of the tree god.' On the 23rd day of the first lunar month in 1925 just west of Suifu in Szechuan province some Chinese saw a beggar lying on the ground. They returned very shortly after to find the beggar had disappeared completely, the ground where he had lain was bone dry and his imprint on the wet grass stood out. They realized that he must have been an Immortal and built a small shrine dedicated to him. Once a year thereafter, on the 23rd of the first month anniversary local people held a special festival to celebrate his disappearance. Innumerable stories are told of the creation of such new deities. These tend to have the following common factors: a. a human dies under unusual circumstances and his spirit is 'found' to have special and supernatural characteristics. b. An image is carved and placed on an altar as a direct result of the god's behaviour or action. Usually the deity has appeared in a dream, or in a more tangible form as a piece of wood sometimes rough, at other times shaped (a gate or door) — floating in the sea, on a lake or a river, and manifesting supernatural characteristics. Although in theory the deification of a dead soul requires the joint authority of the supreme Taoist deity, the Jade Emperor and the terrestrial emperor of China, there have been a large number of minor deities in particular who owe their deification to the common people, voting with their feet, going to shrines to offer up incense and oil. And just as gods fade and disappear because of lack of support from devotees who have found other and apparently more potent deities, so the creation of new gods springs from a natural but unusual happening such as was the case of the small boy in Singapore, who, as we shall see later, was killed in 1963 by lightning. Cults spring up whenever the spirit of a dead person responds to public devotions and offerings and grants devotees their requests. The deceased need not be from the distant past. An image of Chiang Kai-shek, who only died in 1976, has been seen on at least one major altar in Taiwan, against the wishes of the Kuomintang government, though they would appear to have turned a blind eye. Sun Yat-sen, one of the Republic's greatest worthies, has also been seen in both image and ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 130 to commercial goods, as it moved under the Japanese shadow. Under her conception of “incident” Japan had methods of applying pressure to foreign shipping companies, a pressure which in the existing atmosphere of appeasement it was difficult to resist. Following on the occupation of Canton, the Japanese mopped back towards Hongkong, but they left only a small garrison to watch the border. A heavy smuggled trade sprang up, not only over the border, but also by junk through the countless small inlets and bays of the neighbourhood. The Japanese exerted themselves to coerce the Colonial Government to suppress the trade. Their efforts met with failure: until Hongkong was itself submerged in a wider conflict, the Chinese war effort continued to benefit. Hongkong is one of the world's great ports, the offspring of British administrative practice and Chinese commercial fecundity. Every year twenty-two million tons of shipping were entered and cleared. In the harbour the flags of many nations could be seen, from those of the great Western Powers to that of the little republic of Panama. The flags of the Scandinavian nations, of Norway and Denmark, were particularly in evidence, so far from home, witness to the freedom of the seas for which Britain stood sponsor. The volume of trade which passed through Hongkong was naturally restricted by the Japanese occupation of Canton. Cargo vessels called less frequently, but the great liners on fixed passenger schedules continued to go alongside the Kowloon wharves, often two or three at a time, ships of the American President line, the Canadian Pacific line, the Peninsular and Oriental, the Nord Deutscher Lloyd, the Nippon Yoshen Kaisha, the Dutch J.C.L., the Lloyd Trestino, the Blue Funnel, the City, the Messageries Maritimes and many other lines. I was due for home leave and sailed in the new P.& O. liner, the R.M.S. "Canton", on her maiden trip, in December 1938. The passengers lined the rails as we steamed towards the Lyeemoon passage. Did they realise what a remarkable monument to Sino-British co-operation was that lovely green hill side at which they gazed? Hongkong bears happy testimony, in a difficult future, to the benefits that flow from cordial relations between China and the British Empire. Shanghai and Eastern China 1939 Shanghai was the splendid stronghold of foreign interests in the Far ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 242 Chartered Bank Until 1840 or so banking facilities in Hong Kong were provided by the large hongs, such as Jardine's, Dent's and Russell's. However, once the Colony was considered stable enough, bankers came here following the traders, and, after the establishment of the Treaty Port System, starting in 1843, a number of joint-stock banks with their headquarters in India or London opened. The Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, one of the principal promoters of which was James Wilson MP, the founder of The Economist, and a successful businessman, was such a bank. It was established in London in 1853, and its first branches in the East were founded in Calcutta and Shanghai, both in 1858. Only six years after receiving its Royal Charter Makalee (F), as the bank is called in China (a direct translation of John MacKellar, the first manager in Shanghai), set up a branch in 1859 in Hong Kong. Since 1862, Jah Da (†) (as 'Chartered' is usually called in Cantonese in Hong Kong) has issued its own bank notes. It is at present the oldest foreign bank and was the first licensed financial institution in the Colony. Together with the Hong Kong Bank, the Bank of East Asia, and the Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation, the 'Textile Bank' (yet another sobriquet for 'Chartered' because of its connections with that industry) was one of four overseas banks that was allowed to keep its branch in Shanghai after the People's Republic Government came to power in 1949. The author recalls opening his first account with the Chartered Bank in early January 1955, not in the building that was demolished in 1986 (which was completed in 1959 and at the time was the tallest building in Hong Kong) but in the one before that. There was a colonial atmosphere about the place, with paddle-type fans suspended from ceilings. Few buildings in Hong Kong were air-conditioned then. The bank did not open its first branch in the Territory until early 1962. This was in Tsuen Wan. A time-worn adage had it, a little unkindly perhaps, that officers of Chartered were bankers aiming to be gentlemen, and that expatriates in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank were gentlemen trying to be bankers. In those days the Hong Kong Bank did not employ Chinese, other than in menial positions, and local staff were mainly Eurasians. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 243 and persons of Portuguese descent. To a degree banks symbolise power, and the People's Republic gained in prestige when its 17-storey Bank of China slightly overtopped the Hong Kong Bank in 1950. The latter then erected a flagpole, so it is said, which gave it a few extra feet. In 1959, however, the then new Chartered Bank rose about three metres above the old Bank of China. With the new 42-storey standard Chartered Bank, completed in 1990, looking down on the Hong Kong Bank claimed to be the most cost-efficient bank building in the world it seems that, to some degree, history is repeating itself. Nevertheless, this is well short of the 70-floor new Bank of China (also completed in 1990) which, for a few years, was the tallest building in Asia. Hong Kong Bank ▬ Unlike the Chartered Bank which is essentially British, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which is today the largest bank headquartered in Asia outside Japan, has always prided itself on being international. Nevertheless, the original prospectus of the 'Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Company Limited' stated the aim was: "for an institution to be operated on sound Scottish banking principles." Most of its senior staff have, from the outset, thus been British. The Hong Kong Bank was founded in 1864, on co-operative lines. Business commenced in 1865 (by which time six banks were already established in Hong Kong), and nearly all the principal firms in the Colony were represented. The purpose of Wayfoong (?) (meaning 'Abundance of Remittances' which first appeared, in Chinese, on bank notes in 1881) was to serve the needs of merchants of the China coast and to finance the growing trade between China, Europe and North America. The traders of old felt their needs would be served better if they had a bank (in Hong Kong it is often spoken of as The Bank) which was owned, managed and operated locally. Although the provisional committee was chaired by the British firm Dent and Company its members were far from being exclusively British. They included Americans, Germans, Scandinavians and ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 309 SOJOURNERS IN XIAMEN: NOTES ON THE RAS VISIT It was up-up-and-away' on Friday March 6, 1992, as 18 stalwart RAS Members took a one-hour flight to Xiamen Island, in Fujian Province. Also known as Amoy, the town is similar, in some ways, to Hong Kong. Both are situated in the typhoon belt. Also, like Macau, there are isolated 'dip-nets' for coastal fishing, mournful water buffalo haul ploughs as in Guangdong and 'knife-bean' and flame trees adorn skylines as at Repulse Bay. As in most of China for the past decade, 'free markets' exist in Xiamen with intriguing street stall smells. But this city, where Chinese still stare at Europeans, is also different from Hong Kong. Limited English is spoken, and, when it is, people often have Japanese accents. Nor is there the same high-rise concrete jungle, sampans and junks have more pronounced curves, straining bare-footed labourers pull carts and street sweepers use brooms made from branches of trees. Although one of the People's Republic's Special Economic Zones, Xiamen cannot be compared to hectic Shenzhen. But if direct relations can be established across the shallow, 150 kilometre wide, Taiwan Straits, instead of routing transactions through Hong Kong, the volume of trade could increase rapidly. To make it easier for the Taiwanese, to attract business many of the street signs in Xiamen are in conventional Chinese characters, as in Hong Kong, rather than the simplified ideograms normally used in China. The Group's first stop on arrival in Xiamen, arranged by Member David Norris, was to 'Meixia Arts and Handicrafts' established and run by American Bill Job and wife Kitty. They manufacture and export stained art glass murals, windows and lampshades. The following day, the couple invited the Party to their spartan but adequate house, built in 1928, for which the present rent is US$120 a month. An open well and grapevines grace the forecourt. Their two young daughters attend the Chinese school and are fluent in both Putonghua and the local dialect. The latter sounds more nasal than Cantonese. When the Group arrived the two girls were playing ball with Chinese friends in the narrow street at the front of their home. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 310 Dr Elizabeth Sinn explained at intervals during the three-day trip something of the history of Amoy. Together with Ningpo, efforts were made by the British to establish the two towns as centres of trade before Canton secured commercial dominance in 1757. The Canton monopoly was broken in 1842, with the Treaty of Nanking, by the opening of not only Amoy and Ningpo but also the Treaty Ports of Foochow and Shanghai. From and to these ports, among other commodities, were shipped tea, silk, and opium. But before then, in the late 17th century, Amoy had been the lair of freebooting, swashbuckling Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), who not only drove the Dutch from Taiwan to make it an anti-Manchu base but also attempted to wrest power from the Qing Dynasty. Today, the People's Republic is trying to proclaim that Koxinga, who had a Japanese mother, was no common pirate but a national hero. Amoy also played a big part in the infamous, so-called in Chinese, 'pig business'. The first Chinese contract coolies left Canton in 1845, but they were soon being shipped from other ports in southern China. Recruiters frequently shanghaied labourers who departed for various countries, including Hawaii, Trinidad, British Guiana, Jamaica, and British Borneo. The journey to Peru or Cuba took about 130 days. Conditions aboard, because of overcrowding, were unimaginable. With a lack of food, unsanitary conditions, and harsh treatment, and 500 men crowded into a hull with barely room to lie down, riots and murders sometimes occurred. Over one-quarter of the labourers are said to have died aboard in their 'pens'. Many others, however, emigrated from Fujian under somewhat better conditions, and today most families in Xiamen have relatives living overseas. But the Province's most famous son has to be Tan Kah Kee (1874-1961), well known for his philanthropy, which is evident in several parts of town, including Xiamen University. This was completed in 1919 on its 100-hectare campus. Tan (pronounced Chan in Cantonese) was born just north of Xiamen to a father who had emigrated to Singapore and was engaged in the rice, pineapple, and rubber business. At an early age, Tan Junior also transferred to the British Colony, as it was then, where he later had four wives and fathered 17 children. Although he spoke neither Mandarin nor English, for business convenience, he became a British subject in ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 311 spite of his deep love for his motherland. Naturally, his pictures take pride of place in the 'Overseas Chinese Museum' which has over 6,000 exhibits portraying the Ming and Qing diaspora. The building was completed in 1956, endowed by Tan and other overseas donors. Like most similar establishments in China, information is available in Chinese only. If the People's Republic really wishes to attract overseas visitors, is it too much to ask that literature and captions be printed in English as well? The Group also made a visit to Huli Shan Fortress, completed in 1823, which protected the entrance to the fine, deep-sea port in the lead-up to the First Opium War. The island of Quemoy, from which the Nationalist Government relayed propaganda with loudspeakers during the 'cold war', lies only 2.4 kilometres off the Communist China Mainland near this fortress. The RAS Party later went to the Nanputuo Temple, under the towering 'Five Old Men Peak', which is an architectural masterpiece and crammed with Buddhist statuary. Renovations were in progress. It was encouraging, too, to see the local People's Patriotic Church had recently been given a facelift by the provincial government. But impressions lie in the senses of the beholder. Some RAS Members may especially remember Xiamen for its reasonably priced seafood available, with over 600 varieties of fish compared to Hong Kong, or the edible frogs or fine noodles. There was even champagne available with the buffet breakfast! ― Nevertheless, for the author, the most treasured recollections are of banyans and buildings. Some of the former, with labyrinths of contorting, twisting roots, were probably growing a century-and-a-half ago, before the island became a Treaty port. The town is also a 'museum' of vernacular and colonial architecture. Whether the vantage point is Bill Job's workshop or the hotel window, a vista of old, mellowed, orange, Chinese 'roll and trough' roof tiles, with some roofs of interlocking tiles, blend in reasonably well with new structures erected often from overseas remittances. Although the more ornate, gently sloping, swallow-tail roofs were traditionally reserved for temples, official buildings, and residences ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 321 Dudden's work is essentially narrative history based upon Western-language secondary sources. Beginning with a summary of early American involvement in the China trade, he proceeds to describe the United States' acquisition of and subsequent relations with Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines. After surveying the contrasting course of American dealings with Japan and China up to World War I, he covers the Pacific War, the beginning of the Cold War, and American intervention in Korea and Vietnam. A final chapter deals with the somewhat ambiguous developments of the past two decades. The early portion of the book tells the fascinating story of how the American Republic gained its two last states and its largest colony. An irredeemably commercial nation, the United States purchased two large tracts of its own territory, Louisiana from the Emperor Napoleon I of France in 1803 and Alaska from the Russian Tsar Alexander II in 1867. Until 1910 the near exclusive domain of fur trading companies and gold miners, Alaska's sparse population and remoteness meant that, despite its mineral wealth, only in 1958 did it win statehood. Not until 1778, when Captain James Cook's final expedition landed there, did Westerners discover the Hawaiian islands, "the most isolated archipelago in the world". Once found, they became a magnet attracting American whalers, merchants, and missionaries. In the 1820s the last group assisted Queen Kaahumanu, one of the widows of King Kamehameha the Great, 'a six-foot, three-hundred-pound, strong-willed beauty', to overthrow the dominant religious kapu system which among other things banned women from exercising political power. From then onwards successive rulers were under the tutelage of Americans, who eliminated the native religion, advised the monarchs, and introduced private property rights in land. Soon afterwards, American sugar and pineapple interests acquired large holdings, which would dominate Hawaiian economic and political life until after World War II. In the 1890s the efforts of the anti-American Queen Liliuokalani to restore the powers of the monarchy led to a coup, backed by American sugar interests, and suggestions that the United States annex the islands, also long coveted by French, German, and British imperialists. Congress initially rejected the suggestion, but in 1898, in the war-generated expansionism of the Spanish-American War, reversed itself. Hawaii would become a major American naval base, a centre of tourism, and a focus of Japanese immigration: the attack on Pearl Harbour ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j 68 can demonstrate the relationship between arts exchanges and political, and cultural developments in domestic-bilateral terms. To meet that end, I will analyse the stimulus for arts exchanges between the People's Republic of China and the United States of America and examine the consequences of these exchanges. I maintain that arts exchanges, the product of foreign and cultural policies, are generated by political and international developments. They are affected by these developments, though there may be some time lag between major policy changes and a consequent development in the area of arts exchanges. On the other hand, the two governments, consciously and sometimes directly, were involved in this enterprise, aiming at creating a cultural imagery in order to promote what they consider their respective national interests. Nevertheless, I hold that arts exchanges are not passive. Rather, they have their own impact on affairs in domestic cultural and political life as well as in bilateral relations. In certain cases, this impact generates a new political international environment. Arts exchanges in Sino-American relations are seldom mentioned by political leaders, nor are they sufficiently explored in academic writings. This is because arts exchanges hold a very low position in the two countries' foreign policy priorities. There are always more urgent and apparently bigger issues to handle. However, arts exchanges as part of cultural relations stand for a major facet of the Sino-American general relationship and they often serve as a barometer of the development, and more importantly, the nature of such a relationship. In the period between 1949 and 1972, arts exchanges were non-existent. Artists in the United States were biased against a communist China or hindered by the U.S. government from visiting China. Simultaneously, China made few efforts to send performing groups or arts exhibitions to the United States. In a like manner, there were no exchanges of movies. Before 1972, the United States regarded China as a major antagonist. Anti-Communism and hostility to China had characterized every president's foreign policy since Truman. In American domestic politics, anti-Communism had been a constant theme, especially dominating politics in the early fifties when McCarthyism was strong. When writing later on his experience in this period, John King Fairbank reflected: "It became second nature to indicate that one was safely anti-Communist." McCarthyism did not last long, but it left a shadow over the succeeding decades. 114 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j 73 In China's foreign policy one goal has never changed - the quest for national prestige. The modernization programme, judged from the international perspective, is an expression of China's striving for prestige. In that context, to have her national flag saluted, the national anthem played, and China's name mentioned was something for China to pursue. For a long time, China had viewed international sports competitions as chances to enhance her prestige. Since 1979 high culture was incorporated into the Struggle to the End. To raise the level of Chinese artists to that end needs foreign expertise. Though Western art forms such as ballet had been introduced to the Chinese scene in the first decade of the Republic, China has long been suspicious of Western influence in China's cultural life. Before the Cultural Revolution, few Western cultural groups visited China. The Cultural Revolution not only continued that tendency of suspicion, but also cut Chinese artists totally off from foreign artists for a period long enough for them to fall behind in artistic achievements. To reverse that situation, China needed to use foreign co-operation in arts. On the other hand, Chinese audiences had become very dissatisfied with the monochrome culture developed in the years of the Cultural Revolution. After the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese artists tried to enrich the cultural life of the people, but progress was slow due to many factors. This naturally led to a growing interest in cultural pluralism. The lack of high-quality indigenous cultural performers provided a rationale to invite Western arts groups to make up the deficiency. Since 1978, a few organizations have been deeply involved in hosting artists from Western countries, among which the most important is the China Performing Arts Agency (CPAA). In the period 1979-1981, the CPAA hosted 37 Western performing arts groups, nine of which were from the United States. Among the nine American groups it hosted in this period, seven fell in the category of non-governmental exchanges. As a state agency, its policy in regards to what programmes should be accepted was surprisingly liberal. All "orthodox" performing arts forms, such as classical music, ballet and operas, were considered acceptable by it as long as the group was qualified and, with few exceptions, able to cover its own costs, as the agency had a limited budget for hosting foreign groups, which went almost exclusively to official exchange programmes. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j 81 relations with China were employed for the first time by Richard Nixon. Among a number of measures, he lifted restrictions against Americans wanting to travel to China as a gesture for and, therefore, a step to reconciliation. Nixon approved the visit of the American table tennis team to China. At the White House, the president chatted with members of a table tennis team which was the first Chinese sports delegation that ever toured the United States since the founding of the People's Republic. On 13 January, 1973, he interviewed the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe. Such meetings were conducted as part of the administration's policy of strengthening the U.S.-China general relationship. Even at a time when the administration could only place cultural exchanges low on its priority list, they still enjoyed the attention and support of the president. At this stage, Sino-American ties in culture were far from sufficient. This does not mean that either party failed to see the importance of such exchanges. Thus, the Nixon Administration repeatedly expressed its recognition of the importance of cultural relations in the Shanghai Communique and the communique on 22 February, 1973 which actually announced a programme to expand cultural relations. The president's meetings with visiting Chinese artists were also expressions of this concern. However, in the two years after Nixon's visit, the administration could not find the time to handle matters other than strategic concerns. Furthermore, the president was bogged down in the domestic political difficulties which eventually led to his resignation. The Ford Administration, afraid of irritating the Soviet Union and the right wing at home, could only maintain the status quo and even sacrificed arts exchanges with China. By doing so it accelerated a general deterioration in Sino-American relations. The Carter Administration made no improvement in either the general relationship or cultural relations with China in its first eighteen months in office. When a new China policy began to take shape in the middle of 1977, the general relationship improved. In May, the State Department prepared a memo for the president which pointed out that unless diplomatic relations were established, the existing cultural and economic relations would possibly stagnate or even be weakened. It also pointed out that Sino-Soviet relations would get closer if the United States failed to have a formal relationship with China. But what played a decisive role in the American efforts to establish diplomatic relations was the soaring influence of the Soviet Union in international affairs, a situation Nixon faced before the Sino-American rapprochement. Clearly ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j 85 Nonetheless, a large portion of the participants in U.S.-China arts exchanges believe that, since the two countries are major players in international relations, mutual understanding of the other's culture was crucial in making the world a better place to live in. To the people in whose mind this theme loomed large, it was important to have a friendly relationship with China and exchanges in the arts were a handy way to achieve this goal. The uniqueness of Chinese culture has also motivated some Americans who saw that exchanges could bring to American culture some diversity and therefore enrich it. The interest of Americans in Chinese culture was obvious, as can be seen by, for instance, the increasing number of Americans travelling to China each year. Finally, but by no means the least important factor in supporting arts exchanges with China by private sectors, there was a rejuvenation of the affinity which can be traced back to the 19th century "special relationship" between the United States and China which existed to the 1940s. To some, the special opportunity for the United States to transfer its culture and products to China on favourable terms re-emerged as a result of the drastically increased contacts between the two countries in the Carter years. "Recognition of the People's Republic set long suppressed dreams of a return to China swirling in the minds of educators (the legatees of the missionary impulse) and businessmen." This helps to explain the involvement, rather intensive, of the RBF and the Henry Luce Foundation, which maintained close ties with China in the 1940s, and the United Board For Christian Higher Education, in China's arts education. Affinity and crisis The highpoint of Sino-American arts relations was in 1970-1981. In his visit to the United States in January 1979, Deng Xiaoping personally signed a cultural agreement with President Carter in Washington D.C.. While in the United States, Deng extended to Seiji Ozawa, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, an invitation for the BSO to visit China. When the BSO arrived in Beijing in March 1979, Deng again paid his personal tribute to Sino-American arts exchanges by personally attending its performance and welcoming it as the first American performing art group to visit China since the elevation of relations to ambassadorial level. Page 105 Page 106 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j 88 the United States and further raise suspicion of the American cultural inflow. In a deeper sense, the negative impact of this incident may have been even worse. Obviously, the proposed ban on the abstract paintings was part of the campaign to oppose "bourgeois liberalization", a campaign which itself shows that liberal policies regarding culture had become controversial. As the United States benefited considerably from such a policy, it is understandable that it was not happy with the launching of this campaign. But the consequence of the strong American position on the abstract paintings left the already controversial open-door policy on culture even more vulnerable to criticism. The vulnerability of arts exchanges to an unfavorable climate in bilateral political terms can also be demonstrated by the management of the Hu Na case which grew into a symbolic confrontation between the United States and the People's Republic of China. As a measure of retaliation, the Chinese government cancelled the entire schedule of officially arranged cultural exchanges for the remainder of 1983. Together with the campaign in China to oppose "spiritual pollution" beginning in October 1983, this unfavorable climate in Sino-American relations contributed to the decline of Sino-American exchanges of performing groups and art exhibitions to the lowest ebb since 1980. Although there have been ups and downs in Sino-American cultural relations in the fields of performing groups and arts exhibitions, an American cultural presence in movie presentations in China has enjoyed a relatively steady increase since 1981. By examining the films the China Film Export and Import Corporation (CFEIC) directly purchased from American corporations for public showing, we find that the increase in the number of American films shown in China has grown steadily from one in 1981 to nine in 1984. The number of films purchased in each year roughly doubled. Both of the movies imported in 1982 were shown in the following year, while all four in 1983 got to the public in 1984 and 1985. In 1981 an American movie week was held. In June 1982, 40,000 film workers gathered in Beijing and Shanghai to see six movies shot by James Wong Howe, which were provided by the American embassy to Beijing, in memory of this famous Chinese American film maker. There were also screenings of American movies that the CFEIC purchased from other countries and products of other countries reflecting American life, such as the movie Uncle Tom's Cabin. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j NOTES 99 I Except for those documented otherwise, all the figures presented in this paper are obtained through researches in published and unpublished sources, including those from Xinhua News Agency, year books, newspapers and magazines, personal interviews and so on. 2 Records of CFEIC 3 See Samuel S. Kim, ed. China and The World: Chinese Foreign Policy in the Post-Mao Era (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984) for a discussion of a number of cases reflecting this. 4 John K. Fairbank, China Bound (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 338 5 USIA: Its Work and Structure (USIA), p. 2 6 Ying Hua, "**Youhao, reqing, guangcai**" ("Friendly, Enthusiastic and Glorious"), Guangming ribao (Guangming Daily), 19 September 1973, p. 4 7 For further information on the definition, see Hu Qiaomu, "Dangqian sixiang zhanxian de ruogan wenti" ("Some Issues of the Current Ideological Work") in Jianchi sixiang jiben yuanze, fandui zichan jieji ziyouhua (Uphold the Four Fundamental Principles, Oppose Bourgeois Liberalization) (Beijing: Renmin Press, 1987), pp. 158-198 8 In this respect, one may think that Chinese performing artists were like athletes in that they were more competition-oriented than performance-oriented. This was especially true of opera singers and ballet dancers. While quite a few of them, some of whom had the experience of being trained by foreign artists, won international competitions, there was seldom opera or ballet staged in China. 9 Records of CPAA 10 Personal interview with Wu Fenghua, 31 March 1987 11 Records of CPAA 12 Personal interview with Zhongyan, 14 March 1988 13 Km, p. 115 14 Tang Tsou, "Political Change and Reform," in The Cultural Revolution and the Post-Mao Reforms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 223 15 Ibid., p. 224 16 Li Jian, "Gede yu Quede" ("Praise and Shame"), Hebei Wenyi (Hebei Literature and Art), June 1979 17 Hebei ribao (Hebei Daily), 7 August 1979 18 Guangming ribao (Guangming Daily), 20 July 1979 19 Merle Goldman, "Intellectual Dissent in the People's Republic of China," in Yu-ming Shaw, ed., Power and Politics in the People's Republic of China (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), p. 294 20 Ibid. 21 Liu Binyan, for example, said: "when literature mirrors what is undesirable in life, the mirror itself is not to be blamed, instead, disagreeable things in real life should be spotted and wiped out." For more of his view, see Beijing Review, No. 52, 28 December 1979, p. 13. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j 101 BIBLIOGRAPHY Bai Hua. "Kulian." ("Bitter Love.'') Shiyue (October), September 1979. Barnet, A. Doak and Ralph N. Clough, eds. Modernizing China. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1986. Dietrich, Craig. People's China, a Brief History. Oxford, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1986. Dong, Mei, ed. Zhongmei guanxi ziliao xuanbian: 1971, 7-1981, 7 (Selected Documents Regarding Sino-American Relations: 1971, 7-1981, 7). Beijing: Shishi Press, 1982. Fairbank, John K. Chinabound. New York: Harper and Row, 1982. Goldstein, Martin E. American Foreign Policy: Drift or Decision. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1984. Guangming ribao (Guangming Daily). Guan, L. “Zai menghuan gongchang li" ("In the Mill of Nightmares"), Renmin ribao (Renmin Daily). 13 January 1980, p. 8. Hinton, Harold C., ed. The People's Republic of China, 1979-1984: A Documentary Survey. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1986. Hsiung, James C., ed. Beyond China's Independent Foreign Policy. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985. Hunt, Michael H. The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Implementing Accord for Cultural Exchange in 1980 and 1981 under the Cultural Agreement between the Government of the People's Republic of China and the Government of the United States of America and the three subsequent accords. Index to Newspapers and Periodicals - Philosophy and Social Sciences. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1991 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j 132 NOTES This paper is based largely on the author's own experiences while attending and being involved with Chinese funerals over a period of four decades. 2. B.D. Wilson, 'Chinese Burial Customs in Hong Kong', Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 1 (1960-1), pp. 115-123. Martin K. Whyte, 'Death in the People's Republic of China', Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Eds. James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, University of California Press (1988), pp. 289-316, (p. 313); Laurence G. Thompson, Chinese Religion, An Introduction, Fourth Edition, The Religious Life of Man Series (1979), pp. 50-54. Patrick Hase, 'Traditional funerals', Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 21 (1981), pp. 192-6; Patrick Hase, 'Observations at a Village Funeral', From Village in the City: Studies in the Traditional Roots of Hong Kong Society, Ed. Davis Faure et al., Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong (1984), pp. 129-163; Hugh Baker, 'Burial, Geomancy and Ancestor Worship', Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch, Aspects of Social Organization in the New Territories, Week-end Symposium, 9th-10th May 1964, pp. 36-39. 5. VR Burkhardt, 'Funerals, Requiem Masses and the Path to Purgatory', Chinese Creeds and Customs (1982), pp. 96-110. Evelyn S. Rawski, "The Imperial Way of Death: Ming and Ching Emperors and Death Ritual", Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, op. cit., pp. 228-253 (p. 238). 7. T.C. Lai, Husein Rofe, and Philip Mao, Things Chinese, ed. T.C. Lai (1971), p. 70. 9. Ibid., p. 71. John Z. Bowers, 'Surgery Past and Present', Medicine and Public Health in the People's Republic of China, ed. Joseph R. Quinn (1973), pp. 53-62. 10. Linda Chih-ling Koo, Nourishment of Life: Health in Chinese Society (1982), p. 7, and discussion between Dr. Koo and the author, 18 June 1992. 11. Hugh Baker, 'Soul', More Ancestral Images, A Second Hong Kong Album (1980), pp. 5-8. 12. Elizabeth Sinn, Power and Charity: The Early History of the Tung Wah Hospital (1989). 13. James Hayes, The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911, Institutions and Leadership in Towns and Countryside (1977), pp. 67-8. 14. James Hayes, The Rural Committees of Hong Kong - Studies and Themes (1983), p. 45. 15. Frena Bloomfield, The Book of Chinese Beliefs (1983), pp. 100, 101, and 112. 16. The author has visited this 'Coffin Home' on various occasions. 18. Harold Ingrams, Hong Kong (1952), plate vi; James L. Watson, 'Funeral Specialists in Cantonese Society: Pollution, Performance and Social Hierarchy', Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, op. cit., p. 109. 19. James Hayes, 'Sandal Wood Mills at Tsun Wan', Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 16 (1976), pp. 283-3. 20. Gems of Langzhu Culture, exhibition at Hong Kong Museum of History, 11 April to 9 August 1992. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1992 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x 4 off with a whole pound, 'the foundation of his fortune' which induced him to go to sea as a sailor. He then sailed away, at the age of 12, and in the course of the next six years visited various parts of the world including Australia, Africa and the Americas before finally settling in China in 1860 during the last days of the Arrow War [better known perhaps as the Second Opium War]. Mesny arrived in China at the start of the era known to the Chinese as the 'post-unequal treaties', an extraordinary period of readjustment in Chinese thinking. He arrived in a China whose rulers were an alien dynasty, the non-Chinese Manchus from Manchuria whose dynasty, the Ch'ing, ruled China between 1644-1911. Mesny's era covered the gradual collapse of the dynasty and its fall, followed by the first years of the Republic. William Mesny spent a total of 59 years in China during which time he first, for some thirteen years, led a life of high adventure and, later, one which he lived to the full but at the same time one which appears to have fluctuated between the verge of success and pathetic failure. As it stands the later years of Mesny's life, following his short military career, fall into four periods; first, trekking across China, second, his life in Shanghai whilst still hoping to make his fortune; third, his time there when that hope had all but disappeared and finally, his last days, apparently alone in Hankow. The story contains elements which can only be guessed by reading between the lines in his Miscellanies, sadly without the help of other written or oral records. I have attempted to provide a chronology of Mesny's life from the multitude of snippets and asides he provided in his Miscellanies. This will be found at Appendix B. The great majority of the research in the UK has been carried out by Dr R G Tiedemann of SOAS in the University of London to whom I am also greatly indebted for both his advice and comments, as I am too to Miss Lucie Mesny of St Lawrence in Jersey, for her memories and photographs. However, any errors are mine alone. Apart from the autobiographical portions of the Miscellany we have to rely upon the tiny smattering of family memory still available, two obituaries from Shanghai English language newspapers and what little has been written about Mesny by others who knew him in China. It is unfortunate that other living descendants of William Mesny have fought ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1992 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x The Boxer Rebellion in north China in 1900, which involved the massacre of some western missionaries and a siege of the Legation area in Peking, did not reach as far south as Shanghai, though in his curriculum vitae Mesny mentions 'Volunteered for service at Peking 1900'. Unfortunately, we do not know whether his service was accepted or what he did during that period. The Chinese Imperial government survived these rebellions but slowly became even weaker as the years went by. Western nations also took full advantage of Chinese imperial weakness until in 1911 the Revolution overthrew the imperial government and established a very weak republic which, after some further thirty or so years of both inner turmoil and invasion by the Japanese, ended with the Communist victory. Mesny lived through the first eight years of the Republic, and though they were stirring times, he must have had many nostalgic memories of his prowess and success in the Chinese imperial army, particularly in the latter days of the suppression of the Miao rebels, and the time when he was a prisoner of the Taipings, features which make his eye-witness accounts of value today. Mesny lived in a China which followed a predominantly masculine routine. The majority of foreigners were either isolated loners or members of small groups in remote parts of China, or they lived in treaty ports, enclaves in which the relative comfort of 'home', friends, and social occasions made life bearable, even though foreign women tended to live circumscribed and artificial lives. However, his accounts lack such intimate detail of his and his family's lives. Despite the autobiographical notes in the Miscellany, not only in segments but selective in the extreme, Mesny remains somewhat of an elusive person, and, as none of his letters appear to have survived, much of his personal life would seem to be largely irrecoverable. His enigmatic snippets about his Chinese family are such that they do little more than fuel guesswork. We still lack an account of Mesny's private life in his later years, one in which we might hear the voices of his wives and children as clearly as those of the senior officers we have been provided in the Miscellanies, of the senior Chinese officers during the Kueichou campaign. Much of the raw material provided by Mesny contains stark, bald statements which leave loose ends and strands which we cannot gather together without straying into the realms of guesswork. Regrettably, there would appear to be little chance of ever satisfying our curiosity from... ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1993 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302 19 of rule over the mainland. With such status and role performance, the People's Republic of China gradually gained recognition. She was gradually given invitations to many important events and admitted into various international bodies including the United Nations. These are gestures by which other nations take note of her place in the family of nations and of her performance in international affairs. It is her performance which earns her the honour of being a strong nation, the influence in international affairs, the deference to other nations, especially her neighbours. It can now be said that China (PRC) has a complete face to interact with other nations, following her official entry into international bodies. In addition, it can be said that she is given face in many events. She is elected to important positions or even chairmanship in many federations Actions Concerning Face As the amount of face is dynamic, actions taken in a social interaction may change or restore the amount of face of those concerned. They may enhance, lose, or save the face of them, as shown in Table 1. TABLE 1. Categories of Face Behaviour Tentative Effects Whose Face Enhancing One's Face Other's Face Losing Saving In an interpersonal relationship involving two parties, the categories of behaviour that concerns face could thus be divided into enhancing, losing and saving one's face as well as other's face (Bond, 1986: 246-248). In Table 1, these categories are put against the dimensions of whose face and the effects on face through the actions taken. Of central concern under this heading is the dynamic aspects in the amount of face. It is changeable as a result of actions taken by people, or nations in an interaction. It can be enhanced, lost, or saved. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1993 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302 26 Face Behaviour And Verbal Mass Media Contents It can also be seen that many of the strategies mentioned in the previous section can be verbal ones (the entire list of Modigliani's facework index and Strategy Nos. One to Five, and Eight in Berk's case). This point seems specially pertinent in the case of China. The view that Chinese people are particularly concerned with face may be attributed to the Chinese language. There are numerous expressions that apply the figurative meanings of the characters "mian" and "lian" (see Note 5). As such, it may be 'a rich source of verbal data for the study of face behaviour' (Ho, 1980: 30), and there is also high hope in spotting some face strategies being in use. This unique feature of the Chinese language and the nature of contemporary Chinese Communist mass media suggest that the concept of face may be examined as well by delving into the verbal content of mass communication." And this is precisely the reasoning behind the present study. In the events reported in the mass media, we may analyse face behaviour, if any, of the incumbents through the depicted actions they undertake and through the words and reasoning they apply as quoted by media workers. More so, media workers, as a class in themselves, may have face behaviour in their own right. This may be shown in their treatment of news. If the homogeneity among media workers is high, there is strong ground to treat them as a collectivity, and as a collective mouthpiece or scribe for their boss(es). This seems to be the case in the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC). In Communist China, the mass media can be regarded as the verbal instruments of the ruling regime. The media as "mouthpieces" of the Party, the country and the people have been reiterated time and again but the concern of this pronouncement is still centre upon the Party or the Party Government. In order for the media to serve as mouthpieces of the Party and the Government, structurally, the Party Government has devised a comprehensive and encompassing system of communications strictly under its control. Nationwide media are under the supervision of the Department of Propaganda which is directly controlled by the Party's Central Committee. Provincial media, on the other hand, are monitored through the Party's provincial committees. The newspaper industry, for example, is said to have developed into a multi-layer, multifarious and multi-lingual socialist ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1993 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302 67 Chinese athletes work for the country. They live under the guidance of coaches, the sports hierarchy which in turn are fed by the government and are supervised by the government. Coaches are government employees, and so are the athletes. If these athletes and coaches were found to fare poorly, the government might be unfavourably associated. But if these poor performances were excused, the losses were presented in diminished forms, then not only the athletes, but also the coaches, government officials, or even the whole bureaucracy could be saved from severe criticisms or challenges from other forces in the country. Not being totally defeated socially, albeit the physical defeat would mean the possibility of a revival of status and the possibility of a comeback, both in the sports arena, and in the socio-political area for the government employees. As such, when Chinese athletes or teams encountered face-threatening situations, the unfavourableness would be alleviated or even overturned by a matter of presentation skills. Whether these skills could produce the desired results is beyond the scope of the present analysis. But for sure, if these strategies to forestall the face-threatening situations are clearly evident, then it could be said that the press did some facework for the athletes and the country of the government. And there were reasons to believe that it did facework for the sake of politics since whom it protected from the loss of face or the threats to face were government employees or those who were closely identified with the country. Another relationship between the concept of face with politics can be viewed from a more macroscopic and positive perspective: nation-building. Alan Liu, in his Communication and National Integration in Communist China, quoted Inkeles' initiation of the study of mass media and social systems in the process of nation-building. The roles of mass media in the context of nation-building is to serve as a tool of identification with the country under a specific leadership, and to help to convey a new set of norms, values and symbols across the country so as to achieve national integration. Both added together reflected polity and society (Liu, 1975: 2-3). This seems especially important in a new nation like the People's Republic of China. It was promulgated in 1949. It advocated an ideology which sounded exotic to the general masses. A convenient means would be to use familiar terms with new relationships to construct a new society. Face offers an age-old concept to manipulate with. The new relationships are up to the party leaders' wishes. XIX ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1993 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302 228 And what a worthwhile effort it is! Shoza gave a detailed account and clear analysis of the nature of the Chinese and the significant roles they played in Southeast Asia, their reasons for migration, and, even more importantly, their progress from being indigent coolies to the wealthiest element of the community, controlling all aspects of agriculture, mining trade and finance, from production to distribution. It may be superfluous to state here that at the time of Shoza's writing, the mid-1930s, the world was still in the throes of a wide-spread economic depression. With the exception of what we know as Thailand today, Southeast Asia had comprised European colonies, thus any study of local economies had to take into consideration the colonial powers. As a rule, colonial powers adopted oppressive measures against the Chinese in their colonies. Readers need to keep in mind also that place names were also different from what they are today as they peruse the work, Still, the significance of the Chinese to local economies cannot be over-emphasised. By the 1930s, a poor Chinese in Southeast Asia was rare, Shoza avers. The growth of the Chinese economic power was due to a constant process of individual adaptations to changing market opportunities concluded Shoza, putting aside traditional reasons given for Chinese successes as the cultural trait of hard-work and parsimonious living. It would be irresponsible for a reviewer not to point out that the author was a Japanese research scholar and that his intended readership was Japanese, therefore the book was written from a standpoint of Chinese intent on economic aggression in Southeast Asia. Shoza's statistics may be dated, observations he made are valid still more three score years later. 'The economy of the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, controlling the economic life of the natives, is a grand spectacle within the East Asian economy' (Chapter 9), ++ Politically, the ethnic Chinese population in Southeast Asia today no longer need to worry about local citizenship as they did in the 1930s, but their relationship with the native population, like that between the Southeast Asian countries and the People's Republic of China is still of concern at the end of the 1990s. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g 69 the views expressed right at the start of this paper by Dr Ernest J. Eitel, sometimes titled Hong Kong's first historian and for some time a Hong Kong civil servant, were by no means unusual. Today, far more empathy is shown towards Chinese culture in general by Westerners. For instance, many Caucasian firms believe aquariums enrich the fung shu of an office. It is not just Chinese who can relax, Westerners will tell you, when they lie back and watch fish swimming. It gives everyone a special feeling and lowers their blood pressure by a few degrees. Of course, certain rules have to be followed. The number of fish kept is often six or nine. Three multiplied by three equals nine (a lucky number); and a homonym of three, in Cantonese, sounds similar to the character meaning 'lively'. Because of colour symbolism, one fish may be black (a Black Molly), another reddish (a goldfish), and the rest any other colour. Because the fish are supposed to act as a shield against bad fung shui, sometimes a fish dies. But better a dead fish than a dead customer. Higher up the hill above Central District, at the Albany in Albany Road, residents were concerned about the 70-storey, new, People's Republic Bank of China Building 'giving off vibes'. They feared the sharp edges of its structure with their negative forces would menace the abode of some of Hong Kong's rich and famous. In the West, the new Bank of China building would perhaps be described as 'ominous', 'overshadowing' or 'overpowering'. Many Chinese, however, liken the sharp edges of the Bank of China to a knife pointed at, or arrows cast at, Government House and Central Government Offices, namely, the heart of the British Colonial Administration. These 'weapons', together with the flyovers close to Government House, tie the decision-making hands of the British Governor and threaten the prosperity of Hong Kong. The fung shui 'dragon vein', with the dragon's head turned to face its ancestors, serpents down from Victoria Peak, close to the Albany, concealed by a carpet of vegetation. It passes close to the Albany apartments. The dragon thrusts and turns as the topography changes. The earth surges with natural energy. Chinese dragons are more serpent-like and sinuous than those in the West. And, as the vein gathers strength, it proceeds vigorously on to the 'dragon sites' such as the home of the Governor and down to the Hong Kong Bank. It then dips into the harbour, the 'dragon's lair'. Although now the slope up the Peak is largely obscured by high-rise buildings, on some hills and 70 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g 71 Most Chinese will, however, tell you that a dragon has sinews and veins which can be severed. Blood can be spilled. Thus, when the earth's flesh was pierced, blood, in the form of bright red, ochre-coloured earth, appeared during excavations for the construction of Hong Kong's underground railway in the 1970s. This could mean the time had come for workers to down tools. The evil that might follow had to be averted ritually. Taoist priests would then beat ceremonial gongs and offer prayers to pacify spirits of the earth where the dragon's peace was being destroyed. Exorcism in modern day Hong Kong is by no means uncommon (Raceday rites, 1987). Neither is exorcism uncommon in Christian churches. It is mentioned in the Bible. One can compare certain Buddhist, Taoist or folk-religion ceremonies, which purify and bestow blessings, with walking through fields in Europe in springtime while conducting a Christian Rogation Service to ensure a good harvest. Interestingly, some Chinese came to the conclusion during the last century, that foreigners know far more about fung shui than they are prepared to admit. Otherwise, why would they have picked such a fine site (as it was then) for the Governor's residence? Why would they plant vegetation over the slopes of Victoria Peak in which dwells the resident dragon? Returning to the cutting edges of the Bank of China: a fung shui master is supposed to adhere to strict ethical standards and not do anything which could be construed as the 'black art'. He should not 'attack' a neighbour. However, in the New Territories, for example, a case where a successful family's fortune has suddenly waned has sometimes been traced to the desecration of an ancestor's grave. As a result, revenge against perpetrators was, in the past, not uncommon. A buried 'person' needs to 'breathe', and, whether he or she can do this properly or not, affects his or her descendants. Some believed Chiang Kai-Shek's rise to power depended on his mother's fine grave. This, the Communists are said to have dug up. The People's Republic's 'Red Guards' went to considerable lengths during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) to destroy the 'Four Olds' (old customs, old habits, old culture, old thoughts). These included fung shui. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g 72 Thus, although the doctrine has made a comeback among the citizens of the People's Republic (Superstition rife, 1989: 13), no thought was supposed to have been paid to it when the towering Bank of China was planned. The Chinese-American architect, I. M. Pei, insists, even though the building includes water features, geomancy was not a consideration. Eugene Ho (Ho, 1987), in a letter to the South China Morning Post, wrote: I find the whole theory of fung shui wholly devoid of cognitive content. (For instance) that the sharp edges of the Bank of China in Central are allegedly bad luck. (It has been suggested) a triangle resembles a pyramid, called kam che tap in Cantonese, and this is similar to kam tap -- which means urns where the remains of the dead are kept. Why (should) the mere resemblance between a triangle and a pyramid be sufficient implication of and invitation to bad luck? There are those who maintain that paying attention to fung shui helps promote business and keeps staff contented. Few Chinese are likely to quibble over an office layout if it has been designed on the advice of a fung shui consultant. It is, one can argue, a branch of ergonomics. Altering the positions of furniture (which fung shui experts sensibly say should have rounded corners) and office paraphernalia can provide a better sense of space and convenience. Customs in Other Countries Chinese fung shui is more complex than most geomantic doctrines, yet there are comparable customs in other countries. A Hindu in India does not like building a house on a triangular site. The position of his bed is important. Such beliefs are more on account of spiritual reasons. Similarly, in the Philippines it is not good to construct a staircase or door facing the direction in which the sun will set because it signifies the disappearance of wealth. The front and back doors, as with Chinese belief, should, likewise, not be in a straight line through the building; otherwise, wealth can escape. You should also not face the door when you sleep. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g 148 The Beginnings; Local History before the 1970s While the first History of Hong Kong was published as early as 1862, systematic research on local history began only in the 1950s/early 60s, when a handful of pioneers helped to lay the foundation. Though few in number, they may be divided roughly into five groups, based on different background, training, approach, focus and methodology. Mainstream Chinese Historians One group were Chinese historians arriving in Hong Kong from the Mainland after the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Their interest in Hong Kong was a new phenomenon since in the eyes of 'mainstream' Chinese historians, Hong Kong was simply too peripheral to 'real history', i.e. 'dynastic' history, and therefore, too insignificant to warrant serious scholarly attention. However, now that they were to work in Hong Kong, they began to devolve some of their energy on local studies. They 'discovered' Hong Kong, so to speak. The first scholar to study the localities was Lo Hsiang-lin who joined the Chinese Department of the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 1951. One of the courses he taught, ‘Introduction to Historiography', had a Hong Kong history component which lasted ten weeks, and during this time, students were taken to visit historical sites throughout the territory. His first major work on Hong Kong was published in 1959 in Chinese, An English version appeared in 1963, entitled, Hong Kong and Its External Communications Before 1842 the History of Hong Kong Prior to British Arrival. Each of the ten chapters deals with one locality or topic, and the book represents the most detailed local study to date Lo Hsiang-lin also researched into Dr. Sun Yat-sen's history in Hong Kong, and discovered a large number of documents and sites related to Sun. Other historians in this group included Jen Yu-wen, Jao Tsung-yi and later, Lin Tien-wen, but it must be emphasized that Hong Kong was quite peripheral to their main studies They wrote only occasionally on Hong Kong, and only where it featured in mainstream history. For instance when Jen Yu-wen wrote about the Sung Wong Toi, (a knoll near the Hong Kong International Airport), it was because the two last emperors of the Page 165 Page 166 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zk522640g 205 Kendall, Elizabeth Kimball, A Wayfarer in China, Boston New York Houghton Mifflin, 1913 Kerby, Philip, Beyond the Bund, New York Payson Clarke, 1927 Knox, Thomas Wallace (1835-1896), Overland Through Asia. Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar Life, Chicago FS gilman, etc, 1871 The Boy Travellers in the Far East Part just. Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey to Japan and China etc, New York and London Harper, 1898 Kranzler, David H, Japanese, Nazis and Jews. The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai 1938-1945, New York Yeshiva University Press, 1976 Lamberton, Mary, St John's University Shanghai, 1879-1951, New York United Board for Christian Colleges in China, 1955 Lamont, Florence, Far Eastern Diary 1920, New York Horizon Press, 1951 Latourette, Kenneth S, A History of Christian Missions in China, New York Macmillan, 1929 - Beyond the Ranges, an Autobiography, Grand Rapids. William Erdman Publishers, 1967 + Le Coy, Albert von, Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, London Allen and Unwin, 1926 (Hong Kong Reprint. Oxford University Press) Levy, Howard Seymour, Chinese Foot Binding, London Neville Spearman, 1970 Lewisohn, William, China's Wild West A Road Trip of 5,000 Miles in a Motor Car, Shanghai North China Daily News and Herald, 1937 Leys, Simon, Chinese Shadows, London Penguin, 1974 Li, Anthony C, The History of Privately Controlled Higher Education in the Republic of China, Washington DC Catholic University of America Press, 1954, Westport, Conn Greenwood Press reprint, 1977 Liddell, T Hodgson (B1860), China Its Marvel and Mystery, London Allen, 1909 Lin-ch'ung (1791-1846), A Wild Swan's Frank the Havels of a Mandarin, translated by TC Lai, Hong Kong, 1978 Lau, Alicia Helen Neva (Bewicke) (d. 1926), My Diary in a Chinese Farm, Shanghai Kelly and Walsh, 1892 74pp - The Land of Blue Gown, London Unwin, 1902 + AMAMT 11 41 DL/ ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1996 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641 196 Europeans believed that Africa belonged to tribes and power should be distributed among "tribal chiefs", so Africans constructed tribes to which to belong. Europeans believed that India belonged to religious groups and that chairs for direct election should be distributed to separate religious groups, so India became polarized along Muslim and Hindu lines, and eventually divided into Pakistan and India. In colonies which were overwhelmingly Chinese, Malaya and Hong Kong, for instance, British administrators were struck by the fact that the Chinese had no nationalism toward the respective colony: the British feared that Malaya would be colonized by Chinese settlers and would one day be part of China. Because of a similar fear, Singapore was excluded from Malaysia. Unlike the cases of India and Africa, the concept of nationhood is readily available in China. Chinese settlers carried the concept along with them to the colonies. As a consequence, British rule in the overseas Chinese communities always faced enormous challenges which were exported from China. One of these challenges occurred at the turn of this century, when the concept of “China” and the method to present one's "chineseness" underwent very dramatic changes. The narrative of these changes went something like this: a Manchu China was overthrown by revolutionaries and then a Republican China was stolen by warlords. Before the Guomindang successfully promoted their ideology based upon the cult of Sun Yat-sen and unified China in 1927, China had already disintegrated into competitive regional powers. The overseas Chinese, linked to different competing groups, were drawn into this political arena in China. Their involvement was manifold. This short article deals with one aspect of this involvement - political investment in regional politics. It attempts to illustrate three points. I) The Guomindang ideology of a Chinese Republic based upon the legend of Sun was absent in this period of time. With or without this ideology, China was a political landscape with layers of national and regional networks 2) British colonists commanded some, but not the final, authority over the colonial Chinese. To the overseas Chinese, the political arena that commanded their attention and participation was not in the colony, but in China. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1997 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579 2 Councillors (of whom 20 would be elected from both Chinese and expatriate jurors, or property-holders of a certain value with residential qualifications), and potentially extendible functions. However Young's successor, Sir Alexander Grantham, soon had second thoughts which were warmly shared by his Executive Council (Exco) advisers, and the plans were put into cold storage, to be quietly forgotten. They had seemed to reduce the wholly centralised powers of the Governor-in-Council, besides being of apparently little interest to a mobile and volatile Cantonese population, passing by customary right freely to and fro across the international border, and more concerned with rebuilding their lives after the war's privations. Besides, the Communist victory over the Chiang Kai-shek Nationalists, and the declaration of the People's Republic in 1949, created a new set of problems. It became common parlance that Hong Kong was "different." Unlike African, Caribbean, Asian and Pacific colonies, it could not be built into a Nation. In facing such a novel threat there were cultural divisions within Hong Kong's administration in the 1950s and 60s that commentators have often overlooked. The most obvious was that between those prisoners-of-war or internees during the Japanese occupation who had been judged physically fit to return to post-war duties, and their colleagues who either had fought throughout (in China or in other theatres) or had been recruited subsequently but had served in no other territory. They might differ in their views of what threatened stability, but were in agreement that nothing should, in the cant phrase of the time, "rock the boat." All tended to accept what is now dubbed the economic 'trickle-down' theory, that what was good for the businessmen who dominated the Colony's appointed Councils was good for their employees - and equally for a large proportion of the population that had voted with its feet by flooding into Hong Kong to escape Communism, and also to find employment until it might seem safe to exercise their right to cross the border again and go home. But it seemed to some observers that those who claimed to understand and to love the Colony best had least faith in its unsinkability. A smaller but growing subset consisted of those colonial servants who had been transferred to Hong Kong within Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service (HMOCS) from other territories, usually upon the grant of independence, or who had accepted fixed renewable contracts as mature entrants ("retreads"). Such officers might well have learnt in ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1997 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579 course, think about The Little Man; it can't think about little men." This is not to decry what individual officers could, and usually did, do for personal complainants in specific cases. Sir David Trench had his own ideas; thoughts from on high are less easily smothered than unsolicited disturbances from below. The received wisdom, which equally impressed most of the interlopers, was that since most of the population might want to return home across the border at some time, the electoral roll would be far too fluid to embrace a stable, identifiable and representable society; and that in any event direct elections to Legislative Council (Legco) were unthinkable, because they would be hi-jacked by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Kuomintang (KMT) from Taiwan; the fundamental Chinese political battle would then be fought out in the streets and on any hustings of Hong Kong, which the Chinese People's Republic (CPR) would never be willing to stand idly by and watch being conceivably won by Hong Kong Chinese Nationalist sympathisers. However Trench recognised that Legco was not the only possible forum for expression of popular feeling. Trench had no problems with sharing some of the lifestyle of the taipans and Chinese millionaires who were so noticeable among those traditionally appointed by governors to Exco and Legco, and whose nature he did little to change; despite the familiar jibe that he ranked third, after the taipan of the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation and the Chairman of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, all knew that in the last resort he recommended the names of Executive Councillors to the Secretary of State. In his earlier days, however, he had preferred the raffish and disrespectful ambience of the multi-racial Foreign Correspondents' Club to that of the Hong Kong Club, Fanling [the Governor's official residence in the New Territories Hon. Editor] and the Jockey Club; while he enjoyed the actual sports of golf and racing for their own sakes; he never lost touch with his humbler post-war acquaintances in the Chinese community, such as his language teacher. He insisted that the introductory review chapter of one year's colonial annual report should spell out the wide sweep and valued authority of the great number of statutory, non-statutory and ad hoc committees which he believed to be a valid response to critics who would not understand why the people had no democratically elected voice in his councils. Yet his broad sympathies told him that, even so, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1997 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579 156 which came out at the end of the last century (about Europeans living in the Colony), that (Spurr 1995: 48): There was no real pleasure, nothing but a heavy and pompous extravagance, with no return on the large sums fooled away, an outstanding ignorance of all the surroundings, the Chinese, their language and their ways, or even of the very place itself. Yet, having said that, today, as in the past, many Europeans do come to Hong Kong and, during their stay, they do learn something about local history, and Chinese customs and culture. This need will no doubt continue. In such cases the RAS can help. In addition, a number of scholars visit Hong Kong or write to the RASHKB from overseas. Information has been requested on the pre-World War II Fox Hunt, held at Fanling in the New Territories, details regarding past Hong Kong personalities and wildlife sightings, to give but a few examples. Hong Kong can be proud of its religious tolerance, with regard to temples, ancestral halls and the like, and, when the British took over the New Territories in 1898, on a 99-year lease, they promised that Ching dynasty laws would be retained and local customs respected (Endacott 1958: 38). Consequently, unlike many territories occupied by more oppressive colonial powers, in spite of the British and the Chinese keeping largely apart, an affinity of sorts developed between the two races. Governor Sir John Bowring, too, who chaired RASHKB meetings in the 1850s, disliked weaning the Chinese away from their own religious beliefs and practices (Spurr 1995: 51). A fair amount of local culture has been retained in spite of westernisation and the passage of time. This retention of local culture in the Territory means that, if scholars want to study "things Chinese" which are closer to customs of the old China, and to visit locations where fewer changes have taken place, they are more likely to come to Hong Kong (or go to Taiwan). Here old customs and the modern can be seen side by side. This is less likely to be the case in the People's Republic where much has been disrupted by the influences of Communism over the past half century, including such events as the devastating Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1997 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579 179 (3) Held by Public Records Office (a) RASHKB files some dating from 1959 when the Branch was reformed. These files relate to meetings of Council, general correspondence, President's papers, historical papers, activities programmes, minutes of Council meetings, papers for RAS symposia, HK Arts Centre membership, Board of Governors to Chung Chi College, newsletters and related papers, membership lists, information on other societies, and various other files and papers. (b) Photographs and Papers A collection of papers and photographs, largely concerning Shanghai, China and the Sino-Japanese War, from the 1920s up until shortly after the People's Republic came to power in China in 1949. There is also an album of photographs, 37 × 27 centimetres. All the above papers and photographs are from the collection of the late Arnold Graham Esq., late of Shanghai and Hong Kong. They were donated to the RASHKB by his daughter, Mrs Rothay Woodcock, who is at present in New Zealand. It is intended that more of the Branch's photographs, such as old buildings in Hong Kong, some of which were used for the RASHKB publication Hong Kong Going and Gone, will be added to the RASHKB collection at the Public Records Office First, however, they have to be sorted and listed and further work done on them. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 15 ing is as good as a session of aerobics. Cousins' book has become a classic. It has been said that people laugh more in a warmer climate than they do in the cold north, which, up to a point, is understandable. Opening your mouth too wide lets in the cold! But certainly, as we have seen, senses of humour can differ from the north to the south of Europe, and from country to country. They can also change considerably across Asia. There are differences even among the population of China, from one region or one sub-ethnic group of people to another. Many of the latter have their own dialects which, many insist, may be classified as separate languages in their own right. In China, jokes about politics often go down better in Beijing, the capital city of the country and the heart of Government; whereas Shanghai is the major commercial centre in the People's Republic on the Mainland. The People's Daily is purported to have quoted the Chinese joke about an alien being captured in China (HK Standard, 1998). In Shanghai, so it was written, they would dissect it for medical research. Beijingers, conversely, would send it to a museum as an educational exhibit, while the Cantonese, who eat anything whose back faces the sky and has four legs, except a table, would ask, 'which part of the creature can be braised in brown sauce?' Part-time comedian Brent Ambacher, long-time resident in Hong Kong, told the author that he had been unable to think of any similar jokes about Hong Kong people. Quite rightly, making fun of people today because of their origins is usually frowned upon, as is the cracking of sexist and racist jokes. Many squirm at 'black humour' which is too close to the bone. Yet in Hong Kong the term gweilo (meaning 'ghost person' or 'foreign devil') may, or, as the term is so widely used, may not carry pejorative intentions. Certainly not everyone agrees with the latter, and Frank Ching, the well-known Hong Kong journalist, on more than one occasion has said he never uses the term and that to say it is not derogatory is to deny the obvious (Waters, 1995; 146). Nevertheless, a number of Westerners, especially British, use the term as a self-deprecating form of humour. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 43 Sources and acknowledgements A considerable amount of material in this paper has been drawn from the author's own experiences. Much of it he has heard with his own ears rather than just repeating what he has read or what others have told him. This information has been gleaned over a period of four-and-a-half decades living and working with Chinese in Hong Kong and while visiting cities and regions in the People's Republic of China and while visiting overseas Chinese communities. The author is grateful to a number of Hong Kong comedians, including Reuben M., Brent Ambacher, Harry Wong and Michael Hui. He is also grateful to a number of Chinese friends, such as Howard Young, Legislative Councillor, Joseph Chow, civil engineer and businessman, who enjoy amusing their friends, both Chinese and Western, by telling jokes. Thanks are also due to Nury Vittachi, journalist, author and part-time comic. The author also acknowledges help received from Dr Kristin Stapleton of the University of Kentucky, Carol A R Andrews of the British Museum, Josephine Khu and Dr Sandra Tsang of Hong Kong University, Dr Elizabeth Sinn of the Centre of Asian Studies, Hong Kong University, and Catherine Lau of the Hong Kong Fringe Club. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 49 Yeung, Chris (1998a, March 22), 'Broadcaster stays open to debate,' Sunday Morning Post. (1998b, March 27), 'Civil servants fail to see joke,' South China Morning Post. Zeldin, Theodore (1983), The French, Fontana Paperbacks NOTES Discussion with Howard Young, Legislative Councillor Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the People's Republic of China, 1 February 1999. 2 These appear to be mainly Mainland Chinese jokes with some added, in stages, from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some jokes appear to be 15 or so years behind the times. Many are not really funny. See Internet web page: http://www.sc.cninfo.net/index/new/yml.htm. 3 Carol A. R. Andrews, Assistant Keeper, conducted a 'gallery talk,' April 1997, on Ancient Egyptian Humour. 4 Mr Bean is played by Rowan Atkinson who was said, in 1998, to be Britain's highest paid actor: see South China Morning Post, 15 November 1998. 5 Howard Young, who although himself a Hong Kong Chinese, tells western jokes as he finds Chinese jokes, to use his own words, 'boring;' interviewed by author on 1 February 1999. 6 This is, in other words, the Lun Yu, one of the Chinese Classics which has been the essence of Confucianism for more than 2,500 years. 7 Fok and the author worked together in the Hong Kong Education Department up to 1980. 8 The 'Gang of Four,' which had been centred around Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution, was arrested in October 1976, less than a month after Mao's death. The 'Gang' consisted of Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, Yao Wengyuan, Zhang Chunqiao and the youthful Wang Hongwen. 9 Chinese soldiers too exhausted to march on were taken to the nearest habitation, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 131 Not only did he write many of the Journal's editorials but also in each edition a number of miscellaneous articles on subjects ranging from hunting in Manchuria and boating as a holiday to the Hall of Antiquities in the Hude Museum in Shanghai - a pet project of his, as well as Scientific Notes and Reviews. His editorials ranged from Shanghai's Position in the World to China's New Industrialisation. A typical editorial described the colossal task facing the leaders of China's Republic and, as the years passed, so his editorials became more and more anti-Japanese. In the great age of European self-confidence these editorials reflected the general mood of expatriates not only in the Treaty Ports but also within the hinterland of China. None of this necessarily precluded a measure of genuine interest in Chinese culture though he, himself, appears not to have been a convinced ‘Orientalist.' He covered a vast range of subjects under broad-brush headings Engineering, Industrial and Commercial Notes; Scientific Notes and Reviews; Educational Notes and Intelligence and Travel and Exploration Notes. A number of articles written by people whose names have come down to us as authors of well-known books such as Florence Ayscough, L.C. Arlington, Juliet Bredon and James Hutson appeared in the Journal over the years. It would be impossible to list here many of the articles and papers printed issue by issue ranging as they did from tea to river craft, secret societies to criticisms on the Shanghai local artists exhibitions as well as descriptions of expeditions into the interior With Kua-tzu and Camera in the Yangtze Gorges by H. Foote-Carey and in 1923 - Investigation of the Thermal Dissociation of Hydrated Alumo-silicates, Prehnite, Zoisite and Epidote by E. Norin of the Nystrøm Institute, Taiyuan Fu, Shansi. In early 1938 Arthur and his wife, Clarice, sold their interest in the China Journal to a new company called "The China Journal Publishing Company Limited" based at 117 Hong Kong Road, Shanghai, accepting part of the purchase price in shares of the new company. There were now three directors, H.J. Timperley, A. de C. Sowerby and H.J. Freyn. The manager at that point was a Mr. W.V.D. White with Clarice Moise no longer referred to on the staff of the Journal. Then, on 7 December 1941, after Pearl Harbour, men of the Japanese navy broke into the offices and destroyed everything, including the files, mailing lists, back numbers, and that was the end of the China Journal. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 ARNOLD GRAHAM 1905 - 1996 DAN WATERS 'No Names, No Packdrill, No Hard Words, No Soft Drinks' 305 Before Arnold Graham left Hong Kong for New Zealand in 1994, he donated 515 books to our Branch library. Members of our Society remain grateful to Mr Graham for his generosity. In late August 1996 his daughter, Mrs Rothay Woodcock, wrote to the Royal Asiatic Society to say her Father was ... just too tired to carry on any longer he literally just went to sleep.' His acute wit * remained with him to the end. He was born in Carlisle in 1905 and sailed for Shanghai in 1928. Like many Shanghailanders, in order to complete his full and interesting life, he was forced, when the People's Republic Government came to power in China, to move to Hong Kong in the early 1950s. There, he wrote letters to the Editor of the South China Morning Post under the pseudonym of 'Ancient Gwailo' (his own initials were also ‘A. G.'). In Hong Kong, as in Shanghai, he worked for the Gas Company and, later, as office manager for Binnie and Partners, civil engineers, on schemes like the Sek Pik Reservoir. Although he had spent the greater part of his life in cities, he always maintained the best place to find God is in a garden. As his daughter wrote, 'It is a pity he won't see the new spring leaves coming out on the trees backgrounding his garden or go down to sit by the sea again' + Later Mrs Woodcock wrote to ask if our Branch would like to have some of her father's photographs, maps and papers. It is the end of an era. Today, few Shanghailanders (expatriates who lived for many years in Shanghai) are still with us. Sorting out the contents of the cardboard box that his daughter sent to our Branch I am hesitant. It is like intruding into someone's private life. There is a news- ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 306 paper cutting recalling the story of his life. Many of the papers and photographs, which have been placed by the Royal Asiatic Society with the Government Public Records Office on permanent loan, could be of interest to RAS members who are undertaking research in relevant fields. Among the maps of the Pacific region are some of Japan and Shanghai, one dated 1919. There is also an unusual map (undated) of Shanghai (3 feet x 2 feet 3 inches) which has a 'border' consisting of a large number of small pictures. On the map is printed, 'In this map we have tried to depict for you the history, customs and points of interest in this cosmopolitan city of Shanghai.' Many of Mr Graham's photographs concern the Shanghai Gas Company. They include group pictures of the staff, both Chinese and Westerners, at farewell parties, group gatherings and the like. In all these pictures no women are present. Most images were taken in the early 1930s, when Arnold Graham, as a young man, was Assistant Secretary. There is one photograph of a smaller group, again of both Westerners and Chinese, where some Chinese men are wearing cheung saams. This is interesting because it was taken in October 1950, one year after the People's Republic Government came to power. There is just one photograph of a group which includes both men and women. This was taken in London in 1957. All are Europeans. It was probably a reunion. There is also an album containing a number of snaps of life in Shanghai and China, in the 1930s, and during the Sino-Japanese war. There are also a number of family photographs depicting the lifestyle of Europeans in the Far East between the two World Wars. What did Arnold Graham do in his spare time? He was a keen cricketer and a Shanghai Interporter. There are a number of photographs, of varying sizes, of cricket teams: such as Hong Kong versus Malaya, at Singapore in 1926. There is a picture of the teams, 'Hankow versus Shanghai circa 1930.' There are some pictures taken with people sitting in front of pavilions. Most of the photographs consist entirely of Europeans. In a few pictures, however, there are one or two Chinese who could have been groundsmen. The papers in the box include a ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 397 as, post 1945. One would expect, bearing in mind that many of Hong Kong's records were destroyed during the Japanese occupation (1941-1945), that these last two would be the easiest of the seven to trace. The help of the staff of the Urban Services Department was again sought. They searched the registers of the Jewish and Muslim Cemeteries, and further searches were again made in the Hong Kong Cemetery and the Catholic Cemetery. But still we were unable to locate the two missing graves. A search was also made by Mr Derek Cheng, cemetery attendant at the Stanley Cemetery, but without success. In addition a search was made in the Government Public Records Office, at Kwun Tong, for the birth certificates of Knox and Moss. Again we were unsuccessful. A discussion was also held with an Immigration Department Officer in the Government Births and Deaths Registry. He informed me that unless more information could be obtained, including places of death (for example a hospital), it was extremely unlikely that the death certificates of the two could be traced. Search fees of HK$140.00 for the first and HK$680.00 for a second more general search would be charged for each person. This information has been passed back through BACSA to the relatives. The seven dead persons were all British and it is therefore unlikely that they would have been buried in the delightful little Chiu Yuen (meaning bright and faraway) Eurasian Cemetery, on Hong Kong Island, or in one of the many Chinese cemeteries. Although cremation was rare until more recently (in 1958/59 only 1.65 per cent of corpses in Hong Kong were cremated1), it is just possible these two dead persons' bodies were disposed of in this way. Their ashes could have been scattered (very few are in Hong Kong) or placed in an urn, in a niche, in a columbarium. It is even more unlikely that the bones of these persons, being Europeans, would be placed in an ossuary. Again, it is unlikely that either of the two would have been buried on the China Mainland (although Moss, having died 'post 1945, could have been) after the People's Republic Government came to power in 1949. It should be mentioned that all four graves that we found were located in pleasant surroundings close to, or under trees. Again the two ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1999 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY HONG KONG BRANCH 1999/2000 PRESIDENT'S REPORT PRESENTED AT THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY, ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING ON FRIDAY 24TH MARCH 2000 No man can know a country who only knows what is happening in it today. Anon. As you know the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch (RASHKB) took the 1997 Handover of the Territory, from Britain back to China, in its stride. That Hong Kong has rejoined its Motherland makes little difference to the way our Branch operates. More recently, we have taken a further leap into what most people have come to accept as the New Millennium. This year is also, incidentally, the 40th anniversary since our Branch was reconstituted. Our Branch was first established in Hong Kong in 1847. Unfortunately, it survived only 12 years. It then slumbered for a century and was reconstituted in 1960. Now, moving on into the 21st century means in effect that the RASHKB has played an active part in the local community during three centuries. That is from early British colonial times to the present day when Hong Kong forms a part of the People's Republic of China. Our Society is pleased to have been able to contribute to our community in a variety of ways as this report amply illustrates. Although we are a Royal Society with our head office in London we are at the same time, with branches in several parts of the world, international in character. Together, we share a rich history. Nevertheless our local Branch ploughs its own furrow entirely and we receive no financial assistance from Headquarters. Our Branch is very much part of the Hong Kong scene doing its best to serve the local community, foster goodwill and provide close working relationships between locals and expatriates. Let us examine various aspects of our Branch's activities since the 1999 Annual General Meeting one year ago. I should emphasise that the Branch has continued to be strong and virile as you will see from the following pages. xi ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2000 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n 18 'purge' as a requisite for good health. 29 Chong Su-see: The Foreign Trade in China. 1919. 21 Elliot lasted until replaced by Pottinger in August 1841; he was then sent as Consul to the new Republic of Texas, "a British diplomatic posting equivalent at the time to Turkestan." (M. Booth) 22 M. Booth: Opium: A History, London 1996, p.136. 23 Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801-1885), great reformer and philanthropist. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2000 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n 75 had been handed over the Chinese departed and nothing further had been heard from them. A member of the Mayor's office in Noyelles asked whether we knew where Tungkang was as they had searched the map of China to locate it without success. They seemed quite surprised when they were informed that it is a small fishing town south of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. The French and Chinese inscriptions on the socles of the two Lions gave the date as 1984 and not 1994. Our next move was to telephone the Tungkang Town Council Offices only to find that everyone, though very helpful, had no idea what we were talking about. The Mayor of Tungkang of the time, 1984, had long gone and was, they thought, dead. The more we thought about it the more puzzling it became with the only ideas we could come up with being the short semi-official drive in the 1980s by the Taipei government to widen their contacts with the western world and to remind foreigners of Taiwan's existence. Some months later, the Mayor's Office in Noyelles came up with two documents. One was an undated invoice to the then Maire de Noyelles, M. Claude de Valicourt, covering the shipment of two ‘marble of ramp as they were called, 'Gift of No Commercial Value' being shipped from the port city of Kaohsiung to Noyelles via Le Havre. It was signed Tungkang Town, Town Office. The Bill of Lading, however, was dated 1st June 1985. The other was a typed certificate in Chinese signed by both the Tungkang Mayor and the 'Nuo-ye-le' Mayor, with the French translation. Neither signature is legible, though the date clearly is 20th January 1984 [the 73rd year of the Republic and not 1994]. It is headed Dijie Jiemei Zhen Mengshu which literally means 'Wedded Sister Towns Alliance' and is addressed to the Noyelles's Mayor [Nuo-ye-le Shizhang]. The flowery language used, typical of such pronouncements, declared everlasting friendship between the people of Noyelles and people of the Republic of China [Taiwan] and good wishes for future co-operation for mutual understanding. The significant line, however, thanks the people of Noyelles for their respect for the graves of the Chinese labourers in the Chinese cemetery. The French version of the Chinese produced 'Pledge,' freely translated, also mentions the Chinese cemetery. The date in 1984 is ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g 392 Ms. Han did not practice medicine in China in the 1950s or at any other time * Ms. Leon Comber was a superintendent (not assistant superintendent) with the Malayan police, and acted as assistant commissioner On the morning of Sunday, 25 June, 1950, communist forces from North Korea crossed the border into South Korea. The next day, on 26 June, President Harry S. Truman ordered American air and naval forces to go to the assistance of South Korea, and Clement Attlee in the House of Commons expressed support for Mr. Truman's actions. On 27 June, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution recommending that all members of the UN furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to meet the armed attack.' The Korean War had begun. The unexpected outbreak of the Korean War took all newspapers by surprise but The Times had Ian Ernest McLeavy Morrison, a member of its staff, in the Far East at that time. By August of that year he would be dead. Born in Beijing on 31 May 1913, he was the son of the famous Australian journalist, Dr. George Ernest Morrison (4 February 1862-29 May 1920) and a New Zealander Jennie Wark Robin (1889 – 20 June 1923), Dr. Morrison's former secretary who he had married in 1912. Dr. Morrison was known as "China Morrison" and was himself a correspondent for The Times during 1897-1912 and later political adviser to the Chinese Government. His brother, Alastair Gwynne Morrison was born on 24 August 1915. He ultimately joined the Diplomatic Dr. Morrison and his three sons, Ian, Colin and Alastair, 1917, (Mitchell Library) ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2002 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278 177 3 xii The whole plan was discussed with RAC North, Secretary for Chinese Affairs and JA Fraser, Defence Secretary who agreed. When Harrop went to Chongqing the first person she contacted was her old friend from pre-war, Madame Soong Ching Ling. Madame Soong was the widow of Dr Sun Yat Sen, founder of the Chinese Republic and a former Hong Kong resident himself, and graduate of the Hong Kong Medical School which predated Hong Kong University. When Chiang Kai Shek and his extreme rightist faction won the power struggle for control of the National Government, Madame Soong moved to Hong Kong where she and other supporters of the left wing principles Sun had espoused were able to operate with more latitude. She headed an organisation known as the China Defence League which raised funds in support of the anti-Japanese war effort in China, and had connections with many left wing liberal groups, both within China and among the western intelligentsia in Hong Kong and China. This organisation was effectively a form of interface between the KMT Old Guard and more progressive groups. Agnes Smedley, Rewi Alley, Anna Louise Strong and other westerners with strong contacts with the Communist Party under Mao Ze Dong mixed in the same circles as Madame Soong and her supporters, which included Sun Fo, Dr Sun's son by a previous marriage. Sun Fo himself, though he lived in Hong Kong, frequently travelled to Moscow, ostensibly for 'medical treatment,' often staying for long periods. The league did humanitarian work, organising aid for the millions of refugees in Guangdong and in Hong Kong. Percy Chen, son of Dr Eugene Chen, Dr Sun's Foreign minister and close friend worked closely with this aspect of the League's activities. Chen was a socialist and would later declare for the Communist Party. Significantly, FW Kendall had worked with the league in organising programmes to cope with refugees. He himself was something of a refugee, having lost his livelihood in the same Japanese push in Guangdong. Contacts between this left faction of the Guomindang and British people in Hong Kong of a progressive frame of mind were also significant. Hilda Selwyn-Clarke, known as 'Red Hilda' not only for the colour of her hair, but for her politics, was part of this group, rather than a member of the conventional, highly stratified world of colonial society. Her husband may have been a member of the government administration but she did not subscribe to colonial or establishment values. Kendall also worked with Selwyn-Clarke, as did his Chinese wife, who was to be one of the Selwyn ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2002 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278 261 were keen to claim association with the first rulers of the Zhou, of the 12th century BC, and also with the infamous first ruler of China, Qin Shih Huangdi who, it was claimed, had used the area of Dantu as a penal settlement. During dynastic times Zhenjiang was a walled administrative seat, an important prefecture, and one of twelve prefectural cities in Jiangsu province, in a major region known as Jiangnan [South of the River]. Zhenjiang means 'Guard-post of the River', a title given in 1113 during the Song dynasty, and its location, guarding the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yangzi, is such that it was a fortified post at the point where the southern arm of the Grand Canal crosses the Great River to join the northern arm, as well as being the first and ideal position to control the upstream passage of the Yangzi. The British political aim, when their soldiers captured the city in 1842, was to cut off the vital supply route, the Grand Canal, from southern China to the north in order to exert maximum pressure upon the Imperial government. Although Zhenjiang lays claim to a number of incidents, destruction by nature and by human hand, visits by royalty, legendary happenings we shall restrain ourselves to note but a few. Sun Ce**, who was assassinated in 200 AD, conquered a wide territory down to the mouth of the Great River, to which region he gave the title Jiangdong [East of the River]. His brother, Sun Quan of Wu# succeeded to his throne, and it is to him that Zhenjiang is said to owe its existence as a city. Moreover, it was here that he came to court the beauty, Pan Furen, whose father Sun Quan had condemned to death. He pursued her until he was able to make her his wife. Although Nanjing was Sun's main city Zhenjiang had reminders of his fortifications still visible during the early years of the Republic. The foundations of the fortifications that he built round his Governor's Residence could still be traced in a line of crumbling masonry that capped the ridge of heights connecting the then existing Zhenjiang city wall northward to the monastery, Ganlu Si. Also, inside the present city stood a high solitary gateway, with a building on it known as the Old Drum Tower. The masonry foundations of the gate were alleged to date from the time of Sun Quan, and some graves outside the North gate were also said to be those of some members of his line. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2002 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278 309 During their drive north to eliminate the War Lords and unify China under the Republic, the Nationalist [KMT] forces entered Zhenjiang in March of 1927 and at the same time took over the Concession. Most westerners left for Shanghai whilst those who remained lived aboard hulks on the River or as close to the River as they could get. Even the British Consul was withdrawn to Shanghai where he continued to carry out his Zhenjiang duties. Eventually, in 1929, bowing to the inevitable the Zhenjiang Concession was finally retroceded to Chinese control and the treaty port, as such, was no more. Gerald Yorke travelled to China in 1931 planning to spend a couple of years travelling around China and studying, to satisfy a childhood dream. Not long after his arrival, as Reuter's correspondent, he joined a party chosen by the Chinese Government to inspect the dyke systems of the Yangzi and Huai river valleys which had just been rebuilt as a result of the disastrous floods in 1931. During the tour with the party they departed from Shanghai and reached Zhenjiang early the next morning. They were greeted on the hulk by a band which played valiantly out of tune. After motoring through the town to a public garden they were entertained at a European luncheon. The weather was cold but presuming that any entertainment would be indoors an under-dressed Yorke froze in the open pavilion. A Shandong medicinal wine was served with the first course; appetising dishes came hot from the kitchen, all of which sat on the table waiting for the Chairman of the Provincial Reconstruction Committee to finish his welcoming speech. When the tepid lunch was over they were each given a pamphlet describing the flood protection work done and the reconstruction planned for the future, a perfect example of how provincial officials wasted their time and country's money by publishing, with their portraits next to the title-page, an account of rather more than they have done and of what they would like one to think they are going to do. The afternoon was spent sight-seeing at the monastery on Silver Island [Jin Shan], with its hundred or so monks and its ancient fir tree in the outer courtyard. The tree had but one branch still alive, its trunk bound in iron and its base enclosed in marble - a symbol of the passing of classical Chinese culture. The monastic treasures were all displayed, the bronze vessel from the Zhou dynasty, a drum from the Han, and a jade belt belonging to a former statesman, possibly Ming. There was also a small hexagonal column inscribed with the Daode Jing, the Daoist classic which had surprised Yorke as he had not expected to see a Daoist classic in a Page 375 Page 376 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2002 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278 324 old Colonial Office in Great Smith Street. Sir Christopher Cox, who headed the interview panel, said: 'Waters, you would be more suitable teaching building subjects in Hong Kong than in Trinidad. Go away and think about it!' Rose, Rose I Love You was the first song originating in the People's Republic of China to become popular in Britain. Yet the composers never received royalties. They could not afford to be seen drawing money from a capitalist country. And as I listened to the refrain in Merry England, it all tied in. Serving in the Colonial Service in Hong Kong seemed terribly exciting and romantic. It made me think of Camp Coffee, Zam Buk ointment and other similar branded goods with scenes of Empire on bottles and tins which I grew up with as a child. 'You're not going to the Far East?!' an acquaintance exclaimed. 'The Communists have just acquired half Korea. There's fighting in Vietnam and Malaya. Hong Kong will be the next to fall!” In spite of adverse comments I accepted the offer from the Colonial Office which was shortly to become Her Majesty's Overseas Civil Service. After all a considerable amount of a map of the world was still coloured red. Hadn't Winston Churchill proclaimed: 'I have not become the King's first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire'? At the time I could have been posted to any one of something like 55 different colonies or dependent territories within the British Commonwealth. For me, 'Go East young man!' was the watchword. Nevertheless, some said that the Hong Kong Royal Naval Dockyard was shortly to be closed down. So, in spite of discouraging remarks, I "burned my boats,” sold the family business as a going concern, and went shopping. I spotted cabin trunks made of sheet metal. 'Oh no," the shop assistant exclaimed, 'you only need those, Sir, if you are going to some humid place like Hong Kong!' 'I'll have two!' I replied. Shipboard In the early 1950s, if one flew to Hong Kong, one normally went by seaplane, landed on water and slept the night in a hotel. The journey took five days. But up until 1959 most of us travelled by sea. The Page 390 Page 391 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2002 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278 342 they would have provided (had they been left) and for the urban lineage they would have represented. Those wonderful old buildings are no longer with us to provide anchors in times of need. They were replaced within a few years by high-rise air-conditioned buildings. Many depend upon artificial lighting and ventilation and have windows which do not open. Today, so many live and work in an artificial atmosphere. This major change led long ago to people discarding shorts and open-necked shirts and wearing two-piece suits and more formal and more uncomfortable clothing. The new lifestyle meant the better off were stepping from their air-conditioned homes, carrying brief cases, into their air-conditioned cars and then being conveyed to their air-conditioned offices. At the end of World War Two the Chinese Nationalist Government was waiting in the wings just over the border to take over Hong Kong. But the British beat them to it. If the Americans had had their way, and British rule had been terminated in Hong Kong in 1945 and the place had been returned to China, it is possible to speculate what would have happened. In 1949 Hong Kong, like other big cities in China, would have been taken over by the People's Republic Government. This would have meant that, after 30 or so years of communist rule, Hong Kong would have been as backward economically as the rest of China. There would have been no 'Hong Kong miracle'. After 1978 the Territory would not have been able to form a nucleus for the economic development for the rest of China with its 'Open Door Policy.' Pigeons Up until 1914 every marine launch of Hong Kong's Water Police (as the Marine Police were known then) took a few pigeons on board. These were used to fly messages back to headquarters in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon. But in spite of the introduction of radio the pigeons were kept on strength. Members of the force contributed to buy them food. The flock of about 50 birds came to be looked upon much like the Barbary Apes at Gibraltar or the Ravens at the Tower of London. It was said when the pigeons departed from Marine Police Headquarters so would the British from Hong Kong. The pigeons disappeared during the Japanese occupation but were ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2003 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390 regarding a clandestine relationship that he had many years before with a Chinese lady and which produced three children. Roderick O'Brien addresses a totally different subject. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia, after the defeat of Lon Nol's Khmer Republic forces, and entered Phnom Penh. Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge remained in power for nearly four years, pursuing policies which resulted in the death of nearly two million people through execution, starvation, and disease. The question of a tribunal to bring those responsible to justice has been on the drawing board for several years but has yet to materialise. Roderick has lived and worked in Cambodia and provides a factual, objective and unemotional account of the tragedy of Cambodia and what may lie ahead. The exploits of H.M.S. Hermes on the China Station in the 1930s occupy Jonathan Parkinson. Hermes was the Royal Navy's first purpose-built aircraft carrier and was, by all accounts, a happy ship. She was ultimately sunk by the Japanese off Batticaloa in 1942; a sad end to a distinguished career spanning nearly 20 years. Where would our Journal be without the redoubtable Keith Stevens? Keith has produced another splendid article for this volume. It recounts the Russo-Japanese War fought largely on Chinese soil - and with scant regard for the Chinese people who suffered greatly - almost exactly 100 years ago. The Notes and Queries section is an important miscellany of this and that. Each little and not so little piece represents an investment in time and effort by the individual concerned. Included is another piece on the Chinese Labour Corps in Europe during World War I (See The Chinese Labour Corps in France, 1917-1921, Vol. 40, JHKBRAS, pp. 33-111, and various Notes and Queries in Vols. 41 and 42); some interesting photos which I will leave readers to mull over themselves; a further moving piece (which was almost an article) on Samuel Cornell Plant by his nephew Michael Gillam no less (see The Life and Times of Captain Samuel Cornell Plant, Vol. 41, JHKBRAS, pp. 407-416); a note on the Belilios Star (Hong Kong's official life-saving medal); and a piece on what became of the Tyndareus Stone which used to adorn the sitting out area beneath High West (Victoria Peak) before it was plundered - I see no other word for it - by the British Army in 1993. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2003 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390 18 Restoring the damage done by the three years of Taiping destruction required a massive reconstruction project which lasted for nearly 30 years from 1871 to 1899. In addition to rebuilding the previous structures, several new halls which had not existed before were added during this time, including the Guest House (Ke Tang) and the Dining Hall (Zhai Tang) in 1887; the Goddess of Mercy Hall (Guan Yin Dian), Ancestors Hall (Zu Shi Dian), and the Kshitigarbha Hall (Di Zang Dian) in 1890; and finally the 500 Arhats Hall (Wu Bai Luohan Tang) in 1896. The Republican era, 1911-1949 At the beginning of the Min Guo Republic (1912), all the monks were forced to move out by armed soldiers who moved in and used the temple as a barracks. The soldiers looted the golden statues from the temple, and wooden parts of the temple such as window frames were used by the soldiers to make cooking fires. However, in 1920 the temple and the pagoda were both repaired, and after being closed for a whole decade the temple finally officially reopened in 1922 when all the monks came back. Holmes Welch's otherwise authoritative 1967 study of Buddhism in China mistakenly stated that Longhua Temple was occupied by the Chinese military for the entire Min Guo period. Photos from D. C. Burn's brief 1926 study of the temple show that the Qing Dynasty 500 Arhat Hall (Wu Bai Luohan Tang) was still intact then, although it no longer exists now. Longhua Temple enjoyed 15 years of peace and tranquility until September 11, 1937 when the temple was badly damaged during the Japanese attack on Shanghai. Nine Japanese airplanes dropped 30 bombs on the Longhua area. Most likely they were targeting the nearby Longhua Airport and the Guomindang's Longhua Garrison military camp next door, but they accidentally caused severe damage to the temple. Before the attack there had been 80 monks living in the temple, but afterward there were only 7 monks remaining. During the first five years of the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1942, the internal affairs of the temple were confused and disorganized, with rival masters claiming the post of Abbot, and unqualified persons claiming to be Buddhist monks for the sake of seeking safe haven in the temple. On September 9, 1942 a reorganization committee was ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2003 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390 19 established to restore order within the temple's community of resident monks. In 1944 this committee restored the Da Xiong Bao Dian, and the next year, 1945, the Bao Ta. Once the Sino-Japanese War had ended, in 1946 life in the temple returned to a resemblance of its pre-war normalcy. However, the tranquility which existed within the temple for the next three years was suddenly disrupted when the Communist's captured Shanghai in May 1949 and proclaimed the People's Republic in October 1949. With all the disasters the temple had survived over the previous 900 years, the worst was yet to come. People's Republic, 1949-2003 In June 1949, one month after their capture of Shanghai, the new Communist government took over the temple, and on October 1, 1949, the day celebrating the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the Red flag of the P.R.C. was flown from the top of the pagoda. This unprecedented disrespect shown by the new regime to the temple by flying its flag from the pagoda was only the first in a series of incidents which illustrated the temple's now endangered status. The temple grounds were drastically reduced in size by at least two-thirds when their garden area was seized by the state and converted into Longhua Park in 1954. The temple's halls were temporarily appropriated by the government in January 1956 for a series of meetings held between local government officials and Chinese businessmen to explain and then celebrate the new policy of abolishing private enterprise in favor of a new system of joint private-state companies. The celebration involved a party for 2,000 people which undoubtedly included activities such as smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol which are contrary to the Buddhist faith. This temporary appropriation of the temple by the government for non-religious purposes was herald of worse things to come during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). In the summer of 1966 Longhua Temple suffered a devastating series of events over a one month period which destroyed nearly all vestiges of its centuries old heritage. On August 24, 1966 a mob of more than 1,000 Red Guards (Hong Wei Bing) rushed into the temple and in one day destroyed all of the temple's Buddha statues, library of books, treasures, and art work. The next day, August 25, the Red Guards returned with the intention of destroying the Longhua Pagoda (Bao Ta), which we've seen had probably been built in the Northern Song ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2003 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390 138 preyed on the Chinese who had settled in Siberia, north of the Amur River, and every now and then, upon those who lived in Manchuria just south of the river. The Russian bandits gradually disappeared from this region, and their place was more and more taken by Chinese, and so the term Hung Hutse came to be applied to Chinese bandits as well, even though the latter with rare exception have no beards.' Another version provided by an American reporter with a vivid imagination explained that the bandits painted their faces red and wore false beards to engender fear in the hearts of all and sundry. Brindle related the story of two Hong Huzi chiefs who held high positions in the Imperial Army of China, and periodically visited Peking. They had organised large bands of Hong Huzi during the summer and autumn of 1904, the result being a determined and continual harassment of outlying Russian camps. The Hong Huzi, he wrote, 'were splendid horsemen, well armed and mounted on Manchurian ponies, and made admirable irregulars.' Two early French travellers, Ular and Mury, described a community in northern Manchuria as 'Zheltuga, the republic of the Chinese bandits, the Hong Huzi'. Zheltuga was the community of illegal Chinese gold miners which existed on the banks of the Heilongjiang [Amur], the border between Manchuria and Russia, between 1883 and 1886. It consisted of Russians and Chinese who flocked into the area from Siberia and Manchuria when gold was found in the area of the present Chinese town of Mohe as far north as one can get in Manchuria. Zheltuga lasted three years and was destroyed by the Qing in 1886. There would appear to be no corroboration of the French claim, and the miners so described consisted of unauthorised speculators who doubtless were referred to as bandits by the Qing authorities and by extension as Hong Huzi. They may, perhaps, have been a community dominated by Hong Huzi but it is doubtful whether they were an organised community of Red Beards. General Ma, one of China's generals stationed in northern Manchuria near its border with Mongolia, attracted significant attention of the Russians as he was one of a small but powerful party who urged the Chinese Government to cast her lot with the Japanese, making common cause against the encroaching northern Power. Many of his ================================================================================