RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1964 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r 97 HONG KONG BUTTERFLIES V. R. BURKHARDT Richard South, the author of the most popular handbook of British butterflies, prefaces his work by saying, "Almost everyone admires the wild flowers that Nature produces so lavishly, and in such charming variety of form and colour; but, in addition to their own proper florescence, the plants of woodland, meadow, moor, and down have other blossoms that arise from them, although they are not of them. These are the beautiful winged creatures called butterflies, which, as crawling caterpillars, obtain their nourishment from plant leafage, and in the perfect state help the bees to rifle the flowers of their sweets, and at the same time assist in the work of fertilisation. English butterflies rarely obtrude themselves on the stroller's gaze apart from the whites which devastate his cabbages, and the apparently aimless flight of the Meadow Brown, when crossing a hayfield. The real country lover passing through the leafless copse on a sunny windless day in February, may be heartened by the sight of the sulphur yellow of the male Brimstone which, as the "butter-coloured fly", gives its English name to the whole race. In Hong Kong, the most unobservant cannot fail to notice the brilliant "aerial flowers" referred to by the British naturalist, as the purple shot Euploeas, or the yellow Euremas pass him in the very centre of the city. Though the Colony lies just within the tropic of Cancer, at least seventy per cent of its butterflies are Palaearctic, that is to say, to be found normally in a zone running from Africa north of the Sahara across Europe and Asia to Japan and Formosa. The geology and climate of the Colony both militate against the luxurious vegetation associated with a tropical country. Though much has been done by the Government in the way of afforestation, there has not been time since the British occupation to produce the leaf mould and rich subsoil found in primitive jungle and forest, and the flora on which the larvae of butterflies feed is much more restricted than in countries like Malaya and Indonesia. Early collectors identified about 140 different species of butterflies in the Colony, and J. C. Kershaw in his "Butterflies of Hong ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1967 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g HONG KONG MAMMALS PATRICIA MARSHALL 11 Introduction Zoologically the world may be divided into 5 regions, the Holarctic (Eurasia and North America; once connected across the Bering Straits), Oriental (South East Asia), Australasian (Australia and New Guinea), Ethiopian (Africa south of the Sahara) and South American regions. These regions are distinguished from one another by the different assemblage of animals which each contains. Hong Kong is situated on the borders between the Holarctic and Oriental regions, and its fauna is of interest in that it contains animals from both the Holarctic, such as the fox, and from the Orient such as the pangolin and the civets, Historical In the 10th century, Hong Kong was covered in dense tropical rain forest, with tall trees, and a fairly rich soil. In the early Sung dynasty Chinese people began to settle in this region and to farm in the traditional style of lowland cultivation. They drained the valleys to grow wet paddy, and kept cows, pigs and chickens. In doing so they were harassed by pirates from the sea and by wild beasts such as elephants, rhinos, tigers, leopards and wolves from the forest. Particularly the herds of elephants did great damage to the crops, and in 962 A.D. the Buddhist farmers, to placate the wild elephants, collected together all the elephant bones they could find, buried them, and erected a stone pagoda. Today a temple stands on this site which is said to be just north of the Sino-British border, and a stone tablet inscribed with a prayer to the elephants is still present. Not only were there wild beasts in the forests but there were crocodiles and dugongs in the rivers. For fuel and to discourage the wild animals, the villagers burnt down and logged vast areas of forest. This had the desired effect Dr. Patricia Marshall has been lecturing in Zoology at the University of Hong Kong since 1962. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG 47 the Chicago meat trade. Morès soon joined forces with Drumont,49 the brilliant anti-semitic editor of La Libre Parole, served as the paper's official duellist, and created a body of street fighters called 'Morès and His Friends'. These street fighters, the first 'storm-troopers', were recruited from among the butcher boys of the district of La Villette in northeastern Paris. Morès outfitted his 'friends' in cowboy hats, purple shirts and other Wild West accoutrements. 51 In June 1890 Morès was sentenced to three months imprisonment50 for the publication of inflammatory writings; but this experience did not dampen his ardour as a fervent nationalist, socialist and anti-semite. He fought four duels, in one of which he killed Captain Armand Mayer, a Jewish officer in the French Army; but in 1893 his political position was compromised when Clemenceau revealed that the anti-semitic Morès had borrowed money from Cornelius Herz, a Jew associated with the notorious Panama scandal. In 1894 the impetuous Morès landed in Algeria and immediately embarked on a violent campaign to arouse the Moslems in North Africa. In 1895, after a short visit to France, Morès returned to Algeria. His purpose was to create an alliance between Catholic France and Moslem Africa so as to block British expansion in the African continent. His scheme was visionary and it is not clear how he expected to unify Frenchmen and Arabs in a crusade against British imperialism; but we do know he planned an expedition from Tunis through Ghadames and Ghat across the Sahara Desert to Bahr el Ghazal, where the French would be in a strong position on the Upper Nile to throttle British power in Egypt and prevent complete British control of the route from Cape to Cairo. In Tunis on 29 April 1896, Morès signed an agreement with a certain El Hadj Ali to guide a caravan from Gabes, Tunisia, to Ghat, a distance of some thousand miles. He left Gabes on the morning of 14 May with a small escort. On the journey south a party of Touaregs attached themselves to the caravan, claiming they would guide the party through the desert. In fact, they were the henchmen of the Touareg Bechaoui, who was waiting to plunder the caravan and kill Morès at a place on the Libyan frontier called Mechiguig. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 54 H. J. LETHBRIDGE in André Malraux, Antimémoires. Paris, 1967, pp. 375-473. There is a short biography in Roman d'Amat and R. Limouzin-Lamothe, eds., Dictionnaire de Biographie Française, Paris, 1965. 17 Souvenirs de Cochinchine par Ch. David de Mayréna, Capitaine d'État-Major, Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur... Toulon, J. Laurent, 1871. 18 See Marcel Ner, 'Marie Ier Roi des Sedangs', Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient (Hanoi), Vol. 27, 1927, p. 316. 19 Ibid., p. 333. 20 Ahnaja, Mayréna's consort, died of tuberculosis in late 1888. She had followed Mayréna from Saigon but they were never legally married. 21 There are many studies of Morès, but most are written from a French nationalist point of view: see, for example, Baron Charles de Donos, Morès: Sa vie, sa mort, Paris, 1899; Auguste Pavy, L'Expédition de Morès, Paris 1897; Félicien Pascal, L'Assassinat de Morès, un crime d'État, Paris, 1902; Jules Delahaye, Les Assassins et les vengeurs de Morès, 3 vols., Paris, 1905-1907; Pierre Frondaie, L'Assassinat du marquis de Morès, Paris, 1934. Of great interest are chapters on Morès in Maurice Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, Paris, 1902, and in Georges Bernanos, La Grande peur des bien-pensants, Paris, 1931. For details on the family see Almanach de Gotha, Gotha, 1890, pp. 390-91. Robert F. Byrnes, Antisemitism in Modern France, vol. 1, New Brunswick, NJ., 1950, contains many illuminating insights into Morès' political career. The most modern study is Donald Dresden's The Marquis de Morès: Emperor of the Bad Lands, 1970, which is particularly good on Morès's adventures in the Far West. 22 One of his fellow cadets was Philippe Pétain (1856-1951), who later became the head of the Vichy Government. Another was the saintly Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), a missionary in the Sahara. 23 His full name is given in the New York Times Obituary Index as Louis A. von Baron Hoffmann. He died in 1909. His daughter's name, Medora, was probably taken from Byron's poem 'The Corsair'. 24 See Russell Reid, 'The De Morès Historical Site', North Dakota Historical Quarterly, vol. 8, 1941, pp. 272-83. In 1963 Louis Vallombrosa, the Marquis' eldest son, presented the château and the surrounding grounds to the State of North Dakota. 25 See Maurice Soulié, Marie Ier, roi des Sédangs, 1888-1890, Paris, 1927, pp. 122-6. Mlle Dahlberg was supposed to be studying Siamese monuments in Bangkok but she was probably in the pay of the Germans who had recently discovered an interest in the region. Her brother was ostensibly a trader at Haiphong but really engaged in the smuggling of contraband goods. 26 A tour of the East was often a risky venture. Many companies went broke and singers and actresses left penniless and hence vulnerable as a consequence. See, for example, Conrad's novel Victory and Somerset Maugham's story 'Flotsam and Jetsam' for fictional but accurate accounts of the lives of distressed European actresses in the East. 27 Robert Fraser-Smith founded the Hong Kong Telegraph in 1881. He was also its editor and publisher until his death in 1895. The paper was edited from 6 Pedder's Hill and Fraser-Smith employed a staff of about four Europeans, usually Scotsmen, as reporters. As J. S. Thomson in The Chinese (London, 1909) writes: "The newspapers of the Treaty Ports are generally set up by the Macaense (sic) and edited by Scotchmen". Fraser-Smith was constantly involved in libel actions and in 1890 was sentenced to six months imprisonment for libelling J. Minhinett, a foreman in the Public Works Department, by suggesting he had committed rape. He did Page 60 Page 61 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 56 Yin in the other temple, the Pi-yun Ssu, depicts her with only two arms sitting cross-legged on a recumbent blue lion. Her assistants are an unnamed dark-faced elderly minister who appears to be South Asian, standing holding a tablet before his chest and dressed in a long blue robe. Her other attendant is the Red Youth, Hung Hai-eh, standing on her left hand with his hands held together before his chest, and dressed in a red robe over green trousers with a flowing scarf-like halo. Taking the three groups, the twenty Deva listed in Soothill, and the two groups in the Ta Pei Ssu and the Pi-yun Ssu, we have twenty deities common to all three. These are: Brahma, Indra, Pancika, Sarasvati, Laksmi, Skanda [Wei T'o], Prthivi, Hariti, Marici, Surya, Candra, Siva, Yamaraja, Bodhidhruma, Guyapati, Kinnara and the four T'ien-wang guardians Vaisravana, Dhrtarastra, Virudhaka and Virupaksa. In the Ta Pei Ssu we also have five additional Deva not present in the Pi-yun Ssu, the Asura, Vimalakirti, Nanda Upananda and Mahoraga. A further two Deva images are seen only in the Pi-yun Ssu. These are Lei Kung and Sagara. Taking each of the deities in turn, we shall examine their background and in particular their Brahmanist [or Vedic] origins, their role in the Chinese pantheon and any ambiguities or contradictions we encounter. The important three Brahmanist deities are known in Sanskrit as the Trimurti: the creator Brahma the preserver Vishnu the destroyer Siva Brahma and Siva are indeed included in the two temples whilst Vishnu is not3. Though a major Hindu deity today Vishnu was not so during the Vedic era of the second millennium BC. His particular task ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 70 the primary one in China being as the Lord of the Underworld known as Yen-lo Wang. In later Brahmanist mythology he is one of the eight Lokapalas, the guardian of the south and judge of the dead. He was the son of the sun, with a twin sister Yamuna - regarded by some Hindus as the first human pair. An image of Yama is present in both the Pi-yun Ssu and the Ta Pei Ssu. In northern China images of Yen-lo Wang have been noted in several old temples where he is portrayed as a benign elderly human, dressed in court robes and cap of dynastic China. In the Kuan Yin Hall of the Ta Pei Ssu in Peking his image depicts him thus, with his hands held palms together before his chest. He has no unique characteristics and is known simply as Yen Mo Lo. He is referred to by the temple staff as Yama and appears to have no other title and is looked upon by the monks as the Lord of the Underworld. In the Pi-yun Ssu he is a general wearing armour under his colourful robes and has an axe clutched in his right hand. His left hand is held across his body pointing with two of his fingers. He has dark skin, round eyes, a short black beard and moustache and a scarf swirling behind his head hanging down in front of his body. There is also Yen-mo Hu-fa, a Lama Buddhist [Tantric] deity, whose image stands in the Lama Temple in Peking. It is typical Tibeto-Mongol iconography, swathed in silken robes obscuring the body leaving only the fierce head and the raised right arm visible. The head, which looks somewhat like a blue pig with gold eyebrows and red mouth, has a row of skulls across the top of the head mounted on a coronet, with a fiery nimbus behind that. He is holding in the air in his right hand a short rod [a heavenly cane] with a miniature white skull mounted on the top. Without the silken robe the deity is revealed standing on a blue horse or mule which, in turn, is prostrate on a naked human. The deity has another small blue-skinned demonic figure standing before him, facing him and holding its hands up towards the deity in supplication. 14] Sagara known in Chinese as P'o-chie Lung-wang and P'o-chie-lo Sagara is the Naga King of the Ocean Palace north of Mount Meru, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 one of the Twenty Deva. Sagara Naga, the Dragon King of Rain. 71 In Chinese he is the Dragon King. His image has only been noted in one of our two temples in the Western Hills, the Pi-yun Ssu where he is portrayed as a standing, black-skinned official in multi-coloured robes and a pill-box cap with a small sunburst on the front. He has large round eyes and a black beard and is holding a tablet in both hands clasped before his chest. His image is also present in the cave/tunnel under the Taiwanese temple where he is known as Sha Lo Wang 沙洛王 and is portrayed as a middle-aged Chinese, standing, dressed in gilded armour and small Taoist crown. He is holding an unsheathed sword in his right hand and a small snake-like dragon in his left. 15] Asura known in Chinese as Ah-hsü-lo The Asura in the Lotus Sutra are one of the Eight Classes of super-natural beings - Asura originally meant a spirit or even a god - and are regarded as demons who fight against the forces of Indra. There is an image of an Asura in the group in the Ta Pei Ssu but not in the Pi-yun Ssu, nor in the cave/tunnel in the Taiwanese temple. In the Ta Pei Ssu he is a demonic human with four arms, three eyes and a further head superimposed upon his normal head. He has fiery red spiky hair, red moustache and beard, large round eyes and rings one in each ear. He is stripped to the waist and is white skinned, has bare legs and feet and is wearing a highly decorated colourful skirt. 16] Vimalakirti known in Chinese as Wei-mo Chu-shih Vimalakirti was a disciple of Sakyamuni at Vaisali who the Buddha is said to have instructed, and who later recorded it as the Sutra of Vimalakirti. The realm of Vimalakirti is a realm of profound joy. An image of Vimalakirti is in the group in the Ta Pei Ssu but not in the Pi-yun Ssu, nor in the cave/tunnel in the Taiwanese temple. He is standing, dressed in a green robe decorated with gilded roundels and border, and a scarf round his head holding his hair in a loose knot protruding up and through it. He has grey hair, beard, moustache and eyebrows. There are no unique characteristics. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 90 Chun-t'i P'u-sa Marici Jih T'ien-tzu Surya Yüeh-kung T'ien-tzu Candra Lung Wang Sagara Yen-mo-lo Yamaraja Ah Su-lo Asura Kan Ta-po Wei Mo-chi Nan-t'o Ma-hu-lo Tzu-wei Ta-ti Chin na-lo Gandharva Vimalakirti Nanda Mahoraga a Chinese deity Kinnara Tung Yueh Ta-ti A Chinese deity ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 93 Appendix D THE TWENTY-EIGHT BUDDHAS OF YORE Twenty-eight images of the Early Buddhas, the Ku Fo; the Buddhas of pre-history, the Buddhas who came before Sakyamuni, The Buddha, are to be seen in the Kuan Tu temple complex, to the north-west of Taipei. These 28 'Old Buddhas' are: Ta Fan T'ien Wang 大梵天王 [Maha Brahman - Brahma] P'i-p'o Chia-lo Wang 毘婆迦羅王 [Vipasyin: the first of the Seven Buddhas of antiquity] Kan-ta-p'o Wang 乾達婆王 [Gandharva: the gods of fragrance and music: the musicians of Indra] Ti-shih T'ien 帝釋天 [Indra] Ta Pien-ts'ai 大辯才 [Sarasvati] Ma-hsi-shou-lo 摩醯首羅 [Siva: Mahesvara] Ta Hai Lung Wang 大海龍王 [Sagara - Lung Wang] Chien-na-lo Wang 監那羅王 [Kinnara] Wu Pu Ching 五部凈 Chin-p'i-lo Wang 金毘羅王 [Yama - as protector of the 1000 arm Kuan Yin] [Kumbhira - a Yaksha king, who was converted and became a guardian of Buddhism] ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1998 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794 96 Appendix E THE LIST OF TWENTY DEVA 十天 +* IN SOOTHILL'S DICTIONARY OF CHINESE BUDDHIST TERMS Maha Brahman - Brahma Sakra devanam - Indra Vaisravana Dhrtarastra Virudhaka The Four Diamond Kings - Temple Guardians of the Four Directions Virupaksa Guhyapati Mahesvara Pancika Sarasvati Laksmi Skanda Prthivi Bodhidruma or Bodhivrksa Hariti Marici Surya Candra Sagara Yama-raja ================================================================================