RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1961
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch

RASHKB and author

16

Vol. 1 (1961)

ISSN 1991-7295

Christian centuries of the new states of South-east Asia, formed under Indian influence in Indo-China, Indonesia and the Malay Peninsula.

During the Middle Ages the navigation of the Southern Seas was in the hands of the Arabs. But after the rounding of the Cape, direct contact between Europe and the East by sea was restored. It was mainly by the sea-route that India, China, and South-east Asia became known to modern Europe. In this the Portuguese navigators played an all-important part. Passing over the rivalries of the Western nations we come to the days of the East India Company.

In India the Moghul empire had reached its height, fine examples of its art remaining in the Moghul architecture of Pakistan and North-west India, and Moghul miniature painting. But with the Moghul Moslem law had come to India, and it was soon recognized by the East India Company that the study of Moslem languages was necessary for the government of India. So Islamics now became part of the study of India as of Persia.

In 1783 Sir William Jones, a brilliant linguist who had mastered Persian and Arabic during his student days in England, was appointed Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Bengal. In 1784 he proposed the forming of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and became its first President. Becoming aware of the importance of Sanskrit, he became the founder of Sanskrit studies in the West. In accordance with Warren Hastings' decision in 1776 that Indians should be ruled by their own laws, he undertook the immense task of compiling a complete digest of Moslem and Hindu law, a task which he left unfinished at his death eleven years later.

It was from India that the Western study of Tibet commenced, initiated by Catholic missionaries, of whom the most eminent was Desideri who lived for many years in the great Sera monastery at Lhasa, and wrote the first comprehensive account of Tibet.

Meantime the Jesuit missionaries had proceeded eastwards in the wake of the Portuguese to Malacca, Macau and Japan. It was from Macau that Matthew Ricci entered China in 1580 and in course of time reached Peking, where a beginning was made in the study of the Chinese Classics and Histories, which led to the first real knowledge of Chinese civilization in the West. It was now realized that the 'China' at the end of the sea-route was the same as Marco Polo's 'Cathay'.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century modern Sinology commenced with Robert Morrison at Canton, and continued with a number of able scholars, too numerous to mention here, of whom James Legge with his translation of the Chinese Classics into
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f
NESTORIAN CROSSES

21

Nestorian community in his letters, and their king George, whom he converted from Nestorianism to the Catholic faith.

The scattered references to the Nestorians in the accounts of the friars are confirmed by Marco Polo (1271-1295) who with his father and uncle can represent for us the second group of travelling merchants. Everywhere through Central Asia and China Marco found Nestorian Christians, usually in the service of the Court, and probably more often than not of Syrian, Persian or Turkish race, employed as administrative officials by the alien government on account of their high standard of literacy.

Marco Polo also confirms the existence of a Nestorian Christian tribe with their Christian king George (whom he confuses with Prester John as Odoric also does) at the Yellow River bend. It seems likely that the name 'Tenduc' which he gives to the region is the early pronunciation of T'ien-tê which was an old name of the present city of Kuei-hua{ in that region, near which is the important market town of Pao-t'ou in which Mr. P. M. Scott found the first fourteen crosses of our paper. Similarly the Tozan of Odoric may be identified with Tung-sheng, an early name for the same region. The Christian Mongol tribe situated by the Ordos bend of the Yellow River is known from various sources to have been the Onguts (Wang-ku people), to which Marco Polo refers, though confusedly, in calling their king Ung-Khan.

These facts are confirmed in a remarkable way by a Syriac document describing a pilgrimage of two Eastern Nestorian monks—one an Ongut, the other of Uigur stock—from their monastery near Peking to the seat of the Nestorian Patriarch in Mesopotamia in A.D. 1278. In the course of their journey they visited the Christian Ongut tribe by the Yellow River bend, and from them received a touching farewell.19

IV. NESTORIAN RELICS IN CHINA AND MONGOLIA

With the expulsion of the Mongols from China at the fall of the Yuan dynasty in A.D. 1368, the Christianity both Nestorian and Franciscan that had been associated with their regime disappeared.

17 Letters of Montecorvino, see Yule, op. cit., and Moule, op. cit., pp. 171 ff.

18 Yule, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, revised by Cordier, London, Murray, 1903.

19 Budge, The Monks of Kublai Khan, London, R.T.S. 1928.

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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1963
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EUROPEAN NAVIGATION ON THE YANGTSE

A. D. BLUE *

The Yangtse is the greatest river in China, and has been of much greater importance in the history of the world than the Amazon and the Mississippi, which are superior in length and volume. In this respect it ranks with the Nile and the Euphrates, but unlike them it has always had a much greater population living along its banks. The Chinese know the Yangtse as the Long, or Great, River. Marco Polo may not have been the first European to see the Yangtse, but he was certainly the first to appreciate its importance, and to bring it to the notice of the Western world.

Of the Yangtse in general Marco Polo said "the multitude of vessels that invest this great river is so great that no one who should read or hear would believe it. The quantity of merchandise carried up and down is past all belief. In fact it is so big, that it seems to be a sea rather than a river". There is no doubt but at that time, the second half of the 13th century, the Yangtse carried a greater volume of traffic than any other river in the world. Marco Polo was correct in thinking that no one would believe his reports on the Yangtse, or on China, and it was left to later generations to appreciate the accuracy of his observations.

It was the missions to China of Lord Macartney and Lord Amherst in 1793 and 1816 respectively, that made Europeans realise the importance of the Yangtse. Then in 1842, during the First China War, a British naval force entered the Yangtse, and was on the point of attacking Nanking (182 miles from the mouth) when the Chinese sued for peace. Sixteen years later, after the Second China War, one of the clauses of the Treaty of Tientsin

* The author served as an Engineer Officer with the China Navigation Company from 1928 until 1938, and was on the Yangtse in 1930 in the Shengking and again in 1934 in the Wuhu. He was captured by pirates in the Newchang river in Manchuria in 1933 and held prisoner for five and a half months. During and after the War he was in the Colonial Service in West Africa, but in 1958 he returned to service with the China Navigation Company, and this has enabled him to revisit a number of the former Treaty Ports.

1 Chinese records mention the visit of a 'Roman merchant' to Nanking about 230 A.D. See G. F. Hudson, Europe and China (London, 1931), p. 90.

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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1966
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811
50

HERBERT FRANKE

monks, missionaries and translators of the holy scriptures came from Iranian Central Asia at a time when there was certainly no universal peace in Asia. But was there really something like a Pax Mongolica, even during a very short time? The Mongol rulers of China who had adopted the Chinese dynastic name of Yüan in 1271, regarded themselves, from Khubilai on, more as rulers of China than of a universal empire of which China was only a part. This is reflected, as we shall see, in the Yuan dynastic history which is usually vague and uninformed as soon as a geographical area outside of China proper is mentioned. Although Khubilai was the Great Khan of all Mongols, his rule was always threatened by dissatisfied pretenders who tried to set up their own kingdoms in the Northern and Western regions, and there are recorded, in Chinese historical sources at least, as many feuds, campaigns and full-scale wars with other Mongol rulers and pretenders as good-will embassies from the other Mongol ulus (dominions); those of Chagatai in Central Asia, the Ilkhans in Persia and the Golden Horde rulers of Southwestern Siberia and South Russia. The situation, at least in the fourteenth century, among the non-Chinese ulus was not much different. The Golden Horde rulers and the Persian Ilkhans were, to say the least, not friendly to each other and war was frequent. In short, it seems as if the Pax Mongolica is no more than one of those brilliant simplifications that can serve as chapter titles for world history books. There remains some doubt whether it was easier to get from, say, Venice or the Black Sea region or Persia to China under the Mongols than some centuries earlier.

However that may be, there can be no doubt that there was a certain amount of cultural contact between China and the non-Chinese West under the rule of the Mongol emperors. But the fact remains that there was no Chinese Marco Polo, no Chinese Rubruk or Giovanni da Montecorvino. China, it seems, was not very much interested in learning more about the countries of the West; we have in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries no Chinese pilgrims like I-ching and Hsüan-tsang who had travelled to India in search of the Buddhist religion. There was no appeal and no challenge to learn more about the West. This relative indifference towards the civilization outside one's own geographical habitat and cultural background is to be seen in The Secret History of the Mongols, This fascinating book, the oldest
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1966
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811
SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS

71

the former empire of Chingis Khan this development was, as we saw, mostly a result of the conversion of the ruling minority to the religion of the ruled majority. Events would have followed a different course if the Mongols had been able to substitute a religion, or a universal set of values of their own, for the existing indigenous creeds and patterns of life in their respective dominions; this had happened some centuries earlier with the Arabs who not only conquered much of the Near East but also succeeded in imposing Islam, their own religion, on the subjugated countries. In the cultural field, Islamisation had a much stronger effect on the affected areas and nations than the equally or even more far-reaching conquests of the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The most lasting, and, from the point of view of world history, perhaps most important result of East-West contacts in the period of Mongol domination was that these commercial and cultural contacts inaugurated for Europe the age of maritime exploration. The seafaring nations of Europe attempted to reach by sea those fabulous countries in the East which Marco Polo and other travellers or merchants had described after their travels through the Mongol dominions. When Columbus left Spain to discover a sea route to the East Indies and to Cathay, land of the Great Khan, he had a copy of Marco Polo's book on board his ship. And so it came that instead of achieving a renewed contact between the Far East and the West a new world was discovered.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1966
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811
72

HERBERT FRANKE

NOTES

1 On Europe and Europeans as mentioned in Chinese sources, see H. Franke in Saeculum, Vol. II (1951), pp. 65-75.

2 W. Fuchs, The Mongol Atlas of China by Chu Ssu-pen, Peiping, 1946, Monumenta Serica Monographs, No. 8; J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Vol III, pp. 555-556.

3 H. Franke in Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 112 (1962), pp. 228-232 (review of Leonardo Olschki, Marco Polo's Asia).

4 Francis A. Rouleau, "The Yangchow Latin Tombstone as a Landmark of Medieval Christianity in China", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 17 (1954) pp. 346-365.

5 John Foster, "Crosses from the Walls of Zaitun", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1954, pp. 1-25. (pl. XII).

6 Saeculum, Vol. II (1951), p. 74-75.

7 J. Needham, op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 167-382.

8 See for example, H. Franke, Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte Chinas unter der Mongolenherrschaft, Wiesbaden 1956, p. 34 (Nestorian surgeon).

9 J. Needham, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 381, note (c).

10 A. C. Moule, "The Siege of Saianfu and the Murder of Achmach Bailo", Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 58 (1927), pp. 1-28; Vol. 59 (1928), pp. 256-257.

11 J. Needham, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 141.

12 Yüan-shih ed. K'ai-ming, ch. 190, p. 6565, II/III. For the Ho-fang t'ung-i see Ts'ung-shu chi-ch'eng, Vol. 1486.

13 A. C. Moule, op. cit.

14 R. Loewenthal, "The Nomenclature of Jews in China", Monumenta Serica, Vol. XII (1947), p. 113.

15 H. G. Farmer, "Reciprocal Influences in Music 'twixt the Far and Middle East", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1934, pp. 327-342.

16 Ch'ing-lou chi, ed. Ts'ung-shu chi-ch'eng, Vol. 2734, p. 9.

17 H. Franke, "Der kluge Richter", in Asiatische Studien, 1950, pp. 55-59.

18 Renate Noethen, Das Sha-kou ch'üan-fu, München, 1961 (Diss.).

19 L. C. Goodrich, "Westerners and Central Asians in Yuan China", Oriente Poliano, Rome, 1957, pp. 1-21; "Western Regions Writers of Chinese Lyrics during the Yuan", International Conference of Orientalists in Japan, No. VII (1962) pp. 17-21.

20 L. C. Goodrich, Oriente Poliano, p. 15.

21 O. Sirén, Chinese Painting, Vol. IV, New York/London, 1958, pp. 54-59, plates Vol. VI, Nos. 57-60.

22 W. Fuchs, "Analecta zur mongolischen Übersetzungsliteratur der Yüan-Zeit", Monumenta Serica, Vol. XI (1946), pp. 34-39; W. Fuchs und A. Mostaert, "Ein Ming-Druck einer chinesisch-mongolischen Ausgabe des Hsiao-ching", ibid., Vol. IV (1939/40), pp. 325-329.

23 E. Haenisch, Mongolica der Berliner Turfan-Sammlung, II, Berlin 1959.

24 A. Mostaert and F. W. Cleaves, Les lettres de 1289 et 1305 des ilkhan Argun et Öljeitü à Philippe le Bel, Cambridge, Mass. 1962.

25 M. S. Ipsiroğlu, Saray-Alben, Wiesbaden, 1964, pl. XLIV, No. 64.

26 J. Needham, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 217-219.

27 H. Franke, "Some Sinological Remarks on Rashid ad-Din's History of China", Oriens, Vol. 4, (1951), pp. 21-26.

28 W. Franke, "Zur Frage der Mongolen in China nach dem Sturz der Yüan-Dynastie", Oriens Extremus, Vol. 9 (1962), pp. 57-68.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1970
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241
22

L. CARRINGTON GOODRICH

Library of Peiping reported on its copy of the local history of Shao-hsing-fu, Chekiang (YLTT ch. 7963). One must also mention the excellent use made by Professor Jao Tsung-i of chüan 11,907 (preserved in Peking) in his article on "Some place-names in the South Seas in the Yung-lo ta-tien."8 Finally, because everyone is interested in Marco Polo and the authenticity of his record of travel, let us mention the discovery in chüan 19,418 of the YLTT by two Chinese scholars of the names of the three envoys from the Mongol court of Persia who were dispatched in 1290 to Kubilai in Cambaluc to convey the Lady Kukachin (Marco's Cocachin) to Tabriz to become the bride of Argon. Their names, rendered in Chinese transcription, correspond fairly closely with those preserved in Marco's account. His name and the names of his father and uncle, unfortunately, were not considered of sufficient importance to receive mention. Hopefully we may expect more enlightenment on China's past as these rare volumes are further explored.

NOTES

1 For example, Leonard Aurousseau in Bull. de l'Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient XII: 9 (1912), and both Walter Swingle and Arthur W. Hummel in Reports of the Library of Congress, 1922-23, 1935-36, 1940, etc.

2 Wang Chung-min1 has recently identified 246 of these individuals, including the three principals, in an article entitled "Yung-lo ta-tien tsuan-hsiu jen k'ao,”†^#, Wên-shih★★ 4 (June 1965), 17 ff. (Mrs. Lienche Tu Fang kindly drew this to my attention.)

3 Bull. de l'Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient IX (1909), 828, n.3.

4 Communication to the author, dated 15th Oct., 1969, from the curator, D. Zichy.

5 I owe this to Mrs. Delano Young (née Yang Chin-yi) who received the information from a member of the staff of the Library.

6 Extracts of books were distributed under different tone groups.

7 A Study of Chiang-su and Che-chiang gazetteers of the Ming Dynasty (Canberra 1969), p. 5.

8 Symposium on Historical, Archaeological and Linguistic Studies of Southern China, South-east Asia, and the Hong Kong Region (Hong Kong 1967), 191-7.

9 Yang Chih-chiu and Ho Yung-chi, "Marco Polo quits China," Harvard Jo. of Asiatic Studies IX (1945), 51. See also Yule-Cordier, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (London 1903), I, p. 32.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593
178

DAVID H. S. CHAU

The fact that in the Tsin Dynasty (#), 303-379 AD, the technique had been widely used, and about the seventh or eighth century the Chinese already used woodblock to print calendars (Ɔ).

The oldest woodblock printed book still in existence, so far as we understand, is the Diamond Sutra (✨#∞) a Buddhist text (**) printed in the year 868 AD, which was found along with thousands of manuscripts from Mokao (†) the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas (†) at Tun-huang ( ). Tun-huang, a city situated on the outskirt of the Lob Desert in western Kansu Province (+), was once the main gate of the Old Silk Road (***). From the first century until the fourteenth century, merchants, caravans, travellers, monks, and armies leaving for the West all passed through Tun-huang on their way to the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Europe. The Italian merchant Marco Polo („§ +) used the same route to come to China.

Hollowed out in irregular tiers along the face of a steep cliff, the cave temples of the Thousand Buddhas were known in the Tang Dynasty () as Mokao or “Grottos of Surpassing Height". They are located a few miles southeast of Tun-huang City. There had been huge Buddhist monasteries at the place for centuries, but it became forgotten when the Ming Dynasty (#9) began trading with the West by sea, and since then most of the caves had been buried by the shifting sand of the desert. In the late nineteenth century, it was rediscovered by a Taoist Priest called Wang Yuan-lu (10*), but by then all the wooden structures of the monasteries had vanished, and only the stone caves used as shrines remained.

Mokao is more than five thousand feet in length and consists of four hundred and ninety-two caves of various sizes. Over two thousand Buddhist statues and numerous huge murals can still be found in the caves. If we could have all the murals linked together, they would be at least twenty-five miles long.

In the year 1899, Wang Yuan-lu discovered an old monastery library in a walled-up chamber behind a mural in one of the caves. In the chamber, he found more than twenty thousand volumes of manuscripts and woodblock-printed documents and books, among them the Diamond Sutra. The news of the discovery soon spread abroad. In 1907 an Englishman, Sir Aurel Stein, traded with the priest and carried away 29 cases of manuscripts and books. More
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day to Changsha. The capital of Hunan, the province with a long history of anti-foreign fanaticism, is situated on the Siang river, which flows down to the Yangtze above Hankow. In summer the middle-river steamers come up as far as Changsha, but in winter the level over the sand flats where the river passes through the Tung Ting lake, near its mouth, is so shallow that even the specially designed river gunboats cannot pass. One British gunboat generally wintered at Changsha.

There was no concession, and in the course of time the foreign community had congregated on a long sand bar, which made an island in the river, opposite the city. The few bungalows were grouped round the Club. It was a simple life with tennis and walks for relaxation. Normally Changsha connected with the outer world by ship through Shanghai, but now for over a year that channel had been closed by the war and the number of the foreign community, usually not more than a couple of dozen, was reduced. It did, however, include two British tank officers, loaned to the Chinese army, whom I had last seen in Nanking. They now depended for their supplies on the new railway to Hongkong. I left my car here and went on to Hankow by train.

It was nearly twenty years since I had last been in Hankow, years crowded with change, not only material but also intellectual. Hither junks from the far north-west of China, in Shensi Province, came down the Han river. From here they could sail a leg up the Yangtze, and proceed along the Siang river, until their mast-tops showed a view towards Kweilin. To the west, through the famous gorges, the small steamers fought the current to Chungking 700 miles distant; and 600 miles downriver, past Kiu Kiang, Wuhu, and Nanking, lay Shanghai and the sea. The railway in normal times ran north-east to Peking and south to Canton and Hongkong. On the opposite bank, a kilometre away, the provincial capital, Wuchang, showed; larger than Hankow and, across the Han, where that river made an angle with the Yangtze, the industrial town of Hanyang belched its smoke. Of the Concessions along the water front, only the French retained its status. The British Concession had been returned at the time of the Chen-O'Malley negotiations ten years previously; the German and Russian Concessions had reverted to China after the Great War, and the Japanese Concession had been evacuated soon after the Lukouchiao (Marco Polo Bridge) incident.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994
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209

Nevins, John Livingston (1829-1893), China and the Chinese, New York Harper, 1869

Northey, James E, People Go to Church the Story of Greater Lancashire, London Salvationist Publication and Supplies, 1973

Oliphant, Laurence (1829-1888), Narrative of the Earl of Elgin's Mission to China and Japan in the Years 1857, 1858, 1859, New York Harper, 1860

Orleans, Pierre Joseph d' (1641-1698), History of the Two Tartar Conquerors of China. Including the two Journeys into Tartary of Father Ferdinand Verbiest, in the Suite of the Emperor Kang-Hi from the French, London printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1854

Osbeck, Per (1723-1805), A Voyage to China and the East Indies Together with an Account of Chinese Husbandry by John Reinhold Forster - Appendix of Faunula and Flora Sinensis, London B White, 1771

Owen, David Edward, British Opium Policy in China and India, London and Oxford Oxford University Press, 1934

Parker, Edward Harper, Chinese Customs, a Lecture, Shanghai Kelly and Walsh, 1899

Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons (1857) Session 2, No XLIII, papers relating to the opium trade in China 1842-56 (Opium Trade 1932, Correspondence Relating to China 1840, Additional Correspondence Relating to China 1840, Report from the Select Committee on the Trade with China 1840)

Paterno, Roberto M, The Yangtze Valley anti-Missionary Riots of 1891, Harvard University PhD dissertation, 1967

Pelliot, Paul, Notes on Marco Polo, Paris Imprimerie Nationale, 1957-1963

1

Le voyage de MM Gabet et Huc a Lhasa (a reprint of 1850 article) in Toung Pao 24 133-78 (1926)

Pennell, Wilfred V, A Lifetime with the Chinese, Hong Kong Privately printed, 1974

Percival, William Spencer, The Land of the Dragons, My Boating and Shooting Excursions to the Gorges of the Yangtze. London Hurst, 1889

Twenty Years in the Far East, Sketches, London Simpkin, 1905

Pereira, Thomas, The Treaties and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689, the Diary of Thomas Pereira, SJ, Rome 1961 (Bibliotheca Instituti Historici S J vol 18)

Playfair, G M H, The Cities and Towns of China, a Geographical Dictionary, Shanghai Kelly and Walsh, 2nd edition, 1910 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen publishing)
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Younghusband, Francis, The Heart of a Continent. London John Murray, 1896 (Hong Kong Reprint. Oxford University Press)

Yuan, Chung Teng, Reverend Issachar Jacob Roberts and the Taiping Rebellion, Journal of Asian Studies 23.1:55-67 (November 1963)

Yule, Colonel Sir Henry, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, edited and with notes by Henri Cordier, London John Murray, 3rd edn, 1903

—, Cathay and the Way Thither, new edition revised with notes prepared by Henri Cordier, London Hakluyt Society, 1915 (Taipei Reprint Ch'eng-wen Publishing)

J

MANI
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2003
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390
2003 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE FRIENDS OF THE HONG KONG BRANCH OF

THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY (UK)

Although the number of Friends' activities during the past year cannot compete with those in Hong Kong, it is nevertheless pleasing to report that the quarterly meetings which have taken place have been of a very high standard. They started in May 2003 with a bold and forthright talk by Dr. Francis Wood, entitled 'Marco Polo and Me.' Dr. Wood is curator of Chinese Collections at the British Library and author of 'Did Marco Polo Go To China?' and 'No Dogs, Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port Life in China 1843-1943.' Her talk was very convincing and one was left in no doubt that there are still many unanswered questions about Marco Polo's trips to China.

The second event took 35 Friends to Bath and Bristol for two days in early October, 2003. Bath has an excellent Museum of East Asian Art, originally set up by Mr. Brian McElney, who lived in Hong Kong for many years in the 1960s and 70s. He became a well-known collector of Chinese artefacts. The museum now houses a wide range of Far Eastern art, including items from South Korea and Japan. Our visit coincided with the very well presented exhibition 'Death and Burial: The Chinese and the Afterlife.' The Friends were particularly impressed by the emphasis on education and the museum's outreach to local schools. The day ended with a very authentic Chinese meal at the Cathay Rendezvous in Bristol.

The following morning the Friends met at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum, which was opened in Bristol three years ago, with a great deal of local and overseas backing, including the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. It was particularly pleasing to see Dr. Dan Waters' name inscribed in the entrance hall. The exhibition portrayed in very enlightened and balanced ways a history of the Commonwealth countries, as seen by many of the local people who lived there. The items on display showed that the build-up of Empire and Commonwealth was a remarkable achievement, but there were clearly some aspects which did not come up to the high ideals many expected - this precipitated a lively topic for discussion during the lunch that followed after the visit and the subsequent river cruise through the old town of Bristol.

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