CCF02012016.jpg | Gwulo: Old Hong Kong

CCF02012016.jpg

CCF02012016.jpg
Authors: 
Date picture taken (may be approximate): 
Monday, November 1, 1926

Comments

Greetings.  My skills and vocabury were limited in my Hong Kong days, and certainly worse now.  So allow me to share my thoughts.  I am impressed by the writer's penmanship and patience, and this is only his/her first page.

I can still recognize most of the characters, but when string together, I get a bit fuzzy about the meaning.  They were using traditional characters, and the style was formal at least in the opening remarks.  Notice how the year 1,000-900-0-6 was written, except for the zero, all others have more strokes than what I learned.  Same impression how they wrote 11(th)month-1day.  I wonder if this was intentional in order to discourage illegal alteration of the writing.

A quick (and dirty) translation may make it more interesting, as follows:  "This contract is translated from its original in English to Han language so possibly has some errors.... This contract dated 1906-11(monty)-1(day) . The first party is ..."

Was this photo taken in Nov 1,1926 as the page header says?

Regards,  Peter

 

Thanks Peter , it is the original areement with seal still intact which I have scanned into jpeg image only recently some two years ago.

The document was prepared and drawn up by Messrs Johnson Stokes & Master, Solicitors.

You are welcome Alex, and thank you for showing this document.  Regards,  Peter

Dear Alex. I am from hong kong museum of history. May I contact you direct regarding the comprador agreement? Want to see if we csn display it. Thankd. Osmond

Thanks a lot!

I think this is a very precious documents. Compradore is not a small career group in modern China. Though there are many stories about them, the original material about them is scarce.

It is said that, the agreement between the Compradore and its boss is in triplicate, one is submitted to the consulate, one is in hand of the boss, and one is in the hand of the Compradore.

However, here we can see is only a cover and the first page of the document, can the author show more information about it?

 Yours sincerely, Adam Liu

 

Yes, my pleasure, Dr. Ting Sun Pau in fact was my classmate at HKU.