118-686: Yee Wo Street ( Chinese : 怡和街 ; Cantonese Yale : yi4 wo2 gaai1 ) is a street , actually a thoroughfare nowaday, on Hong Kong Island in Hong Kong , situated in the area of East Point in the early colonial history and the area of Causeway Bay after World War II . It connects Hennessy Road to the west and Causeway Road to the east, functioning as an aorta on metropolitan island side. Hong Kong Tramways pass through it, numerous bus routes run and stop on it. Its great junction with Hennessy Road, where East Point Road , Great George Street , Jardine's Bazaar and Jardine's Crescent meet,
236-547: A family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
354-469: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
472-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
590-510: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
708-599: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
826-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
944-615: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
1062-714: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
1180-588: A day in the camp, including a bowl of congee given at 8:00 in the morning. Prisoners were confined in jail all day. Some were stripped naked.There were children in the camp as well. Two weeks later, the number of people in the camp reached 400. At 4 pm that day, all of them were forced to board a boat by the port at North Point. After a day, they arrived in Pinghai Town, Huizhou City . The able-bodied refugees were released; about seventy people deemed physically weak were slaughtered and their bodies were dumped into
1298-701: A few bombs fell accidentally on Hong Kong territory, destroying a bridge and a train station. In 1936, Germany and the Empire of Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact . In 1937, Fascist Italy joined the pact, forming the core of what would become known as the Axis Powers . In the autumn of 1941, Nazi Germany was near the height of its military power. After the invasion of Poland and fall of France , German forces had overrun much of Western Europe and were racing towards Moscow . The United States
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#17327727106681416-553: A long-term financier of Po Leung Kuk. There were very few public hospitals during the Japanese occupation, as many of them were forcibly converted to military hospitals. Despite the inadequate supply of resources, Tung Wah Hospital and Kwong Wah Hospital still continuously offered limited social services to needy people. In June 1943, the management of water, gas and electricity was transferred into private Japanese hands. Through schooling, mass media and other means of propaganda,
1534-576: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
1652-416: A possible invasion to retake the colony, the Japanese introduced a policy of enforced deportation. As a result, the unemployed were deported to mainland China , and the population of Hong Kong dwindled from 1.6 million in 1941 to 600,000 in 1945. Furthermore, the Japanese modified the territory's infrastructure and landscape significantly in order to serve their wartime interests. For example, to expand
1770-542: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
1888-508: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
2006-653: A small boat, but soon after the journey started, a typhoon hit and the ships were left to drift on their own. Fourteen sank, killing about 3,000 people. The bow of another ship was destroyed. Survivors rescued later were unable to walk due to starvation. Many of them died on the beach. On 18 September 1942, the Japanese Occupation Government in Hong Kong held the first population census . According to historical documents, more than 2,000 people were killed or disappeared after being arrested during
2124-540: A small hotel, while some bankers who were viewed as enemies of the Imperial Japanese were executed. In May 1942, Imperial Japanese companies were encouraged to be set up. A Hong Kong trade syndicate consisting of Imperial Japanese firms was set up in October 1942 to manipulate overseas trade. To cope with a lack of resources and the potential for Chinese residents of Hong Kong to support the allied forces in
2242-515: A testimonial, English was forbidden from being taught and was not tolerated outside the classroom. Some private Japanese language schools were established to promote oral Japanese. The Military Administration ran the Teachers' Training Course, and those teachers who failed a Japanese bench-mark test would need to take a three-month training course. The Japanese authorities tried to introduce Japanese traditions and customs to Hong Kong students through
2360-631: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
2478-575: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
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#17327727106682596-602: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
2714-490: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
2832-603: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
2950-421: Is one of the busiest junctions in Hong Kong. Sogo Causeway Bay is the most visible feature at the junction. The street joins Paterson Street and Sugar Street on the north side and Pennington Street south. Its east end is also a great junction with Causeway Bay Terminus of the trams , where Causeway Road, Gloucester Road , Irving Street , Leighton Road and Tung Lo Wan Road meet. Regal Hong Kong Hotel
3068-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
3186-425: Is situated at this end as well. Built in 1965, the circular footbridge, given a number HF85 and having no fixed name, in the middle of the street erects over the junction with Sugar Street and Pennington Street is a tourist and cinematic feature in the area. It was known by several name such as Yee Wo Street Footbridge, Yee Wo Street Circular Pedestrian Bridge, Causeway Round Pedestrian Bridge and so on. Like most of
3304-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
3422-489: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
3540-445: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
3658-500: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
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3776-552: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
3894-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
4012-697: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
4130-556: The South China Morning Post . It became the mouthpiece of the Japanese propaganda. Ten local Chinese newspapers had been reduced to five in May. These newspapers were under press censorship. Radio sets were used for Japanese propaganda. Amusements still existed, though only for those who could afford them. The cinemas only screened Japanese films, such as The Battle of Hong Kong , the only film made in Hong Kong during
4248-550: The 2014 Hong Kong protests (aka "Umbrella Revolution"), substantial tracts of the area were occupied by suffragists. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of
4366-709: The 2nd China Expeditionary Fleet . Originally formed by Zeng Sheng ( 曾生 ) in Guangdong in 1939, this group mainly comprised peasants, students, and seamen, including Yuan Geng . When the war reached Hong Kong in 1941, the guerrilla force grew from 200 to more than 6,000 soldiers. In January 1942, the Guangdong people's anti-Japanese East River guerrillas ( 廣東人民抗日游擊隊東江縱隊 ) was established to reinforce anti-Japanese forces in Dongjiang and Zhujiang Pearl River deltas. The guerrillas' most significant contribution to
4484-668: The Allies , in particular, was their rescue of twenty American pilots who parachuted into Kowloon when their planes were shot down by the Japanese. In the wake of the British retreat , the guerrillas picked up abandoned weapons and established bases in the New Territories and Kowloon. Applying the tactics of guerrilla warfare, they killed Chinese traitors and collaborators. They protected traders in Kowloon and Guangzhou , attacked
4602-626: The Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in
4720-731: The Gloucester Hotel became the Matsubara . The Peninsula Hotel, the Matsumoto; Lane Crawford , Matsuzakaya . The Queen's was renamed first the Nakajima Theatre, then the Meiji Theatre. Their propaganda also pointed to the pre-eminence of the Japanese way of life, of Japanese spiritual values and the ills of western materialism . Government House , the residence of British governors prior to occupation,
4838-590: The Japanese Military Yen . The exchange rate was fixed at 2 Hong Kong dollars to one military yen in January 1942. Later, the yen was re-valued at 4 Hong Kong dollars to a yen in July 1942, which meant local people could exchange fewer military notes than before. While the residents of Hong Kong were impoverished by the inequitable and forcibly imposed exchange rate, the Imperial Japanese government sold
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4956-580: The Japanese occupation of Malaya , as well as other attacks including attacking the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor and American-ruled Philippines , and the Japanese invasion of Thailand . As part of a general Pacific campaign, the Japanese launched an assault on Hong Kong on the morning of 8 December 1941. British , Canadian , and Indian forces, supported by the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Forces attempted to resist
5074-539: The Kai Tak Airport , the Japanese demolished the Sung Wong Toi Monument in today's Kowloon City . Buildings of prestigious secondary schools such as Wah Yan College Hong Kong , Diocesan Boys' School , Central British School , St. Paul's Girls' College , and La Salle College were commandeered by occupying forces as military hospitals. It was rumoured that Diocesan Boys' School was used by
5192-533: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
5310-710: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
5428-595: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
5546-496: The Surrender of Japan (15 August 1945) and formal surrender of Hong Kong to Rear Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt (16 September 1945), fifteen Japanese soldiers arrested, tortured and executed around three hundred villagers of Silver Mine District of Lantau Island as retaliation after being ambushed by Chinese guerrillas. The incident was later referred as Silver Mine Bay massacre ( 銀礦灣大屠殺 ) by locals. The 38th Infantry Division ,
5664-659: The governor of Hong Kong , Sir Mark Young , surrendered the British Crown colony of Hong Kong to the Empire of Japan on 25 December 1941. His surrender occurred after 18 days of fierce fighting against the Imperial Japanese Army that invaded the territory. The occupation lasted for three years and eight months until Japan surrendered at the end of the Second World War . The length of
5782-478: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
5900-596: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
6018-701: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Japanese occupation of Hong Kong The Imperial Japanese occupation of Hong Kong began when
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#17327727106686136-526: The Governor's Office and its various bureaus. Two councils of Chinese and Eurasian leaders were set up to manage the Chinese population. All trade and economic activities were strictly regulated by Japanese authorities, who took control of the majority of the factories. Having deprived vendors and banks of their possessions, the occupying forces outlawed the Hong Kong Dollar and replaced it with
6254-603: The Hong Kong Dollar to help finance their war-time economy. In June 1943, the military yen was made the sole legal tender . Prices of commodities for sale had to be marked in yen. Hyper-inflation then disrupted the economy, inflicting hardship upon the residents of the colony. Enormous devaluation of the Imperial Japanese Military Yen after the war made it almost worthless. Public transportation and utilities unavoidably failed, owing to
6372-676: The Hong Kong area from October 1942. Most of these raids involved a small number of aircraft, and typically targeted Japanese cargo ships which had been reported by Chinese guerrillas. By January 1945 the city was being regularly raided by the USAAF. The largest raid on Hong Kong took place on 16 January 1945 when, as part of the South China Sea raid , 471 United States Navy aircraft attacked shipping, harbour facilities and other targets. The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong ended in 1945, after Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945. Hong Kong
6490-576: The Imperial Japanese influence on Hong Kong, two Imperial Japanese banks, the Yokohama Specie Bank and the Bank of Taiwan , were re-opened. These two banks replaced the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) and two other British banks responsible for issuing the banknotes. They then liquidated various Allied banks. British, American and Dutch bankers were forced to live in
6608-553: The Imperial Japanese occupation, Hong Kong was ruled under martial law as an occupied territory. Led by General Rensuke Isogai , the Japanese established their administrative centre and military headquarters at the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon. The military government; comprising administrative, civilian affairs, economic, judicial, and naval departments; enacted stringent regulations and, through executive bureaux, exercised power over all residents of Hong Kong. They also set up
6726-447: The Japanese as an execution site. Life was difficult for Hong Kong people under Japanese rule. As there was inadequate food supply, the Japanese rationed necessities such as rice, oil, flour, salt, and sugar. Each family was given a rationing licence, and every person could only buy 6.4 taels (240 g (8.5 oz)) of rice per day. Most people did not have enough food to eat, and many died of starvation. The rationing system
6844-537: The Japanese influence over Hong Kong. For instance, there was Yasukuri or Shrine Festival honouring the dead. There was also a Japanese Empire Day on 11 February 1943 centred around the worship of the Emperor Jimmu . The Hong Kong News , a pre-war Japanese-owned English newspaper, was revived in January 1942 during the Japanese occupation. The editor, E.G. Ogura, was Japanese and the staff members were mainly Chinese and Portuguese who previously worked for
6962-599: The Japanese lessons at school. Famous historical stories such as Mōri Motonari 's " Sanbon no ya (Three Arrows)" and Xufu 's ( 徐福 ) voyage to Japan were introduced in Japanese language textbooks. The primary aim of the Japanisation of the education system was to facilitate Japanese control over the territory's populace in furtherence of the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere . By 1943, in stark contrast to
7080-525: The Japanese occupation, a total of 20,000 Hong Kong people and 20,000 mainlanders were abducted to mine in Hainan Island, where they were abused and many died of starvation.Of the 40,000 Chinese workers on Hainan Island, only 5,000 survived. On the afternoon of 1 December 1944, a woman went out to collect firewood sticks on the side of the mountain. Suddenly, a Japanese military police and two Chinese police officers came to arrest her and stabbed her in
7198-567: The Japanese occupation. Directed by Shigeo Tanaka ( 田中重雄 Tanaka Shigeo ) and produced by the Dai Nippon Film Company , the film featured an all-Japanese cast but a few Hong Kong film personalities were also involved. This film appeared on the first anniversary of the attack. In 1941, the Japanese army transported a carload of people to the beach near the Queen Mary Hospital and killed them all. Identities of
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#17327727106687316-408: The Japanese tried to foster favourable view amongst residents of the occupation. This process of Japanisation prevailed in many aspects of daily life. It was the Japanese conviction that education was key to securing their influence over the populace. The Japanese language became a mandatory subject in schools, and students who performed poorly in Japanese exams risked corporal punishment. According to
7434-565: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
7552-457: The Police into five divisions, namely East Hong Kong, West Hong Kong, Kowloon, New Territories and Water Police. This force was headed by Colonel Noma Kennosuke . The headquarters was situated in the former Supreme Court Building . Police in Hong Kong were under the organisation and control of the Imperial Japanese government. Imperial Japanese experts and administrators were chiefly employed in
7670-769: The Stanley Internment Camp in 1945. Moreover, the Imperial Japanese military government blockaded Victoria Harbour and controlled various warehouses in and around the city. Early in January 1942, former members of the Hong Kong Police , including Indians and Chinese, were recruited into a reformed police called the Kempeitai with new uniforms . The police routinely performed executions at King's Park in Kowloon by using Chinese for beheading, shooting and bayonet practice. The Imperial Japanese gendarmerie took over all police stations and organised
7788-476: The US Pacific Fleet in the sea off Zhoushan, Zhejiang. The ship sank on 2 October. Although some prisoners of war swam out of the cabin to escape, the Japanese soldiers on the adjacent ships shot and killed the escaped prisoners, resulting in about 1,000 deaths and 384 injuries. In July 1944, about 400 refugees were found on the Beaufort Island where there were few plants or animals. They were left to fend for themselves. According to residents of Cape D'Aguilar in
7906-551: The area, the street is surrounded by skyscrapers . Lacking of large shopping centres in the middle make it less prominent shopping street comparing to Hennessy Road and Great George Street. But it does not mean it is less busy. Over a million people walk through the street each day, with a great number of passengers of buses and trams boarding and alighting on the street. Building like Hang Seng Causeway Bay Building and McDonald's Building as attracting doctors operates private clinics inside. The origin street, long before it
8024-473: The back.Two other elderly women who were arrested at the same time were also stabbed in the back. They were immediately taken to the Aberdeen Police Station and imprisoned. During the period, they were not provided with food and water. They were taken to the North Point Refugee Camp on 2 December. There were also many prisoners in the camp, and the camp gate was guarded by Japanese military police and Chinese police with weapons. Some said there were only two meals
8142-402: The census. On 25 September 1942, the Japanese army brought 1,816 prisoners of war from the Sham Shui Po prisoner of war camp to the freighter "Lisbon Maru" moored at Stonecutters Island , and set sail two days later to transport the prisoners of war to Japan for hard labor. The Japanese army did not mark the ship as transporting POWs. Lisbon Maru was torpedoed by the submarine USS Grouper of
8260-410: The day was known as "Black Christmas". The surrender of Hong Kong was signed on the 26th at The Peninsula Hotel . On 20 February 1942 General Rensuke Isogai became the first Imperial Japanese governor of Hong Kong. This ushered in almost four years of Imperial Japanese administration, which they used the city as a naval and logistics base for their campaign in the western Pacific. Throughout
8378-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
8496-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
8614-576: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
8732-588: The escape. A team of amateur archaeologists found the remains of half of a badge. Evidence pointed to its belonging to Barclay, the captain of the Royal Army Medical Corps , therefore the archaeologists presented it to Barclay's son, Jim, who had never met his father before his death. Other notable massacres near the end of the Battle of Hong Kong including the St. Stephen's College massacre . Between
8850-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
8968-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
9086-618: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
9204-587: The guerrillas were noteworthy in rescuing prisoners-of-war, notably Sir Lindsay Ride , Sir Douglas Clague , Professor Gordan King , and David Bosanquet . In December 1943 the Guangdong force reformed, with the East River guerrillas absorbing the HK-Kowloon brigade into the larger unit. The British Army Aid Group was formed in 1942 at the suggestion of Colonel Lindsay Ride. The group rescued allied POWs, including airmen shot down and workers trapped in
9322-529: The high reparation costs forced them to promote fundraising activities like musical performances and dramas. Tung Wah Hospital and the charitable organisation Po Leung Kuk continued to provide charity relief, while substantial donations were given by members of the Chinese elite. Po Leung Kuk also took in orphans, but were faced with financial problems during the occupation, as their bank deposits could not be withdrawn under Japanese control. Their services could only be continued through donations by Aw Boon Haw ,
9440-583: The interrogations were conducted by the Japanese military police only. There were no judges, lawyers, and observers. In March 1942, 484 civilians who had been imprisoned at the Hop Kee Company on Gloucester Road, Wanchai, were deported to Hainan Island via the Japanese cargo ship Yuen Lam for forced labour. After the Liberation of Hong Kong, only a hundred people were able to return. More than 300 people died of torture and starvation. During
9558-586: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
9676-528: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
9794-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
9912-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
10030-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
10148-492: The nearby region, they often heard screams and cries coming from the island. Skeletons were found all over the area later on, most died from starvation or drowning in failed escape. During the Japanese occupation, most people released from the Station died soon after, and it is estimated that more than 100 died due to starvation or torture. The police also transported some prisoners directly for execution without trials. Most of
10266-576: The occasion demands" and "it would be easier for Cantonese people to learn Japanese than Japanese people to learn Cantonese". The Japanese promoted the use of Japanese as the lingua franca between the locals and the occupying forces. English shop signs and advertisements were banned and, in April 1942, streets and buildings in Central were renamed in Japanese. For example, Queen's Road became Meiji -dori and Des Voeux Road became Shōwa -dori. Similarly,
10384-626: The occupied colony. It also developed a role in intelligence gathering. In the process, the Group provided protection to the Dongjiang River which was a source for domestic water in Hong Kong. This was the first organisation in which Britons, Chinese and other nationalities served with no racial divide. Francis Lee Yiu-pui and Paul Tsui Ka-cheung were commissioned as officers. United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) units based in China attacked
10502-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
10620-510: The period ( 三年零八個月 , lit. ' three years and eight months ' ) later became a metonym of the occupation. During the Imperial Japanese military's full-scale invasion of China in 1937, Hong Kong as part of the British Empire was not under attack. Nevertheless, its situation was influenced by the war in China due to proximity to the mainland China. In early March 1939, during an Imperial Japanese bombing raid on Shenzhen ,
10738-801: The police station at Tai Po , and bombed Kai Tak Airport. During the Japanese occupation the only fortified resistance was mounted by the East River guerrillas. In January 1942, the HK-Kowloon Brigade ( 港九大隊 ) was established from the Guangdong People's anti-Japanese guerrilla force. In February 1942, with local residents Choi Kwok-Leung ( 蔡國梁 ) as commander and Chan Tat-Ming ( 陳達明 ) as political commissar, they were armed with 30 machine guns and several hundred rifles left by defeated British forces. They numbered about 400 between 1942 and 1945 and operated in Sai Kung . Additionally,
10856-449: The puppet Chinese Representative Council and Chinese Cooperative Council , consisting of local leading Chinese and Eurasian community leaders. In addition to Governor Mark Young, 7,000 British soldiers and civilians were kept in prisoner-of-war or internment camps, such as Sham Shui Po Prisoner Camp and Stanley Internment Camp . Famine, malnourishment and sickness were pervasive. Severe cases of malnutrition among inmates occurred in
10974-469: The rapidly advancing Japanese, but were heavily outnumbered. After racing down the New Territories and Kowloon , Japanese forces crossed Victoria Harbour on 18 December. After fierce fighting continued on Hong Kong Island on 25 December 1941, British colonial officials headed by the governor of Hong Kong , Mark Aitchison Young , surrendered at the Japanese headquarters. To the local people,
11092-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
11210-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
11328-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
11446-424: The sea. On 19 December 1941, a group of Japanese soldiers killed ten St. John stretcher bearers at Wong Nai Chung Gap despite the fact that all the stretcher bearers wore the red cross armband . These soldiers captured a further five medics who were tied to a tree , two of whom were taken away by the soldiers, never to be seen again. The remaining three attempted to escape during the night, but only one survived
11564-457: The shortage of fuel and the aerial bombardment of Hong Kong by the Americans. Tens of thousands of people became homeless and helpless, and many of them were employed in shipbuilding and construction. In the agricultural field, the Imperial Japanese took over the race track at Fanling and the air strip at Kam Tin for their rice-growing experiments. With the intention of boosting
11682-517: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
11800-561: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
11918-580: The street was straightened and widened, and finally got its present shape around 1920s. Yeewo was the Cantonese name of a Qing dynasty hong established by Wǔ Guóyíng ( simplified Chinese : 五国莹 ; traditional Chinese : 伍國瑩 ) in Canton in 1783, which later became the leader of the cohong of the Thirteen Factories under the stewardship of Howqua , who took over in 1803. The name
12036-465: The successful imposition of the Japanese language upon the local populace, only one formal language school, the Bougok School ( 寳覺學校 ), was providing Cantonese language courses to Japanese people in Hong Kong. According to an instructor at the Bougok School, "teaching Cantonese is difficult because there is no system and set pattern in Cantonese grammar; and you have to change the pronunciation as
12154-623: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
12272-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
12390-493: The unit mainly responsible for capturing Hong Kong, departed in January 1942. The Hong Kong Defence Force was established during the same month, and was the main Japanese military unit in Hong Kong throughout the occupation. The other Japanese military units stationed in Hong Kong from early 1942 were the small Hong Kong Artillery Force and the Imperial Japanese Navy 's Hong Kong Base Force, which formed part of
12508-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
12626-454: The victims are still unknown. On 19 May 1942, 10,000 refugees were detained by the Japanese army and escorted to the Sai Wan , where they boarded the ships. When they boarded the ship, each was given a jar of rice weighing about two kilograms, two pieces of bread, and ten Hong Kong dollars. After boarding the ship, the refugees were locked in the bilge. A total of nineteen ships were towed by
12744-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
12862-517: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
12980-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
13098-662: Was abolished in 1944. According to eyewitnesses, the Japanese committed atrocities against many locals, including the rape of many ethnic Chinese women. During the three years and eight months of occupation, an estimated 10,000 civilians were executed, while many others were tortured, raped, or mutilated. Between the Surrender of Japan (15 August 1945) and formal surrender of Hong Kong to Rear Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt (16 September 1945), fifteen Japanese soldiers arrested, tortured, and executed around three hundred villagers of Silver Mine District of Lantau Island in retaliation for being ambushed by Chinese guerrillas. The incident
13216-536: Was handed over by the Imperial Japanese Army to the Royal Navy on 30 August 1945; British control over Hong Kong was thus restored. 30 August was declared as " Liberation Day " (Chinese: 重光紀念日 ), and was a public holiday in Hong Kong until 1997. General Takashi Sakai , who led the invasion of Hong Kong and subsequently served as governor-general during the Japanese occupation, was tried as
13334-485: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
13452-668: Was later referred by locals as the Silver Mine Bay massacre ( 銀礦灣大屠殺 ). During the occupation, hospitals available to the masses were limited. The Kowloon Hospital and Queen Mary Hospital were occupied by the Japanese army. Despite the lack of medicine and funds, the Tung Wah and Kwong Wah Hospital continued their social services but on a limited scale. These included provision of food, medicine, clothing, and burial services. Although funds were provided, they still had great financial difficulties. Failure to collect rents and
13570-582: Was later used by trading company Jardine, Matheson & Co. , owners of much land in East Point in the early days of Hong Kong . The road was renamed "Kasuga-dori" (春日通) during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong . After the surrender and evacuation of the Japanese army , the name was reverted. The street begins west at Hennessy Road and ends east in Causeway Road . It hosts a section of Hong Kong Tramways and its Causeway Bay terminus. During
13688-453: Was named, ran naturally along the original coastline of Causeway Bay east of East Point. The place was under its landlord Jardine, Matheson and Company which dominated the development of the area from 1841. In 1842 it adopt the Chinese name, 怡和, /jy wɔ/, transcribed as Ewo which became Yee Wo reflecting on the street name. The shore along the street and East Point was later reclaimed. The street got its present name no later than 1889. Over time
13806-553: Was neutral and opposition to Nazi Germany was given only by Britain, the British Commonwealth and the Soviet Union. The United States provided minor support to China in its fight against Imperial Japan's invasion. It imposed an embargo on the sale of oil to Japan after less aggressive forms of economic sanctions failed to halt Japanese advances. On 7 December 1941 (Honolulu time), Japan entered World War II with
13924-504: Was the seat of power for the Japanese military governors. During the occupation, the buildings were largely reconstructed in 1944 following designs by Japanese engineer Siechi Fujimura , including the addition of a Japanese-style tower which remains to this day. Many Georgian architectural features were removed during this period. The roofs also continue to reflect a Japanese influence. The commemoration of Japanese festivals , state occasions, victories and anniversaries also strengthened
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