|
本帖最后由 choi 于 2-11-2014 15:55 编辑
黄安伟, 新宁铁路遗存见证当年华侨的'中国梦.' 纽约时报中文网, Feb 11, 2014 (under teh heading 江门日志)
cn.nytimes.com/china/20140211/c11jiangmen/
, which is translated from
Edward Wong, A Long Goodbye for a Lost Railroad; A project, dogged by problems, met its end in the 1930s. New York Times, Feb 4, 2014 (under trhe heading Jianmen Journal).
* Because there is no Web page for the railroad in English Wikipedia. Most of the following information comes from Chinese Wikipedia. The quotations, however, are derived from the English-language NYT report.
* Perhaps thanks to Lunar New Year, cn.nytimes.com did not translate for about two weeks--a week longer than cn.wsj.com. Now, cn.nytimes.com is trying to catch up--hence translation of the week-old report.
Note:
(a) 江门市
zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%9F%E9%97%A8%E5%B8%82
(地级市; 江门市区因地处西江与其支流──蓬江的会合处，江南的烟墩山和江北的蓬莱山对峙如门，故名江门; section 3 行政区划: including 新会区 and 台山市 (as 县级市))
is a northern neighbor of City of Taishan.
(b) In the print edition, the report carried a map of Guangdong, highlighting City of Taishan, whose three places are shown: city seat (which is Taicheng Subdistrict 台城街道), Baisha 白沙镇, Doushan 斗山镇, and Tonggu 赤溪镇铜鼓管理区 (by the South China Sea). (Taishan seat, Doushan and Tonggu forms a north to south line, but Baisha lies west of Taishan seat.)
(c) "It has been decades since a train has passed through the old Beijie train station 北街火车站 in southern China. On a recent winter morning, the only sign of activity came from a group of architecture students busy with their sketch pads. The station is a two-story building of brick and concrete with stained-glass windows. A ticket counter with metal bars still stands in the main hallway. On the wall behind the counter is a copy of a train schedule from the pre-Communist era: one silver dollar for a first-class ticket from this station to the town of San He; 70 cents for a second-class ticket."
新宁铁路北街站旧址
zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E5%AE%81%E9%93%81%E8%B7%AF%E5%8C%97%E8%A1%97%E7%AB%99%E6%97%A7%E5%9D%80
("位于中国广东省江门市蓬江区北街甘化厂职工生活区内，原为新宁铁路最东部的火车站，现仅存候车大楼 * * * 候车大楼建于1928年")
(d) "The station is the most prominent survivor of the Xinning Railway, an ambitious attempt by a Chinese businessman who lived overseas in the early 20th century to help modernize his home county, Taishan * * * it was a private railway, one of China’s first * * * That man, CHEN Yixi 陈 宜禧, returned to Taishan after spending 40 years in the United States amassing a fortune, mostly as a labor contractor in Seattle for railroad projects. The money he raised for the Xinning Railway came primarily from Chinese-Americans."
(e) "At Doushan, the southern terminus of the railway, there is another statue and also a black locomotive in the main plaza.At Doushan, the southern terminus of the railway, there is another statue and also a black locomotive in the main plaza."
That is what the photo of the report is about.
(e) "The Museum of Overseas Chinese in Jiangmen has a large exhibition on the railroad."
江门五邑华侨华人博物馆
www.jmbwg.com/about.aspx
(f) "'It was arguably Chen Yixi who came closest to attaining the heroic stature attributed to huaqiao,' or overseas Chinese, in magazines known as qiaokan, wrote Madeline Y HSU, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, in 'Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home,' a book on transnationalism and the southern Chinese that has a chapter on Mr Chen. * * * Through family connections, Mr Chen first moved to the United States around 1862, as a teenager. He learned English and took engineering classes, and eventually he founded a company supplying labor for railroad projects. He became a pillar of the business community in Seattle."
(i) Madeline Y Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home; Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943. Stanford University Press, 2000.
books.google.com/books/about/Dreaming_of_Gold_Dreaming_of_Home.html
(ii) Madeline Y Hsu 徐 元音
Associate Professor, Center for Asian American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, undated
www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/aas/faculty/myh95
(g) “In 1895, foreign powers seized control of China’s railroads through a treaty that resulted from China’s defeat in a war with Japan. * * * Mr Chen took a stab at such a project [building private railroads]. He was not the first; a previous attempt by another overseas Chinese businessman to build a private railway had failed. Mr. Chen’s goal was to build a railway first from Taishan City north to Jiangmen, where passengers could take boats to and from Hong Kong. Eventually the railway would extend south to the coast of the Taishan region * ** Construction began around 1906. * * * A big geographic hurdle was the Niuwan River 牛湾河. * * * The first stretch was completed in 1909. It ran from Doushan in the south to Gongyi 台山市大江镇公益圩 公益港, on the northern border of Taishan. The second section, from Gongyi to Jiangmen, was completed two years later. In 1917, Mr Chen added a trunk line connecting Taishan City to Baisha. The lines together ran 137 kilometers, about 85 miles. * * * And there was not much of a market for the transportation of manufactured goods across Taishan because it was not an industrialized area. * * * Mr Chen died in 1928, his dreams unfulfilled. * * * After the Japanese conquered Guangzhou in October 1938, Chinese officials [under Chiang Kai-shek, in 1939 (presumably Japanese only occupied Guangzhou)] ordered the railroad dismantled so the Japanese would not be able to use it.”
(i) ““In 1895, foreign powers seized control of China’s railroads through a treaty that resulted from China’s defeat in a war with Japan.”
(A) The sentence is ambiguous. My first impression is that a treaty was signed between powers and Qing Dynasty in 1895, asides from that of the same year between Japan and Qing. But there was no second Qing treaty that year.
* List of treaties
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_treaties
* Category:Treaties of the Qing Dynasty
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Treaties_of_the_Qing_Dynasty
(a list of all Qing treaties)
(B) After more readings of the sentence, I concluded that the “treaty” in the sentence alludes to Treaty of Shimonoseki 下関条約.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Shimonoseki
* Shimonoseki 山口県 下関市
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimonoseki
(The city prior to 1902 was commonly known as Bakan 馬関 and formally Akamagaseki 赤間関)
(c) Japanese Wiki for the page of the city: “中心部の下関港周辺は、古くは赤間関（あかまがせき）と呼ばれており、これを赤馬関（あかまがせき，せきばかん）とも書いたことから、これを略した馬関（ばかん）という別名も用いられた。”
translation: Around the center of Shimonoseki harbor was called 赤間関 (pronounced “Akamagaseki”). Because it sometimes written as 赤馬関 (pronounced the same or “seki-bakan”), it was (gradually) shortened to 馬関 (pronounced “bakan”).
* aka (adj) 赤
* The kanji 馬 has Chinese and Japanese pronunciations “ba” and “uma,” respectively.
* The “ga” has no meaning, much like”no.”
* The kanji 関 has Chinese and Japanese pronunciations “kan” and “seki,” respectively.
(C) history of rail transport in China
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_China
(section 1.1 Early efforts; section 1.2 Fast development during 1895-1911)
(ii) trunk line (n): "a transportation system (as an airline, railroad, or highway) handling long-distance through traffic"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%20trunk%20line
As opposed to a spur line.
新宁铁路
zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%96%B0%E5%AE%81%E9%93%81%E8%B7%AF
(Sunning Railway; 曾是位于中国广东省新宁 （今台山）和新会境内的一条铁路。* * * 1909年通车。此路是继潮汕铁路之后，中国第二条商办铁路。它亦是全部不用外国资本和技术人员建造的铁路")
(h) “Japanese troops occupied Guangzhou from October 21, 1938, to September 16, 1945. * * * The glory survives in memories, which are gradually disappearing. Chen Huajia, 84, recalled riding the railroad as a boy with his father, who took the train from San He to Taishan City to get supplies for his restaurant.”
(i) Guangzhou
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangzhou
(ii) “三合镇位于中国广东省台山市西北部.” Chinese Wikipedia. 白沙镇 is its northern neighbor.
|
发表于 2-11-2014 12:03:54
收藏
分享
支持
反对
楼主