as it does from the Republican period, is governed as to its essentials by the Nationalist Civil Code, and is as a result ipso facto mono- gamous. It is most doubtful whether this argument could sustain serious legal analysis. It is true that the monogamous character of marriages celebrated in China (before 1950) in Taiwan, in accordance with the provisions of the Nationalist Civil Code has been accepted by the Hong Kong courts, and if evidence to that effect were forthcoming, those courts might well further accept that persons whose personal law by domicile was the law of that Civil Code would be incapable of contracting a potentially poly- gamous marriage, just as persons subject to English law are incapable of contracting such unions. However, this does not in any sense imply that the marriages in Hong Kong of Chinese persons of Hong Kong domicile can be said to be governed by the Civil Code simply because the parties choose to follow the form of the Chinese Modern Marriage. Such a proposition runs quite counter to the accepted principles of the conflict of laws. It is scarcely contestable that a Chinese person domiciled in Hong Kong is capable of contracting potentially and actually polygamous marriages, and no choice of personal law is available to such persons. (The Sinha Peerage Claim (1939) 171 House of Lords Journals 350 is thus clearly distinguishable, for the decision apparently turned on objectively verifiable membership of a defined religious sect which forbade polygamy, and religion prescribed the personal law in India at that time: see Dicey, 7th Edition pp. 272 to 273). Moreover, once marriage has taken place in Chinese Modern form, there is apparently no legal sanction whatever, known to the law of Hong Kong, to prevent the husband from taking a concubine just as he would have done had he married in traditional form. Further, even if the Hong Kong Court were to entertain an action in contract, based on the somewhat doubtful proposition that a husband, merely by going through a Chinese Modern Marriage, bound himself implicitly to a monogamous marriage, it would seem that the action could sound in damages only. If he took a concubine in a way valid by traditional Chinese law and custom, it could scarcely be maintained that the transaction was invalidated by the terms of a contract with his first wife, for that would amount to holding
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