LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES
77
by the seasons was reinforced and coloured by the Confucian system of ethical behaviour which included filial piety and ancestor worship, two fundamentals which were re-expressed every New Year and at the two grave festivals. Both operated through the closely knit organisation of the clan, a group of families of the same name linked by descent from a common ancestor. This internal bond was further tightened by the restrictions of thought and movement imposed by poverty and poor communications.
I have always felt that this essential unity of life and thought is reflected in the traditional village scene, whose component parts are laid out in accordance with a general pattern whose essential beauty and simplicity leave an impression on the mind. Most of the present villages in the New Territory existed in 1898 and it is only mainly in the last ten or fifteen years that their original outline has been cluttered up with additional buildings in a semi-European style and their surrounding fields covered with wooden shacks put up by immigrant vegetable farmers. Clear all this away and in a good many cases you can still see what Stewart Lockhart and the gentlemen of his party saw as they travelled through the Territory in the month of August some sixty years ago. You will see a village whose houses are laid out in close rows on the higher ground. Behind them will be a thick grove of fung shui trees and to their front will extend terrace after terrace of rice fields, the one sliding almost imperceptibly into the other, the whole layout shaped for the purpose of seeing that a water supply can be led to each field for the planting periods of the year. On the slopes of the hills there may be pine trees and, occasionally, crops like pine-apples and peanuts. You will also notice a few prominent horseshoe-shaped graves, some green or brown burial urns glistening in the sun, and areas on the higher slopes which look as though they have been shaved recently; as they virtually have by the women of the village who cut grass to sell for boat breaming and brushwood to burn in their own stoves. Entering one of these larger villages you will still see what Lockhart had to report.
The houses in these villages are, as a rule, well and solidly built. The foundations and lower courses of their walls are, in many cases, of granite masonry, the upper courses