CHINESE RELIGION AND RURAL COHESION
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the New Territories of Hong Kong many big lineage villages have ancestral halls containing boards or plaques which indicate the former official or scholarly status of the deceased whose tablets are housed therein,
The crowning ambition of the rich scholar or business man in mono-lineage villages is said to have been the building of a large ancestral hall or endowing it with property. Hsiao Kung-chuan quotes a case of a rural businessman who purchased a fifth degree and then built a hall, calling the gentry together to set up regulations for his kinsmen.4 It appears the hall-land complex might develop at any stage of a mono-lineage village's history providing it contained such persons. Conversely cases are known of lineage villages declining, when wealth and scholarship were no longer there. Once coordinated kinship systems fragmented and people lived apart from their kinsmen. In a poor lineage village the lineage head — most senior man in the most senior generation — might perform simple ancestral rites and try cases between villagers, but the organization of such a village was much less tight. It is noted from one poor area that there, the inhabitants did not pay attention to clan organization.5
With land available for use of the peasantry, and gentry to protect their interests, however, villagers were more likely to stay at home: the village would grow in numbers as well as wealth. The command of wealthy mono-lineage villages over economic resources of the countryside increased their influence outside the village too, of course. Poor villages and peasants living outside villages might be forced to place themselves under the protection of the powerful and rent their land from them. Families of other lineage origins might come and settle round the walls of powerful mono-lineages.7
A lineage's power might be further extended through branching. Branches of such units might be established in neighbouring villages and when established in multi-lineage villages, by virtue of their link with a powerful centre, their leaders might exert power in their new home. Branches also might settle new villages, such villages then becoming linked with the parent village through its founding ancestral hall.
But segmentation might occasionally lead to conflict also. When segments or branches built separate halls endowing them