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MILITIA, MARKET AND LINEAGE:
CHINESE RESISTANCE TO THE OCCUPATION OF HONG KONG'S NEW TERRITORIES IN 18991
R. G. GROVES*
Introduction
Violence, or the very real possibility of violence, was endemic in southeastern China during the nineteenth century. The provinces of Kwangsi, Kwangtung, and Fukien were notorious to imperial official and foreign observer alike for their varieties of armed conflict. Brine, a British naval officer with contemporary experience of the coastal provinces, described the mid-nineteenth century situation as follows: "the whole history of the period is little else than a continual series of local insurrections, bursting out in all directions. The coast was infested with pirates, who not only caused great injury to the coasting trade, but frequently landed and sacked the villages lying adjacent to the sea. In the two Kwang provinces armed bodies of men moved from town to town, and committed large robberies in open day... the Pekin Gazettes were full of reports from the provincial governors acquainting the emperor with the disorganized state of the country, and complaining of the inadequacy of their troops to quell the interminable revolts." To this catalogue of ills may be added the Opium and Arrow Wars, inter-lineage and clan warfare, ethnic conflict, and major and minor rebellions.
The prevalence of violence was by no means new. Writing of the Hsin-an District of Kwangtung Province, just over a century ago, the German missionary Krone noted: "Hung-mo the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1399 A.D.), found it necessary... to appoint an officer with the title ‘Shou-yu-sho'... Protector of the region, in order to protect the population, which was rapidly increasing, against the bands of robbers and vagabonds which infested the district."3 More recently Professor Maurice Freedman, surveying a mass of evidence and arguing that organized violence
* Mr. Groves is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of East Anglia. He conducted field research in the New Territories between 1963-65. His article "The Origins of Two Market Towns in the New Territories" appeared in Aspects of Social Organization in the New Territories (ed. M. Topley) published by the Hong Kong Branch, R.A.S. in 1965.