NOTES AND QUERIES
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Territories to Great Britain in 1898. It was a one-clan village, then and now, and the clan record shows that the first ancestor arrived in Lantau Island about 1780. Family tradition states that they lived first in the larger older settlement at nearby Pui O before establishing themselves at Shan Shek Wan.
The principal actor in the removal is still alive, aged 70, and what follows was taken from him and other elderly villagers. The occasion for the removal is said to have been the destruction caused locally by the severe typhoon of 1937, which takes its place with those of 1874 and 1906 as one of the three most severe storms in the preceding near century of British rule.
Prior to this particular typhoon, the village, which stood close to the seashore, was fronted by a line of large old trees. These shut off the sea from the houses and constituted an effective visual screen, which was held to be an essential feature of village Fung Shui. The typhoon blew over many of these trees and made large gaps in the screen. This caused considerable uneasiness among the villagers, who, in pondering the new situation, are said to have considered another current feature of their lives. It is related that, at this time, there was a noticeable shortage of male children in the village, few families possessing more than one living son. The sudden removal of the accustomed leafy screen, together with the lack of male offspring, were interpreted by some as a sign that the place had become unlucky. My principal informant states that he decided to remove to another site about a quarter of a mile away, and that within two or three years, his example had been followed by the other villagers.
Considerable expense and inconvenience were involved. Their old homes were substantial dwellings of mud-brick on a rubble foundation with granite fittings and tiled roofs. An ancestral hall was included in their number. Removal meant the total loss of these houses; and because they were old—a hundred years or more—and had been damaged by the typhoon, it was not possible, I was told, to recover many of the fittings for use in the new dwellings. For these and general economic reasons, the removal cannot be interpreted as an improvement in housing conditions. As at Shek Pik, it is worth noting that the new houses were not built to the same standard or decorative style. Another feature of this particular case, unlike the others, was that