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NOTES AND QUERIES
But luckily for them and for me, the prophet's prediction proved to be an invention of his own, and nobody was injured but his own reputation.
Hong Kong, May 1969.
JAMES HAYES
HEMP
A few years ago, I wrote about itinerant Hakka craftsmen who came regularly to some of the New Territories villages to weave locally grown hemp-flax into cloth for making clothes (see the 1968 Journal, pp. 162-165). In the course of reading and making further enquiries, more information has become available that may interest readers of my earlier note on this now relatively obscure subject.
A few words of background may serve to show that the disappearance of this crop and this craft from Hong Kong in comparatively recent times signals the end of a practice that must have been followed from time immemorial in this region and elsewhere. Hemp constituted the main source of textiles in China until the introduction of cotton from the tenth or eleventh centuries A.D. According to M. Loewe's Everyday Life in Early Imperial China (London, B.T. Batsford, Ltd., 1968), the planting of hemp for the coarse raiment in which most of the population was clothed was already one of the farmer's main occupations in the Han time (202 B.C.-A.D. 200) along with another prime necessity, grain for food. Fragments of a short text on husbandry ascribed to Ts'ui Shih (c. 100-170) set out a yearly programme of activities for the farmer and his household and include instructions on the cultivation and use of hemp. Unfortunately, however, despite the use of hemp clothing by the bulk of the Han population, it is of silk fabrics that most is known today. By the late Sung period in the mid-13th century, ordinary people still wore clothes made of hempen cloth since cotton, too, was a luxury, though its use had begun to spread (see Jacques Gernet Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276 (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1962, p. 130).
The description of the planting, preparation, and processing of hemp that follows is taken from pp. 205-208 of Samuel...