NOTES AND QUERIES
“LETTING GO THE WOODEN GOOSE”
207
LI Mau-ying (*), posthumous name Man-kan (††), an official of the Sung dynasty who graduated chin-shih in 1226, was given an estate on Lantau, one of the larger islands of the Hong Kong region.* His rights continued through succeeding dynasties but were mostly extinguished at the land settlement that accompanied the lease of the New Territories to Britain at the end of the 19th century. A curious story is linked with the Li's ownership of their Lantau estates, indicating that this grant of land may have been given in a novel fashion. According to a villager of Sha Lo Wan, Lantau Island (1913-1962) who had an interest in local tales, the emperor was so pleased with Li that he told him to put a wooden duck on the sea and that he could have whichever land it touched.
There is an echo of this in Cecil Clementi's minute to the Colonial Secretary of 16th June 1904 in a file about the Tang clan's claim to Tsing Yi Island (CSO1903/8551).† Without there being any apparent reason or preparation for making such a statement—probably because a whole section was omitted by the copier—one paragraph suddenly states 'For the method of "letting go the wooden goose" see minute of this date in N.T. 7466/03'. This file is unfortunately no longer in existence.
Can any reader explain this 'system' of deciding upon which land to include in a grant?
Hong Kong, 1972.
JAMES HAYES
PROGRAMME NOTES FOR THE VISIT TO POKFULAM, HONG KONG ISLAND, 29TH JULY, 1972‡
Today's visit is to a part of Hong Kong island that has not been subject to the same amount of change as other districts. Even today
* For the Li family see Lo Hsiang-lin, Hong Kong and its External Communications before 1842, Hong Kong, Institute of Chinese Culture, 1963 (this is a part-translation of the Chinese version published in 1959), p. 73 and plate 20 and his article "This Sung Wang T'ai and the Location of the Travelling Courts by the Sea Shore in the Last Days of the Sung" in Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. III, No. 2 (1958) at p. 212 (English text) and note 29 (Chinese text), with Plate XI.
† Located in the Public Records Office of Hong Kong.
‡ Printed here for the convenience of members who were unable to join the party on this occasion.