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major systems of romanization now in use by English speaking sinologists, viz. Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Pinyin, and Yale. This alone might make the book worth the money to those of us who have trouble keeping them all sorted out. I, for one, would like to call for a revised and expanded version, with smaller print and less wasted space and adding the French, German, and Russian systems. In such a form one might predict that it would be a must for every beginning scholar in the field.
Cornell University, 1972.
JOHN MCCOY
ARMANDO DA SILVA. TAI YU SHAN, TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL ADAPTION IN A SOUTH CHINESE ISLAND. Taipei, Orient Cultural Service, 1972 pp. 102, U.S.$4.75.
This brief work is one in the series 'Asian Folklore and Social Life Monographs' (Vol. XXXII) edited by Professor Lou Tsu-k'uang in collaboration with Professor Wolfram Eberhard. The author was educated in Hong Kong and at the time of publication was on the faculty of the Geography Department in the University of Hawaii. The book is of particular interest to Hong Kong residents because it is written about the Colony's largest island, Lantau or Tai Yu Shan; and because little has been written on the particular aspects of local rural life with which he deals,
The book is an abridged version of a master's thesis for the Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, for which the field work was done on Lantau in 1962-64. The author states in his preface: "I chose the island of Tai Yu Shan as a place for study as it still possessed many cultural relics of archeological, historical, and ecological interest; old forts, abandoned beach-temples, disused lime kilns, ruins of former settlements, hillside terraces in disuse, and well-constructed hillside trails that led to nowhere. Fast disappearing even then were certain forms of livelihood such as sea-weed collecting, stake-net fishing, and hillside liquor distilling. But most of all, I chose Tai Yu Shan because I just enjoyed being there." His purpose was to describe a traditional coastal way of life that had endured for so long. "I thought it important then, as I still do now, that I had to understand and to interpret, before imminent changes made things difficult, the man-land processes that made for the genre of Tai Yu Shan."