NOTES AND QUERIES
301
sampan an elderly woman with thinning hair dressed in black with an empty red "mei dai" was urging the polers on with a straw fan, and another middle-aged woman was also pretending to pole the sampan along. They were all exerting themselves to the utmost and generally behaving in an extreme manner with exaggerated gestures and shouting as they went along. Another boat accompanied them with only one person "poling" it. When they reached the boat anchorage, the gonging continued, and the two women on the roof began to shadow-box and then to grapple and wrestle with one another. Eventually the elderly woman went down on to the fore-deck, and then she and the woman on the top deck began to push and pull at one of the poles in a vigorous manner until eventually the woman on the roof herself came down on to the fore-deck. There was a brief interval during which some of the younger polers then engaged in mock fights which were almost obscene in their intention. Then the elderly woman and the other began their mock fighting again and eventually collapsed together struggling on the deck and went in under the cover of the sampan. At one stage an empty red bucket was, it seemed, symbolically emptied over the front of the sampan.
In the middle of all this there was a wedding ceremony, and I think that all the preceding activities were connected with it. But I was particularly struck by the frenzied, almost ecstatic and unseemly behaviour of the women.
(II) 31st January, 1975
About a week later after the ceremony described in my note of 5th January 1975, I witnessed a similar ceremony but this time performed by the owners of intermediate-size boats.
The ceremony followed a similar pattern, but in this case there were two actual sampans without motors, which were propelled by a team of oarsmen, using small poles rather than oars and manipulated in a rhythmic way rather like the way a dragon boat paddle is manipulated. Both teams of rowers, six in each boat, were dressed in a sort of deep blue uniform, and one team consisted of young women and the other of older women. When they reached what I assumed to have been a wedding boat, it was contrived that the older women reached the target first, and that they then together with the women on the boat tried to keep off the young women. These attempts lasted for quite some considerable time with much