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which only a very few would eventually scale. (At the time of the British assumption of power there were roughly 100,000 people in the New Territories; it was then established that there were over three hundred schoolmasters in the area.) Most of the pupils in the country schoolrooms attended for only two or three years, but some of them managed to stay long enough to lay the foundation which, built upon in town academies, formed the basis for the classical education demanded of graduates.
14. There can be no doubt, from our general knowledge of Kwangtung during this period, that the scholar-gentry (shan sz: 'shen-shih') created by the examination system and its attendant institutions formed in San On a category of 'natural leaders' for the countryside. The scholar-gentry were not the formal headmen of recognised administrative units; far from it; their status in society was too high to allow them to occupy so humble a position. They could not be subjected to routine control by the county magistrate (although he had a certain responsibility for keeping young scholars in order), and the authority they enjoyed within their local communities rested precisely on their ability to speak with a privileged voice to the magistrate and those standing above him in the official hierarchy. They were not necessarily large landowners, but in the nature of the case they were not peasants (nor, except rarely, the sons of peasants), their economic strength being based in general on income drawn from rents, interest on loans, and sometimes (despite the apparent contradiction between gentry status and officially despised commercial activity) business. Culturally they were the elite of their society. Socially they made themselves responsible for initiating and maintaining public works which in the eyes of the bureaucracy were a matter for local enterprise; so that it is possible (although I have seen no evidence to support my guess) that their disappearance in the twentieth century brought with it a decline in the care of bridges, paths, public buildings, and so on, in so far as the responsibility for these works was not taken over by the new government.
15. The scholar-gentry would have vanished from the New Territories scene—or, more correctly, faded to the sad remnant now sought out by research workers and otherwise largely ignored—even if British rule had not been extended from Hong Kong. The examination system came to an end in 1905, several years before the final collapse of the Empire. British administration made far