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promote among themselves morality, education, social solidarity, and mutual aid. The plan seems to have enjoyed some vogue in the Ming dynasty, but the early Ch'ing rulers took over the term to give it a new meaning: 'hsiang-yüeh' became a public lecture system by means of which the masses were to be indoctrinated with the political ethics of Confucianism. Yet by the nineteenth century 'hsiang-yüeh' had once again undergone a transformation, a lecture system developing into a framework of state control to the point where 'hsiang-yüeh' was sometimes taken to be synonymous with 'pao-chia' and 'li-chia', the state organisations for security and taxation. On the other hand, a contrary process of evolution was also at work moving ‘hsiang-yüeh' back towards the kind of self-government which had been originally conceived under its name. It is on record that in places in Kwangtung the heads of 'hsiang-yüeh' assumed roles of local leadership in such a way as to take command of local affairs. In addition, 'hsiang-yüeh' were used as a setting for organising ‘regiment and drill corps' ('t'uan-lien') for local defence, and it is an interesting speculation that just as the 'ke yüeh hsiang-yung', the village braves of the several yeuk, rallied to the defence of Canton against the British in 1842, so we might find on closer inspection that some of the armed resistance to the first British in the New Territories was bound up with the Ts'at Yeuk and other yeuk-complexes. (There are of course many sources, both Western and Chinese, for the history of 'hsiang-yüeh'. The best and most convenient is Hsiao Kung-chuan, Rural China, Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century, Seattle, 1960, pp. 184, 205).
28. My tentative view of the matter is that, while early Ch'ing policy may have popularised the term heung yeuk in the course of spreading the public lecture system, at the time we are concerned with, at least in our part of Kwangtung, yeuk were looked upon by the people who engaged in them as instruments of local control independent of state supervision. They might be used for treating with the state, as seems to have been the case especially with the three yeuk-complexes oriented to Kowloon City, and might have allied themselves with officialdom in the face of banditry or attack by outsiders, but they were far removed from being mere instruments of state control. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, whose home was in an area of Kwangtung which may be regarded as being in many ways comparable to San On, laid stress on the heung yeuk as a basis for a high degree of local independence and self-government in his