SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963
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inhabiting the village point to the ruined ancestral halls of their late rivals and ascribe their own fortune to the cunning of their ancestor who, at the time when all the ancestral halls were being built in a line, surreptitiously made a slight alteration to the direction in which his own hall was to face. If ever there was such an incident, which I take leave to doubt, the alignment now to be seen bears no trace of it. The jubilant survivors cannot detect it either; they merely assume it to be there.
64. Just as the fung shui (and in consequence the status) of people may be attacked by poaching on grave-sites, so conflict can arise over buildings. X's attempt to build higher than my house is an affront. I say he is ruining my fung shui. I am implying that he has no right to put himself above me. Y has pierced his wall to make a new window. It has caused sickness in the village. We protest against his lack of consideration; he should have taken precautions. Perhaps we are also saying that he should not have done what others do not do. And fung shui objections become intensified when those who have been held to be at fault are outsiders: strangers or the government. For then the community as a whole can be united in its determination to defend its interests.
65. A village is not just the ground on which its fields are made and its houses stand. It is the whole area which, by custom, falls within the control of the community. When the British arrived they acknowledged rights not only to building sites and cultivations, registering these rights in the land records, but also to a wider village territory within which the local population had certain privileges, especially for burying their dead, grazing their beasts, and collecting fuel. Villagers stand by these rights in the sense that intrusion is resented and attempts made to force trespassers to pay for their boldness if they cannot, or it is not desirable that they be, excluded. The immigrant vegetable-grower or poultry-farmer may think that he has acquired the right to put up a shack but he may find himself the centre of a dispute from which he can extricate himself only by paying a sum of money. An industrialist may have all the necessary permits but he may be forced to come to terms with the people in whose area he wishes to operate. The wise immigrant and the wise industrialist make their terms before they begin to build. Similarly, the government undertaking public works may fall foul of objections which are phrased in fung shui language. A hole is being drilled; a child falls sick; the work must stop.