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working). As long, then, as village life remains the kind of community life it has been, fung shui is likely to continue undiminished. But in fact, life in the New Territories cannot remain unchanged; industrialisation and the blurring of community limits by the penetration of newcomers have already gone too far. So that there is a prospect that, just as in the city today, so in the New Territories tomorrow, geomantic ideas will survive (affecting the behaviour of people striving for status and providing a retrospective explanation of fortune and misfortune) without involving everybody in a sharp geomantic response to a challenge to his rights.
71. My analysis, as I have stressed, is provisional, and I should certainly hope that it will be checked by later research and against the experience of administrators. Once again, I should like to suggest the possibility of District Officers systematising the data they have in their files, so that, by comparing the situation in different areas and at different points in time, we may get a clearer picture of what is afoot and the likely direction of change. Of course, any field study by an anthropologist which sets out to analyse the life of a community will almost certainly produce case material on fung shui, but there would be no point in suggesting that the subject be made the centre of an extended anthropological enquiry unless a specialist in Chinese religion were available and willing to undertake the task. There is certainly a need for a broad enquiry into religious life in the New Territories—ancestor worship, cults, spirit-mediumship, temples, and so on—but it would take a mature and experienced research worker to do it.
72. There is a third and final problem I propose to discuss at some length: emigration and its effects. It is generally assumed that there are some 20,000 Hong Kong men in the United Kingdom at the present time, most of them in the restaurant trade. (The figure may be larger; the head of the biggest travel agency in the New Territories puts it at 25,000). Most of these men are from the New Territories. In addition, men have gone to other parts of the world to seek a living. It is known that the money remitted home is a sizeable portion of the annual income of the New Territories. I write without a copy of the 1961 census before me, and I am unable to calculate very accurately how large a proportion the emigrants must form of the relevant sector of the population; but if we remember (a) that very few of the emigrants are men from the city,