260
MAURICE FREEDMAN
are discarded, inscriptions neglected. I have already referred to the cast out stone in the Tin Hau Temple in Tai Po Kau Hui. The stock of genealogy books and old land deeds is being fast depleted by loss and decay. The apparatus of ancestral halls is in many cases being allowed to disintegrate. (I came across a village where only the initiative of the Village Representative restored to the ancestral halls the honours boards which villagers had filched to make beds). Now people are at liberty to do what they like about their past and I am not in favour of any artificial antiquarianism; but it is surely a good argument that both the world at large and their own future generations will be grateful to the New Territories people for the preservation of their historical relics. Would it not be possible for the Administration to undertake to register all monuments, to collect unwanted documents, to copy those which their owners are unwilling to part with, and generally to preserve what can stand as a witness to the past of an interesting corner of civilisation? I am told that it is the intention of the new City Hall Museum in Hong Kong to start collecting at some future date objects illustrating the art and material culture of the New Territories, but I fear that if action is long delayed there may be little to survive.
101. I have covered many subjects in this report and made a number of suggestions for research. In many cases I have implied the degree of priority I should give to particular kinds of investigation, but I have not attempted to offer a neat arrangement of subjects on a scale of usefulness, because it is for the Administration and not me to say what is more or less important to its needs. I have tried to indicate the kinds of research that I should sponsor if I were in a position to do so and within the limits of the talent and money at our disposal my colleagues and I hope to be able to pursue some of the investigations I have proposed. If the New Territories Administration is interested in the private research to be undertaken and should itself wish to sponsor investigations then a plan could be drawn up to co-ordinate more closely the needs of the Administration with the interests of the social scientists.
Hong Kong, Singapore
May-July 1963.