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Users of the Mountain
NOTES AND QUERIES
8. Besides the villagers, other persons make use of the mountain for utilitarian purposes. On Tai Mo Shan as on other hillsides, there are the collectors of the plants and herbs that form so essential a part of Chinese medicine; and those who trap birds, snakes and wild creatures, or comb the mountain streams and pools for items that serve the same medicinal purposes. These they sell to shops or individuals, or consume at home. These persons are usually outsiders in a skilled line rather than local villagers, although these can also be found carrying home plants and leafy branches for use at home in the bath, to soothe or invigorate the body. The collectors include the springtime pluckers of wild tea bushes, high up on the mountain, for, as mentioned briefly in the gazetteer, it is famous for tea, producing a favoured type of green tea.* Besides the cultivators of distant upland padi fields, village users of the mountain include boys tending draught cattle which rove across its slopes when not at work; and, most distinctive of all, the village grass-cutters, women as a rule, looking from a distance, as Heywood described them just before the war, 'like miniature haystacks wandering on the mountain-side' (Heywood: 52).
Religious Establishments
9. Mountains are specially favoured by devout men and women as places for quiet residence and deep contemplation. Some places are more noted than others in this respect. Tai Mo Shan, though outclassing other mountains of the Hong Kong region in height, has not been as popular as a place of religious retreat: at least not in recent centuries. On the south or Tsuen Wan side of the mountain none of the existing religious establishments is over fifty years old, though in the two decades before the 1939-45 war its leafy, tranquil, well-watered lower slopes were attracting the attention of a growing number of religious persons who came here from China to settle. These, with the help of their followers, supporters and wealthy patrons, purchased land from local villagers and built new, and in some cases, large and impressive, quarters for themselves and their fellows. Many of these have been further extended in the past ten years or so.
* Known locally as or 'cloud and mist tea'.