176
NOTES AND QUERIES
(usually brought in by boat at extra cost) to some lofty spot to which the only access was by hill path and sometimes not even that. 23. Other visitors to the hills at the grave worshipping festivals include persons from outside the Colony who, on account of old and important ancestral graves located by geomancers in time past, have long been accustomed to make the annual pilgrimage. This tradition has been eroded by the establishment of the People Republic in 1949, though some persons have continued the visits intermittently. In one case known to me at Lo Wai, Tsuen Wan, where the grave was repaired in the Hsien Feng reign (1851-1861), and the people came from beyond Sham Chun Market in Po On county adjoining the New Territories, the family have not come for many years now. The geomantic name of the site is
Pre-Chinese Occupation
NE
24. Another aspect of the mountain is its pre-Chinese connections. These are now very difficult to ascertain and one would need to comb the hillside for evidence of pre-Chinese occupation such as field systems and irrigation works, and look closely into the place names of localities, fields and villages, to see which of them contain signs of pre-Chinese words, together with the nature and location of the earth shrines of the area. Mr. K.M.A. Barnett has done a lot of work generally on this subject and has prepared a name list for 150 words which he thinks descend from and relate to pre-Chinese languages in the Hong Kong area (see JHKBRAS 14 (1974),
Resources
25. Resources of the mountain included mineral deposits — the largest prewar wolfram workings were at Shing Mun (Davis: 116)
and kaolin clay used in the pottery kilns long established at Wun Yiu near Tai Po (JHKBRAS 15 (1975) 291-2). Other clay was specially used for mud bricks, notably at the village now known as Ta Chuen Ping near Upper Kwai Chung. Another resource, long since exhausted, was the forest trees used for charcoal burning, once a flourishing local industry all over the New Territories. The memory of both trees and of this old occupation remains at one of the place names at Shing Mun, known as Tan Chong (炭廠) or 'charcoal factory', in which there were some houses already abandoned from the early years of this century.