NOTES AND QUERIES
187
The villagers turned to a variety of other employment; in Govt. service (because of obligations felt to and claimed by the villagers), in Kowloon, locally and even abroad.
The villagers decreased in numbers after the move and this was attributed to ill-fortune (bad fung-shui in their new houses), disease, and the rigours of the Japanese occupation and probably, too, to the traumatic shock of the uprooting from their old houses. It led directly to the neglect of the 3 ancestral halls erected to one side of the new village and to the establishment of a church of the Hong Kong Basel Mission in a converted village house just after the war. The halls were requisitioned by the Japanese during the Occupation and the altars and ancestral tablets put out, but thereafter they were not replaced in the period of pessimism, eroded spirits and lack of faith (and of hard cash), and they have not been put back since. Consequently, there have long been no ancestral halls in operation, despite the existence in a reasonable state of these large and carefully constructed buildings which now house the kindergarten of the village school.
The halls still show, in good preservation, much of the decoration worked by skilled craftsmen in stucco and paint on the interior and exterior of the buildings and are evidence not only of the conservatism and loving care of the village leadership of the time but also of the continued existence at that time in the Hong Kong region of a body of craftsmen capable of fine work in the traditional local style.
The old village houses number some 120. As many of them are still in their original or slightly altered state, they too, show the interesting style and extensive decoration of the masons and craftsmen who built these to the demands of the villagers. In contrast to this tasteful and substantial style of reprovisioning, there is a group of single-storey white walled structures to the S.W. of the main settlement. This is said to have predated the houses built by the villagers and to have been constructed by the Hong Kong Government to serve as examples of a planned rehousing programme. The offer was declined, and the present 2 storey houses were constructed instead with public funds (and perhaps additional money from the village). Today, these earlier buildings are used to house Govt. workers still employed in the locality.