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NOTES AND QUERIES
In addition to the renewal of these seven pots, a small ceremony was held at one other location. There were prayers and burnt offerings, and a tall bamboo frond with a charm attached was set up, but there was no incense pot at the site. This spot was thus symbolically included in protective rites, but at the same time it was not granted full inclusion, and it is indeed a spot about which Fung Yuen villagers feel some ambivalence. One of the lineages was approached a few years ago by an urban clan association of the same surname, thus claiming descent from a common ancestor long ago, which was seeking a place with good fung seui to erect a clan association hall; Fung Yuen was just such a place. The local lineage is small and poor, and evidently realized some financial gain by making some land available to their urban tuhng sing. The widow of the former village representative, the man who was apparently instrumental in the deal, is the caretaker of the new clan hall, and burns incense there regularly. But I have heard other members of the local group speak disdainfully of the hall. Moreover, it was built directly in front of the ancestral hall of one of the other lineages, and there has been a dispute about the geomantic effects of its orientation on the older hall. Nonetheless, it is a place of religious significance which, theoretically at least, embraces one of the local lineages. For that reason, it seems, it cannot be left out completely when rites of propitiation and protection for the valley and its inhabitants are conducted. So, the clan hall was given half a ceremony - better than none at all, but stopping decidedly short of granting it full inclusion in the valley community.
A final observation I would like to mention in passing relates to the continuing strength of the multilineage alliance in the face of social change and emigration. Though four lineages are resident in the valley, and were brought under the protection of the tun fu ceremonies I observed, men of only two surnames participated (and of course, no women at all; this was "men's business"). The other two groups have few adult men currently living in the village, and of those few, some are elderly and too ill to spend the afternoon walking all over the valley, while their sons were working that day as usual in other parts of the colony; many others are living and working in Europe. Nonetheless, the same attention was given to the third hamlet and the third ancestral hall, and to the new house of a family currently in Europe, that the residential and ritual places of the actual participants received. This expression of con-