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NOTES
* A general study on traditional education in the New Territories before the arrival of the British is given in another paper, "Village Education in the New Territories under the Ch'ing" shortly to be published by the Centre of Asian Studies, Hong Kong University. This present article is a related study on a single village in the N.T., with the purpose of seeing how and why education changed from its traditional pattern to a modern structure in the late 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century.
* Sheung Shui is a large single surname village consisting of eight sub-villages lying at the heart of the Sheung Shui/Fanling plain (originally called Sheung U Tung [上烏塘] in Chinese). The village lies in a fertile low-lying river valley some twenty miles north of Kowloon and four miles south of Sham Chun. The village has been discussed in detail by Hugh Baker in his book, A Chinese Lineage Village, Frank Cass, 1968.
* We were told by the village elders that their ancestors made special efforts to convert their dialect and custom into Punti shortly after their settlement in the district, just to be qualified to partake in the imperial examinations, for it was not until 1802 that the Hakkas were given a small quota in the examination, see also Hsin-an-Hsien-chih, 1981 reprint of the 1819 edition, Hong Kong, vol. 9, p. 99.
According to the Liao genealogy and records on the ancestral tables (神主牌), the number of first degrees (生員) won by the lineage by generation were as follows:
no of Sheng-yuan Generation 9 1 17th 10 century 11 12 10 Enw. 2 13 13 18th century 14 8 15 4 16 12 19th century 17 4 18 3These data are not completely reliable, especially for those before the 14th generation, when the genealogy had not yet been written. Yet the numbers can be taken as an indication of the academic success of the Liaos. According to official records, there were at least three chu-jen degree holders from Sheung Shui in the 19th century.
The six halls included the Ming Te Tang 明德堂, Hsien Ch'eng Tang, Yun Sheng Chia-shou 潤生齋, Tu Nan Tang 圖南堂, Ming Te Chia-shou 明德齋, and Yen Siu Tang 延壽堂. The Liaos stood next only to the T'angs of Kam Tin and Ping Shan within the New Territories in possessing such a number of halls for studying purposes.
The Wan Shih Tang, unlike the other ancestral halls, was seldom used as a classroom as it was reserved for ceremonial functions. But in 1932, the building was re-modelled to accommodate the Fung Kai School, the first modern school set up in the village. For the history of the Wan Shih T'ang and founding of the Fung Kai School, see Liao Yin-sen.