BOOK REVIEWS
329
Augustus K. K. Siu and Anthony K. K. Siu, Studies on Chinese Genealogies and the History of the Hong Kong Region, Fung Chin Institute, Hong Kong, 1982.
This book consists of eleven essays on the Hong Kong region (Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, the New Territories, and neighbouring areas). Four of them deal with genealogies, six principally with the history of the New Territories, and the last with boat people's songs. The central theme is that genealogies are valuable source materials for writing the history of this area, and this theme is illustrated with numerous examples.
There should be no dispute on the central theme: the question is how to put it into practice. The essay on migration into the Hong Kong region (chapter 5), despite the misleading reference in the title to all immigrant lineages as "guest lineages", is a useful example. In this essay, the authors list the time periods during which fifty-three surname groups first settled here from evidence recorded in their genealogies. The Tangs of Kam Tin, Lung Yeuk Tau, etc., and the P'aangs of Fan Ling came at the end of the Sung dynasty, the Lams of Shek Po Tsuen, and the Lius of Wu Kai Sha came in the Ming, and so on. The list is a useful first approximation, but obviously much more needs to be done.
Another interesting essay (chapter 4) describes ten historical “events” recorded in the genealogies. They include the marriage of the Sung princess to the ancestor of the Tangs, several famines and piratical attacks, the coastal evacuation from 1662 to 1668, the establishment of Tai Po New Market, the burial of a Chinese Christian at a Protestant cemetery on Hong Kong Island in 1854, the establishment of charity schools by philanthropist Fung Ping Shan, and flooding in Tsuen Wan in 1954. Similar "events" are discussed in greater detail in four other chapters (6, 8, 9 and 10), i.e., the establishment of the "five great clans" of the New Territories, the legend often referred to as "letting go of the wooden goose", the experience of the Southern Sung court in Kowloon, and the Tsuen Wan village feud of 1862 to 1864. Quite a few of these events have been discussed by other authors, notably Lo Hsiang-lin and James Hayes.
These later chapters make use of stone tablets and oral