SECULAR NON-GENTRY LEADERSHIP OF TEMPLE AND SHRINE ORGANIZATIONS IN URBAN BRITISH HONG KONG
JAMES HAYES
There is now, in contrast to ten or twenty years ago, a sufficient body of research on Hong Kong's rural society to make possible some reliable conclusions on the nature of its institutions and their leadership at the local level, especially in the field of religion.* The place of the community temple in the rural setting, and the manner of its secular leadership, has been well-established by a number of studies, and comparisons with adjoining areas of Kwangtung enable one to state with confidence that communally organized non-gentry temple management bodies were normal and of crucial significance throughout traditional Hong Kong (and South-east China) society. This phenomenon mirrored the general capacity for self-management that characterized rural society as a whole, and its manifestation in the religious sector of village life was clearly only a part of a general competence that extended into social, economic and political aspects of the whole spectrum of rural activities.
1
The urban situation is less well researched, especially in its historical aspects. Hong Kong comprised a number of scattered villages and small fishing ports before the establishment of Victoria and its first urban suburbs in the 1840s, and whilst it is clear that, being without gentry, these were organized in the self-management pattern by peasants or shopkeepers that we have come to expect from studies of similar communities in the New Territories, it is not so certain whether this pattern was continued into the new city which was so quickly established on the northern shore of Hong Kong Island. Did the same pattern of leadership emerge at street and district level, associated with the new shrines and temples established by and for the new population; or did another pattern of temple organization involving overall leadership by merchant elites who were not identified with a particular
* See plates 1-8.
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