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temple's immediate vicinity take their place? Practically from the start, for example, the Man Mo Temple in Hollywood Road, Tai Ping Shan, became identified with a city-wide group of merchant and trade guild elite figures that, by 1870, had been further elevated by its incorporation into the management of the newly established Tung Wah Hospital, an institution that could speak for all Chinese in Hong Kong. But was this to imply that all new urban and suburban temples and shrines were subject to merchant and trade guild elite control? Was a new, elite-leadership pattern imposed from the outset in all localities by the leaders of the merchant community in what, after all, was not a very large or widely dispersed population, given the tendency to congregate near the workplace in the central districts of Victoria? Or did any new urban and suburban village-type shrines and temples emerge according to the well-established self-managing patterns of the countryside from which most of the new population had come? And did the older, pre-British temples also fall under the sway of this merchant elite, or did they continue under their own local management?
This article endeavours to answer these questions, being mostly concerned with the new communities of British Hong Kong, established after the island passed under British rule in 1842. The first of the communities studied was located on the small island of Ap Lei Chau, a coastal market centre and boat people's anchorage on the south side of Hong Kong Island and was centred on a long-established temple. Five others were geographically organized inter-dialect communities organized to arrange the worship of street shrines serving their localities. Three of these shrines were located in the older and well-populated western part of early urban Hong Kong; the others were in the Shau Kei Wan area on the eastern part of the island, in what were originally scattered small communities of vegetable farmers, stone cutters, boat builders and shopkeepers settled along the shore and on the hillsides, just outside the long-established fishing port.
In every one of these cases the inspiration and continuance of these shrines was due to local initiatives and local management, perhaps because their universally desired end — namely, communal good fortune and prosperity under the protection of the gods was the concern of residents in each place.