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alike, they made their own arrangements for self management in clan, village, sub-district, coastal centre and market town. So long as they paid their taxes and did not commit crimes or affrays they were left alone by the authorities. Being settled, in many cases, for so long, the inhabitants had intermarried over generations, sending their daughters to other villages and taking wives from neighbouring settlements as well as from further afield, from Kowloon and nearby places in the present New Territories. Some villages were linked by blood ties in the male line, as at Little Hong Kong and Pokfulam where the Chans and Chaus had settled or branched off, and some Wong Nei Chung clans had male cousins at Little Hong Kong. These links made it natural for the villages to join together in periodic communal protective rites like the ta chiu (打醮) which according to old residents still persisted into this century; whilst the temples attracted large gatherings at major festivals, especially on the birthdays of their patron deities.
This is not the place to provide yet another description of the forms which the local village communities used to provide for the regulation of their society. Full descriptions have been given elsewhere of the role of the clan, centred on the ancestral hall and the ancestral graves; of the village, centred on the earthgod shrines, village school, and the village fields and water supply; and of the market town and the nexus of villages it served, centred on the kaifong, the temple and its management committee, and the ta chiu.1 All that is needed here is the emphatic confirmation that all the parts of this traditional system, so well-known from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century New Territories, were present on Hong Kong Island in and before 1841.
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Ancestral halls certainly existed in all the major and some of the minor villages although few now survive. Tai Tam Tuk and Law Uk (Chai Wan) both had one, and there were others at Little Hong Kong and Wong Nei Chung, and the Tai Tam villagers had two, although it is likely that both were built after 1841. Earthgod shrines equally certainly existed - the very name of To Tei Wan village ("Earthgod Bay") suggests this, and we have seen that the Hung Shing Temple in Wanchai probably originated in an earthgod shrine. Several of the quarry hamlets in the Quarry Bay to Shaukeiwan area had shrines, and others survive built into the
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