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THE HONG KONG HISTORY PROJECT
This note is based on a taped recording of the meeting of the Society, 22 May 1984, when this subject was discussed by James Hayes, David Faure, and Patrick Hase, with questions and comments from the speakers and the floor.
James Hayes
This evening, we are going to hear about the "Hong Kong History Project". This aims at rescuing something of the social, economic, and political history of the communities of this area before 1841, and indeed right up to the eve of the modernization of the New Territories in the 1970s.
The late Maurice Freedman, who was Professor of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics, and then at Oxford University before his death in 1975, said that until the 1950s, Hong Kong was almost totally neglected by all manner of social scientists. It was regarded as of no importance to scholarship, being viewed as "no more than the railway route into Guangdong". Thereafter, a few mainly overseas scholars, people who were mostly anthropologists engaged on researching doctoral dissertations, came now and then to Hong Kong. This continued, and is going on at the present time. Among the first of them was our member Barbara Ward — unfortunately for us, she died at the beginning of this year — who went to study the boat people of Kau Sai in 1952. She was followed by Hugh Baker and Bob Groves, who came in the early 1960s to work in Sheung Shui and Tai Po Market, and there were one or two others before that. They were the pioneers of the anthropological study of Hong Kong's past and present, and its social history, too. You will note that the researchers mainly came from outside. Neither Chinese nor European staff of the University of Hong Kong were interested in the subject, and it also took some time for people at the Chinese University established in the 1960s to become aware of local history.
I want now to say something about my own interest in the subject, how it began, and its relevance for the efforts made later