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expert knowledge to do anything about it.
Long afterwards, about 1977, when I had taken things as far as I could, I became aware that David Faure and his colleagues Bernard Luk and Alice Ng at the Chinese University were becoming interested in such relics and beginning to relate them to their own professional teaching of Chinese history, and in particular the history of South China. I turned over the documents to them and suggested that what we ought to be doing was to send their students round to check on the texts and, hopefully, publish them.
Earlier - and I'll finish at this point - I had got help from another source. In 1974 the Hong Kong Tourist Association got impatient at the neglect of historical Chinese buildings in the New Territories. They provided $10,000 for a project, and I was an adviser to a survey which Patrick Lau of the University of Hong Kong did with his students in 1975. Based on its results, that splendid book Rural Architecture in Hong Kong was published by the Government Information Services in 1979.
I shall now turn you over to David Faure who can tell you something about setting up his project. It led in time to collecting a mass of historical material about the New Territories that might otherwise have been lost for ever.
David Faure
I came with some notes, I think I always speak better with them. Let me just say a few things before I go on with this. I think in all fairness, some credit should be given to people who worked on these things before the Second World War. Sung Hok-pang, who was working in the Government, must have been a rather rare specimen at that time. He collected a lot of legends from the New Territories and wrote many articles about Hong Kong subjects. However, it is generally true, and I see it all the time, that Chinese scholars trained in the orthodox tradition do not think very highly of village studies. You mention the villages to them — but everything there is too common. The Chinese texts that you find in village books are not literary enough. Errors creep in here and there, they write the characters poorly, and so on. I may touch on