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some of these things again, because we run into an awful lot of problems because of that sort of attitude.
How did I get involved in all this? Now and then I think that James framed the "trap" and I fell right into it. I was not interested in local history for a long time - I was never interested all the way through college and graduate school. When I got my job in the Chinese University, I lived in Tai Po Market. I remember there was this year when they had the shed for their village opera but I never went once. Although I passed by many times, it never occurred to me to go and see what was happening.
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I had set my mind on writing about the rural economy of a couple of provinces in China from about 1870 onwards, and thought, "Well, being here one should look at what happened in the New Territories, and see what you get in the field”. James showed me some of the inscriptions that he had collected, and there were a couple that were about tenancy disputes in the Ch'ing dynasty in the 18th Century. At the time this is only about five years ago these documents were rather rare, although in the last couple of years China has published a lot more of them. To have the actual dispute recorded in full, to have the text of the decision from the Magistrate, and to have all the details there, and to be able to find out from local enquiries who the people were who were involved in all these sort of things, was just too tempting. It was a trap that I suppose any historian would fall into! I was hoping that there would be more of these things in the New Territories, and knew that the only way to get to them was to go around the whole of the New Territories and look at every temple. So something had to be organised. My interest was totally selfish, I just wanted more inscriptions and land deeds and the like!
Anyway, that's how it began. I got a couple of colleagues together and other people who were interested. We were lucky at the time, because Professor Ch'en Ching-ho was running the Institute of Chinese Studies in the Chinese University and was interested in local history. He had done similar work in Singapore. He gave us funds and we managed to employ some students, and that got the project started.