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Basically, it is hard labour. It is a matter of going around every village recorded on the map, and every temple, and asking if they had inscriptions. If they did, we would copy them down.
I must say something about working with students, as this comes up again and again and would apply also to our later research. As anyone who has organised field research will realize, you don't just round up a few people and send them into the field. You've got to make them understand the known problems, and you have got to be available to examine any problems that are unexpected, brief them and be briefed by them in return. We had our meetings once a week in summer and every month in term. Obviously, we do much more work in the summer holidays. You must also search around to see if other people have done similar work, and find out where errors have crept in, and you must make contacts. Very often, you go into the field yourself. Before we started doing anything, I remember going around with Bernard Luk along Ting Kok Road, walking into every village there and asking about inscriptions, so that we would know the situation before we sent our students out. After that, very often people would come back and say "I know from James and other folk that there should be some inscriptions here, but we couldn't find them". You have got to go down to the village, talk to the people and get guidance.
Well, we copied quite a bit. We copied all these tablets and inscriptions from iron objects such as you see in temples, the gongs, the bells and incense burners. Also the wooden presentation boards, and now and then mirrors. We hand-copied them. I did take some photographs, but not many and usually only for illustrative purposes.
As the project progressed, a suggestion was made that we should have taken a lot more photographs, and perhaps even rubbings. It was thought, especially, that at some future date people would be interested in these things for other than historical reasons. The calligraphy may be very nice and worth looking at, and so on, which is very true. We also set ourselves a lower time limit not going beyond 1945. We were only interested in inscriptions that were written before that time, and it was said that even-