tually the day will come when somebody else will have to do the project all over again, and take in everything from 1945 onwards. This is also true. Then, of course, we were working on a small budget. It was not possible to employ somebody to do the photo-copying and make rubbings and I did not know how to do them, my photography was not good enough, and so on.
Eventually, there was a compromise, because after we had got the whole collection done the Museum of History became interested in publishing the lot and holding an exhibition. They got some people to help them make rubbings, and I made suggestions as to which were the ones to be selected on grounds of calligraphy and art as well as history.
The main drawback of hand-copying is, of course, that errors creep in rather easily. We had to proof-read the whole lot, but even then we still had a lot of errors. Once you have rubbings, the errors are obvious. So the more rubbings you make, the more work you make for yourselves. At the moment I've got the nasty task of going through all our inscriptions again, piece by piece, to make sure that I can correct as many errors as possible.
As you can see, the project took me into the villages. Walking around the villages is a very instructive experience. Here, I suppose I should say something about the state of sinological research at the time (the 1970's). What we are learning from the New Territories has a lot to do with the sinological background as well as my own narrower interests. You see, if you talk with villagers and you ask to be directed to temples and ancestral halls, and you ask about the history of these buildings (or what they thought was the history of these buildings), and you go into village festivals, it doesn't take very long to realise that we social historians of China do not know very much about rural Chinese society. Historians working with historical documents incorporate an elitist bias into their writings, whilst field researchers (which in Sinology usually means the anthropologists) lack sufficient historical perspective. There are exceptions, but they are rather rare.
Moreover, in the post-war period, specialists in Chinese social
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