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In the course of interviewing systemically within the district and going to all the festivals, and also doing what we call 'spot interviews', we began to discover that villagers had in their possession a lot of books. Our first big find in this area was a box in the house of a Taoist priest who kindly and generously allowed us to photocopy all the books in it. These were handwritten, and some of them were not even used in his time. We also found quite a few in Shatin, and then all sorts of other things turned up. At the moment, what we call the "Historical Literature of the New Territories" runs into 30,000 photocopied sheets, and more material is coming in all the time. Photocopies of these papers have been made for various libraries, here and abroad, in view of their historical importance. I should also mention a project on collecting folk songs in the New Territories, which is being sponsored by the Hong Kong Museum of History.
In hindsight, the organisation we had was rather too simple. Working in the way we did, we in fact needed a much greater amount of institutional support than we actually had. The problem is, you need a certain amount of continuity. You see, strangely enough, money is not the biggest issue. Continuity is needed to build up and sustain your contacts. People also need a place to work in, which we never really had. It has got to the stage where if somebody really wants to go on working along these lines, collecting interview materials and documents, he has to give up all his writing, which is quite impossible. On the other hand, the price you pay for writing without continuing to collect is that a lot of the material will be lost. Old people will simply not be around for so long, and the books will be thrown away before they are collected. Unfortunately, so far no institution has come forward to support a project of this sort. The people who are involved are working in their personal capacities and doing whatever they can. But because we have not got a better organisation, more will be lost than need be the case.
Patrick Hase
Well I'll also start by saying how I started in this field. Like other people now keenly interested in village life in Hong Kong, I was not initially interested in the subject. Then I became District