267 notebooks were filled with notes of everything that was done. All this material landed on my desk, to get all put together into a description of what is almost certainly the last really major funeral to take place in Shatin,
Having done that, and got myself very interested in Chinese traditional funeral rites, another pure chance came my way. It was when, again with David, we went to visit a small village in the remoter parts of Northern Sai Kung and discovered not the few books that we have been getting in Shatin but what still, at the moment, seems to be a unique find in the New Territories complete untouched village library.
We had heard, throughout the Shatin villages and elsewhere, of libraries of two or three hundred volumes that had existed up to or just after the War, libraries that had been got together by the teachers of the people who were talking to us. These were persons in their 70's, describing their teachers and the books they had had when they had been at school, say in 1910 or 1920; and again and again we were hearing of these libraries of 200-300 books, about half of them handwritten. We were shown books from various villages, one from this house, two books from this house, and again and again we were told "This is all that is left of 50, 100 or 200 or 300 books, because when the old man died they were all burnt for fung shui reasons, but we kept this one because it was useful".
Although we had got from Shatin nearly 70 books, in every case they were just remnants. For instance, in one case we found a text on village medicine that had been used to prop up a table. The table had been rocking, and the book that had been shoved under the leg had been left there at least 20 years. The rest of the library had been burned, but we were able to pull this book from under the table, and by this stage having reached the end of its useful life they were about to throw the table away, and so we got that book!
However, we found in this North Sai Kung house, shut up and unused for the last 40 years, a complete library of 493 books which we have just managed to get the villagers to donate to the New Territories Services Department. To date, I have spent a lot of