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Well, over to you again, David.
David Faure
When I was in England last year I had a look to see what local history societies do, and what sort of material people have in local histories, and I was very impressed. Wherever you go, you find some sort of society with people who are interested in something. Then you have publications that are primarily documentation. You have to walk into a church or the pub, pay your 10p, and you get your little sheet where somebody has written up the history of a village and that sort of thing. You have a whole range of them, you've got scholars interested in broader problems in the field, or trying to fit the local scene into a larger context. You also have the tourist side of things, where people just want to know what that churchyard is all about.
I think we fall far short of that in Hong Kong. I suppose the nearest to a local history society we have in Hong Kong is the Royal Asiatic Society, and our Journals are the only ones I know of that discuss local history as local history. You have a few other places you can publish in. The academic journals abroad are interested in Hong Kong material if you can fit what is said here into a wider theoretical context, so called. Then you also have the publishers that are interested in having a few books on Hong Kong. But we have not got a lot of local materials assembled where people can have a look at them. The conference on Hong Kong History that we had a couple of years ago at the Chinese University was a venue for people interested in the subject, and I suppose we should have more of those. Some sort of publication of source materials would also be useful, and I can't think of a better way of doing it other than by photocopying them and leaving copies in the major libraries.
It is a new development that the District Boards are now interested in their own history. Quite a few seem to be. They are all compiling these handbooks, describing what happened with the district, and want to include a section on the history of the district. That would be a useful development for our sort of interest.