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recorded by Sung (1974:181-182), Wan-Guk "was a very rich man, and he owned a lot of cultivated land in [Xin'an County]". He died before 1513 (ibid: 182). We have more detail about some of his great-great-grandsons, among them Dang Yun-Fan who made a donation of 1,000 sek of rice to the county government for relief during a bad famine. The details of Dang Yun-fan's descent from Wan-Guk are obscure. Because of this act of generosity Kam Tin was given its present name in 1587, instead of the Sham Tin used earlier (Sung 1973:111-112). The story must be quite close to the truth. Siu (1982:23:24) has checked the Xin'an gazetteer to verify it. He found an entry for a serious drought in 1583, and the County Magistrate named in the anecdote assumed his position in 1586. I have found other supportive data in a local manuscript that records some of the inside inscriptions of the spirit tablets in one of the ancestral halls of Kam Tin. Two ancestors of this period had "pen-names" (hou) that probably alluded to the new name of the settlement.
An elder I interviewed attributed the change of the place name to Kam Tin to his ancestor Pou-Am, another great-great-grandson of Wan-Guk's, and provided the following information. Pou-am's holdings reached Chuk Yuen near San Tin. He had house(s) where the rent collectors could stay when collecting the payment and being entertained by the tenants. Pou-Am's grandson Lok-Sin had comparable holdings.
It was probably in the second half of the 16th century that an ancestral hall was built in honour of Ching-Lok, Wan-Guk's father. It was in all likelihood the earliest ancestral hall ever built in Kam Tin. We know the approximate date of the ancestral hall because a handbook for its rituals prescribed that extra portions of ritual pork were to be given to the descendants of certain individuals, some for their part in the initial building of the hall and some for their contribution towards subsequent repairs and rebuilding. These involved six people. Among them the two rewarded for the original building and another two rewarded for the first rebuilding were all Wan-Guk's great-grandsons. It was only in a subsequent repair in 1788 that one of the descendants of the other sons of Ching-Lok became involved. The spirit tablets in the hall confirm the dominance of Wan-Guk's segment. The two Dangs honoured for the initial effort, as already mentioned, were Wan-Guk's great-grandsons. The time when the ancestral hall was first built was probably not later than the time of Yun-Fan, the great-great-grandson of Wan-Guk's who made the donation to the county in 1587. It was also in the second half of the 16th Century that Kei-Fong (not a descendant of Ching-Lok)