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would send a horse to carry the document to heaven so as to ask blessings for the people whose names appeared in the list. Other women villagers to whom I talked had the same kind of understanding.
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The Memorial listed the participants under six categories, which were, in the original order, ritual representatives, “faithful elder”, "faithful scholar”, “jiu representatives”, "faithful farmers”, and "faithful outsiders”. The first three titles were used for the Dangs of Kam Tin and their families. Which one among the three was used was determined by whether the person was a ritual representative or over 60 years old. The **jiu representatives** were the Ying Lung Wai villagers. The fact and the position of the category among the others was probably more important than the literal meaning of the term. At the end were the "faithful farmers" and "faithful outsiders". The former included the indigenous non-Dangs of the heung as well as immigrant farmers. The latter referred to immigrants who operated businesses in Kam Tin.
The importance and meaning of these entries was made clearer to me by a "mistake".
At one point a leader of a lineage segment was copying an entry in the posted memorial for use in the distribution of ancestral ritual pork. I took the opportunity to ask him about a strange entry. The person named in the entry (and his family) was a Dang, but he was classified as “faithful farmer”. I also noticed that there had been an alteration, and the original classification, "faithful scholar", was also visible. The elder could not explain this. Later I saw him and another elder talking near the posted memorial, and went to see if they had the answer. The other elder knew the case very well. The person concerned had been taken to Naam Tau by his widowed mother when he was small. It was quite recently that he had returned and found his kinsmen. There were several houses in the village under his father's name. But in his absence someone else had assumed ownership. The elders of Kam Tin had been helping him at the District Office to recover his rights. The case was not settled yet. The elder had no doubt that it was the other party who altered **faithful scholar** to “faithful farmer”. He took this act very seriously, “What if someone did that to you!” He suggested that this was more than an insult. It was part of the other fellow's trick: to deny that his recently returned kinsman was a Kam Tin Dang. But he also thought this alteration to the name list was not useful, because the document would be burnt at the end of the festival.