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and oral history collected in the field. Though oral history traces Jiao festivals to as early as the beginning of the Qing dynasty, written records relating to the Jiao festivals in Hong Kong before the Japanese occupation (1941-1945) are rare. Written attacks on the Jiao by missionaries in the area, however, are quite common from the 1850s
the missionaries recognised fully the importance of the Jiao as the most important religious event in the villages they were interested in. These attacks rarely supply detail, but confirm the central place of the Jiao in the mid nineteenth century villages in the area. The Jiao in Tai Wai, Sha Tin, is mentioned as a once-in-ten-years event in a poem written by a Sha Tin village about 1897."
Besides ethnography and oral tradition, three types of local documents are invaluable sources to the study of Jiao festivals. The first are the Taoist texts used for rituals performed at Jiao festivals in the New Territories. These texts, mostly copied by hand, can be found in the 11-volume Fanling Wenxian [Historical Literature of Fan Ling] and the 4-volume Xinjie Zhongjiao Wenxian [Historical Literature of Religion in the New Territories] collections of written documents found in the New Territories." As most of the Jiao festivals of the leading communities in Hong Kong are performed by the same Zhengyi Taoist group and the villagers rarely interfere in the work of the Taoist priests, there is a high level of uniformity in the rituals.” The following are all standard rituals: (1) reporting to and inviting the deities of all directions and levels, (2) fetching water to cleanse the festival area, (3) the daily offering and repentance, (4) the opening of the name-list, (5) welcoming the highest saints, (6) the small and great offerings, (7) letting free birds and fishes and (8) receiving amnesty from the Heavenly Emperor etc. The rituals are performed differently only when the Taoist group hired is different, or when the ritual has to be shortened due to a tight schedule. Different communities may request to have more or fewer rituals performed. However, the basic Jiao rituals are always the same. Given either a 3-day or 5-day Jiao one can predict, quite accurately, the approximate schedule and content of the daily rituals.
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A second type of document, again mostly hand-written, are records that detail preparations for the festival. These are kept by the villagers themselves. The earliest such which still survive are probably the records of the Gengzhi year (1960) Jiao celebration in Fanling compiled by a local Taoist priest Peng Bing. Minutes of the preparatory
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