ARTICLES
TRADITIONAL LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES: THE EVIDENCE OF THE 1911 AND 1921 CENSUSES
P.H. Hase
The Censuses and Traditional New Territories Society
The 1911 and 1921 Censuses were the first to take a scientific look at the New Territories. These censuses are particularly important, as they show the New Territories before the traditional way of life there began to disappear.
Modernisation is normally a factor of physical communication with more developed societies and intellectual contact with new ideas. In the New Territories, these factors only began to be significant after 1911, and over much of the area only became important after 1921.
Contact with new ideas had begun to be noticeable before 1899 in some parts of the New Territories. Italian priests had established missions at Tai Po and Sai Kung in the 1860s, and Protestant missionaries were active in the Sha Tau Kok area from 1849. By about 1910, information about the wider world was trickling down from these foreign missionaries, even to relatively remote villages. Villagers were emigrating from parts of the New Territories from the 1860s onwards, and this became a marked social phenomenon from the 1880s. By 1900-1910 there were many returned emigrants in villages in the New Territories: since the emigrants came especially from the poorer villages of the eastern New Territories and Islands, this helped circulate new ideas in the remoter parts of the area. Returned emigrants also brought their savings back with them: the New Territories experienced a significant increase in prosperity in the early years of this century in consequence, which in turn led to more overseas products reaching traditional New Territories villages.
In 1912, the district officer noted this high rate of emigration and the resultant prosperity. "More and more of the young men from the country have been tempted into Hong Kong or abroad in quest of higher wages, and many have returned with their savings to their native villages, with all this added wealth, many more substantial houses have been...
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