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between three-compartment ancestral halls restricted to officials and ancestral worship within the domestic unit or bed chamber appropriate for commoners. Faure points out that the three-compartment ancestral hall is related to claims of official title. Faure sees some small ancestral halls found in the New Territories of Hong Kong as the “bed chamber” variety. Examples of villages in which ancestral halls of this style are found include Ping Long, Kau To, Man Uk Pin and Wo Hang, the last three of these four are Hakka villages. Faure thus writes of the New Territories in the 19th Century: "with rising prosperity and acquisition of official degrees, some of their ancestral halls became more ornate even though none quite reproduce the official style." Although the bed-chamber type ancestral hall is found in both Hakka and Cantonese villages, a Hakka ancestral hall holds a single spirit tablet, dedicated to unnamed shi, gao, zheng ancestors. This is probably related to the practice of moving incense ashes from the domestic unit to the incense burner of the ancestral hall mentioned above. This contrasts with the “major surname” clan ancestral halls in the Hakka county town of Xingning described in ZHJLS, in which those who had made donations had a spirit tablet of their ancestor installed.
That ancestors are represented in individual ancestral tablets is a prerequisite of some ancestral hall ceremonies found in Cantonese lineages in Hong Kong, such as one found in the Qingle ancestral hall of Kam Tin, in which the group of ancestors to whom the ancestral hall is dedicated is escorted in the form of ancestral tablets for special treatment.
Despite the possible difference in the form of ancestral halls, the Hakka probably followed the trend of development of lineages since the 16th century. Ancestral hall rites, Faure has pointed out, was an example of the incorporation of a literate tradition into a proto-literate culture, the literate tradition spread with the literati ideal, coming... in the Ming and the Qing dynasties as local government strengthened, as neo-Confucianism was taken for granted as an acceptable social code, and as examination awards were granted in large numbers for