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from singing Mountain Songs, at least within the vicinity of the village. I lived in the village for about 10 years before 1974. A neighbour in the village in her 30s in the 1960s did sing them for fun at home from a book compiled by a modern author and brought from a bookstore. According to an older woman in the same village, born around 1910, those songs were exchanged mainly among female villagers while working outside the village. They did not sing them within the village, because otherwise a village leader would scold them. My recent interviews in the village show that this leader is a member of the lineage segment that produced some degree holders not so many generations before, and his other contribution to the lineage was the compilation of a genealogy that incorporates information from genealogies from other counties that trace to the same ancestors. Unfortunately, unlike ordination names which are recorded in genealogies, spirit tablets, and grave stone inscriptions, Mountain Songs do not leave much dateable information, and it is improbable that much evidence can be found bearing on the status of Mountain Songs among the Hakka before the 17th Century.
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NOTES
One may speculate that such widespread ordination may be related to their claim of exemption from corvee levy. But for ordinations to be used to back a claim for such exemption, they probably have to be either Daoist or Buddhist, and I do not think the ordination names of the Yau or of the Hakka could be accepted as Daoist by the imperial Chinese governments.
Luo Xianglin, Kejia Yanjiu Daolun, vol. 1, Hong Kong: Zhongguo Xueshe, 1965.
For example, the first ancestor of the House of Kam Tin and nearby villages of the New Territories to come to the region is a Hon Wu Lang. The ancestor of the Pengs of Fanling, N.T., who came with his father to the region is a Peng Fa Guang. Both names match the style of ordination names found among the Hakka, and some of their descendants' villages are the only ones in the N.T. which hold the rite of Hongtou, which relates closely to the Hakka sang tradition. See David Faure, The Structure of Chinese Rural Society, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1986, for the two lineages and the rite of Hongtou, and a Chicken Song ritual.
Although some examples of the non-numeric character could be interpreted as forming a numeric expression with the character that followed, e.g., "nian" could mean twenty, they were probably not intended as such. As I shall elaborate later, some of those characters seen thus used in the Hakka genealogies are also found among the She minorities of Fujian to indicate generation.