154
limited surplus funds.
The Local Principal Deity Cult and the Making of Communal Culture
Large-scale local festival activities can best demonstrate a community's communal culture. Unlike single-clan communities, where ancestral halls serve as the venues for collective functions, Tung Chung's ceremonies of ancestor worship generally occur within individual families. Most villages are multi-surnamed and do not have ancestral halls. Only a few single-lineage villages, such as Mok Ka 家 Wong Ka Wai 黄家圍 Lam Che 藍峰 Nim Yuen 稔園, and Ba Mei te, and some larger lineages such as the Hsiehs, the Hos, and the Chous at the multi-surname village San Tau, have, or used to have, ancestral halls for worship ceremonies in spring and autumn. For villages with ancestral halls, ancestor worship may be conducted on both a family basis and a lineage basis. At the houses of most villagers, spirit tablets of their ancestors are enshrined on the family altars in the main halls. Joss sticks are burnt daily in front of the tablets. During festival days, animal sacrifices, food, wine, and other offerings are prepared. Kowtow and the burning of incense and ritual paper form part of the simple ceremony.
For a minority of single-surname villages with ancestral halls, collective ancestral worship on a lineage basis is held at the halls during the Ch'ing-ming Festival and the Double Ninth Festival. Among ancestral halls built before World War II at villages such as Mok Ka, Wong Ka Wai, Ba Mei, and San Tau, the Mo-yu-sheng tang at Mok Ka, and the Yung-ho t'ang at Wong Ka Wei are best maintained. Some of these halls also served as village schools to which boys were sent for three to four years, before a modern school was established near the Tung Chung Fort in the 1940s. At these halls, pupils were taught with the traditional primers, i.e., the San-tzu-ching (Trimetrical Classic), Ch'ien-tzu-wen (Thousand Character Classic), the Confucian classics, and the collection of Chinese idioms. After some halls had deteriorated, village offices would sometimes be used to accommodate the schools. As a case in point, the public office of the upper Ling Pei village was turned into a classroom after Ho's Study, the ancestral hall of the Hos and a village school at upper Ling Pei, had fallen into ruin.