166
For family members who have emigrated to the city or overseas, the annual festival offers the opportunity for reunion that they hesitate to miss. Visitors, tourists, researchers, and guests, including elders from other village alliances, and government representatives who come to observe the celebration and participate in the related activities, are also sources of information from outside. Tung Chung may be a secluded community, but it is certainly not totally insulated from the outside world. In fact, the government and the Rural Committee of the New Territories highly value the annual festival and send representatives to the district as congratulators, or even donors, during the festival season, which has also become a time for informal communication between the government and the local people.
50
What impresses the outside world here is Tung Chung's characteristic communal culture crystallized through the ages on the basis of the collective worship of the principal local deity. If the Houwang Temple plays a significant role in maintaining the village coalition system of the area, the territorial cult itself also operates as a system marked by its all-encompassing and pervasive influence on local life and its cyclical self-renewal. Through daily or seasonal rituals, individual or collective worship, ceremonies for invoking and repaying the god's blessings, and all the associated social activities in the year, community members are able to mark, in a concrete fashion, the rhythm of their religious life-cycle. With the annual god's feast day festival signifying the climax of the cycle, the system renews itself for another round of yearly operation. It is through this system of local deity worship that the Tung Chung community has become culturally self-sustaining and integrated.
To sum up, the religious, social, and entertaining rituals centering around the Houwang worship in Tung Chung have effectively maintained village cohesion, rejuvenated the system of cultural patterns, and served to show off the pride and glory of a local tradition. Via the annual celebration of the god's feast day, a set of customs which villagers consider their own is maintained and continues to represent a living community. Through the festival's ritual cycle, bonds between the deity and worshippers are renewed and ties between community members are reaffirmed. It is the community rituals that embody a universal body of knowledge, overarching territorial cohesion and communal solidarity. Compared to the chiao ceremony which was held