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were indeed set out by the same Fung Shui master. This strongly suggests that the walls of Nga Tsin Wai were built about 1570-1574. This date fits very neatly with the dates calculated above for Chan Chiu-yin, the first ancestor of the Chans to live in Nga Tsin Wai. It is, therefore, likely that Chan Chiu-yin was not the first of his name to move to Nga Tsin Wai, but was the villager in whose lifetime the place changed its name from Nga Pin Heung to Nga Tsin Wai, and that he was the first of the clan to move inside the newly built walls from his earlier residence in the open
open fields
The reason given by the Tai Wai villagers for building their walls in 1574 was the ravaging
the area by bandits. Pirates or bandits are recorded in the Hsin An County Gazetteer as ravaging in the county in 1551 (when they killed the local Military Commander), 1566, 1567, and 1570 (when a local Military Sub-Commander was killed by them). Particularly active in the area during this period were the bandits under the command of Lam Fung (#, he was known as "Limahong" to the Portuguese, who also suffered from him). Lam Fung is credited in the Ming History with killing 20,000 people in the general Hong Kong area, which he dominated from 1568-1574: the County Gazetteer specifies attacks in the Tai Po area in 1570. Nga Tsin Wai, only a hundred yards or so inland from the best landing place in Kowloon Bay, was doubtless extremely exposed to the attacks of all these pirate bands. Pirates remained a problem here for many years. Cheung Po-tsai was active in the Victoria Harbour area in the mid-eighteenth century, and the Shau Kei Wan area was notorious for pirates right down to the middle nineteenth, when a vigorous local military commander drove them out for a while. In the unwalled village of Ngau Chi Wan even as late as the 1920s the village youths took turn to spend the night on watch from a bamboo shelter in front of the village - there was a gong there to waken the village if any bandits were spotted. Walls, therefore, were highly desirable, and a late sixteenth century date for them entirely reasonable.
The Ng clan Tsuk Po starts with an ancestor who achieved a Tsun Sze degree in the period 1056-1063, who enjoyed significant official success in the early twelfth century, and who died in 1113. This man was unlikely to have been born any earlier than about 1040, since his eldest son was born in 1078 (this son died in 1158). This eldest son, Ng Kui-hau, (5), the second generation of the clan to live in