Kwangtung, is treated as the First Ancestor of the Nga Tsin Wai clan. His eldest son was in turn born in 1102, but the Nga Tsin Wai descendants stem from the fifth son, who can hardly have been born much before 1120. Nine further generations are recorded in the Tsuk Po. The fifth of these was a sixth son. Assuming a 25-year generation gap for those ancestors born as the first, second, or third sons, and a forty-year generation gap for the sixth son, the eldest son in this ninth generation must have been born about 1370-1385. There were five brothers in this generation, who must have been born within the period 1370-1400.

Ng Kui-hau fled from Nam Hung in the disturbances of 1126-1127, when the Northern Sung collapsed in the face of barbarian invasion. He went to the safety of Canton City where he lived until his death in 1158. Six of his seven sons moved away from Canton, five to establish descent lines in various places in central Kwangtung, and one to settle in Annam. The fifth son, Ng Jui (42) from whom the Nga Tsin Wai Ngs descend, settled in Tung Kuan, at Ng Ka Chung (4, "Creek of the Ng Family”).

One of the sixth generation descendants of Ng Jui, (Ng Chung-tak, the eighth generation Clan Ancestor), born about 1290-1300, moved from Ng Ka Chung to “Kowloon”. The recent revised Tsuk Po states that he settled at a place called “Kwun Fu Sz Nga Tsin Tsuen”TM 1775, "The Unwalled Village in front of the Kwun Fu Yamen". Ng Chung-tak's third, but only surviving son, Ng Shing-tat, is considered the Founding Ancestor of the Nga Tsin Wai clan. He cannot have been born much before 1320-1335. The old Tsuk Po does not say that either Ng Shing-tak or his father settled in Nga Tsin Wai, merely in “Kowloon”; presumably implying that the family were then settled here and there in the open fields rather than in a village as such - presumably in that Nga Pin Heung where the Chans had already been settled for nearly two hundred years by the time the Ngs moved there. A date somewhere in the middle of the fourteenth century is the most likely for the Ng clan to have settled in the Nga Tsin Wai area, in Ng Chung-tak's old age (the Tsuk Po has a reference to Ng Shing-tak bringing his ancestor's bones to "Kowloon": this may refer to his mother's remains). The date remembered by the clan as the foundation date of the Tin Hau Temple, 1354, is almost exactly the period when the Ngs are most likely to have settled in the Nga Tsin Wai area, and the establishment of the temple, or whatever this date

Share This Page