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AFTERTHOUGHTS ON
SOUTH CHINA VILLAGE CULTURE
(Hong Kong: Oxford University Press (China), 2001)
JAMES HAYES
After completing a book, there are bound to be after-thoughts! Whether one likes it or not, the mind continues to work away in the sub-conscious, reviewing the end result. This has certainly been the case with my South China Village Culture.
The Oxford University Press Images of Asia series, to which it belongs, has been a considerable success, but perhaps because it is a tall order to compress big subjects into a small book format, does render its authors more prone to having such after-thoughts. I now consider there have been certain omissions, and would like to make at least some amends.
Some precedents for supplying further information after publishing come to mind. When reviewing Dr. Hugh Baker's three volumes in his Ancestral Images series (Hong Kong, SCMP Ltd., 1979-81), I had regretted the lack of full references for so many interesting quotations from older books, whereupon Dr. Baker had supplied a complete set, prefaced by an interesting bibliographic note. These were printed in a subsequent issue of the Journal (Vol. 23, 1983, pp.221-232), to our enduring benefit.
My first omission was to completely overlook, in the 'Heritage and Preservation' chapter, the former Hong Kong Government's policy for the reinstatement of old village communities in the New Territories. Although a large number of villages were demolished to allow New Town development, the indigenous communities themselves were preserved intact through reprovisioning on new sites at public expense. This applied - and as far as I know the policy is still being followed by the SAR Government - not only to houses, but also to ancestral halls, shrines, and temples. Over a hundred old villages have been reprovisioned in this way in the last forty and more years.
However, a greater omission was the absence of any reference to