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COLONIAL RULE IN HONG KONG
"magistrate" Ou-yang Hsiu of yore (Kuci-t'ion Lu, "Recollections in Tranquillity", 1068) and thereby testifying to the view that Hong Kong is the last remaining place where Chinese people are governed on principi es traditional to their civilization.
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The survival, and massive development, of this mere "remnant of Empire" - of two empires - rests, in words Dr Miners quotes from another of the "mandarins", "on a tripod of consents of the local people, of China, and of Britain". Professor Osgood (Yale emeritus, of Anthropology) provides an instructive close-up of one community of those local people. He modestly apologizes for an old-fashioned presentation of his research, not rearranged in today's theoretical categories; were his descriptive ethnography truly such a defect, it would be offset by his sympathetic portrayal of the daily round of the characters he introduces us to - not to say by the many cross-references, full Chinese glossary, and complete topical index he has added. But, on the contrary, testimonials to the scientific value of the work are implied in the fact that the National Science Foundation financed his visits to Hong Kong and that the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological research subsidized publication. The subject of study is Ap Lei (Duck's Tongue) Island, opposite Aberdeen; the period of inquiry lasted from 1960 to 1966. Volume I describes various minute settlements which have grown up round the shoreline of the island since the flight from China in 1949; we meet them house- hold by household their pigs and chickens and the very clothes that hang in their wardrobes. Volume II describes this time topically by the families' trades - the residents of the island's main settlement: how they make and sell things, their public and private entertainments, school- ing of their children, their recourse to doctors and hospitals, and even their sundry peccadilloes (or worse), from building contraventions to eating dogs or "chasing the dragon" (smoking heroin). Volume III summarizes the other two and makes good earlier oversights. Nine thousand souls nearly all Cartonese though other Chinese have no difficulty fitting in these people are admittedly a non-random sample of barely 0.225 per cent of all Hong Kong; their homes and the equipment of their trades, as photographed ar neticulously drawn in these volumes, bear less resemblance to the Colcay's industrial conurbations like Wong Tai Sin or Kwun Tong than to fe little towns of the Pearl River delta as they were before 1949. We get to know the craft-terms, techniques, and finances of junk-building and operating, how to make noodles by the ton or tinfoil and "hell-money" by the sheet, the different modes of bowing or kneeling at a grave, the ceremonial and regalement for solemnizing a wedding, and a hundred unexpected ways of carning a living or just passing the time. Here is a picture of everyday life made up in equal proportions of modern skills and traditional social conduct - a combina- tion which sounds near to the ideal of the nineteenth-century Confucians, before revolutionary extremism took over in the Chinese Empire. For the purpose of this review, however, one looks through Professor Osgood's study to detect the impact on people's lives of the colonial government. Truth to tell, there is not much oft: licensing of workplaces and dwellings, but rarely a policeman in sight; as for public services, the government
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