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ship of the struggle over the market; for up to that point they were perhaps strong enough to be independent, becoming a yeuk (and so assimilating themselves to an older pattern) in response to the needs of the new situation. (I may add that the Man of Tai Hang, the Liu of Sheung Shui, and the Tang of Lung Yeuk Tau were three particularly prominent clans in the area, and that their interrelations probably fluctuated as their respective fortunes waxed and waned. When the Man and their allies ruined the old market a Liu of Sheung Shui wrote a poem congratulating the Man leader; the poet was clearly pleased to see Tang 'arrogance' humbled). The villages in the Luk Yeuk of Sai Kung were subject to Tang landlords or taxlords (which they were it would not be possible to decide without a long debate on the relation between rent and the taxes exacted, officially or otherwise, by strong clans), and they may have used their contacts with the Kowloon organisation to protect themselves. In a part of the Empire where the state could certainly not be relied upon to redress wrongs and protect property and lives, the weaker communities were forced to seek among themselves (and sometimes, as the case of the Ts'at Yeuk illustrates, with the aid of a stronger one) protection against oppression by local powers. In many parts of what were to become the New Territories the Tang were regarded as being unduly dominant, their riches, scholarship, and connexions with officialdom being the bases of their strength; and smaller communities banded together against them. But on their home ground in the Yuen Long area Tang dominance was so complete that yeuk could not emerge. That, at least, is one possible conclusion.
27. It is time now to examine the word yeuk more closely. It can be taken to mean a pact or agreement, and several of my informants interpreted yeuk and yeuk-complexes as contracts or joint enterprises freely entered into. (It is like a business partnership, one man told me, in which people take shares). But in fact it is possible to argue that what we have been examining at the end of the Ch'ing dynasty may not have been some spontaneous and popular form of grouping so much as a development of an official and imposed system of control. Yeuk is an abbreviation of heung yeuk (‘hsiang-yüeh'), a term with a long history in Chinese local government and administration. It appears first in the Northern Sung period when (late eleventh century) a Confucian scholar set out a scheme for a kind of village self-government in which country people were to
206
MAURICE FREEDMAN
ship of the struggle over the market; for up to that point they were perhaps strong enough to be independent, becoming a yeuk (and so assimilating themselves to an older pattern) in response to the needs of the new situation. (I may add that the Man of Tai Hang, the Liu of Sheung Shui, and the Tang of Lung Yeuk Tau were three particularly prominent clans in the area, and that their interrela- tions probably fluctuated as their respective fortunes waxed and waned. When the Man and their allies ruined the old market a Liu of Sheung Shui wrote a poem congratulating the Man leader; the poet was clearly pleased to see Tang 'arrogance' humbled). The villages in the Luk Yeuk of Sai Kung were subject to Tang land- lords or taxlords (which they were it would not be possible to decide without a long debate on the relation between rent and the taxes exacted, officially or otherwise, by strong clans), and they may have used their contacts with the Kowloon organisation to protect them- selves. In a part of the Empire where the state could certainly not be relied upon to redress wrongs and protect property and lives, the weaker communities were forced to seek among themselves (and sometimes, as the case of the Ts'at Yeuk illustrates, with the aid of a stronger one) protection against oppression by local powers. In many parts of what were to become the New Territories the Tang were regarded as being unduly dominant, their riches, scholar- ship, and connexions with officialdom being the bases of their strength; and smaller communities banded together against them. But on their home ground in the Yuen Long area Tang dominance was so complete that yeuk could not emerge. That, at least, is one possible conclusion.
27. It is time now to examine the word yeuk more closely. It can be taken to mean a pact or agreement, and several of my informants interpreted yeuk and yeuk-complexes as contracts or joint enter- prises freely entered into. (It is like a business partnership, one man told me, in which people take shares). But in fact it is possible to argue that what we have been examining at the end of the Ch'ing dynasty may not been some spontaneous and popular form of grouping so much as a development of an official and imposed system of control. Yeuk is an abbreviation of heung yeuk (‘hsiang- yüeh'), a term with a long history in Chinese local government and administration. It appears first in the Northern Sung period when (late eleventh century) a Confucian scholar set out a scheme for a kind of village self-government in which country people were to
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