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modern buildings, the banks, the cinemas, and the daily shopping, the country town still has many of the characteristics of the place it was in former times when the market was held only on certain days of the month and formed the only means by which people in different parts of the area kept in regular touch with one another. Marriages, business deals, and politics were and remain important elements in the body of transactions which the country town stands for. But not all the issues are to be prejudged; it may be that as the town grows in size and economic significance it develops an urban autonomy, and a kind of small-townsman emerges whose interests and values are no longer so tightly correlated with those of the villager. The town of Yuen Long, for example, may prove to have gone far in this direction already, and the advent of new business men into the market towns, some of them with bases in the city, may point the way to an increasing tendency for the small urban areas of the New Territories to set themselves up as independent social entities with their own mechanisms of internal order (chambers of commerce, kaifongs, and trade associations). It is for this reason that I hope that one of the two students from London who will be arriving in the New Territories in the autumn will be able to concentrate on a market town and its relations to the countryside. There is of course another kind of market town in the New Territories: the one which depends on fishermen and in which, as a result, there has traditionally been a social cleavage between the buyers and the sellers, such that the town has not been under the control of the people of the surrounding area. Such a town fell within the scope of Miss Ward's study. An outstandingly interesting example (especially attractive because its historical background has been explored in a paper, now in press, by Mr. Hayes*) is Cheung Chau; it should certainly be borne in mind for future investigation. It offers the promise of our being able to see the results of a long period of tight urban organisation, resembling very strikingly, I suspect, the kind of urban settlement built up by Chinese emigrants in many parts of South-East Asia.
93. I have been brought by questions of urban organisation to touch on fishermen. The Tanka were the first group of the New Territories population to be studied by an anthropologist, and there is little likelihood that fishermen, whether land-based or boat people,
* "Cheung Chau 1850-1898: Information from Commemorative Tablets" in JHKBRAS, 3, 1963: 88-99. — Ed.
SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963
253
modern buildings, the banks, the cinemas, and the daily shopping, the country town still has many of the characteristics of the place it was in former times when the market was held only on certain days of the month and formed the only means by which people in different parts of the area kept in regular touch with one another. Marriages, business deals, and politics were and remain important elements in the body of transactions which the country town stands for. But not all the issues are to be prejudged; it may be that as the town grows in size and economic significance it develops an urban autonomy, and a kind of small-townsman emerges whose interests and values are no longer so tightly correlated with those of the villager. The town of Yuen Long, for example, may prove to have gone far in this direction already, and the advent of new business men into the market towns, some of them with bases in the city, may point the way to an increasing tendency for the small urban areas of the New Territories to set themselves up as indepen- dent social entities with their own mechanisms of internal order (chambers of commerce, kaifongs, and trade associations). It is for this reason that I hope that one of the two students from London who will be arriving in the New Territories in the autumn will be able to concentrate on a market town and its relations to the coun- tryside. There is of course another kind of market town in the New Territories: the one which depends on fishermen and in which, as a result, there has traditionally been a social cleavage between the buyers and the sellers, such that the town has not been under the control of the people of the surrounding area. Such a town fell within the scope of Miss Ward's study. An outstandingly interest- ing example (especially attractive because its historical background has been explored in a paper, now in press, by Mr. Hayes*) is Cheung Chau; it should certainly be borne in mind for future investigation, It offers the promise of our being able to see the results of a long period of tight urban organisation, resembling very strikingly, I suspect, the kind of urban settlement built up by Chinese emigrants in many parts of South-East Asia.
93. I have been brought by questions of urban organisation to touch on fishermen. The Tanka were the first group of the New Territories population to be studied by an anthropologist, and there is little likelihood that fishermen, whether land-based or boat people,
* "Cheung Chau 1850-1898: Information from Commemorative Tablets" in JHKBRAS, 3, 1963: 88-99. — Ed.
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