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few places in the world where genuine social enquiry is nearly completely free and, second, that, exactly as Dr. Wang Sung-hsing has just told us, the traditional ways of South Chinese rural life have been retained longer here than elsewhere. A simple example about marriage customs will show you what this can mean: In 1950, when I arrived here first, all rural weddings included the bride being carried to her husband's home in a red sedan chair (fa k’iu ##). I well remember the astonishment of a Mainland Chinese anthropologist friend when he saw this "relic" of what to him was an ancient, extinct custom of the remote past that he had never seen in his life before, and he had travelled almost all over China.
An interesting paper could be written about the paradox that the preservation of the traditional has been a direct result of colonialism. It happened in rather similar ways almost everywhere in the rural parts of the British colonial empire (and most parts were rural) but there is no time to discuss it this evening. Suffice it to say here that, contrary to popular opinion today, it was not usually the intention of the British colonial administrators (District Officers and the like) to impose alien ways and force change but to leave well alone (as long as in their eyes it was well) and interfere as little as possible. (The well-known book Myself a Mandarin by Austin Coates, once a District Officer in the New Territories, is a fairly representative account of common grass-roots administrative attitudes.) The result was that at least up to the time of the Second World War British colonialism almost everywhere tended to act in one sense rather like a refrigerator, "freezing" the local social and cultural systems at more or less the stage they had been when the British first arrived, and to a surprisingly large extent inhibiting changes that might otherwise have happened.
That something like this was certainly the case in the New Territories is obvious. Here, though rice is no longer grown, largely traditional villages can still be found, lineage and clan organisation still exists, formal ancestor worship in ancestral halls (ch'i t'ong: **) is still observed, and people still have a strong sense of local as well as cultural identification which is expressed in temple festivals, with Cantonese opera performances and fa p’aau (JE#) and kam chue (✯*), as well as in the continuance of old local rivalries in new political and administrative forms. Here, too, we can still talk with old people who remember the still recent more
SOCIAL & CULTURAL HERITAGE IN N.T.
121
few places in the world where genuine social enquiry is nearly completely free and, second, that, exactly as Dr. Wang Sung-hsing has just told us, the traditional ways of South Chinese rural life have been retained longer here than elsewhere. A simple example about marriage customs will show you what this can mean: In 1950, when I arrived here first, all rural weddings included the bride being carried to her husband's home in a red sedan chair (fa k’iu ##). I well remember the astonishment of a Mainland Chinese anthropologist friend when he saw this "relic" of what to him was an ancient, extint custom the remote past that he had never seen in his life before, and he had travelled almost all over China.
An interesting paper could be written about the paradox that the preservation of the traditional has been a direct result of colon- ialism. It happened in rather similar ways almost everywhere in the rural parts of the British colonial empire (and most parts were rural) but there is no time to discuss it this evening. Suffice it to say here that, contrary to popular opinion to-day, it was not usually the intention of the British colonial administrators (District Officers and the like) to impose alien ways and force change but to leave well alone (as long as in their eyes it was well) and interfere as little as possible. (The well-known book Myself a Mandarin by Austin Coates, once a District Officer in the New Territories, is a fairly representative account of common grass-roots administrative attitudes.) The result was that at least up to the time of the Second World War British colonialism almost everywhere tended to act in one sense rather like a refrigerator, "freezing" the local social and cultural systems at more or less the stage they had been when the British first arrived, and to a surprisingly large extent inhibiting changes that might otherwise have happened.
That something like this was certainly the case in the New Territories is obvious. Here, though rice is no longer grown, largely traditional villages can still be found, lineage and clan organisation still exists, formal ancestor worship in ancestral halls (ch'i t'ong: **) is still observed, and people still have a strong sense of local as well as cultural identification which is expressed in temple festivals, with Cantonese opera performances and fa p’aau (JE# ) and kam chue (✯*), as well as in the continuance of old local rivalries in new political and administrative forms. Here, too, we can still talk with old people who remember the still recent more
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