307
WAI CHEUNG ( Mk),
A KIND OF RURAL LEADER
IN THE 19TH CENTURY HONG KONG REGION
JAMES HAYES
Leadership in the villages and market towns of the Hong Kong Region has always fascinated me, and I have touched on the subject in The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911, Institutions and Leadership in Town and Countryside (Hampden, Archon Books 1977) and The Rural Communities of Hong Kong, Studies and Themes (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1983).
Besides the more common terms encountered in my enquiries as described in the two studies mentioned above, I have come across the less familiar one which forms the subject of this Note. Fortunately, there is both verbal and documentary evidence for its existence.
In speaking twenty and more years ago with old people born in local villages in the late 70's and early 80's of the last century, the term wai cheung (#1) was used in several places for another category of local leader.
In Sha Kok Mei village in Sai Kung, for instance, I was told by a leading elder born in 1885 that this was a post pertaining to each of the accepted clans in this large village, of which there were no less than eleven in the late 19th century (the implication is that there were other, newer clans which were not permitted to have a wai cheung). Clansmen were to serve by rotation in the post for one year. The post carried responsibility for the guardianship of the common property of the lineage, and also an obligation to join with the wai cheung of the other clans to hear and settle dispute cases, though the council so formed had no collective name or other description. This council had little to do in this line in his youth, as far as he can remember, as the times were quiet.
In the Tung Chung villages, according to an old lady born in one of the local settlements in 1879 and married into another of
307
WAI CHEUNG ( MK),
A KIND OF RURAL LEADER
IN THE 19TH CENTURY HONG KONG REGION
JAMES HAYES
Leadership in the villages and market towns of the Hong Kong Region has always fascinated me, and I have touched on the sub- ject in The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911, Institutions and Lead- ership in Town and Countryside (Hampden, Archon Books 1977) and The Rural Communities of Hong Kong, Studies and Themes (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1983).
Besides the more common terms encountered in my enquiries as described in the two studies mentioned above,' I have come across the less familiar one which forms the subject of this Note. Fortunately, there is both verbal and documentary evidence for its existence.
In speaking twenty and more years ago with old people born in local villages in the late 70's and early 80's of the last century, the term wai cheung (#1) was used in several places for another category of local leader.
In Sha Kok Mei village in Sai Kung, for instance, I was told by a leading elder born in 1885 that this was a post pertaining to each of the accepted clans in this large village, of which there were no less than eleven in the late 19th century (the implication is that there were other, newer clans which were not permitted to have a wai cheung). Clansmen were to serve by rotation in the post for one year. The post carried responsibility for the guardianship of the common property of the lineage, and also an obligation to join with the wai cheung of the other clans to hear and settle dispute cases, though the council so formed had no collective name or other description. This council had little to do in this line in his youth, as far as he can remember, as the times were quiet.
In the Tung Chung villages, according to an old lady born in one of the local settlements in 1879 and married into another of
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