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dwellers' Earth Spirit who was honoured in the same way ashore). On land the previous evening's activities would be repeated, the baths taken, the doors finally closed for sleep. The liners would have mostly returned, and they too would settle down to sleep; so would the crews of the collecting boats which in the days before mechanisation used sometimes to call in the evenings ready to pick up fish from the purse-seiners returning again next morning.
So it went on, round and round: the daily rhythm of production, consumption, education, recreation and ritual, enlivened by the excitements of fishing and the interests of gambling, gossip and children, and, every now and again, too, by the recurring items in the patterns of the larger rhythms of living: monthly, seasonal, annual and personal.
Weekly and Monthly Rhythms
Kau Sai used the ordinary modern Chinese seven-day week for reckoning, and fishermen found it necessary to adjust their business to the British weekend which curtailed the activities of the officially controlled Fish Marketing Organisation on Sundays. Otherwise the week as such did not appear to have any particular significance for them. The street markets and shops they patronised had no closing days.
Monthly patterns were more important. The months were always reckoned according to the Chinese lunar calendar (‘the old calendar'); adjustment when necessary to the western one ('the new calendar') being made very simple by the local custom of printing calendar and diaries with both dates. The first and fifteenth days of each lunar month were marked by slightly more elaborate performances of the daily worship at the boats' prows and the houses' Earth Shrines, before the ancestral shrines and in the temple.
When I first went to Kau Sai it was usual for every boat to be careened at least once a month, and twice in the summer. Careening was most conveniently done where deep water over a sandy bottom dried out at low tide. One of the attractions of Kau
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dwellers' Earth Spirit who was honoured in the same way ashore). On land the previous evening's activities would be repeated, the baths taken, the doors finally closed for sleep. The liners would have mostly returned, and they too would settle down to sleep; so would the crews of the collecting boats which in the days before mechanisation used sometimes to call in the evenings ready to pick up fish from the purse-seiners returning again next morning.
So it went on, round and round: the daily rhythm of production, consumption, education, recreation and ritual, enlivened by the excitements of fishing and the interests of gambling, gossip and children, and, every now and again, too, by the recurring items in the patterns of the larger rhythms of living: monthly, seasonal, annual and personal.
Weekly and Monthly Rhythms
Kau Sai used the ordinary modern Chinese seven day week for reckoning, and fishermen found it necessary to adjust their business to the British weekend which curtailed the activities of the officially controlled Fish Marketing Organisation on Sun- days. Otherwise the week as such did not appear to have any particular significance for them. The street markets and shops they patronised had no closing days.
Monthly patterns were more important. The months were always reckoned according to the Chinese lunar calendar (‘the old calendar') adjustment when necessary to the western one ('the new calendar') being made very simple by the local custom of printing calendar and diaries with both dates. The first and fifteenth days of each lunar month were marked by slightly more elaborate performances of the daily worship at the boats' prows and the houses' Earth Shrines, before the ancestral shrines and in the temple.
When I first went to Kau Sai it was usual for every boat to be careened at least once a month, and twice in the summer. Careening was most conveniently done where deep water over a sandy bottom dried out at low tide. One of the attractions of Kau
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