[ { "id": 204772, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1964", "page_number": 75, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "64 \n\nK. M. A. BARNETT \n\nNg \n\n103 Ngraahcrinn-chynn, \n\n104 Ngrhtrung-shaann, \n\nN. L. \n\n105 Ngrr-droi, £1 (+908—+959, with local variations). \n\n0 \n\n106 Obliterated villages:- Nai Tong Kok,101 Pak Hok Tuns and the original Tai Pak,35 some way from the present site. \n\nP \n\n107 Phuunniryh, #5. \n\n108 Preangzhaw, , an island five miles west of the western tip of Hong Kong Island. \n\n109 Preangzhaw, H, an island in the north-eastern part of Mirs Bay,41 \n\n110 Pre-Chinese languages: I should exempt from this stricture Professor Princeton S. Hsu,23 whose books, \"History of the People of South China”72 and \"A Study of the Thais, Chuangs and the Cantonese People\"133 are of great interest and should be read by anyone anxious to learn more in this field. But I think he goes too far in suggesting a Malay origin for the Tanka-or is it a Tanka origin for the Malays? \n\n111 Prengshaann, Ħ4. \n\n112 Pruunn-gwuur, 1. \n\nR \n\n113 River Capture. The break-through of the Kwun Yam Ho62 from the Lam Tsuen74 valley to Taipo:33 formerly it flowed through Fanling48 and Sheung Shui130 into Deep Bay;152 and that of the two streams which now flow into the sea at Sham Tseng,119 the headwaters of which used to flow through Tin Fu Tsai137 into Tai Lam.38 \n\n$ \n\nSei-braak, see 35, \n\n114 Shaahtraw-gok, YA★ · \n\n115 Shaahtrinn, 3⁄4w. \n\n+ \n\n116 Shaahtrinn-xoe, , still better known to the local people as Lik Yuen Hoi. \n\nShaamm-braak, E★ see 35, \n\n117 shaann-ghoh, Hakka saan-go, L. \n\n118 Shaannloo, \n\n#. \n\n119 Shamm-zearng, ##. \n\n+ \n\n120 Shamm-zeon, . The second word means an artificial channel with earth banks and suggests that the present river was cut to drain the swamps to the east and south-east of the present town. \n\n121 Shann Ngrrdroi-sir, ĦARK - \n\nPage 75\n\nPage 76", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204784, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1964", "page_number": 87, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "PENG CHAU\n\n75\n\nIt is not certain whether the fishermen who petitioned the Viceroy were local men, but, if so, their initiative on that occasion showed itself again some twenty years later when in 1857 an association called the Peng Wo Tong was formed among the trawlers based on Peng Chau. These are said to have numbered about 200 at that time. Though this may be an exaggeration, the Tong was undoubtedly a large organisation. Its name appears on the Tin Hau temple repair tablet of 1878 where its joint contribution of 140 taels of silver, out of a total of about 640 taels subscribed for the work, heads the list and its leaders were among the twelve principal organisers. Little is now remembered locally of its work and objects, or of its origin, but perhaps it was formed to retain more of the profits of fishing for the fishermen themselves, instead of letting them go to the Cantonese shopkeepers who might have become demanding and oppressive at the time. I do not know whether fishermen in other ports organised themselves into such groups, and it would be interesting to have further information on this point. This particular Tong concerned itself with more than business. As we have seen, it helped with temple repairs and it is known to have taken a hand in organising festival matters. One elder remembers attending an opera show organised by the Tong when he was about ten years old (1905) and he can even remember the name of the opera! It is certainly an organisation which would repay such detailed study as is still possible.\n\nThe number of fishing boats based on Peng Chau during this period was considerable, and an interesting variety of persons were engaged in fishing. At the end of the century there were said to have been still nearly 200 trawling junks there and a similar number, more or less equally divided, of two smaller types of sailing craft. Whilst this is perhaps an exaggeration it is certain that there were many more than can be seen there today. These were all operated by Tanka fishermen, the true boat people of South China, who lived and died on their craft.17 There were also a hundred Hoklo boats, long narrow craft with two or three standing rowers of a type still to be seen round Peng Chau and Cheung Chau. The Hoklos themselves spent their life between their boats and their mat-shed homes near the beaches. There were also lesser numbers of Hakka and Cantonese fishermen,18", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204785, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1964", "page_number": 88, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "76\n\nJ. W. HAYES\n\nOf these various groups of fishermen the trawlers were by far the most important. As has been said above, the Peng Wo Tong was organised from among them and does not appear to have included the fishermen from the smaller Tanka craft. This group seems to have based itself on Peng Chau for at least fifty years, and in all probability for a much longer period, between the formation of the Tong in 1857 and the destructive typhoon of 18th September 1906 which is said to have hit them very hard as many boats were at sea during the sudden storm and were lost. They were tied to the island by their links with the shopkeepers and wholesale fish dealers, or laans as they are known locally,20 The trawlers caught all kinds of fish and salted them in brine21 pending a return to harbour. There was a comparative lull in their fishing season between the Tin Hau festival in the third moon and the end of the seventh moon, when they returned to Peng Chau, gave their boats and tackle a thorough overhaul, allowed themselves the luxury of a holiday on land, and participated in religious activities which included the inevitable season of Chinese opera. The opera performances lasted for about five weeks, by tradition overlapping the end of the third moon and the beginning of the fifth. There is no doubt that these trawlers and their crews added considerably to the bustle and prosperity of the island.\n\nBesides the Tanka there were also Cantonese families who made their principal livelihood from fishing. I spoke to one old man of seventy-three (born 1891) whose whole life had been spent, as was his father's before him, \"on the surface of the sea” ✯❀ as he put it. This family were Puntis from Tung Kwun and my informant said he was the fifth generation on Peng Chau. There is no doubt that they were land people, but they earned their living from the sea using small boats called and operating several stake nets at various points round the island's coast. They fished mostly by day in the waters round Peng Chau, to which they returned at night-fall. There were over twenty of these boats when my informant was a boy.\n\nBeside the Cantonese fishermen, there were also some Hakkas with, at that period, as much interest in the sea as the land. The first ancestors of the CHUNG family came to Peng Chau at the beginning of the nineteenth century. An account of their", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204794, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1964", "page_number": 97, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "PENG CHAU\n\n85\n\nbetween the Tanka fishermen and the land dwellers. The traditional picture is one of the two communities rigidly separated, with the despised fishermen exploited by the land dwellers whenever they came on land at the sheltered anchorages and excluded from a share in the amenities of village life, including the important one of education. It is supposed that the villagers or townsfolk would not let them take essential items like grass and firewood for themselves but insisted on selling everything to them, even charging for the use of the beaches where they beached their boats on the average once a month, and carried out running repairs.39\n\nHow far is this assessment borne out in Peng Chau in the period under review? In the first place, it has been shown that it was not only the Tanka who owned boats and obtained a living from the sea. Apart from the Hoklo fishermen who maintained an uneasy existence between land and sea and are generally considered to be more sea dwellers than landsmen, a number of land people, Hakka and Cantonese alike, owned and operated boats and sampans. Other land people were accustomed to fish from the rocky coast by line or by means of a stake net. The latter represented fishing for profit and was not just a way of supplementing a livelihood gained by other means since the financial outlay for a stake net was considerable. The fishing community was therefore wider than the group of Tanka who chose to base themselves on the island. Though this is not really surprising when the sea was near at hand and could provide a living for all, it led to a blurring of the sharp lines of differentiation commonly imagined to exist between the traditional boat people and the land dwellers.40 This must have assisted participation in religious activities, including the repair of temples, in which task both sea and land people were equally concerned because they all in some measure lived by the sea, if not all of them actually on it.41 Shopkeepers living on an island had as much reason to pray for the gods' blessings on their cargoes and customers as the fishermen for good catches and the safety of their boats and families. In such a small community, too, business connections were probably on a very personal basis and the boat people customers no less well known by the shopmen than their land neighbours.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204795, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1964", "page_number": 98, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "86\n\nJ. W. HAYES\n\nHowever, the Cantonese, Hakka and even Hoklo fishermen lived on land and were still landsmen who could live in both worlds. The first two, if not always the third, could cut their own firewood, and grass for breaming, whereas I am led to believe that in the anchorages, which were nearly always in populated places, the Tanka fishermen had usually to buy these necessities from the villagers. The reason usually given for this is that the villagers had planted the trees which supplied the firewood and paid rent to the imperial government or, more often, to some powerful clan.42 A less striking, but equally practical reason, I was told on Peng Chau, was that fishermen did not wish to carry the grass or poles used in breaming their craft, in order to save valuable space. Breaming facilities were not always charged for, it seems, though on Peng Chau a breaming charge of 20 cents per boat was levied by the personnel of the military post before 1899 — the sort of \"squeeze\" by which soldiers supplemented their pay. The military post seems to have been a late innovation, prior to which no breaming charges are believed to have been levied by Peng Chau's land dwellers. On nearby Cheung Chau the WONG clan owned the main breaming beaches in the main anchorage and in a secondary one at Sai Wan, also much used by the boat people. They charged a fee for their use, part of the proceeds going to the upkeep and ceremonies connected with the clan's main ancestral grave on the island.43 Of course the boatmen could go to some deserted beach, but they were hard to find since villagers were well distributed in the coastal areas and islands by the nineteenth century and there were few areas capable of returning crops left undeveloped.44 In any case, there were no amenities, such as shops and temples, to tempt fishermen to such places; whilst, as Miss Ward remarks in her study of the Kau Sai fishing village in the Port Shelter area of Sai Kung, boat people are not the sea rovers drifting from place to place they are commonly imagined to be, but have been linked to a home base over a long period.45 This seems certainly to have been true of Peng Chau in the period under review.\n\nIn a mixed community of the small size of Peng Chau it is hardly surprising that no district associations similar to those of Cheung Chau and Tai O were established.46 The Cantonese residents were relatively few in number, whilst the Hakka clans had their own family ties and, at the grave festivals and the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204945, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1965", "page_number": 53, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "46\n\nTHE DIALECTS OF HONG KONG BOAT PEOPLE: KAU SAI1\n\nJOHN MCCOY\n\nI. Introduction.\n\nThis paper and the research preceding it were undertaken in an effort to solve a specific problem raised elsewhere concerning the origins of China's Boat PeopleLA. Many authors prefer the term Tanka and some distinguish these from Hoklo, Swatow, Cantonese and other boat-dwelling groups, but even if these basic linguistic distinctions are made we are not left with a Tanka which is a unique and homogeneous group. The Tanka, by their own admission and by such evidence as their speech, form subgroups which differ at least in minor features. The Hoklo and Swatow are easy to identify as separate linguistic entities, but probably they preserve variations within their own particular dialect groups. In order to eliminate what I consider to be misleading terminology, and to bring the terms closer to probabilities suggested by my present research, I will follow Miss Barbara Ward and use the term Boat People to refer to all those who permanently reside on boats and use these boats in water-based occupations. This term is occupational or cultural and includes groups which can be subdivided linguistically into Hoklo, Swatow, Cantonese, and possibly others. I will not make regular use of the term Tanka, partly because it is offensive to those to whom it is regularly applied, and partly because my data indicate that the group known as Tanka are at best merely a subgroup of the Cantonese-speaking Boat People.\n\nAdmittedly, final word on this terminology will require a number of studies of the type discussed here, and this is precisely the long-range research which I propose. If more of the Hong Kong Boat People are given the careful study which Miss Ward gave those in Kau Sai, it will be a much easier matter to solve some of the questions about their origins. With the hope that this research will be done in the future, I suggest a project designed to approach as many of the local Boat People as possible", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204948, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1965", "page_number": 56, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "THE DIALECTS OF HONG KONG BOAT PEOPLE\n\n49\n\nof any living resident and they have no consensus on their own provenance. In chatting with my informants on this subject I found some agreement that Tung Kun District was their source plus much speculation and guesses ranging from 'some place up north' to 'maybe Fukien Province'. The northern origins are of course common to all Han Chinese and reflect no special knowledge on the part of the informant. The possibility of Fukien Province seems completely unsupported by the linguistic evidence, but in view of the fact that many Boat People are Swatow, Hoklo, or other obviously Fukien types2, it is more than possible that Fukien individuals have been absorbed by the Kau Sai group from time to time. However, there is evidence to indicate that some area reasonably close to Tung Kun District may well be the origins of this community.\n\nConcerning the Boat People, certain assumptions have been made elsewhere which do not seem valid or which should at least be held in abeyance until making a number of the studies of the type I will describe here. First, the Boat People, or sometimes those referred to specifically as the Tanka, are often treated as a homogeneous group which represents the remnants of the earliest inhabitants of the South China regions, assumed to descend from the non-Han tribes and to have been assimilated and acculturated as the Han peoples moved into this area. It is difficult to refute this point except with cultural and linguistic data which support Ward's (1965) point that the boat people's descent is probably neither more nor less non-Han than that of most other Cantonese speaking inhabitants of Kwangtung.1 It would be reasonable to assume that some Yao or other southern barbarian blood may still flow in local veins but probably to about equal degree in the Boat People as in the average resident of Kwangtung Province. With nothing very concrete to go on we would be in the same position if we discussed the amount of Pict blood in today's inhabitants of the British Isles.\n\nWhen we do not have complete historical evidence for origins of a group it is possible to get information from other sources, such as archeology, anthropology, and linguistics. However, with all these fields our results will be more reliable if we are dealing with an overall picture of structured data rather than extracted", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205824, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1969", "page_number": 130, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "124\n\nSOME NOTES ON ETHNO-BOTANY IN THE NEW TERRITORIES OF HONGKONG\n\nARMANDO DA SILVA*\n\nThere is an old Cantonese proverb that goes \"Kau shan yak shan, kau shui yak shui, (*****). When translated it means \"When in the hills, live off the hills, when on water, live off the water\". In many of the smaller villages of the New Territories, and especially among the more isolated coastal ones, this maxim is still practised to some extent in everyday life. Most of the older villagers possess an intimate knowledge of various qualities of common plants. Many plants that thrive in the neighbourhood of settlements owe their survival because they have some useful or medicinal qualities to offer, which distinguish them from mere brushwood destined for the kitchen stove.\n\nA source of income for coastal settlements derives from economic activities related to the use of beaches by Tanka and Hoklo fishermen for careening their boats. These fishermen also use the beaches to dry and mend their nets. As these tasks must be done frequently to prevent rot and tear, many villagers often find it profitable to provide services for the fishermen. Large vats are installed so that salt can be boiled out of the nets. Other vats are used for dyeing and for applying net preservatives. Most nets are made from imported ramie or coconut coir fibers. However, a plant common to many coastal villages is often used to make fibers for fishing nets. This is the Agave, called by Tanka and Hoklo fishermen poh lo ma (\"pineapple hemp\"). It is also known by its other Chinese name of lung sit lan (⃧ \"dragon tongue orchid\") because of its high flowering stamen. The Agave thrives on drier sandy soils near beaches and does not seem to be affected by salt water spray. After the spines are removed from the plant, fiber is extracted by pounding and retting. The juice is often used as an insecticide and the saponin content as a form of soap for washing clothes.\n\n* Mr. da Silva has a Master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley and is presently with the Department of Geography, University of Hawaii. His article \"Fan Lau and its Fort: an Historical Perspective\" appeared at pp. 82-95 of last year's Journal. Mr. da Silva states that the present article refers, in particular, to some coastal settlements in Lantau and the Saikung Peninsula where he spent much time visiting and observing people and things from October 1962 to September 1963, and again in the summer of 1964.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205828, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1969", "page_number": 134, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "128\n\nARMANDO DA SILVA\n\naccessibility, seasonal demand, and tonic quality. The Chinese names are in colloquial Cantonese:\n\nArtemisia vulgaris (ng yuet ngai AX) is a traditionally sacred medicinal plant. Sprigs of artemisia are hung on doorways on the festival day of tuen yeung (), that day associated with glutinous rice dumplings and dragon-boat races; hence the colloquial name \"fifth moon artemisia\". A powder is made from this and is used in moxa (ngai yung *). For medicinal use the sprigs are ground and sprinkled into warm rice wine to make a fragrant tonic drink, which allegedly relieves upset stomach.\n\nAmaranthus spinosus (lak yuen tsoi ). The roots and leaves of this plant are boiled in water and the infusion used in the treatment of piles. A soup is made by boiling the leaves and the shoots and the decoction is drunk as a yuet hei reliever. It is also considered a diuretic drink. Although this plant is not cultivated, it is often sold as a vegetable in vegetable stalls.\n\nHylocereus undatus (pa wong fa re£) is a seashore plant of the cactus family. The silk tassels from the flowers are dried and used to make a cough medicine. The tassels may also be boiled as a vegetable and cooked with pieces of pork to make soup. See Plate 10.\n\nVitex trifolia (pak fei muk yee ¶). This is another beach plant whose leaves and vines are boiled to make a poultice for bruises. The leaves are ground and drunk with warm rice wine. This is a favourite medicinal plant among the Tanka boat-people.\n\nBreynia fruticosa (hak min shun i) is a hillside plant whose leaves are boiled in water to make an infusion for the cleansing of sores. To complete the treatment a poultice of its leaves is applied to the sores.\n\nMelastoma sanguineum (long kau lei #Ƒ) is a styptic simple. Its leaves are both ground and drunk with warm rice wine, and are also used as a styptic poultice.\n\nPolygonum chinenses (fo tan mo ★★). The leaves are fried with honey and eaten as a treatment for dysentery. The leaves can also be made into a poultice to relieve rheumatic pain and for treating foot sores and arm boils,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206061, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1970", "page_number": 141, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "136 \n\nS. F. BALFOUR \n\nThe Tanka or the Tan people are the Cantonese-speaking fishing population. The word Tan is a proper name and dictionaries define it as follows: \n\n\"Tan is the name of a people. They are held to be a branch of the Man tribe. They live in boats along the coast of Fukien and Kwangtung making fishing their livelihood. They are pearl divers. Since the T'ang dynasty (A.D. 618) they have been counted by able-bodied males for purposes of taxation. In the year 1618 they were classified according to families, headmen were appointed among them and anchorages in the rivers were set apart for them. A yearly tax of fishing produce was collected.” \n\nIn 1723 an imperial edit was passed allowing them all the privileges of ordinary Chinese citizens, except the right to compete in the public examinations which they never obtained. \n\nLet us now pass to the Hoklo. The word Hok is a dialect variation of Fukien and the Hoklo are the Fukienese fishing people of our region, but there is another term for them always used in literature, Man. We have already seen that the Tanka are considered a branch of the Man tribe. The word is very ancient and is used synonymously for \"barbarian\" or \"uncouth\". From the name alone you can judge that the Hoklo were once considered by the Chinese as barbarians. \n\nThe Punti are the Cantonese-speaking peasants. The word means \"native to the country\" and it is a weak adjective of the type used by one man to describe himself in relation to a different person. It therefore gives no clue to the origin of the people bearing it. They themselves claim to be of pure Chinese stock and to have colonised the province of Kwangtung from North China, and they refer to themselves as men of T'ang, meaning the T'ang dynasty. In many cases they can trace their ancestry back to Chinese settlers of northern stock, though there is no record of any arriving in the region earlier than the Sung dynasty (A.D. 960). \n\nThe word Hakka means the \"stranger people\", it is used to describe the peasants of a different dialect to Cantonese who have \n\nIn the topographies for instance Man is used for Hok-lo.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206062, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1970", "page_number": 142, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "HONG KONG BEFORE THE BRITISH\n\n137\n\nsettled in the hills and along the coasts of our region. They themselves acknowledge that they are the latest comers into the region, and that they have migrated from exclusively Hakka-speaking country between Kwangtung, Fukien and Kiangsi provinces. The Hakka of those parts declare that they migrated from North China and this tradition is confirmed in every way by scholars, often Hakka themselves, who have collated separate family histories. From these studies it is possible to know that the Hakka did not migrate south of Kiangsi before the 10th century A.D. and we can infer from this that their appearance in this region was several centuries later.\n\n7\n\nFrom the evidence of their names we can begin to distinguish two kinds of inhabitants--one pure Chinese and one of non-Chinese origin. But on the other hand there is much negative evidence that could be brought forward. In the first place in customs and religion the Tanka and Hoklo seem to follow Chinese tradition; they have the same reverence for ancestors, the same surnames, they marry and bury the dead with the same ceremonies. They have an identical calendar of feast days, and their dialects, Cantonese and Fukienese, have nothing either in place-names, or vocational expressions or any other vocabulary which might contain archaisms to suggest that they ever used another language.\n\nIn the second place there is absolutely no apparent evidence that the Tanka and Hoklo are of the same extraction. They do not look alike physically and they do not intermarry nor mix freely in spite of being in close contact with one another. Indeed, the Tanka are much more akin to the Cantonese in outward appearance, and but for a difference of pronunciation it would be almost impossible to distinguish between them.\n\nIn the third place, the Hakka and Punti differ in their religious customs on one important point. The Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated by the Punti, Tanka and Hoklo on the 5th day of the 5th moon every year. The Hakka do not keep this feast. The importance of the Dragon Boat Festival as a clue to origins of culture will be described in a later section of this article.\n\nHowever there is one broad distinction which can be made. In their differences in occupation and dwellings the population divides\n\n7 For instance, Lo Hsiang Ling (#); K'o Chia Yen Chiu (3 RMX).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207046, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1974", "page_number": 117, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "THE HONG KONG REGION\n\n111\n\nOctober 1860, and again by the lease of the New Territories by the Convention of Peking in June 18981.\n\nThe population of the region was probably around 100,000 in 1898, including boat people. These persons inhabited — in round figures — a thousand villages and a number of market centres. Seven hundred of these settlements were located within the present New Territories of Hong Kong, with many others around Sham Chun and in Hong Kong island and Kowloon. The Punti or Cantonese-speaking element accounted for rather more than half the land population, with Hakka speakers comprising most of the remainder. The boat population, mainly Tanka, lived afloat in the main.2\n\nDescriptions of the geography and climate of the present British Crown Colony are generally applicable to the Hong Kong region. They have long been given in the Hong Kong annual reports. The most recent is supplied in the opening sections of chapter 18 of the report for 1974.3\n\n1. The Hong Kong Region in the wider scene: some historical and geographical considerations\n\nIn Ch'ing times Hsin-an was one of the 14 hsien of the Kuang-chou prefecture. The designation fu or 'prefecture' was adopted only at the start of the Ming dynasty but the area of Canton and the Delta had long been administered under various designations that changed through the centuries and with dynastic change. The oldest of its hsien, Nan-hai, was established in the Sui dynasty in the year 590-591; the next, P'an-yu in 703-704 during the Tang; with the rest becoming separate districts at various times until the first year of Wan Li of the Ming (1573-1574) when, finally, Hsin-an was created from one of the former commanderies of Tung-kuan district (a hsien of 973-974) established in the 27th year of the first Ming ruler (1394-1395).\n\n1 The relevant documents are given in Alabaster, III, pp. 2-4 and 6-8. 2 See Baker 1968: 3-4. Also the Colony Census for 1911 in SP1911: 103(27-36) and (37-38), though it does not list all the villages of the Southern District of the New Territories or of New Kowloon.\n\n3 CR1974, pp. 176-178.\n\n4 See e.g. TCITC 41/1 and KCFC 6/10.\n\n5 KCFC 6/1-10 and YCKC 4/1-9.\n\n6 KTTC 2/93 and KTKKCY 1/1. The administrative areas to which the Hsin-an district belonged from the Ch'in dynasty (221-207 B.C.) onwards are shown in KCFC 6/24 and in HNHC 1/1. The date of the establishment of the commandery is given as Hung Wu 27 in HNHC 1/3, KTKKCY 1/1, TCITC 41/3 and KTTC 2/93, but as Hung Wu 14 in KCFC 6/24.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207672, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1976", "page_number": 60, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "THE TEOCHIU: ETHNICITY IN URBAN HONG KONG\n\n45\n\nHong Kong can now be considered rural or non-urban given current development and planning in the New Territories centering on three New Towns (Tsuen Wan, Tuen Mun and Sha Tin). This is not to say that there are no differences in scale or social organization between villages or small market towns in the New Territories and Mongkok, the area of highest population density in Hong Kong, but rather that these differences can no longer be usefully conceptualized as corresponding to urban and rural social systems. Some of these differences appear to be significant in influencing the nature of ethnicity, and in particular interethnic rivalry and competition.\n\nBlake's study of Sai Kung, a market town in the New Territories, indicates that the formation of ethnic categories is a process in which \"powerful men struggle for the land and status positions in the emerging organization of the market” [Blake, 1975:233]. Ethnic groups in Sai Kung are closely identified with particular ecological niches in the local area. For example, Tanka [Cantonese] fishermen do deep sea fishing while \"Hoklo\" Hoi Luk Fung fishermen are restricted to less lucrative shallow fishing. Blake found that inter-ethnic dynamics are largely centered upon these traditional niches and that immigrant Chinese have had to negotiate their ethnic identity with the traditionally dominant ethnic group in the local area, the Hakka.\n\nThe patterns of interethnic dynamics that Blake describes for Sai Kung are very different from those in the housing estates I studied. Apparently much of the dynamics of interethnic relationships in small market towns and villages in the New Territories are related to two factors: *\n\n(1) Competition over access and ownership of land and local markets between traditional lineage groups and the immigrant population, and between different ethnic groups.\n\n(2) Competition over control of formal political positions within the locality, such as village representative and membership of\n\n* These generalizations are based upon Blake's study and a paper read to the Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, by Michael Palmer in March 1977.\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209233, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 136, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "122\n\nTA ACTON\n\nconversation F.M.O. officials made it clear that from the beginning they had consciously been combating the pariah status of the Shui-sheung-yan, or \"Tanka\" as they had been called by ordinary Cantonese. The word “Tanka” is an opprobrious term, with rather ambiguous and shifting ethnic and occupational connotations, like \"nigger\", or \"tinker\".\n\nThe first schools for the children of fishermen were established by the F.M.O. in 1947 and 1948, two in villages on Hong Kong Island, and two in the New Territories. By 1968 there were thirteen primary schools, and one secondary school with a primary department, at Aberdeen on Hong Kong Island. In 1980 this primary department was given a separate school building on the island of Apleichau, which is joined to Aberdeen by a new road bridge. Education in these schools has always been free.\n\nDuring the early years of the scheme ordinary primary education in Hong Kong was neither free, nor sufficient. In 1956, however, the Education Department began to subsidise the F.M.O. schools, and since then there has been general progress towards free compulsory education in Hong Kong. In 1978, the first three years of secondary education were also made free. Where there are no F.M.O. schools, and inadequate Education Department provision also, the F.M.O. sometimes pays the fees of fishermen's children at privately run schools, like the Po Kwong school, which is actually located on a boat in Yaumatei typhoon shelter. The Po Kwong boat school is run by an evangelical Christian group called International Missions Inc. It was known as the “Jesus boat” to boat-people activists struggling for re-housing; although they were working with Roman Catholic social workers, they firmly declined to take me to it. F.M.O. scholarships are also available for higher studies.\n\nIt is not entirely true that no fishing community children were educated before the F.M.O. schools began. Some parents did send their children to school at great sacrifice to themselves, sometimes to traditional Chinese schools, such as that run in the temple on the island of Kau Sai. This school, however, largely served the Hakka land-based population on the island, and when these Hakka were re-housed on the mainland, it was replaced by an F.M.O. school. Before the Second World War in Canton there were even Trade-Union-run Shui-sheung-yan schools. Conditions were, perhaps, however, more difficult for the sea-going fishermen's children of Hong Kong, away for days at a time from all land contact on occasion, than for the riverine salt-traders and transporters of Canton. Before mechanisation very few fishing parents could afford much by the way of school fees. Without the F.M.O. schools it is unlikely that the revolution in literacy would have\n\n10", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209236, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 139, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "EDUCATION AS A BY-PRODUCT OF FISH MARKETING\n\n125\n\nthat is, the nomadic population, of Britain, do belong to a series of ethnic communities genealogically linked to the settlement of Romani immigrants in the sixteenth century, who now speak Romanes-linked creole dialects, as well as standard English.\" Several times in the early 1970s I was still able to converse with pupils in dialects that teachers had assured me were quite unknown to \"their\" Gypsies. Now it is much harder to catch teachers out this way. Work for Gypsies has become a small part of Britain's \"Race Relations Industry\". The word \"Gypsy\" has been ethnicized.\n\nThe case with the fisherfolk of Hong Kong is exactly the reverse. Originally thought to be a distinct ethnic community, the thrust of modern scholarly research since the mid-1950s is that they are no such thing, that the vast majority are Cantonese, ethnically indistinguishable from the majority of Hong Kong inhabitants.\n\nThe pre-War view, however, of the British administration in Hong Kong was that the boat people comprised two of the four ethnic groups native to Hong Kong. S.F. Balfour wrote: \"This region has a country population consisting of four distinct communities known in Chinese as the Tanka, the Hokio, the Punti and the Hakka.\"18 By the \"Punti\" he meant the local Cantonese; by the 'Hakka' the descendants of late Han migrants from Northern China. Both the \"Tanka\" and the 'Hoklo' were boat-dwellers, fisherfolk. The Hoklo, a small minority of the boat people, mostly in the north-east of the New Territories, spoke a variety of Fukien dialect. The Tanka spoke Cantonese, but were believed to have another dialect of their own, to be in fact not Han Chinese at all, but, said Balfour, drawing on Chinese sources, \"a branch of the Man tribe.\"\n\nIn fact, it was generally believed that there existed in South China an aboriginally-descended aquatic people called the Tanka boat-people like the Hoklo. In Hong Kong they were fishermen, but in the Pearl River delta, and further north along inland waterways, they were transporters, salt-traders, prostitutes and followers of numerous other pariah occupations that could be based on a boat. Detailed studies in the 1930s by the new school of sociologists based at Lingnam University did not challenge this assumption.10 They were backed up by historian colleagues who traced back a recorded history of the Tan people to T'ang times. Then, Ho Ke-en concluded, Tan \"was broadly equivalent to Man\", a name covering several non-Han tribes in South China, but \"in its narrow sense it designated one particular South China tribe\". In the Sung period, he tells us, \"the Tan people began to live on boats,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209237, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 140, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "126\n\nTA ACTON\n\n+\n\nan oppressed and pariah people without social status.\n\n20\n\nIt must be emphasized that this picture of an ethnic group with a long history was not the image of a few scholars only. It was the socially constructed reality of pre-1939 China. Even though since the mid-1950s modern scholarship and the views of the officials most directly concerned, both in the People's Republic of China21 and in Hong Kong have demolished it as though it had never been, it lingers among ordinary people and even some British officials not directly concerned.\n\n22\n\n23\n\n26\n\nFrom the early 1950s one British social-anthropologist, Barbara Ward, has carried out recurrent field-work on a community of the kind that used to be called 'Tanka', on the little island of Kau Sai.29 She found that with minor exceptions they were ethnically Cantonese, with similar models of the world, marriage and death practices, and religious beliefs to other Han Chinese.24 Other scholars endorsed her view; even their language, apart from an enormous, specialised fishing vocabulary was said to be virtually the same as ordinary Cantonese. In fact, Hong Kong fishing people in the larger ports can tell each others' origins partly by the fact that they speak with different, local coastal accents - for example, a 'Yeung Kong' accent.;\n\n26\n\n27\n\nOfficial policy in Hong Kong also now sees the boat-people as an occupational, and not an ethnic group, whereas the British Government in Britain sees the Gypsies now as an ethnic and not an occupational group, both viewpoints having reversed themselves over the past thirty years.\n\n28\n\nIt should be emphasized, though, that these perceptions of ethnicity, whatever relation they may have to the form and organisation of education (and the vigour with which it is pursued), do not usually affect the content of special educational provision by the state, for either group. Both the curriculum and language remains that of the ordinary school, and the amount of exotic cultural material included is meagre. Despite some pioneering work by voluntary projects, the Gypsy dialects are not used in the West Midlands Local Authority projects, and \"Gypsy material\" is limited to commercially published books featuring Gypsies, and the occasional pasted cardboard caravan. Equally, in the F.MO. schools in Hong Kong, one might find general readers, with a carefully laudatory couple of pages on the brave fishermen, or, once or twice, beautiful collections of strange fish and other marine creatures in jars, that have been contributed by parents; but the main task was to give them the same education other Chinese children received.\n\n29", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209238, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 141, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "EDUCATION AS A BY-PRODUCT OF FISH MARKETING\n\n127\n\nget.\n\nThe Hoklo children in the north-east of the New Territories most definitely do have a dialect of their own, mutually unintelligible with Cantonese; yet they are placed in no special category in the schools, nor is their language used. Indeed, I was met with astonishment when I enquired about it, as if such a thing were unthinkable. When I asked at one school whether any of the teachers spoke Hoklo, one teacher was pointed out as \"perhaps\" speaking it; she, amid giggles, simply concentrated on her marking without saying yes or no. It was not, it was explained to me, that children were punished for speaking Hoklo at school, or anything like that; rather that they realised that speaking Cantonese, writing Chinese, and learning English were the things useful for later life that they could gain from school.\n\nThe former \"Tanka\" ethnic image was a reflection of the boat-dwellers' pariah occupational status. Since China is no longer an inward-looking power fearful of the corruption that people from the sea might bring, (and the rulers of Hong Kong never were), and since fishing (and in China, river and canal transport) are now seen as vital and honourable sectors of a modern economy, there is no longer any rationale for this pariah status, even though traditional social discrimination may continue among some ordinary people.\n\nEconomic organisation and social division\n\nA major part of the strategy pursued by the F.M.O. to improve the economic efficiency and raise the social standing of the fisherfolk is the encouragement of voluntary associations among them. There are fourteen F.M.O. liaison officers, stationed at markets and depots, whose job is primarily community and social work, with a dash of public relations thrown in, making sure the press and TV are aware of any gallant acts of life-saving or other public service carried out by fishermen. One or two of the liaison officers are themselves of Shui-sheung-yan origin.\n\nAround seventy co-operative societies are sponsored by the F.M.O., each with at least ten members, run on a one-man-one-vote basis, according to the Hong Kong Co-operative Societies Ordinance. The majority are credit societies (which, of course, can draw on long traditions of mutual financial aid) to enable the purchase of mechanised boats and fishing equipment. A few, the \"better-living societies\", enable fishermen to build and own houses as home bases. These co-operatives", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209247, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 150, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "136 \n\nT.A ACTON \n\nCantonese Shui-sheung-yan who have joined, and not the Hoklo, who have been \"resistant to the Gospel message.\" When I asked Philip Chan about the use of the term \"Tanka”, he answered, as did most Shui-sheung-yan, that the term was no longer used as it was offensive, because of the way ordinary Cantonese used it to oppress them. Nevertheless, in the sermon he preached the next day, referring to the knowledge of the sea his audience possessed, which land people could not understand, he spoke of \"We Tanka... or so to speak, Shui-sheung-yan.\" The whole sermon, over an hour and a quarter long, held his audience spell-bound with illustrations from storms at sea, fishing disasters and marine life, salting his speech with fisherman's talk (Shui-sheung-wa) so deep that the Malaysian student who had been put by my side and knew only standard Cantonese, was often completely baffled and unable to give me any interpretation. (Later, Philip Chan referred to Shui-sheung-wa as “a separate dialect”.) \n\nOf course, the content of this sermon can hardly have been completely unaffected by the knowledge that there was a sociologist in the congregation interested in the life of boat-people. Nonetheless, it is indicative of the way in which an ethnic and cultural solidarity has been maintained, an assertion of pride of origin, which provides a way of avoiding the schizophrenic need to assimilate wholly to ordinary Cantonese society and suppress one's own identity. \n\nAdaptation and Education \n\nAs Barbara Ward and other sociologists have indicated, the majority of boat people are able to assimilate into land-based Cantonese society, and do so fairly often. Members of the Fishermen's Recreation Clubs, the True Jesus Church, and perhaps to some extent the Hong Kong and Kowloon Fishermen's Association Ltd., find a middle way of adaptation that relieves them from the stark dilemma between the self-obliteration and the stasis of isolation. Nonetheless, one cannot speak of any general emergence of Shui-sheung-yan ethnic consciousness; the leaders of the three movements mentioned above, geographically separated at the three opposite corners of the territory, appeared absolutely unaware of each others' activities. When one asks Shui-sheung-yan the conventional Cantonese question about what kind of Chinese they are, (“Nei hai matye yan a ?\"), the most common answer remains a reference to their home village, or, at any rate, to that of their grandparents — “Ngo hai Tunglowaan-yan\" or \"Yeung Kong yan”, or “Ap Chau yan”, \n\nPage 150\n\nPage 151", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209355, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 12, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "It is with much regret that I record that among the deaths of members this year are some of our oldest friends. One, Mr. Holmes Welch, was a founding member of the Society and Member of Council during our first four years. He came to Hong Kong with the American Consulate General after academic studies in Sinology and publication of a highly original work on Taoism: The Parting of the Way. In Hong Kong his interest in Chinese religion and philosophy, and the organization of religious institutions, continued, and he gave one of the very first lectures to the Society, published in our first Journal, “Buddhist organization in Hong Kong”. Later he left the Consulate but remained in Hong Kong to continue field research into Chinese Buddhism, working with refugee monks. In the late sixties he published several volumes on contemporary Buddhism in China. After returning to the United States he continued his sinological studies and whenever I met him at conferences on religion he always asked after the progress of the Society.\n\nAnother of our recently deceased friends was Mr. John Romer, Curator of Mammals at Hong Kong's Zoological and Botanic Gardens, Hon. Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology, University of Hong Kong, and Senior Pest Control Officer of the Hong Kong Government until he retired. He has contributed on several occasions to the Notes and Queries section of our Journal.\n\nIt was also with great shock that we learnt of the death, in January this year, of Barbara Ward, whose last talk to the Society was given only just over a year ago. Barbara was the first anthropologist to conduct field-work in Hong Kong. Coming out in 1950 she picked as her field a very challenging group about which very little was known from direct contact: the Cantonese Tanka, or sui seung yan “people upon the water” as they preferred to be known, that is, the floating population of fisherfolk. She showed how the traditional Chinese institutions and culture in which they participated were modified by their very way of life: ancestor worship is different when you do not live on the land, the role of father in a family is different too when he is also captain of a boat. Barbara's later studies in Hong Kong, to where she frequently returned, included Cantonese opera and its role in\n\nxii\n\nPage 12\n\n \n\nPage 12 \n\nPage 12 \n\nxii \n\nPage 12 \n\nPage 12", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209681, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 338, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "316\n\n \nBOOK REVIEWS\n\n \nAt the same time, however, it is possible to push this thesis too far, and to postulate a society formed of distinct island communities formed essentially on a cultural basis and only temporarily, and warily, in amity with other ethnic groups. Blake, it seems to me, does begin to move towards this position in some places. There are differences, for instance, between Hakka and Punti, but they are less significant, in most circumstances, than the factors which link them together as \"the indigenous\" and set them apart from \"the outsiders\". On the other hand, there are factors linking land Hoklo and sea Hoklo, but they are, on the whole, less significant than the deep social and economic divides set between land and sea people. In a book such as this it is surely strange that there is no discussion of the concept of indigenousness, and no study on the effects of time on the concept of social separateness.\n\n \nof social separateness. Is a Chaochiu immigrant of just one or two years residence not socially distinct from one with 30 years residence? Certainly in some other New Territories areas the long resident outsider is regarded by the indigenous and by himself as representing a natural ally to the indigenous, even, on some matters, as against his own more recently arrived ethnic brothers. Other factors, such as the relative social status of land owners (indigenous and long resident outsiders) as against tenants (newcomer outsiders) and landless men (boat people and Hoklo labourers), and the differing relationships of each group to the Government, also need fuller discussion to flesh out and clarify the basic thesis. Ethnic groups and their interactions are of great importance in the social structure of the area, but they are not the sole or even, perhaps, the most important factor; historical, social, economic and other factors cannot be forgotten.\n\n \nOn matters of detail there are also some points which seem a little uncertain. To call the Tanka \"Cantonese Boat People\" rather than \"Cantonese Speaking Boat People\" is in itself to assume a good deal: to go on to assume that many (most, if near the sea) Cantonese villages in the New Territories descend from Tanka who had settled on land is to assume far more than is justified without far more discussion than is given. And to assume without discussion that all groups whose history in the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209701, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 358, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "336\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\n(No. 92) are equally successful in giving new perspectives on the human life of Hong Kong.\n\nAll in all, this volume is recommended to anyone wishing to own a superbly produced volume of intelligently conceived and masterfully produced photographs of Hong Kong.\n\nP. H. HASE\n\nChukoku Saiki Yengeki Kenkyu (Ritual Theatres in China). By Issei Tanaka, Institute of Oriental Culture, The University of Tokyo, 1981, xvi + 926 pp, Index.\n\nThis impressive book contains the results of the author's researches during the period of ten years since he joined the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, in 1972. Trained as a sinologist, Prof. Tanaka started his study on ritual theatre in China from a historical viewpoint. Later his research focus shifted to field studies, particularly in Hong Kong. Between 1978 to 1981 he visited Hong Kong eight times and stayed here in total for eleven months. Most of the data presented in this volume are his field reports collected during his time in Hong Kong, and these form a mine of fascinating material which will prove to be of great value to many scholars.\n\nIn addition to presenting the field reports, however, the book analyses three aspects of ritual theatre in China. One of these is the origin of ritual theatre. Based on historical data, the author traces the process of transformation of ritual theatre from ancient times to the present. Through these studies, he points out that the original form of ritual theatre was aimed at exorcising or controlling evil forces or at celebrating beneficial forces and seeking their assistance. Theatre of this kind can still be found in Hong Kong. The ritual theatre of Hoklo and Ch'ao-chou people in Hong Kong are mostly performed for exorcising, i.e., these theatrical performances are mainly aimed at freeing orphan souls and wandering spirits. Cantonese ritual theatre, on the other hand, is of the latter type, celebrating the deities' birthdays and beseeching their blessing.\n\nThe second aspect is concerned with the social organization of ritual theatre. The author classifies Chinese local theatre,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210440, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1985", "page_number": 47, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "28\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\nEyes and ears alone would be enough to inform anyone who cared to notice that the Boat People (who very sensibly go barefoot when on board) have the usual complement of toes and speak Cantonese, albeit often with a broad accent and always with the specialised vocabulary necessary to their water-borne way of life. I have discussed these matters and the questions of non-Han descent and non-Chinese customs elsewhere. Very briefly my argument is that because both additions to and departures from the floating populations have been more or less continuous it is probable that the genetic endowment of the Boat People is neither more nor less “non-Han” than that of most of the other Cantonese-speaking inhabitants of South China. It is true that Boat People are usually easily recognisable; so are sailors everywhere. Browner complexions, rolling gait, small leg muscles and heavy shoulder development are readily explicable by a life lived mainly out-of-doors on boats which have to be poled and rowed, and working at fishing or shifting cargo. There are also certain peculiarities of dress and ceremonial, but, as this account of life in a Hong Kong fishing community will show, Tanka social structure and ideology are unequivocally Chinese.\n\n5\n\nRather less than half the Boat People in Hong Kong are fishermen. The rest are engaged in various forms of water carriage (both within the Colony and between it and neighbouring Chinese and Portuguese ports), and in providing services within the larger local anchorages — hawkers, sellers of water and ice, floating restaurants and so on and so forth. The most numerous of the carriers are the almost square Kam Shing Teng, the junk lighters which attend the ocean-going ships in the harbour or line the waterfront by day, and return to their accustomed anchorages in the typhoon shelters, where they traditionally moor in regular, named “streets” by night.\n\nThe 150,000 or so dwellers on the harbour junks are the most urbanised of Hong Kong's Boat People. They have close business, and sometimes marriage ties with firms of launch and lorry owners and many of them are members of one or other of the several transport associations which help to organise much of the business and social life of the waterfront for land and water people together. The fishermen, even those who live in the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210479, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1985", "page_number": 86, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "67\n\ncontact between Hakka landsmen and Tanka (Cantonese) fishermen in Kau Sai was very slight. In the normal circumstances of daily life and occupation, in matters of kinship and the vast majority of ritual and social occasions as much before the exodus in 1952 as after the fishermen simply ignored the local land people. The immediately following chapters, which treat of occupational, economic and family organization on the junks can safely do the same.\n\n5. THE BOATS\n\n33\n\nIn this chapter I describe the three main types of boat operating from Kau Sai in terms of the accommodation they provide for the tasks that have to be performed on them. These include caring for children and old people, doing the family cooking and much of its washing, copulation, birth and death, as well as fishing operations and most things connected with them.\n\n14\n\nAll Chinese junks have certain features in common. Among them the best known is probably the system of sub-division into watertight compartments. This was a Chinese invention of the early T'ang dynasty, only much later introduced into Europe. Bulkheads run both transversely and longitudinally, forming a kind of chequer-board pattern of watertight holds extremely convenient for storing fish, water, salt and ice, as well, of course, as items of gear and personal possessions. In some junks one or more outside compartments may be used for housing fresh fish alive, holes in the hull admitting a constant flow of clean sea water. The standard of sub-division on a Chinese junk is said to be far above that required by international regulations for the safety of passenger ships, and a junk is almost unsinkable by bilging alone.\n\nNearly all junks have a high stern and poop deck and are relatively low in the bows. Together with the usual forward rake of the masts (particularly marked in the larger vessels) this gives them a characteristically leaning, rather urgent, look. Except on the big long-liners, whose crews may include as many as sixty persons each trip, the forward part of the junk is used for carrying gear, fish and so on, not for accommodation. In general", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210525, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1985", "page_number": 132, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "113\n\n3 This is the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters which in literal translation mean \"egg families\".\n\n4 Ref: my articles in A.S.A. Volume and in Man. [\"Varieties of the conscious model, the fishermen of South China,\" in M. Banton, ed. The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology (London, Tavistock, 1965), pp. 113-37, and \"Sociological self-awareness; some uses of the conscious models,” Man (1966) vol. 1, pp. 200-15.]\n\n* Professor Chan Tze-king states that the Boat People speak whatever dialect is dominant in the area in which they live, and that some of them (notably around Kwangtung) therefore speak non-Cantonese dialects [Ch'en Hsü-ching, op. cit., pp.30-1.]. To the best of my knowledge all so-called Tanka in Hong Kong speak Cantonese.\n\n\"[The 1961 census reported a 'marine population' of 136,802 persons.]\n\n7 This is a translation of the local term (suen cheung), the official title was Village Representative.\n\n& Substituted by nylon in late 'fifties.\n\n9 The Chinese expression used was either a fisherman's name or a pronoun, followed by the possessive particle.\n\n10 Chinese is suen.\n\n11 Note about equipment from New Zealand C.A.R.E. etc.\n\n12 Note on land tenure situation: these were officially \"temporary structures\" and therefore limited in size.\n\n13 Eating sweet potatoes, except by children as a kind of sweetmeat, is regarded as a sure sign of poverty and much derided.\n\n14 Except at weekends. His wife refused to live at Kau Sai and he quite often failed to return until Tuesday or even later in the week. The present day teachers also go back to the Mainland at the weekends and during school holidays, but are punctilious about keeping school hours.\n\n15 Officially called Kau Sai New Village.\n\n16 Or rather his wife; but that was not stated, nor were his wages taken into account.\n\n17 The roles of these different organs of administration are discussed fully below. [Discussion not found in manuscript.]\n\n18 [Not included in manuscript.]\n\n19 It does not follow that because for practical purposes movements on land and water were equally simple no intellectual distinctions were made. The point is discussed at length in the final chapter below. [This final chapter is not found in the manuscript.]\n\n20 Note on dynamite.\n\n21 The effect of mechanisation in breaking down specialisation seems to have been quite general among inshore fishermen. It is discussed further in Chapter V [section 5 below].", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212118, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 60, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "37\n\nNOTES TO TABLE 2\n\nA = yearly cycle claimed\n\nB = celebration period (one-day, three-day, five-day), (refers only to main rituals started from the ritual “Qi Tan” [Opening of the Jiao) and ended with the \"Da You\" [Great Offering])\n\nC = predominant occupation of the community\n\n== market town\n\nD = spority ethnic groups:\n\nE\n\nP → Punti Cantonese\n\nH\n\nT = Takka\n\n:. = Tanka\n\n=Territorial type:\n\nบ = village\n\nVC = village cluster\n\nlocal alliance\n\n1: = Descent type:\n\nS = single-lineage\n\nsc = single-lineage dominated\n\nH = single-lineage village, multi-lineage community\n\nm = multi-surname in one community\n\nyear celebrated\n\n--\n\nSources: Either seen by myself\n\nJE = from beginning to end,\n\ne = only partially.\n\nrecorded in other scholars' work [0], or provided by villages or Taoist priests\n\n[T].\n\nOI\n\n02\n\n——\n\n03 = Chan, \"Jiu festival** see note 37\n\nTanaka, Village Festival, 99, 816\n\nNote:\n\n*1 In fact, it is held every ninth year, as the year of celebration is counted into both the outgoing and incoming decade.\n\n*2 Photos taken on 1989.3.10. A poster was written Cheung Lung walled-village of Ping Kong Tsuen village, ten years' once Taiping Qing Jiao\". The notice recorded the Year Mu Wa (1988).\n\n*3 This alliance include the following fishing villages in the northeastern part of Hong Kong: Tap Mun, Kau Lau Wan, Sham Wan, Wong Wan, Kat O, Sam Mun Tsai. See Tanaka, Village Festival, 99, 816.\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212123, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 65, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "42\n\ndisasters. the second is for those who died because of plague. The final reason is to thank the benevolent governors Wang Lai-ren and Zhou You-de of the beginning of the Qing dynasty. In my opinion, all these reasons can be integrated into the first one.\n\n(d) Chan Wing-hoi \"The Tangs of Kam Tin and their Jiu festival\", Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 29 (1989) 302-375, a rich and detailed account of the lineage, its temples and villages, and the festival which draws them together.\n\nDr. Faure gradually switched his interest to the Pearl River Delta while Prof. Tanaka, as I was told, is now looking at Sichuan province. Talk on publishing a book on Hong Kong Jiao festivals has been going on for years by members of the \"Research Circle of the Regional Society of Southern China''. In 1990, the editorial board of the society set up a schedule to compile a book focusing on the Jiao festival. It is expected that papers on various aspects will be completed by the end of April 1991. (Correspondence from the society dated 28.12.1990)\n\nSchipper, Kristofer M., \"The Written Memorial in Taoist Ceremonies\" in Wolf, Arthur P. (ed.) Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 324,\n\nFor example, according to Chan Wing-hoi, villagers of Shek O celebrated their 16th Jiao in 1986 (Chan, 78). The Dengs in Kam Tin claimed to have celebrated their Jiao since 1684 (Tanaka, 918).\n\nSee for instance Basel Mission Archives, doct. Al-6, No. 51 (1869), and doct. Al-7, No. 51 (1870) and Der Evangelische Heidenbote, July 1867, in which a missionary describes how he was forced to go to the Magistrate to get his support before he could avoid having to pay his share of the Jiao expenses. All these cases are from Hsin An County. The Sha Tin poem will, it is hoped, shortly be published by Dr. P.H. Hase.\n\nThese two series are part of the 15 series of historical documents collected by Dr. D. Faure and others in the New Territories. Copies of the collections are kept in the libraries of CUHK, Hong Kong University, Sha Tin Regional Council Library, and Institute of Oriental Culture, Tokyo University.\n\n31\n\nTanaka Chugoku no Sozoku to Engeki [Lineage and Theatre in China] (Tokyo Univ. Press 1985), 608. Jiao festivals celebrated by the powerful communities in Hong Kong like Kam Tin, Ha Tsuen, Lung Yeuk Tau etc., were all performed by the Zhengyi Taoist group, led first by the late Master Lin Pei and now by Master Chan Kau. Another Zhengyi Taoist group is led by Master Chan Wah. However, many Taoist priests work for both groups. There are also other Taoist groups who performed for the Jiao festivals, like a Cantonese group which performed for Ho Chung and a Heklo group for Cheung Chau. In 1983, four out of five Jiao festivals were performed by monastery Taoists. It is not clear whether it was because of tradition or out of economic reasons. A comparison of the two Taoist groups has yet to be made.\n\n14 Choi Chi-cheung **Sho matsuri no jinmei risuto ni mirareru shinzoku ban'i” [Kinship as seen in the name lists of Jiao festival] Bunka Jinnú Gaku 5 (1988): 131, table L. 35 **Shinshi men\" [Section of Believers] in Fanling Wenxian (Historical Literature of Fanling) vol. 8. This brief account records details of the arrangement of the Jiao area, including the contents of couplets, names of deities invited, location and direction of matshed stages, and the sacrifices prepared etc.. See n. 32 for the depositories of Fanling Wenxian.\n\n36 See (1972) Lin Chuan [Lam Tsuen] Xiang Taiping Qingjiao huiyi jilubu in Dapu [Tai Po] Wenzian [Historical Literature of Tai Po] vol. 1. (see n. 32 for depositories)\n\n37 Tanaka Issei's three books, all published by the Tokyo Univ. Press are: Chugoku Saishi Engeki Kenkyu [Ritual Theatres in China] (1981), Chugoku no Sozoku to Engeki [Lineage and Theatre in China) (1985), and Chugoku Kyoson Saishi Kenkyu: Chihogeki", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212257, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 199, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "176\n\n8.\n\ntwo actors resume their normal human identity at the conclusion of the ritual before they can step into the backstage.\n\nAt this moment, troupe members who stay onstage cry out loudly to signal the removal of the taboo which prohibits the opening of mouths. Joss papers are then burned as offerings to the spirits and deities. The whole White Tiger ritual lasts approximately from about three to five minutes.\n\nConclusion\n\nAs pointed out by both Tanaka Issei and Barbara E. Ward, there is an inseparable relationship between Chinese opera and religious rituals. The Offering to the White Tiger aptly illustrates how the performing conventions of Chinese opera are incorporated into the staging of an exorcistic act. On the other hand, as many scholars believe that Chinese opera grew out of religious roots, we might also say that the former adopted the conventions of the latter for dramatic expression.\n\nWhat is discussed in the present article relates to the White Tiger ritual and describes only some of the taboos and religious practices which are preserved in the tradition of Cantonese opera. As the present writer has pointed out in his other articles, other taboos and religious practices require troupe members to pay respect to the local deities upon their arrival at the place where they are hired to perform. Troupe members should also offer incense to the shrines of the profession's patron deities backstage, and place joss sticks at the edge of the frontstage to appease the spirits, ghosts and deities which will then protect them from falling off the stage. On the second day of the performance series, before the evening's play starts, joss papers should be burnt, as an offering to troupe members who have died. Moreover, as in many other Chinese regional operatic genres, whenever a troupe first arrives at a performing hall, even if it does not contain a \"new stage,\" the principal comic role actor has to write the Chinese characters dai ger (big fortune) on the wooden or bamboo pillar closest to the Tiger Gate at stage right, with a brush and using a type of red pigment made from a combination of oil and cinnabar, before the other actors can start their make-up. Such a ritual is known as hoi ber (to open a brush'').\n\nA traditional taboo prescribes that the strokes in the radicle hau ...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212469, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1991", "page_number": 23, "title": "RAS-1991", "content_text": "the reliance on native place ties by Shaoxing natives away from home. Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski, in their history of eighteenth-century China, observe that \"native place was the principle most often invoked as grounds for affiliation and assistance by men who left their homes to work in an alien environment.”\n\nThe most extensive analysis of native place ties in an urban environment is William Rowe's detailed study of the central China treaty port city Hankow (Hankou). Although concluding that \"the prevailing mood of the city was cosmopolitan,\" he nevertheless emphasizes the persistence of localism in urban development. Rowe describes the importance of hometown bonds in securing jobs, financial help in time of need, and defence in daily street brawls. Commercial cliques, worker recruitment, and leisure activities were often organized around native place ties. More interestingly, Rowe's study has demonstrated a process of different ethnic groups establishing themselves in the newly developed city. The most distinctive one was a rivalry between Cantonese and Ningbo with Shaoxing people, the two prominent ethnic groups in Hankou. Cantonese used the advent of Western trade to advance their position in native commercial circles while the Ning-Shao natives had become the most powerful force in the native banking and lower Yangzi River trade, but they were second to their Cantonese counterparts in foreign trade. More recently, in addition to the above studies, as shown in Emily Honig's study of Subei people in Shanghai, there are many more factors determining ethnic identities than race, religion and nationality.\n\nOrigins of Cantonese Emigration in the Nineteenth Century\n\nHistorically, South China was the recipient of successive waves of migration from the north, which is more hilly and hence conducive to the isolation of one social group from another. In Guangdong province, the Chinese inhabitants categorized themselves as Punti (Bendi, locals) which included the Cantonese and the people of Teochiu; Hakka (Hejia, guests); Hoklo or Tanka (Danjia, boat people). By the end of the eighteenth century, the rate of delta land reclamation could not match the rate of increase in population in South China. Growth of population caused massive emigration both domestically and overseas. The rapid growth of population, unaccompanied by improvements in agricultural technology, meant that it was increasingly difficult for peasants in this area to depend on the soil alone for a decent livelihood. To support", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1991.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/k356gt84j", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213445, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 41, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "The territories are ribbed by rugged mountainous ranges rising to over 3,000 feet running mainly from northeast to southwest, the eastern half enclosing numerous landlocked bays and arms of the sea. Included in the area are some two hundred islands, the majority of which are small and barren. These islands are uncultivated for the most part. The largest area of cultivable land is to be found in the northwest of the territories. Only about 50 square miles altogether are under crop,\n\nThe population of the New Territories can be broadly split into land-dwellers and sea-dwellers. That broad division should be qualified by the fact that certain of the land-dwellers combine fishing with agriculture and again certain of the purely fishing population live half on the land in derelict boats and huts built on stilts in muddy creeks. The census last year revealed that the total population of the New Territories was 456,404 of which the land-dwellers numbered 409,945 and the sea-dwellers 46,459.\n\nThe land-dwellers for the most part live in traditional village communities of one or more clans. Their livelihood depends on the cultivation of rice and vegetables, in the cultivation of pine forests and in the cutting of undergrowth for fuel, in the rearing of livestock and poultry, in the picking of medicinal herbs, in oyster culture, in fishponds, brickworks, limekilns and in food factories. The sea-dwellers engage in fishing both deep sea and offshore, operate water transport by junks, and ply for hire in sampans.\n\nThere are a number of immigrant groups who have entered the New Territories as refugees since the Chinese revolution and especially during the period after the last World War. The largest of these communities is that from Shanghai which arrived during the years 1948-51 and brought with it considerable capital and industrial skill. But the unassimilated customs of these immigrants are no part of the Chinese customary law of the New Territories. It is with the indigenous inhabitants, the land-dwellers and the sea-dwellers, that we are presently concerned, and although none of these appear to have been autochthonous nor do some appear to have been of Chinese origin, they have all been settled so long in these territories and now regard themselves as Chinese and speak Chinese dialects that they must be classed as the indigenous Chinese inhabitants. These inhabitants can be sub-divided into the Cantonese, the Hakka, the Tanka and the Hoklo.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213446, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 42, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "9\n\nBy their differences in dwellings and occupations, already observed, these four communities can be grouped into land-dwellers and sea-dwellers, the Cantonese and Hakka being the former and the Tanka and Hoklo the latter.\n\n43\n\nThe Cantonese, or Punti as they are sometimes called, had their origins in North China and speak a Chinese dialect of the western section of the Yueh language which evidences their claim to be of pure Chinese stock. There is no record of their arriving in the province of Kwangtung, which they colonised, earlier than the Sung Dynasty (960-1278 A.D.). In the van were a clan surnamed Tang who settled in the Yuen Long district of the New Territories late in the 11th century. This clan became the largest landowners with their main centres at Kam T'in, P'ing Shan, Lung Yeuk Tau and Ha Tsuen. They exercised \"a kind of feudal power, and the tradition they had brought with them was so strong that they not only became the founders of the Cantonese settlement but to this day exert a great influence in affairs. The Cantonese occupy most of the two principal plains in the northwest sector of the New Territories, and own a good deal of the best valley land in various other areas. Villages in the Tung Chung and Shek Pik valleys, on Lantau Island, date back to the early Yuan dynasty in the late thirteenth century. The livelihood of the Cantonese is dependent mainly on the cultivation of rice.\n\nThe Hakka migrated originally also from North China and, moving gradually southwards through Fukien and Kiangsi in the 10th century, reached Kwangtung Province during the latter years of the Southern Sung Dynasty. They speak two dialects or sub-dialects of the eastern section of the same Yueh language that the Cantonese speak. Arriving after the Cantonese, the Hakka settled usually upstream of them, that is, on the poorer ground. They have, however, steadily over the centuries encroached on the land first occupied by the Cantonese. For example, after the Manchus in the 17th century had evacuated the entire population of the China Coast inland to guard against the fleet of the Ming Dynasty based on Formosa, the Hakka apparently took the opportunity of resettling in the abandoned coastal area. Again, Hong Kong island is said to have been originally occupied by the Tang clan but the British in the 19th century found it almost entirely inhabited by Hakka. A third example of Hakka encroachment is said to be Lantau Island which in recent times was depopulated by...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213447, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 43, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "malaria and then was resettled by Hakka squatters.\"' Now the Hakka are in almost exclusive possession of the Sha Tau Kok, Sai Kung and Hang Hau peninsulas and of the foot-hills of Tai Mo Shan besides being in the majority in some other area.62 Near the coast and on the islands the Hakka combine agriculture and fishing.63\n\nIn a few villages the Cantonese and the Hakka live side by side.65 Although strict exogamy is practised according to the usual Chinese custom, many Cantonese have taken Hakka wives but not often does the reverse take place. In practice, and in spite of differences in language, the Cantonese and Hakka have almost identical customs. Nowadays, indeed, the Hakka talk the standard Cantonese dialect (pun yu),** dress like the Cantonese and are in general indistinguishable from them.69\n\nThe Tanka67 form the majority of the sea-dwellers in the waters of the New Territories68 and land-dwellers who have few dealings with any sea-dwellers tend to call both the sea-dwelling communities \"Tanka.\"?? The Tanka dialect, like the Cantonese, belongs to the western section of the Yueh language.” The Tanka have their main centres of population around the islands of Cheung Chau and Lantau but also are to be found around many smaller islands. Their arrival in the region is shrouded in the mists of the past74 but Balfour's description of them is worth repeating:-\n\n“The Tanka or the Tan people are the Cantonese-speaking fishing population. The word Tan is a proper name and dictionaries define it as follows:-\n\n'Tan is the name of a people. They are held to be a branch of the Man tribe. They live in boats along the coast of Fukien and Kwang-tung making fishing their livelihood. They are pearl divers. Since the T'ang dynasty (A.D. 618) they have been counted by able-bodied males for purposes of taxation. In the year 1618 they were classified according to families, headmen were appointed among them and anchorages in the rivers were set apart for them. A yearly tax of fishing produce was collected'\n\nIn 1723 an imperial edict was passed allowing them all the privileges of ordinary Chinese citizens, except the right to compete in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213448, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 44, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "the public examinations which they never obtained.\"7%\n\nThe Tanka have always been despised by the land-dwellers and intermarriage between land and sea-dwellers is probably non-existent.” Nevertheless the Tanka \"are the principal sea-faring people of South China, owning large sea-going junks and engaging in deep-sea fishing.\n\nThe Hoklo* speak “a Min dialect similar to those spoken in the Province of Fukien and in the Chruchow, Hoilukfung and Kiungchow areas of Kwangtung Province \"They have frequented the territories since some unknown era.\" The Hoklo are few in numbers and are mostly to be found in the eastern waters of the area. Balfour has an interesting observation to make on all four communities:-\n\n“Our analysis of the existing population has revealed that the order of migration into the region corresponds roughly with the height above sea level of each part of the community. The Tanka and Hoklo, who were the earliest people, live on the seacoast, the Punti, who came next, occupy the fertile plains and valleys, and the latest comers the Hakka, are to be found mostly in the uplands\n\nA Restatement of the Customary Law,\n\n1983\n\nTwo general types of omission have been made on principle in this restatement: firstly, all doubtful points of customary law, for the courts may in due course be called upon to decide them; secondly, mere social customs without legal force, for they are the concern rather of the sociologist.*\n\nThe Customary Law of the Land-dwellers, the Cantonese and Hakka Land\n\nThe most important part of the customary law obtaining in the New Territories undoubtedly concerns its land if for no other reason than that all questions affecting such land, in view of the preservation of Chinese custom by statute, should prima facie be governed by such custom.** Such is not the position in regard to proceedings which do not involve land, then by virtue of section 5 of the Supreme Court Ordinance, English law as existing in 1843 as modified by subsequent", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213470, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 66, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "33\n\nOriginally compiled in 1955 by Mr. B D Wilson, MA, District Officer in the New Territories Administration. These notes were revised from time to time in the light of the comments of other officers of that Administration and of the Secretariat for Chinese Affairs and have been circulated among the Administration though not published. I gratefully record my thanks to Mr GCM Lupton, District Officer, Tupo who made available to me the latest revision dated 15th September 1959.\n\nFor the customs of the sea-dwelling Tanka and Hoklo I have relied upon material collected by Mr W Duncan of the Department of Co-operative Development and Fisheries. He generously provided me with a copy of that material which in due course he proposes to publish.\n\nThe following brief topographical description is based on the Reports DCNT 1952-53 paras 1-5 as amended by the 1953-54 paras. 1-4; a scientific and detailed description is to be found in Tregear, Land Use in Hong Kong and the New Territories. Hong Kong Univ Press. 1958 (The World Land Use Survey Monograph).\n\nAnalysis of Census Returns, Hong Kong 1961, Table I.\n\nVide Reports, DCNT, 1952-53 para 5 and 1959-60 para 49.\n\nReport, DCNT, 1954-55, para 8.\n\nVide Ballou's article \"Hong Kong Before the British\" in T'ien Hsia Monthly, Shanghai, 1941, pp 331, and 334-336 (Balfour's article is of great authority as it was based on the official local history of the area of Hong Kong and the New Territories \"The Topography of the San On District\" dated 1820 being a revised version of earlier editions dating back to the 15th century).\n\n\"Native to the country\" a Hakka expression for the Cantonese (Reports, DCNT, 1954-55. para 8 and Ballou, op cit p332).\n\nBalfour, op cit p 332.\n\nReports, DCNT, 1954-55, para 8.\n\nBalfour, loc cit.\n\nIbid.\n\nBalfour, op cit p 445.\n\nReports, DCNT, 1959-60, para 45.\n\nBallou, op cit pp 445 and 448.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215371, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2001", "page_number": 148, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "At the end of one or both lower straps, the corners were folded over to the centre to form a pocket in which to carry a few coins. Gradually the overall size of the carriers became smaller during the 20th century.\n\nThe style favoured by Cantonese and Hakka women followed the old shape with a decorated centre, on average about 25cm square, with straps which were a continuation of the top and bottom edges (Plate 1). Modern versions were usually made with a red cotton embroidered centre square and brightly patterned cotton surround, with the extensions of the straps in plain red cotton. Those made for presentation on special occasions had a red satin embroidered centre, brocade surrounds and red cotton extension straps.\n\nThe style preferred by the Hoklo and Tanka fishing people was slightly smaller overall, with the ornate centre having a patterned cotton or decorated surround. Longer straps were fixed diagonally to the four corners of the square, sometimes with white stitching to decorate and strengthen. Head supports were often attached to these baby carriers. These were made of folded strips of cotton, about 1cm wide, stitched at intervals to form a lattice square and attached to the top edge of the carrier to support the baby's head (Plate 2). Some were made from a plain piece of cloth to shield it from the sun.\n\nThe third style, once used by both land and sea dwellers, was the simplest, being a plain, undecorated strip of red cotton or hemp, approximately 2.7m long by 30cm wide. In the past it was a tradition for the bridegroom to wear a strip of red cloth draped across one shoulder of his long gown and tied on the opposite hip. After the wedding day it was put aside for later use as a baby carrier, by winding the strip of cloth twice round the child, then tying in a knot in front of the wearer (Plate 3).\n\nCarrier Covers\n\nWhen the weather was cold a cover was placed over the baby in its carrier. Chinese Lunar New Year is traditionally the time when new clothes are bought and worn to signify new beginnings. Carriers and covers made for this festival were most spectacular in colour and design, and continued to be used on special occasions such as clan festivals and weddings. Covers were made of two layers of brightly patterned", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216327, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2003", "page_number": 86, "title": "RAS-2003", "content_text": "35\n\nremarks each still makes about the other to this day. Northerners thought that Cantonese were quick and tricky, often rebellious, and overly concerned with money. They rarely got a good press from the officials, Manchus or Chinese from other provinces, who were posted to the South.\n\n‘Ungrateful and avaricious,' the Emperor was advised by the Imperial Commissioner in Canton in 1841, who said he wrote in these terms 'after personal observation of the character and disposition of the people of this province,23 Earlier, in 1807, a Viceroy observed that 'not only do the common people desire to obtain money, and do all they can to get it, but the gentry talk of nothing else but money.24 In 1847, the Xinan magistrate commented, 'In Kowloon, the people mingle with foreigners, and the custom of the residents is that they value money and material things and belittle poetry and studies.'25\n\nCantonese also had a reputation for being rude to Westerners. Returning with the Amherst Embassy from Beijing in 1816, the future Sir John Davis recounted that, upon approaching Canton, 'Here for the first time in the course of our travels, my ears were greeted with the sounds so frequent and familiar at Canton, Fankwei and Hoong-maou, \"Foreign devil\" and \"Rufus\" - without having the slightest personal claims to the last distinction, however indisputable my claims to the first.'26\n\nThe Boat People of Canton\n\nThe Canton waterfront was noted for the very large number of boat people whose tiny craft were anchored off and along the whole frontage. These were the Tanka, or indigenous boat people of the Pearl River Delta. They appear in many of the China Trade Pictures, whether lying off the Foreign Factories or at Whampoa, Lintin or Macau.\n\nThe river attracted the intense interest of foreigners because of the numbers and great variety of craft and activity to be seen upon its crowded, animated waters. They were impressed by the most remarkable degree of 'order' reigning, but were less enthusiastic about the 'noise of the music, gongs, and other discordant sounds' which 'defied description', compensated in part by the night scene, 'when all the boats display coloured lanterns [and] the scene is extremely pleasing.'\n\nThe boat people provided utility services to the factories and ferried", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2003.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2v242g390", "rank": 0 } ]