[ { "id": 204791, "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": 94, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "82 \n\nJ. W. HAYES \n\nwas committed outside their shop. Fearing further complications, the brothers left their native village of Nam Ling Wai nearby, two of them going to Jamaica and the third to Peng Chau. The reason for his selecting Peng Chau is an interesting one. There had been difficulty in finding a bride with a suitable horoscope and a go-between in Yuen Long Market with contacts on Peng Chau had arranged his marriage with a girl of the LUI family. The family were not poor, and by the end of the century had secured a considerable area of fields on the Lantau coast opposite Peng Chau by giving mortgages to incautious or unlucky farmers. \n\nSome light on Peng Chau's development in the nineteenth century is given in the tablet commemorating the repairs made to the temple in 1878. Though the total number of subscribers is less than in the 1798 tablet — 181 instead of 218 — the number of shops is greater, and their locations specified. Fifty Peng Chau undertakings were listed, including one factory, though what manufacture it carried out is unknown. Some of the local shops listed on the tablet were quite large concerns by the end of the century. Among their number the San Tai Li business owned six or seven adjoining shops on the east side of Wing On Street, near the present ferry pier. It is said to have handled several lines of business including ship-chandlering and the production of sails and tackle, fishmongering and general dealings with fishermen, grocery and general goods and Chinese medicine. It also owned several junks for cargo and ferry purposes. A WONG of the third generation was managing its affairs in 1899, the business having been started by his grandfather, who was a Cantonese from Shun Tak district. Besides the shops, and the lime kilns, of which there were almost a dozen by 1904, there were at least two boat building and repair yards, and a business which specialised in beaching boats. \n\nThe repair tablet lists numerous outside subscribers, which indicates the business and social contacts which the island had with neighbouring areas. Eighteen Hong Kong businesses, including seven fish laans, and another seven shops from Shaukiwan, contributed to the fund, and so did shops from Tai Ping, Shek Wan and Kong Moon in the Pearl River Delta. A ferry boat business from Heung Shan, had", "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": 204804, "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": 107, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "FENG CHAU\n\n95\n\nfrom his own or adjoining villages worked with him. The Shek Pik people were therefore closely connected with the sea despite the fact that their fields were extensive and well-watered. Elsewhere on Lantau, an old account book of the Hakka CHEUNG Kung Tak Tong at Pui O, which is dated 1897-99 (Kuang Hsu 23rd-24th years), shows that the Tong had a regular income from a fishing sampan.\n\n41 It has been shown that the Peng Chau shopkeepers always contributed to the temple repairs. A more illuminating instance of merchants' concern for the safety of local waters is to be found in the Tin Hau temple at Fan Lau on the south-west tip of Lantau, facing Macau and the mouth of the Delta, a remote area two hours' walk from Tai O Market. Here tablets survive from the Chia Ching and Hsien Feng periods (1796-1820 and 1851-61) and contain the names of many Tai O shops. One imagines that few of the donors would ever visit the temple, but they were obviously intent to ensure Tin Hau's benevolent care.\n\n42 Information received from CHEUNG Kai Chun of Ham Tin, Pui O, Lantau (born 1886). But this was not true everywhere. At Shek Pik several families of Tanka used the anchorage for at least fifty years. There was no remembered animosity during this time and these fishermen were allowed to cut grass and firewood without charge. However, they rarely strayed far from the beach and the two groups did not intermarry or have much to do with each other, except in casual contact at the main festivals and when villagers bought fish from them at the jetty, which was over a mile from the village. The fishermen would not go to the village to sell their catch.\n\n43 Information received from the present leaders of the WONG Wai Chak Tong ✯ of Cheung Chau.\n\n44 This statement is based on close knowledge of the Southern District of the New Territories and of the District land registers.\n\n45 Barbara E. Ward \"A Hong Kong Fishing Village”, Journal of Oriental Studies (University of Hong Kong) volume 1, no. 1 (January 1954) pp. 195-214, especially p. 211. See also note 42.\n\n46 See my Cheung Chau article for the Cheung Chau district associations before the British lease. At Tai O in the same period there appear to have been associations of Tung Kwun and San On origin, each with a club-house.\n\n47 The number is wrongly given as 28 in note 14 to the Cheung Chau article.\n\n48 A tablet in the Pak Tai temple at Cheung Chau dated January, February 1906 (a lucky day of the first month of spring of the thirty-second year of Kuang Hsü) shows that Peng Chau people also contributed to its repair.\n\n49 See the Cheung Chau article for this institution.\n\n50 The Kaifong of the Hong Kong region, and their like, are local institutions with a fairly long history. The Peng Chau Kaifong is quite likely to have an early date in relation to the age of the present settlement.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204827, "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": 130, "title": "RAS-1964", "content_text": "A RECONNAISSANCE OF MA WAN\n\n109\n\nthe thick weather would allow us to judge, we thought to the contrary, and it is sketched in according to the concurring opinions of the gentlemen on board\". Immediately after dinner we weighed and worked out of the bay, we anchored in the evening at the outermost anchor the weather again became thick and squally with rain. At break of day we weighed and worked over to anchor on the north shore which is laid down in the charts as a part of the main. It was now so thick that we could only see the Bottoe Islands12 at intervals, and very rarely the shore of Lantao. At eleven it cleared a little, we again got under weigh, and stood eastward along the shore, having a fine deep bay with a sandy beach to our left. We saw some large fishing boats and several huts, apparently the habitations of fishermen along the shore marked G. When we got off the point G we had irregular and very strong gusts of wind off the high land, and we could get no bottom with a hand line of 14 fathoms. Westward of the point H is a beach of about three quarters of a mile on which is a village consisting of ten or twelve houses13; some of these appeared very lately to have suffered from fire. On seeing the vessel approach, five or six men ran to the top of a small, but rather high conical rock, at H, as if for protection, here they remained till we passed them. The wind still blew fresh in puffs off the land, and we could get no bottom, at length however we got up to anchor eastward of H. and anchored in 13 fathoms hard gravel and shells, with 15 fathoms under the ship's stern. From the strength and irregularity of the squalls, the rapidity of the currents in this narrow channel, and the badness of the ground on which we had anchored, Captain Proctor wished to get away again with the vessel as soon as possible; we therefore went on shore on the island of Cowhee, agreeable to your Excellency's instructions.\n\nWe first stood over to the point I, we found no bottom with the hand line till very near the shore, where we had seven fathoms with a rocky bottom. We could not land here owing to the sea occasioned by the wind and current. We rowed eastward along the island six or seven hundred yards, where we turned a rocky point, close to which we had 34 fathoms with a rocky bottom, and a little way further out 17 fathoms. East of this is a small bay about 300 yards from point to point, and 80 or 100 yards in depth. In this bay we had 7, 6, 5 and 44 fathoms over soft mud,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1964.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qz20zx09r", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 204963, "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": 71, "title": "RAS-1965", "content_text": "64\n\n6.\n\n7.\n\n8.\n\n9.\n\nJ. MCCOY (1958). A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York.\n\nWang, Li (1932). Une Prononciation Chinoise de Po-pei. Paris.\n\nand Ch'ien Sung-sheng (1949-50a), “Chu-chiang San-chiao-chou Fan-yin Tsung-lun\" (A General Discussion of Local Dialects in the Pearl River Delta), Ling-nan Hsüeh-pao (Lingnan Journal), Vol. 10, No. 2.\n\nand Ch'ien Sung-sheng (1949-50b). \"Tai-shan Fang-yin\" (The Toishan Dialect), Ling-nan Hsieh-pao (Lingnan Journal), Vol. 10, No. 2.\n\n10. Ward, Barbara E, (1954). \"A Hong Kong Fishing Village,\" Journal of Oriental Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1. Hong Kong.\n\n11. (1965). “Varieties of the Conscious Model, The Fishermen of South China,\" The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology. London. From the Association of Social Anthropologists Monographs.\n\n12. Wong, S. L. (1963). Cantonese Conversation Grammar. Hong Kong.\n\n13. Yuan, Chia-hua, and others (1960), Han-yü-fang-yen Kai-yao (The Principal Features of Chinese Dialects). Peking.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1965.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205318, "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-1967", "page_number": 80, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "EXPANSION AND EXTENSION IN HAKKA SOCIETY\n\n73\n\n2 There are indications that this mountain area at one time was inhabited by non-Chinese Yao people; Barnett 1957, p. 261. The present inhabitants, however, are all Hakka- and Cantonese-speaking Chinese, settled here for only about 300 years.\n\n3 The estimated average price for local unmilled rice is (1965) HK$28 per picul for first crop rice. The corresponding figure for second crop rice is HK$36 a picul.\n\n4 Chiu 1964, p. 77.\n\n5 Bot. Report 1906, p. 221.\n\nIt could be added that a fish hawker is touring the area daily. He is from Sai Kung and his route includes Grass Field Village and Plum Grove Village. There are also other occasional peddlers, trading in food and sweets. Some shops can be found at the mining workers' settlement at Ma On Shan. Fishermen call at the pier there every morning. People from Big Stream Village often take advantage of these facilities.\n\n7 S., D. W. 1900, p. 202f. See also Tregear & Berry 1959, p. 12ff, and Hayes 1966, p. 128f.\n\n8 In a village just outside Canton, \"almost all those who went to work on ships were Wongs. This was chiefly due to the functioning of kinship relations in economic life. One who knew of an opportunity in one's own occupation usually recommended it to a kinsman. A Lee already engaged in business in Hong Kong would hire his own relatives as help or recommend them to fellow businessmen who might need help. A Wong in the 'hard labour' business, an activity tightly controlled by secret societies, or in marine work, did the same for his own kinsmen.\" Yang 1959, p. 73.\n\n9 Lockhart Report, p. 557. Census 1911, p. 103.\n\n10 Skinner 1964/65, p. 202. For further details, see Groves 1965a and 1965b.\n\n11 The Ng people in Plum Grove Village have no connections with the former Grass Field people of the same surname.\n\n12 The coastal area of Kwangtung was the scene of a dramatic mass deportation, executed by the Ch'ing occupants as a counter-measure in the struggle against raiding Ming loyalists. This course of action was carried out from 1661. Eight years later the coastal strip was declared open for settlement and an active policy by the Viceroy of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, A Ke-min, lured immigrants to the waste lands. The main influx of Hakka to the New Territories was in the following decades. If this is correct it may be that the Lau people appeared in this area during the course of this re-occupation. See Hui 1963, p. 89ff.\n\nSee Hui 1963, p. 89ff. However, Professor Freedman (1967) has quite correctly pointed out that the data are by no means conclusive on the effective evacuation of the area.\n\n13 Skinner 1964/65, p. 37.\n\n14 Freedman 1958, p. 50.\n\n15 In the Hakka village in the Tolo Harbour area, studied by Jean Pratt, at the Chinese New Year 'all the men go to the lineage hall in a village across the valley, where they claim their ancestors lived. Pratt 1960, p. 149. But note supplementary information in Freedman 1966, p. 41; this issue, however, has no bearing on my argument. Similar social ceremonialism seems to have occurred among the Cantonese-speaking Punti population. See Hayes 1962, p. 28.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205383, "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-1967", "page_number": 145, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "138\n\nSALT MANUFACTURE IN HONG KONG\n\nS. Y. LIN\n\nEditor's Note. This article, which is of considerable ethnographic and nearly thirty years after-historical interest, first appeared in the pre-war publication The Hong Kong Naturalist (1930-41), Volume X, No. 1, January 1940. The editor of this interesting series, Dr. G. A. C. Herklots, Reader in Biology at the University of Hong Kong 1928-45 and Principal and Director of Research at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, Trinidad 1953-60, has kindly given permission to reproduce it here. It is hoped that the article will be of interest to present-day residents of Hong Kong as well as providing for scholars a record of salt-production on the South China coast by both the leaching (percolation) and solar (evaporation) processes, now practically defunct in Tai O where the salt pans have been almost deserted for several years past. The author, Dr. Shu-yen Lin, who is now with the Fisheries Division, Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction Taipei, Taiwan (Formosa) has also expressed his agreement to the article being reproduced. I have added a few notes which, it is hoped, will be of some interest and may encourage others to take up this interesting subject in more detail.\n\nIn three places only is salt prepared from sea-water in the Colony namely at Tai O, a fishing village on Lantau island, Sha-taukok on the frontier in Starling Inlet and San Hui in Castle Peak Bay. Of these the first is the most important.\n\nThe salt marsh at Tai O, which occupies an area of about 70 acres and is enclosed by high dykes to prevent flooding at high tide or by storms, is owned by three companies, two of which are slightly bigger than the third. The annual production in 1938 amounted to about 25,000 piculs (1,488 tons) valued at about $27,500. A small portion is consumed locally, chiefly by the fishermen in the salting of fish, and all the rest is exported.\n\nThe companies lease the salines from Government and sub-let to individual salt-makers or hire them on a piece-wage basis in the form of shares in the profits. In the former case each salt-farmer leases a small saline of about 1/10 acre from the company, paying a rental of $2.00 per month, and endeavours to produce as much salt as possible from this limited area of land. The salt produced, however, must be sold to the company from which the saline has been leased. The company should be able to pay the farmer at a fixed price (50 cents per picul for 1938-1939), immediately on receiving the salt. On the average,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205411, "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-1967", "page_number": 173, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "166\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nheld office for many years on the main advisory bodies representing the Chinese community in the Colony, including the District Watchmen's Committee, the Tung Wah Hospital Committee, the Chinese Public Dispensaries Committee and the Po Leung Kuk.15\n\nSir Show-son CHOW's son, Mr. CHOW Yat-kwong, J.P. has kindly given permission for members to visit the house in the New Village which contains the family's ancestral hall,\n\nIII. THE Hung Shing Temple And AP LEI CHAU\n\nThe Hung Shing Temple, The Hung Shing Temple at Ap Lei Chau, judging by the temple bell, dates from the 18th century.16 It appears to have been enlarged in 1847 and some wall-tablets show that it was given a major repair in 1888. The present building dates from that time or earlier. Its origin is uncertain because it is not clear who built it in the first instance. Records show that the Ap Li Chau land population was \"no more than two or three families of Hakka grass cutters\" before 1841, so that we must look elsewhere for the builders. It could have only been built and supported by the joint efforts of the local (i.e. Aberdeen) land people and boat population. The former only amounted to a few hundreds before the British came, but the boat population was probably as considerable before 1841 as after, e.g. 415 boats and 2,243 persons at the 1856 census18 and 424 boats and 4,130 persons in 1866.19\n\nThe temple is interesting in that it has old-style flagpoles still standing in front of the building. Old prints frequently show this kind of pole; but though a few bases can still be seen nowadays in Hong Kong, Macau and the New Territories these could be the only ones left with the poles and their basket-like tops still in place.\n\nAp Lei Chau before 1911. The present land settlement on Ap Lei Chau was founded in the early decades of British rule. By the mid-1860's there were 60 houses there, which implies that several hundred residents were living on the island at that time.20 By 1897 the number of residents was 1,123 rising to 1,437 at the Colony Census of 1911.21 This population gained its livelihood to a great extent from concerns directly associated with the fishing industry, such as boat-building yards, ship chandlers and rope and sail works, and from provision shops and general stores that also catered for the fishermen's daily needs.22 There was very", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205610, "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-1968", "page_number": 152, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n147\n\nIt is in connexion with worship of “Mother” that the lay-out of the shrine rooms in vegetarian halls of the sect is important. Mother must be placed higher than any other deity and should occupy a room to herself (or occasionally shared with Kuan-yin with whom, as we have said, she is sometimes identified). This means that halls of the sect should whenever possible be built on two storeys, with \"Mother's\" room on the upper storey. This was so in the case of all the halls visited. Usually, one of the popular triads is housed in the main downstairs shrine-room (occasionally one finds an image downstairs of the many-armed Chun-t'i: “Goddess of Dawn\" supposedly of Buddhist origin, but she was not present in the halls visited).\n\nUpstairs besides the room dedicated to “Mother\" there is often a shrine also for the soul-tablets of past members.\n\nMembers of the Society were fortunately permitted to visit all shrine rooms (some halls do not permit outsiders to enter the \"Mother\" room).\n\nRelations between the Halls and the Ngau Chi Wan Village\n\nThere is a certain amount of inter-action between the halls at Ngau Chi Wan and the village of this name which, though on the fringe of urban Kowloon and augmented by neighbouring squatter huts and factions, is still largely inhabited by the descendants of founding Hakka families who came to this spot in the mid-eighteenth century and after. The annual festival of the god of the main village temple (said to be a Ch'iu Ch'au deity whose image was brought up from the sea off Ngau Chi Wan by village fishermen a long time ago) occurs on the 25th of the 2nd lunar month. At this time the inmates of the halls visit the opera performance that is held in a matshed on open ground in front of the KAM HA CHING SHE and worship at the portable shrine that is brought on these occasions from the temple half a mile away. Our visit took place just before this festival and already the bamboo structure on which the matshed for the opera was to be built, was being erected. A large temporary cooking stove had also been constructed for the occasion for serving vegetarian food (which Marjorie Topley gathered in conversation with some of the inmates was contracted for by the village temple association from the vegetarian halls).\n\nAgain, at the Festival of Hungry Ghosts on the 7th of the 7th moon, it is “traditional” practice for about 100 students from the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205636, "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-1968", "page_number": 178, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n173\n\nestates of which none can be said to have the identity inhering in its predecessor. The so-called joint family has a short life.\n\nRitual primogeniture is inherent in the worship, but rests on a true primogeniture of a much older phase. No one son can step effectively into his father's shoes and exercise authority over the same range of people. Married sons are not seen as a threat to the father's position and the father, also, does not, once in his soul-tablet, support the authority of sons over their juniors. In a nut-shell then, the ancestor is worshipped but cannot be used as a major instrument of domestic discipline.\n\nMiss Ward's paper is very different in subject matter and theoretical interest to that of Dr. Freedman's but again is concerned with matters on which Professor Firth has done considerable work: peasant communities, including fishing communities, and their economies. \"Chinese Fishermen in Hong Kong: their Post-Peasant Economy\" is based particularly on data derived by Miss Ward from the village of Kau Sai which is on the shores of a narrow strait between two small islands in the Port Shelter area of Hong Kong's waters. It was there, in the early 'fifties, that Miss Ward first began her field work on the boat people.\n\nThe essay discusses problems of economic and social change. Miss Ward talks of the rapid technological changes in the fishing industry (whereas in 1952 in Kau Sai all but one boat had been wind-driven, by mid-1963 only one was not mechanized). She argues that this was possible because the economic attitudes of the fishermen and the social structure of fishing communities were already favourable. When the opportunity to adopt useful technical change was offered, it was likely to be seized upon unless blocked by something else. By 1950 the opportunity to mechanize did appear -- engines were available. By then the possible educational block had also been partly removed, and government action in freeing the market, injecting money and providing training courses and encouragement was all that was required to set a revolution in action.\n\nThe essay deals with the effects of mechanization and change on different kinds of fishermen, and changes in social structure consequent on such developments, highlighting as a factor of general importance the movement of boat-people to land-dwellings. This affects particularly the position of women, changing their opportunities to earn an independent income either by working in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205974, "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": 54, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "HONG KONG CADETS, 1862 - 1941\n\n49\n\nThe staffing situation improved between 1897 and 1901 and 12 more cadets were recruited from England, the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States including Reginald Fleming Johnston, Cecil Clementi, A. G. M. Fletcher,50 and Geoffrey Norman Orme. The incorporation of the New Territories into the Colony meant that more recruits would be needed for district administration and as members of the Land Court set up to determine thorny problems of land ownership and tenancy.52 However, 17 cadets were recruited between 1901 and the end of 1914. There were losses of course: notably the gifted Stewart Lockhart who was transferred in 1902 to Wei-hai-wei as H.M.'s Commissioner, and the equally gifted R. F. Johnston who was also transferred to Wei-hai-wei as District Officer in 1904.\n\nA posting in the New Territories provided for some younger cadets an escape-hatch that removed them from office life in the Colonial Secretariat and other departments in the Central District. Service in the New Territories, a mainly agricultural area dotted with small village communities and small market towns, had more in common with colonial service in Africa and South-East Asia, and the cadet was left comparatively free to go his own way, lead an open-air life and exercise judicious authority. The job demanded initiative, stamina, and magisterial skills; and, if one is to believe Mr. Austin Coates,54 a cadet at a much later date, it was a deeply rewarding life which allowed a cadet to become involved in the lives of simple people, farmers and fishermen, small shopkeepers and craftsmen. Certainly, the report of the District Officers for the New Territories, such as those written by Stewart Carne Ross, have a little more colour than the stilted administrative reports presented annually by heads of departments.\n\nBy the 1920s cadets had become entrenched in most government departments and they filled all the senior posts in the Colonial Secretariat, the directing and co-ordinating agency of government. The exceptions were some departments, such as the Medical and Sanitary Services, Public Works, the Royal Observatory, and Marine Department, which necessitated at the top someone with specialist knowledge. The Inspector General of Police (also in charge of the Fire Brigade), the Director of Education, the Postmaster General, and the Superintendent of Imports and Exports, however, were all cadets, but not the...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206109, "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": 189, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "184\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nthat the bay presented for boats taking shelter in bad weather, these pirates were gradually displaced by fishing people and shopkeepers, leading in time to a permanent settlement. (See 香港百年史 Centenary History of Hong Kong 南中編譯出 Hi Ep 7 n.d. pp. 74-75).\n\nThe name Ngo-yan-wan appears to have been used officially, too. Government Notification No. 69 of 1857 which appears in The Hongkong Government Gazette for May 9, 1857 describes District No. 2 Show-ke-wan as being \"from Hoong-heung-loo to the village of Ngo-yan-wan, taking in Wong-kok-tsai, Chut-che-mooey, Shui-cheang-wan, Show-ke-wan and Ngo-yan-wan,\" but it is not clear to which part of the present extended Shau Kei Wan Ngo-yan-wan belonged,\n\nThe oldest part of Shau Kei Wan, where original settlement took place, is along the Main Street East which we shall visit today. Many old houses probably dating from the 1850's to 1870's are still in existence. It is likely that the style of building followed that in contemporary Victoria and the Western district, though successive waves of redevelopment have left few traces of them there. They are all shop houses, and a count of the present shops in old premises shows besides groceries and general stores 9 Chinese herb shops, 7 josspaper shops, 7 fishing suppliers, 5 goldsmiths and 5 rice shops, indicating long established lines of trade with a predominantly fishing clientele*.\n\nIn Main Street East is the Tin Hau Temple. The existing building dates from the 1870's, but since the inscription above the entrance states this to be a reconstruction, it is likely that a smaller building stood on the same site for many years before. A stone tablet dated 1876 states that it was badly damaged by the famous typhoon of 1874, necessitating a major repair. In this connection there is an interesting parallel with the Tam Kung Temple below which had also to be rebuilt a short time after its first construction owing to a more than usually destructive typhoon. The temple contains two other major shrines to Kwun Yam (Goddess of Mercy) and Lui Cho (one of the most prominent among the later Taoist patriarchs).\n\nsee\n\n* A prominent local shopkeeper has told me that, pre-war, fishermen would not go outside Main Street East for business or pleasure.\n\nThe shop houses are shown in plates 21-22,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206124, "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": 204, "title": "RAS-1970", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n197\n\ntook place locally, in the areas just across the Sino-British border at Sha Tau Kok. The villagers of these three places became alarmed for the fate of their cherished Tin Hau image and brought it into British territory for safety. They also brought back two incense burners (†) dated in the 2nd and 3rd years of Kuang Hsü (1876-78) that had been donated by local shops and fishermen in one case and by Lin Ma Hang (A) natives then in Australia (J).\n\nThe leaders of the three villages then combined to form the Sha Tau Kok Three Villages Tin Hau Temple Building Committee (沙頭角三鄉籌建天后廟委員會) and obtained a temporary building permit from the Tai Po District Office to erect a temple for the image. The temple is situated at map reference KV 140962 at the west end of Kong Ha Village in the Frontier Closed Area. It is under the management of a special trust, the Sam Wo Tong (*) constituting one manager each from Tong To, Tan Shui Hang and Sha Tsui villages.\n\nPhotographs of this new temple and of the Tin Hau image which inspired such devotion can be seen at Plates 30 and 31.\n\nPlace names used in this note can be found in A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories. (H.K. Govt. Printer, n.d. but 1960) pp. 216-218.\n\nHong Kong, 1970.\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nPILE HOUSES AT TAI O, LANTAU ISLAND, HONG KONG,\n\n7TH JANUARY 1937\n\nEditor's Note\n\nThe following details of some of the interesting pile houses or matsheds on stilts that survive in considerable numbers in Tai O Creek to the present day are taken from one of Mr. Walter Schofield's notebooks, under the date given in the heading. Mr. Schofield (1888-1968) served in the Hong Kong Cadet (Administrative) Service between 1911-1938 in various posts, including those of District Officer South, Chief Assistant Secretary for Chinese Affairs and First Police Magistrate. He was also a well-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1970.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207060, "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": 131, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "The Hong Kong Region\n\n125\n\nthe inhabitants were less fortunate and had either to flee into the hills or stay to oppose or meet the pirates' demands. Walls were built or repaired, and a defence by desperate men of even these not very imposing defences might help to stave off an attack. Village refuges, into which cattle and livestock, valuables, women and children and old people were put, were also utilised. One of these places existed at Shek Pik, but was already in ruins by about 1900.1 Most villages kept arms and even cannon available for use up to 1899 and some of these remain to this day.2\n\nNonetheless, the villagers' position was pitiful in the event of attack, and their attitude towards pirates was probably too often similar to that recorded by Commander Vansittart of H.M.S. Bittern from the River Min in March, 1855:\n\n+ miserably poor boats followed the Brig begging assistance; one Village sent me a well drawn up petition; another a present of waste paper and Joss-stick; fishermen, and passage boats, small Traders, all telling the same pitiable story; landing on Hootow, I was quickly surrounded by Peasantry; desiring the Interpreter to ask them why so many fine looking fellows permitted strangers to molest them; they declared it was useless to resist Pirates, and so whenever Pirates came the villagers hid themselves and cried.\n\nThis extract, quoted from Miss Fox's book,3 shows how Chinese on land and sea suffered at the hands of their less scrupulous fellow countrymen.\n\nThings were no better on the sea at the end of the century. L. C. Arlington of the Chinese Maritime Customs, who spent six years 1893-1899 in charge of the Customs station at Cheung Chau, says;\n\n'as well as other numerous islands forming the Ladrones, [it] was the rendezvous of pirates, who kept all of us on the qui vive, foreigners and natives alike. Gangs of pirates would get together and attack the villages, even in broad daylight, and after looting and killing, escape either to Macau or Hong Kong, where they disposed of their booty. The Customs Officers had many tussles and narrow escapes from these pests of the sea.\n\n1 The elders told me about it after I had come across a reference to it as a place name in an old deed of sale of fields in the valley.\n\n2 R. L. Ozorio, personal communication on the village armoury of Kak Tin, Shatin Valley, 1973. These arms were, of course, sometimes used against other villages.\n\n3 Fox, p. 130.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207106, "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": 177, "title": "RAS-1974", "content_text": "LEGENDS & STORIES OF THE NEW TERRITORIES\n\n171\n\nTang Leung Sz passed Kung Shaang degree in the 38th year of Maan Lik♬ of Ming dynasty, A.D. 1610, and held the office of Fan-to.\n\nTang Yue Cheung took his Sau-t'soi✯✯ degree in the 2nd year of Yung Ching of Ts'ing dynasty A.D. 1724 and in the following year became a Lam Shang. In the first year of Kin-lung✯✯ A.D. 1736 he passed Kui Yan, second in the list of successful candidates, but just failed to pass the Wui Shi examination the following year. However, his name was put on the Ming T'ung Pong list and he was appointed as Hok-ching of Tak Hing Chau in Kwangtung province.\n\nTang Yue Cheung's name in the San On Record book is among the “Heung Yin\" or \"village worthies,\" and it is said there that:— Tang Yue Cheung was a scholar of a very kind and honest nature. He was very \"taan-chik”✯✯ (\"to wear the heart upon the sleeve for daws to peck at\") and his knowledge of learning was very wide. In all his dealings with his friends he was sincere and faithful, and as a Hok-ching he was very diligent. Once some of his students fell out with the authorities, and found themselves faced with a false accusation, but were too afraid to defend themselves. Tang, however, at once entered into the dispute, and through his clear-headedness kept his students out of trouble. In the 17th year of K'in Lung A.D. 1752 Tang was called to the capital to attend an examination, but he died there, and Fung Shing Sau (a Hon Lam graduate) wrote the epitaph \"for his name lives for ever,” to be carved on his grave.\n\nTang Man Wai was the only Tsun-sz come from the New Territories, and his name is recorded in the San On book under the column devoted to hang yee \"men of high repute.\" He was left fatherless at an early age, and had to work with the fishermen and wood-cutters in great poverty, to earn money to support himself and his mother. But all the while he was a scholar at heart and in his spare time he read his books and people said that he could be heard continually humming his lessons on the road, as he carried wood or worked with the fishermen. His uncle Tang Chan Ng, a Lam Shang, helped him, and his success in later years was greatly due to the old man's teaching. In the 14th year of Shun Chi A.D. 1657, Ts'ing dynasty, he passed his Kui Yan degree, but later failed for Tsun Sz and so returned to Kam T'in where he passed twenty years or more, living as a hermit.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207618, "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": 6, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "166\n\nDAVID FAURE\n\nin Sheung Yiu, Tsak Yue Wu, Tai Mong Tsai, She Tau, Shek Hang, Tai Long, Wo Mei, Nam Wai, and Ho Chung.1\n\nFinally, the pirates must not be omitted in any discussion of the early history of Sai Kung. It would seem that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the pirates were most rampant in the outer reaches of the region. Seung Sz Wan and Hang Hau Village kept two guns on the two arms of the bay to be directed against pirates. Madam Lau of Seung Sz Wan remembered that the pirates once came into the village, and took away the villagers' pigs. In Tan Ka Wan, there were bandits in the late 1920's and 1930's, and the young men had to keep watch regularly.1\n\n15\n\nUp to the early 1900's, despite the economic development, Sai Kung was not yet in any strict sense a \"district\". There is no indication that the villagers of the time thought of the area that is now Sai Kung District as a single territorial unit. Crucial to the creation of the district was the founding of Sai Kung Market.\n\nSAI KUNG MARKET AND ITS TRADE\n\nThe San On Gazetteer of 1819 did not consider either Sai Kung or Hang Hau to be a market. Unlike other markets in the New Territories, periodic market gatherings were not held here at any time. As Mr. Yau T’aam Shang explained it to us, \"Sai Kung in those days was not a market; it was a moorage inlet.\"10\n\nIn 1835, Lai Tak Yau, a Tanka fisherman who sometimes served as pilot for Western sailing boats, took by force some four thousand dollars from one that was hit by storm. Out of this, he spent over a hundred dollars to settle his debts with the general store San Ue T'aai on Leung Shuen Wan. He went on a shopping spree, and spent more than a hundred dollars on Peng Chau and Cheung Chau, buying silk goods from the shops in the latter place. He left most of the balance with a certain Wong Yau Kwong, of Kowloon, a Tanka boatman who owned a large fishing boat and moored at Fat Tong Mun. Wong, in turn, went to San Ue T'aai, and purchased four hundred and fifty dollars' worth of provisions, and then, because he thought", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207620, "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": 8, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "168\n\nDAVID FAURE\n\nand others from Sai Kung over the mountains past Mau Ping and Wong Chuk Shan to Siu Lek Yuen and the Shatin area. To the north, there were ferries from Kei Ling Ha to Tai Po Market.21 Sai Kung was therefore conveniently located in the centre of local trade routes to Tai Po, Kowloon, Shatin and via Hang Hau, also Shaukiwan. It was an ideal location for a market in the region.\n\nMrs. Kong Lei San Kiu, who married into Lung Mei Village, used to farm, raise pigs, and cut firewood. When a pig had been fattened to a hundred catties, she carried it into Sai Kung with some assistance, and sold it to the butchers. Sometimes she carried firewood into Kowloon, and sometimes into Sai Kung. If she carried it to Sai Kung, she sold it to shops which in turn sold it to the boat people. She would buy oil, salt, and sundries to take back to the village.22 Many other villagers, like Mrs. Kong, also sold pigs and firewood in the markets in order to buy daily necessities.\n\nThe fishermen also came to Sai Kung, but many did not have to come personally for there was a wide collecting network working for the shops. Mr. Chan Kei Shang of Yim Tin Tsai, who used to work in the two teams of fishing boats known as the “ku-tsai” in the village, used to salt his fish and send them by the ferries to Sai Kung. These ferries were operated by Hakka people from Sai Kung Market, and they sold the salt fish for the fishermen. For some time, Mr. Chan Shau of Pak Tam Au worked on a Mr. Kong's boat selling rice, oil, salt, and biscuits to the boat people. Fish-mongers with their own boats also came from Tai Po and Kowloon, and collected fish directly from the fishermen.23\n\nVillagers obtained their supplies on credit. Nam Shan villagers, for instance, shopped regularly at Kwong Tak Lung in Sai Kung Market, and they were given credit for such daily necessities as rice and sugar. They paid for their supplies by selling grass to the shop, which was used as fuel. Piglets were also obtained from the shops on credit, and when fattened, the pigs were re-sold back to the shops. Fishermen also relied on credit for their supplies. Mr. Cheung Ming Shing from Leung Shuen Wan purchased his fishing equipment from Saam T'aai, and his food supply from Saam Shing, both of Sai Kung Market.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207621, "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": 9, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "169\n\nHe paid when he had money, but he always settled his accounts before Chinese New Year so that the shops would give him his New Year supplies.2 Interest was charged for credit; it was nominally 30 percent per annum.25\n\nThe rice, salt, oil, and many other articles (school books and stationery, incense and ritual paper, etc.) had to be imported into Sai Kung from outside. Kerosene was introduced towards the 1910's or 1920's and came to be used in kerosene lamps. Villagers from seaside villages and the boat people also depended on the Sai Kung shipyards for boat building, repair, and the annual removal of barnacles from the boats. The wood used in the shipyards was imported from Fat Shan or Wai Chau, and iron nails were supplied by a ship (the Sai Kung) that came regularly to the Market to take orders. Fishermen also needed fishing explosives.20 Neither the land residents nor the boat people were by any means self-sufficient.\n\nThe markets, Sai Kung and Hang Hau, provided other important services besides ship-building and repair. Quite a few shops made rice wine, and a shop made beancurd. Sai Kung also provided a Taoist priest, and the most important temple in the area.\n\nRoman Catholic converts from villages nearer Sai Kung (e.g. Nam Shan) as well as other villagers attended Sung Chen, the Church school in the market. There can be no question that from the early 1900's, Sai Kung Market and Hang Hau were growing as local marketing centres.\n\nA substantial portion of the trade in the Sai Kung region must nonetheless have bypassed the two markets. Lime, much of the firewood, and some of the pigs were taken directly to Kowloon without passing through the markets. Where Sai Kung and Hang Hau were crucial, it would seem, was in the provision of local services and retail, and in gathering fish for Kowloon and Hong Kong. Even those fishmongers who collected directly from the fishermen for the city markets sent the fish ashore in Sai Kung to be carried into Kowloon by village women. The fish could not have been very fresh when it arrived, and much of it was probably salted before it was sold.28\n\nOn the premise that the primary functions of the markets were largely local services and retail, the marketing regions can", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "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": 208116, "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-1977", "page_number": 155, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "CHEUNG CHOW LONG ISLAND\n\n-\n\n139\n\nwith a deft sweep of the foot, does one see more than an ankle.\n\nOur friend on the other side is not so particular. He sits in the open space between two counters of his shop, and having rolled his cotton singlet up into his armpits, fans with languid strokes a portly form, naked to a very low waist. Now the road begins to widen. It is almost four strides across at this point, owing no doubt to the zeal of some P.W.D. official, but as the extra width is entirely taken up with stalls extended from the shops, no loss of custom can be said to result.\n\nWe have come through a crowded street, and not seen a scowl or a frown, not been jostled, or hustled. The sweating burdened porters have been given right of way, politely asked for, and as graciously conceded. For in China men respect the burden. There are no cars or even bicycles to upset the stream, but if a European, in the usual hurry to leave a boat or catch a boat walks rapidly through the street, there is sometimes a little awkward eddy in the stream, and people have to step aside into shops while the impatient one passes. Not that the Europeans push or rudely press, for there is perfect good temper, and understanding on both sides; but distinguished foreigners in all countries are apt to be in a hurry, one has to help them on their way.\n\nNow we are in the market place... rows of stalls covered with canvas shades set forth cigarettes and sweets, vegetables, fish and meat. Cooked food is here in plenty, steaming soups and succulent pork: cheap Japanese matches, cottons and tin and hardware: but above all, food. The Chinese like to snatch a snack now and then between the main meals. Many coolies feed entirely on snacks obtained at these stalls, drink a cup of tea, take a cake or a bowl of rice, and put down a few cents before they gird up their loins and pass on to the next task. There is also a restaurant of two storeys here, overlooking the pier, the first storey buttressed by barbers' parlours, resplendent with mirrors and American barbers' chairs made in Canton. This is the Cantonese or Punti ward, here in the centre where drapers' shops, and chandlers, the pawnshop and houses are thickest. The Punti is one of the world's best traders and financiers within his own range, and it is here or hereabouts that the village magnates live and work. Here are the money lenders and fish merchants, the landlords and rulers of the people, the mortgage holders for whom the fishermen mostly work. This is the down town section, and the operations are probably", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208280, "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-1978", "page_number": 4, "title": "RAS-1978", "content_text": "183\n\nthere would have been some people who could make use of them. These, often village teachers, acted as scribes for other villagers.59\n\nLivelihood\n\nThe village economy in 1920 was not self-sufficient. The increase in trade since the mid-nineteenth century had brought about a type of economy that gave priority to subsistence, but that nonetheless depended directly or indirectly on trade with the city. It was a common pattern, even in better-off families, to find that the men worked outside the village, either independently or in employment, while the women farmed at home. The land yielded two crops of rice per annum, and an additional catch crop of sweet potatoes. But it was frequently asserted in interviews that it was not possible for a family to grow enough for a year's supply, and extra rice (as much as half a year's supply) had to be purchased from Sai Kung Market. Outside village income no doubt paid for some of these purchases, but those who farmed also sold firewood and pigs, and helped to transport fish into Kowloon, and for all these activities they were paid in cash. These different sources of cash income, in conjunction with the credit arrangements provided by the shops in Sai Kung, enabled villagers to make regular purchases.60 There were also other sources of income. Until cement replaced lime just before World War II, the lime kilns were profitable. There were also the occasional villages with specialized economic activities: Wong Chuk Shan being noted, for instance, for the making of rice polishers, and Tai Lam Wu for providing the wedding sedan chair, the carriers, and the musicians, for wedding ceremonies. The fishermen, of course, sold their fish, and bought rice, meat, and firewood, with their cash income.61\n\nAs far as can be ascertained, nobody starved in Sai Kung, but for the majority, life was not luxurious. Only the better-off had rice for every meal, and for many, for at least part of the year, rice was cooked mixed with sweet potatoes.62 Fortunately, most villagers owned the land that they farmed, but those who rented land had to pay half the crop as rent.63 Women, in particular, led a fairly harsh life. The history of Mrs. Shing,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208843, "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-1980", "page_number": 5, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "204\n\nDAVID FAURE\n\nhsü 12 (1886). In the Kau Sai Hung Shing Temple, the lintel is dated Kuang-hsü 15 (1889), and the altar Kuang-hsü 20 (1894); and in the Hang Hau T'in Hau Temple (besides the 1840 bell), the lintel is dated Kuang-hsü 1 (1875), a tablet Kuang-hsü 2 (1876), an altar is of the same year, a wooden board of Kuang-hsü 4 (1878), a shrine of Kuang-hsü 10 (1884), a pair of stone lions of Kuang-hsü 13 (1887), and a pair of incense burners of Kuang-hsü 20 (1894). The bell and the incense burner at the Tin Ha Wan T'in Hau Temple are both undated, but Mr. Ip Ch'un, who lived nearby, told us that the temple was already in disrepair over fifty years ago. Historical inscriptions found in Sai Kung and elsewhere in Hong Kong and the New Territories have been transcribed as a special project and may be found in David Faure, Alice Ng, and Bernard Luk, \"A collection of historical inscriptions in Hong Kong\". The report is available in the Institute of Chinese Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and will, it is hoped, be published shortly.\n\n7\n\nMr. Hoh Taai of Ko Tong, aged over 60, knew of the whereabouts of a charcoal burner, but never saw it in operation (Int. 10.6.81). Lime kilns were reported in Wong Yi Chau, Wong Keng Tei, Tai Mong Tsai Tso Wo Hang, Tai Wan, Kiu Tsui, Sha Ha, Pak Sha Wan, Che Keng Tuk, Ta Ho Tun, Tai Tan, and Yau Yu Wan (Ints. Mr. Yau T'aam Shang 15.5.81, 22.5.81, Mr. Wong Yung Ts'ing 20.5.81, Mr. Tang Kei Faat 25.6.81, Mr. Lei Yau 28.6.81, Mr. Wong Ping Lin 29.6.81, Madam Liu 20.5.81, Mr. Lau Lui Faat 23.6.81, Mr. Tse Wing 9.6.81, Mr. Tse Shui Kam 24.6.81, Madam Lo Koon Mooi 21.6.81, Mrs. Hoh née Lei 28.6.81, Mr. Chung 23.7.81, and Madam Lam Yau Ch'un 19.8.81.) The Liu family at Kiu Tsui built the ancestral hall that can be seen today on the main road into Sai Kung Market. For an impression of the long history of lime making in Sai Kung, it should be noted that Madam Lo Koon Mooi was 85 and Mr. Yau T'aam Shang 87 in 1981, and it was their fathers who were engaged in the lime business. Mr. Yau continued working the kilns until his early 40's. Brick kilns were reported in Chek Keng and Pak Tam Chung (Ints. Mr. Chiu Sz 7.5.81 and Mr. Yau T'aam Shang 15.5.81, 22.5.81). The lime industry, of course, also provided income for fishermen who collected coral for the kilns. See \"Return of the approximate number of fishermen employed in taking coral and shell from the sea adjoining the New Territory\", in Hong Kong Legislative Council, Sessional Papers, 1901, p. 685.\n\n\"The best indication of the growing importance of the trade in pigs is a set of account books that belonged to Mr. Yung Sz Ch'iu of Pak Sha O, a photocopy of which is held by the Oral History Project. See also ints. Mr. Chan Tsz K'eung 28.5.81 and Mr. Hoh King 5.6.81.\n\n• There are many instances of seamen recruited by recruitment firms (haang shuen koon); see, eg. Mr. Chiu Sz (Int. 7.5.81). Remittance from abroad was sent back to the village through import-export houses (kam shan tsong), see Mr. Yau T'aai Hong (Int. 11.8.81).\n\n10 Mr. Cheung T'o's grandfather was a cook on Hong Kong Island, and his father was employed on the Kowloon-Canton Railway. Mr. Cheung, of Ho Chung, was c. 70 in 1981 (Int. 15.6.81). Mr. Tsang Yau of Tai Mong Tsai (age unknown, but who married before World War II) worked in a shop started by his father in Shaukiwan on Hong Kong Island (Int. 23.6.81).\n\n11 Ints. Mr. Cheng Chung Ting 21.5.81, Mr. Chan P'aang Hing 29.5.81, Mr. Chan T'aai 22.7.81; Bernard Williams, \"Visit to Ho Chung and Sheung Yeung villages in the Sai Kung area”, in Marjorie Topley, ed. Aspects of Social Organization in the New Territories, Hong Kong, 1965, pp. 46-47, and \"The Chan family of Tseung Kwan O\", JHKBRAS 7 (1967), pp. 158-160.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209245, "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": 148, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "134\n\nTA ACTON\n\n\"home village associations\", which are formed by all members of particular villages in China who have migrated to Hong Kong. The clubs are the home village associations of two little fishing villages left behind not in distance, but in time, engulfed by technological change and urban sprawl. The villages still exist, surrounded by or transmuted into flats, but their former inhabitants are as much spiritual exiles as most other Hong Kong Chinese.\n\nThat these clubs are not primarily economic in aim does not mean, however, that they cannot be used for economic advantage, of course. The members do help each other. Members of the clubs, for example, had managed to secure most of the life-guard jobs at the new Chai Wan public swimming pool.\n\nThe fishermen's club on Lamma Island was founded by a business-man who had been active in trade with China since the 1930s, Jonathan Gray. It is similar to those of Chai Wan and Stanley, but has been prepared to be more militant and public in its pressure group activity to gain compensation for fishermen when their best fishing areas off Lamma were being 'reclaimed'.\n\nThese three clubs, confined to a small area in the south of the territory, are the only instances that even approach an ethnic mobilisation of the Shui-sheung-yan,\n\nThe True Jesus Church\n\nThe True Jesus Church was founded in Peking in 1917, and is evidently part of the world-wide Pentecostal revival of the early years of this century. It is distinctive in that, as well as being charismatic, it is \"Seventh Day\" — that is, it holds the Sabbath should be celebrated on Saturday, not Sunday. It also holds that believers' baptism should be carried out by total immersion with the face facing downwards, and should be followed by the washing of feet. Otherwise, it is fairly orthodox in its evangelicalism. It describes itself as \"a revived apostolic church”, preaching \"a full gospel of salvation based on the truth in the Bible, accompanied by signs and miracles and the gifts of the Holy Spirit\".\n\nThe membership of this church remained almost wholly Chinese as it spread to South-East Asia, apart from some missionary work in Nigeria. Its headquarters are now in Taiwan. During the Japanese occupation in World War II, a lady fish merchant belonging to the church came to Hong Kong from Malaya to buy seafood. She began to preach to her Shui-sheung-yan suppliers, and to pray for healing for their", "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": 209762, "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-1983", "page_number": 21, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "that tentative plans to publish a collection of her initial papers on popular Chinese drama will come to fruition. Barbara's earlier essays, dealing with the boat people, conscious models and so on, are to be published in the near future by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press under the title Through Other Eyes: Essays in understanding 'conscious models' mostly in Hong Kong.\n\nBarbara was a founding member of the British Sociologists of China Research Group and her dedicated and imaginative contributions to sinological anthropology will be sorely missed by the group.\n\n(This Obituary was produced by the British Sociologists of China Research Group and printed in the Bulletin of the British Association of Chinese Studies and is reprinted here with the permission of the President of the British Association of Chinese Studies).\n\nNOTES\n\nSocial Organization of the Ewe-speaking People, M.A. Thesis, Anthropology, University of London, 1965.\nSome observations on religious cults in Ashanti, Africa, 26 (1): 47-61 (1956).\nAt the time of her death Barbara was writing the introduction to a revised version of Tien's monograph, The Chinese of Sarawak: A Study of Social Structure, (London, 1953).\n\nA Hong Kong fishing village, Journal of Oriental Studies, 1 (1): 195-214 (1954); A Hong Kong fishing village, Geographical Magazine 31 (6): 300-03 (1958); Floating villagers: Chinese fishermen in Hong Kong, Man, 59 (article 62): 44-45 (1959); The surge to the towns, Unesco Courier, 9: 5-6 (Sept., 1964); Varieties of the conscious model: The fishermen of south China, in M. Banton (ed.) The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology, (London, 1965); Sociological self-awareness: some uses of the conscious model, Man (N.S.) 1 (2): 201-15 (1966); Chinese fishermen in Hong Kong: their post-peasant economy, in M. Freedman (ed.) Social Organization—Essays Presented To Raymond Firth, (London, 1967); Temper tantrums in Kau Sai: some speculations upon their effects, in P. Mayer (ed.) Socialization: The Approach from Social Anthropology, (London, 1970); Women and technology in developing countries, Impact of Science on Society, 20 (1): 93-101 (1970).\n\nA small factory in Hong Kong: some aspects of its internal organization, in W. E. Willmott (ed.) Economic Organization in Chinese Society, (Stanford, 1972); A Hakka Kongsi in Borneo, Journal of Oriental Studies, 1 (2): 358-70 (1954). Note also Barbara's papers: Chinese secret societies, in N. Mackenzie (ed.) Secret Societies, (New York, 1967): The\n\nXX", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209763, "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-1983", "page_number": 22, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "integration of the child into a Chinese social world: a preliminary exploration of some non-literate village concepts, Psyche: Hong Kong Psychological Society Bulletin, 4: 7-17 (1980).\n\n• Cash or credit crops? an examination of some implications of peasant commercial production with special reference to the multiplicity of traders and middlemen, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 8 (2): 148-63 (1960). Reprinted in J. Potter, M. Diaz and G. Foster (eds.) Peasant Society: A Reader (Boston, 1967).\n\n7\n\n* Men, women and change: an essay in understanding social roles in south and south-east Asia, in B. E. Ward (ed). Women in New Asia, (Paris, 1963).\n\nLF\n\nVarieties of the conscious model: The fishermen of south China, in M. Banton (ed.) The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology, (London, 1965); Sociological self-awareness: some uses of the conscious model, Man (N.S.) 1 (2): 201-15 (1966). Note also her forthcoming essay, Folk models, decision and change, in B. E. Ward, Through Other Eyes: essays in understanding conscious models mostly in Hong Kong, (Hong Kong 1985).\n\n\"Barbara's writings on opera include: Readers and audiences: an exploration of the spread of traditional Chinese culture, in R. Jain Text and Context: The Social Anthropology of Tradition (Philadelphia, 1977); Not merely players: art and ritual in traditional China, Man (N.S.) 14 (1): 18-39 (1979); The red boats of the Canton delta: a historical chapter in the sociology of Chinese regional drama, (paper read at a conference held in Taipei, 1980); Regional operas and their audiences: evidence from Hong Kong, in (editor unknown) Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, forthcoming, probably 1984); see also John Law and Barbara E. Ward, Chinese Festivals (Hong Kong, 1982).\n\nxxi", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210162, "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-1984", "page_number": 133, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "112 \n\nJAMES HAYES \n\nen are all of the sort that go barefooted and work in the field. I have not seen one small-footed woman here. At least 8/10 of men here smoke opium.' \n\nAs we have seen, Aberdeen, about the same time, was, as Collinson reports, also a fishing port. According to another military observer, Captain Cunynghame, it contained about 200 buildings, and had “a very respectable appearance”. It is thus very likely that it engaged in the same mixed business as Stanley, and contained a similar size of population and a similar mixture of people.24 \n\nThe villagers were essentially farmers and fishermen relying on their padi fields for a subsistence rice crop twice a year, supplemented by coastal fishing. The old style of village life, that must have characterized Hong Kong's settlements before British rule, lingered on in its essentials well into this century until squatters and development ended the old life style. Even as late as 1967, at Little Hong Kong, Old Village, an old lady then aged 80 told me that her's had been the first family in the village to apply for a mains water supply ten years before, and some villagers were still in 1967 cutting grass to use as fuel to heat water, cook pig food, etc. and going to the foreshore to find edible items. \n\nIn earlier days, the hillsides were apportioned for grass cutting between clans and their member families as in the New Territories, and she had changed areas where she married a man in another clan from the New Village. Besides being cut for fuel at home, grass was taken to Aberdeen and Deep Water Bay to sell to the boat people anchored there. They used it to burn the marine growth from the underside of their craft at regular intervals (usually twice a month), as was done in many coastal villages in the area. \n\nThe villagers used the adjacent sea shore to supplement their diet, waiting for the tide to go out and spending up to four or five hours daily in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th lunar months (March till May or June) gathering sea eggs, digging in the sand for clams, looking for other shell fish among the stones and gathering sea weed to feed the pigs. Both men and women engaged in the work, and she recalls both her mother and father carrying large baskets of sea", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210176, "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-1984", "page_number": 147, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "126 \n\nJAMES HAYES \n\nbeen characterized as being a group apart. They were conceived, born, lived, married and died upon their craft, often no more than the cockleshell sampans which used to be so common a feature of our coastal waters. They were not allowed to live on shore, did not attend the village schools and were excluded from the official examinations and hardly ever intermarried with the landsmen, though some of their girls became the secondary wives of wealthier villagers. Generally, they lived a life apart, under separate official regulation, and were despised and often oppressed by the land population as the popular and long received legend has it.\n\n67 \n\n66 \n\nThe Tanka people manned the larger fishing craft that were usually based on the fishing ports of the Hong Kong region in places like Cheung Chau and Tai O. They also congregated in small groups that frequented sheltered bays and inlets for generations at a time. I have encountered this in various parts of the New Territories, and found it also at Tai Tam Tuk on Hong Kong island when I enquired into the land and boat populations there in the early 1960s. I learned that the elder fishermen and their fathers had been born at Tai Tam Tuk which had been used as a permanent anchorage by a group of Tanka boat people for at least the previous eighty years, one old lady having been born there in 1884. They were always at Tai Tam Tuk during the main typhoon season from the fifth to the eighth lunar month of every year, fishing the surrounding waters for the rest of the year. From what they said, there were about twenty families living in boats there when the village was removed in 1913 for the reservoir. About half these families were surnamed Cheng, while the remainder came from four or five other surnames. It was very likely a man from one of these boat families who, under the recorded name Chun-Fat-Che, gave evidence against a mandarin junk charged with piracy in May 1874 during the Chinese so-called “blockade” of Hong Kong. 'I am a fisherman and have a small fishing boat about 18 feet long. It has one sail and carries myself and wife, my four sons and their two children. My fishing place is at Stanley, Tai Tam and Cape D'Aguilar. I have fished there ever since I was a child and I am 62 years of age, and my father before me. My son generally accompanies me in another boat.68 \n\nWhilst this information comes from the 1870s, its reference to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210184, "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-1984", "page_number": 155, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "134\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nequally there is no reason to doubt that arrangements similar to those at Stanley and Shau Kei Wan were to be found there.\n\nThis account does not claim to be a comprehensive account of Hong Kong before 1841, but aims to stimulate an interest. If it reaches members of old Hong Kong village families by one reason or another, I hope it will encourage them to dig into their family chests to see if anything remains that will fill out the story.\n\n89\n\nNOTES\n\nThe material for this essay is varied. I am in considerable debt to several good friends; Ian Diamond, Tom Poon, Anthony Siu Kwok-kin, Patrick Hase, and Carl Smith among others. Nineteenth-century writers, including officials, especially those who saw Hong Kong in its early colonial years, are also valued contributors to the story. Correspondence in the possession of the Tang family of Kam Tin figures prominently. I have also been fortunate to have spoken with old persons in their 'seventies' and 'eighties' back in the 1960s. They were able to give valuable information about life in their youth, when the lifestyle and appearance of the Hong Kong villages and boat people's anchorages had changed relatively little since the 1840s, compared with the total obliteration and change all too frequently experienced in the past fifteen years. These interviews took place in a variety of places; in an old tenement in Shaukeiwan, in one of the old hillside villages there, in a resettlement estate, in a Housing Society estate for fishermen's families, on a friend's pleasure craft manned by a boatman whose family had been living on boats in Deep Bay for generations, on a working cargo boat in a typhoon shelter, in a converted stake-net fisherman's hut, in a village house overwhelmed by squatter huts, and so on. Each of these locations testified to how modern Hong Kong was dealing cards to the persons concerned and their families, swept along or thrust to one side in the maelstrom of intensive postwar development and redevelopment. To all the above contributors, I tender thanks and appreciation.\n\n1\n\nC.J.C. in Revd G.N. Wright and Thomas Allom, China Illustrated in a Series of Views (London and Paris, Fisher and Co., 1843), Vol. 1, p. 17 in my set, \"Harbour of Hong Kong”.\n\n2 Harley Farnsworth MacNair, Modern Chinese History Selected Readings (Shanghai, Commercial Press, Second edition, 1927), p. 169.\n\n3 W.L. Bales, Tso Tsungtang, Soldier and Statesman of Old China, (Shanghai, Kelly and Walsh, 1937), p. 69.\n\n4 The Letters of Queen Victoria, A Selection from Her Majesty's Correspondence between the Years 1837 and 1861, ed A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher, (London, John Murray, 1908), Vol. 1, p. 262.\n\n5 Following G.B. Endacott's History of Hong Kong (Oxford, University Press, 1958), p. 18.\n\n6\n\nSessional Papers (Papers laid before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong) 1884-85, p. 2.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210444, "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": 51, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "32\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\nThere was also an illicit still for making rice spirits, owned by the last mentioned. Beyond the village on the narrowest part of the strait were three stone sheds known as “fish huts”, and used by three separate fisher families for storing nets, fish baskets and other items of gear. Across the other side of the strait, on the second island, were a couple of concrete pits, used as tanks for dyeing sails and nets, and a wooden steaming vat. These were the property of the \"headman\".\n\nMost of Hong Kong's shoreline is steep and rocky. Kau Sai island is no exception. The village is built on one of the few stretches that offer a small ledge above high water mark. It is about thirty yards in width in most places. In front of the temple, south-eastwards from there, and at another point about half-a-mile beyond the northern end of the village, land has been reclaimed from the sea. The fishermen state that this process was started by their forebears. In 1950 the reclamations consisted of accumulations of large boulders carefully arranged to afford as flat a surface as possible. In front of the temple the reclaimed area formed a large semi-circular platform about fifty yards in diameter, raised about six or seven feet above the natural beach and contained by a sea wall, like a ha-ha. Both wall and platform had been sealed with concrete some time before the Japanese occupation. On the southern edge of the platform, near but just beyond the temple, lay the village well. The water, being somewhat brackish, was used mainly for washing. Sweet water was fetched by boat from a never-failing stream about a mile away to the north.\n\nFrom the temple southwards a little beyond the end of the village the reclamation had been filled in with beaten earth to make a broad path. Beyond that, flanking both sides of the strait, there were simply two wide stretches of carefully gathered boulders. These parts of the reclamation were still being added to. The same was true of the essentially similar boulder reclamation north of the village.\n\nThe existence of flat or flattish areas near the water's edge was a necessity for the fishermen who used them for net and fish drying, sail making, rope twisting and so on. Nets being at that", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210446, "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": 53, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "34 \n\nBARBARA E. WARD \n\nBy 1970 there was only one set of sails left. The jetties, all the pathways and the large reclamation on the northern bank of the strait were of concrete. All but four of the grey stone and whitewashed houses had gone. Instead there were three wooden ones and thirteen others in bright, fresh, colour-washed concrete. The temple had been redecorated (its beautiful sea-green tiles replaced by asbestos dipped in an analine “emerald” dye), and above it, up a newly constructed concrete stairway, stood a modern, purpose-built school with three well-equipped classrooms, a special bungalow for the teachers and an enclosed basketball pitch levelled out of the hillside. There were no pig-sties, but a fine public latrine, piped running water, electric light and a public incinerator. \n\nSuch were some of the outward and visible signs of processes of change which were just beginning to accelerate when I first visited the village in 1950. Other changes less obvious on the surface were even more significant. Most striking of all was the fact that where twenty years before there had been seventeen families living ashore, all but two of them Hakka-speaking landsmen, there were now twenty-one families (not including the teachers) of which twenty were composed of ex-Boat People, speaking Cantonese. Yet the number of fishing junks was slightly larger than it had been. Kau Sai's population was more exclusively devoted to fishing than before, but many of the fishermen now owned houses ashore. \n\nThe new houses differed from the old ones not only in outward appearance and ownership but also in internal arrangement, furnishing and use. Built to the specifications of their owners they were basically hollow concrete cubes, with glazed, metal framed windows, and internal partitions made of wood. Each had a wooden front door, in the centre of the wall facing the street, leading directly into a kind of sitting room that ran the whole width of the building and covered about one-third of the depth from front to back. The rear portion was normally divided both vertically and horizontally to form two stories with compartments for sleeping and storage.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210449, "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": 56, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "37\n\nThe differences in house form and use between 1950 and 1970 reflect nothing less than the complete substitution of one cultural-occupational group for another. In 1950 Kau Sai's houses were inhabited by families who followed the occupational patterns and sexual division of labour common among Hakka speakers in the eastern part of the New Territories, among whom village shopkeepers and temple caretakers (where these exist) are almost the only exceptions to a general rule of able-bodied male absenteeism. By 1970 there was only one Hakka family in Kau Sai. Its male head was the (new) temple caretaker who also ran a small shop. All the other houses were occupied by fishermen's families, whose men do not have to leave home to find work.\n\nThe change had two major sources: the former, being a particular historical event peculiar to Kau Sai may be quickly related here; the second, being the local manifestation of the general movement of socio-economic change among the Boat People not only of Hong Kong but of South China as a whole is part of the major theme of this book.\n\nThe Removal of the Hakka\n\nIt so happens that Kau Sai Bay lies near the central portion of a range for firing practice which is drawn in a wide arc on the seaward side of the British Army's camp near Sai Kung on the mainland. It is obviously inconvenient for gunnery practice to have to operate with a safety angle, but this is done and to the best of my knowledge no serious damage has ever occurred. However, the villagers were not slow to demand compensation whenever a shell fell anywhere on, or even near, either of the two islands. In order to put an end to what they probably correctly deemed would become a perennial drain on their resources, Government and Army agreed that it would be wise to resettle the villagers elsewhere. (This was, indeed, one of the earliest of the resettlement programmes for which the Hong Kong authorities later became famous). When I took up residence in the spring of 1952 negotiations were already far advanced. A new village was in process of building at Pak Sha Wan (Hebe Haven) on the bus route to Sai Kung, and the move was to be made in a few months' time. Every householder in Kau Sai was", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210451, "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": 58, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "39\n\nproposed resettlement was a matter for the land villagers alone. As the day fixed for the move drew nearer, however, they began to fear that they too would be expected to leave. It was true that the original reason for deciding upon the move was to prevent the future accumulation of massive claims for compensation (with the resulting time-consuming investigations, apportionment of responsibility between civil and military authorities and so on), but in the absence of knowledge about the status of the fishermen at their anchorage it seemed only too likely that once the householders had been moved away the Army authorities would assume it to be no longer necessary to maintain the safety angle during gunnery practice. The fishermen began to wonder about their own safety, but remained extremely reluctant even to consider moving. They were, they said, Kau Sai residents, descended most of them from fishermen who had anchored in the bay long before any houses had been built. Kau Sai, they maintained, was excellently placed for their fishing grounds, and ideally well-equipped for tasks like fish-drying and sail-making, that had to be done ashore. Furthermore, the fung shui of “our bay\" was uniquely propitious or, as some of them put it, the god of their temple, who was a fisherman's god, had been very good to them and they were not prepared to desert him and risk the consequences of his displeasure.\n\nIn other\n\nThe examination of the validity of their argument words, the problem of the degree to which the potentially completely mobile Boat People are in fact tethered to any one spot or area is one of the major themes of this book. To cut a long story short now, it is enough to say that the argument was in fact accepted. On a morning in June 1952 three L.S.W.'s arrived to remove the Hakka land families. The fishermen sat and watched them go. Hardly a word was exchanged. Within a few days the landsmen had returned and stripped their buildings of tiles and anything else of any value. The temple, two shops and two other houses remained. For the rest the village appeared to be in ruins.\n\nThe anchorage, however, was unaffected. The safety angle remained on the guns. The fishermen went about their ordinary business, and prospered. The move in fact coincided with the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210453, "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": 60, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "41\n\nhad disappeared.\n\nThe improved landing facilities were a great convenience. The new main pier, a good deal higher than the old jetty at the seaward end, sloped gradually up to the level of the village path and both path and pier were smooth surfaced, not slippery even in rain. (With the removal of the pigs they were also much cleaner.) All major landing and embarkation operations were now conducted from this, the new westernmost, pier. The smaller one was in fairly frequent use for more domestic purposes: children coming ashore to play, women dashing in to the shops to buy something wanted at the last minute for supper, and so on. The concrete latrine, built to comply with government regulations when the school was put up in 1958, occupied the site of a similar matting and bamboo structure which used to make an appearance for about a week in the second lunar month during the period of Kau Sai's annual temple festival.\n\nNeither the change in the outline of the water front nor the movement of as many as seventeen boat families into their newly built houses ashore made much difference to the lay-out of the anchorage proper. Allowing for a few departures by death or change of occupation or anchorage, and the arrival of one or two others, the accompanying diagram made originally in 1952 is still a fair record of the stations occupied by boats belonging to people of the same surnames as these in 1970.\n\nThe forty-two junks included in the diagram were seldom all in port together. From time to time, too, they were joined by others - notably by a group of six purse seiners, whose owners all surnamed Ng, often anchored at the neighbouring island of Kiu Tsui to which they had moved en bloc from Kau Sai shortly after the end of the Japanese occupation, and by further small liners claiming Kau Sai residence. Visitors also came from many places, particularly at the time of the festival when the bay was suddenly filled for the better part of a week with three hundred or more junks at once. Few visitors stayed more than a few nights or days at a time, but certain Hoklo fishermen, all surnamed Sou, reappeared year after year at certain seasons. The arrival of strangers in \"our Bay\" was always a source of some\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210460, "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": 67, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "48\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\nmen to gamble much later than before. In 1950 there had been one battery-operated wireless, owned by the main shopkeeper, around which the small evening population used to gather for entertainment, particularly on Mondays and Fridays when programmes of Cantonese opera were broadcast live from the Po Hing or Ko Shing theatres, and the shop therefore remained open till midnight. In 1970 nearly all the families and many individuals had their own transistor radios.\n\nOn the purse-seiners there would be a rather exhilarating passage out to the chosen fishing ground, where the boats would stop, set their kerosene pressure lamps, and wait. If it was calm and there were fish about, some people might do a little hand-lining, but usually this was a time for sleeping until awakened by an alarm clock sometime before midnight. The time of actual fishing operations obviously depended on the presence or otherwise of fish, but often there would be two main spells around midnight and just before dawn, with sleep in between. Small children on board slept through the night, but even on the mechanised junks, a ten-year-old was already a useful hand. During the fishing periods, and especially at dawn, fish-collecting boats might call around to buy the catch, and a few small-liners might also come to buy bait for their next day's activities. As dawn was breaking, the night-time fishermen would be well on their way either to market first or directly back to the anchorage. After mechanisation, most purse-seiners were able to take their own fish to the wholesale markets and still get back to their bases well before noon.\n\nMeanwhile, the land dwellers and those remaining on boats at the anchorage had slept, but they too would wake at dawn, or just before. The first purse-seiners would arrive at an already busy village. The day-time fishermen would be getting ready to go out, waiting usually to buy bait from the returning night workers. Women on shore would be drawing water, hanging clothes out to dry, rousing children from sleep. In the days before the nylon revolution, the first object of a purse-seiner was to ensure that his net was properly dried. As each pair came in, the sampans were launched, the wet net, piled high in the bows of the net-junk, was bundled into one of them, and carried off at", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210467, "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": 74, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "55 \n\nremoved in 1952 was coincidental). The 14th day of the 7th month was the day for remembering all those who at death had received no proper burial. Any seafaring community would be likely to know of many such, and like most Hong Kong Boat People, Kau Sai's fishermen marked the month of the 'Hungry Ghosts' with ceremonies of exorcism, both privately on the junks and publicly in the temple. The day of the Moon Festival (the 15th day of the 8th month) was the next occasion for making family offerings in the temple, and on the Double Ninth came the second of the annual dates for visiting the family graves.\n\nOn the 10th day of the 10th month a public offering of pork (and/or fish) was made to Shui Shing Ye, whose image stood next to that of Hung Shing Kung in the temple, and after that came the celebration of the winter solstice (fixed, of course, by the solar calendar, like Ch'ing Ming, but falling usually in the eleventh month). Finally, on the 15th day of the 12th month a pig was slaughtered and offered in the temple on behalf of the community as a whole in public thanksgiving for the successful completion of another year before the preparations for the New Year ceremonies once again got under way.\n\nOnly four of these ritual occasions were publicly observed in the sense that the offerings made and ceremonies performed were provided at joint expense and on behalf of the village as a whole. The rest were private, that is family celebrations, taking place on or about the same dates but quite independently. The four public occasions were the festivals of two gods of the local temple, Hung Shing Kung (13th of 2nd month) and Shui Shing Ye (10th of 10th month), the exorcism of the Hungry Ghosts (14th of 7th month) and the general thanksgiving at the end of the year (15th of 12th month). By far the most spectacular of these was the festival for Hung Shing Kung, for which a group of priests was always engaged to carry out the religious ceremonies and an opera troupe performed plays on five consecutive nights and four days. The organisation of this festival, which involved the collection and disbursement of well over 10,000 Hong Kong dollars each year, was much the most important single joint activity in Kau Sai.\n\ni", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210470, "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": 77, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "58\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\nMarketing Organisation's depot in the local market town at the road head in Sai Kung, or even to the wholesale market at Shaukiwan on Hong Kong island.25 Here were opportunities for buying kerosene and diesel oil, fishing gear, foodstuffs, clothing materials, arranging to have a new boat built or raise a loan, having one's hair cut and shampooed,26 chatting with friends and business acquaintances in the tea houses, and so forth: opportunities which might or might not be taken up on any particular day but which were always available. Women went ashore in these places far less often than men, but they were certainly free to do so if they had occasion. Kau Sai-based children, rather shy in such large centres of population or restrained by anxious parents, tended to stay on board.\n\nIt is important to notice that these were at least potentially daily movements. Even under sail the voyage from Kau Sai to Sai Kung seldom took as long as two hours. With a fair wind Shaukiwan could be reached in three. Although by cutting these times to forty minutes and under two hours respectively mechanisation allowed visits to be more frequent, it did not initiate them. Many of the Kau Sai fishermen had contacts in Shaukiwan and Sai Kung that were of very long standing and spread far beyond the mere marketing of fish. It was interesting to observe that when with mechanisation the longer journeys to Aberdeen and Kowloon (and later Cheung Sha Wan) markets became possible, they remained largely ‘one-shot' voyages: the fish once sold the junks turned straight for home.\n\nIn the small liners the pattern of daily movement was somewhat different. Less dependent than the purse-seiners on the daily performance of shore-based tasks and requiring less space for the less frequent tasks they did have to do there, they were at the same time more dependent upon being able to sell their fish fresh. It was obviously convenient for them, therefore, to orient the economic/technological aspect of their lives first towards the places where they could sell their fish and only secondarily, if at all, towards a particular village anchorage. With a few exceptions the small liners claiming to be \"Kau Sai people\" were consistently much less regular in their attendance at Kau Sai's anchorage than the purse-seiners. The movements that took", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210474, "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": 81, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "62\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\nvisited the village only at long intervals. Travelling to and fro they usually hitched a lift to Sai Kung from one of the fishermen, and then went by bus. Their wives, on the other hand, hardly ever left the village, except perhaps to see an opera performance at one of the neighbouring festivals listed above. The 'headman' and his brother normally followed a slightly different pattern. Their shop, a new departure opened shortly before the time of my arrival, required the permanent presence of one of them. The 'headman' had his fingers in a number of enterprises on the mainland, but returned frequently to Kau Sai to deal in pigs (his own and others') and to keep an eye on the illicit still which was his main source of income. He owned a small transport junk. (The other, and larger, shop was owned by an ex-fisherman, at that time permanently resident on shore but sharing fully in the fishermen's ritual and recreational movements). Hakka men being seldom present were not often included in fishermen's sociable gatherings; their social life was elsewhere. The ‘headman', and more especially his shopkeeper brother who was popular, who were present, were exceptions.\n\nAn overview of the various patterns of movement yields two obvious inferences which are as significant as they are self-evident. First, although mobile the fishermen were far from footloose. Not only did many of them (particularly the purse-seiners) return constantly to one particular base, namely Kau Sai, but their movements away from there also took place within a definitely circumscribed area. This comprised, in effect, the waters of Port Shelter and Rocky Harbour as far as Basalt Island, Bluff Island and the Ninepins, with an outlying channel to Shaukiwan or Hong Kong island (from which it was only a 10¢ or 20¢ tram or bus ride to all the bright lights of the city). Only occasionally and for limited purposes did Kau Sai-based boats go beyond the boundaries of this area. It included two market towns, Sai Kung and Shaukiwan, and a number of fishing villages the main ones being at Yim Tin Tsai, Lung Shuen Wan, Kiu Tsui, Pak Sha Wan, Pu To Au).\n\nWith the obvious difference that it contained more than one market and was within fairly easy reach of a great international centre of commerce and industry, this area was closely similar to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210477, "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": 84, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "65\n\nand landsmen as \"people of our bay\".\n\nThe significance of these differences will have to be discussed at length in later chapters. For the present it is simply a matter of record that, whereas both liners and seiners claimed to be domiciled in Kau Sai, the seiners were the more obvious and effective residents.3\n\nMost of the Hakka speakers moved in a totally different sphere. Their places of work being in the cities of Hong Kong (Victoria) and Kowloon where they spent by far the major portion of their time, the men were in no way connected with the territory in which all Kau Sai's (Cantonese) Boat People passed their lives. Their women stayed in the village, oriented almost exclusively towards it, to their memories of their natal homes (which they never visited) and to their absent husbands and children. There were one or two old men in much the same position. Only in the case of the so-called \"headman\" and his shopkeeper brother did the spheres of movement of landsmen partially overlap those of the Boat People. Like the Hakka women they lived in Kau Sai (or at least stayed there very frequently) and like the fishermen they looked to the market town of Sai Kung. Neither of them was oriented at all towards the other market, Shaukiwan, however, nor, before the move which took them and all the other landsmen to Pak Sha Wan, did they have relationships within the fishermen's territory as a whole. Like the other land villagers of the Sai Kung peninsula and islands, their movements are most usefully to be understood in terms of Skinner's now classic model of a standard market area: they were villagers exploiting a fixed resource (land and house property) and travelling at intervals between their place of residence (Kau Sai) and the market town (Sai Kung) in which nearly all their significant extra-village social contacts were made (including those with other villages).\n\nA comparison between Hakka patterns of spatial mobility and the fishermen's patterns will at once make it obvious that interaction between members of the land and water sections of Kau Sai's population as they existed in the early 'fifties (and for at least a century before) was likely to be limited.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210490, "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": 97, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "78\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\nand the development of radio weather forecasts directed specifically to the fishing fleets, brought at least a measure of security which was quite new.\n\nI have stated that Kau Sai bay was not safe in a typhoon. Under sail the journey to the nearest relatively safe place, Sai Kung, might take anything up to two-and-a-half or even three hours. Given the unpredictability of typhoons any master who did not take his boat, with his family on board, off to Sai Kung at the first intimation of a possibly threatening storm would have been failing in his manifest duty. Many fishing days and nights in the summer were lost in this way. But with an engine there was nowhere in the whole territory which was more than an hour's journey from a typhoon refuge, and the journey itself was not dependent upon the very winds one was hastening to avoid. One of the most vivid and lasting memories of windy days in the summer of 1952 in Kau Sai, the first summer in which the village had had a properly mechanised boat at the anchorage, is of old Chung Fuk Hei chugging about here, there and everywhere to round up the stragglers and tow them into safety. He was unfailingly generous in this self-imposed task, and several times made two or even three journeys back to Kau Sai to make sure that no one was left behind. The lesson that engines spelled safety was very quickly learnt.\n\nSafety when proceeding under power was, of course, also a matter of official concern. The prohibition of petrol engines as a safety measure has already been mentioned. With the introduction of small marine diesels the Hong Kong Government, through the Marine Department, devised a simplified form of license for coxswains and engineers in order to make it possible for inshore fishermen with only a few years' schooling to obtain essential minimum skills in navigation and engine maintenance. If this had not been done it would have been necessary for the owners of mechanised junks to employ men with the existing unnecessarily advanced qualifications. Since such men could command salaries well beyond the range of ordinary purse-seiners or small long-liners, the mechanisation of the inshore fishing fleets would never have taken place. At about the time that the first small marine engines made their appearance the", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210491, "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": 98, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "79\n\nDepartment of Fisheries opened its first courses for training fishermen and their sons in the requirements of the simplified examination. The courses, for which no charge is made, have been running ever since.43\n\nThe Boats: Seasonal and Individual Differences\n\nLying as it does just within the Tropic of Cancer, Hong Kong experiences quite marked seasonal variations in temperature and rainfall. The months of January, February and March can be chilly indeed and very damp. The boat covers are seldom removed, padded clothes are piled on, and those who can afford them are glad to sleep rolled up in thick padded cotton quilts. April begins to warm up, but is usually still cool and wet until at the end of the month there is a dramatic change (often heralded by a week or two of dull, very humid weather) to the strong sunlight and high humidity of summer. The covers are rolled up, padded clothes and quilts stored away, and out come the canvas awnings which are rigged to provide shade at stern and bows. The warmth of the engine, which is a comfort in the winter, is much disliked in summer, but a moving boat is always cool and even at anchor the heat and humidity seem less on board than on land. One of the attractions of Kau Sai in the summer is the constant cool breeze that is guaranteed by its position at the edge of the narrow strait, and the clear, clean water where the children splash and swim. In the old days one of the most important functions of the village shop was to provide storage for winter clothes and quilts during the summer months; now these are kept in the fishermen's own new houses, but as the shopkeeper made no charge for this service no one is either better or worse off.\n\nApart from such seasonal changes as these it might be thought that there could be little scope for individual variations from junk to junk. The general layout of holds and deck space was the same for all purse-seiners and all long-liners respectively, and each was engaged in essentially exactly similar work. Moreover all were subject to such crushing limitations of space (giving each family quite considerably less room than in an old-fashioned gypsy caravan in England) that individual idiosyncrasy might be", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210520, "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": 127, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "108\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\nintelligent and a willing worker. With about four years' village schooling as a boy in China behind him, he was better educated than most Kau Sai fishermen at the time. Nevertheless, he remained a foki, unmarried and without prospects. This was largely because he had no kinsmen of any kind, all having been lost to him during the Japanese occupation of Kwangtung and Hong Kong. By birth a land child, he had taken to work on fishing boats faute de mieux when he found himself alone in the world at the age of about 16. Now, a dozen or so years later, he was indistinguishably a boat man. His earnings were too small to make it possible for him to marry, unless someone else would put up the bride-price for him (a most unlikely occurrence, though not unknown), and although he could have saved enough to buy at least a sampan of his own, he preferred the freedom from responsibility of a hired man's life on his employer's boat, with all found and a chance to supplement his earnings every now and again.\n\nIn this, he but followed the pattern of all the other unmarried fokis: a married man liked to have his own boat, however small, or a woman alone might also own her sampan; unmarried men seldom, if ever, did so. Only 3 of the 31 fokis employed in Kau Sai in 1953 owned small boats of their own. All were married men over thirty years of age with more than one child. Two of these boats were small sampans, normally acting as houseboats for the man's wife and two or three young children, occasionally journeying to Sai Kung, where the boat population was much larger, or to one of the local Boat Peoples' festivals, when short-haul water transport was in demand to make a small income from ferrying passengers. The third boat, with a somewhat larger complement, including the owner's two adult brothers as well as his wife and children, acted as a hand liner catching smallish quantities of good-quality fish and selling them direct to local consumers or tea-houses in Sai Kung. Both the adult men on this boat were unmarried and had previously worked as fokis on other men's boats. They were prepared to do so again if their present experiment failed. Unfortunately, on my return to Kau Sai in 1959, I found they had moved away, and I have no further record of their story. The other 3 married fokis in Kau Sai in 1953 had their wives living with them on their employers' boats.", "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": 210526, "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": 133, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "114\n\nBARBARA E. WARD\n\n22 All but one of Kau Sai's long-liners fall into the category Small long-liner. A small long-liner shoots his lines direct from his junk, which is on average about 30-35 feet in overall length. Bigger long-liners (classed as Medium or Large Long-liners) carry sampans for the shooting and hauling of lines. Baiting-up is always done on the mother ship. In 1950 the Large Long-liners based mainly on Shaukiwan were the aristocrats of the Hong Kong fishing fleets, wealthy men, employing large crews. Informants claimed that before the Japanese occupation two or three of these large boats had been based on Kau Sai anchorage. By 1970 shortages of labour had driven nearly all of them out of business. Kau Sai then boasted one Medium Long-liner.\n\nThe nylon line, which everywhere replaced the old ramie during the early 'sixties, was greatly appreciated for lightness, strength and quick drying, but it tangled easily and so made baiting-up an even more finicking job than before. 23 Note on this and role of F.M.O. (N.B.) and on numbers of pupils etc: 84 in 1970. [Note not written; for related information, see T.A. Acton, \"Education as a by-product of fish marketing,” JHKBRAS vol, 21 (1981) pp 120-143.]\n\n24 In 1969 a special typhoon shelter, with concrete break-waters, was constructed at Government expense at Yim Tin Tsai a well sheltered cove to the north of Kau Sai island.\n\n25 The Fish Marketing Organisation, a non-government trading organisation controlled by a Government Servant, the Director of Marketing, was established in 1945. The Director is empowered to control the landing, movement and wholesaling of all marine fish (except shellfish and marine fish 'alive and in water'). For further detail see Chapter V below. In 1950 controlled wholesale markets existed at Shaukiwan and Kennedy Town on Hong Kong Island, in Kowloon, and at Tai Po in the New Territories. The Kennedy Town market was transferred to Aberdeen in 1952 and the Kowloon market to Cheung Sha Wan in 1966. A fifth market was opened at Castle Peak in 1969. The Organisation also maintains collecting depots and/or other offices at Cheung Chau, Castle Peak, Tsun Wan, Sha Tau Kok and Sai Kung.\n\n26 A male recreation; women in 1950 always wore long hair, shampooing their own or each other's with... [note incomplete]\n\n27 On this and the whole question 'What is a real Kau Sai person? see below Chapters 5 and [p. 75]. [The following indicates how this question might have been answered: \"The non-kin groups to which he sees himself belonging are also few. First there is the village as a whole: Kau Sai. He may describe himself as a Kau Sai man, or refer, as he does very frequently, to 'our bay' as a membership unit. This includes all people for which Kau Sai bay is a permanent anchorage, or who have houses ashore there.\" \"Sociological self-awareness: some uses of the conscious models”, Man (1966), vol. 1, p. 203.]\n\n28 [G. William Skinner, \"Marketing and social structure in rural China, Part 1,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 63 (1964), pp. 21-50.]\n\n29 See also Ward 1967 and 1968. [Probably reference to articles cited in note 4.]\n\n30 One most important aspect of the territoriality of all the fishermen was their inescapable need for credit. See below pp.\n\n31 boon wan ge yan this expression which was used synonymously with \"Kau Sai\" was the more usual in colloquial speech.\n\n32 [The next paragraph in the manuscript summarizes the argument here: \"These", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210746, "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-1986", "page_number": 97, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "80\n\nCHAN WING HOI\n\nwere a fishing family who moved in from Naam Tau. The Chan family started the village.\n\nThe jung-lei (chairman)* Mr. Wong Man Gwong, a 59-year-old former seaman, provided more information on local history. It was his great-great-grandfather who first came here. The original population consisted of about 60 fishing households. The Hoklo and Chiu Chau newcomers were already there when he was small. The present site of the golf club was occupied by paddy fields. One village, known as Seung Wai, was relocated to present Shek O to make way for the golf club. Mr. Wong pointed out the place when we passed it in a procession in the festival, which was just outside the golf club enclosure. Traces of walls could still be seen, and Mr. Wong remembered going back there to worship the Daai Wong Ye Earth God when he was small. At the time the golf club was built the foreigners were powerful and met with little resistance when they took away the land from the villages.\n\nA 39-year-old Mr. Lam, an indigenous villager, told me about the occupations of the original Shek O people. At the beginning, the inhabitants made their living in vegetable gardening and fishing. In more recent times the men worked as seamen. Very few people travelled to the West to work in restaurants, and such emigration started only in the last ten years or so. Most people of his own generation worked in the city. Many of the retired seamen came back and worked as waiters at the Shek O Country Club. He was a seaman himself, a radio officer.\n\nA 56-year-old Mr. Lau, the owner of the restaurant where I had a vegetarian dinner, provided additional information about the changes that had taken place in local life. The indigenous people fished with stake-nets (jang-paang). He believed that the golf club was built in the 1930s. It was already there when he was born. But some of the facilities, at least the swimming pool, were still being built when he was small. He remembered that at the age of 7, he was scolded when he jumped on a pile of sand that was prepared for the construction of the swimming pool. Most of the Chinese newcomers at Shek O arrived after the Japanese Occupation. They were Hoklo fishermen who came in their boats. It took only one night to reach Shek O from Hoi Luk Fung when the wind was in...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211220, "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-1987", "page_number": 281, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "256\n\nI had been interested in social history in England and started to look for books about the New Territories, in particular on the Southern District, but soon found there was practically nothing. After a while, I realized that papers had been written but they were usually in journals that were not easy to get hold of in Hong Kong; and there was not very much anyway in English. I suppose that spurred me on to do more than I might have done. I was rather cross about it, I recall, because I gathered that many of the local settlements had been there for many centuries. The Shek Pik village alone was established in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, in the 15th century, and possibly before that.\n\nFaced with a challenge, I began to look around for materials that would tell me more about the district and its people. I soon noticed that the temples and some other buildings contained inscribed tablets, sometimes about the repair of the building and sometimes about law cases in the long ago when the District Magistrate, or the local people after asking the Magistrate, had stone tablets put there commemorating legal decisions. I collected copies of these inscriptions and other documentary material, like land deeds, family papers, account books and genealogies (a point to which I will return later in this talk). I interviewed persons in their homes, and they were nervous for reasons not connected with the impositions of research. Once some people were very fidgety, and I couldn't understand why. This was in a fishing village on the shores of Junk Bay. I looked down, and saw that I was sitting on what I hoped was an expended tin of explosives! They liked fishing with dynamite, and they still do. In fact, there was a letter from a lady from Tolo Harbour in the South China Morning Post only the other day asking 'how come they are still dynamiting?' This goes right back to 1904 and probably earlier, when the reports of the Alice Memorial Hospital contained reports about fishermen coming in with missing hands or legs.\n\nI persuaded other District Officers to get their staff to record these tablets, too, and built up a collection of inscriptions with other people's help of about 30 or 40 of them. However, I couldn't do anything with them. My Chinese was not good enough to handle that material. In any case, some of the tablets were defaced and some characters were hard to read or even missing. It required", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211398, "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-1988", "page_number": 114, "title": "RAS-1988", "content_text": "90\n\nKwangtung province formerly, I found the people could earn their living. Latterly since the people have been moved inside the boundary, they have gradually died off. Out of every ten of them about eight or nine have been killed by the removal. The best thing that can be done at present, as we cannot allow them to return to their homes, is to allow the boundary limit to be made larger so that the farmers may find a place to farm and the fishermen room for fishing.\" Nothing came of the position, but the Viceroy's interest in their plight was remembered by the people and they were grateful to him.\n\nIn the 5th year of Hong Hei there was a bad drought in Kwangtung and the Emperor gave order that the rice kept in the Government granaries should be given to the people. It was during that year the San On district was abolished, all government appointments there were cancelled, and what was originally San On was added to Tung Kwun (東莞).\n\nDuring this time the Governor Wong Loi Yam (黃律琰) wrote a report to the throne suggesting that six principal causes of growing discontent should be removed. At first no notice was taken of this effort but in the 6th year of Hong Hei, when things were getting worse, the Emperor allowed Governor Wong's suggestions to be carved on stone tablets, and each city gate had one of the tablets displayed there. Beyond that, the Emperor did nothing, but the fact that someone was interesting himself on their behalf helped to soothe the increasing resentment of the people. The Governor Wong was a very good man and he made great improvements in a lot of government affairs. It is said that he dressed as a common man during his leisure and spent much time talking to the simple farming people. In this way he learnt much about his subordinates, which were good and which were bad, and he really benefited his people. But he was unable to get on with the ministers in Peking and in the following year he was dismissed by the Emperor and ordered to return to Peking. When Wong received the message of his dismissal he wrote his valedictory address and in it he mentioned five important steps which should be taken to ease the burden on his people. Two of these were that the numbers of troops should be reduced in Kwangtung, and the boundary be removed, the people being allowed to return to their homes. He then started off for Peking, but a Lei P’aai (里排) (chief of the village elders) named Poon Shai Ts'eung (潘世璋) heard about this, and went to beg the Emperor to allow Wong to retain his post. Wong died, whether...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1988.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212167, "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": 109, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "86\n\nA local Ch'ao-chou cult image seen on a secondary altar in a tiny makeshift rural temple in Ulu Sembawang in Singapore is said to represent the spirit of a nine-year-old boy who died in the late 1960s. He is the medium spirit who speaks through his aunt, providing advice for local devotees. His aunt raised the image after she found that the spirit of the boy returned to her in a dream offering to help people. The boy is known by the title of 'the Prince of the East of the Sea', Hai-tung Tai-tzu.\n\nA Cantonese Kuomintang soldier, Huang Chin-ch'uang, crossed to Taiwan in 1949 with the retreating KMT forces. He was posted to Pingtung near Kaohsiung and served with a unit near the main village on the island of Little Liuchiu where some time later he became ill and died. The people of the village, remembering his kindness and goodwill and knowing that he had no family of his own, buried him in an auspicious spot on the hillside. He became the spirit guarding the hills above the village and also gained renown for his ability to protect fishermen in danger. A shrine, a privately run temple, was built in his honour and an image of him placed on the altar where he is now known as Marshal Huang despite having been a mere private soldier.\n\nWang was a sailor left behind in Java by the great Ming explorer Cheng Ho at the beginning of the sixteenth century. His image is to be seen on a side altar in the Earth God temple at Ancol, not all that far from Jakarta, whilst tablets dedicated to him are to be seen in Chinese temples in Semarang and near Sourabaya, all on the island of Java. Local Chinese belief is divided as to whether he was pure Chinese or Javanese, and whether he was a shipwright, navigator, or senior member of Cheng Ho's crew, or merely a Javanese interpreter. They are at one, however, that Wang was a Moslem and that he married a Javanese wife and lived out his days, dying peacefully in Semarang.\n\nOf these ten male and two female spirits, all but two are represented by stylised images on altars, and they are taken from each of the main ethnic groups along the south China coast, the Cantonese, Fukienese, Hakka, Ch'ao-chou, and Hainanese.\n\nFive originated during the past fifty years, three some time during the past century, whilst four definitely developed during the Ch'ing dynasty.\n\nOnly six of the spirits still have their full names remembered, and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213129, "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-1993", "page_number": 197, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "179\n\nIt seems that the shops were not very long-lived; most must have existed only for the period of the founder's life. Where shops were succeeded to by a son on his father's death, it seems to have been common for the shop name to be changed. The coming of the new frontier seems to have led to a particularly thorough shake-out of shops. Of the 42 shops mentioned in the 1894 Shan Tsui tablet, only eight appear among the 19 mentioned on the 1906 Bride's Pool tablet, and only seven among the 39 on the 1920 tablet, including five of the eight which are mentioned on the 1906 tablet. Furthermore, the elders do not remember any shops with names corresponding to the majority of the donating shops in 1894 (only about 13 of the 42 shops donating in 1894 were remembered - about 31% - and two or three of these are doubtful): clearly many of these premises had gone out of business before the 1920s. At the same time, 10 of the 19 shops on the 1906 Bride's Pool tablet also appear on the 1920 Cheung Sha Kwu Tze tablet. Five of the 1906 donors appear on neither the 1894 tablet nor the 1920 tablet. This all suggests that more than half of the shops changed name between 1894 and 1906, but less than half between 1906 and 1920. It would seem that, on average, perhaps a quarter or a third of the shops changed names each decade.\n\nAll the elders contacted were land-people, and they knew little of the economic and social lifestyles of the boat-people. It seems that, while to the foreign visitor of 1925 mentioned above Sha Tau Kok was \"a fishing town\", Sha Tau Kok, while it had the essential structure of a wholesale fish market and a boatyard, was less dominated by the need to service the fishing fleet than towns such as Sai Kung, to say nothing of places like Cheung Chau or Tai O. The Sha Tau Kok area fishermen fished mostly within Mirs Bay - they did not, it would appear, normally join the fleets of better-located ports in exploiting the deep sea Wong Fa fisheries. Sha Tau Kok was a fishing port, but it was more of a land market than a sea market.\n\nAll the markets in the area required hawkers and coolies as well as shops, and Sha Tau Kok was no exception - indeed, given the importance of its carrying trade with Sham Chun, Sha Tau Kok may well have been more dependent on coolies than elsewhere. The hawkers were of two types: those who traded as a part-time occupation, and those who made their living by it. The villagers of the surrounding villages regularly supplemented their income by casual hawking in the town. Each village seems to have specialised in what it sold. Women from the villages near", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213130, "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-1993", "page_number": 198, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "180\n\nthe town would bring baskets of vegetables to sell retail on street in Wang Tau Street. Some sold their vegetables at Yim Liu Ha - even before the hawkers started to migrate across the frontier there was some trading here. The saltworkers had no fields, and had to buy all their food - since there was about 100 of them, this represented quite a market. Usually, those villagers trading vegetables with the saltworkers at Yim Liu Ha would exchange their vegetables for salt, which they then hawked around the villages away from the market. One or two villages specialised in this vegetables and salt trade. Yet others specialised in exchanging vegetables for fish (usually the poorer quality, or broken, fish), which they then hawked around villages away from the market.\n\nThe villages further from the market found the vegetable trade difficult, and they usually did not take part in it. Their specialty was fuel. The villages near the market had cut all the trees in the vicinity of the village, except for the untouchable Fung Shui groves, long before, and they were seriously short of fuel as a consequence. The remote mountainside villages of the Shap Yeuk area, however, still had plenty of wood, but were usually short of cultivable land. The economy of these villages depended, essentially, on exchanging firewood for rice. Village women would leave these villages at day-break, carrying loads of about 75 catties of wood, cut and dried, and prepared to suit the particular needs of the specific market aimed at. The boat-people required wood cut into very small and even billets, to fit the tiny stoves on board their boats. The saltworkers needed wood cut to larger sizes to feed their furnaces and stoves. Individual villager or shopkeeper households needed wood cut to medium sizes. Individual fuel-selling villages tended to specialise in one or other of these markets. The best-placed fuel-selling villages, those whose wood reached the market first, tended to sell their wood in whole loads, 75 catties at a time. Those who reached the market later tended to have to sell their wood retail, catty by catty, originally in Wang Tau Street, later from the Railway Station forecourt. It was the custom that, if someone bought a whole load of wood, then the seller had to carry it all the way to the buyer's house, no matter how far from the market. Individual seller villages tended to develop a close relationship with individual buyer villages and households - often buyers would look out for sellers they knew, and order a load of fuel for the next market day. As with vegetables, so villagers who sold fuel to the saltworkers or fishermen sometimes exchanged their wood for salt or fish, which they then hawked through the villages away from the market.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213146, "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-1993", "page_number": 214, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "196\n\nfor fishermen in the north-east New Territories for the Year 1936, p. J11, where the District Officer notes that \"dealers were further encouraged by a reduction in the duty on dried fish\" It seems likely that the trade in both fresh and dried fish was affected\n\n31 This is a reference to a scheme introduced by the Customs in 1937 (see Jiulonghaiguan Bainian Dashiji, op cit., sub anno), by which every cow in the border area was to be registered and branded, and a record kept of every time it crossed the frontier All this was part of an attempt to control \"smuggling\" of cattle—i.e. the buying of new plough animals in the market, and bringing them back to the New Territories villages without paying export duty on them The animals had been taken across the frontier on the pretext that they were crossing the frontier to work fields on the New Territories side\n\n32 Shatoujiao de Lishe, op cit ch 2 I have heard very similar comments from elders in Wo Hang in the New Territories Fees of $20 for a seed-pig, and $20 for a new wok were quoted to me\n\n33 Petition translated in Enclosure 22 to Item 204 (pp. 272-273) in File No. 66 Extension of the Boundaries of the Colony, op cit\n\n34 Shatoujiao de Lishe, loc cit\n\n35 Elder at Wo Hang village\n\n36 Administrative Reports for the Year 1924, Appendix J. “Report on the New Territories for the Year 1924\", p. J2\n\n37 The Jiudonghaiguan Bainian Dashiji, op cit has no records of events in the Sha Tau Kok area from 1925-28, suggesting that the Customs records for this period have been lost\n\n38 The District Officer had this to say \"Conditions on the frontier, however, gave rise to considerable trouble and anxiety, the undisciplined and licentious conduct of the armed strikers' pickets extending to acts of violence and robbery committed even within our Territories British Sha Tau Kok suffered especially in this respect, so much so that on two occasions at least armed forces had to be summoned to assist, in the first case in August when H.M.S. 'Foxglove' was despatched to recover two junks, laden with merchandise, which had been seized by the \"strikers\", and later, in November, when troops of the Punjabi regiment were stationed at Sha Tau Kok in order to discourage the armed pickets who were terrorizing the inhabitants of British territory The close of the year brought more peaceful\n\nFor the history of the Kowloon Customs, see SF Wright, Hongkong and the Chinese Customs, Inspectorate Series, No 7 (Confidential), Statistics Dept, of the Inspectorate-General of Customs, Shanghai, 1930, SF Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs, Belfast, 1950, and Jiulonghaiguan Bainian Dashiji, op cit. The arrangements of the Patrol Districts and duty Stations were constantly re-ordered; the arrangements mentioned in the text are the standard arrangement for most of the 1920s and 1930s As for staff, establishment and strength figures varied widely, depending on funds—levels of manning were particularly low in the early 1920s, when the Customs were starved of funds, but greatly improved in the 1930s", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213499, "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": 95, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "63\n\nwaters.\n\nSai Ying Pun During the Early Years of British Colonization\n\nOn 20 January 1841, Captain Elliot announced the conclusion of preliminary arrangements with the Chinese Imperial Commissioner involving the cession of the Hong Kong Island and harbour to the British Government. Lord Palmerston in April 1841, hearing of Captain Elliot's restoration of Chusan to the Chinese government in return for the cession of Hong Kong, relieved him of his post and contemptuously remarked that Captain Elliot had obtained a barren island with hardly a house upon it.\n\nLord Palmerston was right in describing Hong Kong as a barren island. It was then almost entirely grass-covered, as the fine drawing of Collinson in 1845 showed. When on 26 January 1841, a party of marines landed and raised the British flag, Hong Kong was virtually unoccupied, apart from the little villages and hamlets, like Chek Chu, Shek Pai Wan, and Shau Kei Wan, which were inhabited by a few fishermen, stonecutters, and farmers.\n\nAt that time, the area of Sai Ying Pun was mere rugged slopes of rocks with a narrow, hard-trodded pathway winding along the cliffs, to which the fanciful name of Kwantailou was given by the fishermen and villagers. It was said that the path was used by the local inhabitants to go up to the hillside to cut the grasses and wood for fuel. E.J. Eitel, in his book \"Europe in China\", gave a rather detailed description of the path. He said:\n\n“Along the northern shore of the Island, there used to be, previous to the British occupation, a narrow bridle-path leading, high above the beach, across rocks and boulders, all the way from Westpoint to a hamlet near Eastpoint called Kwantalou, described in the first census (May 15, 1841) as a fishing village with 50 inhabitants. This path was used by the crews of trading junks in cases of wind and tide being unfavourable to track the junks along by a towing line attached to the peak of the foremast. Now, this hard-trodden path standing, to an observer from the opposite shore, clear out from the grass-grown hillside, like a fringe or border along the skirts of the hill, was by the natives called Kwantailou (petticoat string road), and the hamlet...", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213836, "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-1996", "page_number": 188, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "161\n\nthe community from calamity.\" The temple is nothing more than a small room of about 50 sq ft with simple decoration. On the altar an idol representing the deity is enshrined. At the corner of the room, there is a place for the earth god. As observed, incense is occasionally offered at this unfrequented temple.\n\nEven smaller in size is the wooden Ta-wang Palace at Ma Wan Chung. Hung there is a 1989 canopy with the title \"the Pantheon of The Earth God in Southeast and the Empress of Heaven\" (天后地主大王). The temple thus seems to serve as a Ta-wang shrine for individual worshippers at the village, as well as a temple of the Empress of Heaven for the fishing community in the vicinity. Fishermen, or former fishermen, there all regard themselves as members of the Tung Chung community. They settled ashore at their shacks 40-50 years ago. They also have ancestral graves in the area. Now more than 400 people from 48 households are official residents of the Fishermen's Village. Some of them have even managed to acquire and expand homesteads. Intermarriage between them and settlers at other villages has become acceptable. While fishermen in other regions usually worship the Empress of Heaven as their patron goddess, Tung Chung's fishing population are mainly Houwang worshippers. They have donated money to support opera shows during the deity's birthday festival and formed an association called Sheng-li t’ang which has actively taken part in festivities in celebration of the Houwang's feast day.\n\n40\n\nNotwithstanding the establishment of the Ta-wang Palace, as pointed out by a settler at the fishermen's village, only a few of them have become frequent visitors to this temple. The Houwang, as Tung Chung's principal god occupying a higher position in the pantheon hierarchy than other deities, remains the most popular deity in the locale, and the Houwang Temple has all along drawn the biggest crowd of worshippers from the community.\n\nFacing the Tung Chung Bay, the Houwang Temple is located at Sha Tsui Tau (see the map of Tung Chung). There is an adjacent open space in front of the temple, now used mainly for the holding of the annual festival commemorating the deity's feast day. The earliest dated ritual item inside the temple, a bell cast with the date of the 30th year of the Ch'ien Lung reign, suggests that the temple might have", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213856, "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-1996", "page_number": 208, "title": "RAS-1996", "content_text": "181\n\nper-muing hia-pren, diffighi Vol 2 (Hong Kong Urban Council. 1986), pp. 395-402\n\n* Interview of Lo Ch`uan, op cat Jun 22 1991\n\n46 Interviews La P'o † # (surname Ho, age 70+), Ma Wan Chung, Jun 30, 1991, Ch'en Kuang-sheng P4144 (age 63) Fishermen's Village. Jul 8,1991 & by telephone, Aug 1,1991, 20 Mall, op cit\n\n1\n\nAnthony KK Sau “Distribution of Temples on Lantan Island as Recorded in 1979.** JHKBRAS, Vol 20(1980), p 138\n\n** Ch^en Po-Cao BR1MB \"Touwang ku-mao sheng-shih per-chu,” (Kowloon: n.p., 1917) the Flouwang Temple Kowloon City For different opinions on the Houwang's identity, see Hsiao Kuo-chuen \"Hstang-kang Hou-lung so ssu-feng chih 'Yang-hou-ta-wang' k'ao,” in Hstang-kang ch'inh-tai-shih huu-chu (Taipei: Taiwan Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1985), pp 307, 313, Jao Tsung-yı \"Yang-1'ai-hou chia-chih yu Chit-lung Yang-Houwang miao,' in Chu-hung vu Sung-chi shuh-hao (Hong Kong: Wan-yu t'u-shu kungssa, 1959), pp 84--92\n\n* Ronald Ng. \"Culture and Society of a Hakka Community on Lantau Island,” in I_C Jarvie, ed, A Society in Fransition. Contributions to the Study of Hong Kong Society (London: Butler & Tanmer Lid. 1969), pp. 55, 62\n\n40\n\nAccording to an interview at the Tung Chung Public School, Jun 24,1991, see also interviews. La P'o †% (age 63), upper Ling Per, Jun 15, 1991, Cheng Man-hung, op cit\n\n1\n\n5? Interview of 11 Chii-sheng PL/ (age_73), Lam Che. Jun 18,1991\n\n* Interview of M. Huang (age 76), Wong Ka Wai, Jun 25, 1991\n\nBrim, op eit, p. 100, N 10\n\n** Interview of Cheng Man-hung, op uit, upper Ling Per Aug. 11. 1991\n\nHo, op ett. p 13\n\nFlayes, 1967, op eit, p 91\n\n* Ho, op. cit, p9\n\n5 lbid. p 13\n\n* Brum op eit,p/103", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215330, "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": 107, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "55\n\nmost places she holds a sceptre in the palm of her right hand resting against her shoulder.\n\nShe is said in some places to be particularly efficacious in helping children do well at school, and also for adults to pass tests, examinations and interviews. She is also prayed to separately by ladies, young and old, with the request that they may never lose their good looks and is offered perfume, talcum powder and handkerchiefs on her birthday, all taken home again by the devotees once the Holy Mother has blessed them. Her festival is celebrated on her birthday though this date varies from area to area, the most popular dates being the 4th or 25th of the second lunar month, the 4th of the fifth lunar month and any two days between the 10th and 16th of the tenth lunar month.\n\nHer full title is Nantian Shuiwei Shengmu ****, The Holy Mother of Shuiwei of the Southern Heaven. She has also been referred to as Nantian Shantian Shuiwei Shengniang 水尾聖娘, Shuiwei Niangniang 水尾娘娘 and Shuiwei Shengniang 水尾聖娘. Colloquially however, she is simply known as Shengmu, the Holy Mother.\n\nThe legend describing the Holy Mother's origins has been related with little variation in all the areas where her shrines have been noted. A fisherman named Pan who lived many, many years ago in Wenchang county in eastern Hainan island kept hauling in a piece of wood whilst fishing and no matter how many times he cast the net he pulled in the same piece of wood. It finally dawned on him that there was more to it than caught the eye and he called out in a loud voice that he would take the wood home with him and have it carved into a holy statue if the next two casts of his net brought him large hauls of fish. Despite landing exceptionally large hauls he forgot his promise and even used the wood to make a door for his pigsty. His son remarked that every time he passed the pigsty he thought he saw a remarkably beautiful woman combing her hair sitting on the bough of a tree. This reminded the fisherman of his promise but being poor he was unable to build a shrine for the deity and, wondering what to do he consulted a spirit medium who revealed where the shrine should be built. The goddess, in the guise of a village woman, appeared before a local builder and ordered bricks and timber to be delivered to the site but after delivery he was unable to find anyone to whom he could present", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215654, "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": 431, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "NOTES\n\nAlthough nothing remains of the huts presence in the 1970s the homes of fishermen but on silt over the water lined the then waterfront at Tapi village.\n\nThe pediment of the porch is also decorated with the Portuguese Arms.\n\nThe road passes through a tunnel cut into the hill immediately behind the Fort.\n\n3\n\n>\n\nThe pier was built some time after 1947.\n\nThe timber of the mount has possibly been replaced, but the fittings appear to be the original and there is no reason to doubt that its form is as it was originally.\n\nThe marking is on the trunnion, but is now partly obscured by paint.\n\nThe iron round shot that it fired would weigh approximately 32 pounds (14.5 kg).\n\nJohn Gibbon. The Artillerist's Manual, D Van Nostrand. New York.\n\n1860\n\n383", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]