[ { "id": 212884, "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-1992", "page_number": 193, "title": "RAS-1992", "content_text": "178\n\nNOTES\n\n1\n\nSaid by one of the Tangs of Ha Pa. The father had won a Jockey Club lottery ticket\n\nMrs Wong Chau Yuk-bing, 10 July 1991\n\nI once became concerned with a grave on a hill above Tsuen Wan. There had been a mistake and confusion when exhuming illegal graves and removing the remains to an authorized cemetery. My subsequent enquiry showed that this slope contained a number of graves of Chans of Sam Tung Uk, repaired in 1919, and another old grave belonging to their cousins from Kwan Mun Hau, a recent reburial of another of their graves whose old site had been required for development; the earth grave with stone tablet dated 1954 belonging to another local lineage recently taken up and remains placed in an urn (whose removal caused all the trouble); and a Tsang grave dated 1909 but removed at some time previously. The enquiry showed that the hill was a favoured burial site, that it was mostly monopolized by the Chans of Sam Tung Uk; that they had received objections from Kwan Mun Hau to a new grave and had not used it but found another site.\n\n4\n\nThe exercise was prompted by what I personally felt was the misguided notion that all the owners of old graves could, and should, one fine day be asked to exhume them.\n\n4 This was still felt to be the case, even though some leading members of the clan were Christians, with forebears who had also been members of the local protestant Chuen Yuen Church, established in Tsuen Wan about 1905.\n\n+\n\nAddressed to DOTW but sent to NTA HQ. See Secretary for the NT's NT L/M No.(172) in E/948/78 to TM&DO TW dated 11 December 1980, enclosing Chinese letter dated November 1980.\n\n+ Chinese letter from Mr. Wong Kit-hung, Village Representative of Shui Pin Village, Yuen Long, dated 14 January 1980.\n\n\"Wong Cho-yip and 22 other villagers of this place are the owners of the grave of Ancestor Shui-tai at Tsing Lung Tau. Ancestor Shui-tai was buried there in the tenth month of the first year of Tung Chih [1862], so that the grave has a history of 120 years. The villagers have recently learned that the government will resume the land there for development. They fear that great damage will be done to the fung-shui [of the clan] if the grave is destroyed. We entreat you to remedy the situation quickly [by cancelling the notice] or by compensating for this loss, so that they may choose a lucky day for the removal of their ancestral grave (and another auspicious burial ground for).\n\nM\n\nChopped DOTW Inward. Serial No. 1861 of 17 August 1963. The District Commissioner gave an account of a ceremonial visit following damage to a grave. See Annual Departmental Report, District Commissioner, New Territories, 1955-56.\n\n4\n\nADR, DCNT 1955-56, para. 87.\n\nMr Wong Kwai-chi, Land Inspector, Class 1. He and I had been colleagues and friends since we first served together in the District Office South, twenty years before.\n\n|| DOTW file TW6/WL/71, Chinese letter dated 4 May 1971.\n\n1:\n\nSee JHKBRAS, Vol. 17 (1977), p.189 for background.\n\nFile TW130/983/77, for China Light and Power Company's electricity supply sub-station on NE Lantau.\n\n14\n\nThis was partly their own fault, as owing to a particularly intense intra-lineage feud, all through the late 1970s and most of the 1980s they could not agree on removal terms,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213974, "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-1997", "page_number": 43, "title": "RAS-1997", "content_text": "8\n\nover on to Hong Kong's streets. It may be remembered that at this time the population was 3.85 millions, and was expected to reach 7 millions by 1986.\n\nThe report opened with an assurance that examination of local government varieties elsewhere had produced no models to which Hong Kong might be expected closely to conform, but expressed an awareness that there was a local ignorance of the principles and practice of local administration, in any form. This they defined as embracing those services and that responsibility which met the needs of individual localities, as opposed to the population as a whole. They also differentiated between the formulation of policy on the one hand, 'national' responsibilities and services best undertaken on a colony-wide basis, and control and execution, where localised interests had special importance, on the other. They particularly emphasised the need for willing delegation by the existing Colonial Secretariat and Departments, and the subsequent treatment of delegates as full partners in joint ideals and purposes. This could not, they all knew, be taken for granted.\n\nAfter a tour d'horizon of centralised and decentralised forms of government around the world, including the CPR's party pyramid, and an examination of Hong Kong's statutory and traditional institutions, the report pointed to the disparities the working party had found in the latter; but also to the irrelevance of many of these to the New Towns which were just beginning to raise their skylines. It also quoted with modified respect some colourful extracts from the records of Mencius, Confucius and Moh Tze on the poetically ideal Chinese view of the relationship between government and people, which had been submitted by a future Chief Secretary who was serving as a DO in the NT; but it recognised that the world had changed since the time of the Classics, that the dominance of the English language presented problems, and that corruption was fertilised by inefficiency and distrust. The report concluded that, if the support of local residents was assured ('it is men, not buildings, which make a city'—persons of goodwill, common-sense and public spirit), a new system must achieve:\n\n(a) the provision of the greatest possible amount of popular participation;", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215294, "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": 71, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "19\n\nvery useful in the depression, and the factory would provide employment for 100 Africans.\" Hong Kong was also seen as a special case where the decline of the entrepôt trade with China justified the policy of fostering industrial development. After much discussion the only specific recommendation made by the committee was that when a protective tariff was granted an excise duty equivalent to the import duty should always be imposed. The final report of the committee was never published and apparently was never considered by the cabinet.\n\nSo the Colonial Office continued to vet proposals for new industries according to the guidelines laid down in the 1934 Report, that manufacturing should not be 'artificially encouraged'. Officials were concerned to safeguard colonial revenues at a time when most colonies were in financial difficulties as a result of the world depression. The Colonial Office insisted that budgets must be balanced, to avoid the need for a grant from the British government and the consequent Treasury control of the colony's finances. The Colonial Office had no money available in its own account to subsidise ingenious schemes, such as a project put forward by an entrepreneur from Trinidad to produce newsprint paper from bagasse and to power the factory with anhydrous alcohol distilled from sugar cane juice.70 Governors could apply for funds from the Colonial Development Advisory Committee which provided £36,500,000 for development assistance from 1929 to 1939. But this fund was originally set up to alleviate unemployment in Britain and no application for industrial development would be entertained which would be likely to compete with British industry.? Officials believed that by discouraging uneconomic industrial development they were acting in the best interests of the native inhabitants. An assistant secretary minuted, 'Manufacturing industry, which can be established in a colony only at the price of a monopoly protected by a high tariff, ends in producing a locally manufactured article which is too expensive for the primary agricultural producers to buy.' Governors were more suspicious of the motives of Colonial Office officials. The governor of Sierra Leone complained that any industrial project was approached from the standpoint that British trade interests must rank first, dominions' interests second and those of the colonies last. Perhaps the fairest summary of Colonial Office policy was made by a junior official: 'Generally speaking we do not want to encourage industrial development in the colonial empire, but we are reluctant to go so far as actually to prohibit it.'\"\n\nWhy then was it that Hong Kong was able to develop a flourishing export-oriented industry without any subsidy or assistance from the colonial government whatsoever when in all the other dependent territories the development of manufacturing industry was derisory, and the few factories that were established were heavily dependent on protective tariffs, special", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]