[
    {
        "id": 204481,
        "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-1962",
        "page_number": 113,
        "title": "RAS-1962",
        "content_text": "102\n\nJ. W. HAYES\n\nthere are sometimes several. As a general rule they are small buildings, but the major clans have constructed large high spacious buildings with several courtyards and side rooms. Among the largest in the New Territories are the ancestral temples of branches of the TANG clan at Ping Shan and Ha Tsuen near Yuen Long. These are fine and impressive buildings but are not, unfortunately, kept in good repair. Much of the opposition to the British troops in 1898 was planned in the ancestral hall at Ha Tsuen. Beside the Ping Shan hall there is a school/library building, now used as a private residence.\n\n53 The reason is always said to be lack of funds though I suspect a lack of leadership is also a prime factor. The clan usually waits until something is seriously wrong, by which time it is often too late; a storm completes the ruination. There seems to be some truth in this as I have found newly built ancestral halls in several villages, e.g. the CHEUNG ancestral hall at Lo Wai, Pui O which was rebuilt in 1960 on a new site, the old one having been in ruins for twenty years.\n\n54 Clan worship at the graves still goes on, but is much more informal than in 1898. Mr. TANG Kiu-fong of Fui Sha Wai, a retired schoolmaster, previously quoted, who was born in 1894, tells me that when he was a boy the ceremony was taken very seriously. Everyone wore the long robe, elders were carried to the graves in sedan chairs, and male members of the clan were drawn up in ranks by generations and worshipped in strict seniority, under the direction of a master of ceremonies.\n\n55 These ancestral obligations often imposed considerable inconvenience and up to several days' travel for the whole family. Mr. CHEUNG Yau of Tai Ping village, North Lamma, (b. 1883) tells me that his grandfather settled on Lamma Island from his native village of Wai Tau in the Lam Tsuen valley in the present Tai Po district. Ever since he can remember, and until old age interfered with visits a few years ago, he has gone back to his ancestral village at least three times a year, as dictated by custom. For the first twenty-five years there was no railway and his family used to go by junk to Kowloon and walk the rest of the way, children included. Others went further afield. Mr. LAM Shue Chun, Chairman of the Peng Chau Rural Committee, told me that his family went regularly to their ancestral village of Nam Leng Wai in Po On, north of the border, and were interrupted in their journeys first by the Japanese and latterly by the Communists. He has been twice since 1942 and an uncle has been visiting fairly regularly up to last year. The family travelled to Kowloon by junk, then used the railway and had a long walk from Sham Chon Market. Sometimes there was no need to go from home as contact had been lost with the ancestral village which was too far away.\n\n56 They were full at any time. There is an interesting count of travel on the Colony's border roads and the Shum Chun ferries taken 11th and 12th December 1905 in Enclosure E to Despatch No. 59 in Correspondence relating to Kowloon-Canton Railway already quoted. The first was a market day, when the count of persons, with and without goods, roughly doubled the figures for the second, or ordinary day. On the two main ferries, for instance, the count on December 11 was with goods 1126, without goods 1379 and on the Shum Chun-Sha Tau Kok road 521 and 1302. On the day following the figures were 468 and 1124, and 158 and 550 respectively. At New Year and the two grave festivals the number must have been very much increased.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208169,
        "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": 208,
        "title": "RAS-1977",
        "content_text": "192\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nContinuously to the present, since elders in both communities were boys and reportedly before, worship of these heroes has been carried out twice a year, at the times of the first and second padi harvests (described as 春分*). It even continued throughout the Japanese Occupation, a hard time when traditional practices were sometimes dispensed with and not taken up again. Such practices, whilst tending to keep each community together, also had the effect of perpetuating a rift; and the existence of such shrines did nothing to reduce the endemic bickering that characterized much of local society at that time.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Sessional Papers 1928 (see the District Officer North's report which follows at Part C to the Notes for this Visit).\n\n2 See Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (Hong Kong Government Printer, n.d. but circa 1960): 148-152.\n\n3 Copies of genealogies of the Cheng (#) Tang (*) and some other local lineages have been recently deposited in the Chinese Library, University of Hong Kong.\n\n4 They also went to Tai Po Market and to North West Kowloon.\n\n5 YEUNG Kwok-shui (#) of Yeung Uk, a small single lineage settled since the Ch'ien Lung period.\n\n6 Local place name of the district city of Hsin-an.\n\n7 Gazetteer: 154.\n\n* Gazetteer: 150. Lo Wai is claimed to be the oldest of the Tsuen Wan villages.\n\n9 See e.g. G. N. Orme's Report on the New Territory 1899-1912 in the Hong Kong Government's Sessional Papers 1912: paras 58-60; and the file CSD1903 Ext/17, minutes of 6 April and 5 May 1905 in Public Records Office of Hong Kong.\n\n10 Gazetteer: 150-151.\n\n11 GR.\n\n12 Shek Lei Pui (†) was the name of a village moved to Sha Tin in the 1920s to make way for an extension to the Kowloon Reservoir. See H.K. Government's Administrative Reports 1924, page Q146, para. 4.\n\n13 Gazetteer: 151.\n\n14 The Tin Hau Temple inscription says a wooden tablet, worshipped for 70 years.\n\n15 of Sam Tung Uk, Chairman of the Tsuen Wan Rural Committee and Chairman of the New Territories Heung Yee Kuk, died 15th October, 1956: para. 119 of District Commissioner, New Territories' Annual Departmental Report 1956-57.\n\n16 From the names listed it seems likely that, as stated by informants, friends and relatives of the Shing Mun people from the Pat Heung (Gazetteer: 170) aided them in the war against Tsuen Wan.\n\n17 According to the Tsuen Wan tablet, the fighting took place with sharp weapons. (i).\n\n18 This name was a purely Shing Mun description and does not appear in Gazetteer which only refers to the other Pat Heung to the north.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208877,
        "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": 39,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "CHINESE MONASTERIES, TEMPLES, SHRINES, ALTARS\n\n11\n\nThere are a dozen or so temples in Hong Kong the titles of which should leave one in no doubt that they are Buddhist. To highlight the problem of classifying temples by their religious affiliation, let us examine one in Lo Wai above Tsuen Wan which has a typically Buddhist name followed by the characters for \"Buddhist temple\". The staff consists of three laymen who run the vegetarian restaurant below the temple and the deities on the altar from senior to junior are Guan Di, Guan Yin, Lu Dong Bin, Dou Mu and Yao Shi Fo. Guan Yin and Yao Shi Fo are Buddhist, whilst the other three are Daoist folk religion deities. Opposite the main altar, on a secondary altar, are a Kitchen God and a Protector of the Law, both represented by framed prints; the first is a folk religion deity and the second Buddhist. And finally, on the table before the main altar is a red wooden rice bucket containing a peck of uncooked rice in which stand numerous items which have without doubt Daoist and not Buddhist origins. Despite the mixture, the three laymen were surprised that there was any doubt that their temple was Buddhist.\n\nConfucian and Daoist temples\n\nIn Hong Kong and Macau there are no Confucian temples as there were in China and still are in Taiwan. There are, however, Confucian Halls such as the one in a school sponsored by the Confucian Society at Caroline Hill, Hong Kong Island. Several Chinese societies in Hong Kong are understood to have private altars dedicated solely to Confucius.\n\nThe official state religion had its own rites and deities and involved the official bureaucracy and the gentry only. The nearest thing to a State temple in our two territories is the rural school at Fanling where an image of the Yellow Emperor (*) stands on an altar in the main hall, and the side hall of a Macau temple in which a school is held where on an altar there are full-size images of the inventors of ink and writing.\n\n\"Pure\" Daoist temples are rare, there appearing to be none in Macau and some two dozen in Hong Kong of which two are branches of two of the others. These two dozen contain distinct Daoist deities, are run by Daoist bodies represented by a committee, whilst Daoist lay priests and priestesses perform Daoist ceremonies.\n\n* Peng Lai Ge (**M**)",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 208899,
        "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": 61,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "CHINESE MONASTERIES, TEMPLES, SHRINES, ALTARS\n\n33\n\n14 Because of the exorbitant rents for such accommodation, temples in shop houses and flats in Hong Kong are few and far between. In Singapore and Malaysia, temples in shop houses are very common indeed, though they are becoming less so as the years pass and rents in urban areas rapidly rise.\n\n15 Occasionally such a temple may be a converted private house, as in the many examples in Lo Wai village, Tsuen Wan, but more often it is a purpose-built but inexpensive hut.\n\n18 Temples containing images of the Buddhist deities Di Zang Wang, Milofu, and Guan Yin are not necessarily specifically Buddhist, as all three of these deities nowadays are also extremely popular deities in folk religion temples.\n\n17 Mahayana is Northern Buddhism and Theravada or Hinayana is Southern Buddhism.\n\n18 \"Illegal\" is a Hong Kong term for buildings which have been built on Crown Land often by squatters without Government land control or planning permission, but which have been permitted to remain standing under sufferance. In practice, they are temporary structures put up without permission, occasionally ramshackle though more often they are well-built timber, weather-board, and corrugated iron buildings, clean and well-proportioned. (Illustration 17). Some have stood for such a length of time as to have been gradually converted to concrete and brick. All are labelled on the side in rough daubs of paint with the bureaucratic abbreviations and digits prefixed by \"TEM\" (= temporary) affixed by squatter control staff of the Housing Department.\n\n19 Demons are well known to Chinese to be unable to go around corners and must travel in straight lines, hence these inner doors to prevent the demons from entering the temple. The inner doors originally were opened exclusively for influential people.\n\n20 See also James Hayes' information at JHKBRAS 6 (1966): 129-130.\n\n21 In overseas Chinese areas, this kind of large street shrine is still very common and, in Singapore alone, some four to five hundred exist in all kinds of nooks and crannies. For a Hong Kong example, see JHKBRAS 14 (1974): 203.\n\n22 Chu is one of the 28 Constellations (= xiu).\n\n** See pp. 111-113 of the Hong Kong Government's publication Rural Architecture in Hong Kong (1979) for this pagoda.\n\n24 In Imperial times, such masts were always to be seen outside the local magistrate's yamen.\n\n25 Chinese bells have no internal tongue clapper, being tolled by an external blow with a wooden mallet.\n\n26 For the Evacuation of the Coast, see Lo Hsiang-lin and others, Hong Kong and its External Communications before 1842 (Hong Kong, 1963) Chapter VI.\n\n27 For background, see Jen Yu-wen's article \"The Southern Sung stone-engraving at North Fu-t'ang\" in JHKBRAS 5 (1965): 65-68.\n\n28 Government action is through the Chinese Temples Committee, serviced by the Trust Funds Section of the Home Affairs Department.\n\n29 Temples according to this Ordinance include Miao (廟), Si (寺), Buddhist and Daoist monasteries, Guan (觀) and Dao Yuan (道院), and nunneries An (庵).",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 209026,
        "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": 188,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "156\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nremoval to the housing estate, to ensure that a full scale excavation programme could begin in late 1980. Thereby, through uninterrupt-ed intensive work, we hoped to make up part of the lost time.\n\nIn the interim one other incident which showed the strength of village feeling about the fung shui hill occurred in November 1979. In this case, a demolition contract had been let for the houses in the old Chung Mei and Lo Uk villages. The Rural Committee and the village elders had agreed, but unexpectedly there was opposition when the contractor began to move his bulldozer into position to start the work. This time, it came from the young men of the village, and we were informed by the Rural Committee Chairman that they could not be persuaded to agree.\n\nUpon investigation I found that it was not (in the main) the demolition which was being objected to, but rather the route by which the bulldozer was to obtain access to the old village sites. This was over the face of the same fung shui hill that had been causing the prolonged delay, and naturally it was being objected to.\n\nI greatly wished the contract to proceed, on the principle that, when you are dealing with villagers, it is bad to go back on a deci-sion reached with their leaders, besides having to explain to the Finance Branch of the Government Secretariat the claims from the thwarted contractor. However, when I saw how things were, and being mindful of the wisdom of not interfering with the hill, I instructed staff to take the bulldozer by an alternative route. This would still open bare earth on the hillside but it would be out of the sight of the villages, which was what mattered, and it would be on a route to be formed for roadworks at a later stage. In a meet-ing held in my office, the twelve or so young men who had insisted on accompanying the elders, were perfectly agreeable to this solution and the demolition continued.\n\nThe end of the story is quickly told. The residents of the four villages moved into the new public housing accommodation when it was ready for occupation, the Project Manager (P.W.D.) was able to let his contract, and the successful contractor was at last able to carry out uninterrupted major excavation of soil from the hill-sides. There was trouble at the seashore where mariculturists had to be moved to enable a pier to be built and a channel dredged for the barges that would take away the soil to the Tsuen Wan Bay reclamation: but that is another story!\n\nHong Kong, June 1981\n\nJAMES HAYES",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 210320,
        "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": 291,
        "title": "RAS-1984",
        "content_text": "270\n\nP.H. HASE, J.W. HAYES AND K.C. IU\n\nIn the 1970s when District Officer and Town Manager, Tsuen Wan, my contacts with local village people established that there were families in Lo Wai which had tea bushes on the mountain slopes of Tai Mo Shan. The Hui (4) family of Lo Wai village collected tea from wild bushes near the present radar station at the very top of Tai Mo Shan. One old man, born in 1896, used to collect ten catties a week during the season, commenting that the best time for plucking the leaves was in the third lunar month: the leaves become older and coarser thereafter. This type of tea was described as wan mo (雲霧) (\"cloud mist\"). He began doing this when he was about 10 years old, selling to other villagers and not to shops or teahouses. He also collected medicinal herbs on the mountain. Another favourable location for wild tea trees on this mountain, he said, was Nam Tong To (南塘肚) where the Shing Mun villagers collected leaves from wild tea bushes there of the same type. Such trees could not be replanted and grown elsewhere, he stated. Separately, old Shing Mun villagers living in Kam Tin since their removal there in 1928 for construction of the Jubilee Reservoir, themselves confirmed their taking of leaves from trees in this locality. In the foothills west of Tsuen Wan, villagers of Yau Kam Tau also collected leaves from wild tea bushes.12\n\nLantau island possessed a rather special type of red \"tea\", with a brilliant red infusion, known as tsz pooi tin kwai (紫背天葵). Tsz pooi tin kwai was described to me as being “half herb half tea”. It was used as a kind of cooling tea (清熱茶) for “over-heating” from food or drink, sore throats and the like. The leaves came from a plant growing between cracks in rocks and stones in high gulleys where there was much moisture. The people of Tong Fuk village on south Lantau, at the foot of the Fung Wong mountain, used to collect these from upper slopes. It was also collected by the women inmates of the religious houses of Ngong Ping and others living at the Po Lin monastery there. Some of the produce found its way to shops in Tai O market where one of the leading shopkeepers, chairman of the Rural Committee, gave me some at intervals. According to Shiu-ying's Hu's An Enumeration of Chinese Materia Medica (Hong Kong, Chinese University Press, 1980) page 153, it is to be described in English as the Tea Begonia (Begonia fimbristipula) and in Chinese as (紅天葵/紫背天葵).13",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212085,
        "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": 27,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "4 \n\nmodernity has been, on the whole, so successful.\n\n2. Traditional Self-Management in the New Territories\n\nThe large, indigenous, long-settled population of the New Territories possessed managerial talents in abundance, and, after 1898, the new British officials were willing to let their leaders continue to exercise them, though within a more effective framework of law and order than had been possible under Chinese rule. In the 1920s, an experienced District Officer South, Walter Schofield, saw this self-management in action among the larger communities in his District (it included Tsuen Wan) and commented on local leadership and the prevailing official attitude to it as follows:\n\n\"We never went closely into details of how or why so and so acquired the status and duties of village elder; we just accepted the natural leaders we found.\"7\n\nDecades later, in the mid 1950s, the same capabilities were still to be found among the people of Tsuen Wan. This was indeed very fortunate. Although the town's population had risen to around 80,000, it was yet without a local management office. The District Office Tsuen Wan was not established until 1959, and, in the interim, the local people had had to cope with many problems, initially at least by themselves and largely unaided. Austin Coates, the District Officer responsible for the area a few years earlier, has given a vivid account of the burden carried by the Tsuen Wan Rural Committee, the only local body that was able to fill the yawning gap between the Hong Kong government's responsibilities and its then capabilities:\n\n\"As can be seen, their [Rural Committee's] duties are varied and, if done properly, heavy. In Tsuen Wan, these duties have become overwhelming, and the same may happen elsewhere. The Chairman of Tsuen Wan Rural Committee is in effect a sort of magistrate and mayor rolled into one. All day long he has a stream of problems to attend to. He is obliged to work a full day from nine to five and maintain his own clerical staff in addition to what is paid for by the Committee. ... There is no time whatever for the running of his own business, so great are the demands made on his public services.\"8",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212098,
        "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": 40,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "17\n\nwith its inculcation of “right thinking\", the complete process has been summed up in a few well-chosen words by Dr. Monlin Chiang, one of the most prominent educationalists of the early Republican period:\n\n“These moral precepts came from the Confucian classics. Moral ideas were driven into the people by every possible means — temples, theatres, houses, toys, proverbs, schools, history and stories until they became habits in daily life, 233\n\nThe effect of both the legacy and the drilling was not lost on competent Western observers. Writing over 150 years ago, in his standard work on China first published in the 1830s, a future governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Davis, then only lately returned to England from many years' membership of the Honourable East India Company's Select Committee at Canton, had this to say: \"The Chinese lower classes are better educated or at least better trained than in most other countries”.\n\nPART THREE: “Right Thinking\" in Action in Tsuen Wan\n\n134\n\n+\n\nTsuen Wan District (like all the rest) provides plenty of evidence for the effectiveness of the indoctrination, as well as occasional examples of emulation and performance. People knew what to think and what to do, and recognized the attainment of the prescribed high standards of conduct and behaviour even if they themselves did not measure up. Men who did so were greatly respected, to the point of veneration.\n\nIt is the general opinion among Tsuen Wan natives, then and now, that such a one was the late Mr. Chan Wing-on, a former Tsuen Wan Rural Committee leader and also Chairman of the New Territories Heung Yee Kuk. Mr. Chan, who unfortunately died comparatively young, left a fine reputation behind him. He is commemorated by a tablet in a traditional-style pavilion, named for him, which was erected the year after his death near the entrance to the Chuk Lam Sim Yuen, one of the large religious houses located above the town. The memorial tablet records his life and achievements as a teacher and as a public figure; with an emphasis on his virtuous conduct and character and how it had influenced others for good:\n\n\"Entering the teaching profession, he taught the village",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212099,
        "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": 41,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "18 \n\nchildren with skill and patience. Being a teacher, he was dutiful to his parents and respectful to the elders, thereby setting a good example to his fellow villagers. Thus, being virtuous himself he caused others to establish their virtue also. **35\n\nThe inscription ends on this note:\n\n\"It was little expected that Mr. Chan should die from an illness last year. Upon hearing the news of his death, many persons expressed their condolences. Being sincere and virtuous, he should have enjoyed a long life. It is deeply regretted that we have lost such an honourable leader. In order to sustain the traditional morals, and to commemorate his virtuous acts, I have composed this elegy.\"\n\nNotice here how the traditional morals are to be maintained through recording the virtuous conduct and attainments of a revered public figure. The only other public memorial of such a character seen to date in Tsuen Wan is that to Yeung Kwok-shui of Yeung Uk Village (1871-1940), Ch'ing dynasty scholar of the hsiu tsai degree, graduate of the Kwangtung Senior Teacher's Training College, village teacher, leading prewar elder and a founder member of the Heung Yee Kuk. His photo-memorial, which hangs in the office of the Tsuen Wan Rural Committee, was composed and written by another surviving hsiu tsai and senior rural leader of his day, the late Li Chung-chong of Kuk Po, North District. It is recorded that one of his funeral elegies contained the phrase, \"He deserved to be called The Perfect Man of the New Territories\" **36\n\nOther reminders of how deeply the Confucian virtues were esteemed and honoured, illustrating how obligations to the family and the community were keenly felt and sometimes fully honoured, are to be found in a few of the inscribed tablets at the older ancestral graves of the District. One of these, located in the Shing Mun area on the slopes of Tai Mo Shan, is of special interest in the context of virtuous reputation and its ongoing influence among descendants. The person buried there had been born about 1710 and the reburial in 1884 was carried out by all three branches of the family then living. However, retained on the new tablet, were the names of the elder brothers of the deceased who had been responsible for the initial burial at this site\n\n37",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212106,
        "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": 48,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "G. Knapp, The Chinese House: Craft Symbol, and the Folk Tradition (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1990). Knapp does not cover the paintings and stucco work that were a marked feature of the Kwangtung architectural style. For examples of this fine traditional decorative work, see Rural Architecture in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, Government Information Services Department, 1979).\n\nIn the Hakka villages of the Tsuen Wan district, this \"animal\" was always a unicorn. In Cantonese villages the lion was usual. However, their purpose and motivation was clearly the same. Informants said there were differences in the dance performances of lions and unicorns; unicorns \"crept, bobbed and weaved\", whereas lions would \"stand up and prance\". The musical accompaniment, drums and gongs, was the same, and previously firecrackers had been an indispensable part of any performance by lions or unicorns.\n\nHugh Baker mentions that the Liaos of Sheung Shui were known throughout the New Territories for their unicorn dance team. See the interesting information given in his Sheung Shui, A Chinese Lineage Village (London, Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., 1968), p. 193.\n\nSee my \"Notes on Temples and Shrines on Hong Kong Island\" in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 27 (1987), p. 287.\n\nMonlin Chiang, Tides from the West (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1947), p. 9. John Francis Davis, The Chinese, A General Description of the Empire of China and its Inhabitants (London, Charles Knight, 1836) Vol. 2, pp. 29-30.\n\nFrom the memorial tablet to Mr. Chan Wing-on, Chairman of the Tsuen Wan Rural Committee and Chairman of the 18th Term, New Territories Heung Yee Kuk 1950-52, at the Wing On Pavilion, Fu Yung Shan, Tsuen Wan. Mr. Chan died on 15 October 1956; see Annual Departmental Reports, District Commissioner, New Territories, (1953-54 para. 56, and 1956-57 para. 119).\n\nFrom a “Short History of Yeung Uk Village\" (in Chinese), published at the time of the village resiting in 1965 and written by Yeung's eldest grandson, Mr Yeung Cho-ling. According to the commemorative tablet, the grave was repaired on a lucky day in the middle month of the autumn season in the 10th year of Kuang Hsu, that is in September-October 1884.\n\n1736; but in fact the ping-san year is the 1st year of Ch'ien Lung's long reign. There was probably another, less altruistic factor at work here too: since it was believed that the graves of good people have a beneficial effect on the fortunes of their family for generations to come. It is implicit in this case that the good influences of the grave were not yet spent.\n\nFor a more recent example from Tsing Yi Island, see my Rural Communities, op. cit., p. 143.\n\nContents more than values, I suggest? Wolfram Eberhard, Cantonese Ballads (Munich State Library Collection) (Taipei, The Orient Cultural Service, 1972), p.2.\n\nR. David Arkush, \"Orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Twentieth-Century Chinese Peasant Proverbs\" at pp. 310-335 of Kwang-Ching Liu (ed.) Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990).\n\nHelen Kwok and Mini Chan, Fossils From a Rural Past, A Study of Extant Cantonese Children's Songs (Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 1990), pp. 17, 29.\n\nLucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1971), successively pp.126, 94-95.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212383,
        "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": 325,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "302\n\nNOTES\n\nL\n\nThis same carver also referred to the Fukienese Pestilence Wang Yeh as \"pan-shen pan-kuei\" (Note 1: Page 59 of Vol 29: 1989 Journal) as they too are neither gods nor demons, but 'humans of the other world'.\n\nSee Plates 7-9.\n\nTHE MAKING OF A HUSK-GRINDER\n\nMr Chung Yick Ming, the Chairman of Tai Po Rural Committee took me to see Mr Chung Koon Tai (#) who is a villager of Chung Uk Village in Lam Tsuen Valley in Tai Po, New Territories.\n\nMr Chung Koon Tai is now 76 years old. He first joined the trade of husk-grinder (A) making when he was 16 years old as an apprentice. His teacher was a fellow clansman. He retired in 1980. He also got an apprentice to succeed to the craft of husk grinder making. Because of the decline of rice farming in the New Territories since the 60's, the apprentice could not find a living with his profession, and therefore has migrated to UK.\n\nIn those golden days of husk-grinder making, Mr Chung received orders for grinder making from villages all over the New Territories. He had to travel to these villages on foot and stayed there for three to four days to make a husk-grinder. He also made husk-grinders for rice-grinding shops (*) in the old market towns in Tai Po, Yuen Long and Tuen Mun. Chan Yat Sun (H), the former Heung Yee Kuk Chairman, was also his customer when he owned a rice-grinding shop in the town of old Castle Peak (Tuen Mun today).\n\nThere used to be two skilled workers working together to make a husk-grinder. When they arrived at the village, they first went to find some bamboo which was available almost everywhere in the New Territories. They cut down some bamboo and then stripped the bark off layer by layer into long narrow pieces of a quarter to a half inch wide. They then wove these long narrow bamboo strips into the upper and lower parts of the outer framework of the grinder, which looked like two empty baskets. The upper part was fixed with a wooden handle and a wooden funnel which helped the grain to go to the grinding surface. The lower part was also fixed with an axis of iron in the centre.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
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    },
    {
        "id": 212882,
        "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": 191,
        "title": "RAS-1992",
        "content_text": "176\n\nfrom other places [to Shek Lei Tau].\n\nIt is now clear that we have come to the end of [the available] burial ground and that there is nowhere to which we can effect removal [of the graves]. We therefore appeal to you in grief and resentment for your understanding and support in this matter. We shall be most grateful if you will advise the concerned authority to rescind the order and cease development in the area.\n\n15\n\nNo further action was taken by the Lands Department at the time, and during my three years as Regional Secretary, New Territories, I was concerned to retain the grave area and wrote to the department on their behalf. So far as I am aware, the rights of the Kau Wah Keng people to this remaining part of their traditional burial area are still being respected.\n\nCharitable Graves\n\nAnother kind of grave should also be mentioned. This is the yi chung or 'charitable grave' which was built to contain the remains of persons without descendants. Sometimes it was provided by a charitable society or a conscientious local organization, or at times by worthy individuals, after or during an epidemic which had killed numbers of people. This action was taken by the Tung Wah Hospital of Hong Kong and by the Lok Sin Tong of New Kowloon after the Plague of 1894. It has also been taken by rural committees in the postwar New Territories, and by temples and other religious bodies, for the remains of persons who were killed or died during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong between 1941-1945. Several such graves were provisioned by the Tsuen Wan Rural Committee.\n\nA grave of this kind had to be moved and reprovisioned at Sai Cho Wan on Tsing Yi Island when that part of the Island was being developed for industry in 1977. The Tsing Yi Rural Committee took up this responsibility, writing to the District Office to explain the position and ask for money to effect the removal and reconstruction in another place. The letter is not without charm and interest:\n\nBefore the War, Tsing Yi Island was a well-wooded spot, with lots of birds and wild-life. Magpies, partridges,",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1992.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/qf85tx75x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213975,
        "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": 44,
        "title": "RAS-1997",
        "content_text": "9 \n\n(b) the maximum decentralisation of functions by the Central \nGovernment; \n\n(c) simplicity in concept and operation; \n\n(d) the possession of built-in controls; \n\n(e) the allocation of priority of consideration to the densely-populated urban areas, including Tsuen Wan; \n\n(f) compromises, appropriate to particular localities, governing community of interest, development or expected development, economic and industrial characteristics, financial resources measured in relation to financial needs, physical features, population, past administration, size and shape of existing administrative areas, and the wishes of the inhabitants. \n\nAn interesting discussion was recorded of theoretical local government criteria, between the 'Grass Roots School,' which brought government close to the people through attending to day-to-day social cohesion but, while providing local debating societies, resulted in units too small for executive responsibility; and the 'Functional School,' which by relating boundaries to the area of optimal performance of technical services (as in the Colony itself) led to authorities too extensive to be local; and the ‘Finance School,' which by requiring viable internal financial strength reflected the views of the Finance Branch of the Colonial Secretariat but also questioned the validity of the whole concept. This did not daunt the working party's draftsman. \n\nNo immediate application to the NT was expected (where the ark was peculiarly susceptible to rocking), and the special position of the Heung Yee Kuk and the Rural Committees as important consultative bodies in the sensitive circumstances of the self-consciously unBritish leased territories was acknowledged; but although that door should be left open, Tsuen Wan, already a swelling wen, must be made an exception now. The recommended procedure was to appoint an officer with overall responsibility for each developing NT area; to establish an advisory committee to him of local residents; and ultimately to transform this committee into a local authority.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1997.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/wp98g7579",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215840,
        "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-2002",
        "page_number": 139,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "72\n\naltars erected within the enclosure. On more social occasions, especially among the kaifong associations, it was also usual (and tedious for those present) to invite principal guests to speak: some orators did not need a second invitation!\n\nOwing to its super-glossy surface, this particular card does not reproduce well, nor does its successor for the 1985 Ta Chiu. I have therefore used the invitation card for the similar event at Shatin, held also in 1985 to indicate type and content (Plates 2-5).2\n\nAlthough the majority of invitation cards were printed, some were still being hand-written in black Chinese ink using a brush (Plate 6), and even on the printed ones, the recipients' names and ranks were usually added by brush rather than by fountain pen or biro (Plate 2). Owing to their intrinsic interest, and the fact that most were destined for the wastepaper basket, I kept many of those I received, and sent specimens to library collections as ephemera, literary productions of a fleeting kind. The Hong Kong Collection at the University of Hong Kong has, or should have, them in its holdings today.\n\nAt the scene\n\nInvariably, there would be some indication on site of the event being celebrated. Decorated archways and banners raised on bamboo scaffolding (pai lau), and/or floral tributes (fa pai), were the norm, and very colourful and ingenious they sometimes were, too. They were the work of skilled artisans, but their wording had to be supplied by the host body.\n\nHere are a few examples. The elaborate archway erected at the entrance to the ground used for the Ta Chiu at Kam Tin in 1985 features in Plate 7. The floral banner erected to mark the District Commissioner, NT's ceremonial opening of a newly completed local public works concrete track on Cheung Chau Peak in 1960 is shown in Plate 8, whilst the subject of Plate 9 is one of the large floral tributes made to honour a new chairman and his two vice-chairmen of the Tsuen Wan Rural Committee, which, along with others, was set up outside the restaurant\n\n1 I must apologize for the high family content of the illustrations, the selection being made, of necessity, from our own photographs and memorabilia, from my wife's and my own service in the relevant departments.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215857,
        "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-2002",
        "page_number": 156,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "Plate 9. One of several large floral tributes to mark the inauguration of the 20th term Tsuen Wan Rural Committee, 1970s.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]