RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1985 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x KAU SAI, AN UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPT BARBARA E. WARD* 27 1. INTRODUCTION Every traveller to Hong Kong remembers the junks. They swarm in the harbour: fishermen, cargo boats, pilot craft, countless small passenger sampans, wooden lighters clustering around the ocean-going ships like suckling pigs around their dams, Chinese boats of every shape and size. The men and women aboard them are the Boat People. Traditionally they were born, married, died on their boats. They went ashore permanently only after death, for it is unchancy to be buried at sea. In the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong today they number about 250,000. Their counterparts (perhaps two or three million) are spread all along the Pearl River and its branches, throughout the intricate network of navigable inland waterways in Kwangtung and Kwangsi, and all along the Chinese coast southeast from Fukien. 2 3 Water dwelling is not unusual in China (or Japan, or, indeed, most of South East Asia) but the Boat People of Kwangtung and Kwangsi seem to have acquired a special notoriety from at least the Sung dynasty onwards. Known as Tanka, a name rightly resented by them as a term of derision and disrepute, they have been despised, placed at the bottom of local systems of social stratification, and often referred to as exemplars of loose sexual morality and other un-Chinese characteristics. They are still frequently explained away as being not really Chinese, or even not really human. I have heard well-educated landsmen expatiating upon their non-Han descent, their non-Chinese language, their utterly alien customs (which are often alleged to include matriliny), and the special biological distinction which gives them all six toes on each foot. * Barbara E. Ward passed away in 1982 before completing this manuscript, obviously an early draft for a full-length book. It is published here by kind permission of her husband, Dr. Stephen Morris, who has also supplied the plates. Miss Ward was, for many years, a member of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1985 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x TEMPLE Jerry -971 Parse W SKETCH PLAN of ANCHORAGE ~ 1952 SEHER. SMALL LINER N VISITORS and offers VSTALLY e) THIS SIBINCLUDING NO SURNAME MA THEK SHEK NA SHEKSE Suek SË Не Ho SHEK на Lo CHUNGE Lo Cuunta (hawker) CRUNG CHANG SHEK SHEK SHER SHEK MAIN JETTY SHE K SHER MA Summe MEDIUM LINEA ने other small lines when MA present To "JUARANTINE" Lo E MA Но ANCHORAGE CHAN SHEK CHAN LEE CHAN Lef CHING (shop) THER CHANKA)& ALLEN LEG SMALL JETTY BARBARA E. WARD 42 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522 99 REFERENCES Allen, Barbara, and William L. Montell 1981 From Memory to History: Using Oral Sources in Local Historical Research. Nashville: The American Association For State and Local History. Chin, Margaret, et al. 1977 Religion and Organization: A Study of the Temple of Wong Tai Sin. Department of Sociology, Hong Kong University. Day, Clarence Burton 1969 Chinese Peasant Cults. (2nd edition) Taipei: Ch'eng Wen Publishing Co. Hayes, James 1966 "Chinese Temples in the Local Setting". In Some Traditional Chinese Ideas and Conceptions in Hong Kong Social Life Today, pp. 86-95. Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Lang, Graeme, and Lars Ragvald 1988 "Upward Mobility of a Refugee God: Hong Kong's Huang Daxian”. Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies. vol. 1, 54-87. Loomis, C. Grant 1948 White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend. Cambridge, Mass.: The Mediaeval Academy of America. Ogura, Manabu 1980 Drifted Deities in the Noto Peninsula. In Studies in Japanese Folklore, ed. Richard M. Dorson, pp. 133-44. New York: Arno Press. ================================================================================