RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f
103

EXCAVATIONS AT MAN KOK TSUI ON LANTAU ISLAND

ELSPETH MANEELY *

[On 13 May 1961 over fifty members of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society landed from a launch at Man Kok Tsui, a promontory on Lantau facing Hong Kong. Here Professor S. G. Davis and Dr. S. M. Bard explained to the members of the Society how the excavations were carried out and what objects had been discovered. Later the party walked over the hills to Silvermine Bay. This article gives an account of the excavations carried out there in 1958, Ed.]

To date, the investigation of Neolithic remains in China points to the existence of three main Neolithic cultures.' This broad classification depends largely on differences in the types of fine pottery. In the north-west traces of the Painted Pottery Culture were first noted by J. G. Andersson at Yang Shao, Honan in 1920, and three years later at the Tao river sites, Kansu. In the north-east, traces of the Black Pottery Culture were uncovered in 1928 at Lung Shan, Shantung. The finds at Man Kok Tsui belong to the third of these Neolithic traditions: the South-East Neolithic, and the characteristic fine pottery found is a hard stoneware bearing a variety of impressed designs. This type of impressed pottery was first discovered in Hong Kong by Dr. C. M. Heanley in 1926 and it was associated with several kinds of stone artifact. It is interesting to note that the traces of these three Neolithic cultures were uncovered within a period of eight years and that in 1926—the year in which Dr. Heanley began his work on pre-historic remains in Hong Kong—the exciting discovery of "Peking Man" took place at Chou Kou Tien, south-west of Peking.

Dr. Heanley was joined in his systematic survey of the Hong Kong area by Professor J. L. Shellshear and Mr. W. Schofield and they soon established that the Colony was rich in scattered finds, in general concentrated near the beaches and on the low

* Mrs. Maneely has lived in Hong Kong since 1956, and is the Hon. Secretary of the Hong Kong University Archaeological team.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f
104

ELSPETH MANEELY

16

hill slopes of the western islands and in the Castle Peak area; but perhaps only four places investigated since archaeological work began in the Colony may be dignified by the term "site". These are: So Kun Wat #, a series of low hilltops to the west of the Tai Lam Chun reservoir; Lamma Island (Pok Liu Chau14), which really comprises several distinct sites; Shek Pik and Man Kok Tsui, both on Lantau Island (Tai Yu Shan). A report on the findings at So Kun Wat was presented by C. M. Heanley and J. L. Shellshear in 1932 at the first Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East held at Hanoi. Father Finn's publications on the Lamma sites, begun in 1932, have recently been reprinted in one volume, Archaeological Finds on Lamma Island Near Hong Kong.3 The Shek Pik site, on the south-west coast of Lantau Island, was excavated by W. Schofield and J. G. Andersson in 1937 and a report was published in the Proceedings of the Third Congress of Prehistorians of the Far East, Singapore, in 1938. The artifacts uncovered at Man Kok Tsui are similar to those found at these earlier sites and are of three kinds: stone tools and ornaments, pottery and bronze.

Before describing the discovery of Man Kok Tsui in more detail however, reference should be made to Father R. L. Maglioni's extensive discoveries in Hoifung as they bear a definite relationship to finds in the Hong Kong area. Hoifung lies on the China coast about one hundred miles north-east of Hong Kong. In 1934 Fr. Maglioni, then a priest in the Hoifung region, embarked on a thorough search for prehistoric remains. He located as many as twenty distinct sites. In general the finds were of the same type as those described by archaeologists working in Hong Kong, but Fr. Maglioni was able to distinguish three separate Neolithic cultures. These three he called the SON, SAK and PAT cultures from the capital letters of the romanized names of villages adjacent to the sites. So far Neolithic remains in Hong Kong resemble closely those of Fr. Maglioni's PAT culture, the latest of the three.

In April 1958, Dr. S. M. Bard first reported Man Kok Tsui as a possible area for investigation by the University Archaeological Team. The site, given the number 30 by the Team, lies at the extreme tip of the northern arm of Silvermine Bay, Lantau Island. It consists of two sheltered, sandy beaches, a flat fertile valley
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1965
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s752cj653
S. G. DAVIS

1897). Laufer also pointed out that the only reference that he could find in Chinese literature to pottery of the Han Dynasty is by Chow Mi in the Kuei Hsin Tsa Shih, Chow Mi lived under the Southern Sung Dynasty in the thirteenth century.

Such an observation by Laufer is of importance because he was an established authority on Chinese archaeology. As Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago he was in China from 1901 to 1904 collecting specimens and making investigations with the Jacob H. Schiff Chinese expedition. He returned again to China in 1910 with the Mrs. T. B. Blackstone expedition. While he collected most of his Chou and Han pottery mainly in Shensi Province he also travelled widely in China and visited Canton and Hong Kong. Thus he would certainly have reported Han pottery if it had been known in the area.

This relatively recent discovery of neolithic archaeology in China is certainly paralleled here in Hong Kong. The first reference to it that I can find is by Dr. C. M. Heanley in 1928 when he described Hong Kong celts (8). Dr. Heanley, who fortunately is still active and keenly interested in Hong Kong (I received a letter from him recently), lives in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. He was head of the Government Vaccine and Bacteriological Department and in his spare time was a devoted amateur geologist. He knew of Laufer's work and in his article on celts referred to Laufer's statement that prehistory stone implements were scarce in China. Heanley suggested that they were only scarce because prospectors did not know how to look for them. He said, "To find celts in South China select the crests and spurs of granite hills bared of vegetation by rain erosion. Do not look for celts but look for isolated fragments of pottery and water-worn stones. The eyes should be kept ranging well ahead and on either side and little attention given to the ground near the feet." Heanley estimated that on granite outcrops in Hong Kong there was an average of about 30 to 40 celts to the square mile within 600 yards of the sea and land reclaimed from the sea.

Dr. Heanley's shrewd advice to prospectors has helped considerably in later searches. It is on raised beaches, terraces and hill-spurs that most of our archaeological remains have been

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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1967
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g
150

LIN SHU-YEN

families the men and women were in their fifties. In the third, the son, who is about thirty, did most of the work.

The leaching process, Lin tells us, was carried out mainly by natives of Lantau Island and was the only method inherited from their remote ancestors. In 1962 I was able to speak to an old lady who came in 1898 at the age of 16 to the village of Leung Uk, at the south-west edge of the salt pans, to be married to one of the villagers. She told me that men and women from the locality worked in the fields, some of them from Leung Uk. Not many people worked in the fields at that time, and they were operated by an outsider. The workers were paid on a piece work basis depending on their output, but it was customary for the company to advance money for daily food and deduct the sum from the final wage.

For how long the local village people, as opposed to outsiders, carried out the work on the salt-pans is not known. The Leung Uk settlement, since it is named after the Leung family, it is reasonable to suppose that they were the first inhabitants of the present settlement, was apparently settled about 1800. This estimate is based on calculations from a genealogy which also states that the first ancestor came to Tai O from a village near Shum Chun Market to the north of the present Sino-British frontier. These people are Hakkas. The other villages in the Tai O basin, adjacent to the market town, are the similar small settlements of Nam Chung, San Tsuen, and Wang Hang, and it is unlikely that they are earlier than Leung Uk. At the 1911 Colony census, the population of these three small villages was recorded at 50, 42, and 90 respectively, whilst the population of Leung Uk was 104 persons. There were other, larger villages a little further afield, and some of their inhabitants may also have worked at the pans.

Since writing the above, I have chanced upon a note in The Hong Kong Naturalist, also in Vol X (1940), by Father R. Maglioni, the noted archaeologist, in which he offers some comments upon Lin's article and an earlier one by Dr. C. M. Heanley on some of the problems connected with local, i.e., Hong Kong archaeology. He writes:

"About the furnaces described by Dr. Heanley in The Hong Kong Naturalist (Vol. VI, Nos. 3-4), I must confess that I am not
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2001
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g
Police Force and was its chief information officer for the last seven years of his service. He is now the managing director of an IT services company. He is the Hon. Editor of JHKBRAS (peterhalliday@netvigator.com).

Patrick Hase, B.A. Ph.D., is the current president of HKBRAS. He is a noted scholar and Hong Kong historian, and has written prolifically on the culture and history of Hong Kong (phhase@hkusua.hku.hk).

James Hayes, Ph.D., D.Litt.(Hon.), is a past-president of HKBRAS. He is a noted scholar and Hong Kong historian and has written several books, the most recent having been Friends and Teachers: Hong Kong and its People, 1953-87. He has contributed prolifically to JHKBRAS (mouse1@bigpond.com).

Professor Anthony Headley, B.B.S., J.P., M.D., F.R.C.P. (Lond., Edin., Glas.), F.F.P.H.M., F.H.K.C.C.M., F.H.K.A.M., F.A.C.E., D. Soc. Med., was trained in the medical schools of Aberdeen and Edinburgh and formerly worked in endocrinology and internal medicine before moving to the field of public health medicine. In 1983 he was appointed to the chair of public health in the University of Glasgow and since 1988 has been Professor of Community Medicine in Hong Kong and honorary consultant to the Hong Kong Department of Health and to the Hospital Authority. The involvement of four graduates of his alma mater, Aberdeen University, including Kai Ho Kai, in the founding of the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese in 1888, has stimulated his interest in their many contributions to several aspects of educational, social, and political developments in Hong Kong in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (commed@hkucc.hku.hk)

Ko Tim-keung is a council member of HKBRAS and a keen researcher into Hong Kong history.

Rosemary Lee spent thirty years abroad in Pakistan, Switzerland, Iran, and Hong Kong. During this time she was able to indulge her interest in archaeology and in Hong Kong was one of a team of Antiquities and Monuments Office volunteers. She was a member of the Archaeological and Palaeontological Committee and Programme and Events Organiser of the Council of the HK Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. On returning to England, she became Co-Events Organiser of the Friends of HKBRAS, as well as becoming actively involved with the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (rosemary.lee@talk21.com).

Dr. Alfred H.Y. Lin, B.A., M.Phil. (Hong Kong), Ph.D. (London), was trained as an historian at the University of Hong Kong and the School of Oriental and African Studies (London). He is currently an associate professor of modern Chinese history at HKU. His research focuses on the history of South China, particularly Guangzhou politics and society in the 1920s and 1930s. He recently published an article entitled The Founding of the University of Hong Kong: British

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