RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES 81 weddings and funerals, repairs to the ancestral temple, and so on. In Another and less formal method of securing these aims is the setting aside of joss and oil fields, sometimes known by the obscure title of ching sheung 1, whose proceeds, again, are used for the proper observance of ancestral rites and other family needs.1 One need hardly emphasise the integrating effect of these land measures, To understand the people and their outlook and background it is necessary to see to what sort of government they were accustomed.1 The government of the San On district was essentially Confucian, like that of every other administrative division; by which I mean that Confucian principles were ostensibly followed. This was sealed by the state worship of the sage. In every district city there was a temple to Confucius styled a man miu in which the District Magistrate, his senior staff and the local gentry paid the customary respects to the sage and his seventy-two disciples on his birthday (twenty-seventh day of the eighth moon) and at the spring worship or chun chai 1 in the second moon. The same thing happened at the prefectural and provincial capitals. At the head of the San On district was the District Magistrate whose superior was the prefect of the Kwang Chau prefecture which embraced at least five large districts. He was subordinate to the provincial governor and he in turn to the Viceroy of the two Kwang Provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi. The nature and duties of the provincial officers had been established since the T'ang dynasty and for well over a millennium the pattern of government had been cast in an identical mould. The District Magistrate was usually a scholar who had taken one of the metropolitan examinations at Peking and he was always a native of another province than his native one, this being a long standing rule. He spent three or six years in one post and was then moved elsewhere, and was promoted in due course to be prefect or to higher office through merit, connections or good fortune. Some persons began and ended their official careers as District Magistrates. 1 The District Magistrate's duties were many and his competence was most extensive. He was, in truth, the father-mother official1 of the people so called by them and also so styled in official documents because of his authority over all their affairs, criminal or civil. He certainly regarded himself as ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES 83 divisions of the district, or tung, several of which were within the present boundaries of the New Territory. There were also military officers in the district, a battalion commander at Tai Pang, who also had quarters at Kowloon in which he was more often to be found. He had subordinates with him at Kowloon City and also in the Islands, at Tung Chung and Tai O on Lantau, whilst there appear to have been other subordinate officers on at least Lamma and Cheung Chau.20 In addition to the military posts (Lockhart does not mention any naval forces) there were the police, of which there were two kinds. First, there were the chai or runners, of whom there were about sixty, stationed in Nam Tau under the direct control of the magistrate. “They are sent, as occasion requires, throughout the district for a variety of purposes, including the making of arrests, the collecting of the land tax, and acting generally as the eyes and ears of the magistrate. They receive no pay from Government, but manage to earn a fair livelihood by illicit squeezes,” says Lockhart. There were also village constables, from two to six, according to the size of a village, appointed by the village and paid by village contributions levied according to the size of land holdings. Their duty is to keep watch, especially at night. They have the power of arrest, which is deputed to them by the gentry and elders of the village. ** 7 **21 + The elders played a great part in maintaining the status quo. Together with the headman of the village and the local gentry, they formed a local tribunal which dealt summarily with all minor matters in the tung and heung into which the district was divided.22 Inside the villages, the headmen and elders acted likewise. A form of genuine local self-government existed in 1898. Its raison d'être was probably nothing more high-flown than because the District Magistrate, traditionally an overworked official, would have been completely swamped with work of a trifling nature had they not existed. To quote Lockhart, “The gentry and elders in the village council determined summarily cases of theft, disputes about land, domestic squabbles, and cases of debt. As a rule, the decision of that council is accepted as final. But if either of the parties to a case is dissatisfied, he can appeal to a council of the Tung,” ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES 85 examination by the District Magistrate at Nam Tau and by the Kwang Chau prefect at Canton, proceeded to the Viceroy's yamen in the same city where eventually a favoured few would manage to pass the first degree of sau choi. This in theory entitled the scholar to qualify for an official post. In practise there were many more sau choi than there were posts and a scholar had to pursue further study and pass other examinations before he stood a real chance of becoming an official. In every district there were sau choi who would never obtain posts. Many became local schoolmasters. Others by virtue of wealth and position became the local gentry who, by report, were sometimes a help to the magistrate and frequently a nuisance, both to him and to the litigant or criminal public. They sat on the local tribunals kuk and advised the magistrate on local affairs. Being literati like himself they had ready access to his yamen and to his ear. Sometimes they even outranked him. Elders, on the other hand, rarely sat on the kuk. Lockhart estimated that there were one hundred and fifty sau choi in the whole district.20 In 1898 the elders of important villages like Ha Tsuen and Ping Shan were literati. Several of them played a leading part in the planning of operations against the British take-over.27 20 Sometimes the wealthier village elders enhanced their position by purchasing degrees. In the late Ch'ing period the sale of examination titles appears to have been considerable. Smith mentions it in his Village Life in China** and I have come across several such persons in villages in the Southern District of the New Territory. They were usually substantial villagers. Such a one was CHAN Tak-hang4 of Cheung Kwan O in Junk Bay who died in the seventeenth year of Kwong Shui (1892) at the age of sixty-four. According to his descendant, the present Village Representative, he was a man of substance who built a guest house in the village which is still standing to-day, gave money for the upkeep of the stone tracks which linked the villages of the area with Kowloon, and was well known locally. His portrait, painted at the age of fifty-seven, shows him in his borrowed finery as a kwok hok sang, for which he paid an unknown consideration to Government. A man such as this would obviously play a considerable part in the affairs of his immediate neighbourhood. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES 87 Heaven. In Canton itself there was a serious plot to seize the city in October 1894, which led Consul Fraser to write in his next report There is little doubt that dissatisfaction with the administration of their native country is growing among the Southern Chinese, and if no attempt at reform is made, may result in a serious insurrection". He mentioned the plot but remarked that its failure was due more to the ineptitude of its organisers than to the vigour of the local authorities.33 His colleague at Pakhoi, in the south-east of the province, was more critical. Such as is Chinese civilisation, Pakhoi is of its outskirt only and shows a lower level than I have seen anywhere else in this country. Piracy is in the blood of the race. A glance through the year's diary shows a monotonous record of petty coast raids, hoverings of pirate junks (which still terrorise the neighbouring coastline) and robberies of every degree of dignity from the sacking of the larger pawnshops to the plunder of a returned emigrant from the Straits or Sumatra. Of Chinese local authorities at Pakhoi itself there are practically none, the highest native Civilian within 20 miles being an officer of the rank of sub-district deputy magistrate armed with an amount of authority that barely enables him to call in question the theft of a matchbox. It would be invidious to say this much of the Pakhoi neighbourhood without adding that most of the adjacent areas are worse.34 Whilst these reports were confined to individual districts there can be little doubt that the general unrest was known and felt in the New Territory. It will be recalled that SUN Yat Sen was a Cantonese and some of his followers are credited with swelling the ranks of the village bands which offered resistance to the British troops who entered the New Territory in 1899.35 This tale of unrest and lawlessness, and weakness on the part of the civil authorities, provides a background to the unsuccessful reform movement of 1898, sponsored by the southern party at Peking, whose sequel was the incarceration of the emperor by his formidable aunt, the Empress Dowager, the stringent capital measures against the reform party and their dispersal overseas or in foreign concessions in China. The leader of the movement and adviser to the emperor was KANG Yue Wei, a prominent scholar and mandarin, and himself a Cantonese. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES 91 which it had supplanted eighteen years before. Great hardship was encountered which is hardly surprising, and the people were eternally grateful to their benevolent officials and commemorated them in several temples dedicated in their honour. One of these was burned down in 1955 during the fire which destroyed Shek Wu Hui near Fanling, and others are to be found at Sha Tau Kok and Kam Tin, and Sai Heung in Chinese Territory. In addition a school was named in their honour at Kam Tin, and when it was repaired in 1744 the San On magistrate of the time composed a Confucian discourse which was inscribed on the wall of the restored building, to instruct the pupils and their parents. An interesting survival which still existed in 1898 was the appearance of an old beggar in the Yuen Long villages every Chinese New Year who brought statues of WONG and CHOW for the people to worship, and incidentally to supply him with food and money.'' To these men-become-gods for whom the construction of a temple was necessary to ensure their better worship and resulting favours, there must be added an equal and possibly much older faith in sacred tree spirits and the multitude of earth spirits known as pak kung ih, tai wong ★, and ordinary she taan 4, who look after villages and localities such as passes, bridges, and fords over streams. This insurance with the spirits who ruled this world and would assuredly be encountered in the next was expressed in the continual reconstruction of temples. A great many of the temples in the New Territory to-day owe their present fabric, or a great part of it, to repairs made during the last fifty years of the Ching dynasty. It was evidently a highly necessary part of the proceedings that the god should be informed of the names of the contributors so that his benefits should not pass anyone by, since their names, and often the amounts they gave, were scrupulously inscribed on the commemorative tablet which was always let into the wall to mark the occasion. Sometimes over a thousand names had to be recorded in this way, most of them in respect of trifling amounts, even for a small and out of the way temple, as in the reconstruction of the Tin Hau temple at Cheung Chau in the second year of the last Ch'ing Emperor (1909). The magistrate, too, was expected to play his part in warding off disaster. The District History mentions that CHAN Kuk ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES 95 2 Extracts from the Report are given between pages 181-209 of Papers laid before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong 1899, (Hong Kong, Government Printer, 1900). For this quotation see p. 198. Lockhart was referring specifically to development which was noticeably lacking. The same cannot be said of the population during this period. The evacuation of the coastal areas (1662-69) caused a great disruption to the villages at the time. For a brief mention in English, based on Chinese authorities, see S. F. Balfour, "Hong Kong before the British", an article in T'ien Hsia, Vol. XI, No. 4, 1941, p. 334. In any case there has been a continuous inward flow of both Cantonese and Hakka since then, more especially of Hakka in the 19th century, from which time many of the hill villages in the Colony take their origin. It is interesting to compare this report with a book on Wei Hai Wei, Lion and Dragon in North China (London, John Murray, 1910) which was written by a junior colleague from Hong Kong, R. F. Johnston (1874-1938) who went to Wei Hai Wei as Magistrate and Secretary to Government in 1904, probably at Lockhart's request. Johnston, later knighted and Professor of Chinese in the University of London was a man of great application and erudition who became tutor to the deposed boy emperor, P'u Yi, (1919-25) and wrote the well-known book Twilight in the Forbidden City, (London, Gollancz, 1934). He was himself Commissioner of Wei Hai Wei 1927-30. His detailed description of Wei Hai Wei, its people and their customs leaves an impression of the striking similarity of life and thought between that remote part of Shantung and this small corner of Kwangtung. The means of government was of course the same, but so also are the ways of doing and thinking which seem, in my own experience, hardly to differ at all despite the different agricultural background. To anyone interested in the Chinese peasant Johnston's book is a mine of information. The annual reports on Wei Hai Wei presented to both Houses of Parliament are, too, an interesting commentary on life in this northern leased territory. The market towns of the New Territories in 1898 were Tai Po, Yuen Long, Tai O, Cheung Chau, Sai Kung and Tsuen Wan. A despatch of 1905 in connection with the Kowloon-Canton Railway No. 59 dated 11th January 1905 from Governor Sir Matthew Nathan to the then Secretary of State, Mr. Lyttelton gives some figures. Yuen Long had "seventy-four shops of which twenty-five are large and deal in rice, oil, samshu etc. The remainder belong to barbers, doctors, jewellers, vegetable sellers, piece goods dealers etc." Tai Po Market consisted of twenty-three large shops and fifteen smaller ones, Tsuen Wan had a few shops supplying the local needs". No figures are given for Cheung Chau or Tai O with which the railway was not concerned, but an inscription of 1878 inside the grounds of the Fong Pin Hospital at Cheung Chau states that there "used to be over two hundred shops trading here". Lockhart Papers 1899, p. 207 gave Cheung Chau a population of 5,000, whilst Tai O with its fisheries and salt pans was reported to have about 3,000. These were larger towns than Yuen Long (no figure given), Tai Po (280), Sai Kung Market (800) and Tsuen Wan (900). The present New Territories towns were not the largest in the San On district. Pride of place went to Sham Chun, now on the Chinese side of the border, with sixty-one large shops and three hundred and twenty-three medium sized shops, and to Kun Lan Hui, also north of the border which was the cattle centre of the whole district with fifteen large and one hundred and thirty-six medium sized shops. (Enclosure C to No. 59). See Eastern No. 88 Correspondence relating to the Kowloon-Canton Railway (London, Colonial Office, 1907). ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f 96 5 J. W. HAYES See a tablet in the Chow-Wong School at Kam Tin. * Papers 1899 p. 188. * Papers 1899 p. 188. 'Lockhart's figures, given in Appendixes 3 and 5 to his Report are not exact, and he has emphasised his sketchy estimate of the land population "in default of any reliable statistics possessed by the Chinese Government" and said he had been unable to obtain even an estimate of the boat people Papers 1899 pp. 187,189. Taking areas within my own detailed knowledge I have found that villages established long before 1898 have not been included in the returns or else have been linked with other villages without special mention, The population figures for the Islands, in particular, are not above suspicion and are probably greater than shown in Appendix 5. * Papers 1899 p. 189. Papers 1899 p. 189. 10 Universal ownership was clearly shown by the land survey which followed the lease of 1898. This was carried out by surveyors and staff on loan from the Government of India, and was followed by a registration of titles which was enlivened by land courts which sat to determine possession in disputed cases. The survey sheets and the Crown Rent Rolls which form the schedules to them can be found in the District Offices of the New Territories Administration and they are a valuable record of land ownership and land classification at the time of the lease. At Shek Pik and Fan Pui in 1958 out of sixty-six families four owned between 3-4 acres, nine between 2-3 acres, nineteen between 1-2 acres, fourteen owned between a half to one acre, twelve owned between a quarter to a half, and eight between 10 to 25 acres. Except a few late arrivals, therefore, every family owned land of its own. The position was much the same as in 1898. The same was true of Wei Hai Wei, of which Johnston wrote Lion & Dragon, p. 148, "Whatever the faults of the Chinese social system may be there is no doubt that in Wei Hai Wei it very largely accounts for the complete absence of pauperism (though no one is rich) for the orderliness of the people (nearly everyone has a stake in the land and has nothing to gain and everything to lose from disorder), for the uninterrupted succession of father and son in the homesteads, and for the long pedigrees attested by family graveyards and ancestral tablets". 11 See Johnston Lion and Dragon pp. 134-54. I have compared customary deeds of sale and mortgage from the New Territory between the years 1898 and 1958 with those cited by him and find that they invariably follow the same form (see especially Johnston pp. 144-145). These deeds are known as white deeds (as in Ching times) and had not been put through the formal process of registration in the District Office which would turn them into legal documents; or, as formerly in Ching days, in the Magistrate's yamen when they became red deeds (RI #). They were common until the Pacific war and even now are occasionally known to be drawn up in addition to the Memorial registering the conveyance in the Land Office. To select an example at random here is one from Shek Pik on Lantau Island dated the second year of the Republic (1913) which reads ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1962 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f LIFE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES 99 three districts in the vicinity of Canton the phrase shui shui, tso shui, tsou shui (£££) literally "sleeping in-come, sitting in-come, walking in-come" which may be thus explained: the incumbent of the first may go to sleep, whilst his emoluments come rolling in; in the second he may sit still, and his emoluments come rolling in; and in the third he must trot around, but his emoluments come rolling in". 12 Lockhart calls these officers assistant and deputy magistrates, Papers 1899 p. 191 and so does Consul Allen in his Trade Report for Pakhoi 1896, FO No. 1983, but there appear in fact, to have been no such titles. There were one or two yuen shing (B) in each district styled to ye (*) who were officers of the sixth and seventh rank and were graduates of kam sang (1) degree. These were appointed from Peking and were transferable every three years like the magistrate himself. They were stationed at places in the district and their powers were very limited. 20 He does not mention officers other than those at the two Lantau forts, but there was another fort on Lantau at Fan Lau, still standing, which may or may not have been occupied at this time, and there were posts on Lamma and Cheung Chau officered by shun tei kun (MILF) (information from Mr. CHEUNG Yau (4) of Tai Ping, Lamma Island, and from a list of donors inscribed on a tablet in the Tin Hau temple on Cheung Chau). There must also have been shun tei kun in the mainland part of the district. More information is sought about their stations and their duties. As far as I know, they were military officers of low rank who controlled ten or twenty men in an out-station, 21 Papers 1899 p. 192. 22 A map showing these divisions, dated July 1899 on the reverse, is to be found in the Registrar-General's Department, in the Supreme Court. It is probably the Map VI referred to on page 192 of the Papers 1899, which was not printed with them. The Councils of the Tung may not have existed in the remoter and more sparsely populated areas. On Lamma for instance the village elders appear to have administered summary justice individually and not in unison. Mr. CHEUNG Yau already quoted, and other gentlemen of similar age, state there was no Council on the island. The map does not assist in this instance, being vague in some details. There were four tung in any district: north, south, east and west. 23 Dyer Ball, The Chinese at Home (London, Religious Tract Society, 1912) p. 189 says "The life of an official in China, if he occupies a high position and rules over a populous district of country, is arduous in the extreme. He knows no hours. His work is never done. He is up before dawn, and official receptions take place in the small or early hours of the morning. The health of many a man is injured by the incessant toil and unremitting anxiety". He calls him "often hard worked, harassed with many cares, and loaded with responsibilities". His is experienced and impartial testimony. 24 Papers 1899 p. 192. 25 Sir Robert Douglas, Society in China (London, Ward Lock & Co., 1901) pp. 120-1 has hard things to say of them. "The mental activity of these men, not having... any power to operate in a beneficent way, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1963 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v CHEUNG CHAU 103 20 See T'ung-tsu CH'U Local Government in China under the Ch'ing (Harvard University Press 1962) chapter 9, especially pp. 161-164. I am indebted to Mr. W. Schofield, a former District Officer, and Cudet Officer, Hong Kong Government, for a reference to an inscription, now lost, relating to the foundation of the Lung Chun Yee Hok *** in 1847. The school, which is still standing inside the former Kowloon walled city, was opened by the district magistrate WONG Ming Ting after the sub-district deputy magistrate HUI Man Sham had reported that it was being built. Orme in his "Report on the New Territories 1899-1912” in Sessional Papers 1912, p. 63, Appendix G, gives a school census for April 1912, by which time there had apparently been little change since 1898. There were 10 schools on Cheung Chau, average attendance 20, average monthly fee 38 cents. 21 See HSIAO op. cit. pp. 235-240 and CH'U, op. cit., pp. 161-162. Occasionally government-sponsored schools were granted land for their maintenance. In the 28th year of Kuang-hsü (1902-3) four years after the lease of the New Territories to Great Britain, land inside the boundary, previously used for the purpose of aiding a school still in Chinese territory, was sold by order of the Commissioner of Education for San On district. Part of the proceeds had also been used for offerings at the Confucian temple (in Nam Tau). 22 The group of titles on the defence bureau tablet is another demonstration of the widespread sale of degree titles and positions in the late Ch'ing period already remarked in several places. (see HSIAO Kung-Chuan Rural China p. 415 and chapter 10 of CH'U's Local Government in China under the Ch'ing op. cit., pp. 168-173 and notes and, in more detail, Chung-li CHANG, The Chinese Gentry. Studies on their Role in Nineteenth Century Chinese Society, (Seattle, University of Washington Press 1955) pp. 102-111. For contemporary notices see Rev. Krone "A Notice of the Sanon District" in Transactions of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Hong Kong), Part VI (1859) p. 84 and Arthur H. Smith Village Life in China (Edinburgh, Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier c. 1900 p. 121, amongst others.) No fewer than twenty-one persons have titles prefixed to their names, many of them minor ones, of which three-quarters were probably purchased. the first Of the purchased titles and posts five were chien-sheng degree by purchase, which was the prerequisite to purchasing any superior post, such as that of district magistrate or prefect. It was the most commonly purchased degree. Two others were styled chih-chien and chih-sheng. There were four chin-kung and four chih-yüan 職員。 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1967 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g LAND AND LEADERSHIP IN THE H.K. REGION OF KWANGTUNG 101 Lockhart calls them in his 1898 report on the New Territories.18 He states that the council for the Eastern Tung embraced most of the leased territory and sat in the market town of Sham Chun just north of the 1898 boundary. One imagines that men such as the three who form the subject of this paper might have been members. Here I have had the benefit of conversations with a former mandarin, now deceased, who served as a Chou and then as a Fu magistrate in Hupeh for some years before the Revolution of 1911. He told me that the councils of the poorer districts were augmented by prominent non-literati of the type to be found on Lantau, the normal restrictions on scholar membership being waived in order to secure the presence of persons who carried weight in their localities. If practised in San On this realistic approach, in part occasioned by the need to obtain their help in chasing in and securing the payment of the land tax, would probably have brought in local leaders like Chan, Cheung and Kung. I must record that this is conjecture since no information on their participation in the council, their work there, and their relations with the district magistrate and the true gentry of the District has yet turned up though I am by no means sure, given local conditions, that it ever will. However an account of these men would be lacking unless one hinted at the possibility of their participation in local councils, especially as it is probable that the rural gentry of Lantau and similar fringe areas in South China and elsewhere in the Ching period were similar in origins to these three men. NOTES 1 The New Territories were ceded by the Convention of Peking signed on 9th June 1898; for the text see The Hong Kong Government Gazette for 8 April 1899, pp. 552-553—but were not occupied until the following year. The boundaries were not discussed until March 1899, and some hostilities took place in March and April of that year when the Hong Kong Government took possession of the New Territory. See Sessional Papers 1899, No. 32 "Dispatches and Other Papers Relating to the Extension of the Colony of Hong Kong" and No. 35 "Further Papers relating to Military Operations in Connection with the Disturbances On The Taking Over of the New Territory". The Romanisation used in this article is in the Cantonese form. For place names see A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories. (Hong Kong Government Printer, 1960). ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1967 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g LAND AND LEADERSHIP IN THE H.K. REGION OF KWANGTUNG 103 many Punti villages from "squeezes" formerly levied on them, "especially the Hakkas". 13 The market town of Tai O had a land population of 2,248 and a boat population of at least several thousands, many of whom lived in mat-huts over the water and were therefore part of the settled population. Sessional Papers 1911, p. 103 (26 and 38). The Hong Kong Government's Administrative Reports for 1911, District Officer South, mentions 221 mat-shed permits in respect of pile huts in Tai O Creek. There were said to be 8 schools in Tai O or district at a New Territories School Census in April 1912, with an average attendance of 21. See Appendix G to Orme's Report in Sessional Papers 1912, p. 63. 14 See for instance Hugh D. R. Baker, "The Five Great Clans of the New Territories" in JHKBRAS, Vol. 6 (1966), pp. 25-47 and his references at his note 9 to Sung Hok-pang's prewar articles in The Hong Kong Naturalist. 15 The schedules of ownership attached to the Block Crown Leases for 1898 New Territories' villages show this general pattern of peasant ownership very clearly. They are kept in the District Offices of the New Territories Administration. 16 A hint of the strength of superstition at this time is given by Orme, op. cit., paras. 97-98, 17 They held, in addition, a considerable number of mortgages from Shek Pik people. Those recorded in the 1904 Block Crown Leases for the Shek Pik Valley may well be less in number than in 1899 because, in the intervening years, it was reported that mortgagors were making great efforts to recover unencumbered ownership, e.g., Sessional Papers 1902, Mr. Stewart Lockhart's 'Report on the New Territory for the Year 1901' p. 4. It is not entirely clear from the context whether this was a general reaction or limited only to New Kowloon, 18 Hong Kong Government Gazette, 8 April 1899, p. 546 under the heading ‘Local Government in the Villages'. The information about there usually being four Tung in any administrative district comes from the former magistrate mentioned in the same paragraph of the text. He was in charge of ## and ✯✯ in Hupeh for part of the first decade of this century. Where no sources are cited, the text is based on information obtained from old inhabitants, some of whom knew Cheung Kwong-chuen and Kung Fong-tsai personally, and from documents in Chinese relating to the land and money transactions of these two men and those of the third, Chan Fu-shing, that have been made available to me through the kindness of their present owners to whom I am much indebted for their courtesy and cooperation. I am also grateful for help with translation, especially to Mr. Chan Kwun-ngok, and for the ready help of many Lantau residents with my enquiries, Addition to Note 8. The quotation in the text comes from Professor Ho's "The Examination System and Social Mobility in China, 1368-1911", Proceedings of the 1959 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, pp. 60-65. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1968 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d 90 ARMANDO M. DA SILVA It will suffice here to say that the exterior defence of the Chu Kong estuary consisted of a series of forts, customs-stations and guard-posts in the Lo Man Shan 老萬山, Kai Pong 鷄澎, Sam Chau Mun 三洲門, Ngoi Ling Ting 外伶仃, and the Tam Kon ## groups of the outer off-shore islands. The civil administration ruled from Nam Tau, the district city of the San On district. The military administration was centred at Tai Pang, on the western arm enclosing Tai Pang Hoi (Mirs Bay). The civil administration operated on a north-south axis, as against the east-west axis of the military coastal defence system. This is understandable when one realizes that the military could facilitate their control of the coast-line by establishing easy communications by water running the length of the coast-line from strongpoints on strategic head-lands and the offshore islands. 3 For the Chinese characters of place names of some locales in the vicinity of Tai Yu Shan see map 3. For names of places within the present territory of Hong Kong see A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (Hong Kong, Government Printer, 1960). 4 So far as I know there has been no published study of this fort by Hongkong's local historians, except for a brief mention in one work which states that Kai Yik Kok fort was of Ch'ing dynasty date. Lo Hsiang-lin, Hongkong and its External Communication before 1842, (Hongkong, Institute of Chinese Culture, 1963) p. 172. 5 The principal ingredients of this cement are clam and oyster shells which are crushed and burnt to produce slaked lime. The lime is then mixed with fine sand to produce a holding cement. Shells and fine sand are common to many local beaches and are, apparently for this purpose, used in lime kilns. 6 San On Yuen Chi, kuen 22, under section on Coastal Defence reads: 看復界後海絮籹寧而設險更捻周密雖今之汎地 及設兵皆與舊制不同而大嶼山雞翼角炮臺南頭 炮臺赤濘炮蠱最為餓要 7 Fan Lau is also known as Shek Sun meaning "boulder growths", a reference to the numerous residual boulders at Kai Yik Kok, 8 Luis Gomes, Monografia de Macau (Macau, 1951), a Portuguese translation of the O Mun Kei Leuk p. 70. "No 7° ano de long Tcheng (1730) construiram-se fortalezas nas duas montanhas, distribuiram-se as guarniçoes para a sua defensa e foram reforçadas as tropas que guarneciam Tai-U-San formando assim como que um angulo semelhante ao que e constituido pelos chifres dum boi, para servir de defensa exterior de Macau e o Boca Tigre", 9 J. J. L. Duyvendak, "Sailing directions of Chinese voyages" T'oung Pao, vol. 34 (1938) pp. 230-237; and "The true dates of the Chinese maritime expeditions in the early fifteenth century", T'oung Pao, vol. 34 (1938), pp. 341-412. 10 The district of San On (新安) was formed in the sixth year of Lung Hing (隆慶) ie. 1572-73, Fourteen years later, in 1587, the San On district gazetteer was written by Yan Tai-kon (縣太君), the District Magistrate. Various editions followed. The latest edition was published in 1819. This gazetteer provides the best primary source of information on pre-British Hongkong. Chapters (kuen) XIV and XXII deal with Coastal Defence. These are chapters of special interest to historical geographers. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1969 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d 65 TUNG KWU ISLAND: THE TYPE SITE OF HONG KONG'S OLDER PRE-HISTORIC CULTURE INTRODUCTION W. SCHOFIELD* The present paper describes the writer's investigations of the large site revealed from 1925 onwards by sand diggers on the island of Tung Kwu beyond Castle Peak,† This dumb-bell island, which is formed entirely of Hong Kong granite and the sand which links its two portions by an isthmus, has not only yielded pottery of the historic period in one area of its western beach, but a great many remains of a culture obviously earlier than that of the Bronze Age in Lamma described by Father Finn.‡ DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLAND (See Plates 1 and 2) Tung Kwu is a typical single dumb-bell with an isthmus joining a large northern hill ridge 76 metres high to a smaller southern one of 68 metres. These hills show all the signs of early loss of their original woods, followed by washing away of most of the thick subsoil of clay full of quartz grains which formed beneath their cover, some of which remained on the isthmus and beaches. Much of the hill surface is occupied by large masses of granite boulders formed by chemical action in the clay, and left behind when it was washed away. A noteworthy feature of the northern hill area is the 35 metres hill that rises just north of the isthmus and is surrounded by a * Mr. Schofield (1888-1968) served in Hong Kong between 1911-1938 as a Cadet Officer and Police Magistrate, He was noted for his work pre-war on the geology and archaeology of Hong Kong, in which fields he was a pioneer scholar. More recently his article "Further Notes on the Sung Wong Toi" appeared in the 1968 Journal. Ed. †This island has long been misnamed on local maps. The Hong Kong Government's official Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (no date, but 1960), p. 161, calls it Lung Kwu Chau (##) and describes it as "an uninhabited island in area 0.158 sq. mile off the west of the Castle Peak Peninsula, incorrectly named TUNG KWU (Tongku) on the 1:25,000 official map. (Sheet 13, 1957 edition)". ‡ The photographs which illustrate this article may be found at Plates 1 to 9 at the rear of this volume. They are representative, and not ordinarily related to items mentioned in the text because Mr. Schofield died before we had chosen and discussed the illustrations. I am greatly indebted to Mr. James C. Y. Watt, Assistant Curator of the Hong Kong City Hall Museum and Art Gallery and Hon. Sec. of the Hong Kong Archaeological Society, for much help and advice with the sketch-map, charts and plates. Ed. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1969 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d 174 BOOK REVIEWS tive or sub-administrative area?" So far as the Kowloon school was concerned it served the rural areas immediately east, west, north of and round Kowloon, whose principal villages were linked in yeuk (yueh) (#5) or 'compacts” — though whether the latter were self-organised or instituted by Government is still unknown to me. These villages used Kowloon as a market centre though there were small local markets in some of the yeuk. Together these yeuk do not appear to have constituted either an administrative or sub-administrative area of the county (1) save in the sense that the Kowloon sub-magistrate utilised their existence as a medium of contact and, no doubt, control. Again, whether they had any tuan lien is unknown - though village tradition at Nga Tsin Wai just in front of the Kowloon Walled City has it that, assisted by the Tin Hau goddess from the village temple, whose image glistened with her supreme effort, the villagers 'saved' the City from the Red Turban rebels in the 1850s and their leading elder was given a kung ming (1) by Government in recognition of their part in the defence. In short, the detailed picture remains unfilled but we stand greatly in Mr. Wakeman's debt for having set the scene in such a stimulating and authoritative manner. Hong Kong, 1969, JAMES HAYES HONG KONG: A SOCIETY IN TRANSITION. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF HONG KONG SOCIETY, ed. I. C. Jarvie, in consultation with Joseph Agassi, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, pp xxix, 378, illustrated. A symposium such as this might be approached from one of two angles: its theme could be either an exploration of the conflicts within Hong Kong society, or a comparison between the problems of Hong Kong and those of other areas in a similar situation of rapid and profound change. None of the papers in this volume attempts the latter; and those which attempt the former are noticeably more stimulating and more valuable than those which attempt neither. Hong Kong is a place in which a number of almost totally disparate groups, their interests sometimes diametrically opposed (e.g. the indigenous people and the immigrants in the New Territories), coexist in an exceedingly small compass: an opportunity to survey the relationships, often Page 180 Page 181 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1970 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241 46 H. J. LETHBRIDGE any interpretation that may be going on'.42 On the other hand, the scarcity of cadets in government caused serious problems at the end of the century. No scheme of localisation, except at the clerical level, had been promoted in Hong Kong; and although Government had been forced, as a result of Sir William Robinson's Retrenchment Committee of 1894, to abolish the post of Clerk of the Councils, one Magistrate and the Superintendent of the Jail, and amalgamate the posts of the Colonial Secretary and the Registrar-General, the number of cadets was still far too small for the efficient administration of even a municipality. Alleyne Ireland, after a visit to Hong Kong at the turn of the century, argued that there was a need for more cadets, and reported that 'no one who has spent four months, as I recently did, in the Colony could fail to be impressed, as I was, with the fact that in the service as well as in the junior ranks of the service there are a few men of the highest ability and usefulness, nor could he fail to notice that such men were few and not many'.43 The reports of the Finance Committee for 1901 showed, moreover, that the attendance included an Acting Attorney-General, an Acting Colonial Treasurer, and an Acting Director of Works. The service of the colony, Ireland adduced, 'has suffered greatly from the evil of acting appointments, and a system should be introduced under which it would not be necessary to transfer so many officials from one department to another whenever a senior official goes on leave'.44 He also pointed out the inadequate size of the Government offices, and 'the employment of a large number of junior clerks, Chinese and Portuguese, at salaries little better than those paid to day labourers'. Ireland, however, did not mention that the incorporation of the New Territories had led to a drain of officials from Hong Kong. A concatenation of these processes of retrenchment, scarcity of cadets, acting appointments, and ill-paid clerical staff led to a major government scandal which brought to an end in 1895 the career of one cadet, N.G. Mitchell-Innes,45 who had joined the service in 1881, and this scandal led not only to a commission of inquiry but a rebuke from the Secretary of State. Mitchell-Innes' troubles began when Alfred Lister was appointed Treasurer in 1888. Lister, who was also Postmaster General, served for the first six months of the year, but was ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1970 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241 HONG KONG CADETS, 1862 - 1941 53 19 Sir Francis Henry May (1860-1922), Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Dublin. Hong Kong Civil Service 1881; Captain Superintendent of Police, 1893-1902; Colonial Secretary, 1902-1910; Governor of Fiji and High Commissioner of Western Pacific, 1910-12; Governor of Hong Kong, 1912-1919. First cadet to become Governor. Altogether May spent 38 years in Hong Kong. 20 Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston (1874-1938), Educated at Edinburgh University (Gray Prize; prox. accessit., Lord Rector's Essay); Magdalen College, Oxford (mentioned hon, causa Stanhope Essay). Hong Kong Civil Service 1898; Assistant Colonial Secretary, 1899-1904, Transferred to Weihaiwai 1904; Senior District Officer and Magistrate, Weihaiwai, 1906-17. Tutor to the Ex-Emperor of China, 1919-1925. Commissioner of Weihaiwai, 1927-30. Professor of Chinese and Head of Department of Languages and Cultures of the Far East, School of Oriental Languages, London University, 1931-1937. 21 Sir Cecil Clementi (1875-1947). Educated at St. Paul's School and Magdalen College, Oxford, Hong Kong Civil Service 1899. Clementi, following his uncle and godfather, Sir Cecil Clementi Smith, preferred an Eastern Cadetship, and was posted to Hong Kong. Land Officer and Police Magistrate in the New Territories, 1903-6, Clementi had the task of recognizing the land titles of over 300,000 claims. Appointed Colonial Secretary of British Guiana 1913-1921; Colonial Secretary, Ceylon, 1922-1925; Governor of Hong Kong, 1925-30; Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner for the Malay States 1930. In 1934 Clementi retired on account of ill-health. 22 James Legge "The Colony of Hong Kong", China Review, Vol. I, 1872-3, p. 173. 23 Dominions Office and Colonial Office List 1939, p. 624, states: "The average number of cadets appointed to Malaya and Hongkong during the period of 1919-31 inclusive was between 9 and 10. Since 1931 the average has been 5-8, 6 generally. In 1937, 7 cadets were appointed, and 9 in 1938. There were none appointed to Hong Kong 1937, and only 2 in 1938. The demand for cadets in Hong Kong was always small”. 24 For example, Thomas Sercombe Smith (1854-1937) was appointed a Hong Kong Cadet in 1882. In 1883 he was attached to the Colonial Office for a year; and in 1884, after a brief spell attached to the Colonial Secretary's Office, Hong Kong, proceeded to Peking where he studied Chinese, 1884-6. On the other hand, Arthur Winbolt Brewin (1867-1946), proceeded to Canton in 1888. Brewin, who was educated at Winchester, succeeded Eitel as Inspector of Schools in 1897; became Registrar General in 1901 and retired in 1912. 25 Victor Purcell The Memoirs of a Malayan Official, London, 1965, pp. 108-109. The Index to Correspondence (of the Colonial Secretariat), compiled in 1902 by R. H. Kotewall, has a cryptic entry: "Cadets studying Chinese in China must reside at a place removed from European social surroundings". 26 Alexander Grantham Via Ports, Hong Kong, 1965, p. 5. 27 I have been able to discover the schools attended by 64 of the cadets: 52 went to schools listed in the Public Schools Yearbook; the other 12 to small private schools. Two cadets (H. E. Wodehouse and A. W. Brewin), it seems, did not go to a university; five I have been unable to trace; and of the rest - 78 in all — 55 went to English universities (Cambridge 25; Oxford 23; London 4; and one each at Leicester University College, Liverpool University, and Manchester University); 10 to universities in Ireland (Trinity College 8); and 11 to Scottish universities (Edinburgh 6, -55 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1970 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241 HONG KONG CADETS, 1862 - 1941 55 19 Kenneth Myer Arthur Barnett (born 1911). Educated at Mill Hill School, London, and King's College, Cambridge, Hong Kong Civil Service 1934. Retired as Director of Census and Statistics 1970. 40 Quoted in James Hope Hennessy's Verandah, London, 1964, p. 186. Hennessy is quoting, presumably, from Sir George Bowen's Thirty Years of Colonial Government, London, 1889, which I have not seen. 41 Margery Perham, op. cit., p. 302. Lugard also liked and trusted A. W. Brewin, the Registrar General: "if he once said, he was very 'pro-Chinese' this was really a compliment. He would allow Brewin to forbid his own delivery of a speech to a Chinese gathering. He could not always understand the reason ‘but I trust implicitly in him'." 42 E. J. Eitel "Chinese Studies and Official Interpretation", p. 8. 43 Alleyne Ireland, Far Eastern Tropics, London, 1905, p. 34. In 1901 Ireland was appointed Colonial Commissioner of the University of Chicago for the purpose of visiting the Far East. 44 Ibid., p. 32. 45 Norman Gilbert Mitchell-Innes (1860-1947). Educated at Repton and Edinburgh Academy, Hong Kong Civil Service 1881; Treasurer 1891; left Hong Kong Service in 1896 and transferred to the Home Prison Service. Des Voeux thought highly of Mitchell-Innes. See G. B. Endacott, Government and People in Hong Kong 1841-1962, Hong Kong, 1964, p. 112. 46 Report on Defalcations in the Treasury, Sessional Papers, Hong Kong, 1893, p. 546. 47 Ibid., p. 546. 48 Norton-Kyshe, vol. 2, p. 447. 49 Ibid., p. 447. 50 Sir Arthur George Murchison Fletcher (1878-1954). Educated at Cheltenham College and Trinity College, Oxford, Hong Kong Civil Service 1901; transferred to Ceylon 1927; Colonial Secretary, Ceylon, 1926-9; Governor of Fiji and High Commissioner for Western Pacific 1929-36; Governor and Commander-in-Chief, Trinidad and Tobago, 1936-38. 51 Geoffrey Norman Orme (1879-1966). Educated at Cheltenham College and Hertford College, Oxford, Hong Kong Civil Service 1902. Director of Education 1924-26. Left Hong Kong Service in 1926. 52 The Report on the Land Court, 1900-1905, Sessional Papers, 1905, gives a list of the presidents and members of the Land Court in order of their appointment, most of whom were cadets. H. H. J. Gompertz was appointed in 1900 and resigned in 1904; Cecil Clementi in 1903; and C. M. Messer and J. R. Wood in 1904. The Registrars in order of appointment - all cadets were: J. H. Kemp, E. D. C. Wolfe, and S. B. C. Ross. The Land Court in 1905 consisted of three members: C. M. Messer, Cecil Clementi, and J. R. Wood. The New Territories became popular with cadets as a place to walk or shoot in on week-ends. Robert Oliphant Hutchison (1880-1920), the Superintendent of Imports and Exports, on his way to shoot snipe at Saikung fell off a launch in a squall and drowned. His body was never found. With him at the time was D. W. Tratman, the Colonial Treasurer. One imagines from the evidence that both had "tiffined" rather too well. 53 "At first British officials were limited in principle to two, dealing with police and land. In 1899 a police magistrate was appointed and also an assistant land officer to deal with land cases, and the police were placed Page 60 Page 61 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1970 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241 56 H. J. LETHBRIDGE under the Captain Superintendent in Hong Kong. The islands, and later, an outlying part of the mainland, were organised separately as the Southern District, with an assistant land officer appointed on 1 January 1905; he became an Assistant District Officer in 191054. G. B. Endacott Government and People in Hong Kong, pp. 134-5, Stewart Lockhart's Report on the New Territory at Hong Kong, 1900, says: "Since Mr. Lockhart's return to Hong Kong in July (1899) the work of the New Territory has been carried on by Messrs. Messer, Kemp and Hallifax, three cadets who are carrying out their instructions in a most satisfactory manner". The tradition developed of sending newly passed cadets to be "blooded" in the New Territory before they took up more sedentary duties in the Central Government Departments. 54 Austin Coates Myself a Magistrate. London, 1968, p. 13; speaking of his appointment as a Magistrate in the New Territories, Mr. Coates writes: "It was a job which would demand a complete change of thought and attitude after the Secretariat, occupied as I had been there with the doings of the modern world. Yet in this older world, bypassed by time, might I not find the roots—perhaps even the soul of the people who, met with in the city, held in their hearts something that everlastingly eluded me?” 55 G. B. Endacott Government and People in Hong Kong, p. 169. 56 Ibid., p. 169. 57 A particularly acidulous, but fictional, portrait of an Assistant Colonial Secretary is presented in Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil (London, 1925). This so enraged the then Assistant Colonial Secretary of Hong Kong, A. G. M. Fletcher, that he threatened an action against the publishers, Heinemann. The name Hong Kong was replaced in the second issue of the book by "Tching Yen". 58 Richard Symonds The British and Their Successors, London, 1966, p. 16. 59 G. B. Sayer Hong Kong: Birth, Adolescence, and Coming of Age, London, 1937, p.15. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1970 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ww72j0241 NOTES AND QUERIES 197 took 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). The 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. Photographs of this new temple and of the Tin Hau image which inspired such devotion can be seen at Plates 30 and 31. Place 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. Hong Kong, 1970. JAMES HAYES PILE HOUSES AT TAI O, LANTAU ISLAND, HONG KONG, 7TH JANUARY 1937 Editor's Note The 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- ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1971 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g 134 H. J. LETHBRIDGE of its history64. The Hong Kong government utilised a number of Chinese associations that had developed independently, gave official status to a few and drew them for the convenience of administration into its orbit. In doing so, to some degree it had to forego total control over the Chinese population and share such control with a small number of Chinese notables. Both benefited from the arrangement. This system has been called one of 'indirect rule' but I feel the phrase conceals more than it reveals, for a committee such as the District Watch could on occasion shape government policy. Government had to play along with a number of Chinese committees for without their support the regulation of the Chinese masses would have been at best an uncertain matter. The heaping of honours on a small number of Chinese notables was, surely, a recognition of the key part they played in promoting stability rather than prizes given for their alienation from Chinese society. Such prominent Chinese, as I have suggested, were as much watchdogs for the Chinese community, and especially the Chinese bourgeoisie, as barking dogs for the colonial government. NOTES 1 Lennox A. Mills, British Rule in Eastern Asia, London, Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 398. 2 i.e., Sir Shouson Chow, Sir Robert Kotewall, Lo Man-kam, Dr. Li Shu-fan, and William Ngartsee Thomas Tam. 3 S. F. Balfour states that Hong Kong Island was owned originally by the Tang (Têng) clan of the New Territories: 'Hong Kong Before the British', Tien Hsia Monthly, vol. xi, 1941, p. 464. A translation of a Chinese notice printed in the Friend of China, 24 July 1858, reads: Tung Wing-Fook-Tong (sic) of the Sun-on district, was formerly sole proprietor of the Island of Hong Kong, and of the hills and coast of the North Side of the Harbour under the general name of Tsin Shat-Choy.... Lately Tung Wing-Fook-Tong petitioned the Magistrate of Sun-on to examine Tung's claim to Tsin Shat-Choy and the Magistrate issued a proclamation declaring that Tung Wing-Fook-Tong is the real owner of the Property. The editor asseverated 'as to his having been a Lord of this Isle, as well as of Tsim-shat-choy, —in a word, we do not believe a word of it'. Barbara Ward writes of fishermen that for reasons probably mainly connected with their spatial mobility and the lack of land, these fishermen do not have a developed lineage system nor any real concept of one'. See Barbara Ward, 'Chinese Fishermen in Hong Kong: Their Post-peasant economy', in Maurice Freedman, ed., Social Organisation: Essays Presented to Raymond Firth, London, Frank Cass, 1967, p. 278. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1973 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r The Kam Tin Gates 43 composite whole, was put forward so convincingly that it carried the vote. And so the work was completed just in time for the ceremony of re-opening. Thus, on May 26, 1925, Governor Sir Reginald E. Stubbs and his entourage arrived at Kam Tin for the ceremonial return of the revered gates. They were greeted by a Chinese salute of small guns and firecrackers and were presented with an Address which stated: "We shall always now remember, how when your royal chair did pass, children and women left all the lanes deserted to come to bid you welcome, and when your car of state did stop, the neighbourhood was filled with joy"16 There were "expressions of goodwill and loyalty heard on all hands"17, and the Government congratulated itself on a fine public relations exercise. Is there anything in this episode which gives it more than a mere antiquarian interest? Perhaps it illustrates the increasing readiness of the Hong Kong Government to accommodate the wishes of the local population; certainly, Governor Stubbs intended to impress upon the Kam Tin villagers his Government's munificence. He had gone to a good deal of trouble to ensure the gates' return, and the whole operation was paid for out of public funds. The Hong Kong Telegraph commented that "there has perhaps been no incident in the whole history of Hongkong and of the New Territories which has more eloquently and genuinely revealed the Government's friendly feeling and sympathy towards the Chinese of the New Territories"18. Yet within a month the anti-British strike and boycott of 1925-26 had commenced, and relations with the local Chinese thence rapidly deteriorated. One can also detect in Stewart Lockhart's Papers the Special Commissioner's disapproval of Blake's appropriation of the gates. The Governor and his deputy were at odds on several matters relating to the early administration of the New Territories, and there is evidence that differences of opinion regarding policy occasioned some personal animosity. Perhaps the episode of the gates from Kam Tin was a contributing factor. NOTES 1 And to correct them. According to a translation deposited in the Colonial Secretariat Library, Hong Kong, the Kam Tin villagers offered resistance to the British in 1899 because the Ch'ing Government had not previously proclaimed the fact of the New Territories lease. This is false, for a proclamation had been issued by the San On Magistrate. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1973 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8910rj06r LEGENDS AND STORIES OF THE NEW TERRITORIES KAM T'IN 錦田 SUNG HOK-P'ANG Kam T'in is one of the oldest villages in the New Territories. During the dynasty of Hau Chau (後周) A.D. 951-959 most of the villagers belonged to the family of Ch'an (陳) and the place was called Ch'an Tin (陳田) meaning Chan's field. In the 6th year of Hoi Po (開寶) A.D. 973 of Sung (宋) dynasty Tang Hon Fat (鄧漢黻) who is said to be the first Tang (鄧) ancestor to come to Kwangtung (廣東) settled in the village, and built the first house at the bottom of a hill called Kwai Kok Shaan (龜角山) about ¼ of a mile away from the present Kam T'in. It was at first called Sham Lei (岑里), but later on they cultivated the surrounding country and the name was changed to Sham Lei T'in (岑里田) which was soon shortened to Sham T'in (岑田) meaning fields surrounding a small hill. The present name of Kam T'in (錦田) or ornamental fields, was given to the village in the 15th year of Maan Lik (萬曆) A.D. 1587 of Ming dynasty (明朝), and it came about in this way. At that time there was a very bad famine in the San On district (新安縣), and the district magistrate Yau T'ai K’în (游大乾) was obliged to open the government granaries and distribute the rice to relieve the people. But when it was finished they were still in need, and the magistrate then sent his officers to all the rich men in the district asking them for donations to help the poor. Most of them contributed a few piculs of rice, but none of them more than a hundred. Then Tang Yuen Fan (鄧元藩) of Sham T'in was visited. He was the richest man in San On district, and was noted for his generosity. He owned over 10,000 Chinese acres of cultivated *There are six sections to this long article, each printed in different numbers of The Hong Kong Naturalist. In this reissue the separate parts will be indicated by figures within square brackets. The first three sections, given here, appeared in the issues for December 1935 and April and June 1936. The rest will follow in the next issue of this Journal. The romanizations used in the original included figures to indicate tone values. These are now excluded. Ed. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 128 JAMES HAYES be feared, but internecine wars are almost always raging between some or other of the villages: and these wars, although often arising from trivial causes, are not mere temporary quarrels, but are often long-continued and sanguinary'.1 He gives a description of these feuds, and relates one example in which the District Magistrate, even with a force of 1,000 men, was unable to restore peace, and could not even save his face without the mediation of a neighbouring village. The device that secured this, Krone comments, had no influence at all upon the dispute, fighting being carried on afterwards just as before".2 There are several documented examples of intervillage and clan wars from the mainland New Territories at this time which indicate that Krone was not exaggerating the situation in mid century. Halls to 'martyrs' killed in these struggles were provided in at least four local temples, each containing memorials to slain heroes. These are to be found in the temples at Shek Kong (Pat Heung), Miu Kong (Tsuen Wan), Lam Tsuen, and Yuen Long (Shap-pat Heung). The Tsuen Wan memorial tells of a three year feud between the Tsuen Wan villagers and Shing Mun Pat Heung, beginning in the first year of the Tung Chih reign (1862-1863) and ended only after eventually successful mediation by elders of neighbouring villages. During this time, the Tsuen Wan villages—their men being outnumbered according to the tablet—were invaded and left in ruins, and 17 local men were killed in the prolonged struggle.3 Baker gives other local and contemporary examples of these clan wars taken from genealogies and village tradition in the northern New Territories. He also draws attention to the feuds that occurred within local lineages, including frequent fights between the Ping Shan and Ha Tsuen branches of the Tang lineage. These persisted into the British period. In 1921, in his administrative report for that year, the District Officer North mentions trouble that 'assumed very serious proportions' over water rights between 1 Krone, p. 114. 2 Krone, pp. 125-126. 3 The hall at Miu Kong is entitled the I-yung Tz'u (義勇祠) and that at Yuen Long the Ying-yung Tz'u (英勇祠). In the Pat Heung temple the tablet is in the Ching-chung Tz'u (清忠祠). At Lam Tsuen there is no named hall, but a side room contains a tablet bearing the characters jang hsiang ch'ang sheng lu wei (...). 4 Baker, 1968, pp. 167, 183 and 187. 5 Baker, 1968, p. 188 and Baker 1965, pp. 39-41. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 The Hong Kong Region 129 the Kam Tin and Ping Shan branches of the Tang lineage, mediated by the Tai Po and Yuen Long branches of the same clan.1 The chronic warfare inside Hsin-an and other districts of Kwangtung was perhaps not too well known to the Hong Kong authorities, but was all too plain to the mandarins. The Viceroy of Liang-kuang, commenting on representations from the British about the alleged help given by the provincial military forces to the village bands that were opposing the occupation of the New Territories, wrote: The Governor of Hong Kong suspected that they were regular troops from the fact that they had guns, cannon and uniforms. He was not aware that the villagers of Kwangtung, in their constant fights with each other, are always erecting forts, and use guns and cannon, and wear uniforms. This is a matter of common notoriety.2 The less populated parts of the district do not seem to have experienced trouble on this scale, probably because pressure on the land was less great and there were no large lineages competing for power and struggling to retain or improve their position. However, disputes did occur and are remembered by older villagers. On Lantau, fighting between Shek Pik people and villagers from Sha Lo Wan over a grave has been mentioned to me; relations between Tong Fuk and its neighbour Shui Hau were never very good; and a fight between Pui O villagers from San Tsuen and adjoining Lo Wai took place pre-war over the mining of kaolin in a spot behind the two villages that the Lo Wai people held was disturbing the local feng shui3 It appears that in days when communications were poor and the officials at a distance, such disputes would not always come to the attention of the authorities, even if deaths occurred. This must often have been the case in the 19th century. It was thus not without good reason that the Hsin-an magistrate of 1847, quoted at the beginning of this article, considered that his difficulties were many and real, and that they were not always appreciated as such by his colleagues and superiors. 1 ARDONT, 1921, J2; with some background at J2 of his 1920 Report. 2 Quoted by Groves, p. 63, note 65. Balfour shows 23 Punti villages with outer walls at Plate 16 in JHKBRAS, 10, 1970. Many other villages, including Hakka ones, had lesser defences, as at Pui O (Lo Wai), Lantau, pp. 14-15 above. * Information secured from local elders. Page 130 is missing, directly followed by Page 135 Page 136 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 LEGENDS & STORIES OF THE NEW TERRITORIES 161 Another ancestral hall, built by the Tang family was less fortunate. The story goes that in the 1st year of Ka Hing (✯✯) A.D. 1796 of Ts'ing dynasty, the sons of Tang Yue Cheung (**) decided to build an ancestral hall worthy to house the tablet of their illustrious ancestress, the princess. So they built a house of “kak muk” (**) in T’aai Họng (✯✯✯) village, and in shape the house was like a king's palace. At that time the district magistrate of Sun On was a man nicknamed “Hungry Bug" on account of his habit of collecting "squeeze" wherever he could. When he heard of the new building being erected in Kam T'in, and how magnificent it was, he scented a chance to make money. So he sent a message to the Tangs to say he would like to inspect their new acquisition. The Tangs were much dismayed; being familiar with the character of their district officer they knew quite well the object of his visit, they did not want to pull down the house yet its very existence was an indication of their wealth and prosperity. In the village of Lung Kwat T'au (#) where the villagers are Tangs too, being descendants of the first son of the princess, there was a portrait of the princess and the Tangs of Kam T'in borrowed it and hung it up in the entrance of the hall. When the district officer saw it he was filled with awe, and hastily made obeisance to it. He was so impressed that he dared not demand money from the descendants of so distinguished a lady, and after making a show of being pleased he stayed one night, and then took his departure. Eventually the picture had to be returned to its rightful owners, and the Kam T’in men fearing further trouble, pulled the hall down, but the foundation stones, overgrown with weeds and grass can still be seen. The legends of Kam T'in are curiously mixed up with tales of buried treasure. One story tells how at the end of the Ming dynasty the Tangs wished to build an ancestral hall for the tablet of their eleventh ancestor, Tang Kwong Yue ( ). Tang Ping Yee (*) (a grandson of Tang Kwong Yue) and eight of Tang Ping Yee's cousins chose what was, according to one "Fung shui" man, a very lucky day to put up the central beam of the house, but a few days later they found that the beam was putting forth shoots. The people considered this to be a bad omen, so they consulted a more reliable fortune-teller, who declared that the day had been a lucky day, but for building boats, not houses! The people at once pulled down the beam, the time happened to be the season of the dragon boat festival, and the villages decided to make the discarded ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 170 SUNG HOK-PANG Shui T'au village in the Shing Fa years of Ming dynasty, and at the same time, Tang Wan Kuk #Tang Shuk Lun and Tang Kwai Yin started the village of Shui Mei, while Tang Chung, Tang Shue and eight others formed the village Ying Lung Waai near Yuen Long Market. When these villages were built on the advice of “fung shui" men a pagoda was also erected to the west of them, called Man Ch'eung Kok. In the 30th year of To Kwong, A.D. 1850, of Ts'ing dynasty the Tang family seemed to have reached the height of their prosperity. Many of them had passed the highest government examination and a census taken in that year shewed that there were more than eighteen hundred males living, belonging to the family. Not content, the elders consulted with ignorant "fung shui" men as to how to increase their numbers even more. They were advised to pull down the pagoda, to alter the course of the river, making three ponds, and to build a school that would hide part of the river from the view of the village. From that time the family decreased considerably, and many of them regretted having taken the advice of the "fung shui" men. In 1930, however, they repaired the banks of the river and built houses called Ch'eung Ch'un Lei near where the pagoda had stood, and since then the Kam T'in people declare that more male children have been born and family is once again on the increase. [5] During and since the Ming dynasty Kam T'in has been able to boast of many scholarly and notable sons. Tang T'ing Ching who passed the Kui-yan degree in the 7th year of Shing Fat of Ming dynasty, A.D. 1471, of Maan On was appointed to the office of Kau Yue district in Kiangsi province, promoted later to District Magistrate of T'ang Yuen Kwangsi. He was a great friend of Hau Kui, a well-known poet of the New Territories. His poems are included in an anthology named "Ling Naam Chue Yuk" and also in the Record book of San On and among them is a poem written as a farewell to Tang T'ing Ching when he left to take up his new official post. The oldest family tree book of the Tang family of Kam T'in in existence now was compiled by Tang T'ing Ching. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 172 SUNG HOK-PANG He then returned to the capital, and stayed in General Ngai's house where he was able to make friends with many famous scholars. He wrote a book named "Yin t’oi san ngai” which had a preface written by Ts'oi Shing Yuen ## Noi Kok Hok Sz a political minister of high rank. Three years later Tang passed his Tsun sz degree, and was appointed district magistrate of Lung Yau Yuen in Chekiang province. Tang Man Wai was of a kind-hearted disposition and some say that through this the wall of T'aai Hong Wai was built. The story goes that when Tang passed his Sau Tsoi degree he was sent to Kwai Shin district, now Wai Yeung, to collect the rent due on cultivated lands, belonging to his family property. While there he came across a young man named Lei Maan Wing * hanging upside down as a punishment. On asking the reason why, Tang learnt that Lei had contracted gambling debts and was unable to pay them. Tang was sorry for the young man, paid all his debts and was able to use his influence in obtaining a military post for him. This happened during the end of the Ming Dynasty. Later on when the Manchus drove out the Mings in the North and the Ming Emperor Wing Lik✯✯ had retreated to Kwangtung, Lei was a colonel under Cheung Ka Yuk ✯ who was fighting against the Manchus. When Cheung was defeated in battle in the 4th year of Shun Chi A.D., 1647 of Ts'ing dynasty, and drowned himself, Lei, who was with him, fled with about a hundred soldiers. Gradually many of Cheung's soldiers were able to rejoin him, and with a strong army he attacked both Tung Kwun ✯✯ and San On ✯* districts. He drove out the Manchus, and made his headquarters in what is now known as the New Territories. One of Lei's camps was situated in the district round K'ei Lun Wai LP'ing Shan A and T'sing Leung Fat Yuen ****. Before the latter, which is a nunnery, was built, the locality had been known as Ying P'oon Tei, "The ground of the camp," and while the building was in progress the workmen dug up many old coffins which were supposed to be those of Lei's soldiers. Among them was found a general's sword, broken in many pieces. Anyone going to Kwun Yam Shaan to visit the Ling Wan monastery would notice half way up Taai Mo Shaan, far above the cultivated land, a stretch of hillside that has been terraced and flattened out in some former time. This is supposed to have been another of Lei's encampments. Lei burned and pillaged, and most of the + ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q 162 DAVID FAURE including the New Territories, was part of San On county. The magistrate governed from the county seat at Nam T'au, across what is now Deep Bay. There were also sub-county offices, at Tai P'ang on the northern shore of Mirs Bay, and at Koon Foo, later renamed Kowloon City. These, with Nam T'au, were responsible for the southern part of San On county, that is, the area which includes the present-day Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories. The officials hardly ever visited the villages. By default, these villages were for the most part left to conduct their own affairs. Taxes were often collected with the co-operation of the rich and influential families in Yuen Long and Sheung Shui. Litigation could be conducted at Nam T'au, but lawsuits were rare. The principal markets on the mainland in this area were Tai Po, Sheung Shui, Yuen Long, and Sham Chun, and understandably, the main trade routes in the eastern New Territories went north-south, linking Kowloon City, Sha Tin, Tai Po, Sheung Shui, and Sham Chun, from where there were ferries to Nam T'au. Cut off from these trade routes by Ma On Shan, the Sai Kung villages were very much in the backwaters of the county. The history of the development of these villages is the story of a backward area slowly pulling itself up by its bootstraps.1 Development came in two stages. From the early eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, population increased steadily. In the late seventeenth century, only three villages in the entire district merited entry in the San On Gazetteer, i.e., the Punti-speaking villages of Ho Chung, Pak Kong, and Sha Kok Mei. Not surprisingly, all three were located in well-watered valleys that were close to the footpaths leading to Sha Tin and Kowloon. By 1819, the next edition of the gazetteer recorded, in addition to these three, the Punti villages of Wong Chuk Yeung, Tai Long, Chek Keng, Ko Tong, Pak Tam, and Cheung Sheung, as well as the Hakka villages of Mang Kung Uk, Tseng Lan Shue, Sha Kok Mei (sic), Pan Long Wan, and Lan Nei Wan (later Man Yee Wan). The listing is not complete, but it accords with the general pattern of Hakka immigration into the Hong Kong region throughout the eighteenth century. There must have been a substantial boat population in the eighteenth century. There was, in fact, a larger boat population ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q 165 Originally, many Sai Kung villagers owned their land only indirectly. In a system of multiple ownership, the Lius of Sheung Shui and the Tangs of Lung Yeuk Tau, as registered land-owners, collected rent in many places in Sai Kung. Sai Kung villagers who paid rent to them nonetheless held their right to the land in perpetuity, and the registered land-owners merely paid the tax and kept the balance from the rent. When the land was registered by the Hong Kong Government, the Lius and the Tangs lost their tax collection rights, and the Crown Rent that was collected by the Hong Kong Government was usually smaller than the former rent that had been paid. For many villagers, then, this must have meant an increase in income.12 Elderly villagers in Sai Kung still remember the "taxlords". Eighty-seven year old Mr. Wong of Tam Wat had heard of the "great red hats", and Mr. Lam Kaap Shau of Tai Long of the "Koreans" who came here to collect the tax. Mr. Cheung Kau of Ping Tun had heard of the Sheung Shui people collecting rent here, and elderly Mr. Cheung of Tai Po Tsai (near Tai Mong Tsai) of the Lius and the Tangs doing so. Mr. Cheng Yung of Uk Tau called them the "Heung Shui Lo", and knew that they collected rent in his village in his grandfather's days, while Mr. Yau T'aam Shang of Wong Keng Tei actually saw his father among a group of villagers who drove out the rent-collectors from Sheung Shui after the villagers started to pay Crown Rent directly to the Hong Kong Government.13 Yet another influence that affected some villages, although it left no impact on Sai Kung District as a whole (except in the field of education), was the introduction of Christianity. As early as 1861, a Roman Catholic priest had reached Wun Yiu in Tai Po. In 1873, the records of the Roman Catholic Church noted that a priest from Sai Kung visited the San On magistrate. In the 1870's, Sai Kung was noted as one of three centres of the Church in the New Territories, the Sai Kung church being responsible not only for the eastern New Territories but also for Wai Chau and Hoi Fung. By 1934-35, Roman Catholic communities were established in Sai Kung Market, Yim Tin Tsai, Wong Mo Ying, Pak Tam Chung, Long Ke, Leung Shuen Wan, and Kei Ling Ha. There were also converts in the 1930's ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q 198 MAURICE FREEDMAN which only a very few would eventually scale. (At the time of the British assumption of power there were roughly 100,000 people in the New Territories; it was then established that there were over three hundred schoolmasters in the area.) Most of the pupils in the country schoolrooms attended for only two or three years, but some of them managed to stay long enough to lay the foundation which, built upon in town academies, formed the basis for the classical education demanded of graduates. 14. There can be no doubt, from our general knowledge of Kwangtung during this period, that the scholar-gentry (shan sz: 'shen-shih') created by the examination system and its attendant institutions formed in San On a category of 'natural leaders' for the countryside. The scholar-gentry were not the formal headmen of recognised administrative units; far from it; their status in society was too high to allow them to occupy so humble a position. They could not be subjected to routine control by the county magistrate (although he had a certain responsibility for keeping young scholars in order), and the authority they enjoyed within their local communities rested precisely on their ability to speak with a privileged voice to the magistrate and those standing above him in the official hierarchy. They were not necessarily large landowners, but in the nature of the case they were not peasants (nor, except rarely, the sons of peasants), their economic strength being based in general on income drawn from rents, interest on loans, and sometimes (despite the apparent contradiction between gentry status and officially despised commercial activity) business. Culturally they were the elite of their society. Socially they made themselves responsible for initiating and maintaining public works which in the eyes of the bureaucracy were a matter for local enterprise; so that it is possible (although I have seen no evidence to support my guess) that their disappearance in the twentieth century brought with it a decline in the care of bridges, paths, public buildings, and so on, in so far as the responsibility for these works was not taken over by the new government. 15. The scholar-gentry would have vanished from the New Territories scene—or, more correctly, faded to the sad remnant now sought out by research workers and otherwise largely ignored—even if British rule had not been extended from Hong Kong. The examination system came to an end in 1905, several years before the final collapse of the Empire. British administration made far ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q 200 MAURICE FREEDMAN Chinese rule, the remoteness, the danger and the expense of the central courts had left much authority to the local elders, and especially to those entrusted with powers of collecting local taxes: under British rule this authority naturally decayed, though they have continued sometimes to be the medium of dealings with the villagers. But their moral influence has often been of great assistance to the officials in the maintenance of the public peace, and their knowledge of the decisions of questions concerning local customs, disputed successions, fung shui and such like. (Report on the New Territories, 1899-1912, Papers laid before the Legislative Council no. 11 of 1912, p. 45). 17. We shall need to consider who these elders were, but before doing so we must look at a wider context within which local leadership was to be seen. At the time the New Territories were created they were in large part covered by a network of village-groupings, many of them being known under the name of yeuk. A yeuk was a collection of neighbouring villages which had some means of expressing its unity (sometimes in the ownership of property common to the grouping) and which was often combined along with other such yeuk to form what I propose to call a yeuk-complex. This kind of organisation can conveniently be illustrated from material on the yeuk-complex to have survived most fully into our own day. I refer to the Ts'at Yeuk (i.e. the Seven Yeuk) of Tai Po. 18. There for long stood a market town at Tai Po: Tai Po Kau Hui. It was (and physically remains) just by the Tang settlement of Tai Po Tau, but the market was under control of the Tang people further north in Lung Yeuk Tau. As Masters of the Market the Tang taxed sellers and, if the stories told about them now are to be believed as reflecting reality, and not mythical justifications of revolt, they harassed buyers by the exercise of the privilege of claiming choice produce. Their control of the market was from time to time challenged. In 1892, the matter having been brought to the county magistrate's court at Nam Tau, a ruling was given that only the Tang had the right to build shops in the market. This decision (which was inscribed on a stone slab and placed in the local Tin Hau Temple) appears to have been the culmination of a series of challenges to Tang power by the Man of Tai Hang. (Up to 1873, when it was destroyed by a typhoon, the Man had had a settlement next to the market, but by the 1890s their base was Tai Hang). In response to the unfavourable outcome of the lawsuit ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963 201 the Man and their allies rallied local support to form a new market on the other side of what in British times has come to be known as the Kwun Yam River. This was the beginning of the market town of Tai Po in its present form. (The story up to this point is told by Sung Hok-p'ang, 'Legends and Stories of the New Territories. I. Tai Po', The Hong Kong Naturalist, vol. VI, no. 1, May 1935. The stone slab recording the magistrate's decision no longer stands in the temple; when the temple was recently rebuilt the stone was cast into the yard where it now lies, often encumbered with rubbish, a neglected minor monument of late Ch'ing history). 19. The new market in a short time consigned the old one to a decrepitude familiar to anyone who has walked behind the Jockey Club Clinic which now stands next to the Tin Hau Temple. Soon the founder of the new market put up the first of the bridges to span the Kwun Yam River; the subscription list for the bridge is recorded on two stone plaques set into the wall of the Man Mo Temple which had been built as a centre for the new market. A room in the temple still houses the public weighing scales from which the founders and their successors have derived an income. 20. The story goes that the Man who led the revolt against the Tang monopoly called a meeting of the leaders of seven yeuk around Tai Po, each of these taking a share in the new market in the form of shops. The land on which the market was built appears to have been for the most part the property of the Man. Now it is probable that the Ts'at Yeuk dates from this point in time. My informants take this view. And there is one piece of information which tends to confirm it: one of the constituent yeuk is Cheung Shue Tan which, according to what I was told in Sha Tin, was previously a member of a yeuk-complex in this latter area; so that it may well have changed its allegiance at the time of the founding of the new market at Tai Po. But even if the Ts'at Yeuk came into being so recently, the yeuk themselves can hardly have done so for they appear to have been the material out of which the complex was formed. Many locals assert that the yeuk did not antedate the Ts'at Yeuk, but I am inclined to think that we are dealing here with a very old form of grouping, as comparative evidence will suggest. The seven yeuk were Lam Tsuen, Cheung Shue Tan, Ting Kok, Shuen Wan, Hap Wo, Tai Hang, and Fan Leng. Together they had over seventy villages, but the yeuk were of unequal size, so that while, for example, the Man settlement at Tai Hang formed a yeuk ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q 204 MAURICE FREEDMAN Connected with the union there was an organisation which operated a kind of agricultural insurance scheme, making good losses by theft of crops and beasts. Again, the Luk Yeuk was composed of both Punti and Hakka. 24. There are other 'numerical' yeuk-complexes: the Four (Sz) Yeuk of Tsuen Wan, the Six (Luk) Yeuk of Sai Kung, and the Nine (Kau) Yeuk of Sha Tin. In these three cases, however, we see the influence on rural organisation of an urban and administrative centre. The walled city of Kowloon was the only official seat in that part of San On to be converted into the New Territories. It held the yamen of a deputy magistrate and certain military officials, no doubt acquiring some of its importance as a centre of government in the second half of the nineteenth century from the proximity of the British Colony. The Kau Yeuk of Sha Tin appears to have consisted of forty-eight villages, of which the five largest were Punti and the rest Hakka. The Ch'e Kung Temple (now the property of the Secretary for Chinese Affairs in his part as a corporation sole) belonged to the Kau Yeuk, according to one account, but was taken over by the S.C.A. when a dispute was precipitated by a claim put forward by one village to control it. On the Sz Yeuk of Tsuen Wan I have discovered little more than that it existed. Sung Hok-p'ang once told a Chinese scholar, who has since committed the statement to writing, that the area now called Tsuen Wan was in late Ming or early Ch'ing times known as Tsuen Wan Yeuk and that formerly all the villages in the area from Ting Kau to Kowloon City belonged to it. The Luk Yeuk of Sai Kung, however, has left clearer traces. I cannot define its composition exactly, but I have been told that Ho Chung, Pak Kong, Sha Kok Mei, Tseung Kwan O and two settlements in Shap Sz Heung were the six yeuk. Once again, both Hakka and Punti were involved. The three yeuk-complexes of Tsuen Wan, Sha Tin, and Sai Kung were in some fashion tied in with a council, formal or informal, in Kowloon City; and it appears likely that the local deputy magistrate used this organisation to make contact with the villages in his neighbourhood. In 1879 (according to its own records) there came into existence in Kowloon a body known as the Lok Sin Tong; members of the three yeuk-complexes were represented on it. Its primary object seems to have been to promote charity, public works, and education, while in character it would appear to have been an association of local gentry. The Lok Sin Tong still exists; indeed, it has grown ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q 216 MAURICE FREEDMAN For the time being disputes in the New Territories continue to be essentially a matter for mediation by the District Officers, the Rural Committees, and the ‘elders', and if in default of settlement a case drags on, no effective and generally accepted machinery can at the moment be brought into action to force it to a conclusion. (A number of important aspects of the legal situation have necessarily been ignored in this brief discussion. Some civil cases involving large sums of money fall within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. The kinds of cases dealt with by the New Territories Magistrate would be an interesting matter to look into. The whole realm of family law—marriage, divorce, maintenance of wives and children, adoption, and inheritance—requires to be treated in detail). 43. I come now to a point made by this discussion of some aspects of the political and legal situation in the New Territories. An approach to the study of leadership could conveniently be made by collecting some basic information on the Village Representatives. This task, it seems to me, might be discharged by the District Officers if they have the time to undertake it. A sample of Village Representatives could be drawn by a simple statistical procedure and the following data collected in respect of each of the men selected: his age; his birthplace; where he lives; where he lived before he became a Village Representative; whether he has ever lived outside the New Territories, and if so where and for how long; the length of time he has been in office; whether he was elected, and if so on what franchise; his occupations, main and subsidiary, past and present; his education (kinds and where acquired); the number of people living in the area he represents; the number of households in this area; the numbers of 'new population' in these last two figures; details (surnames and numbers of members) of the clans in the area represented; the number of men in the most senior surviving generation in his own clan; the age of the oldest man in this generation; the ages of the ten oldest men in the clan; the names of the previous Village Representatives, including the man appointed under the Japanese and any men acknowledged to be 'headmen' before the war; his precise kinship relation to these men; the number of his brothers; his birth order among them; their occupation; the ages of his sons and daughters; the education they are receiving or have received; their occupations, if any. The answers to these questions (some of which must already be known to the District Officers) would provide an indication of the position ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1977 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n TWO ESSAYS ON THE CH’ING ECONOMY OF HSIN-AN, KWANGTUNG JOHN THOMAS Kamm* INTRODUCTION The British Crown Colony of Hong Kong was carved, in three successive steps, from the Chinese county of Hsin-An (新安). These essays represent attempts to reconstruct modes of economic activity which prevailed in this remote county during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This reconstruction will eventually serve as the groundwork on which an analysis of mercantile capitalism, in terms of its impact on local Chinese social structure, will be built. In the first year of Wan-Li (1573), Hsin-An Hsien was formed from the division of Tung-Kuan Hsien (東莞縣) into two jurisdictions. Except for a brief period during the reign of the Kang-Hsi Emperor, the county remained one of the fourteen counties of the Kwangchow Prefecture throughout Ch'ing. As with most other magistracies in rural imperial China, Hsin-An was characterized by a high degree of self-government. The magistrate seldom intervened in local affairs, and relied heavily on the indigenous social order for the day-to-day administration of the countryside. The dominant stratum of the local hierarchical order consisted principally of landlord-gentry patrilineal descent groups, commonly referred to as great clans (大族). Of these clans, the Tangs (鄧) and especially that branch of the clan which resided in Kam Tin (錦田) -- were probably best representative. Much of the data presented was collected during field work into the social history and oral tradition of this Punti "power brokerage." * Mr. Kamm states, The essays were written in fulfillment of seminar requirements for an A.M. at Harvard University's Regional Studies-East Asia program. The work is based largely on research undertaken in the New Territories (including a brief stint as coordinator of an NTA-Yuen Long "oral history" project in Kam Tin) and in the archives of the Public Records Office, Hong Kong. Writing and editing was supervised by Professor Yang Lien-Sheng of Harvard during late 1974. NOTES The cession of Hong Kong Island was ratified by the Treaty of Nanking (1842). The Kowloon peninsula was added in 1860. Britain obtained the New Territories (on a 99-year lease) in 1898. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1977 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n 136 W. J. HINTON on sanitation and the care of a little system of hill tracks which might serve as a model to the New Territories. Their King is the District Officer South, the "Lord of the Isles," but Kaifong and Residents Association alike show a praiseworthy spirit of independence, and a capacity for governing themselves; moreover, the injunction “Agree with thine adversary quickly" is well understood and followed in China, even under British rule. But we have drifted from geography into politics, like better men before us, and it would be well to pass back to the native community, through the terraced fields dotted with blue-clad figures bowed over the hoe, or shuffling along the narrow paths with a yoke of watering buckets, or cutting and pulling the beetroots, carrots, and cabbages. We will go back to the Eastern end of the village and then traverse its length, completing our brief survey by passing out to our waiting boat over the harbour, and so back to Hongkong. On the stage thus set, it may be that we or someone more competent may stage scenes from the life of the island folk from time to time. There is a strange and interesting feast in the Spring, well worth describing, and at the New Year when the whole fishing fleet lies at anchor in the bay, the little town is all alive. A sitting in the Court of the District Magistrate would be worth describing too, and a meeting of the City Fathers, the Kaifong. We must write, for lack of better witnesses, yet how true it is that those who know do not say, and those who say do not know! But to our walk. There lies our little yacht that brought us from Hongkong, white and strange among the high-sterned junks with their brown mat sails. We have all the afternoon to wander, and half the night to lie in the Harbour before the tide turns and we must up anchor and away. Strolling through the Town We have landed on the beach near the Temple of Kwan Yin and find ourselves among the Hakka people who inhabit this end of the town. Their small, sturdy figures are to be seen clustered about the well where the women are drawing water, or bending over the boats in the boat-building yard that slopes to the water's edge. There is material for a whole study in the types of boat and the methods of building alone, but we cannot stop to watch for more than a few minutes while the skilful ship's carpenters fix the ribs and planking of a brand new sampan. A word of greeting to ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1977 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n MEMORIES OF THE DISTRICT OFFICE SOUTH, NEW TERRITORIES OF HONG KONG W. SCHOFIELD My first introduction to the Southern District took the form of journeys by Water Police launches to various parts of it during the summer of 1919, when I lived for three months in the Water Police station quarters before my first leave. After it I sometimes repeated such voyages for purposes of geological research, on which I embarked with Government encouragement. A professional geological survey of the Colony was being planned in order to help in developing the resources of the Empire after the 1914-18 war, and to most people the Colony's geology was, quite understandably, a sealed book. The coasts and islands of the Southern District afforded many instructive sections, often showing the relations of different rock and mosses in a nearly undecayed state, which except in stream beds could hardly be seen anywhere else in the days before great motor roads cut the hills. This work enabled me to prepare a preliminary report on the Colony's sedimentary rocks and granite batholiths which was presented in 1923 not long before the Canadian geologists began their labours. In 1922, while I was working as second assistant to the Secretary for Chinese Affairs and deputy registrar of marriages, on the first floor of the Post Office building, Mr. Wynne-Jones, the D. O. South, whose office was just above mine on the second floor, went to hospital with appendicitis, and I was instructed at ten minutes' notice to go upstairs and do his job till he got better. As I had coveted the job for some time, and had told my chief so (then the late E. R. Hallifax), I was delighted. In those days one of the D.O.'s duties was to sit in his office as magistrate for the Southern District, excluding New Kowloon and the Lyemun area.† This court usually functioned from 9 to 10 a.m. * 1888-1968, Cadet Officer, Hong Kong Civil Service 1911-38. This article was written in response to my request to Mr. Schofield and others for memories of their service in the Southern District of the New Territories for which I was then (1958) District Officer - Hon. Editor. † Place names may be found in the official publication A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (Government Printer 1960, since reissued). ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1977 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n 180 NOTES AND QUERIES A visit will be made by coach to five of the oldest graves belonging to the family and, in addition, to a school in Kat Hing Wai at Kam Tin to see some of its heirlooms. Quite a bit of walking is involved and lady members are advised to wear flat shoes for comfort and ease of movement over hill paths. The visit will start from the Tsuen Wan Ferry Pier at 11 a.m. Members are advised to catch the regular ferry from the Central Terminus, Hong Kong (35 minutes by ordinary ferry, 20 by hover ferry). Please check ferry times with HK Yaumatei Ferry Co. (Tel. 5-220393) and make your own arrangements. Otherwise, come by car and park locally, allowing plenty of time to find parking space (try the western end of Yeung Uk Road, in the area of the Yeung Uk Road Sports Ground, in the same road as the pier). Members are advised to bring a picnic lunch. The visit should end between 5--6 p.m., back at the Tsuen Wan Ferry Pier. The tour will be limited to two buses and members and their friends are invited on a first-come-first-served basis. Please telephone names to Mrs. Kam at 12-403396 (District Office, Tsuen Wan). Programme notes will be available on the day. DAVID LIU and JAMES HAYES Joint Organizers 29.11.76 THE TANG (4) CLAN IN THE NEW TERRITORIES AND ITS OLDEST GRAVES According to the genealogical record kept by the Tang clan at Kam Tin, it originated from a branch settled in Kut Shui County (*) of Kiangsi Province during the northern Sung period (960-1126).* It all started when one of the ancestors by the name of TANG Fu-hip (###) passed through this part of Kwangtung on his way to his new official assignment as the magistrate of Yeung Chun County () after he had successfully passed the imperial examination and was awarded the chin-shih degree during the reign of Hsi Ning (1068-1077). * With the exception of "Kiangsi” romanizations used in this Note are in Cantonese. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1977 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n 210 NOTES AND QUERIES ritual obligations for Kam Tin, officiating at the Kam Tin ta chiu ceremonies. 21. d. The changing of the name of Sham Tin to Kam Tin dates from 1587. We collected a variant of the tale related by Sung. In this account, the magistrate never leaves San On at all, but is moved to praise the delicious quality of their rice. Hence, the name Kam Tin. In general, this tale illustrates the extent of the wealth and power of the Tangs, and their intimate relationship with the local magistracy. 22. Expansion out of the Pat Heung basin into neighboring heung of Yuen Long Valley, Kowloon Peninsula and Hong Kong Island continued throughout the early years of the 16th century. Sung (p. 205) notes that the appropriation of Hong Kong island was completed by the Wan Li reign of Ming Dynasty (app: 1573-1620), as references exist in the Tung Kwun Leung Chak (ĦM) of that date. Our own evidence (see San On Land Dispute below)* suggests an even later date. In any case, the oft-made assertion that Tang land holdings steadily decreased from large Sung grants is clearly in error. 23. The period coinciding with the fall of Ming and the establishment of Ch'ing [especially the K'ang Hsi reign] although devastating in its consequences for most of the lineages of the present day New Territories (southern San On), left untouched—indeed enhanced—the basis of Tang power in the area. 23. a. Sung spends quite a bit of time (as does O'Dwyer) on the tales surrounding Tang Man-wai (*)† This man was a large landowner and eminent scholar who is remembered for 1) his relationship with the rebel Lei Man-wing (‡✯✯), 2) the building of Tai Hong Wai (✯✯✯) dating from 1647-1656, and 3) the establishment, in his pen-name (*) of the Tong which financed and operated the Yuen Long Old Market. It is clear that, throughout the imperial era, whenever the central government was threatened or weakened by rebellion, the Kam Tin Tangs accommodated and shared power with rebel forces. [The extent to which this fact justifies its characterization by surrounding lineages as a "bandit clan" remains in doubt.] 23. b. As Hugh Baker notes in Sheung Shui A Chinese Lineage * See paras 24-29 below. † JHKBRAS 14 (1974): 172 - 174. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1978 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593 NOTES AND QUERIES 211 Ching period of the Ming Dynasty (1553). From this, we can see that, at that time, there was no fort nor guard-station at Fat Tong Mun. 4 See my article "A Short History of the Pirates of Hong Kong before 1842," published in Volume 8, No. 4, of the Kwong Tung Man Hin 早期海盜略，原載廣東文獻第八卷，第四期。. 5 Chapter 4 of the San On Yuen Chi, Ch'ia Ching edition, ★★★✰ recorded, "North Fat Tong is an isolated island, A fort is erected during the K'ang Hsi period, for the protection of the waterway against the pirates." This proves that the fort on Tung Lung Island was erected during the K'ang Hsi reign. 6 See Chapter 13 of the Kwong Tung Hoi Tu Shuet. 1889 edition ★***, and Chapter 73 of the Kwong Chow Fu Chi, 1879 edition 廣州府志。 7 Chapter 125 of the Kwong Tung Tung Chi, Tao Kuang edition £ A records, "In the 15th year of the Ch'ia Ching rule, Viceroy Chin Mun Fu ✰✰ suggested to have the Fat Tong Mun Fort abandoned, and rebuilt near the Kowloon Walled City, Viceroy Pak Ling ordered the Magistrate of the San On District 4 to carry out the suggestion. The Fat Tong Mun Fort was under the command of the officer commanding of the Tai Pang Battalion ***. The fort stood on an isolated island, two hundred li from the Tai Pang Walled City, and forty li from the Kowloon guard-station. There were no villages on the island that could assist in protecting the region. Thus the fort had to be removed to the Kowloon City Region." Chapter 14 of the Kwong Chow Fu Chi, 1879 edition АЯ, and the Genealogy of Tang's of Kam Tin, New Territories of Hong Kong, 香港新界錦田鄧氏族譜 have the same record. 8 See Note 6, Chapter 8 of Professor LO Hsiang-lin's Hong Kong and its External Communications before 1842, Chinese edition, 1959 -AS- 一八四二年以前之香港及其對外交通，羅香林著. FIRST RECORD OF THE PELOBATID FROG LEPTOBRACHIUM PELODYTOIDES BOULENGER IN HONG KONG It is indeed gratifying to find-in an area as small and zoologically well studied as Hong Kong-any amphibian not previously known to be part of our fauna. Not only does the discovery of Leptobrachium pelodytoides add another species, but represents a genus new to the known fauna of Hong Kong. The first specimens found here, and subsequently identified, are nine tadpoles collected by Dr. Frank F. Reitinger and Mr. Jerry K. S. Lee at an altitude of about 853 metres on Tai Mo Shan in the New Territories on 30 November and 7 December 1974. However, it was not until two adult frogs were found by Mr. Phillip J. Bishop ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1980 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207 NOTES AND QUERIES 141 (1810), General Chin Mun-fu ***** suggested that the Fat Tong Mun Fort be abandoned and be rebuilt near the Kowloon guard-station ✯ ✯ A Viceroy Pak Ling T✯ ordered the Magistrate of the San On County 觚 ***◊ to carry out the suggestion. Chapter 175 of Kwangtung Tung Chi, Tao Kuang edition KKAR £&4-4*+ states, "The Kowloon Fort Aate lies 290 # E west of the Tai Pang Battalion 4. It was guarded by one pa-tsung and one ngai-wai with 48 guards." 5 After the Opium War, the Chinese were defeated, and Hong Kong was ceded to the British. In the 23rd year of the Tao Kuang Reign (1843) Ke Ying was Viceroy of the Kwangtung and Kwangsi Provinces **** and Wong Yan-tung & was Governor of the Liang Kwang-tung ✯✯✯. They proposed building the Kowloon Walled City. The work was completed in the 27th year of the Tao Kuang Reign (1847). * See Chapter 13 of the Kwangtung Tao Shuet, Tung Chih edition ŁATÁRUK+ which records. "The Kowloon Walled City was under the command of a fu-cheung ## or brigadier of the Naval Forces of the Tai Pang Battalion. Under him was an extra ngar-wai who guarded the Walled City with 150 men. There were 75 men under one tsin-tsune for lieutenant guarding the Kowloon Fort; and one ngai-wai-tsin-tsung ††or sub-lieutenant leading 15 men guarding the Kowloon Coastal Guard Station ALDA. * See Chapter 73 of the Kwangchow Fu Chi, Kuang Hsü edition ANA££*TE and Kwong Tung Hoi Tao Shuet, Kuang Hsü edition 張之洞廣東海圆說. * See my article 'The Old Cannons found in Hong Kong' in Volume 8, Part 2 of Kwangtung Man Hin REÆ : RKARXUŁ^ËZI * The Old Yamen is now occupied by the CNEC Grace Light School. TUEN MUN FROM CHINESE HISTORICAL RECORDS 2 Tuen Mun1 lies in the western part of the New Territories. The highest mountain in this area is the Tuen Mun Shan ₺F2 which reaches a height of 582.9 metres. To the east of the mountain is the Tuen Mun Bay, also called the Castle Peak Bay lying to its east, and the Lantau with Kau King Shan A Island lying to its south. Tuen Mun Bay is surrounded by mountains on three sides, thus forming a good typhoon shelter from the strong easterlies. It is also the waterway for entering the Chu Kiang i or Pearl River estuary of the Kwangtung Province. The Bay had been an important harbour for the Persians, the Arabs and the people from India, Indo-china and the East Indies. Their trading fleets had to anchor and gather at Tuen Mun before entering the Chu Kiang. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1983 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v 42 attempt to see if the customs were general throughout the New Territories.1 The Communist army reached Canton in October 1949. Shortly before and after that date, floods of refugees poured into the New Territories, many of them later engaging in agriculture, mostly vegetable farming. Up until then, natives of the New Territories were primarily rice farmers, living in long-established villages with customs and practices that regulated their lives. The only land available for cultivation by refugees tended to be marginal land without water. The refugees dug wells, made new paths, leased land from New Territories natives, and erected shacks all over the place (before October 1949 there were virtually no temporary structures in the Tai Po district). The energy, initiative and desperate attempts by the refugees to earn a living in new communities where neighbours seldom knew each other resulted in their following a way of life without traditional rules of conduct. To some extent, this washed off on the traditional New Territories natives, aggravated by the movement from 1951 onwards of New Territories men to emigrate overseas and to the urban areas of Hong Kong and Kowloon. This movement tended to break down the old indigenous customs. In 1953-55, in Yuen Long, I used to have regular discussions with certain village elders who were locally acknowledged as experts on traditional customs; they proved most co-operative when they appreciated my interest in the subject. I always cross-checked the information with other local informants, but had neither the opportunity nor the need at the time to cross-check further afield so as to ascertain how widespread the custom was or the extent to which it applied to both Punti and Hakka communities. It must be accepted therefore that, in the absence of further proof, these customs may not necessarily have been uniformly observed throughout the New Territories or elsewhere in Kwangtung. From September 1953 to early 1954, in addition to my work as District Officer, I was also Police Court Magistrate (in Ping Shan), Assistant Land Officer (holding Land Courts), and Small Debts Court Magistrate. These had always been the functions of the District Officers at Tai Po and Yuen Long. But, during my ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 138 JAMES HAYES 37 CO 129/99, Despatch No. 115 of 28 July 1864. 38 Ibid. The report, by Lieutenant Adams, R.N., dated ‘Woodcock’, Hong Kong, 28 June 1864, is at pp. 37-45. 39 Reports on the Past and Present State of Her Majesty's Colonial Possessions (hereafter Blue Book) 1845, No. 38 Hong Kong, p. 149. 40 Blue Book for 1847, No. 36 Hong Kong, p. 308. 41 e.g. W.F. Mayers, N.B. Dennys and C. King, The Treaty Ports of China and Japan. (London, Trubner and Co., 1867), p. 108, for two very bad piracies there. 42 Harbour Master's Report for 1887 in Sessional Papers (Papers laid before the Legislative Council of Hong Kong) September 1887-December 1888, p. 258. 43 Blue Book for 1845, No. 38 Hong Kong, p. 151. 44 **科大蘭,陳鴻基,吳倫霓霞, 合品 香港碑銘彙編 p. 98 (D. Faure, B. Luk, A. Ng The Historical Inscriptions of Hong Kong (Hong Kong Urban Council 1986) p. 98-101, 75-78. 45 Public Record Office, London: CO129/12/9757, para 12. 46 E.J. Eitel Europe in China op. cit. p. 132. 47 J.W. Hayes The Hong Kong Region op. cit. p.62, (and see also p. 27, n. 11). 48 Unpublished Temple Directory, The Temples Unit, Home Affairs Dept. H.K. Government, 1980, p. 17. 49 Mayers, Dennys and King, op cit, p. 2. Sin Ngan (#) variously romanized herein as San-on, Sun-on and Hsin-an was the county to which Hong Kong Island belonged in 1841. Tungkwan ( ) otherwise Tung-Kwun was the older, larger county from which it was created in 1573. For Hsin-an see Peter Y.L. Ng, prepared for press and with additional material by Hugh D.R. Baker, New Peace County, A Chinese Gazetteer of the Hong Kong Region (Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 1983). 50 Mayers, Dennys and King, op. cit. p.3 51 52 53 Friend of China, 24 July 1858 (courtesy of Revd. Carl T. Smith), Ibid. See J.W. Hayes The Hong Kong Region op. cit. pp. 46-53. See also J.W. Hayes, The Rural Communities of Hong Kong, Studies and Themes (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1983) pp 9-10. 54 Petition dated 8th day of 4th lunar month, Tao Kuang, 21st year, i.e. 28th May 1841, to the District Magistrate of Hsin-an. This and other quoted papers belong to the Tang family of Kam Tin, New Territories. I am grateful to the District Officer, Yuen Long and Mr. J.T. Kamm for the translations that appear here. They have been checked against the originals by my friend Dr. Anthony K.K. Siu. Kwan Tai Lo was a village near the foot of the present Leighton Hill. 55 Copy of an undated instruction to a presumably subordinate office following the above. 56 Petition dated 28th day of 5th lunar month, Tao Kuang 23rd year i.e. 25th June 1843. 57 Undated reply to the petitioners, presumably from the District Magistrate, following receipt of the foregoing petition. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1984 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572 139 58 Petition dated 23rd day of 4th lunar month, Tao Kuang 24th year i.e. 8th June 1844. 59 60 See notes 19-20 above and relevant text. Response or comment, presumably again by the District Magistrate, following the petition of 8th June 1844. 61 Instruction dated sometime in Tao Kuang 24th year, but date and originator not clear to me. 62 Communication dated 15th day of 11th month, Tao Kuang 24th Year, i.e. 24th December 1844 (from Series CO129/7/9807, p. 326). See also Mayers, Dennys and King, op cit., p. 57. 64 Public Records Series CO129 and FO233. Copies of this deed, together with a few other papers from Chai Wan, belonging to Mr Law Wan-yeung(c) of Chai Wan, are available in the Public Records Office of Hong Kong. 65 See note 26 for the Wong holdings. The Tangs leased out similar properties on Tsing Yi Island in the present New Territories, where they apparently did hold the sole rights to the sub-soil up to 1899. 66 See the account given in J.W. Hayes The Hong Kong Region op cit, p 32 and in J.W. Hayes The Rural Communities of Hong Kong op. cit., pp. 34-37 and 244-246. 67 For accounts of these places see chapters 2 and 3 of J.W. Hayes The Hong Kong Region, op. cit. 6. See J.W. Hayes The Rural Communities of Hong Kong, op. cit., pp 68-9 and relevant notes on p. 254. 69 See the information on settlement in north-west Kowloon and Tsuen Wan in J.W. Hayes The Rural Communities of Hong Kong, op. cit., chapters 5 and 7. 70 Kuo Fei(部) Yueh Ta Chi 與天記三十三政事類渗防廣東沿潮閣 71 This is perhaps misleading and more information is required. The list of places where land was claimed to be in the private ownership of the Tangs, with dates of purchases and names of sellers is given in a petition to the Hsin-an District Magistrate dated 18th day of the 10th moon in Tao Kuang 24th year, i.e. 25 November 1844. This shows that part of those Hong Kong lands registered in the Tung-kwun district yamen, presumably before 1573, had been purchased by the Tangs from another family in the Ch'ien-lung reign, and therefore cannot be used to show Tang ownership in or before the Ming dynasty, although they do suggest that the lands were cultivated and of value in the Ming. Nor do we know whether land registered in what later became Hsin-an had earlier been registered in the Tung-kwun yamen but with the relevant registers transferred to the new district yamen in 1573. 72 For the dates of these temples, and especially for the items mentioned in the Table, see 陸鴻基, 吳偏霞霞, 合编, “香港伸銘彝術 op. cit. (D. Faure, B. Luk, A. Ng, The Historical Inscriptions of Hong Kong), passim. I 71 See J.W. Hayes The Hong Kong Region op. cit. chapter 7. 74 ** A.R. Johnston “Note on the Island of Hong Kong” in London Geographical Journal, XIV, reprinted in the Hong Kong Almanack and Directory, 1846, 75 Endacott, op cit., p. 59 76 E.J. Eitel, Europe in China op. cit. p. 215. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522 papers that I was preparing for publication or for some academic conference, in the hope that he would respond. He invariably did so. He had a wealth of information to draw upon, and his replies always provided insights and incisive comments. They were also full of humour. The eleven pages of closely-typed notes and comments on my book The Rural Communities of Hong Kong (1983 Oxford University Press, Hong Kong) was a particular joy, but this quality was evident in practically everything he wrote. For instance, he perplexed me one day early in my career by writing in a file, “DO South should kindly explain why the Clearwater Bay villages are full of children none of whom have ever been born” a reference to non-compliance with the registration requirements of the Births and Deaths Ordinance. I once sent one of his letters to Sir Ronald Holmes. He returned it with a note, "Thank you so much for letting me see this most interesting and also, like all good writing, highly evocative. It is nice to know that Ken is still going so strong”. This was written in late 1975. I have two favourite anecdotes. One is his amusing account of a pre-war traffic accident case when he was Police Magistrate, Kowloon. Let him tell it himself. "I do not have anything polite to say to those who regard ‘Europeans’ and ‘Asians’ as separate species, like the witnesses in a case I heard 32 years ago almost to the day (1937) in which the ten passengers in a New Territories bus were described by one witness as ‘two other people, besides myself and seven coolies’ and by a second witness as ‘seven people and three GWAEZIRLOO’ (i.e. foreigners).” He added later "I am glad to see this perfectly true story immortalised. Alas, England is getting as bad." ... The other story was told to me recently by Dr. Graham Johnson, of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. When he began the field work for his doctoral thesis on Tsuen Wan in the late 1960s he wanted information from the Census Office. He telephoned Mr. Barnett who said he was happy to meet him, but would like him to go to a sauna for the purpose. This surprised Graham but along he went, and his first meeting with Ken was in the nude, in the heat and steam. Thereafter, he said, they were able ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522 32 looking as though they would roll down any moment, it formed a dramatic and distinctive backdrop to the Walled City. The City was primarily a garrison town. In 1898, the garrison numbered 544, with a civilian population of only 200, largely dependents of the military. By then the watch towers were being used as family dwellings. Besides the several official buildings there was also the Lung-chin i-hsüeh ## (Lung-chin Communal School), named after the small Lung-chin river nearby. The school's raison d'etre is significant. Just as the British presence in Hong Kong had necessitated strengthening the civil and military establishment at Kowloon, so had it highlighted the need to strengthen the inhabitants' moral fibres against Western decadence and materialism. The Hsin-an Magistrate, commenting on the founding of the school in 1847, declared that since Kowloon had become a point of interaction with barbarians, the inhabitants needed to be fortified morally, thus making a school necessary, and he even hoped that they might exert a civilizing influence on the intruders. 10 Built of blue baked bricks on a granite foundation, with granite lintels and frames to the entrance, the school was an imposing building with two main halls and two courtyards, much like the grander ancestral halls of the New Territories. Local literati were elected to the school board each year. The source of fund was irregular. A generous official occasionally made a donation; in the 1880s, a special rate was levied on the sale of suckling pig meat to subsidize the school expenses. Characteristically, public meetings, often attended by officials, were also held there. Its reflecting wall bore the characters "Hai-pin Tsou Lu" to denote a place of high moral and academic excellence by the sea, emphasizing how strongly Confucian orthodoxy still prevailed in this outpost of Empire. In 1897, an annex, a fine two-storeyed building called the K'uei-hsing ke (Kuei-hsing pavilion) was added, K'uei-hsing being the god who protected the literati. This shows that fifty years after its foundation, the school was still a going concern. 14 A small paper-burning pavilion stood near the East Gate. Traditionally, the Chinese literati revered the written word and, to ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522 256 I 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. Faced 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. I 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 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1987 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522 258 some of these things again, because we run into an awful lot of problems because of that sort of attitude. How did I get involved in all this? Now and then I think that James framed the "trap" and I fell right into it. I was not interested in local history for a long time - I was never interested all the way through college and graduate school. When I got my job in the Chinese University, I lived in Tai Po Market. I remember there was this year when they had the shed for their village opera but I never went once. Although I passed by many times, it never occurred to me to go and see what was happening. — I had set my mind on writing about the rural economy of a couple of provinces in China from about 1870 onwards, and thought, "Well, being here one should look at what happened in the New Territories, and see what you get in the field”. James showed me some of the inscriptions that he had collected, and there were a couple that were about tenancy disputes in the Ch'ing dynasty in the 18th Century. At the time this is only about five years ago these documents were rather rare, although in the last couple of years China has published a lot more of them. To have the actual dispute recorded in full, to have the text of the decision from the Magistrate, and to have all the details there, and to be able to find out from local enquiries who the people were who were involved in all these sort of things, was just too tempting. It was a trap that I suppose any historian would fall into! I was hoping that there would be more of these things in the New Territories, and knew that the only way to get to them was to go around the whole of the New Territories and look at every temple. So something had to be organised. My interest was totally selfish, I just wanted more inscriptions and land deeds and the like! Anyway, that's how it began. I got a couple of colleagues together and other people who were interested. We were lucky at the time, because Professor Ch'en Ching-ho was running the Institute of Chinese Studies in the Chinese University and was interested in local history. He had done similar work in Singapore. He gave us funds and we managed to employ some students, and that got the project started. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1988 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q 74 Tang family had the right of building shops there, and a stone with an inscription to that effect, was put up in the temple of T'in Hau Kung(g) which can still be seen in old Tai Po market. When the Man family lost their case a wealthy friend called a big meeting of the elders of the seven districts round about Taai Haang (林村), Fan Ling(K), Lam Ts'un(#1), Yip Woh(), Sheung Wan(), Ting Kok(TM) and Cheung Shue Tan(). At his suggestion, and financed by him, they built a new market where the present market now stands. It was called Taai Woh Shei (utmost friendship market)(★Fifi) and was officially opened on the twenty-third day of the 6th month of the twentieth year of Kwong Sui, A.D. 1894. All the trade at once went to the new market and the old one gradually fell into disuse and can now be seen as a very poor and derelict village. Note. 1. The district of Sun On was formed in the sixth year of Lung Hing() A.D. 1572 of Ming dynasty. Fourteen years later the **History of Sun On District** was written by Yau Tai Kin the district magistrate. It was revised for the first time in the eighth year of Sung Ching(), but this edition was not published until eight years later when a third magistrate Chau Hei Yiu(2) added slightly to it. A second edition was published in the eleventh year of Hong Hei(E) A.D. 1672 of Ts'ing dynasty, a third appeared sixteen years later, and the present edition was published in A.D. 1819. Note. 2. The second character(W) is read yeuk in Cantonese but in the New Territories dialect it is read as Kwat. # Note. 3. Lam Fung is "Limahong" (= Lim a hong, not Li ma hong) whose name is already mentioned in the history of the Philippine Islands. It is also translated as in some Japanese books, and Limahong or Lin Ah Hong in some of the European books. = Lam Fung Limahong was a native of Raoping district(ATM) In the 10th month of the 2nd year of Lung Hing(), A.D. 1568 of Ming dynasty, he took sixty-two battleships with 2,000 sea-soldiers, 1,500 women, and a large store of food and ammunition to attack the Philippines. He was defeated and his fleet dispersed by the soldiers of ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1989 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h 130 ―T towards the end of the century. The original market for the Sha Tau Kok area was Sham Tsun; it was only from about 1825 that the population of the Sha Tau Kok area rose to the point where it could sustain a market of its own, at Sha Tau Kok. The main impetus to the foundation of the Cheung Shan Kwu Tsz, apart from the purely religious one, and the political one to be discussed below, was to provide a resting-place for travellers on the road to Sham Tsun. This road was long, and the two-mile-long deserted section through the mountains was without shelter, either from the elements or from wild animals (tigers were a serious problem in the area, as village tales and placenames demonstrate). The nunnery was founded, in part, to provide services to wayfarers; in particular, according to elderly villagers, free tea was given to anyone stopping to rest there. Traffic on this road was heavy. At its peak, between 1900 and 1915, about 20,000 people a month passed by, carrying up to 400 tons of goods, according to surveys conducted in 1904 and 1910 by the Hong Kong Government to assess likely traffic on railway lines in the area. 10 The road from Sham Tsun to Sha Tau Kok was important not only because of its local significance to the two market towns, but to a wider area as well. It was part of the main road from the county city of Nam Tau (Nantou) to the Deputy Magistrate's city of Tai Pang (Dapeng), which was the most important east-west route in the county. The main north-south routes in the county were those which linked Kowloon with Sham Tsun, and then on from Sham Tsun with the towns further north, and, eventually, with Canton. There were three main crossings of the Sham Tsun river between the New Territories area and Sham Tsun: the Liu Pok ferry to the southwest of Sham Tsun, which carried the traffic on the Yuen Long-Sham Tsun road, and the Lo Wu ferry and the Law Fong bridge, which between them carried the Kowloon-Sham Tsun traffic. The most direct route from Kowloon to the north was the road from Tai Po to Sheung Shui, and thence over the Lo Wu ferry. This ferry, however, was expensive, and could only be bypassed by using a waist-deep ford, which was difficult and dangerous, and impossible after rain. Many travellers, therefore, preferred the slightly longer, but cheap and safe Law Fong bridge crossing. There were two routes from Kowloon to the Law Fong bridge. One crossed the mountains north of Tai Po by the Kat Tsai Au pass, ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1989 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h 147 The Magistrate's influence seems to have deferred the success of the Tsat Yeuk in by-passing the Tai Po ferry from about 1840 to 1892, but otherwise it does not seem to have played any significant part. The Magistrate seems to have played absolutely no role at all in the dispute between the Luk Yeuk and Wong Pui Ling. The main gentry organisations in the area were the Po Tak Temple Old Alliance and the Community School (1) in Sham Tsun, which was managed by the Tung Ping Kuk (T5, "Council for Peace in the East"), consisting of all the Punti degree holders in the Sham Tsun area, who sat in the school in rotation to adjudicate disputes. The political effectiveness (as opposed to their effectiveness in settling inter-personal disputes) of these gentry bodies in ordinary times was slight. The predominant membership of the Community School rota was from Sheung Shui, Lung Yeuk Tau, Wong Pui Ling and Sham Tsun itself, and their mutual enmities rendered it helpless in most major local political crises. The Po Tak Temple was similarly divided. The Sham Tsun Community School was, furthermore, ignored by the Hakka degree-holders, who had a similar, but weaker, body connected with the school in Sha Tau Kok, and known as the Tung Wo Kuk (†1⁄2, “Council for Peace in the East”). 41 The Nuns and Their Background The nuns of the Cheung Shan Kwu Tsz were local Punti girls. This was a common feature of the pre-British Buddhist institutions in the area. The Ta Kwu Ling villagers believe that all the nuns, at all dates, were Punti. They were "women who refused to marry". This was the same at all the indigenous nunneries in the New Territories. The Tang lineage owned three nunneries: the Ling To nunnery being owned by the Ha Tsuen branch of the lineage, the Ling Wan nunnery by the Kam Tin branch, and the Lung Kai nunnery by the Lung Yeuk Tau branch. Village elders of all three villages say that, before they were taken over by immigrant monks (or, in the case of the Lung Kai nunnery, became ruined), they were all houses of nuns, and that, while girls from other places were not debarred from becoming nuns there, effectively all the nuns were Tang girls from the branch of the lineage owning the monastery in question, girls, that is, who “refused to marry". Similarly, the nuns of the Kim Ho monastery at the Law Fong bridge were, according to Law Fong village elders, girls from Punti ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1989 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h 372 yi-chung Ying Lung Wai ying-bong ying-sing 迎聖 Ying-Yun 英元 Yongzheng 雍正 Yuen Kong 元崗 Yuen Long 元朗 Yu-Gaai Yu-Ji 4* Yu-Jung 遇宗 Yu-Man yun 元 Yun 袁 yun-bou 元寶 Yun-Fan yun-sau 綠首 yung-fu seung-yan A Yut-Man # NOTES Sung Hok-p'ang, "Legends and Stories of the New Territories". 1974, pp. 168-9. 2 Included near the end of the Si Kim Tong genealogy. A different version of the early history named Hon-Faat as the first ancestor to settle in Kam Tin. See Faure (1984:240). In the custody of Mr. Dang Yu-Hing. The names are Gam-Tin (1474-?) and Gam-Lei (1512-?). 6 The Ching Lok Ancestral Hall ritual manual. I have consulted Taga (1982), which has some details about this segment on p. 19 and p. 91. He sounded less sure of this later, and a knowledgeable elder of a closely related segment knows nothing peculiar about the house. The petitions are included in vol. 2 of the Kam Tin Historical Documents, the Oral History Project Collection, (copy at Chinese University of Hong Kong) I had the opportunity to work out a chart for the Sing-Ngok segment from a fragment of their genealogy and compare the names with those in the petitions. 01 See Faure (1984). See the genealogy in Kam Tin Historical Documents vol. 1, and also Faure (1984:26-27). ET I did not have the opportunity to see the piece of embroidery which probably bears a useful name list. 12 An examination of the ritual handbook for the ancestral hall (included in the genealogy in Kam Tin Historical Documents vol. 1) shows that among the three branches it was the Naam-Kai jou people who dominated. 13 According to the Yeui branch genealogy in Hugh Baker's Collection of Genealogies and Taga (1982). 14 The Fenggang Shuyuan. See Ng (1983:60) about this school. 13 According to Mr. Yun Mui, whose great grandfather, he said, had held the position before Dang, 16 See the announcement from the Dongguan county magistrate included in the genealogy in Kam Tin Historical Documents vol. 1. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1989 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h 388 goods- true and absolute proof. I now repent. If my own personal appeal that I escape being sent to the Magistrate for formal examination is accepted I will with sincerity go through the punishment imposed publicly by the community. Afterwards I will always obey the advice and rules of the Yeuk. Should there ever be a time when I again do anything improper, then let the community send me to the Magistrate to face trial. I request this. Furthermore, I shall follow the rules of the Yeuk, and shall never dare to be overcome by shame and harm people or do anything of the sort. Because we fear verbal agreements, we have put this in writing, and have also kept several copies as evidence. P.H. HASE NOTES Faure, in his The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories, Hong Kong. Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 1986, pp. 100-127. has discussed these arrangements in detail. The documents from the Yung Sze-chiu collection are now held in the Sha Tin Public Library, Regional Council. The documents are to be found in two volumes, both with the number R802.79 4431, both with the title ([D] (A Collection of Exemplars of Documents and Couplets]). Accession numbers of the two volumes are 622670 and 622679. My thanks are due to Dr. David Faure and Mrs. Nga-ching Miller for assistance with the translation. The two versions show minor variations in wording: these are not noted here. MORE ON THE MAN THE EMPEROR DECAPITATED In Volume 28 of the Journal, David Faure printed various folktales from the Eastern New Territories relating to the history of Ho Chan, in a Note headed "The Man the Emperor Decapitated".' Recently, a further story of the same sort was given to me by Tsim Foh-sang, a village elder of Tsap Wai Kon village in Sha Tin. Mr. Tsim was born about 1918, and was educated in his village. This story was written down by Mr. Tsim in 1981 as an interesting note on the history of Kau Sai. Mr. Tsim's story shows that stories about Ho Chan were current in Sha Tin as well as Kat O and Sai Kung, and were probably current throughout the Eastern New Territories. Tsim Foh-sang's note reads: I was told that there is a Fung Shui site in the sea near Kau Sai. The name of this site is "A Golden Bell Hanging on a Silk Thread" (金鐘絲線) (#Bâ£), and it belonged to Ho, the Minister of the Left (左相). It was one of the ninety- ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 4 modernity has been, on the whole, so successful. 2. Traditional Self-Management in the New Territories The 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: "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 Decades 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: "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 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 42 disasters. the second is for those who died because of plague. The final reason is to thank the benevolent governors Wang Lai-ren and Zhou You-de of the beginning of the Qing dynasty. In my opinion, all these reasons can be integrated into the first one. (d) Chan Wing-hoi "The Tangs of Kam Tin and their Jiu festival", Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 29 (1989) 302-375, a rich and detailed account of the lineage, its temples and villages, and the festival which draws them together. Dr. Faure gradually switched his interest to the Pearl River Delta while Prof. Tanaka, as I was told, is now looking at Sichuan province. Talk on publishing a book on Hong Kong Jiao festivals has been going on for years by members of the "Research Circle of the Regional Society of Southern China''. In 1990, the editorial board of the society set up a schedule to compile a book focusing on the Jiao festival. It is expected that papers on various aspects will be completed by the end of April 1991. (Correspondence from the society dated 28.12.1990) Schipper, Kristofer M., "The Written Memorial in Taoist Ceremonies" in Wolf, Arthur P. (ed.) Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 324, For example, according to Chan Wing-hoi, villagers of Shek O celebrated their 16th Jiao in 1986 (Chan, 78). The Dengs in Kam Tin claimed to have celebrated their Jiao since 1684 (Tanaka, 918). See for instance Basel Mission Archives, doct. Al-6, No. 51 (1869), and doct. Al-7, No. 51 (1870) and Der Evangelische Heidenbote, July 1867, in which a missionary describes how he was forced to go to the Magistrate to get his support before he could avoid having to pay his share of the Jiao expenses. All these cases are from Hsin An County. The Sha Tin poem will, it is hoped, shortly be published by Dr. P.H. Hase. These two series are part of the 15 series of historical documents collected by Dr. D. Faure and others in the New Territories. Copies of the collections are kept in the libraries of CUHK, Hong Kong University, Sha Tin Regional Council Library, and Institute of Oriental Culture, Tokyo University. 31 Tanaka Chugoku no Sozoku to Engeki [Lineage and Theatre in China] (Tokyo Univ. Press 1985), 608. Jiao festivals celebrated by the powerful communities in Hong Kong like Kam Tin, Ha Tsuen, Lung Yeuk Tau etc., were all performed by the Zhengyi Taoist group, led first by the late Master Lin Pei and now by Master Chan Kau. Another Zhengyi Taoist group is led by Master Chan Wah. However, many Taoist priests work for both groups. There are also other Taoist groups who performed for the Jiao festivals, like a Cantonese group which performed for Ho Chung and a Heklo group for Cheung Chau. In 1983, four out of five Jiao festivals were performed by monastery Taoists. It is not clear whether it was because of tradition or out of economic reasons. A comparison of the two Taoist groups has yet to be made. 14 Choi Chi-cheung **Sho matsuri no jinmei risuto ni mirareru shinzoku ban'i” [Kinship as seen in the name lists of Jiao festival] Bunka Jinnú Gaku 5 (1988): 131, table L. 35 **Shinshi men" [Section of Believers] in Fanling Wenxian (Historical Literature of Fanling) vol. 8. This brief account records details of the arrangement of the Jiao area, including the contents of couplets, names of deities invited, location and direction of matshed stages, and the sacrifices prepared etc.. See n. 32 for the depositories of Fanling Wenxian. 36 See (1972) Lin Chuan [Lam Tsuen] Xiang Taiping Qingjiao huiyi jilubu in Dapu [Tai Po] Wenzian [Historical Literature of Tai Po] vol. 1. (see n. 32 for depositories) 37 Tanaka Issei's three books, all published by the Tokyo Univ. Press are: Chugoku Saishi Engeki Kenkyu [Ritual Theatres in China] (1981), Chugoku no Sozoku to Engeki [Lineage and Theatre in China) (1985), and Chugoku Kyoson Saishi Kenkyu: Chihogeki ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1990 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299 275 few fishermens' houses, and a newly-built hotel. This dispute in 1875 did not end the matter. It broke out again between 1902 and 1905. The documents which discuss this last conflict make it clear that the decisions of Tin On-pong in 1875 had not been fully implemented. In 1902, all the land behind the landing stage, which Tin On-pong had ordered to be sold by the Yuens to the Cheungs, was still in the hands of the Yuens. The right to collect toll, however, was wholly in the hands of the Tung Ping Kuk, and the Yuens were not collecting their four-tenths. Presumably the Yuens had passed this right to the Kuk, so long as their land-owning rights were left untouched. The Cheungs seem to have been left with nothing, other than what they could get by their dominance of the Tung Ping Kuk of the “Transit Toll" income. Between 1875 and 1902 conditions on the Sham Chun River had changed. Firstly, from the mid-1890s steam launches had begun to trade with Sham Chun. These vessels were less dependent on the tide than were the junks, since they were more manoeuvrable, so that they could turn within the river. They were, therefore, less dependent on the landing place behind the Ching Shui River island. They had come to dominate the local trade by 1902: by 1904 the Wa Lu company had achieved a virtual monopoly in the steam launch business here. In addition, in 1898 the New Territories lease had included within the territory of Hong Kong all the waters of the Sham Chun River up to the high water mark on the north bank. The Yuens saw in these circumstances the opportunity to regain their position. They sought a lease from the Hong Kong Government of a 2,000-foot-long strip of the main river bed on which to erect a wooden wharf. This would connect with their agricultural land by a wooden bridge which would pass over the wastes of the river banks, thereby side-stepping any claims to ownership of the tolls put forward by the District Magistrate on the grounds of imperial ownership of the wastes. The wharf so built would have blocked the exit from the channel behind the island at the mouth of the Ching Shui River. The Yuens produced this plan in conjunction with the Wa Lu steam-launch company. The plan would have ended at one stroke the use of the old landing place, and would have rendered all sailing junks using ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1993 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302 157 The villagers in the central part of the northern New Territories, accustomed to marketing at Sham Chun, were able to make do after 1899. They had the old satellite market of Shek Wu Hui (Sheung Shui) within British territory; as soon as the new frontier came into effect, Sheung Shui saw its business boom - it quickly replaced Sham Chun as the primary market for this area. At Sha Tau Kok the population within British territory accustomed to shop at Sha Tau Kok had no alternative but to continue to do so. Problems abounded. Village memories of the Customs are uniformly bad. The Customs officials caused the goods of the merchants to be seized unless bribes were paid. They demanded a payment of 18 bushels of rice from each merchant. The villagers from the New Territories would come to the market to have their cloth dyed. Even if the amount of cloth was very small, 25 or £10 would be charged as a licence fee - if it was not paid, the goods would be seized and the villagers penalized. As for the merchants, if they sold a pig, or if a seed-pig was bought for rearing in the villages, when they went to the Customs they would have to pay $40 per tan as registration fee for the pig. At festivals, the village ladies would come to the market to buy oil or local sugar in small quantities. They would have to pay 50 or 60, or even 120 or 130 cash (#5 - #13) as fee before they could get an export licence. For cattle, for every cow crossing the frontier - in either direction for farm work, a Certificate had to be issued, at $20 Haikwan. And, if the Certificate was lost, there was heavy punishment, and a replacement had to be taken out, to avoid confiscation of the cow. Further, at the harvest, if the crop was carried across the frontier, you had to pay what was demanded - it is said that a percentage of the crop was taken. The Customs swallowed money whatever purchases were made. These sorts of evil practices caused the villagers to hate the Customs to the very pit of their stomachs. 12 It is unlikely that the Customs were as corrupt as they are often portrayed by the villagers. The payments complained of were all reasonable, if it was accepted that the transactions were "imports" or "exports". The villagers could never see that their day-to-day marketing should be so regarded - they were only doing what their ancestors had always done. The elders of the Shap Yeuk petitioned the District Magistrate on 19 April 1899, begging that the lease of the New Territories be not proceeded with. Their concern was, essentially, that if it did proceed, then they would be faced with “excessive taxation", especially Harbour Dues and Marine Fees, given that the waters off Sha Tau Kok would become Hong... ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1993 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302 192 ensure that the saltfields there were in the same County as the rest of the salt commission Yin Tin (Yantian, 鹽田, "The Salt Fields") almost certainly got its name somewhen in this period However, areas under the control of a Salt Commissioner were often merely the salt-pans, and the adjacent village of the salt-workers, in pockets scattered along the coast, and the presence of a salt commission could co-exist with a totally undeveloped hinterland See Luo Hsiang-lin (羅香林), 香港前代史 一八四二年以前之香港及其對外交通, Xianggang Qiandaishi Yiqian Ernian Zhi Xianggang Ji Qi Duiwai Jiaotong, Hong Kong, 1959, translated as Hong Kong and its External Communications before 1841, but without the footnotes. Hong Kong, 1963], ch 1, n 5, 13, 12, ch 4, n 14 See also ch In 13 See also S Y Lin, "Salt Manufacture in Hong Kong", in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Vol 7, 1967, pp 138-151 (reprinted from The Hong Kong Naturalist, Vol X, No. 1, January 1940) 4 See Luo Hsiang-lin, op cit, ch 3; SF Balfour, "Hong Kong before the British Being a Local History of the Region of Hong Kong and the New Territories Before the British Occupation”, in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Vol 10. 1970, pp 134-179 (printed from Tien Hsia Monthly, Shanghai, Vols Hand 12, 1940, 1941), K M.A. Barnett, "Hong Kong Before the Chinese, the Frame, the Puzzle, and the Missing Pieces", Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol 4, 1964, pp. 42-67; Sung Hok-p'ang, "Legends and Stories of the New Territories Tai Po, Part I”, in Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol 28, 1988, pp 70-76 (reprinted from The Hong Kong Naturalist, May, 1935) + 6 The Gazetteer mentions pirates in the Mirs Bay area in 1571, 1590, 1641, 1647, 1648, 1664, and 1672, 1688 Gazetteer, ch 12, 1819 Gazetteer, ch 12, Chung Lap Pao edition, 1979, pp. 119-120, and see also 1819 Gazetteer ch 7, and ch 19, Chung Lap Pao edition, pp 80-81, and 154 * The 1688 Gazetteer gives a list of villages in existence in the area in and before 1662 (1688 Gazetteer, ch 3) See the note at ff 13-15, which makes it clear that the villages are those of the period before the Coastal Evacuation of 1662-1668, and not those contemporary with the Gazetteer The Provincial Governor and Magistrate urged on the returning families the need to get tenants or purchasers to take over land which could no longer be tilled by the descendants of the previous owners (see Luo Hsiang-lin, op cit pp. 145-149, n. 15, 19, 23 relating to dates on the 1710s and 1720s) Within the Mirs Bay area, at least the Lees of Wo Hang settled there in 1692 "on the [official] order to reclaim land", see D Faure, The Structure of Chinese Rural Society Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories, Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, Hong Kong, 1986, p 217, n 22 There is at least one case where a lineage abandoned land east of the mountains, to concentrate themselves in the more sheltered west The name of the village of Man Uk Pin, "The Houses of the Man Family") makes it clear that it was once lived in by the Man family That family, however, is now found only in Ta Kwu Ling, to the west, at Ping Che, Tong Fong, and Heung Yuen villages When the present inhabitants of Man Uk Pin, the Chung (鍾) lineage settled there in about 1700, it was deserted - clearly in his case a lineage had concentrated on its best lands to the west, and abandoned the marginal Mirs Bay land to newcomers Page 210 Page 211 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1995 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g 12 Ordinances of Hong Kong is the governing law unless its application would be unjust or oppressive when Chinese customary law may be let in. It is fortunate, therefore that there is available a most comprehensive and authoritative memorandum describing the land tenure found in the New Territories when the area was taken over from the Chinese authorities in 1899. I refer to the "Memorandum of Land” which forms an appendix to the Report of Mr. J. H. Stewart Lockhart, Colonial Secretary and Registrar General of Hong Kong, dated 7th February 1900. Chinese law regarding land is there stated to be as follows:- “Land according to Chinese tenure is held as freehold by grant from the Crown. The land comprised in the original grant can be sold by the proprietors in sub-divisions and is most usually sold in perpetuity or for 1,000 years. The proprietors record their names in the district registry as responsible for the tax, and their possession is legally secure so long as that is paid. Deeds of absolute sale have been brought in from the New Territory for registration which were made in the reign of the Emperor KA TSING and of subsequent Emperors of the Ming Dynasty (A.D. 1519 to 1626) and which have been recognised by the present dynasty. Strictly, a grant issued by the present dynasty should be attached to all grants made by the previous dynasty. The present owners under such grants are all the existing male descendants of the original grantee and in one case the proprietors now number over 700. All land under cultivation is supposed to pay a land tax and... must be registered or is liable to confiscation. On registration stamped title deeds are issued by the District Magistrate. Officially registered title deeds are called "red deeds” (Hung K’ai) because they are stamped with the official stamp in red. Private deeds of sale are called “white deeds" (Pak K’ai) because they are simply written on plain paper and do not bear the official red stamp; but the purchaser has the right to register his purchase and obtain a red deed. There are also mortgages, operating as deeds of sale, redeemable Page 45 Page 46 ================================================================================