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1 Introduction by John Strickland This book comprises the reports written about the rural areas of Hong Kong in the 1910–20 and 1950–60 periods by district officers responsible for the Southern Administrative District, Eric Hamilton, Walter Schofield, S. H. Peplow, Paul Tsui, Austin Coates and James Hayes. These men, all “cadet officers” (now called “administrative officers”) were members of the small group that constituted the core of the governing system in the then British colony, regularly moving between different jobs so as to gain experience and to be able to see the big picture when making decisions. These accounts differ in time and purpose. Hamilton’s extracts come from letters to James Hayes written in 1958, Schofield’s from an article requested by Hayes for publication in our Journal.1 Paul Tsui’s come from his unpublished autobiography,2 and from a series of reports written around 1950, under circumstances which are unclear, but for which James Hayes has provided background information. The bulk of the village reports are otherwise provided by Austin Coates and James Hayes, and date from inspection visits made in the mid and late 1950s. Hamilton, Schofield, and in part Tsui, wrote in reminiscence of times past. Coates intended his Summary Memorandum (as he entitled it) for his successors in office. Hayes wrote for his own enlightenment, keeping his village notes in manuscript for the last fifty years. Peplow wrote when he was still in post. At the time they were serving, none of the district officers were aware that their predecessors had conducted similar surveys and had made a record of their findings, although when James Hayes put his notes in order in 2008, he did have Austin Coates’s reports in front of him. Only Austin Coates compiled a tidy document at the time. This is now lodged in the Public Records Office. Paul Tsui’s village reports were found in an unmarked loose folder in an office drawer by one of James Hayes’s colleagues in the 1980s and were passed to Hayes thereafter. The reason for writing the reports was no doubt primarily as an aide-mémoire for the officers themselves. At the same time, one guesses 2 Southern DiStrict officer reportS that proper documentation of one’s work was a standard discipline for administrative officers. Only Austin Coates explicitly stated that he was putting his notes in order for the benefit of his successors. In the belief that the primary interest of readers will be the description of the villages and life in them, all the material has been reordered so as to put alongside each other the different author’s commentary on the same regions, groups of villages and individual villages. At the same time, these reports give a fascinating insight into how colonial civil servants viewed their jobs and discharged their responsibilities in the first half of the twentieth century. Southern District was somewhat of a misnomer, comprising most of the islands of Hong Kong other than Victoria Island, i.e., Lantao, Cheung Chau, Lamma, Peng Chau, Tsing Yi, Leung Shuen Wan, Kau Sai Chau; plus the Hang Hau Peninsula (which we now think of as Tseung Kwan O), the Clear Water Bay Peninsula and the southern part of the Sai Kung Peninsula. Much of this area is of course to the west and northeast of Hong Kong, rather than to the south. Presumably on account of the normal access route being by boat from Tai Po, the northern part of the Sai Kung Peninsula was part of the North Administrative District. In the period covered by these reports, there were few roads in Southern District. Access was thus either by boat or on foot. With Hong Kong’s mountainous terrain, the villagers must have been hardy people. Eric Hamilton was a convivial soul who, besides his career in the Hong Kong civil service between 1911 and 1945, wrote to the newspapers on cricket and anything whimsical which took his fancy, under the pseudonym of “R. Abbit”. He served as assistant district officer and district officer (Southern District) in 1917–23. He finished up as superintendent of imports and exports, and was interned for four years during the Japanese occupation. His long letters to James Hayes, written from Britain in 1958, now in the Hong Kong Public Records Office, are delightfully written and most evocative of the Southern District, its inhabitants, and his work in his day. Walter Schofield (1888–1968) obtained an MA degree from...

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