The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911: Institutions and Leadership in Town and Countryside

Introduction to the Paperback Edition

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION The Hong Kong Region, now being reprinted by Hong Kong University Press in its “Echoes” series, was a historical reconstruction of certain long-settled villages and sub-districts in the New Territories of Hong Kong, and, more specifically, an enquiry into the nature of local society in the late Qing period, 1850–1911.1 Since the book was published in 1977, and much new material has appeared in print in the intervening thirty-four years, a new Introduction is called for. It will describe the favorable circumstances in which I came to research its contents, re-state the book’s main propositions, review them in the light of the scholarly studies which bear on these topics, and update and carry them forward with the assistance of other authors and through my own later research and publications. The Hong Kong Region was researched before major physical and social change had overtaken the study areas in the old southern district of the NewTerritories. In the late 1950s, when I began my studies, the traditional subsistence economy based on the two annual rice crops, and the life style and institutions that went with it, was still in full swing, and many of the villages had seemed scarcely changed in their externals from sixty years earlier, when they had first come under British rule by the Peking Convention of 1898.This meant that my enquiries could be conducted in a living landscape, full of people at work in the fields, on the hillsides, and by the shores, amidst the plentiful reminders of a long past xi xii INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK VERSION provided by old buildings, centuries-old field systems, the tools used for farming and local fishing, and much else.There were, too, the elderly people who had spent their entire lives within the traditional economic and social systems, and who were, in a very real sense, more closely linked to the village past than their children and grandchildren could ever be.2 Additionally, I had had all the advantages of my government post of district officer for that part of the New Territories. These included ready access to the people—and especially to village heads and lineage elders—and, crucially, to the land records for the District, stretching back to the land survey and settlement of titles of 1900–1905, which had all survived the War and the wartime Japanese military occupation, though the office files had not. Moreover, though about to change with the reorganization of the district administration begun in 1959–60 to meet the needs and challenges of the times, there still subsisted that old-fashioned close relationship with the rural population which assuredly facilitated my research.3 Yet only twenty years later, subsistence rice farming and inshore fishing, had virtually disappeared, and the society associated with them was also at an end. Both had succumbed to the twin pressures of industrialization and modernization, driven by rapid population growth postwar, which, with their ever increasing effect upon the formerly rural New Territories, had dominated Hong Kong life for the previous two decades. For these and other reasons—including further changes in government organization in 1980–82 and a much reduced access to the land and other records—the new situation made it unlikely that historical studies of the kind undertaken for The Hong Kong Region could be conducted with the same facility.4 And with the passage of time, opportunities to speak with knowledgeable people would be severely curtailed, reducing reliable first-hand detail, diminishing the flow of insights, and increasing the likelihood that myths would replace facts. Thus it was, in the main, left to a handful of us, mainly anthropologists and historians who had INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK VERSION xiii begun our historical village studies in more favorable times, to carry out further research into the old society and its institutions. The main proposition offered in The Hong Kong Region was that the several market towns and rural sub-districts in the areas studied had been—and at the time of my earliest enquiries still were—self-supporting and self-managed entities. Throughout the period 1850–1911, as well as before and after, the towns (coastal market centers and boat anchorages) had their own management bodies (kaifong) formed from leading local shopkeepers, whilst the villages had been led by village headmen and lineage elders. Judging from the written and oral...