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...

The proposition that gentry participation was essential to the management of local affairs in imperial times has been long regarded as a theorem of Chinese political and social existence. John Fairbank’s classic statement of the position was first made nearly thirty years ago:

[The] relative smallness of the imperial administration no doubt reflects the fact that it depended upon the gentry to lead and dominate the peasantry in the villages¹

and again :

The imperial government remained a superstructure which did not directly enter the villages because it rested upon the gentry as its foundation. The many public functions of...

There is no satisfactory full length account available in Chinese, English, or any European language which takes in all the complexities of the population and settlement of the Hong Kong region.¹

The Hong Kong region was occupied in prehistoric times by persons whose origin and racial affiliations are, despite plentiful evidence, still uncertain.² It is not clear whether these early inhabitants are the progenitors of the Yao and other tribes who are believed to have occupied the area before the period of intensive Chinese settlement, or of the Tanka boat people who formed a major part of the indigenous local...

Cheung Chau is a small island situated just over five miles west-southwest of Green Island, at the western end of Hong Kong harbor. Its total area is 0.925 square miles.² The island is 2.25 miles long at its greatest extent, and takes the form of a three-ended dumbbell whose arms radiate about a mile from the low beach area in the center on which the town is built. The northern arm is the highest and rockiest, attaining a height of about 300 feet. The other two are flatter and more fertile and contain most of the agricultural land. Because of...

In Comparison with Cheung Chau, the coastal market center of Tai O on the adjacent island of Lantau was less bustling.¹ Though possessing—for the Hong Kong region—large boat and land populations, it seems to have been at this time in a period of decline, and in consequence attracted criticism from the British district officers who lauded Cheung Chau so frequently. “There is very little public spirit in the place,” wrote one of them in 1915.² It is clear that Tai O has long suffered from comparison with Cheung Chau, and rather unfairly as their situations were different.

At...

I have a particular link with Shek Pik and its inhabitants, for between 1957 and 1960 I was responsible for removing the villagers to allow the construction of the Shek Pik Reservoir.

Shek Pik, though for all its history a remote valley on an offshore island, is a long-settled and interesting spot. Its beaches were inhabited in the pre-Han period, and were the site of an important archaeological excavation in 1937.¹ Closer to the period of this study, it was, in my opinion, in some way connected with the last wanderings of the defeated Sung court and army in the...

There are ten villages in the Pui O group.¹ Lo Wai, San Tsuen, Law Uk and Ham Tin are at Pui O, a wide, shallow valley running back from the sea and lying behind a long beach. Four others are situated in scattered locations in the Shap Long Peninsula which extends south from Pui O. These comprise Shap Long itself, Tai Long with Lung Mei, and Mong Tung Wan. Two more small villages lie along the coast to the west of Pui O—Shan Shek Wan and upper Cheung Sha. (See map 4.)

The population in 1899 was well under...

Ngau Tau Kok was a village of stonecutters and cultivators which was formerly located on the seashore on the north-eastern arm of Hong Kong harbour.¹ It was one of a group of four adjacent villages, known locally as “The Four Hills,”² whose inhabitants, mostly stonecutters, exploited the rich granite formations in the area until they were used up in the early decades of this century. The villagers were Hakkas, a people who are traditionally connected with stone quarrying in South China.

The Four Hills were a part of the New Territories leased to Britain by China in 1898. The quarries...

Kowloon was a farming district when the British took possession of Hong Kong Island in 1841. It then consisted of a central agricultural plain with the walled city of Kowloon in its midst, lying together with its commercial suburb, Kowloon Street, under the shadow of the Lion Rock. Rough, hilly areas with rocky outcrops interspersed with stretches of farmland extended the plain to the south, east, and west, and to the north the Kowloon foothills cut off the area from the hinterland.¹

Away from the city and its suburbs, the subdistrict was dotted with farming villages. A total of eighty-two...

Generally speaking, the organizational and leadership situation in the six areas described above was characterized by fragmentation: into lineage and village units in the rural areas, and into street and dialect groupings in the coastal market centers. By their convenient small size and cohesive nature, these bodies both enabled and encouraged self-direction.

This tendency towards independence was greatly assisted by the loose control of land under gentry landlords who were largely absentee. It was usual for land to be divided into surface and subsurface rights, whereby the tenants shared in the ownership and, in the case of houses and shops,...

By way of a postscript to this account of local institutions and leadership as they evolved in one outlying part of Hsin-an by the end of the 19th century, I would like to hazard a few guesses about the wider regional situation, including the mainland areas of the New Territories which were the home of the “Five great clans.”¹ In the course of preparing the main work, I found myself agreeing, yet disagreeing, with some points made by Howard Nelson on the political system that operated in the New Territories before 1899. These may be found in his perceptive and...