In these times of rapid change, every day sees another link with the past broken and it is not surprising if the newcomer to the city of Hong Kong, faced with its spectacular modern architecture looming over the busy harbour and surrounded by crowds of fashionable young people equipped with every latest electronic gadget, does not at first notice the ubiquitous but inconspicuous traces of the old ways. Perhaps at the back of a shop a small gold shrine gleams in the dim light of a tiny red bulb, a dark doorstep half hides a little figure beside a scrap...

There are some things which trigger my camera shutter without my volition. Ancestor tablets and omega-shaped graves, for example, have me reaching for the release button as fast and instinctively as my foot goes to the brake pedal when something runs out in front of the car.

But nothing can compare with the devotion and thoroughness with which I photograph Earth Gods. I must make my confession: I am an Earth God addict! I sacrifice time, film, and cameras to pander to my lust. When I show my slides at home it is heartbreaking to hear my starving and rag-clad...

Bowen Road has a trick up its sleeve. Just when you think it has finished, it suddenly narrows to a single track and continues along the side of the Peak. Reaching a small public garden it again seems to have given up the ghost, but no, it becomes yet slimmer, disguises itself as a footpath, and marches undeterred round the contour all the way to Stubbs Road.

For those who persevere with the walk there are pleasant views over Wanchai and Happy Valley, and at one point above the path can be seen looming a large, angular, tilted rock. The...

Three elders dressed in their long silk ceremonial gowns perform the kowtow before the altar in their clan ancestral hall. In the course of a ritual of ancestor worship lasting over an hour, they will be up and down on their knees many times: no joke for men who are getting on in years. But being the oldest men of the senior surviving generation of the clan, it is their duty and privilege to go through the arduous ceremony as the representatives of the whole group. The worship is thought to benefit both the ancestors and the living.

The Chinese...

There are many different kinds of puppet show known in the world, and most of them seem to exist or to have existed in China. The origins of Chinese puppetry are lost in time, but one much-quoted account says that it began in the 3rd century B.C., just before the start of the Han (漢) dynasty. A “barbarian” chieftain, the Emperor of the Hsiung-nu people, had laid siege to a Chinese city. The Chinese knew that this man’s wife had a very jealous disposition, so they had a life-size wooden figure of a beautiful girl made, and then worked it...

A heavily weathered inscription on one of these granite stones records that it was set up for a man placed 61st on the list of successful gui-yan (舉人) degree candidates at the examinations held in the ding-mau (丁卯) year of the Jia Qing (嘉慶) Emperor’s reign (A.D. 1807). The examinations referred to are the old Imperial Chinese Civil Service examinations, the most ancient such institution in the whole world, dating back to at least 165 B.C. and in embryo form probably to as early as around 2200 B.C. No contemporary system of testing could match them in ferocity.

Candidates studied...

This fearsome figure is over four metres high, and made of a lashed bamboo framework, covered with coloured papers and foils. The head is papier mâché. He is known to the people of Hong Kong as Daai Si (大士). But who is Daai Si?

One answer that is frequently given is that he is Yim Loh Wong (閻羅王), one of the kings of Hell. Hell (perhaps Purgatory would be a better word) is divided into ten halls, and Yim Loh Wong was originally the king of the First Hall. But he was too lenient with the souls of the dead...

The decline of the last dynasty of China, the Qing (清), makes sad reading. It had been founded in 1644 by belligerent Manchu horsemen who were let in through the Great Wall in a desperate attempt by loyalists to put down a rebellion against the Ming dynasty. Put it down they did, but they substituted themselves for the Ming and began nearly 270 years of rule.

The early Qing Emperors brought peace and prosperity to the country. The favourable foreign trade was confined to Canton (Guangzhou 廣州), where by careful control the government could extract revenue from it. Other income...

The Ultimate of Ultimates (taai-gik 太極) is the origin of everything. When in a state of movement it gives rise to Yang (yeung 陽), at rest Yin (yam 陰), and the alternation of these two principles is present in both time and matter. Interaction between Yang and Yin produces the Five Elements: water, fire, wood, metal and earth (sui, foh, muk, gam, to 水火木金土). All things are made up of these elements, which themselves form an endless chain of production. Wood produces fire, fire produces earth, earth produces metal, metal produces water, water produces wood, and so on.

Associated with...

A clutch of ill-starred pigs about to become sacrificial offerings to the ancestors. Slaughtered and cooked the spiritual essence of their bodies will be consumed on the altar table by the ancestral spirits. What is left the living descendants will finish up.

The pig is the Chinese meat, far outstripping other meats in importance. Indeed, the Chinese word for meat, yuk (肉), always means pork unless otherwise specified. Charles Lamb in his famous Dissertation upon Roast Pig credits the Chinese (albeit in ludicrous vein) with the discovery of the merits of roast pork. Certainly few Chinese would disagree with his...

Anyone who has “done” the New Territories by road will know the village of Kat Hing Wai in Kam Tin. Its famous walls loom over the rows of houses inside, shutting out the light and shutting in the used air and the (euphemistically called) “country” smells. Needless to say, the walls were not built for the benefit of the tourists; they served a serious purpose for many years.

Nor is Kat Hing Wai the only walled village of the New Territories. There are many others. Some are still in a good state of repair, but many are now tumbledown and...

Long life is something most of us crave, but there are always the exceptions who seek to cut short their time on this earth, and in Chinese tradition there is considerable respect for them. It was not unknown for widows to commit suicide rather than remarry or live on without their husbands. A defeated general, a ravaged woman, a slighted lover, anyone who felt ashamed for whatever reason was a potential suicide.

One of the most famous suicides of Chinese history was the poet and statesman Wat Yuen (屈原) who flourished about 300 years before Christ. His ruler chose not...

Long ago, we are told, Chinese men used to go raiding to find brides, capturing what women they could; but for many centuries until recently marriages in China were arranged by negotiation between families, and in this way it often happened that bride and groom had not even met before they were united in wedlock.

Defenders of the system point to the almost non-existent divorce rate in traditional China as evidence of the success of arranged marriages. Their argument is nonsensical, if only because the implications of divorce were so unpleasant as to make it an unrealistic alternative to marriage....

Traditionally the Chinese practised a system of marriage which insisted that it was desirable for the man to stay put and his wife to come to live with him. The result of this insistence was a society in which families were thought of as static groups of males, to which were attached the women who moved from the group in which they were born when they were married.

In this way, the more sons a family had the larger it grew, and by the time those sons had had sons, and the sons’ sons had married and produced more sons,...

Ceremonies and rituals are important for most societies. They add significance to events which might otherwise not catch the individual’s notice in a marked enough way. They give excitement, colour, enjoyment and relaxation to a life which for most of the time is drab and repetitive. The religious element heightens the impact of ceremonies, and the participation of gods in rituals is thought to bring benefits to both gods and men.

In the photograph an elaborately carved sedan-chair waits outside a New Territories temple ready to transport the temple gods to a festival several kilometres away. The gods on the...

By the closing years of the 19th century, the Manchu Qing dynasty’s grip on China had become almost non-existent, and the country was racked by rebellion and political disaster. Other countries gathered like wolves to exploit China’s weakness, and the so-called Scramble for Concessions began. In quick succession leases on Chinese territory were extracted by Germany in Shandong province, by France in Guangdong, by Russia in Manchuria, by Britain in Weihaiwei … and on 9th June 1898 the Convention of Peking gave Britain the lease for 99 years of the large peninsula behind Kowloon which came to be called quite...

Building graves, like building houses, requires an architect. For the traditionally-minded in Hong Kong, however, the architect is only one of the specialists needed — the other, the geomancer, is at least as important.

Geomancy in ancient Greece was divination by throwing earth down on the ground and interpreting the pattern formed, much as tea-leaf reading works in more modern times. Geomancy in China is quite different. It is the interpretation of the natural and artificial landscape in order to divine the effect on the fortunes of those living in it. The Chinese term is fung-sui (風水), which means literally...

I once saw some film of wholesale fur-buyers at a trade fair. They inspected each fur closely, picked it up, prodded it, rubbed it, turned it this way and that. The women in the photograph remind me of the fur-buyers. Clustered round the basket of ducks, they pull them out, prod them, inspect them, and take the matter not one whit less seriously than the men who were spending thousands of dollars per fur.

And to the Hong Kong housewife there is little more serious than the daily business of feeding her family. It is surely a mark of civilization...

There are many reasons why Hong Kong is an exciting place to be, and one of them is because it is within easy reach of Macau. In the past the slow steamer ride was peaceful and spiced with the anticipation of arrival almost from the moment of departure. The early hydrofoils gave more immediate thrill, and on a rough day were better than any Big Dipper for stomach-jerking lurches. Now the jet-foils and high-speed ferries and helicopters seem rather tame by comparison.

Pedicabs were a most satisfying way to go sight-seeing, though taxis have pretty well routed them now. And...

For the Chinese the family has always been the most important unit of society. The individual played a role subservient to the family, and lived in order to keep the group strong and vital. By contrast the Western family has developed in such a way that it exists in order to rear the individual to the point of independence — an important difference of emphasis.

The home was the base for family life, and the home therefore needed to be secure and happy. Rituals connected with its security were more strictly observed than any others: what was valued most was...

For many in Hong Kong, Macau is the one great place of escape, somewhere different enough from home to be exciting, but near enough to bring it within range of almost every pocket.

The Portuguese first came to the south coast of China in the second decade of the 16th century, and Macau was founded by them in about 1557, though it was not officially ceded to Portugal until a treaty of 1887.

This photograph of Macau was taken from the Fortaleza do Monte. The fort was built by the Jesuits in the early 17th century: not that they kept...

I did not pose this photograph: there were no children around when I took my camera out. I was walking through a New Territories village, and had come to where a workman was demolishing an old house. There behind his wheelbarrow was a wooden board, and on the board a piece of red paper with the words hing-gung-daai-gat 興工大吉 (“May good luck attend the work”). The formula is a standard one and helps to protect the workman and the neighbours from any unpleasantness which might arise when gods or evil spirits are disturbed by building work. I thought I’d get...

When I look at the photographs I’ve taken in the New Territories over the years, I am struck by how many of them are concerned with death. Not a photograph of a New Territories hillside but doesn’t discover a grave or a burial urn somewhere; for burial procedures are elaborate and carried out over a protracted period of time, and graves are to be shown off and to take pride in, not to be hidden behind stone walls and screened by cypress trees. An indoor shot will show an altar to the ancestors; an outdoor one reveals charms and structures...

Water has never been far from the thoughts of the people of Hong Kong. The place was largely chosen, after all, because it had a good natural harbour for the extensive sea-trade which the British wanted to develop with China; and there was need for “a port whereat they may careen and refit their ships”, as the 1842 Treaty of Nanking said.

Sea water Hong Kong has a-plenty: it has always been fresh water which has been at a premium. The area has such denuded, steep-sided hills that runoff from rain is immediate and nearly total, streams dry up very...

It doesn’t do to ask too many questions of Chinese popular religion. It is so complex and is composed of so many different and often contradictory elements that to try to understand it as a system is to attempt what the man in the village never attempts.

For example, take the ancestor who Buddhism tells us is suffering bloody and excruciating tortures in Purgatory: I do not think that there is any logical explanation how he can at the same time be in a position to grant protection and blessings to his descendants who worship him as a god. Yet...

In 1901 R. K. Douglas, Professor of Chinese at King’s College, London, and an astute observer of Chinese life, wrote:

A feature in the workaday life of China is the number of itinerant craftsmen who earn their livelihood on the streets. Every domestic want, from the riveting of a broken saucer to shaving a man’s head, is supplied by these useful peripatetics. If a man’s jacket wants mending, or his shoes repairing, he summons a passing tailor and cobbler, and possibly, while waiting for his mended clothes, employs the services of a travelling barber to plait his queue, or it...

The Vice-Chancellor of The University of Hong Kong has no easy job. Who would begrudge him this spacious home which goes with the position?

The university was founded in 1911, incorporating the old Hong Kong College of Medicine (where Sun Yat-sen studied) as one of its faculties. The need for the university is graphically set out in Sayers’s Hong Kong 1862–1919:

Thus far, the Queen’s College marked the high-water mark of educational facilities in Hong Kong, if we except the local College of Medicine — well enough for the small tradesman, the clerk, the shroff and the interpreter, passable...

Methods of counting time seem to be important to all peoples. They don’t solve anything, but they appear to tame uncertain Nature and give a sense of security. In 1705 Edmund Halley worked out that the comet which bears his name was a regular 76-year visitor to our skies. Before that its appearance had been viewed with terror, and doubtless the English who saw it in 1066 were not surprised when the Battle of Hastings was lost. But now that it can be seen to be running to a timetable, who could be afraid of it?

Time counting can take...

Sooner or later in conversation with Chinese people the subject of food always crops up. That does not mean that all Chinese are gastronomes (though very many are), but it does reflect a consuming (sic) cultural interest in food.

“If its back faces heaven you can eat it,” say the Cantonese; and they proceed to eat everything of which that is true. From cockroaches to dogs, from snakes to scaly-anteaters, from rice-maggots to sea slugs, they will try anything and will usually find a delectable method of cooking it.

Only man walks with his back not pointing to the sky...

One of the features of Macau which used to make it so relaxing was the pedicab, the three-wheeled cycle transport shown here. Hong Kong had too much traffic, and too many hills for the pedicab, but in tiny flat Macau, it could trundle almost everywhere without hindrance, and the slow pace enabled the passenger to look around him better than in a taxi. The pedicab drivers could be very informative about the sights, though it helped if you understood Cantonese. And of course they were always happy to introduce you to outrageously expensive curio shops.

The word “pedicab” presumably refers...

When in 1911 the Manchu Qing dynasty was overthrown and a republic set up, a new national flag had to be devised. The Imperial five-clawed dragon on its yellow background was no longer suitable. Instead was adopted a plain flag of five horizontal stripes: red, yellow, blue, white and black (chek, wong, cheng, baak, haak 赤黃青白黑).

These colours are the five prime colours (jing-sik 正色) of the Chinese palette, and they were intended to represent the Five Peoples of China (ngjuk 五族). The yellow stripe stood for the Han (漢) Chinese, the red for the Manchus, the blue for the...

The Chinese year contains many festivals and days of special observances. Ritual life is complex and full of anomalies, and there are really two different ritual cycles in operation.

The more important one is the lunar year, composed of twelve or thirteen months of 29 or 30 days each. By the lunar calendar (yuet-lik 月歷), sometimes called the “agrarian calendar” (nung-lik 農歷) are set the Dragon Boat Festival (5th day of 5th month), the Weaving Maiden Festival (7th day of 7th month), and of course Chinese New Year itself, the most important of all the festivals. The lunar year varies...

Lanterns and sons are closely connected in New Territories thinking. In the heavy local dialect the word ding (丁) “a son” is pronounced in almost exactly the same way as dang (燈) “a lantern”.

The photograph shows an ornate lantern hanging in an ancestral hall on the occasion of a ceremony called hoi-dang (開燈) “lighting the lantern”, which symbolically represents the birth of a son. Traditionally this ceremony was held every year at the lunar New Year. On the 15th of the 1st month — that is, at the first full moon of the year — a lantern was put...

Building a permanent grave is no light matter for the man who believes in geomancy. The costs are high, and great attention must be paid to detail. The most difficult thing to do is to find a site in the first place. There are so many graves scattered around the hills of the New Territories that it is almost inevitable that all the prime sites were taken up decades if not centuries ago. In this case a long long search had been rewarded with a hitherto undiscovered spot on a remote island in Mirs Bay.

The geomancer, having found his...

Tai Po Market used to meet nine times each lunar month, as did several other markets of the New Territories. It was built on the sea, at the western end of Tolo Harbour, and as a meeting ground for land and sea dwellers it had its own special flavour. The interdependence of land and sea was clearly demonstrated: the boat people sold the fish the land dwellers needed, and the land dwellers sold the vegetables, rice and products the fishermen could not provide for themselves.

In this photograph taken on market day the distinctive woven hats of the boat people...

In societies dominated by witchcraft and magic, we are told, the failure of the practitioners of these arts to obtain the results they claim is taken as evidence that magic works, not as proof that it is useless. The reason is that the practices are so complex that an explanation for failure can be found in the neglect of some petty ritual detail, or in the existence of counter-magic. And of course a belief in counter-magic is in itself a belief in magic — the man who believes that crossing his fingers will save him from baleful influences is admitting...

Macau has so much life compressed into such a small space that it is very difficult not to stumble across something interesting every few yards. I was wandering through the streets with my camera one day when it suddenly began to pour with rain. I dashed under the nearest shelter, and there sat this gentleman, Mr. Yeung, happily performing lobotomies on papier-mâché lion-heads. There can be few third-generation papier-mâché lion-head makers alive, but I no longer am surprised at meeting such phenomena — in Macau anything can happen.

Mr. Yeung’s grandfather started the business over a century ago in Hong...

The ability of Buddhism to ward off evil is not questioned in rural Chinese religious belief. Buddhism may be only one element in a multifaceted system, but it has powerful gods and charms. The Bodhisattva Gwoon Yam (觀首), Goddess of Mercy, is probably the most widely worshipped and universally efficacious of all Chinese gods. And the Amita Buddha, the Buddha of Boundless Light, is almost as much invoked as Gwoon Yam. He is the ruler of the “Western Paradise” (Sai-tin 西天), the Chinese substitute for Nirvana, and has considerable power.

When the Monkey God was turning Heaven upside down with...

The old Supreme Court building shown here is one of the few “old” (early 20th-century) buildings of Hong Kong. It has no particular significance for me as a building, but it symbolizes by its existence and its central position the importance of the law. Without problems of international law there might conceivably never have been a Hong Kong at all.

When the British began to trade with China in the 18th century, they ran into many problems, not the least of them being that China did not really want to indulge in the trade.

The Chinese legal system was a...

China was and still largely is a land of villages, and village life has always been quiet. Before the introduction of machinery, farm-work was not a noisy affair, and for the solitary weeder in the fields as much as for the housebound wife there can have been little distraction for the ear. Is that, I wonder, why festivals, rituals and entertainments are attended by such an excess of din? to make up for too little noise in normal times?

Rural landscape was drab. The land was tilled and planted to uniform patterns, and almost every house in a village was...

Chinese religion is a complex affair, and a confusing farrago to peoples brought up in monotheistic faiths. Over the millennia of their long history the Chinese have adopted religions from abroad to add to their own native beliefs.

While at times there has been religious intolerance, the eventual outcome has usually been one of compromise and melding of beliefs into a total all-embracing system. Those religions which refused to compromise (and Protestant Christianity was one) have not fared well under this system.

Buddhism, an import from India around the 1st century A.D., is often considered to be the religion of...

A piece of clean-looking modern engineering framed by a ramshackle old-fashioned contraption in the foreground. The bridge is the first one linking Macau with its islands of Coloane and Taipa, photographed in 1973 a few months before completion. The other construction looks like a launching ramp for human cannonballs, complete with safety net (and the sea if that fails). It isn’t of course, it’s a fishing stake-net (jang-pang 罾棚).

By letting out wires running over pulleys, the net is lowered right down into the sea, where it remains until the fisherman thinks he may have fish swimming above it. Then...

The Chinese Almanac (lik-sue 曆書 or tung-sue 通書 or tung-sing 通勝) is chock full of information on how to order your life so as not to run foul of men or gods.

On the worldly side, there are guides to palm-reading and physiognomy which help in judging other men’s characters; quotations from Confucian moral works which help to make you a good neighbour and an inoffensive member of society; practical information such as how to convert Chinese characters into four-figure codes for telegraphic purpose; a complete list of the surnames of China; and a vocabulary list of everyday terms in...

The Almanac used to be a state publication in Imperial China, and there were severe sanctions against anyone who produced an unauthorized edition. The state monopoly no longer exists, but a new edition of the Almanac regularly appears each year in Hong Kong. In the villages of the New Territories at least, it continues to guide people through the ritual and secular intricacies of daily life. It lays down the times of each day which are likely to be the luckiest, and the times when misfortune is most likely to strike. It tells what activities are in harmony with the...

They say that “Walls have ears”. For those trained to listen they also have tongues. This undistinguished-looking specimen has little voice left, but it is singing a song of freedom.

The villages of the great clans of the New Territories are built in a mixture of styles and materials. There are huge ancestral halls (chi-tong 祠堂), with long blue bricks and granite pillars; high-sided “tea-bucket houses” (cha-tunguk 茶桶屋), dark and cool inside; poky, incense-smoke-blackened temples (miu 廟) to favoured gods; low, brick-built houses with a wooden cockloft as an extra half-floor at the back; a rash of modern three-story Spanish-style...

When a Chinese is born, careful note is taken of the Eight Characters (baat-ji 八字) which pinpoint the year, month, day and hour of the birth. In later life these Eight Characters will be needed to compare with those of the boy or girl to whom marriage is proposed, and the wedding will not go ahead unless the two sets of figures, his and hers, are judged compatible by a fortune-teller.

On the first anniversary of the child’s birthday there used to be a little ceremony which was supposed to give a clue to its future prospects:

The child is...

This strange-looking figure appears at major exorcism festivals in the New Territories, notably at the da jiu (打醮), ceremonies which are held by villages at periodic intervals, usually once every ten years. He is about four metres high and made over a bamboo framework, with papier-mâché hands and face.

He is the God of Wealth. Or at least he is one of the many different gods of wealth worshipped by the Chinese. His hat reads: “One look and you’ll get rich”.

The photograph was taken in 1964 at a da jiu in the village of Ha Tsuen in Yuen Long...

The word “pagoda” (from Persian via Hindi and Portuguese) means a holy building, and properly should be used of a Buddhist temple, under which sacred relics were often preserved. But English has chosen to use pagoda as the name for the high, storied towers which stud the Chinese landscape, and many of those towers have no connection with Buddhism, even though they undoubtedly owe their presence in China to the spread of the Buddhist faith.

The towers are usually eight-sided and solidly built, tapering as they go upwards. Commentators all remark on the necessity for an odd number of stories,...

Learning a foreign language is not enough to make you at home with the people and culture where it is spoken. There is so much more than just words and grammar to be mastered. Gesture, for example, can be quite different: some cultures shake their heads for “Yes” and nod them for “No”.

To beckon someone over, a Chinese holds his hand palm downwards and moves all four fingers. To point to himself he points at his face not his chest. To offer a cigarette or a name-card he uses both hands. To indicate the number 6 he holds up...

This little Earth God was found basking in the sunshine in an alley in Macau. From his niche in the wall he can see everything that goes on in the alley, which is the area over which he has jurisdiction.

The name Earth God has been used for many years by Westerners as a translation of the Chinese term To-dei-gung (土地公), but it would better describe his functions if he were called Territory God. Basically his task is to oversee and protect all the people who live within his territory.

The size of that territory can vary considerably. At its...

Walking through the streets of Hong Kong it is hard to miss noticing the massive “flower boards” (fa-paai 花牌) outside restaurants. The flowers are paper ones, garishly coloured, and stuck onto a bamboo framework to make striking patterns and designs.

The most common reason for putting up the boards is to announce the holding of a wedding feast inside. As well as standardized greetings, the boards usually show the surnames of the two families which are being joined together, and the formula runs something like “Wong and Chan uniting in marriage”. Reading the boards, guests at the wedding banquet can...

The island of Ma Wan has few claims to fame, but it does produce a small amount of shrimp paste, and that doubtless gives it, in the opinions of the nasally sensitive at least, a claim to infamy.

There is no doubt that shrimp paste smells, though I’m happy to say I don’t find it too offensive. Not so poor L. C. Arlington who was stationed on Cheung Chau Island at the end of the 19th century. He spoke with horror of the local “shrimp sauce, the vile stench of which nearly drove us frantic.” I detect a note of...

The Classics tell us that after hearing a particular piece of music Confucius abstained from meat for three months, exclaiming:

“I did not imagine that music could be made so perfect.”⁷⁵

What that music was like we now have no idea, because music, along with musical instruments and other symbols of refinement, was destroyed in the great book-burning that accompanied the accession to power in 221 B.C. of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇).

I beg leave to doubt whether many Chinese since that time have similarly abstained. Perhaps priorities have changed? Or perhaps the quality of music has...

This little scene could have been shot almost anywhere in Hong Kong, for trays of ritual offerings are not uncommon. Fresh fruits, rice, tea, wine, candles and incense are all visible, and if you look closely you will see chopsticks laid out too. The plastic flowers emphasize the “Hong Kong connection”. The tiny potted cumquat tree is there because its name gat (釘) sounds like the word for “good luck” gat (丁). Its presence helps to date the scene at the lunar New Year, the time when auspicious symbols abound. Red is the colour of happiness and good fortune, and...

The ninth day of the ninth lunar month has been an important one for the Chinese for many centuries. On it they observe the custom of “climbing high” (dang-go 登高), and the Peak Tram does its best trade of the year. The reason for the upward surge is contained in an old legend:

It tells of a soothsayer who warned a virtuous scholar of a terrible calamity impending. “Hasten!” said he to his friend, “with your kith and kin, climb to the shelter of the mountains, till there is nothing between you and the sky, and take with you food...

When rice was the major crop as well as the staple food of the New Territories, drought was more to be feared than bandits, pirates or plague. Hence Rain Gods. I don’t know how many of them are to be found in the area, but this one sits on the table top of a hill near Sheung Shui. The stone tablet is inscribed with the words “The God who causes the clouds to form and the rain to fall” (Hing-wan-gong-yue-ji-san 興雲降雨之神), and on the sides of the tablet are recorded the date of its erection (1839) and the name of...

How soon one accepts! When I first set foot in Hong Kong one of the first marvels that registered with me was bamboo scaffolding. On close inspection it could be seen to be held together only by short lashings of reed, and when the workmen moved around on it the flimsy poles creaked alarmingly. How could it rise so high and remain so strong? Yet, a short while later I was showing a newly arrived friend around, and I walked straight past some scaffolding without thinking to comment. It was only when he stopped to wonder that I even noticed....

Incense comes in many sizes and fills the temples of Hong Kong with sweet smoke. It has been common for many years to call the sticks “joss-sticks”, and the temples used to be known as “joss-houses”. Both these words derive from a word which has fallen into disuse — a “joss” was a Chinese idol, a god. If it doesn’t sound like a Chinese word that’s because it isn’t, it’s a corruption of the Portuguese word deos “god”.

It would be odd if there were no Portuguese influence on the language of the China coast — they have been trading...

The earliest known writings of the Chinese are records of divination sessions which have survived from the Shang dynasty (approximately 1550–1050 B.C.).

The method of divination was ingenious, though not unknown in other areas of the world. Tortoise shells or the blade bones of oxen were heated over fire until they cracked. The diviner would then interpret the meaning of the cracks. What makes these “oracle bones”, or “dragon bones” as they are called, unique and valuable is that the questions asked of the oracle and the answers obtained from interpreting the cracks were often inscribed on them in...

I have lamented before the obliteration of the traditional landscape of the New Territories. This view of the northern part of the Sheung Shui-Fanling Plain has now changed out of all recognition, thanks to the massive development of the market town of Shek Wu Hui. In the centre here lies the large village of Sheung Shui, the home of the powerful Liu (廖) clan for 400 years. Until the second half of the 20th century it sat isolated in the midst of its extensive landholdings, but this photograph shows how already in 1964 it had begun to merge into Shek...

The minutiae of ritual concerned with death, burial and mourning in traditional China would fill volumes — indeed they have done so. De Groot describes the apparently simple process of washing the corpse, for example. It was actually set about with complicated procedures:

All the sons and grandsons, even those who are scarcely able to walk, silently repair to some well in the vicinity, the eldest carrying a bucket in his hand. On their way they mournfully droop their heads, so that their eyes behold nothing but the pavement of the street. Arrived at the well, the eldest son throws...

In the narrow alleys between the terraces of village houses two or three people make a crowd. Here, with a real crowd, the effect is of noise and chaos.

I remember Peter Ustinov once saying that in crowded places like Hong Kong you can walk along a street without ever touching a soul, whereas in empty places like the outback of Australia you are bound to trip over someone’s foot. He had a point. Despite the apparent chaos, the people in the photograph have a purpose and are calmly getting on with the business of the day — a wedding....

One of the problems posed by ancestor worship is that it is precisely that — worship of ancestors. Now, logic insists that ancestors are only ancestors because they have descendants, and reason tells us that not everyone who dies can become an ancestor, because some people die young or unmarried or childless. If the Chinese were “dead worshippers” as opposed to “ancestor worshippers” there would be no problem; but they aren’t, and the result is that the souls of those who die childless (or whose children neglect to worship them) are thought to suffer from hunger and lack of care...

Fish is excellent food, tasty and nutritious, but it perishes quickly. One of the minor tragedies of recent life in Hong Kong has been the decline in availability of cheap live fish. With over-exploited local waters and so many mouths to feed, it is not possible to take the catch with the care needed to keep it alive for the table, and fresh fish has become a luxury to be sold by the ounce (leung 両) rather than by the catty (gan 斤).

Not all fish used to be eaten fresh, though. Preservation through salting and drying was very popular,...

Pretty well every village in the New Territories has its quota of one or more temples, but not many of these are to be found much more than a stone’s throw away from the settlements. This one in the photograph is at least a kilometre away from the village to which it belongs, and it is also slightly unusual in the shape of its architecture.

The gods worshipped in temples are numerous and vary considerably in different parts of China. Some of the gods are universally worshipped. The Goddess of Mercy Gwoon Yam (觀首, often written Guan Yin or Kuan...

This beautiful old lady is a Hakka from one of the villages on the north side of Tolo Harbour.

The New Territories were settled partly by Hakka people and partly by Cantonese, and as a rule of thumb we can say that the Cantonese took the large areas of fertile plain on the west side of the New Territories, while the Hakka took the hillier and smaller patches of land on the east.

China we now think of as belonging to the Chinese, but 3,000 years ago the Chinese occupied only a small area in the basin of the Yellow...

The old Chinese Empire was vast, and it was run by a pitifully sparse administration. The south of China was notoriously difficult to control, partly because of the great distance from the central government in Beijing, partly because of the difficulty of communication across its mountain-seeded terrain, and partly perhaps because of the volatile and fiercely independent nature of its inhabitants.

One obvious answer to such problems of control would have been to station large bodies of troops in the south. But troops were needed in the north to guard the frontiers across which China’s traditional enemies lay; besides, to...

New Year is a time for looking back and a time for looking forward, a time for optimists and for changes in luck.

Years are dominated by twelve animals which follow each other in rotation — the Rat, the Ox, the Tiger, the Hare or Rabbit, the Dragon, the Snake, the Horse, the Sheep or Goat, the Monkey, the Fowl or Cock, the Dog, and the Pig. Each animal has different characteristics which are thought to affect the tide of events, and in particular each reacts in varying ways with people born under other animal signs. For example, I am...

Hong Kong has no more colourful spectacle than a dancing dragon. As it processes through the open fields of the New Territories plains, the dragon is like a ribbon of colour threaded through the green uniformity of the crops.

The dragon is made of light wooden barrel-like sections, each of which is attached to a carrying stick. Over this is draped the cloth body, highly coloured and sewn with foil “scales” of gold or silver. The one shown here had 38 of the sections plus a massive tail and the ornate and heavy head section, and was about 65 metres...

In the middle of Macau is a spacious old house with an ornate pillared front bearing a blue board on which are the characters 國父紀念館 (Gwok-foo Gei-nim-gwoon, “Memorial Hall to the Father of the State”). Near the door is another board which says: “Please do not enter unless neatly dressed”.

The Father of the State is the honorific title by which Sun Yat-sen is known to posterity, and this was his house when he lived in Macau. After the imposing entrance it is rather disappointing inside. There is little to be seen other than a few sticks of furniture and...

This ancient contraption was once a New Territories village’s fire pump. Made specially for the village, as the metal plate attests, by a firm in Canton, it has rusted out much of its time in front of the Village Council Chamber (chuen-gung-soh 村公所). Just 2 kilometres away is a modern fire station, well equipped, professionally staffed, and capable of rushing in a couple of minutes an efficient fire engine along metalled roads to any outbreak in the village. The old pump is not needed, but it is more than an outmoded and clumsy piece of out-dated technology. It is a...

A troupe of Taoist priests performing at a major village ceremony. The brilliant reds, greens and blues of their robes, and the entertaining histrionics of their ritual dances and movements make them fascinating spectacle. Only the mesmeric monotony of their long rhythmic scripture-chantings seems to spoil the effect.

I have heard cynical laymen say that the chanting comes out as a mumble because the priests do not actually know the words, and on one occasion I was assured that they were not chanting scriptures at all but merely repeating over and over “Hurry up and pay us our fee! Hurry...

There I was on a peaceful afternoon stroll through the New Territories countryside, when suddenly this chilling sight met my eyes.

Had I disturbed grave-robbers at their work? Well, there’s no doubt that in ancient times important people were buried with valuable goods around them, and many of the graves were opened and stripped. But this grave was less than ten years old, and it seemed unlikely that even the most optimistic villain could expect to find a suit of jade or a hoard of gold jewellery inside it. He would know that it would contain very little of value:...

A very ordinary scene in a New Territories market town, and one that seemingly could be repeated in almost any street in urban Hong Kong. Vegetables are weighed on a steelyard, reading from the graduated scale on which the weight is hung. But the New Territories markets were not like street markets in Hong Kong, and this scene is not quite as ordinary as it looks.

The market system of the New Territories was traditionally part of a complex organization that ensured the flow of goods throughout the Chinese Empire.

Virtually every village of any size had a small morning...

Photographs of Chinese people worshipping their gods all look rather similar. Offerings of food and various kinds of paper money, incense, candles, tea, wine, rice and flowers are made in much the same way at all kinds of shrines and temples.

The scene here does not look so very different. Flowers, candles and incense are there, and a whole and succulence-radiating roast pig — one look at the way that crackling has split on his back and my mouth waters. What is quite out of the ordinary is the man’s face: it is heavily made up. He is in fact...

Wo Hop Shek in the New Territories is the site of the largest of Hong Kong’s cemeteries. Whole hillsides are covered with tier upon tier of graves, the granite headstones winding round the contours like strings of pearls round green throats.

In late spring after the Ching Ming grave-sweeping festival, the vast extent of the cemetery can be clearly seen, but by the end of the summer, vegetation has grown again and the area looks from a distance as green and unspoiled as any other hillside.

Here and there the orderly lines are broken by the omega shape of a...

Deserted and overgrown this path winds through the fields in the north of the New Territories. The granite slabs are worn smooth and shiny by generations of feet. They are uneven and wobbly, and in places they have disappeared altogether, but to walk along the path is to feel history soaking up through the soles of your shoes, for this used to be the main road from Canton (Guangzhou) to Kowloon City, the alternative to the sea route down the Pearl River and round the coast. Not much like a main road to look at of course, but that in...

Despite her vast size, geographical diversity, long history and manic concern with food, China has not been naturally endowed with so great a variety of plants that she has wanted to reject new species from abroad. Over the course of several thousand years many food plants have been imported and naturalized to the Chinese diet. Early on came wheat, then coriander, the cucumber, the grape, the onion, peas, the pomegranate, sesame and the walnut. And the peanut and the sweet potato, both now fully naturalized, came only late — within the last four hundred years or so.

Some have credited...

One girl.

Two gods.

Three sticks of incense.

The girl is a schoolgirl. The gods are the Civil and Military Gods of the Hollywood Road Man Mo Temple, and the offering table bears the words “Palace of the Two Emperors” in reference to them. Incense is almost always offered three sticks at a time in temples.

It is the Civil God Man Cheung (文昌) who is being principally worshipped here. He is one of the Gods of Literature, and oddly enough, his temple-mate the Military God Gwaan Dai (關帝) is another.

Man Cheung is usually accompanied by the strange little...

Lunar New Year approaches, and excitement rises with it. For the Chinese it is a family festival in the same way that Christmas is a family festival for Westerners. But unlike Christmas, which falls every 365 or 366 days, Chinese New Year comes at irregular intervals, because the lunar year is of variable length. In order to keep roughly in line with the solar year, seven lunar years in every nineteen have a whole extra month. These thirteen-month years can be as long as 384 days.

In the country districts the approach of New Year was signalled by the thump...

I was driving through the New Territories one day looking for that ubiquitous gentleman Dan Ger. Few people in Hong Kong can have failed to notice the red signs bearing his name. He is apparently a “gentleman of the road”, for it is nearly always near road-works that he betrays his presence. Sometimes he appears in disguise as DANGER, but I for one am not fooled by that.

Well, there I was stopped at a temporary traffic light when the sign illustrated here presented itself to my lens. It refers, I have no doubt, to the peculiar absence of Dan...

The Chinese have believed since earliest times that when men die their souls are kept “alive” through the ministrations of their living descendants — the dead continue to draw sustenance from the living. In theory it is probably sufficient for a man to communicate with his ancestors by holding rites of worship of them, but in practice this worship takes the form of physical offerings of food, money, clothing, housing and means of transport.

However, there are bound to be some dead who are not so fortunate as others:

If the offerings to, and worship of, the dead ancestors are...

If it weren’t for the tell-tale wires in the foreground, this photograph could have been taken at any time since the camera was invented. In fact it was taken in 1969. Few New Territories villages retained their isolation and unspoiled architectural style in the way that this one had. Remarkably, it is in the easily accessible Lam Tsuen Valley, not somewhere remote and unserved by roads.

The Rev. Arthur H. Smith, one of the most astute of the 19th-century missionary observers of the Chinese scene, had his own views on villages:

A Chinese village, like Topsy, “just growed,” how, or...

This is hardly my most distinguished effort at photography, yet it is one of the most unusual in terms of subject matter. It shows the tight-closed doors of an old village house, the paintwork almost gone. Traces of the Door Gods at the top are nearly weathered away completely, giving a clue to the fact that it is late in the year (December actually), and that new gods should soon be stuck up. But it is what is hung on the doors which is a rarity. The two garlands are there because a child has just been born in the...

China is big enough and its people are diverse enough to make many countries. Over the past two millennia as the Chinese spread southwards from their homeland in the Yellow River basin, they met different geographical and climatic conditions, and their way of life had to change to accommodate the environment. Dress, architecture, farming methods, crops, food, means of transport … nearly everything was affected.

Perhaps most noticeable of all was the change in language. Pioneering groups would lose touch with the area from which they came, and the language they spoke would gradually change in a different way from...

The Chinese family was essentially a male dominated institution. Surname was transmitted through the male line, as it is of course in the West too; the family estate was inherited by sons, daughters having no significant share in it; and only sons were full members of the family ancestor worship group.

Women were in theory subject to men throughout their lives. “The Three Subserviences” (saam-chung 二從) stressed that the unmarried girl was subservient to her father, the married woman was subservient to her husband, and the widow to her son. Though reality did not always correspond with the theory, it...

I picked this photograph from my collection not because it has any great distinction but because it offers a nice contrast in dress, and I thought it would serve for an article on that subject. But the more I looked at it the more it grew on me, because it is full of contrasts both obvious and subtle.

The old men in their best hats are getting ready to worship at the grave on the side of which they are standing, putting on their long ceremonial gowns, called “cheongsam” (cheung-saam 長衫), the same name as is given to the Shanghai-inspired,...

Hong Kong must be one of the most photographed places in the world, and to find an unusual angle you must either be a genius or a fool. Coming within the latter category myself, I climbed Lion Rock on a very hot day in the middle of August 1975.

Up the top there is a window-like hole in the rock, and I used it to frame this photograph. It shows quite clearly the contrasts between the hills of Hong Kong Island in the distance and the comparative flatness of the Kowloon peninsula. This flatness was the main reason for Kowloon’s...

This photograph would be quite good material for a Sherlock Holmes–type exercise in deduction. From the characters it is clearly placed in a Chinese environment; the type of iron-mail gate belongs to South China villages; the existence of the gate implies a wall in which the gate is set; and the granite building blocks speak of durability and wealth. No prizes, then, for deducing that these are the ancient gates of a walled clan village of the New Territories.

The photograph can tell us more. The electric light bulb and the water pipe sneaking in at the bottom of...

Chinese religions have not come up with a definitive answer to the question of what happens to a man when he dies. Ancestor worship insists that the soul continues in existence after the body has ceased to function, and that that soul is able to bring blessings to its living descendants if it is properly worshipped by them. It is equally capable of taking unpleasant revenge on descendants who fail to worship it properly.

Buddhism, on the other hand, sees the soul as descending to Purgatory, where it is condemned to vicious punishment in order to expiate its worldly sins....

This Survival of the Fittest: the phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer to explain the evolution of many and different life forms. It seems to me that it can describe death (in the form of ancestors) equally well.

Any Chinese who had married and had sons could expect to be worshipped as an ancestor after death. Every day his descendants would offer tea and incense to his soul at the tablet bearing his name on the family altar; and on special occasions, such as family birthdays, weddings, and annual festivals, more elaborate offerings would be made. For three, four, even...

Two days before, on 25th March, the Almanac had promised thunder, so I was not particularly surprised when at half past midnight I was awoken by a tremendous din. However, it was immediately obvious that it was not thunder. I got dressed, grabbed camera and flash, and went to investigate.

Just a few doors along the row of houses there was great activity, with firecrackers and two large gongs setting standards of noise which everyone else was trying hard to live up to. The house which was the centre of attention had been under repair for several weeks, and a...

The Old Protestant Cemetery in Macau is as peaceful a place as could be desired, and the more so for its unexpectedness in the middle of the city. Visitors used to have to knock on sullen gates to gain admission — a process which discouraged many — but in recent years it has been possible to walk straight in to enjoy the dappled shade and the cool of the little church, not to mention the fascination of the names renowned and unsung which are remembered on the time-worn stones.

Certainly, for most of those buried here the peace is such...

The water buffalo (sui-ngau 水牛) like the paddy-field means Chinese agriculture to me. The Chinese landscape artist and the China tourist both would feel the loss too if the buffalo were not there.

Of course the tractor is faster and more “progressive”, but whether it is as economical is a moot point. A buffalo is powerful, has a working life of twenty-five or more years, is virtually silent, requires little maintenance because it can scavenge for much of its food, uses no scarce petrol or diesel, and its waste is useful as fertiliser and fuel. And (if I may be...

The Ten Thousand Buddhas Temple and Monastery (萬佛寺) in Sha Tin has probably been more visited by Westerners than almost any other religious site in Hong Kong, so photographs like this one must be in many albums.

A pink pagoda studded with images of Buddha serves as a landmark on the hillside above Sha Tin railway station, and beckons the curious to pant up the many steps to the temple. That excellent old book The Golden Guide to Hongkong and Macau is rather hard on this sight, and after a discouraging description of the approach path past “a noisy and...

Tin Hau (天后), Empress of Heaven, is one of the most popular deities of South China, and without question the clear favourite of the boat people, of whom she must be considered the patron goddess.

Gods, like men, are thought to have personalities, and most of them have human form. Like men they also celebrate their birthdays. Tin Hau’s falls on the 23rd day of the 3rd lunar month, and is the occasion for large-scale junketings (ouch!) among the boat people.

On shore there are plenty of temples to Tin Hau, and each of them celebrates the anniversary in its...

If I were to say that this photograph is of a man, I would obviously be wrong, but may I at least be fanciful and say that it is of a substitute for a man? The man is the founding ancestor of a New Territories clan — in this case the Dang (鄧) clan of Lung Yeuk Tau.

The founding ancestor is the trunk of a family tree. If he has more than one son then the tree develops branches, they in turn may divide into subbranches, and so on through generations. Imagine the havoc caused to the tree by...

In the 1960s from the train through the New Territories this village of Tai Po Tau could clearly be seen (and shakily photographed through the window). The apparent squalor and dilapidation was belied on closer inspection, for the houses were solidly built of good brick and the villagers were not unprosperous.

Tai Po Tau was founded during the Yuan dynasty (A.D. 1280–1367), when the Mongols ruled China and when Marco Polo was exciting the West with his accounts of the wonders of China’s culture and civilization. It is the home of a branch of the great New Territories Dang...

Francis Bacon wrote:

Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers for the observers of his law. The people assembled; Mahomet called the hill to come to him, again and again; and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said, “If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.”¹⁴⁹

Unlike Mahomet, the Chinese do not even begin to attempt the impossible, nor do they expect the miraculous.

Chinese gods are to be sacrificed to and...

The human speech organs can produce a huge variety of noises, from squeaks to grunts, clicks to plops, hisses to trills, and the lips and tongue subtly shape them in an infinite number of distinct ways. No one language can use all these sounds, so each selects a limited range of them only, some more, some less; and the particular combination of sounds used becomes the fingerprint of a language — we all recognize French, or American, or Japanese as soon as we hear them.

The Chinese languages are remarkable for the small range of sounds which they use. But...

This photograph makes no claim to originality. It is an everyday Hong Kong picture of what Hong Kong has in abundance — people. Here is “the man in the street”, “the people”, in Cantonese “the old hundred surnames” (lo-baak-sing 老百姓).

Surname has been terribly important to the Chinese, so important that unlike Westerners they put it before their personal names. The Westernized Chinese who reverses his names for the convenience of non-Chinese friends is felt somehow to be disowning his birth-right, not to mention causing confusion to those who do not know whether he has done it or not.

A...

A common enough scene, vegetables on sale in a New Territories market, Tai Po in this case. What the photograph cannot show is the crisp, justcut freshness which makes these vegetables so good.

So insistent is the Chinese housewife on freshness of food that, in the New Territories at least, she shops twice a day, once before each of the main meals. The city dweller in Hong Kong or Kowloon cannot always be quite so choosy, but even so it is almost impossible to find such weary, limp and wrinkled vegetables as fill many of the London greengrocers’ shops.

In...

They say that “An Englishman’s home is his castle.” But in the battle against evil spirits the English home must be considered highly vulnerable in comparison with the Chinese village house, which is a supernatural fortress equipped with a whole battery of defences.

In front of the house is the Spirit Wall (the outer rampart), which blocks the way to the door — evil spirits, unlike humans, are unable to turn round the wall to get in the door. Door Gods in full battle dress stand guard at the entrance itself. Above the door is placed a mirror to frighten...

This rather grisly sight is not unusual in the large public cemeteries, and it is a commonplace occurrence in the New Territories, where exhumation is a regular step in the progression of burial events.

The dead are buried as soon as possible, and this means that there is no time to prospect for a good geomantic site for the grave. The provident few may have reserved a good grave-site for themselves while still alive (just as some people keep their own coffins ready for eventual use), and they can be buried at once in a permanent, properly constructed, omega-shaped grave....

The bars of Wanchai have a long history. The waterfront near the old naval dockyard was the obvious place for entertainment for seamen to spring up, and bars and brothels were early on the scene. For a time brothels were licensed and given a licence number which was conspicuously displayed outside.

The word “number” found its way into Cantonese in the pronunciation lam-ba, and still can be heard in the expression lam-ba-wan (冧巴、溫) “Number One”, meaning “the best”. Combined with the Cantonese word daai (大) “big”, it gave daai-lam-ba “big number”, which from being a description of the signs outside...

I once lived in one of the six houses which make up this terrace in a New Territories village. My house was built of long blue bricks and had a granite threshold and lintel. There were no windows except a tiny one at the back, and a wooden section under the eaves at the front which could be slid open for a little fresh air and light. The roof was tiled over round wooden main beams.

Inside it was quite roomy, the high roof helping to keep out the worst of the summer heat, though it was decidedly cold in...

Cremation was never popular with the Chinese, though it is nowadays much encouraged in cities in China and in urban Hong Kong. Burial was the standard form of disposal of the dead, and it remains so for many today, despite the shortage of space for cemeteries. For the indigenous people of the New Territories space is not such a great problem. They have the right to bury their dead in the hills where they have always done it.

Burial customs differ widely throughout China. In many parts graves took up valuable agricultural land, but in the New Territories there is...

Whole books have been written on Chinese gods, which can appear in all kinds of shapes and sizes. In the Taoist-inspired heavens there is thought to be a hierarchy of gods, with the Jade Emperor (Yuk-wong 玉皇) at the top, beneath him a large body of lesser gods, and beneath them again a host of immortals who are the common subjects of Heaven.

Both Heaven and Purgatory tend to be pictured as exotic copies of this world, supernatural regions inhabited by beings with the same kinds of desires, defects, personalities, and inconsistencies as have men.

Important men have servants; important...

There is enough to be said about this New Territories village scene, ordinary as it seems, to fill several articles. The pigs and the chickens scavenging the ground, the washing hung on bamboo poles, the unusually high construction of the house, the materials of which it is made, its state of dilapidation, all these bear talking about.

But the photograph is most interesting for what cannot be seen in it. It used, for example, to be the house of a spirit-medium, a man who by going into trance could contact the dead or the gods. Many village people go to...

Other than the ancestors, the Kitchen God or Stove God (jo-gwoon 灶君) was probably the most common god to be found in the home. Here he is represented by his name written on a piece of orangey-red paper and stuck on the chimney breast in a New Territories village house.

E. T. C. Werner’s Dictionary of Chinese Mythology says of him:

His temple is a little niche in the brick cooking-range; his palace is often filled with smoke; and his Majesty sells for one farthing.¹⁶⁶

The ancestors were the gods of the family. The Kitchen God was to report once...

The entry in the old Gazetteer for the island of Yim Tin Tsai near Sai Kung reads simply:

this island, in area .097 square mile, is well populated, and has an R.C. Church and school; the island probably had salt pans at one time since the name means “small salt pan”.¹⁶⁹

The weather-beaten church is shown here, the characters high on the wall boldly proclaiming it to be the “Hall of the Lord of Heaven”, a much more resounding title than “Roman Catholic Church” of which it is the Chinese equivalent.

The Protestant churches do not use the term Tin-jue...

The Tang dynasty Emperor Ming Huang (明皇) came to the throne in A.D. 713 and reigned for 44 years. He was a remarkable man in many ways, and had been made heir to the throne in recognition of merit — he was not in the direct line of succession. His early rule was very promising of good government. Mayers says of him:

In his second year, he issued a sumptuary decree prohibiting the extravagant costliness of apparel which was in fashion, and set an example by causing a bonfire to be made in his palace of a vast heap of...

The Chinese belief in Hell or Purgatory cannot escape the notice of anyone who has been to a funeral home or to the now demolished Tiger Balm Gardens. In brief, it is thought that on death everyone goes down to Purgatory for judgement and punishment of the sins committed while alive.

The details of Purgatory and the length of time spent there differ wildly from area to area of China and from person to person. In some accounts, the dead reach the gates of Hell on the evening of the day they die. In others, it seems to take much...

The Man Mo Temple (Man-mo-miu 文武廟) in Hollywood Road contrives to remain a flourishing working institution despite its inclusion on the foreign tourist round. There is plenty to see inside, and it is rare for there not to be someone engaged in worshipping the gods, no matter what time of day you go in.

Probably the most striking feature of the temple is the forest of huge incense coils hung from hooks in the roof like hams in an old-fashioned kitchen. They smoulder slowly, taking two weeks or more to burn away. From the centre of each dangles a bright...

The funeral is nearly over. The corpse has been dressed and its face washed in water bought with copper cash by the mourners from the god of a nearby stream. Its hands have been tied together with white thread, and the lid of the coffin nailed down. Then it has been “elevated” (dang-go 登高) on trestles while the rites have been performed. Offerings of meat, fruit, and cakes have been made and vast quantities of incense, candles and paper money have been burned for the use of the newly dead soul. Buddhist nuns have performed their rituals, a Taoist priest...

In a wet-rice culture such as that of South China, water has always been of great importance. Irrigation systems and careful terracing of the landscape enable water to be used to maximum advantage. In the corners of the fields now growing vegetables can be seen shallow wells from which the farmer fills his watering-cans in the endless, back-breaking battle with desiccation.

But drinking-water too is essential, and virtually every village relied on its wells for this. Even today, when piped water from the public supply is available, some villagers still prefer to drink the water from their wells (if they...

Goldsmith might have written The Deserted Village with this photograph before him, as I write now. For his “sweet smiling village” and for this New Territories hamlet alike, economic forces proved too strong.

The south coast of China has for centuries been the human equivalent of the lemmings’ cliffs. Population pressure has always acted in a southward direction, and the most disadvantaged have been pushed off the land and over the sea.

The island of Taiwan was settled by the Chinese from the 17th century onwards, people moving there mainly from the coast of Fujian province opposite. Neither the aboriginal...

Ceremonies have many functions. They provide relief from the tedium of everyday life, they give added weight to important events, they direct emotions into socially acceptable channels and so ease the trauma of life’s major changes. But by their very nature they tend to disguise true feelings.

Because all brides wail and cry at their weddings it is hard to tell which of them are genuinely afraid of the great change which is happening to them. Because everyone tries to pay the bill at the end of the restaurant meal it is sometimes difficult to know who really wants to...

Eskimos, it is said, have more than ten different words for which the only English equivalent is “white”. Their language is shaped by the demands of their environment.

In much the same way, the Chinese have an enormous vocabulary for what the English just call “rice” or “paddy” (and the latter is itself a borrowing from Malay). The all-purpose word for rice is mai (米), but cooked rice is called faan (飯), rice cooked into porridge (congee) is known as juk (粥), rice harvested but unhusked is guk (榖), and so on.

The cradle of Chinese civilization was in the...

When Britain obtained the cession of Hong Kong Island under the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, she took over what Lord Palmerston the Foreign Secretary called “a barren island with hardly a house upon it”. At that time the majority of the population of Hong Kong (approximately 5,000 people) lived on boats, with a few land-dwellers subsisting on the isolated patches of cultivable soil. They were all, probably, Cantonese speakers.

In 1898 the 99-year lease of the New Territories was signed, and a large settled population came under British rule. They were not all of one type however. The most...

In the 1960s I visited Tokyo. Its temples and formal gardens had a beauty of quietness and simplicity which appealed to me where the clash and clutter of the Hong Kong equivalents had always vaguely disappointed. Yet the greater part of Tokyo I thought excessively ugly, and when I tried to work out why, I decided there were three reasons: the drab colours, the dust, and the wires which criss-crossed everywhere.

Never had I seen such a mess of wires and lines — until I took a trip to the little island of Peng Chau (坪洲) to the east of...