“I’ll take you to my village.”
It’s exactly what you would expect to hear from Patrick Hase, one of the world’s leading experts on rural Hong Kong. Over the past 40 years, ever since he took early retirement from the Hong Kong government, he has been documenting the history and customs of villages and towns across the New Territories, most of which predate modern Hong Kong by hundreds of years.
Hase has published six books and dozens of scholarly articles on topics as diverse as traditional land law, village bandits, aviation-themed village frescoes and the Six-Day War of 1899, in which a number of New Territories clans fought back against British colonial rule. And while his work is roundly appreciated by anyone interested in Hong Kong, he has never seen the kind of reaction that has met his latest book, a 707-page tome named Villages and Market Towns in Hong Kong: Settlement and History.
“The book has been very popular,” notes Hase. “It’s in its sixth printing now, in a year. The Chinese version is in its third printing and it was one of the ten bestsellers of Chinese books in Hong Kong last year. So it’s sold extraordinarily well. Something clicked with this one.”
Wong Uk Village, Sha Tin, date unknown. Photo via Arts Promotion Office
Village life, local life
To find out why, we hopped on the East Rail Line and disembarked at Tai Wo Station, where Hase instructed us to find the McDonald’s, where he would be waiting for us in a small white car. We then travelled halfway down the valley of the Lam Tsuen River to a village arranged around a central square, with parked cars surrounding a feng shui pond painted swimming pool blue.
After parking his car and nodding hello to a couple of neighbours, Hase explains that his village will be hosting an enormous Da Jiu (打醮 daa2 ziu3) festival later this year, a Taoist ritual that honours various gods and spirits with Cantonese opera and a vegetarian feast. The festival takes place every nine years. “This will be my fifth,” he says.
When we arrive at the village house flat where Hase and his wife have lived since the 1980s, he disappears into the kitchen and emerges with a teapot and a selection of biscuits. “It’s village tea,” he says, pouring us a cup. “It was made in the oldest way tea has been made in China. The big tea plantations use more sophisticated methods, but back in the Tang dynasty, when the first tea was grown, they made it in the way the villages are still making it today.”
It turns out this particular tea — grassy and astringent but not altogether unpleasant — is a rare treat, because it is now only made in a single village, Mau Tso Ngam in Sha Tin, where a couple of elderly women harvest tea and roast it the old-fashioned way every Ching Ming. Hong Kong has only ever had one commercial tea plantation and most local tea production was for personal use only, with a small quantity sold in markets as 山茶 (saan1 caa4) or mountain tea. “In the mountain villages, each family would have two or three tea trees,” says Hase.
It’s the kind of thing you might not expect if your conception of Hong Kong is that of a modern international metropolis: shopping malls, an exceptionally efficient rail network and the world’s densest concentration of high-rises. But Hong Kong was a loose collection of small towns and villages well before it was a city, and even today, there are 642 officially recognised villages scattered around the mountainous landscape, some in the shadow of skyscrapers, others surrounded by wilderness.
And it was these villages that drew Hase’s attention in 1972 when he first arrived in Hong Kong. “My background is in Anglo-Saxon history,” he explains. “My PhD is on 7th-century Hampshire. Local history. When I came to Hong Kong, I couldn’t carry on working on that, so I started working on the villages of the New Territories.”
After being promoted to the rank of District Officer (DO), whose job is to liaise with members of the local community, he began meeting villagers in Sha Tin, where he was assigned. “I would be having meals with them and they’d always want to know what they can talk to their DO about. And they very quickly would realise that what I wanted to know about was what life was like when they were small children.”
By then, Hase had learned enough Cantonese to hold a detailed conversation. “The problem is when they start talking about their childhood, they start talking in wai4 tau4 (圍頭), the local village dialect. Wai4 tau4 is not easy to understand. So the more they got excited about talking about their childhood, the more broad their accent would get, the less I would be getting — which was a big sorrow, a big trouble for me. But we got on okay. And over many, many years of listening to the elders talking about this and talking about that and talking about the other, I got to learn an awful lot about life in the villages.”
Colourised photo of Kat Hing Wai, Kam Tin, in the postwar era. Photo by @OldHKinColour
A different story in each village
In Villages and Market Towns in Hong Kong, Hase turns away from the familiar city of governors, taipans and other elite figures that dominate most historical accounts. What he reveals is a Hong Kong of rice fields, incense smoke, fishing ports, quarry gangs and stubborn village lineages. He draws on land records, archaeology and the memories of village elders to follow communities from north Lantau and West Kowloon to Sai Kung, Tai O, Cheung Chau, Peng Chau, Stanley and Aberdeen.
It’s a dense book, but the finely-grained texture of its details is what makes it fascinating. In impoverished Pak Mong and Tai Ho on Lantau, villagers kept schools and rituals alive by selling firewood and cattle to Cheung Chau. In Tung Chung, tenants fought a 70-year rent battle with absentee subsoil landlords. In early 19th-century Sai Kung, rival villages resorted to kidnappings and ruinous lawsuits that poisoned relations for decades. Hase makes old Hong Kong feel intimate, fractious and alive.
There’s also plenty of eye-opening detail about places we’d never associate with village life. In a chapter about Tsim Sha Tsui — today known for its concrete canyons of hotels, malls and restaurants — Hase details how the arrival of the British on Hong Kong Island in 1841 led to the expansion of an existing settlement and the creation of other new villages on the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, facing the nascent colony across the harbour. Eventually, these villages were targeted by triad groups that expanded from Guangdong, extorting residents and controlling contraband trades: the rural beginnings of Hong Kong’s urban underbelly.
What’s missing
Even at 700-plus pages, there’s a lot of material that couldn’t be included in Villages and Market Towns. “There are huge gaps in what I have got,” admits Hases. “There are things I cannot get because I’m male. I cannot talk to the old village ladies about their early life. They will clam up instantly. It’s too personal.”
What he has been able to glean is that, historically, teenage girls in the villages of indigenous Cantonese families — known as Punti (本地 bun2 dei6, “local”) — slept together in the house of a respected local amah (阿媽 aa3 maa1), or nanny, because it was considered immoral for them to sleep alongside their fathers and brothers in tiny one-room village houses. Together, all of the village girls “were almost like sisters, and in fact they called themselves sisters,” says Hase. Nearly all of them were illiterate, but they learned ritual songs that expressed their frustration at patriarchal society and the hardships of life in general. “I was once told that, if a woman was clever, she could sing ritual laments for three hours without repeating herself,” says Hase.
Other topics that villagers were reluctant to discuss included sex work — it was not uncommon for married men to visit prostitutes — and personal traumas like the loss of children, which happened frequently in the days before healthcare was provided by the government.
And there’s the inevitable Punti bias that comes from most ethnographic research in Hong Kong. “I don’t speak Hakka, unfortunately, which is a problem,” says Hase, referring to the ethnolinguistic group that arrived in Hong Kong after the 17th century, settling mainly in rugged mountainous and coastal areas that weren’t already claimed by the Punti. Though most Hakka elders also spoke Cantonese, he was never able to hear their unfiltered perspectives in their own native language. It’s a lesson in how there can be remarkable cultural complexity even in a territory as small as Hong Kong.
Village life today
The introduction of government schools to the New Territories in 1913 began to reshape old village dynamics — partly because the schools brought together children from across the region, including those who spoke the Yuen Long dialect of Cantonese and those who spoke the Kowloon dialect. (Hase says the border between the two linguistic zones was Tai Po Market.)
Things changed even more in the 1950s, when a revision to British immigration policies specified that only second-generation British subjects could move freely to the UK. It was a clause meant to restrict the number of migrants flowing into the country, but it inadvertently created a loophole allowing indigenous New Territories villagers the right to settle in the UK. Many villagers left Hong Kong as a result.
In 1972, the Small House Policy was introduced as a way to regulate village growth. Each male indigenous villager was entitled to construct a 2,100-square-foot, three-storey house within the boundaries of his village. This set off a boom in which villagers — including those who had already left for the UK — built houses at minimal cost and then sold or rented the flats to outsiders. “For a New Territories villager it was often much easier to lead a prosperous life in the UK than in Hong Kong, so they emigrated,” notes Hases. Today, like in many villages, the vast majority of his neighbours are not indigenous.
But that changes every nine years when the Da Jiu festival is held. Most of the people who left Hase’s village settled in Colchester, near the Essex coast. “Every inch of the village will be occupied by people coming back from the UK, speaking with Essex accents,” he says. It’s village life in the 21st century: just another step in centuries of change.