Curious customs make good work

The young graduate from London must have been a curious sight to the villagers. He came among them, a gweilo speaking the Chinese of the north, and took a house in the village. There he held open-house, inviting his neighbours to join him of an evening, to chat in his fast-improving Cantonese about anything and everything. Gently, he would turn the conversation to local history and habits. He patiently asked them about their traditions and practices. In the daytime he would write it all down.

He stayed amongst them for a year. Then he went back to London and made what he had learnt into a PhD thesis which led to a long career as an anthropologist at the School of Oriental and African Studies. A little later his experiences appeared as a book.

Sheung Shui: A Chinese Lineage Village was published in 1968 and is now out of print. Its author, Hugh Baker, is very much active, however, and was back in Hong Kong last month talking at the Centre of Asian Studies about Chinese custom, the subject of the thesis and the book. Those turned him into a specialist and, although he cannot have foreseen this during his stay in early 1960s New Territories, one much in demand to give evidence in the Hong Kong courts.

Prof Baker, now emeritus, is one of a small band of acknowledged experts on Chinese law and custom whose names recur in the reports of cases involving indigenous New Territories people. Another is his colleague at SOAS, Anthony Dicks. This is all the doing of paternalistic, conscience-ridden administrators of the late-Victorian British Empire. Anxious to do the right thing, they promised the inhabitants of the extension of the colony in 1898 that their good customs and practices would be preserved. So the imperial Ching law and the local customs continued to apply in land, personal and inheritance matters.

They still apply to land, two changes of government in Peking and one change in government in Hong Kong notwithstanding. Somehow the modern mainland government was persuaded to preserve traditional rights by a specific article in the Basic Law. So there continues to be a demand for the services of Prof Baker and his colleagues.

The irony is, as the professor explained at the Centre of Asian Studies, it is extremely doubtful that in the area which became the New Territories the Ching code was in practice applied during the nineteenth century. There were just three magistrates, supported by a tiny militia, for the whole of the county of which the area of the Hong Kong SAR was but part. The magistrate for the central and largest portion, which included Hong Kong, was the most junior. The magistrates hardly ever heard cases. In reality the law meant village, clan or lineage customs. These varied with the locality and so to know about them you had to ask the villagers, not a professor from England.

Had those colonial administrators realised the content of those customs, they might not have been so ready to indulge them. The bias in favour of men, so startling to us, would not have been so surprising to the Victorians; likewise the tradition that allowed concubines. But apparently it was common in the villages to punish adultery with death by drowning. The last incident of this occurred only shortly before the time that Prof Baker was holding open house in Sheung Shui. A police land rover arrived just in time to save the guilty couple.

Some issues never change

The first chapter in the Hugh Baker’s book is for a current resident of Sheung Shui the most interesting for it summarises the background and issues of the district before its transformation by development into the town which we see today. Some of the concerns noted by the professor have a strangely contemporary feel: encroaching urbanization, change of the railway into a commuter line, flood prevention.

Apparently at the time of the annexation of the New Territories the main market centre for the district was not Sheung Shui but Shenzhen. Lockhart, the administrator charged with surveying what was then called the new territory, for that reason wanted to incorporate Shenzhen into Hong Kong. But it had been agreed that the river would be the border and the market was to the north of it.

Nevertheless, until the Second World War the locals regularly crossed the border to go to market. So the past decade of “let’s go shopping in Shenzhen” is really just a reversion to the norm. Except that market is slightly larger these days.

The bird has flown, after a rest

I wrote last time about our unexpected visitor, the racing pigeon. He stayed so long that we gave him a name, Peter.

The lady from the Hong Kong Bird Watching Society told us that Peter probably came from Taiwan where there are many pigeon-fanciers. She said that homing pigeons needed to rest and to get their bearings; we should offer him food and drink; when he felt strong enough, he would be on his way.

For two whole weeks, rain or shine, Peter appeared in the morning on the wall of the back garden. When the coast was clear, he would fly down for some rice and water. The neighbours complained to the management: not fear of bird flu -- apparently Peter’s droppings were spoiling their side of the wall. A caretaker told our maid, who told her boss, who ignored it.

But Peter was not the sort of pigeon who courts trouble. One day soon after the complaint, he did not appear; nor the next day, nor the day after that.

We don’t think the caretaker got Peter. We expect he is now at home in Taiwan planning his next trip.

Malcolm Merry is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong and a Hong Kong barrister. He is the author of Hong Kong Tenancy Law (4th ed, LexisNexis 2003) and co-author (with Paul Kent) of Building Management in Hong Kong (2nd ed, LexisNexis 2008).