How have places in Hong Kong evolved since well before the 19th century? Villages and Market Towns in Hong Kong is a vital book, showing us how its various suburban settlements came into being. Such is a history of immense interest as well as unending fascination.
 
Since arriving at Hong Kong more than half a century ago, Patrick Hase has been researching its local history, with a particular focus on the market towns and villages in the New Territories. Due to a lack of written documentation for the study of these communities, much of his research was conducted through oral interviews with village elders in the 1980s and 1990s. Hase sought their memories of the villages in their youth, as well as their grandparents’ accounts of the communities prior to the age of high technology, urbanization, and modernization.
 
Most histories of Hong Kong begin with the arrival of the British, and only incidentally mention the pre-colonial eras. In this book, Patrick Hase, one of the leaders in the field, provides an important addition to the history of Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta region, covering topics such as Chinese ethnicity, commerce, port-towns, and squatting. It is a truly excellent work that will interest historians, anthropologists, and social scientists.
—James L. Watson
Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Anthropology Emeritus,
Harvard University
 
This book, an historical and archaeological portrayal of Hong Kong market villages across the territory, depicts how Hong Kong evolved not through chronicles of emperors and governors but through the ups and downs of different centres of rural life over the centuries. It belongs beyond the bookshelves of historians and archaeologists—anyone wandering the streets of Hong Kong neighbourhoods today wondering “how did this place get to be here?” will find this book well worth reading. After reading this book, I will never again look at Tsim Sha Tsui in quite the same way.
—Gordon Mathews
Research Professor and Emeritus Professor of Anthropology,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
 
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Preface
 
This volume follows on from my Settlement, Life, and Politics: Understanding the Traditional New Territories, published in 2020 by the City University of Hong Kong Press with the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, in the Hong Kong Studies Series. This current volume comprises six essays on the history and development of specific areas in Hong Kong. Work on some of these six began 30 years ago, but all of these essays have been completely reworked and rewritten, and are published here for the first time; others were written for this volume. All represent my heartfelt view that local history, the history of local communities and their development, is vital to any truly balanced programme of historical research and study.
 
I wish to thank, above all, the late Dr. James W. Hayes (1930–2023) for his assistance with the production of this volume. Dr. Hayes has written a number of masterly articles on Cheung Chau, Tai O, and Peng Chau. I have long felt, however, that these could be drawn together into an analytical study of the port-towns as a whole. Dr. Hayes graciously agreed, and allowed me to rework this material into a new study for this volume. I cannot adequately express my gratitude for this. Dr. Hayes also, and equally graciously, allowed me to rework his articles on “Old British Kowloon”, “The Cheung Sha Wan Villages”, and his study of the Four Stone Hills community, without which the articles in this volume on “West Kowloon before the British” and “Beside the Strait of the Sea-Perch” could not have been written. I have also used the work of the late Rev. Carl Smith on Sham Shui Po very extensively. My thanks are heartfelt but inevitably inadequate.
 
Map 1 shows the sites of the village communities studied here, and some other significant places referred to in the text.
 
All place-names of places within Hong Kong referred to in this volume are given as in A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories (Hong Kong Government, 1960), with characters given on first appearance in a chapter. Place-names of places within China are given in Pinyin, with Chinese characters on first appearance, or, for places within Guangdong Province, in standard Cantonese Romanisation, with, in each case, characters and Pinyin on first appearance. Chinese personal names of members of New Territories clans and other Cantonese-speaking persons are given in standard Cantonese transliteration, with characters on first appearance; others are given in Pinyin, with characters on first appearance. Chinese expressions are given in standard Cantonese Romanisation where necessary, with Chinese characters on first appearance. A glossary is also included giving all Chinese expressions used or alluded to in the text. An index of all personal names referred to in the text is included, with a further index of all place-names referred to.
 
My thanks are also due to the many village elders who took their time to answer my questions, and to explain to me the many places where I needed guidance to understand what to them was self-evident. I am extremely grateful for their time and forbearance. There are more than a hundred of them: far too many to name individually here, but I am deeply grateful to all of them.
 
Finally, I wish to thank the dedicatee of this volume, Tim Ko, for his invaluable help with the plates, and his vital assistance with the translations, but even more for 25 years of friendship. He has helped me time and again by encouraging me to continue in what has, at times, felt to me to be a depressing and even pointless exercise; that it has been concluded at all is due to Tim’s much appreciated positive attitude towards the volume. Thanks are inadequate, but very gratefully offered.
 
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Patrick H. Hase received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge before coming to live and work in Hong Kong in 1972. He was a part-time lecturer and the advisory board chairman of the Department of History, Lingnan University. He serves as an honorary advisor to the governments of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Kaiping, and is the past president and honorary fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong, among others.
 
His previous monographs include The Six-Day War of 1899: Hong Kong in the Age of Imperialism (2008); Custom, Land and Livelihood in Rural South China: The Traditional Land Law of Hong Kong’s New Territories, 1750–1950 (2013); Forgotten Heroes: San On County and Its Magistrates in the Late Ming and Early Qing (2017); and Settlement, Life, and Politics: Understanding the Traditional New Territories (2020).