The Hong Kong Region Review
by James Hayes
Hong Kong University Press
Now reissued as one of Hong Kong University Press' Echoes series, James Hayes' classic study of the pre-urban, pre-Republican era Hong Kong region is available for a new generation to appreciate.
Internationally acknowledged as village and rural Hong Kong's pre-eminent, living, amateur historian, the author was a Hong Kong cadet, as the current administrative officers were formerly known. In this capacity, Hayes served as a district officer, spending much of his working life in the New Territories administration before retirement in 1987.
Hayes was - and in active retirement in Sydney, still is - renowned for his range of Hong Kong-themed enthusiasms, and his ability to communicate these interests to others.
As Hayes perceptively notes in his new introduction, when he started his research into rural life in the 1950s, the New Territories still was predominantly rural, and large areas remained isolated, both from each other and the wider world. Consequently, he had rich and varied opportunities - now unavailable to a later generation of researchers - to observe at first-hand patterns of life that had not changed in generations and, sometimes, in centuries.
In particular, the Convention of Peking, which leased what became the New Territories to Britain in 1898, guaranteed that traditional Chinese customs and usages would be respected and upheld by the incoming administration. And for the most part, they were.
