It was one of the most tantalising mysteries of Tang Shing-sze's childhood. The small wooden box sat unnoticed for decades on an altar in the old market office at Ping Shan.
But when the building was restored in 1939, the villagers opened it and, to their surprise, found a roll of paper bearing the names of 174 heroes who were martyred in battle.
There was great excitement among the elders and the names were carved in stone on one wall of the office - once also the headquarters of the village militia - to preserve them for posterity.
The boy - a scholarship student at King's College - was intrigued by the discovery and began to ask around. An old villager told him that years earlier an ageing militiaman had recounted how the clansmen had died fighting a great battle against the British in the 1890s.
'But this man had died and the villager didn't give me his name, so I got it third hand,' said Mr Tang, now 82, who still lives in Ping Shan. 'And when I tried to get more information, he said: 'No, I can't say'.
'When I was a child nobody talked about it and some of them refused to admit that there was a war at all. But the approach of the handover made me interested in this again. The end of the British occupation made me think about the beginning of it.'
Mr Tang, a graduate of Sun Yat-sen University, began to research the battle by drawing on village papers and genealogical records, as well as legislative council papers from 1899 in the Public Record Office.
