ID Number

Title

Item Name

Culture

Material

Manufacturing Technique

Place Made

Date Collected

Collector

Date Owned

Owner

Acquisition Date

Source

Source

Measurements

Condition

Accession Number

Description

Yoke made from a v-shaped tree branch with two lengths of rope attached at notched ends. Part b is a coiled length of twined stem (?) with thin pieces of rope attached at both ends.

History Of Use

This yoke would have been used to attach a cow to a plough, which would have been used to plough the paddy fields prior to the transplanting of the rice shoots. This yoke is relatively small because it comes from a village in the mountains, where the paddy fields were small out of necessity. Cows were used to pull the ploughs in these fields, whereas water buffalo were used in the larger fields of the relatively flat and much more productive lowlands. In these mountainous areas, ploughing was done by both men and women. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Tsuen Wan men often had to go abroad in the hope of alleviating their poverty, and women were left to do the subsistence farming as well as all the other heavy work needed to support their families. After the mid-twentieth century the New Territories of Hong Kong began to undergo fundamental changes. The people who had been settled there before 1898, when the British colonizers claimed the area, began to give up rice agriculture and coastal fishing, turning instead to wage labour and increased employment overseas. By the end of the century, educational opportunities leading to the possibility of white-collar work also increased, together with western influences. These changes meant that objects and clothing once useful and appropriate were no longer needed and generally were discarded. Some were saved by their owners, who sometimes were willing to donate them to museums, sharing, also, their knowledge of how they were made and used.

Narrative

This yoke, and many other objects in this collection, was collected from the abandoned agricultural village of Tsing Fai Tong, in Tsuen Wan District, Hong Kong. The village, like many others in remote and mountainous areas of Hong Kong, had been abandoned because life there was not economically viable in contemporary Hong Kong. Its former inhabitants, members of the Fu lineage, had moved down to the coastal area of Sham Tseng. Elizabeth Johnson collected the objects from the ruined houses with the permission of the Fu lineage, who donated them to the Museum of Anthropology through the intercession of the District Officer, James Hayes. As Hong Kong’s New Territories modernized it was common for people to discard objects that were no longer useful. The dust on this steamer suggests that it had not been used for quite a long time. Hakka people are one of the two original land-dwelling groups that settled the area that became the New Territories of Hong Kong. Their spoken language, and some customs, differed from those of the other original group, the Cantonese or Punti. The Cantonese arrived first and settled on the best rice-growing lands, while the Hakka began to arrive after the late 17th century and settled the more hilly lands.