 Thank you very much, everyone, for coming out to the 2012 SOAS Food Studies Distinguished Lecture. The SOAS Food Studies Center was founded in 2007, and it's based in the anthropology department here at SOAS. We run a distinguished lecture every year, as well as a seminar series. The center is the location of the master's degree program in anthropology of food. While it is based in the anthropology department, there are members of the food studies center from nearly all of the departments here in the school at SOAS. Additionally, there are a great many associate members that come from other institutions across London and beyond, in addition to people working in food policy, in food activist organizations and NGOs, people working in the media, people working in the food industry. For those of you who are interested in keeping abreast of what we do at the SOAS Food Studies Center, you may join the center as associate members if you wish to do so, send an email to soasfoodstudies at soas.ac.uk. Now, I'd like to introduce, I'm Harry West on the chair of the SOAS Food Studies Center, Professor of Anthropology, but I'd like to introduce the deputy chair of the center, Dr. Jacob Klein, who will be introducing our speakers tonight. James L. Watson is Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Harvard University. He is a past president of the Association of Asian Studies and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Watson graduated from the University of Iowa in 1965 with the BA in Chinese Studies. He then trained in anthropology under the supervision of Jack Potter and George Foster at the University of California Berkeley, receiving his PhD in 1972. Following that, he came here to the School of Oriental and African Studies where he taught anthropology until 1983. He then taught at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Harvard in 1988. Since 1969, in collaboration with Ruby Watson, James Watson has been carrying out ethnographic and historical research on Hong Kong's new territories, particularly on the villages of Santin and Hachun. He has also worked with migrants from Santin in the UK, in mainland Europe, and in North America, and since the 1990s, also with returning migrants in Hong Kong. Moreover, he has done fieldwork in the provinces of Guangdong and Jiangxi in the People's Republic of China. Professor Watson has made significant contributions to a number of areas in anthropology and Chinese studies. These include kitchens, especially the study of lineage organizations, migration and diaspora studies, popular religion and ritual, class and social stratification, slavery and servitude, and socialist and post-socialist studies. Food has long played a part in James Watson's scholarship and in a variety of dimensions, ranging from the symbolic meanings of pork in Cantonese death ritual and ancestral worship, to the role of the Chinese restaurant trade in migration patterns and migrants' lives in Britain, as explored, for instance, in his 1975 monograph, Immigration and the Chinese Lineage. Two, also, is now a classic essay from 1987 from the Common Pot, Feasting with Equals in Chinese Society, in which he discusses the use in the rural new territories of banqueting as a social leveling device. In the 1990s, Watson convened a small group of anthropologists who explored ethnographically the roles played by McDonald's in everyday lives in five East Asian settings. This led to the publication in 1997 with Stanford University Press of his edited volume, Golden Arches East McDonald's in East Asia. The book caused an immediate sensation and was an important and controversial intervention in debates on consumption and globalization. In 2006, a second edition of the book was released. That same year, Blackwell published a co-edited volume by James Watson and Melissa Caldwell, the cultural politics of food and eating, a reader, an indispensable resource for researchers, teachers and students in the field. Indeed, Watson's contributions to food studies are to be found not only in his research and writing, but also very much in his teaching. He taught hugely popular courses in food and culture from his time at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s until his retirement from Harvard in 2011. And several of his former graduate students have become important figures in the field of food studies in their own right. So it is truly a great honor to welcome Professor James L. Watson to SOAS and the Food Studies Center this evening. The title of the lecture is Saltwater Marjoram, Red Rice, Reclamation and Restaurateurs along the South China Coast, an ethnographic puzzle. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here. I see some old friends coming back. This is a particularly interesting feeling. I remember attending many talks in this lecture hall. First, I'd like to thank my hosts and the SOAS Food Studies program, Jacob Klein and Harry West for inviting me to come this evening. Jacob has organized this very well indeed and I'm grateful for him for doing so. Now standing here tonight brings back some memories of my 11 years of teaching here at SOAS as lecturer in Asian Anthropology from 1972 to 1983. Now those were very good and productive years and a couple of you in the room by looking around spotting you will agree, I hope, I think. Now in those days the term British Anthropology with quotation marks around it actually meant something. It was still a distinct discipline with a unified canon that everybody read and everybody talked about. One of those leaders of that discipline was Jack Goody, to whom I wish to dedicate this lecture. Jack, unfortunately I can't be here tonight, but there was also a food studies conference held earlier this week at his honor, the 30th year of the publication of this classic volume, Cooking, Class and Cuisine. So I'd like to dedicate this to Jack. Jack is one that many of you know. He always had his feet very firmly on the ground in the pursuit of political economy, ecology and social history. And I hope, when I send this to him, that he will appreciate tonight's trek through the rice paddies of South China. Now my lecture this evening takes the form of an ethnographic puzzle. And by the way, where's my laser pointer? An ethnographic puzzle. Did you leave off? Well, okay. You don't need to run. I thought everybody had laser pointers. So this lecture takes the form of an ethnographic puzzle. How did migrants from an impoverished, hard scrapple village in the remote corner of rural Hong Kong, which is here, how did migrants from one of those villages that I would point out soon, how did the villagers from that remote corner of rural Hong Kong end up being extremely successful and in some respects dominating parts of the Chinese restaurant trade in England, Scotland, Holland, Belgium and Canada. Now like most anthropologists of my generation, and I see a few in the room, we began our ethnographic careers, in my case over 40 years ago, working among people who could be described as the victims of world capitalism. There was no point in denying it. That was what we did. And as the decades have passed, however, I have found myself in the rather awkward role of chronicler-python historian for a kinship group that has become spectacularly successful by any measure. Now in a Cantonese chapter lineage that today has a membership of approximately 3,000, there are, at my last count, and I'm sure I'm out of date, at least 25 multi-millionaires, oh I know, millions don't mean that much anymore, but they're verging, a couple of them are verging on the big B, the billionaires, but there are at least 25 that are quite wealthy by any standards, and plus well over 400 others in this group that are wealthy enough to fly around the world attending to transnational business ventures. Now clearly trying to keep track of a group like this is a very difficult task for an ordinary field working anthropologist. Now having begun my career by talking to retired farmers while they drank tea in mosquito infested ancestral halls, I now have to make appointments with their grandson's secretaries in high-rise office buildings in Toronto, Hong Kong, and Dusseldorf, among other places. But that's another story, a methodological story about what happens to longitudinal studies and multi-cited studies if you keep at it long enough. Basically if you keep at it long enough all kinds of things happen. And you will always regret what you published two decades ago. Well, but all of that is another story. Now returning to tonight's puzzle, how does one explain a pattern of entrepreneurial and professional success that affects not just a few isolated individuals, as is usually the case, but not just a few isolated individuals of an entire kinship group, but an entire group. What is it I'm going to be asking about the members of this patrilineage that sets them apart from their neighbors? Now when asked, members of this group have a ready answer. And this is my generation of people I knew in the patrilineage. This is what they would say to me. We were always different, said a successful restaurateur in 1980. We always had to struggle for a living. Just look at our history, he said. Look at our history. It's always been that way. So tonight I propose that we do just that. Let's look at their history, their agrarian history. Okay, so the place I'm talking about is right here. This is Hong Kong, it was British Hong Kong. The border between China and what was British Hong Kong, and is now the SAR, the Special Enrichment Region, is right here on a river that I will be talking about. The village I studied is right smack in here, and the one that I lived in in the 1970s, a decade or so later, a few years later, is right about here. And this is the Pearl River Delta that I will be talking about. So what is it about their history? Founders of this lineage, referred called the Mon lineage in Cantonese, Mon, Mon, Mon, and Mandarin One, arrived in the Pearl River Delta Region during the chaotic aftermath of the Manchu conquest of South China, and this would have been mid-17th century. As late comers to this region, they had no choice but to settle near assault water marshes that no one else wanted. Basically that was all that was left. They reclaimed nearly a thousand acres of mud flats and constructed brackish water ecosystems and enclosures that produced a single variety of red rice, an industrial crop. And I wish to underline the notion that this is an industrial crop that used primarily for winemaking, and this type of rice is essentially inedible for humans. A point I will return to later. To grasp the full implications of the ecological adaptation that I'm talking about, one needs to look at the agricultural system and the history of the Pearl River Delta itself. Let's see if I can get back, yes, to the map. The Pearl River Delta is one of South China's premier rice growing regions. Most of the valleys and the plains bordering this delta, all of the land that's in green here, all of this land was converted to fresh water, double crop irrigated fields, long before the mon arrived on the scene. Now these lineages in this area, there are about maybe about ten of them, ten big lineage communities in this region. We're studied by Hugh Baker, one of my colleagues here at SOAS, among other people, and by Jack Potter, who was my supervisor at Berkeley when I was a student, and Ruby Watson, who was my life companion and fieldwork companion, and also Chan Guoxing, who was a graduate of SOAS, and that's a student who graduated from here. So a number of these lineages have been studied in this region, and all of them basically are the big, wealthy freshwater lineages. These were first settled during the Song Dynasty around the 13th century. And by this way Han Chinese pioneers built Conquistador-like outposts in this region as early as the Tang Dynasty around the 10th century. Rice grown by the descendants of these pioneers, that rice, was an exceptionally fine, wonderfully tasting, aromatic, long grain variety of white rice that was prized by China's elite. It was fabulous stuff. And this is a rice shop in the nearby market town, but we're near where we live, and it still had some varieties of the old rice when we first arrived. Now legend has it that bags of this long grain of white rice was shipped every year to the Imperial Court in Beijing as tribute from the local magistrate. The lineage communities that emerged in this rice haven were large and prosperous. The affluent Deng lineage, for instance, neighbors of the mon, maintained impressive ancestral halls, beautiful schools, libraries, and the Deng also produced an occasional scholar who passed Imperial exams and became government officials. It was a really significantly wealthy place, the lineage outpost of the Deng. The agricultural system built by the mon lineage, by contrast, was radically different. The very name of the community, as I indicated, the name of that is Santin, which signals its singularity. The Cantonese term Santin means, literally, new fields, highlighting efforts to rest the arable land from the saltwater mud flats of the Delta. The mon fields were limited to a single crop of red rice each year. Here, the brackish water ecosystem, a single crop, and the land was too salty for catch crops of vegetables and sweet potatoes. There was, however, one advantage to this ecological adaptation. In contrast, by the way, the mon had only one single crop of rather low-quality rice, whereas all the other landages had freshwater double crop. They had two crops a year of white rice, plus they could grow vegetables and sweet potatoes on the dykes, and that sort of thing, because it wasn't salt investment. There was, however, an important advantage to inherit to a reclamation technology of the type that the mon developed. This is the border zone, and that is the river in the distance in the border between Hong Kong and China. As the mon lineage expanded, and this is their territory, the dykes were extended farther into the saline marshes step-by-step over the centuries. Santin grew to be one of the largest single lineage villages in the Pearl River Delta region. Rival lineages, based as they were, on freshwater irrigation systems, were caught in a demographic trap. They could not expand, they could only expand at the expense of their neighbors in neighboring lineages, a reality that set off bouts of inter-linear warfare and feuding, which was endemic to this region, and which was also the topic of two books that Morris Friedman wrote and published in the LSE monograph series. Now, from the 17th to the early 20th century, the irrigation-based lineages of the Delta reached a demographic equilibrium, stabilizing the population of between 700 and 800 males. By contrast, by about the 1850s, the mon lineage had grown to twice the size of most of its rivals. The mon thus played a role in the politics of the region, not through wealth, but through sheer weight of numbers and the power of their local security force, about which I will have more to say later, a lot more. The ethnographic puzzle I posed at the outset of this talk would not be complete without delving into the micro-details of the mon reclamation system. Now, try to bear with me some of this. I've been working on this for 43 years, and I'm still working on the details. They are maddeningly complex, and I certainly don't have time to even begin to unpack them all here tonight. These are maddeningly complex details, and because they are, of course, irresistible to any anthropologist. Anything that is complex and is going to be irresistible. Last year, in the bowels of Hong Kong's bureaucracy, I discovered a set of RAF aerial photos taken of the Sontine area. This was one of those eureka moments that all anthropologists saved. We all wait for it, and if we're lucky, we'll get a few in our careers. Suddenly, almost magically, the eureka moment helps you clarify years of interviewing and on-site exploration. Here in front of me, in an RAF photograph taken in 1945, was the reclamation system revealed in all of its involuted glory. Now note the strips, which are going to play a big part in my story, and I'm going to continue working on this for years then I may have. The strips in the system, as opposed to these kind of fields you will find around here, which are regular rice packets, which are oblong, square, but we're talking about strips. Now those of you who are historians will begin to recognize one of the themes that's emerging. The problem was, until I saw these photographs, meant these aerial photographs, until that point I had not actually seen the mon farming system in operation. Rice farming had ceased by the time I arrived as a graduate student to start my first field research in 1969, freshman Berkeley. What follows, therefore, is an ethno-historical reconstruction and a historical reconstruction of years of interviewing, which I carried out with retired farmers, and also, in the context of interviewing, hand-drawn maps, all of which I have saved in my archive and have been scanned, never throw anything away, those of you who are students, thinking of anthropology, keep it all, just be a pat-rad, because someday you're going to use it. Believe it or not, 43 years later, here I am using this stuff. Hand-drawn maps, by local farmers, and I have lots of these, and I spent hours with these guys going over the maps, and they argued and fought in the local tea house, and they broke one time, trying to keep them going with their maps and drinking at the same time. I also, of course, had access to government records. These are maps drawn by Punjabi Sikh cartographers who were on Sukundman from the Indian Civil Service to the Hong Kong government in 1905, and these Sikhs came out into the new territories and spent five years mapping every square inch. It's wonderful. You could kiss them, because this stuff is just so gorgeous and beautiful. It's unlike anything you'll find in almost any other part of China. And I've got land records that go with it, who the owner was, how much it was worth, how much it costed sales. So there were records going with these maps. These just as 1905 showing what the reclamation system looked like when the Punjabi Sikh cartographers were working on it. And then I also have, of course, my own observations, basically having tramped through this region for many, many hours. Many hours of tranting, going out up to my knees and mud with farmers that were then showing me where they farmed and how they did it. Now, tonight I can only give you a quick overview of the system. Please bear with me. I'll try to do this fairly quickly. Each of the major reclamations that I'm talking about are called Guai in Cantonese, Wei in Mandarin. And the term, the Chinese character, means enclosure or compound. A Guai contained up to 24 to 160 acres. Now, let that sink a bit. 160 acres. Now, that's pretty decent-sized cornfield in my native Iowa. This is a serious piece of land, much bigger, far bigger than most rice paddies in this part of China, at least, ever get. The Mon reclaimed eight of these Guai, clustered together in a fan-shaped landscape as I showed in the photographer's map, bordering on a money creek up here, which is called the Shenzhen River, which later became the border between British Hong Kong and China. The eight Guai were separated by buns, and the entire system was protected by a dam out here along the river to keep the saltwater out and to retain whatever fresh water they could get. Now, as shown in the illustration on the screen, each Guai was divided into four subsections called Hou in Cantonese, Hao in Mandarin, which usually translates as number, but it doesn't really have a translation here, or mark. And the divisions between the Hou were maintained by lines of ten-foot-tall bamboo stakes. The Hou, in turn, were divided into strips, as you saw on the aerial photo. Lots and hundreds of strips. And the strips were on every five strides wide, about this wide, and then about a hundred yards long, or somewhat longer, depending on the entire size of the Guai. Now, the strips in Cantonese were called Fu, or in Mandarin they're called Fu, which translates literally as a strip of cloth. Here are the strips, the Fu. Again, depending on the overall size of the reclamation, there could be up to 64 of these strips. Now, are you still with me? I know this is a little tedious, but you've got to love ecology if you're going to do this kind of stuff. The families in the states own differing numbers of folk or strips. If, for instance, as an example, the Sumenin, Mr. Mon, Sam Laram, own three folk, he or his tenant had rights to farm three strips, three strips at each of the four hulls. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, he owned three, but he had actually twelve altogether. The strips were unified and demarcated in the fields by ordinal number, as in third, fourth, fifth strip. The Cantonese linguistic form is daisam folk, daisei folk, daigun folk, and in Mandarin it would be disandisi diwu. In other words, they're labeled as such. So Mon Sam Laram had rights to three of these at each of the four inside the Y. But he did not always cultivate daisam, daigun, daigun. In other words, not the third, fourth, and fifth. He instead, a lottery was held every year here in the ancestral hall, this one, the main ancestral hall, central ancestral hall. And during the lottery, farmers chose lots and were assigned strips for that year. In other words, the owners or their tenants farm a different set of strips each year, thereby randomizing access to the best land. And it depended very much if you were close to the river. It was not so great if you were close to the village. It was somewhat better. And also, of course, not only randomizing access to the most productive land, but ameliorating risk. And it was an interesting social system emerging as context of this, in the context of that. The Mon Lani each had over 100 ancestral states, which were land-only corporations composed of descendants of named ancestors. These strips also were rented annually to Mon farmers in an auction. Also held in the ancestral hall. So, many farmers might farm strips that they inherited from their fathers and also whatever they could get in bidding. But it was all randomized then in the lottery. Now, it will not have escaped the attention of millions among you that this pattern of strip farming combined with an access lottery should be familiar. This system emerged in many agricultural ecosystems in the world. This is Hitchin, England in 1866 in the famous English common field system in which there was a randomization and changing every year the strips that a farmer would farm. Going in cycles from spring corn, fall corn and fallow and then back corn of course in this context meaning grain and usually rye or such. So, there are many obvious parallels of the common field systems in medieval and modern England. This is 1896 study. This is Colonial New England. This is 1652, a map of Concord, Massachusetts. Again, strip farming, you can see down here. And other examples. Here's one from Africa. This is Polly Hill's classic study of couple farmers in Ghana. Now, I could of course go on at great length but I'll desist. However, by the way, if any of you have good examples or know of any especially in the Delta regions of Odesh and India, please send me an email because I'm looking for them and I'm having trouble. I know that they exist but I've got to find them, especially in the Brackishwater Deltas of South Asia. Now, returning to the Pearl River Delta, what are some of the social and economic consequences of a Brackishwater ecosystem? Perhaps the most important was heavy dependence on the market. Red rice, as noted earlier, could not be consumed by people wanting because humans could only eat this specialized crop by milling the grain down to a white core and essentially a tiny nub and even then it was foul bitter tasting. This put them on at a decided disadvantage in a market economy. If you look at calories of rice consumed, the percent of calories, total calories devoted to rice in 1981. This is work by John Wilson Buck. It was average around 83%. And rice supplied by one's own farm in Guangdong, the region that I'm doing my research on double crop rice down, up to almost 60% for people in other words, consume their own crop. The Mon, of course, could not do this. Unlike their neighbors, the Mon could not even eat the portion of their crop. Now, marine byproducts associated with the Brackish paddies, fish, crab, shrimp, etc. were cash commodities far too valuable to eat locally except under dire circumstances. So Mon elders claimed, by the way, that their farming system never let them starve but it did not generate enough income to satisfy the needs in a market economy. Now for that the Mon had to look elsewhere. But there's another critical factor associated with red rice production, namely the super abundance of spare time for men of the community. Red rice here, shown again, and John Bosing Buck's data. Now this is the growing season. Red rice the local variety had a 150 day growing cycle, one season for a single crop and there were no cash crops. So one has to ask what did the Mon do with the remaining 215 days of the year because they were only involved in agriculture for 150 days. Another way to look at this problem is by looking in contrast to freshwater paddy systems which had a huge amount of labor consumed with cash crops and vegetables as I'll show basically hardly any time was left for now. Another way to look at the problem is to review John Bosing Buck's treasure trove of Chinese agricultural data collected in the 1930s. Again this is wonderful data. And he has actually a table or two he refers to as the idleness factor. Buck's survey shows that the average number of idle months per worker and double crop freshwater paddy systems was 1.7 months per year. Now the rice farmers in the area where I've worked is more like this. The true rate is basically hardly ever zero spare time in that region both for men and for women. In red rice systems the idleness factor was as high as 7.1 months per farmer probably actually it was higher. Sontine's local seafood industry certainly couldn't absorb the labor and there were no handicrafts in the village of any consequence. So the mon thus faced an ever present ever urgent push to find alternative sources of income outside of Sontine. Now this was especially true of young men from the age of 15 to 40, men at the height of their physical powers. Now Sontine adopted a survival strategy that was well suited to its local needs. Rival lineages followed what might be called an orthodox mode of lineage development. They invested in double crop rice fields as well as education and business ventures including mills ferries, pawn shops, tea houses and the like. These lineages unlike the neighbors, unlike the mon also produced wealthy landlords. Now the mon by contrast pursued a decidedly unorthodox mode of lineage development specializing in entrepreneurial activities that are probably best described in today's terminology as security services. The mon were renowned for their martial arts skills and their utter fearlessness. Young men from Sontine literally had nothing to lose but their lives and their reputations. For reasons that I've explored elsewhere, the mon also had a high percentage of permanent bachelors. Never marries who lived short but often colorful lives. The mon lineage retained, maintained that residents of neighboring villages referred to as all agree as the largest and most professional self defense corps in the region. The Cantonese term for this organization is chandeng, perhaps best translated as village guard. Now normally guardsmen engaged in crop watching and neighborhood patrols and they sell them for ventures beyond the confines of their lineage domain. The mon guardsmen by contrast were employed as security specialists throughout the eastern Delta region halfway up to Guangzhou formerly known as the city of Canton. They served as body guards for merchants, watchmen, and pawn shops. They rode shotgun for money changers who transported cash to and from Delta centers. Here by the way inside one of the ancestral halls in Sontine is an armory where they kept their weapons which were corporate property of the lineage. That's where they kept the shotguns. Sontine adopted this kind of survival strategy. Mon guardsmen also as you might suspect protected businesses from gangs and extortionists. By the early 20th century after the new territories was absorbed into the Hong Kong British colony recruiters from European freighters companies paid regular visits to Sontine where they knew that they could find men who knew how to eat bitterness. Basically that means Stoics who can survive difficult circumstances without complaining. The Mon were disproportionately represented in this new demanding occupation of sailors on freighters. Many of these villagers jumped ship in London Amsterdam and New York where they established small diners and laundries. These enterprises became the essential footholds as I'll show later for later waves from Sontine to Europe. During the Second World War another part of the story Japanese forces occupied the new territories and put a stop to the entrepreneurial ventures of the Sontine village guard and three of the Mon leaders were executed by the Japanese. There was a desperate push of young men out of the village during this period because the Mon unlike their neighbors of course could not live off their own crops. More like 3035 Sontine youth ended up in the East River Brigade a famous guerrilla unit affiliated with the Red Army. Unlike most of their compatriots and from other Hong Kong villages the majority of these Mon guerrillas survived the war. They knew how to survive. A handful stayed in China where they joined the Communist Party and became local government officials. Others the majority returned to Sontine and later 10 years, maybe a bit later they ended up in Europe and became mainstays in the European restaurant trade. Now the connection between guerrilla activity and the immigrant catering trade is not as far fetched as you might assume. The qualities that ensure success in both spheres are similar determination, confidence and a laser beam attention to detail, meaning survival. The Mon as I've discovered in my 43 years of field work have never lacked in any of these qualities. Meanwhile in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War Hong Kong rapidly became a center of light industry focused on the emerging global market. Hong Kong's urban population exploded as tens of thousands of refugees spilled over the border in the 1980s and 1960s and hence the demand for fresh vegetables to feed this growing population in Hong Kong started a headlong rush to convert the old rice paddies into vegetable plots thereby increasing your profit up to seven fold per year. All of the major lineages that I've described and talked about in the new territories joined the surge of vegetable growing and became wealthy in the process all except of course one the outlier. The Mon of Sontine their brackish water ecosystems would not sustain vegetables because of course it's too much salt. Meanwhile the People's Liberation Army had closed the Hong Kong border and the market for Sontine's red rice collapsed almost overnight because the largest wine distilleries were across the river on the Chinese side. So after nearly three centuries of steady production and the reclaimed fields were fallow and began to revert back to marshland. The Mon were confronted with obviously the most serious crisis in their long history but resilient as ever they opted for the best alternative. They became international migrants on a massive scale using the footholds established by Dirk Hensman namely the jumped ship sailors nearly 1,200 maybe 1,300 members of the Mon lineage males emigrated to Europe between the years 1955 to 1962 this is an entire lineage up and leaving in a very short period it is almost unprecedented especially when you consider they have to get passports they have to get passives they have to mobilize and get out. The latter date 1962 some of you who do migrant studies will be aware is significant because it marks the passage of the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act legislation that restricted access to the UK the Mon were well aware of the political developments in Britain and moved quickly to beat the ban as it was called they had their newspaper circulated newspaper articles circulating in saunty to this effect that had been translated from English into Chinese and everybody knew about it. By the time I began my field work in 1969 85 to 90% of the able-bodied males in the Mon lineage were gone. They moved to Europe where they established over 400 Chinese restaurants by that time it grew much more rapidly like this one in Amsterdam over 400 one sub branch of the lineage relocated from England to Canada where they dominated the Chinese restaurant trade in the Toronto area where I just visited in the course of this wholesale movement the lineage was transformed from a corporation based on land ownership and common fields like I described earlier to an organizational framework for the coordination of large scale emigration. In effect the Mon lineage became an information network a kind of emigration agency with jobs, introductions and travel tips circulating in the pre-existing patrilineal categorized patrilineal group Appliance those married in sons-in-law especially sons-in-law friends and other new territories neighbors were not part of this network and were systematically excluded from advantages that might accrue it was kept strictly within the patrilineal network. In my first take on this problem the book that Jacob referred to in the introduction emigration in the Chinese lineage in 1925 I captured the Mon in a transitional state somewhere between a classic emigrant community in which migrants are considered considered themselves transient workers who will retire to their own village and halfway to the formation of what a layer began to realize was the emergence of a transnational diaspora a micro-diaspora for lack of a better term focused on kinship by any measure members of today's far-flung Mon lineage are highly successful while their grandfathers and great-grandfathers arrived in Europe and Canada with little but the shirts on their back contemporary members of this kinship group are property developers here's a few of them property developers accountants professors even several of their professors in Taiwan professors in China, professors in Britain two or three in the United States that I know of engineers, government officials tour operators and yes there's still a handful of high-end restaurateurs left in this group they've moved out of the restaurant trade and they're now into lots of other things I am now in my fifth decade of fieldwork and I've worked in other Cantonese villages but I still keep track of the Mon when I can and of course the developments in Sante now if I can ever draw a line in the sand which is very hard for field workers to do just draw a line and say that's it and call it quits I'm planning to write a sequel to my first book and I intend to call it the Mon lineage revisited diaspora formation of the long-term consequences of emigration but of course like all anthropologists I can't quit Tai however I want to address the ethnographic puzzle I proposed at the beginning of this talk how does one explain this remarkable transition from the mudflats of the Pearl River Delta to the middle and upper middle classes of Europe now I realize explanation is somewhat out of fashion in modern anthropology but I cling to these notions that we should try to explain things I do not want to leave the impression that I believe the Mon succeeded in Europe because of their ecological adaptation as farmer entrepreneurs on the margins of the Pearl River Delta now by the way you'll notice that at some point I will make a subtle shift and I will stop saying the Mon like the newer or some other group because what happens is they don't necessarily begin to think of themselves as a unified kinship group and my concept and my vision of them begins to change with it when I did my first field work they were indeed the Mon and they would say to you in Cantonese I know who I am and I'm not like the Chun I'm not like the Dong and I'm a Mon and if you don't like it please move out of the way it was central to their personal identity the Mon lineage identity came first and all the other accoutrements of identity were packed down below nowadays it's just one feature of identity and I'm trying very hard in my research to find that subtle transition that happens in diaspora in the formation where these kind of changes occur it's one of the things I'm approaching but we still have to explain this transition I don't want to leave the impression that the Mon succeeded in Europe because of their ecological adaptation as I said farmer, entrepreneurs on the edge of the delta but however and here's comparison coming in of fashion there's good comparative evidence however that their ability to adapt to changing new situations suited them well at least during the early decades of diaspora formation other neighboring lineages also dabbled and they also produced a few immigrants but at a much smaller scale than the Mon at the beginning of the 1950s and early 1960s immigration served alternatives for the Mon they either moved to Europe or they would end up in dead end industrial jobs which are pretty grim in Hong Kong at that time because farming, vegetable farming and all the other things were totally out for them and the nearby village of Ha Chun where Ruby Watson did her research and where I resided with Ruby for nearly two years a few years after we did the Santine study in the mid 70s there were a handful of successful immigrants but there were also if not more villagers who had returned from Europe essentially their tails between their legs as they would say they returned because they could not adapt or as they would say they became, quote, homesick which is an okay thing to say I'm homesick, therefore I want to go back to Hong Kong basically they want to come back and eat and I could understand having Lydman Boston and Pittsburgh in places like that in my 40 years 43 years of tracking the mon I never met one who admitted to homesickness and most did not even understand the question what are you talking about as one restaurant worker said to me in 1977 where am I going to go if I don't work here this would have been here in London what am I going to do when I get back to Santine there's nothing there and I haven't saved enough money to retire yet it is obvious to me at least that their ancestors historical adaptation to a unique ecological niche is a critical determining factor and the chain of events that culminated in the entrepreneurial success of at least the first and second generation of these migrants now having said that tempting as it is for someone of my generation to draw grandiose motor production marxian inspired conclusions which of course I'm always pulling towards and all of my generation it's like a magnetic force attempting as it is to do that it's obvious that there is more to the story than ecology equally important are a set of political and economic circumstances that confronted them on at a critical point in their agricultural system when it collapsed they do not forget their subjects born in a British in a crown colony prior to the immigration act carrying commonwealth passports which gave them access to Britain and from there they could bounce to Europe and Canada and elsewhere at least they could before July 1st 1962 when they all stampeded out in anticipation of that date they also had the advantage of footholds in Europe established by an earlier generation of jump-shipped sailors and not very many communities had that advantage and they arrived at Europe and here's another critical factor when you think of today's economy maybe not in London but certainly maybe in the rest of England go to Detroit and you don't see what I mean they arrived in Europe just at the time of an economic boom when the middle classes were beginning to eat out now in my research when I did my original study I looked into restaurants and eating out in London and Britain and it was a god awful pitiful scene prior to this period when the Chinese restaurant began to take off it was grim indeed so the middle classes were ready to eat out and the Mon and others were ready to feed them now getting back to the question how did the Mon themselves the ones that I talked to in the first and second generation how how do they explain their success they by the way are very aware of their uniqueness among Hong Kong's indigenous lineages and they're proud of it because not very many lineages have succeeded like they have the Mon I have spoken with about this issue have a straightforward unambiguous explanation of their relative success in contrast to their neighbors they have devised a justificatory ideology that resembles a Chinese version of the Protestant ethic Max Weber argued of course that capitalism did not emerge in China because in his view the Chinese lacked a proper mind set as he called it in other words the overpowering influence of Confucianism and Taoism precluded the formation of an inner driven personality of the type fostered by Protestantism in Eastern Europe somehow Weber says they lacked it well my friends in the Mon lineage would be very surprised to hear this in their own representations of their own history they outdo even the most radical Faberians in their emphasis on the social construction of an adaptive personality and the central significance of a work ethic many retired immigrants now many of whom are now my generation grandfathers and great-grandfathers worry about the quality of the next generation the hard-bitten driven men entrepreneurial empires are afraid that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are too soft to prosper in the 21st century during recent encounters in Hong Kong at the grave of the family ancestor some of these old Jansu of course my age now asked me repeatedly if I thought the younger generation was hard enough to compete in the world of global capitalism had I noticed a big change since I started my research many had read my first book in English by the way have our grandchildren suffered enough they would ask are they strong enough to fight their way to the top and they are asking me to quote one of the retired restaurateurs in their own view in their own internal world view therefore at least the original generations the most successful of the Mon are more Faberian than Marxist to them history is important because it explains how they managed to succeed in the tough world by sheer force of will in their view they succeeded in spite of their history not because of it now many members of the Mon group that I've talked about beginning to shift group I'm calling it now now see themselves as members citizens of the world I'd like to say they have created a transnational diaspora that uses the bonds of patrilineal kinship as its focus elsewhere I've explored the nature of this emerging kinship group it is no longer a lineage of course in the classic sense of the term that my anthropologist used in the past the people who today call themselves Mon and claim dissent from monocyte who is the founding ancestor of Sontin people are very complex lot many of them are Eurasian and at least half speak little if any Cantonese most do not live in Hong Kong and some of my coins have never visited Sontin yet in some respect they're members of the Mon lineage because of course the central problem I continue to pursue after all these years and I will keep going is the question of goodness, materiality or lack thereof of the Mon lineage there are hundreds of thousands of lineages and clans like this from South China that have spread to the winds and almost none of them are still held together like this one something that's interesting about it if you look at the American Chinese communities on the east and the west coast they're all fragmented and there's no locality there's no ground in this the question then continues in my research groundedness the question is what about the land or in today's context what about the real estate the old patty system of the Mon ancestors built several centuries ago is still there and the biggest enclosures are still owned by two of the largest ancestral estates this is the river the border and this is the old reclaimed fields fish ponds marsh that is the river and this is Shenzhen the big wild west crazy capitalist center of South China right smack there on the border and literally these postmodern buildings come right up to the river and they hover over like this and they're just lusting after that land in Hong Kong it's the last open space in all of Hong Kong you can imagine what it's worth the old patty system is still there male I emphasized male descendants of that founding ancestor still have certain limited but nonetheless concrete material rights in this property it's very difficult to fair it out and that's what I've been kind of trying to do it's hard by the way are another very serious issue that's come up with this research over the 43 years that I've been dealing with notice who's sitting on the front row of this group of this diaspora group a daughter of the mon lineage who would have thought it my god a daughter of the mon lineage because in the past daughters married out mothers came in from other lineages they took dowry with them their parents they were not part of the ancestral estate system now the daughters are coming home and they say I want my share and the old guys are going to serve because they don't know what to do about it it's the next step in this research and others no doubt some of this may come up in the question period a new generation of anthropologists have been tracking this what can only be called a general revolution in the property system in a while what has become of the land well there's one site here's one one vision of it 1997 and this is another vision of the land in 2009 here is the old you can still see the old fan shape of the estates today this land here sorry I need to get myself back here a little ahead of myself this land here was between 1955 which marked the closure of the border here by the People's Liberation Army in 1955 and 1997 the date of Hong Kong's repatriation to China the old reclamations were fallow and unchanged like they appear here the colonial government would not allow the development of the fallow land because it was too close to the Chinese border not looks all very benign but at the height of the Cold War for decades it was a sometimes dangerous and always unstable Cold War Frontier this was Pan Mun Zhang this was checkpoint Charlie during the Cold War An Mon Land patrolled by Gorka Regiments and the Hong Kong police for decades until the reversion to China now today in the second decade of the post-colonial era the Mon fields have started a transformation into an quasi-industrial transportation zone hugging the border of China this is Luck Ma Zhao border crossing running right along and through some of the Mon land this is one of the world's busiest border crossings now located on the wide land lorry traffic is only backed up for miles on each side of the border it resembles the kind of the border at San Diego with Mexico more than it does anything else it's a hugely complicated center right on Mon land so my saga continues we're just essentially at the beginning of a new phase and my research appears to have taken a new life of its own away from me out of my hands out of anyone's hands Mon lineage it will never end and a younger generation of researchers will, I trust and hope, succeed me and contract with what's going on as long as the common fields which you can see are still somewhat there as long as the common fields survive in some form the lineage in some form will continue and will survive now I leave it you tonight I leave you with this last image the now defunct and seemingly ages common fields of the Mon lineage which are heading somewhere into the future and I hope to be around long enough to see the next phase but that will only be the next phase of God knows how many so thank you very much for your time