Local Initiatives: The Case of Hong Kong

Governmental Efforts

The safeguarding of the ICH of Hong Kong officially started only after China’s ratification of the 2003 Convention as the Convention also applies to Hong Kong. Making reference to the Mainland China, the Hong Kong government established the Intangible Cultural Heritage Unit under the Hong Kong Heritage Museum to undertake the safeguarding measures as stipulated in the Convention. The government upgraded the Unit to an independent organisation called the Intangible Cultural Heritage Office in 2015 with expanded manpower and resources for conducting research and establishing archives and online databases. Several relevant statutory and advisory bodies have been set up, including the Intangible Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee, the Cantonese Opera Advisory Committee, the Cantonese Opera Development Fund, and The Lord Wilson Heritage Trust (Chau, 2019).

After completing a territory-wide survey on the ICH of Hong Kong, the government announced the first Hong Kong ICH Inventory in 2014 (Intangible Cultural Heritage Office, 2022a) and the first Representative List of the ICH of Hong Kong in 2017. Among the 20 items on the Representative List, ten have been inscribed onto the National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of China, and the Cantonese Opera has even been inscribed onto the UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (Intangible Cultural Heritage Office, 2022b). However, unlike Mainland China, there is no official mechanism to identify local ICH bearers in Hong Kong.

 

 

Regarding the publicity, education and promotion of ICH, the Intangible Cultural Heritage Office set up the Hong Kong ICH Centre in 2016 at the Sam Tung Uk Museum, which was restored from a former Hakka walled village. The Centre regularly holds exhibitions, workshops, and traditional music concerts, etc. to enhance public awareness on ICH and facilitates interactions between ICH bearers and the public (Chau, 2019). In 2019, the Intangible Cultural Heritage Office established the ICH Funding Scheme to support partnership and community-driven ICH projects.

 
Safeguarding ICH for Rural Revitalisation: The Case of HSBC Rural Sustainability

The 400-year-old village of Lai Chi Wo is one of the largest remaining traditional Hakka villages in Hong Kong, but it became deserted in the mid-1990s due to rural-urban migration and overseas emigration. A group of homecoming villagers aspired to revitalise their home village, the Centre for Civil Society and Governance (CCSG) at The University of Hong Kong thus initiated the HSBC Rural Sustainability Programme (the Project) in 2013 using Lai Chi Wo as a base to forge a sustainable path for the abandoned villages in Hong Kong. Through frequent interactions with the Indigenous villagers and by conducting oral history interviews with them, the Project Team identified, defined, and documented many ICH elements in Lai Chi Wo and started to think of ways to make good use of them to revitalise the village.

 

 

Generations after generations, Hakka villagers in the past adopted terraced farming techniques in Lai Chi Wo, but the farmlands had been abandoned for 30 years due to depopulation. As paddy farming is the basis of Hakka culture, the Project Team decided to start the revitalisation with restoring the paddy farmlands. Some field-based research and investigations were conducted to confirm on the farming approach that would inherit the traditional farming practice while adopting the ecosystem-friendly protocol to meet the environmental aspirations of today. Agricultural training and experiential activities were organised to transmit the farming skills to the enthusiastic volunteers. Both Indigenous villagers and urban folks have been attracted to engage in the farming resumption, and 11 community farms have been incubated. Produce and products have been promoted locally to villagers and visitors in the village and in urban markets. The co-management practice of the agricultural landscape has been revitalised.

 

 

\Many of the returned Indigenous villagers are good at cooking Hakka dishes and making Hakka snacks. As an empowerment and capacity building initiative, the Project Team incubated some of the Indigenous villagers to become cultural ambassadors by inviting them to prepare Hakka dishes for the volunteers and guests to begin with. Some of them have started delivering Hakka food workshops in the village as well as in outreach workshops for students and the public. Their Hakka food processing techniques also inspired the Project Team to develop Hakka style local farm products.

 

 

With the support from the Project Team, the Indigenous villagers resumed their custom of holding the annual Chinese New Year Banquet with the traditional “Hakka Feast of Nine Dishes” prepared and served locally in the village. The annual big feast preserves traditional rural culinary culture, strengthens the bonding among the Indigenous villagers, and increases the sense of belonging for the new settlers and volunteers.

 

 

The large cluster of Hakka houses is a distinctive feature of Lai Chi Wo and the traditional Hakka construction techniques of using local materials (such as sand, mud, rice straw and oyster shells) to make mudbricks and rammed earth interest many architects who are aspiring for eco-friendly building practices. The Project Team therefore decided to adopt such techniques in rehabilitating a row of dilapidated animal sheds into the Lai Chi Wo Cultural Hub. For cultural transmission purpose, the rehabilitation adopted a collaborative approach, engaging villagers, architectural conservationists, building masters and volunteers. The construction process was also video recorded for documentation. A long-term exhibition of the Hakka traditional paddy farming culture has been held in the Hub to promote the culture.

 

 

To further transmit and disseminate rural heritage and step up the revitalisation effort, two incubation schemes were launched. A “Co-creation of the Community” Scheme was launched to involve specialists of different expertise to serve as community curators to help discover and reinvent rural capital for the revitalisation of rural communities. One of the projects supported under the Scheme was an art project which organised Hakka hand-woven ribbon belt public training workshops to teach participants the techniques of weaving various traditional patterns. The workshops also helped participants understand how the different colours on the ribbon belts represent the different marital status of the Hakka women. Another project used cultural mapping as a tool to record, organise and display local stories and present them as an online mapping database for connecting local and overseas villagers as well as the public. The Project Team has invited some of these co-creation teams to hold public workshops in the annual Village Fest to promote rural ICH to the public.

 

 

A "Rural in Action Start-up Scheme", which nurtures the development of diversified business models for rural vibrancy, was also launched under the Project. Inspired by the Hakka villagers’ traditional wisdom of using a kind of local shrub Vitex negundo to repel mosquitoes and soothe skin allergy, one of the start-up teams has used appropriate technology to develop a range of innovative products with this common plant in Lai Chi Wo. There is also a team, which is based in a fishing village in Hong Kong, working on a sustainable seafood production and experiential education project to revitalise the diminishing fish raft aquaculture with the aid of technology.

 

 

The Project has turned Lai Chi Wo into a hub for rural-urban interaction and collaboration for sustainability and innovation. It illustrates that ICH safeguarding can contribute greatly to the economic, social and environmental dimensions of rural sustainable development. It also shows that, on the safeguarding of ICH, not only governments have a key role to play, but the efforts from businesses, academia and other stakeholders in the society are of great importance as well.

 

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