Preface The present book is based on a series of four lectures given at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong in fall, 2007, and I would like therefore to begin by thanking David Faure for having provided me with that opportunity. By mutual agreement, my first two lectures were to be historical, the second two ethnographical. The reason for proceeding in that order was simple: insofar as ethnography inevitably reflects recent history, it made sense first to sketch what came before. At the same time, history being just as inevitably dependent on written sources, moving from that level of abstraction to the concreteness of ethnographic description should help historians to measure how much is missing from their sources. I would therefore be inclined to say the historian has more to learn from the ethnographer than the other way around. The ethnographer, however, cannot make
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