Max WL Wong - Chinese Marriage and Social Change: The Legal Abolition of Concubinage in Hong Kong

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This book originated from research work of a potential litigation a decade ago, which would have hopefully helped to clarify a womans status as a wife or concubine in a family dispute. However, my research work had to be halted because, like many such family disputes in the Chinese community, this case was settled privately by mediation. Nonetheless, the materials gathered during that period laid down a good foundation for further study. I decided to go forward by conducting further research on the legal status of the concubine in Hong Kong. Since then, the academic journey of this research has taken me into the uncharted waters of traditional Chinese family law in the Qing period and the application of Chinese customary laws and practices in Hong Kong. This journey is never-ending, even after this book, because traditional Chinese family law is still under-researched.

I soon realised the difficulties in researching traditional Chinese laws after I started to research the legal status of the concubine in the Qing period. The relevant elements of Qing law included statutory laws (such asDa Qing L Li), regulations in palace (such asDa Qing Huai Dian), judgments and precedents (such asXin An Hui Lan), provincial laws and regulations, judgments by local magistrates (such as archives in Ba County at Sichuan or Tan Hsin at Taiwan), personal memoirs of local magistrates and other related materials on the rules and regulations at local levels, not to mention that there were special laws which governed different ethnic groups such as Mongolians. I analyse the status of the concubine in Qing laws in the Hong Kong context. Then, I attempt to investigate the ways in which these laws were transplanted into the common law system in Hong Kong after 1843 and, in a wider context, the common law systems in other East Asian jurisdictions.

This journey also led me to study government records in the National Archives in the United Kingdom and the Public Records Office in Hong Kong. With the support of research assistants, I got a clearer picture of the policy developments in both governments that led to the abolition of concubinage and the promulgation of the Marriage Reform Ordinance in Hong Kong in 1971.

This book could not have been finished without the support of many scholars, friends and research assistants. I would like to thank Prof. Michael Palmer and Dr. Dixon Wong for their continuous support and encouragement. I would also like to thank Harry Tse, Melissa Leung, Billy Fung, Samuel Lai, Eric Lai, Janice Lee and Dr. Amy Kellam for their assistance and support in this journey. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Vivian, and my daughters, Frances and Agnes. As always, their patience and support have been my greatest motivation to finish this monograph. All in all, any errors in this book are mine alone.