Band

Hakka women in Hong Kong wore very plain clothes, black, purple-black, brown, or dark blue. The only decoration was perhaps simple stitching around the neck of their tunics, or at the top of their aprons. Their clothing consisted of tunics, pants, simple aprons, rectangular head cloths that hung down at the back, and flat hats, open at the top, with a curtain-like veil around the edge to protect them from the sun and dust while they were working outdoors.
Patterned bands added ornamentation to this simple clothing, however. They were worn in a number of ways: to fasten their aprons at the back, to wrap around their head cloths so that the tassels hung at one side of their faces, or over the top of their hats with the tassels hanging at both sides.
They also had ritual and ceremonial uses. They were hung from the lanterns raised in the ancestral halls to celebrate the birth of sons, and young women wove many of them in the period just before their marriages to give away to relatives.
As the Hakka women in Tsuen Wan had very heavy outdoor work to do, including farming and carrying heavy loads as wage labour, as well as caring for their children and households, they rarely had time to do this weaving. Those with the skill to do it did so on rainy days or whenever they could find a little time.
We do not have information on the clothing of the women who spoke the dialect described by Mrs. Yau, however, nor do we know exactly how these patterned bands were worn.
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.
Traditional clothing, including patterned bands, began to go out of use in the New Territories of Hong Kong after World War II. A few bands could be seen in the 1970s-80s, but about ten years ago a museum curator said that there now is no one who can weave them. He just (2013) reported, however, that they had located a Hakka woman who still has this knowledge, and that they were planning to make a video recording of her weaving.

Mrs. Yau Chan, Shek-ying almost certainly was the donor of this "patterned band", having given it to Elizabeth Johnson to add to the Chinese collections of the Museum of Anthropology. She understood the importance of preserving objects that provided evidence of the local history that she had experienced, and gave significant support to the collection and documentation of many objects in the Museum of Anthropology’s Hong Kong collections.

The colours of the bands and their tassels indicated whether or not the wearer was married. As the tassels on this one are red, this means that the wearer was a young married woman. Young married women wore red or pink, Young married women wore red or pink, while unmarried girls and women or older women wore darker colours such as green. The colour combinations, the materials, and the overall configuration of the band also symbolized the wearer’s place of origin. The patterns themselves all had names and symbolic meanings.

Hand-woven on a very narrow backstrap loom. The weaver started by winding the continuous warp, using the colours that would appear at the edges and in the central patterned area. The tension was created by putting one end of the circular warp around a stool and holding the other with a chopstick tucked into a tape tied around the weaver’s waist. The tassels were created by inserting strands of silk thread in between the two layers of warp. The weaver then created the pattern by inserting the weft across the band and away from her body, hand-picking the pattern with a beater made of hardwood and approximately the size and shape of a western kitchen knife. As one layer of the warp is white (in this case) and the other red, she picked out the pattern by pulling the red through the white in accordance with the designs. As the work progressed, she moved the warp around, and when it was finished she cut the warp, thus adding it to the tassels.

Narrow band with woven pattern and tassels. The pattern repeats red geometric shapes within square blocks on white ground with yellow, green and red borders. The ends have long tassels of green, yellow and red.