It is part of Skinner’s argument that men with wider political and economic horizons will operate within areas defined in relation to higher-order market centres; and it may follow from this that the great lineage groupings maintained in the case of the few dominant ‘surnames’ in the southern part of Hsin-an county (such that local lineages very widely separated were grouped together) were dependent on the fact that the influential leaders of these local lineages had an active interest in the superior market town of Sham Chun, which now lies just to the north of the frontier between China and the Colony of Hong Kong.