tongxiang in various localities. Such tongxiang around the world with the tongxiang who had died abroad.

Cholon, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, the bones still had to be handled by different groups in different xiang in Sanshui before they reached their final resting place. If one multiplies this one operation by the many sets of Chinese bones which had been returned over the decades from different continents to the hundreds of native places in China, one gets an idea of the scale of the operations as well as the density of inter-locality co-operation among tongxiang of different levels (Sinn, 1997b: 230-52).