amount was sold in the "free" market, that is run illegally by the former fresh fish laans who are still able to exercise influence to force fishermen who owe them money to sell their catch through them.
Although the amount of fresh fish landed scarcely met the needs of the local population, there was a substantial exportable surplus of salt dried fish. Altogether, 50% of the salt dried fish sold in the markets was exported and the average value of monthly exports in 1947, although much less than in 1946, was over $600,000. Unstable conditions in China, and the rapid fall in the Chinese National Currency during the winter of 1946/47 had their effect on the local export of fish as much as in other forms of trade, and inevitably the time came when, instead of the greater part of the exports going to China, most of the fish exported from the Colony was going to Chinese populations in America, Australia, Canada, the Philippines and Malaya.
AGRICULTURE.
Most of the 391 square miles within the boundaries of the Colony consists of mountains and hills, the more gradual slopes being clothed with grass, ferns and sparse pine-wood, the rocky ravines with evergreen trees and dense thorny shrubs. None of this land is suitable for cultivation. The level land includes the alluvial plain north of the mountain of Taimoshan but much of this, bordering Deep Bay, is mangrove swamp and salt marsh. The more gentle slopes of the valleys are intensively cultivated and the lower shoulders of the hills have also been terraced where practicable and where water is available for irrigation. The terraces and irrigation channels may in many cases date back many years; some fell into disuse during the Japanese occupation but have since been taken back into cultivation.
Before the war about one-tenth of the Colony's population lived on the land. The Chinese farmer of the New Territories is primarily a rice producer; any other crop that may be grown is subsidiary to rice. Rice from the Sha Tin area is of a very high quality, and is much too valuable for the farmers and villagers to eat; they are content with cheaper rices of poorer quality imported from Indo-China, Burma and Siam. În the time of the Manchus, Sha Tin rice was sent to the Emperor, so fine was the quality; in the years before the war it used to find its way to New York. Now that the export of rice is pro- hibited the local produce is consumed in the Colony; most finds its way to the city where it is bought at a high price in the open market by the more wealthy Chinese. Many farmers do not benefit greatly by this enhanced value of their produce because, as in so many places in the East, a large proportion of the wealth of the land goes to landlords, who may or may not live in the vicinity, and the amount of paddy handed over as interest on debts, perhaps of many years' standing, is not inconsiderable.
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