REVIEW
15
acres in the main catchment areas with young trees raised from local seed in departmental nurseries.
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Little has been said so far about the New Territories, if only because until after the Pacific War Government's activities in this sphere had not gone beyond providing a few of the larger townships with piped supplies fed from intakes in the hills with no arrangement for storage or treatment of water. Before the war there were very few factories in the New Territories and even now, apart from a few pioneers who have settled elsewhere, industrial development is largely confined to Tsuen Wan. Water has therefore been required mainly for domestic use and agricul- ture, and up to the war the problem was one of distribution. There is, however, another aspect which is of great social im- portance to the people affected; that is the impact on them of large projects in the territories designed to augment the domestic supplies of the urban population.
Traditionally New Territories' villages relied on wells and streams for domestic water, wells being the more common source of supply. Communities living in hilly terrain usually found it easier to dam up a stream above their village to make a pool from which to draw water. The use of concrete made these stream intakes more substantial and after the war villagers were not slow to accept grants of cement to reconstruct these works. Since the war Government and the Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Associa- tion have made grants of cement for the construction or re- construction of 510 wells, including 17 built under a Colonial Development and Welfare scheme. In 1955 the village of A Ma Wat, in the centre of the mountainous and remote Sha Tau Kok peninsula, became the first to ask for and obtain a grant of pipes and cement with which to construct its own intake and piped water supply. The idea took a little time to spread, but soon many villages near to streams began to ask for materials and there are now nearly two hundred villages with a piped water supply. In A Ma Wat a single public tap was installed, other villages provided stand pipes at convenient spots, and it was not long before more enterprising or wealthy residents laid pipes into their own homes.