of $15.00 is normally payable in respect of each document so deposited, but where two or more instruments relate to the same property the charge is $15.00 for the first instrument and $2.00 for each additional instrument. Seven deposits were made during the year.
Crown Rents
26. Tables VI and VII give details of the numbers of lots on the Principal and Village Rent Rolls. The number of lots on the Principal Rent Roll has increased by 390 to 20,831, and the total Crown rent by $130,284 to $2,380,602. The principal increases are of 114 Inland Lots on Hong Kong Island, 94 Kowloon Inland Lots, 76 New Kowloon Inland Lots and 46 Kwun Tong Inland Lots.
27. The number of lots on the Village Rent Roll continues slowly to dwindle, the total of 1,320 being one less than last year. The remain- ing lots produce only $1,066.60 per annum, most of the rents being less than $1. In order to reduce the cost of collection, Demand Notes for rents of less than $5 per annum are now issued every five
of annually.
years instead
28. The Crown rents of 209 sections of lots were determined under the Crown Rents (Apportionment) Ordinance (Cap. 125). Applications under this Ordinance may be made either by the owner of the Remain- ing Portion of a lot, in which case the rents of all the sections are determined, or by a section owner, in which case the rent of his section only is determined, the rent of the remainder of the lot being reduced correspondingly. Upon determination of the rent of a section, the owner is deemed to hold the section as if a separate Crown lease for it had been granted to him at the determined rent. It is estimated that since the Ordinance was enacted in 1936 the rents of approximately 5,000 lots have been determined under it.
New Street Index
29. The 27th Edition of the Index of Streets, House Numbers and Lots in Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Kowloon, familiarly known as 'the Street Index', was compiled by the Land Office in 1961 and published in January 1962. Since 1956, when the first post-war edition of the Index was published, a card index has been maintained in the Land Office into which the necessary data for the next edition have been entered as new lots have been sold and new sections carved out, new streets formed and old streets extended or re-numbered. The result has been that although the 27th Edition involved the scrutiny of 94,481 memorials and contains some 250 more pages than its predecessor, its
11