ON FENGSHUI IN SOUTHEASTERN CHINA
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available in Plum Grove Village. In Big Stream Village rice land occupied 16.8 acres and dry cultivation 8.6 acres. The total was then 25.4 acres. The corresponding figures for Plum Grove Village are 17.9 and 6.5 giving a total of 24.4 acres. The ratio between Plum Grove land and Big Stream land is then 6.9, 1.3, and 1.0 respectively.
There is yet a complication to be taken into account. Plum Grove villagers were not the sole occupants of land around their own village. Three other settlements further up in the mountains own a considerable amount of paddy fields and dry cultivation land there. A very old lady in one of these other villages thought she had heard that these fields were bought ‘a very long time ago' and that they were then very expensive. The land around Plum Grove Village is generally considered the best in this mountain area. It is not possible to establish how outsiders were vested with rights in this land. My guess is that this small village could not supply labour enough to make full use of what was at least potentially arable land, and outsiders were let in. There may also have been an earlier decrease in population. Out of the 24.4 acres registered soon after 1899 only 15.5 were controlled by local villagers. The outsiders from the other three villages had together 8.6 acres of rice fields and 0.3 acres of dry land. Thus only 64% of the local arable area were in the hands of Plum Grove people at the turn of the century. If we then compare the actual land-holdings of the two villages at this period we still find that the 2.9 times larger population of Big Stream Village had access to arable land that was only 1.5 times as large as that of Plum Grove Village; which means roughly that five persons in the former village had to live on what three persons were dependent on in the latter. As to the more vital rice land the proportions are the same.
To this basic situation could be added some other factors that were to the advantage of Plum Grove Village. They had a better supply of water for irrigation, they had better-quality soil, and they had better conditions for the formerly important complementary tea plantations. Their situation up in the mountains offered more security than could be obtained on the coast in a pirate-haunted strip of land. Plum Grove people will also have had better marketing conditions in that their traditional market town Xigong (Sai Kung) was situated in a predominantly Hakka-speaking and small-scale lineage area, while Big Stream people were dependent