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on Dabu Jiuxu (Tai Po Old Market), dominated by a single mighty Cantonese lineage, who tried their best to harass market visitors.
This rather tedious exercise provides us with evidence enough to justify an assumption that the people of Plum Grove Village were better off than their neighbours of Big Stream Village.10
A key factor for the understanding of social change in this area is the rapid urbanization on the Kowloon Peninsula after 1875. For the villages in question this process implied a set of new choices, e.g. the use of a new, comparatively lucrative market developing at Youmadi (Yau Ma Tei). Here they came to sell firewood, and once in town they encountered new possibilities. The demand from overseas for Chinese labour had led to the establishment of labour-recruiting bureaux and agencies. The expanding shipping trade in the Hong Kong harbour offered opportunities for jobs on board transoceanic steamers. At the same time the appearance of new industrial products on the market drastically reduced traditionally complementary incomes from home industries.
The men of Big Stream Village soon jumped at the new opportunities that were displayed in Kowloon. Many of them ended up in the United States, Canada, and the West Indies. Through their remittances the home community now had access to an inflow of external incomes. As time passed considerable accumulation of capital brought about changes in the economic status of the village. Before the Pacific War several large and spacious houses were constructed by a handful of very successful emigrés. Conditions had improved, although economic differentiation within the community now was more marked than in the traditional situation. The general location of the village will also have become more favourable as the Kowloon-Canton Railway and a modern road were constructed on the other side of Tide Cove in the opening years of the 20th century.
The possibilities displayed in Kowloon did not have the same attraction for the people in Plum Grove Village. Land was still sufficient, the yield in normal years will have been reckoned as satisfying, and the firewood cutting, charcoal burning, and other home industries could for a long time bridge the slowly emerging gap between increasing population and static means of production. Part of the land that in 1906 belonged to outsiders seems to have been bought back by local people, but such expansion of produc-