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THE CHINESE DESCENT SYSTEM AND THE OCCUPANCY LEVEL OF VILLAGE HOUSES
H. G. H. NELSON*
Dr. Göran Aijmer, in an article in the last issue of this Journal, touches on the problem of the occupancy level of Chinese village houses at the time when the British took over the New Territories. Discussing the relative wealth of two neighbouring communities in 1905, he assumes (footnote 10) that "at one time all house-units were inhabited by one household each ....”, and expresses surprise that his calculations reveal an average of only 1.7 and 2.2 persons per house instead of the five or so that he would have expected (footnote 7). He suggests that there must have been a drastic reduction in the population to produce such a low level of occupancy. I believe, however, that his figures reveal a perfectly normal situation, which does not need to be explained in terms of large-scale out-migration. The purpose of this article is to point out certain features of Chinese social structure, and of the physical nature of New Territories villages, which make inevitable such low ratios of people to houses.
At the same time, Aijmer has indirectly raised the much more fundamental issue of the relation between the kinship structure of the Chinese and their domestic architecture. I shall touch briefly on the problem of understanding what is meant by the term 'village house' in the context of Hong Kong, and hope to give further consideration elsewhere to the light thrown on the Chinese understanding of family development by the way they build and distribute their house-property. It should be pointed out here, however, that the local pattern of building single domestic units in terraced rows finds few, if any, parallels in other parts of China. In Taiwan, for example, the dominant pattern in rural domestic architecture is that of the L or U shaped homestead.
Village Houses: The Problem of Definition
What, then, is a village house? I myself recently came up against the problem of deciding just what is meant by the term
* Mr. Howard Nelson of the London School of Economics was engaged on social research in the New Territories in 1967-68. His review article of Jack Potter's recent book Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant; Social and Economic Change in a Chinese Village (University of California Press, 1968) appeared at pp. 119-127 of last year's Journal.