CHINESE DESCENT SYSTEM
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had at least two houses already, and were usually expanding their land holdings at the same time. I have genealogical information on about two-thirds of the house-buyers, and only in two cases does it seem possible that the number of their sons induced men to buy "houses" (both were in fact ruins, on the sites of which the buyers later rebuilt). There is thus no strong evidence that the buying and selling of houses is in any way connected with family size: houses appear rather to be treated as an investment in very much the same way as land.
The paradox of the simultaneous existence of a moral prohibition on the sale of houses and its occurrence on even the scale described may be partially resolved by the fact that different houses seem to be differently regarded. The strongest attachment is felt to houses which have been lived in by and inherited from one's ancestors: houses acquired in other ways are less valued, and a significant proportion of the house-sales recorded are resales of houses bought either shortly, or in one case as much as fifty-two years, earlier.
b) Renting and Borrowing
I have no evidence on the frequency of renting or loan arrangements between villagers in the past, but at present there are scarcely any cases; a lack which I put down to a dislike of the insecurity of renting (as well as its cost), and the much greater prestige of living in one's own house. I only know of one house in Sheung Tsuen which was rented for a long term by a very poor widow from a wealthy neighbour; of one case in which a woman who was rebuilding the family house was allowed by a neighbour to borrow an empty house while the building was going on; and of a third case where a young man, too deranged to hold down any job for long, and too weak physically to farm, was turned out by his father, and allowed by an older uncle to live in a tumbledown shed whose owner had long since left for England.
There is a sense in which a man's retirement begins as soon as his sons start to marry: once he has moved out of the house with the ancestral tablet, a man is something of a lodger in the village. While most parents have another house into which they can move on the marriage of their son(s), I have the impression (though no actual cases to back this up) that it would be relatively