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kwoh-kai him: so that his line might well be allowed to die out, and his house to stand empty until it fell into ruins.
Adoption seems on the face of it to be the ideal mechanism for balancing the uneven distribution of houses and sons in different branches of a localised descent group, but the above indicates that people neither seek to adopt sons (for themselves or others) unless they have to, nor part with sons in adoption (or transfer themselves to other descent lines) unless strong material advantage is offered
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...and their abandonment.
I have not touched on the problem of out-migration, which, as Aijmer recognises, may be a major cause of the abandonment of village houses. It is worth pointing out, however, that it is very rare for Chinese deliberately to leave their ancestral home for good; their sojourn abroad may be extended, but there is always the hope of an eventual return. For this reason, houses are not transferred when migrants leave. The annual Crown Rent payments may be made by close kin, but they would not feel justified in presuming on a migrant's probable failure to return by actually moving into his house. Even after his death abroad is reported, or becomes virtually certain, there is no mechanism by which his house may be passed to somebody else — a son can only be adopted to a man who is known to have died sonless and although the Crown Rent payments may be continued for many years by people uncertain of the precise meaning of the numbers on their papers, there is no way of preventing the eventual lapsing of the payments, and a re-entry by the Crown of the migrant's long-ruined home,
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Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I have taken the figures given by Aijmer, divided the total population of each of his two villages in 1911 by 5, his own reasonable estimate of household size for that time – and divided the number of registered houses (in 1905) by the result. This gives us the more useful information that at that time, there were about 35 households in Big Stream Village, owning on average 2.2 houses each; and that Plum Grove contained 12 households, with 3 houses each. It is a little curious that a community which by all other measures appeared the better off