NOTES AND QUERIES
201
A NOTE ON AGRICULTURAL CHANGE IN HONG KONG.
It is trivial to point out to those who are somewhat acquainted with the situation of Hong Kong that the British Crown Colony is in the midst of an intense process of change, embracing most if not all of the sectors of the society. This does not apply only to the city areas on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula, where the postwar explosion of industrialization has left an easily observable impact on the urban landscape and on the people who have congregated there. Even the New Territories—some 360 square miles of open country—have been involved in the spectacular process of change, and not even the most remote villages have remained unaffected by the larger society's striving for new economic achievement. Thus it is not only a question of certain minor industries moving away from the costly land in the industrially and commercially developed areas along the Hong Kong harbour to find new locations in the New Territories. Social life has changed there.
A feature of change, which is easily observable in the New Territories, is a common switch-over from the cultivation of rice to horticulture and floriculture. This replacement of one agricultural system for another has been hinted at repeatedly in the literature on the New Territories. However, these remarks have hardly been accompanied by a penetrating analysis of this phase of change. Therefore, in this short paper, it is my intention to engage in a brief discussion on the economic-agricultural transition which has taken place in the Sha Tin valley in the New Territories where I conducted fieldwork in two stages between 1967 and 1969. I shall argue from the baseline of the social anthropologist rather than that of the rural economist. My focus of interest will be on social forms which could be seen as resultants of processes involving economics.
It goes without saying that vegetable growing is no recent innovation, neither in the Sha Tin Valley nor in other areas of the New Territories. Higher level land on the sloping mountain sides has always been used for the cultivation of certain vegetables. Evidence at hand seems to indicate that these vegetables were planted entirely for local consumption. Today this is definitely so in many mountain villages in the area. It is clear also that this production of lesser importance occupied land of no vital interest. Rather, horticulture gave subsidiary crops only. The primary land was the irrigated rice land, and to this, villagers allocated most of their interest and their work. The present-day situation is very different, and the Sha