NOTES AND QUERIES
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New Territories villages. It is well known that Chinese-style restaurants have mushroomed in Britain since the 1950s. By and large, the people in this catering business are former rice peasants who have switched over to culinary activities. Rising costs of living, falling prices of rice, lack of arable land and population growth are factors which created a situation characterized by the feminization of the farm work process, and an increasing abandonment of land. In some instances, villagers have sold off their inherited land holdings to urban speculators and deposited the money in a bank. They claim that the interest gained surpasses the value of the yield of rice of their former holdings. Accompanying this decline in traditional farming is the increasing financing of households by remittances from Britain.
The other macro process is the chain of major political events in the People's Republic of China. I shall not discuss these here. For our present purpose, it is important, however, to note that one aspect of this drama is a strong immigration from China into the Crown Colony of Hong Kong. In Sha Tin, there had been an increase in population of 345% between 1931 and 1961. Today, there are about 35,000 people in the valley as compared with 4,346 persons counted in the last pre-war census.
It was in the situation I have just described that the immigrants from China appeared on the scene asking for tenancy rights. By letting land to tenants, the owner makes more money from his holdings than he can by maintaining the traditional rice farming. This simple fact underlies the predominant pattern of land tenure in Sha Tin; native villagers let land to outsiders at rents that equal or surpass the gains from two crops of rice on that land. At the same time, their own energy is directed to other tasks, varying from overseas or urban work and cottage industry to long tea house conversations or gambling. Thus, the native villager's answer to the explosive city development was, in the first place, not an adjustment in his agricultural production to meet the emerging urban demands; instead, he converted the traditional two rice crops into two crops of cash, and reoriented his own efforts towards urban or suburban occupations which provide new external incomes. The change in land use was brought about by the immigrant tenants. A great many of the newcomers to Sha Tin are people of a definite urban background. Those who are not urbanites are generally influenced by men of urban experience. The vegetable market garden is in many ways