The Hong Kong Region
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steps taken to correct a decline of population that had seemingly begun several decades before.
There is other evidence in support of a large population in, say, mid century. My close knowledge of the hills and valleys of the Southern district of the New Territories suggests that practically every piece of land, high or low, that could be planted with rice had been opened for that purpose at one time or another. This presumes a large and settled population, since the opening of paddy fields and their irrigation dams and channels involves considerable labour, and once rice is cultivated there is continuous farming unless the number of cultivators available in a family or village drops to the point where fields go out of use. There was dry and shifting cultivation in addition, for ancillary crops such as peanuts and sweet potato that, old villagers say, were more extensively cultivated in the past.
A second factor that points to a larger population is the widespread and intense fishing of local waters that was such a marked feature of village life seventy and more years ago, as revealed by my enquiries all over the New Territories. If fishing at its most intensive coincided with farming at its most widespread, one may conclude that, subsidiary reasons and incentive factors apart, all this activity was mainly required to provide for the existence of a large population in the villages.
To conclude, I have here mentioned village tradition and the evidence of the countryside in support of my belief that depopulation was an event in the later history of the Hong Kong region. Using available demographic and economic materials, much work can yet be done to show that Professor Ping-ti Ho's postulation of a 'declining rate of growth' in the population of Kwangtung, 1850-1953, covers reductions as well as increases at the local level.1
1 Ho 1959: 270, 277-278. In the light of my surmises it is interesting to find that Perkins (212-214) notes a sharp reduction in the population figures for Kwangtung between 1851-1873, not fully recovered by 1893. This would, of course, take in the ravages of the Tai Ping time and the Hakka-Punti wars; but there is more to it than these, I suspect.