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exercise of ownership, and are contented to do nothing further than to receive a yearly rent. They can sell this right of receiving rent, but the land is otherwise under the absolute control of the cultivators, who often sell their perpetual leases.
The landlord is called the owner of the "T'i Kwat" (note: Cantonese equivalent for t’i k’u), which may be termed the right of receiving rent. The tenant is said to possess the T'i P'i, or right of cultivation. Constant lawsuits result from this double ownership and the contending interests which it necessarily involves16
To summarize, perpetual lease in Hsin-An was characterized by the division of land into two values, surface-value, which corresponded to cultivation-value, and subsurface-value, which corresponded to rent-value. Landlords held rights over the rent-value, conceptualized locally as t'ien-ku-chuan (†), while tenants held title to the cultivation-value, or t'ien-p’i-ch’üan (✯✯). The process by which rent-value became separated from cultivation-value, i.e. the process of its primary accumulation, becomes manifest in an examination of the social and economic evolution of the county following the resettlement during the early 18th-century.
Of the several kin groups displaced by the Kang-Hsi evacuation, the Tangs were among the least adversely affected. This was so for two reasons: 1) the proximity of the Hsin-An Tangs to several Tang settlements in Tung-Kuan,17 and 2) close relationships between Tang gentry and local officialdom.18 Not only were the Tangs able to keep abreast of developments while residing in a secure base not far from the evacuated county, moreover, the evacuation had the unintended result of increasing clan solidarity. In this regard, the establishment of the Tu-Ch'ing Tang (**)- the largest order ancestral trust uniting the clan, was most significant:
Tang Pao-sheng (£), a chin-shih of the Ch'ing Dynasty, had the intention of constructing an ancestral temple, but his plans were not realized. An official, Tang Hsu-chou (✯✯✯), seeing that the five branches of his clan resided in different places far from one another, decided to fulfill Pao-sheng's wishes. After choosing a beautiful site at Chiu-Ch'iao (**), Tung-Kuan, the clan gathered together to construct a great temple. At each winter sacrifice (), the male descendents of the various branches would assemble and encourage each other to