MEMORIES OF THE DISTRICT OFFICE SOUTH
153
Occasionally the D.O. was called on to do special jobs outside his district. One such job I did at the Land Officer's request in 1930 or 1931 was to enquire into the holdings in Stanley village, to discover who the various lot owners were; this meant a good deal of domiciliary visitation in searching for lot boundaries, and looking for owners who might turn out to be in Macao, Australia, or Panama, and were not infrequently in their graves. This was necessary because the Land Office had no demarcators, and the Land Officer knew law but not Chinese: and the village was to be replanned and modernised. I hope the right people got the compensation, whether in land or cash: I never heard anything over the arrangements.
The collection of revenue from the District, excluding lots held directly from the Government as Inland Lots granted through the Land Office, was always a most important duty of the District Officer. The Crown rent was collected both at the District Office and at various outstations, chiefly Tai O, Cheung Chau, Tsun Wan, and the small police quarters at Yung Shue Wan on Lamma. The outstation collections were done by a shroff accompanied by an Indian constable, and in the remotest places the Water Police gave their assistance. As a rule I believe the Water Police brought back the shroff and the money, though I think the ordinary ferry conveyed him to the scene of action. The collecting was done at the local police stations. It always began about the end of July, after the first rice crop, and went on at full blast till about October: defaulters were dealt with early the next year. Licence fees for forestry, squatters' fees, and pineapple plantation licence fees were usually paid before midsummer at the District Office.
In 1925, the year of the big Communist-inspired Nationalist general strike, the office shroff was transferred on promotion. His substitute was a young fellow fresh from the Treasury, who took advantage of the disturbance and the preoccupations of his superiors to embezzle part of the receipts, and finally absconded three months after the strike began. A former District Officer South remarked to me later that he had always been worried by the possibility of this kind of thing happening to him, and the almost total impossibility of keeping a tight check on shroffs when frequent absence from the office, sometimes all day, is part of the D.O's duty. Luckily his security just covered his defalcations: and another shroff in the same racket was caught out by me and part of his loot recovered.