28
EDGAR WICKBERG
In a fourth case, a sale of land was the origin of the relationship and the convenience of the buyer was the reason. In such a case, described as common in the New Territories, the name of the original owner was retained on the property rolls after the land had changed hands, and he continued to pay the tax for the new owner. The reasons were convenience and money-saving for the new owner. A new registration was expensive and inconvenient. It cost less and was less troublesome to pay a fee to the former owner, which he would use to pay the tax. The size of that fee in relation to the amount of tax might be a subject of research interest. It seems likely that in some cases, at least, the practice of pao-lan that is, of tax-farming as a profitable business was a part of this arrangement. In any case, sales of this kind were common in the New Territories at the time of British takeover.
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In a fifth case, a would-be seller of land, who wished to dispose of lands that were too distant or otherwise inconvenient for him to manage but did not want to part with them completely, did not sell the lands but instead gave them out on a perpetual lease, subject to payment of a fee by the lessee which would allow the "owner" to pay the tax, the land continuing to be registered in his name. In such cases, the owner might be a widow who could neither farm nor manage the land; or it might be a clan or a monastery too distant to administer the holding. The perpetual lessee might be an individual farmer; or it might be a local clan or other institution, like a temple or monastery. Through this "near sale" practice of perpetual lease, an official document of lease being part of the arrangement, it appears, the owner maintained at least a tenuous tie to the land, should he wish to recover it for his own use at some later date. Parenthetically, this kind of near-sale was a common practice in late imperial Chinese property dealings. Some of the early British officials remarked that the perpetual lease of this kind was often confused with the Chinese customary mortgage (tien), also in use in the New Territories. By the terms of such mortgages, the borrower did not pay interest to the lender, but instead he transferred his property, on a long-term loan basis, as it were, to the lender, who, during the life of the unredeemed mortgage loan, had the benefit of all income he could derive from the land. Since such mortgages often were in force for decades, the position of the mortgage holder became that almost of an owner, or, at least, of a perpetual lessee. These practices, by which there were degrees of alienation of one's land, provided for flexibility in land dealings. They also responded to the needs of a society in which agricultural land, particularly that