ANOTHER LOOK AT LAND AND LINEAGE IN THE NT, c. 1900
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inherited from ancestors, could be fully relinquished only with the greatest reluctance.
When we look at New Territories land tenure institutions within the context of Chinese tenure institutions in general, some of the things that confuse us from the writings of the early British land officials are clarified. Thus, in those writings, the relationship between the holder of the revenue right and the holder of the cultivation right is discussed in the same breath, so to speak, as the relationship between the latter and his tenant, with no apparent distinction between the different rights that are being discussed, and no indication that several of these may exist simultaneously on the same piece of land. For example, one writer speaks of a relationship between "owner" and "lease-holder" in which the former charges a rent only sufficient to enable him to pay the tax. He then adds that there are also some leases in which the relationship is "really that of landlord and tenant" and in which rack rents are charged. These are treated as simply two kinds of lease, with no discussion of the possibility that they might both exist on the same piece of land at the same time. What we are talking about, then, is a system in which there may be several parties with rights to a given piece of land at a given time and with differing contractual relationships written or oral between them. The basis of this was the fragmenting of the right to land into rights to several different aspects of a given piece of land. Once those rights were established as perpetual, each of them could be inherited, rented, mortgaged or sold. If we understand this, we can see how several different relationships, claims, etc. apply to the same piece of land.
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How common was the multi-tiered system in the New Territories of 1900? One British writer estimated that almost every plot of land had at least two owners. The same writer elsewhere estimated that 80 percent of the land tax was paid through an intermediary. It was the tax-farming, or pao-lan activities of the powerful, and the fourth practice referred to above by which the actual owner paid the former owner to pay the tax for him, that seem to have encouraged the use of the term "taxlord" by early British land officials. The term, apparently coined by one of them, J. R. Wood, came to be used to refer to all those who claimed a revenue from the land without having documented "ownership" or being in actual occupancy. The term, though convenient, is unfortunate in one way, since it suggests a single origin to a relationship and a claim which, as I have tried to show above, was actually derived from several sources in several situations. "Taxlord"
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